Maria Lumbreras

"The Facture of Evidence" examines the intersection of antiquarian, scientific, and artistic practices in Habsburg Spain at the turn of the seventeenth century. The project traces the history a reproductive artifact of modest legal origins called retrato, which became central to redefining notions of visual evidence at a crucial moment in Iberian archaeology: a time when the rise of sacred history faced local experts with growing anxieties over Spain’s active erasure of its Islamic past, pressing debates about manipulated antiquarian landscapes and the legacies of forced conversion. The project is the first to chart the invention and uses of evidence-seeing technologies in late Renaissance archeology against a growing interest in error, ignorance, and the frailties of human knowledge.