Velázquez und die Mythologie

Bacchus, Vulcan, Mars, Venus — the Spanish court painter Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) painted the gods differently from everyone else. His mythological paintings suspend habits of seeing and thinking and thereby draw in the viewer, for whom fundamental questions of image and myth open up anew. Hanno Tiesbrummel follows the prompting of the paintings themselves, developing an approach that asks both what they mean and how that meaning is constituted in the form and presence of the picture. This first systematic study of an entire group of major works opens up fresh approaches to Velázquez and to looking at art more generally.