The Nigel Gendinning ARTES Annual Lecture 2023: “Así repiten aún las piedras” Juan de Roelas, Seville 1615, and the City as Substrate

In 1615, Seville erupted with fervent debates about the question of the Virgin’s Immaculacy. Clergymen hoped to sway the hearts and minds of both everyday supplicants and the religious powers that be taken to the streets. The main mode by which clerics tested and contested ideas about Immaculacy was through the written word. “No plaza, no fortification, no street,” as one-period source describes, was free from pamphlets and broadsheets that alternatively lambasted or defended this theological tenet. Amid this turmoil, the Flemish cleric and painter Juan de Roelas produced a massive painting covered in texts of all sorts. 

This talk parses the picture’s many inscriptions not simply for their content but for their formal and material aspects, coordinating these against campaigns of the written word that were staged across the city’s surfaces. Doing so reveals the painting to be a carefully constructed message about the potential and the power of particular types of textual objects and of the city itself—its very stones—to serve as a substrate capable of receiving inscription.