Marta Cacho Casal

Villa I Tatti – Harvard University

Artists libraries and the migration of ideas in late Renaissance Italy and Spain

2012-2013: Spring

Marta Cacho Casal received her doctorate from the Warburg Institute (University of London), where she also took an M.A. in Renaissance studies. Her book, Francisco Pacheco y su Libro de retratos (Madrid, 2011) earned her the first Alfonso Pérez Sánchez prize: Velázquez and his century from the Foundation Focus Abengoa, Spain.
Dr. Cacho Casal worked for several years at the Department of Prints and Drawings at The British Museum, London. Last year she was a fellow at the Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence. Her publications have focused on Spanish and Italian art, prints and drawings and iconography. Most recently, she has been researching artists' libraries, the use and value artists ascribed to books, and the education of the artist during the end of the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Her aim is to write a general history of reading and 'book culture' among artists, particularly painters, in the late Renaissance period, taking as a comparative study the cases of Italy and Spain. From September 2012 she will be Senior Fellow at the Drawings Institute of The Morgan Library and Museum, New York.