Cultural modernity has habitually been defined as a focus on the means of representation themselves, as opposed to art that imitates external reality or expresses its maker’s inner life. The crucial moment is usually considered the emergence of Edouard Manet in mid-nineteenth-century France, and the features of French developments have been seen as defining terms in the theory of modernity. However, recent art and cultural history have often spoken of plural modernities, distinct from the pattern set in France. For the first time, this study in cultural history explores how Spanish culture took a radical turn toward the medium of representation itself in the I 850s and early I 860s. It argues that this happened in a way that is critically at odds with many fundamental theoretical suppositions about modernity.

The book investigates the key figure in these developments, the painter Eugenio Lucas Velazquez, whose work centers on a continually playful reworking of art historical pastiche, of autonomous signs without fixed meaning. Unlike the treatment of pastiche in Manet and his successors, Lucas's paintings refuse any attempt to assert a unique artistic identity or uniquely modem manner. The painter's identity is split instead into a multiplicity of other painters' voices, creating a radical problem with the question of "authorship." But, in seeking a cultural historical account of such developments, this highly interdisciplinary book is fundamentally concerned with the interaction between Lucas's paintings and the dynamic, plural context around them.

In exploring the open-ended and potentially irresolvable nature of many of the dilemmas facing intellectuals of the time, this book argues against situating the cultural historian in a position of superiority over the past. Cultural modernity is instead interpreted plurally, as a series of problems and questions resistant to closed description.

The book makes extensive use of little- studied sources, including the paintings and drawings themselves. It offers, for the first time in the study of mid-nineteenth- century Spain, an integrated contextualization of paintings, political and aesthetic thought, nationalism, literature, photography, and even the zarzuela. Moreover, it places this contextualization within an up- to-date historiographical context, drawing on wide-ranging recent revisions of Spanish political, economic, and social history. It explains both Lucas's career and the issues at stake in the terms of those political, economic, and social transformations as now understood.

This book includes twenty-five illustrations, eight of which are in color. It will be of interest to students of Spanish culture and modernity, art historians, and those interested in the development of European modernity and debates about plural modernities.