Diego Velazquez, Andrea Alciati and the Surrender of Breda

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. IRSA s.c. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Artibus et Historiae. the Surrender of Breda". Para mi gemelo psiquico, don Santiago SebastianIn 1964 Jonathan Brown published a paper in which he pointed to Velazquez's employment in The Surrender of Breda (Las Lanzas) 1 of an emblem -"CONCORDIA"which the artist would have taken from Andrea Alciati's then widely read and extremely influential Liber emblemata2 [Figs. 1, 2]. Professor Brown asserted that "even a cursory glance suffices to register the important similarities between the emblem and Velazquez's picture". In 1966 another article was published by Carla Gottlieb in which she, too, pointed to Alciati's CONCORDIA, stating that the painter drew upon this popular source as a prototype to aid him in visualizing what was to be "the first painting to depict warfare as surrender, and surrender as the initial step toward alliance between former adversaries"3. In all the different editions of Alciati's Liber emblemata, the visual essentials of CONCORDIA remain constant. Two armed warriors confront one another in an open field. Behind them there may be seen either an armydivided into two groups, both of which hold spears (las lanzas) aloftor, alternatively, a group of spear-bearers is placed to one side of the two opposing generals, with tents and pavillions on both flanks of the centrally placed protogonists. Regardless of the background accessories, the essential and unchanging central motif of Alciati's CONCORDIA is the proferred, and immediately accepted, symbolic handclasp of reconciliation between victor and vanquished.For some, therefore, this is the emblemetic message of Velazquez's Las Lanzas. As Gottlieb put it, the painter's " intention was to show the end of Civil War in the Spanish Empire, reconciliation, alliance and peace thereafter", or as Brown states, by the use of the CONCORDIA image, "in a touching ceremony, whose nobility and humanity Velazquez unerringly captured, enemies became, if for a moment, comrades-in-arms under a banner of mutual esteem and re-1 Prado cat. no 1172. 307x367 cm. Las Lanzas is customarily dated (Prado Museum catalogue) to before April 1635. Velazquez's magnificent canvas has been the subject of two short monographs: Juan Contreras y L6pez de Ayala (Marques de Lozoya), La Rendicion de Breda ("Obras Maestras del Arte Espahol"), Barcelona, 1953; Werner Hager, Velazquez: Die Obergabe von Breda ("Werkmonographien zur bildenden Kunst", Nr. 12), Stuttgart, 1956. Hager's pamphlet-sized study perhaps overexhausts the possible iconographic sources as the author cites, among others, the Hellenistic mosaic of The Battle of Isus (Naples, unknown until the late 18th-centu...

A review of mentation in REM and NREM sleep: “Covert” REM sleep as a possible reconciliation of two opposing models

“…The present REM recall estimate of 81.9% also compares favorably with both (1) an estimate of 83.3% from over 200 subjects and 2,000 REM sleep awakenings (Dement 1965) and 2 (Armitage 1980;Armitage et al 1992;Cavallero et al 1992;Goodenough et al 1965a;Herman et al 1978;Pivik & Foulkes 1968). On average, recall from these stages is equal to that of stage 2 sleep; a tally of eight studies (Cavallero et al 1992;Fein et al 1985;Foulkes 1966;Lloyd & Cartwright 1995;Moffitt et al 1982;Pivik 1971;Pivik & Foulkes 1968;Rotenberg 1993b) revealed an average recall rate of 52.5 Ϯ 18.6%. The average stage REM recall rate in these studies was 82.2 Ϯ 8.1%.…”

“…The values for stages 3 and 4 are consistent with the finding that stage 2 and 4 mentation differences disappear for awakenings conducted at similar times of the night (Tracy & Tracy 1973). Three studies (Moffitt et al 1982;Pivik 1971;Pivik & Foulkes 1968) found average recall rates to be higher in stage 3 (M ϭ 56%) than in stage 4 sleep (M ϭ 38%), a finding also true of children 9-11 years (42% vs. 26%) and 11-13 years (42 vs. 25%) (Foulkes 1982b). However, Pivik (1971) found nearly identical levels of recall of cognitive activity in stages 3 (41-56%) and 4 (38 -58%).…”