Dr. Cloe Cavero de Carondelet
Research Associate
My research and writing examines themes situated between art history, early modern history and religious culture, focusing on the visual culture of early modern Spain. I am currently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled Imagining Child Martyrs in Early Modern Spain. This work considers the ways in which family anxieties, perceptions of alterity, and religious violence intersected with the development of the cults and images of a series of child martyrs during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Stemming from this project is an article at the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, and two book chapters that compare the role of classification and forensic observation in representations of infantile martyrdom across Catholic Europe (forthcoming in Sacred Images and Normativity: Contested Forms in Early Modern Art, Brepols 2020; and Holy Children and Liminality in Early Modern Art, Brepols).
I am also interested in the ecclesiastical patronage of religious art and architecture in post-Tridentine Toledo, and its connections with Rome. The visual, material and literary reframings of the image of Our Lady del Sagrario of Toledo as a divine relic are the focus of an article in Bulletin of Spanish Studies (2019) and a book chapter (2020). My published work on the artistic connections between Toledo, Rome and Madrid includes articles in Cuadernos de Historia Moderna, Archivo Español de Arte, Boletín del Museo del Prado, and Royal Studies Journal.
Between 2017 and 2021, I was a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in SACRIMA. As part of the team, I worked on the creation of a digital map of contested early modern sacred images, and of a digital library of early modern texts on sacred art, with special responsibility for the Iberian context. In 2019, I was part of a DAAD sponsored research project that investigated the role of objects and images as agents of religious encounter and conflict between early modern Europe and Japan. Before moving to Munich, I received my Ph.D. in History and Civilization from the European University Institute in Florence. I have been the recipient of distinctions and fellowships, including a James Kaye Memorial Prize for the Best EUI Thesis in History and Visual Culture, a FECYT Fellowship at The Courtauld Institute of Art, and a Salvador de Madariaga Doctoral Grant funded by the Spanish Research Foundation. Since February 2021, I am a Lecturer and Juan de la Cierva Fellow at the Department of History and Theory of Art at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
cloe.cavero@uam.es
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- “Eugenio Cajés’s Meeting at the Golden Gate: Purity and Procreation in Seventeenth-Century Madrid”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 83, 257-298 (2020). Read here
- “Wounds on Trial: Forensic Truth, Sanctity, and the Early Modern Visual Culture of Ritual Murder”, in Sacred Images and Normativity: Contested Forms in Early Modern Art, ed. Chiara Franceschini (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming 2020), 68-85.
- “El viaje a Roma de Luis de Oviedo, agente y coleccionista a principios del siglo XVII”, Cuadernos de Historia Moderna 45:1, 55–79 (2020) Read here
- “The Virgin Embracing the Virgin: Eugenio Cajés’ Short-Lived Iconography of Our Lady del Sagrario in Counter-Reformation Toledo”, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 96:6, 921-950 (2019) Read here
- “Roma 1619. Retratos de la nación española en la galería de Ottavio Leoni”, co-authored with Yuri Primarosa, Archivo Español de Arte 90:360, 383-392 (2017) Read here
- “Las relaciones artísticas del cardenal Quiroga con Italia: Un retrato veneciano en las colecciones del Museo del Prado”, Boletín del Museo del Prado, vol. 34:52, 10-16 (2016) Read here
SELECTED TALKS
- “The Cult of the Holy Child of La Guardia: Ritual Murder and its Afterlife”, in the Departamental Seminar of Spanish and Latin American Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2021)
- “Child Martyrs in the Catholic World: Expansion, Mission, Adaptation”, in Oberseminar Neue Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit, Historicum, LMU Munich (2020)
- “Crucified Children from Norwich to Nagasaki: Iconography and the Question of Scale”, in Early Modern Sacred Images in Japan and Europe: Contact, Comparison, Conflict, Waseda University Tokyo (2019)
- “La niña ante la Puerta Dorada: intercesión, limpieza de sangre y santidad infantil en la edad moderna”, in Coloquios investigadores, Department of Art History, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (2019)
- “The Politics of Childhood Sanctity in Early Modern Spain: An Altarpiece of Saints Justus and Pastor in the Royal Basilica of El Escorial”, in Conflicts of Representation in the Late Renaissance Iberian Worlds, RSA New Orleans (2018)
Research
Eugenio Cajés’s Meeting at the Golden Gate: Purity and Procreation in Seventeenth-Century Madrid
Cloe Cavero‘s new article in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes reconstructs the original context of Cajés’s altarpiece to offer a new perspective on the way in which religious art engaged with the tensions prompted by the issue of the purity of blood, as well as with anxieties related to family and procreation
Ritual Murder and its Afterlife
Cloe Cavero examined the complex afterlife of ritual murder accusations as religious cults at the Departamental Seminar of Spanish and Latin American Studies of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Child Martyrs in the Early Modern Spanish Empire
On 8 June, Cloe Cavero discussed processes of migration of local cults within the Catholic world in the framework of Neue Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit, a seminar organized by Arndt Brendecke.
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La imagen del Niño de La Guardia entre calumnia y devoción
Cloe Cavero participated in the Virtual Encounters of the Museo Sefardí de Toledo with a public lecture on the imagery of the Holy Child of La Guardia.
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Atlas Marianus Ibericus
Chiara Franceschini and Cloe Cavero talked about “Marian Atlases, Image Normativity and the Geography of Art” at the first encounter for a planned research network taking place at Université Paris 13.
Copias de imágenes sagradas romanas en Granada: Algunas notas sobre las Vírgenes del Popolo y los retratos de san Pedro y san Pablo
This chapter analyzes early modern Spanish copies of Roman icons to understand the ways in which reproductions of sacred images acquired new identities.
The Virgin Embracing the Virgin: Eugenio Cajés’ Short-Lived Iconography of Our Lady del Sagrario in Counter-Reformation Toledo
In this article, Cloe Cavero de Carondelet examines the rare scene represented in a little-known drawing by the royal painter Eugenio Cajés.
Early Modern Sacred Images in Japan and Europe: Contact, Comparison, Conflict
Centered on sacred images traversing cultures, this DAAD and Waseda sponsored research project investigates the active role of objects and images as agents of religious encounter and conflict between early modern Europe and Japan.
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Contested Images in the Archive: a European Map
By creating a repository and a map of contested images from European archives and texts, the SACRIMA teams hopes to create a resource for scholars and individuals interested in exploring image normativity in early modern Europe.
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Holy children, liminal bodies. The status and materiality of infancy in early modern visual culture
Starting from an investigation of the reinvention, the functions and the adaptations of the ‘normative image’ of the ancient putto in the Renaissance, this conference questioned the multiform transmigration, variation, adaptation and use of images of children in early modern Europe.