"For the first time, this study in cultural history explores how Spanish culture took a radical turn toward the medium of representation in the 1850s and early 1860s. It argues that this happened in a way that is critically at odds with many fundamental theoretical suppositions about modernity." "The book investigates the key figure in these developments, the painter Eugenio Lucas Velazquez, whose work centers on a continually playful reworking of art historical pastiche, of autonomous signs without fixed meaning." "This book includes twenty-five illustrations, eight of which are in color. It will be of interest to students of Spanish culture and modernity, art historians, and those interested in the development of European modernity and debates about plural modernities."--Jacket.