Byron Otis

2026-2027

Affiliated member MIAS

Harvard University

The Revelation of Limits. Antonio de Pereda and the Legacy of Imperial Pessimism

Byron Otis is currently a PhD candidate in the history of art at Harvard University, specializing in early modern Europe. Prior to Harvard, Byron received a Master’s degree in art history from Williams College. His work has been supported by the Clark Art Institute and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. His research engages the visual culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to examine European intellectual and cultural history. 

His dissertation project, which he will begin working on at MIAS, focuses on the seventeenth-century’s pessimistic response to sixteenth-century Spanish aspirations to universal empire. The project begins with a distinct pair of vanitas paintings by the madrileño artist Antonio de Pereda that eloquently express this seventeenth-century imperial pessimism and reflect upon the historical arc of the previous century. Pereda’s work acts as a springboard into various strains of early modern intellectual history, with particular emphasis on the legacy of propagandistic Habsburg millenarianism and the notion of discovery.