Sign In

About David T. Gies
David T. Gies


David T. Gies is Commonwealth Professor of Spanish and former chairman of the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese at the University of Virginia. Professor Gies holds a BA from Penn State University and an MA and PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. An expert on the literature of Enlightenment and Romantic Spain and contemporary Spanish film, Professor Gies has published twelve books and critical editions of Spanish literature, including The Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish Culture (1999), Theatre and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge, 1988), and The Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge, 1994; Spanish version, 1996), which won honorable mention from Phi Beta Kappa in Virginia. He has authored more than eighty articles and one hundred book reviews, and has lectured at universities in the U.S., Canada, England, Italy, Germany, France, Argentina, and Spain. He edits DIECIOCHO, a journal dedicated to the study of the Spanish Enlightenment, and has been awarded numerous grants from agencies such as the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Spanish Ministry of Culture. In 1992 he won the University of Virginia Outstanding Teaching Award. In 1999–2000 he served as chair of the Faculty Senate, and in October 2000 he was awarded the highest recognition presented to a member of the University of Virginia community, the Thomas Jefferson Award. He is currently organizing and editing the Cambridge History of Spanish Literature.

Also In VQR

Newsletter

Sign up to receive our occasional newsletter.




Velazquez, Or Social Climbing As Art

David T. Gies

Velázquez: Painter and Courtier. By Jonathan Brown. Yale. $45.00.

The Spanish genius for producing painters of astonishing originality is admirable. Any listing of the greatest world painters invariably includes the names of Velázquez, El Greco, Goya, Picasso, and Dalí (some would add Murillo, Ribera, Zurbarán, and Miró), and countless tomes have been produced analyzing their works and contributions to Western art. Among them, none is more highly regarded by the connoisseurs of art (as opposed to the merchants of art) than Diego de Velázquez. Velázquez painted in an era of unprecedented artistic richness in Spain: his contemporaries included Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Góngora, Quevcdo, and Calderón. In 1895 Edouard Manet confirmed the newly-discovered vogue for Velázquez (who had fallen out of fashion in the 18th century due to the general inaccessibility of both Spain and the royal collections where his works were kept): "He is the painter of painters. He has astonished me, he has ravished me." Readers of Jonathan Brown's splendid new Velázquez: Painter and Courtier may have a similar reaction.
University of Virginia The Virginia Quarterly Review
One West Range, Box 400223
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4223