Featured Scholar
Thuvia Martin
2006 - 2007 University Scholar
Mentor: Melissa
Hyde
College of Fine Arts
Thuvia Martin’s love for unraveling complex problems led her to some of Europe’s finest art museums and finally back to Gainesville to analyze the artistic and cultural impacts of one 18th century Spanish king’s choice of portraiture.
Martin’s University Scholar’s Program project analyzes the impact that paintings of Philip V might have had on the Spanish national self-image during the 18th century.
“Coming from the court of Versailles, and seeing how effective Louis XIV’s mode of representation was, Philip V hoped to emulate that, but found that transferring that very rigid type of representation didn’t work in a culture that was completely different from the one that he had been raised in, a culture that was already going through a tumultuous period with transitions of monarchies and trying to break through into modernity or what Europe was considering to be modern,” Martin said.
Martin said her research could open up questions about how the style continued to develop in the Spanish Bourbon monarchy and eventually progressed to other famous artists, such as Goya, towards the end of the 18th century.
Early Love of Art and History
Martin said she always loved history and enjoyed studio art. An Art History graduate, with a minor in theater production and a certificate in Latin American Studies, Martin now works as a production technician at the Phillips Center for Performing Arts in Gainesville. When she began her studies at UF, Martin wanted to combine her two interests.
The deeper she got into the program, the more she “could appreciate Art History as a field within itself, outside of just history or studio art,” Martin said.
She chose art history because it allows her to combine historical fact and hands-on artwork with a study of artists’ choices of medium and their attempts to use art to communicate with people.
Gender Studies in Art
Martin’s idea for her University Scholar’s Program project originated in a paper she wrote her senior seminar course on 18th century French representation taught by Melissa Hyde in the Fall of 2006.
“I fell in love with the era,” Martin said. “The paper that I wrote for that seminar was really about cross dressing and what kind of effects or end results people in positions of power hoped to get from cross dressing.”
When Martin designed her University Scholars Program project, she said wanted to look more deeply at the same topic while concentrating on Spain so she could draw on her language studies to use primary sources in her research. Martin’s research took her to a number of European museums and to New York’s Frick Art Reference Library. She also spent time at Versailles.
“It was important for me to go and get a sense of the grandeur of the place, exactly how successfully Louis XIV conveyed his power and wealth and might as a king, in a structure that kings across Europe have tried to imitate since he built it,” Martin said.
Finding Philip V
Martin said that it took about four months for her to find that Philip V was the best Spanish figure on which to focus the thesis of her research.
“Slowly but surely, I found Phillip V and all these questions that surrounded his reign and the different problems that he had with his court and abroad, the issues that he faced with his own people and how his portraits at the time made a bold statement to everyone surrounding him.”
Martin said when she visited the European museums she noticed how stark and dark the Spanish portraiture of the period was. After the 18th century, the art got instantly brighter and much more French. When she was researching at the Frick library, she pulled all the books she could on Spanish art from the 16th–18th centuries and found that same starkness.
“I fell upon Philip and realized that he was the one at this sort of juncture in the history of Spanish art,” Martin said. Philip tried to adhere to Spanish standards of masculinity, but those standards seemed to be completely rejected by the Philip V portrait, after which he faced even more problems in his reign.
Benefits of USP Research
For Martin, the advantages of her university scholars program project included both the length of the project and the close working relationship she developed with her mentor.
“I am very grateful I had the opportunity to work so closely with Dr. Hyde. You have ready and available advice but . . . you have so much freedom to develop the project in a way that both the student writing the paper and the mentor are excited to see happen.”
Working on a long-term project gave her the freedom explore her topic and thesis, enabling her to choose a focus interesting to her and other people, she said.
Martin also feels that her experience on this project will help her secure a position doing post-graduate work.
“Finding different resources that don’t support what you thought you wanted to argue and accepting that your argument has to change was an invaluable experience that will unquestionably help me in graduate school where research is the primary goal,” Martin said.
Back to the Journal of Undergraduate Research
