I've just watched the first episode of a documentary about Pablo Picasso. There's a short bit about his love of bullfighting. Can anyone recommend any books on the topic?
A quick Google brings up Hemingway and a few other suggestions but it's hard to filter out the dross.
I'm curious about the cultural significance and where the practice came from, as well as anything about modern debates regarding it. No love of blood sports here, just a healthy cultural curiosity!
This is just stuff that is occurring to me off the top of my head, I'll do a delve over the weekend if I have time to look up references etc.
A lot of it probably stems from very ancient practices involving bull worship - ancient Minoan culture for example - the Minotaur and all that.
The cult of Mithras (imported to ancient Rome from slightly further east, and from which early Christianity seems to have drawn a lot of inspiration) also involved a bull.
Cattle would a long time back have been a lifeline for early settled agricultural societies in certain parts of the world, and as such their importance crops up in art and culture and religion and even architecture and structures all over the place - from Great Zimbabwe, to ancient Greece, to the ancient near east, across Asia etc.
So there is a very long cultural tradition in various parts of the world, ultimately linked to the rise of cattle farming and certain societies' dependence for their subsistence upon that.
I would be interested actually to read some scholarly articles about it, but it seems to me that modern bullfighting on the Iberian peninsula and other parts of Europe is probably descended from, (or from a similar earlier origin to) Minoan or similar culture - this famous Minoan fresco depicting a bull and a "bull leaper" for example dates from around 1400 BCE.
