"All the Sciences Collected and Perfected": The Career of Fray Juan Ricci

FAIN: FT-56987-09

Ellen Felicia Prokop
Frick Art Reference Library (New York, NY 10021-4915)

I am applying for a Summer Stipend for the period May 18, 2009 to July 18, 2009 to undertake archival research crucial to the completion of a book-length manuscript based on my dissertation. My work focuses on the career of Fray Juan Ricci (1600-1681), an accomplished artist and an exceptional scholar responsible for an innovative corpus of theoretical, exegetical and scientific writings. This interdisciplinary study will not only introduce Ricci's extraordinary artistic and literary achievements to a larger audience and improve current understanding of Catholic humanism, it will also offer a re-evaluation of seventeenth-century Spanish art theory and inquiry into the natural sciences, subjects rarely considered apart from their Italian sources. More broadly, my study will present an approach to Spanish art and literature that expands beyond issues of aesthetic validity, national identity and hybridity, the preoccupations of many Hispanists presently at work in the United States.