Pablo Perez d’Ors

DPhil, Christ Church

Pablo completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Navarra, Spain (where
he read a degree in Humanities, specialising in History of Art) and is now a graduate
student at Christ Church, working under the supervision of Dr Colin Thompson. His
D.Phil thesis, ‘Preaching and painting in 17th-century Spain’, explores the
relationships between religious painting and the visual dimension to sermons in
Golden Age Spain. The central ideas underpinning these relationships were taken
from antique rhetoric (partly re-discovered, and partly in its medieval survivals and
development), and put at the service of the Catholic Reformation. Therefore, many
aspects of the making and display of paintings, as well as the responses they were
meant to elicit, come to the foreground in a side-by-side study of treatises on
preaching and painting, and this angle allows us to understand a wide range of
individual sermons and paintings. Pablo has given several seminar papers and talks in
and out of Oxford, and also at the AHGBI 2006 Liverpool conference. As a sideline,
he has studied some iconographical aspects of the work of Lucas Cranach the Elder,
and published the two Prado hunts in Boletín del Museo del Prado, 41 (2005).