‘Hablando a nuestro modo’: Art and Didacticism in Early Modern Hispanic Writing

Discussions of painting and sculpture permeate early modern Spanish books of jurisprudence, religious doctrine, and political history. Why did writing about the making and viewing of art, broadly understood, lend itself to discussing difficult concepts in non-artistic fields? Painting and sculpture were intellectual endeavours that mediated between human and divine realms, but they were also artisanal and handmade. This duality granted them broad conceptual applicability, encouraging numerous thinkers to deploy them metaphorically in the service of epistemology.