‘Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honour’ – Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (1926)

Hemingway’s marvelling take on Spanish-style bullfighting – for him a spectacular performance art fraught with risk – is but one among many preposterous evasions of the gross reality that animates one of today's most contested public spectacles. In Bullfighting: A Troubled History, the first-ever cross-cultural study of the subject, Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier examines at length and in depth the corruptions, cruelties and delusions that over the centuries have made and sustained the world of celebrity cape-and-sword ‘artists’ decked out in fantastically gaudy suits.

The fighting bull has been systematically bred for aggression for centuries, but on the day it faces its nemesis in the ring in Spain, southern France and elsewhere – sometimes drugged and always terrified – it is first agonizingly crippled by means of the picas and banderillas thrust into it prior to the matador’s capital intervention, a ‘killing’ that often leaves the animal still conscious while its ears and tail are being hacked off. At certain fiestas in South America, live condors are bound by their talons to the backs of bulls, a refining torment for both creatures. But Hardouin-Fugier reaches far beyond what is a depressing catalogue of cruelty, for this book considers the social and economic origins and expansion of bullfighting over the centuries, changes in dress and performance codes, breeding, the architecture of the bullrings, tourists, revenues, seat prices, subsidies, celebrity . . . And more, for this richly illustrated investigation includes works by numerous artists, among them Picasso, Manet, Dalí­ and of course Goya, as well as a fascinating variety of posters past and present and other events ephemera.

Some former bullfighting countries have moved on, while other states (such as Portugal) prefer to place limits on the cruelties permitted in the ring; and there are towns and cities in South America, France and Spain that have imposed municipal bans. What support that remains for bullfighting is diminishing and fatally compromised. But the fight against bullfighting today is far from over, as this important contribution to the debate makes only too clear.