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Open Access book

This publishing project arose from the initial motivation to translate the research conducted on the Álvaro de Luna Chapel (Artistic Rhetoric in Late Gothic Castile: The Álvaro de Luna Chapel in Context, Madrid, 2018) into a broader context of dissemination and knowledge transfer to the public.

To this end, under the same umbrella of scientific rigor and quality, we conceived a work in two formats—online and print—and in two languages—Spanish and English—that would clearly enhance its perceptive and multisensory nature.

The collaboration with graphic designer Cristina Carrascal, who delicately and expertly formatted our initial project, and with TREA for their editorial support and backing of this initiative, has been crucial to this approach.

The visual approach dictates that the anatomy of the study—the index—is structured in colors that mark the nodal axes of the work and, at the same time, reflect a symbolic reality: the blue, red, and green mottos of the Mendoza and Luna lineages, the patrons of the commission.

We were interested in the narrative but also in finding interactive and multisensory forms that would generate different connections with the reader. Voice and sound flow through the links with the musicalized verses and dances dedicated to our protagonist, contributing to the climax of the narrated events (pp. 29 and 52). Voice and movement reappear in the video made during the intervention campaign on the altarpiece (pp. 101 and 125). In a few brief minutes, the video evokes the setup by the technical team of the Spanish Cultural Heritage Institute (a mobile workshop), the on-site execution of the work, and the subsequent laboratory and library processes. Time, dedication, and expertise, developed first in Toledo Cathedral and later in the laboratories of the IPCE (Spanish Institute of Cultural Heritage).

A laborious yet necessary process that allowed us to approach the work from both its visible aspects and its hidden reality. We have synthesized this in various self-developed diagrams designed for the scale and measurements of the altarpiece and tomb, the creative process of the polyptych with the use and codification of models, comparisons and connections between foreign and Hispanic artists, crypto-portraits, and the confrontation and interrelation between the different image techniques used in the works.

This learning process includes a fundamental chapter on image analysis methodologies, where we deemed it necessary both to examine the tools themselves (describing the precise machinery) and to evaluate the results using diagrams or micro-samples. These laboratory-like observations allow us to almost touch this pictorial reality. Sight, hearing, touch, word, and emotion as threads in a visual anatomy of the Spanish Late Gothic..