Las copias de obras maestras de la pintura en las colecciones de los Austrias y el Museo del Prado

The phenomenon of pictorial copying has generally received little attention from historiography, a circumstance largely due to the negative appreciation that twentieth-century culture had of this artistic practice, as the notion of originality was elevated by the avant-garde to one of the main categories that were to guide creative processes. However, in recent years and in the light of the most advanced studies in Art History, there has been a progressive awareness of the importance of the pictorial copy in the Renaissance and Baroque art scene, extending its relevance to the beginning of the same twentieth century. From this process of recovery of the pictorial copy, the volume brings together a series of contributions by renowned specialists on the numerous and relevant set of copies related to the Austrian pictorial collection that the Museo Nacional del Prado gathers, showing in them the value that those copies had as substitutes for the originals, as a complement to the collections owned by the sovereigns of that dynasty, as a means of disseminating certain iconographies and devotions, and as a means of training and improving artists.0David García Cueto, coordinator of the volume, is head of the Department of Italian and French Painting until 1800 at the Museo Nacional del Prado, and specializes in the study of artistic relations between Spain and Italy during the seventeenth century.