Bajo los tormentos del tórculo : Printed Portraits of Male and Female Clergy in Eighteenth-Century New Spain (original) (raw)
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The Art Bulletin, 2018
Art history has approached female monastic culture in New Spain through the lens of crowned-nun portraiture, a late colonial genre that reaffirmed a nun’s position as Bride of Christ. This has led to scholarly neglect of the image of a crucified abbess. Rather than a mystical bride, the crucified abbess was presented as an alter Christus. The exploration of an eighteenth-century Mexican portrait illuminates the history of the design and its significance during periods of monastic reform, the relation between pictorial mimesis and religious imitatio, and the anxiety produced by the visual demand for sensorial mortification.
Imprinting exemplarity: A culture of print in Mexican nuns portraits
Colonial Latin American Review, 2022
Three nuns' images from eighteenth-century New Spain set the stage for an examination of printed books and portraits of their cloistered owners. The first, a likeness of Sor Inés Josepha del Corazón de Jesús by an unnamed artist (Figure 1), is a standard example of New Spain's monjas coronadas or crowned nuns. 1 The newly professed Discalced Carmelite, who took final vows on 25 June 1750 in Mexico City's convent of Santa Teresa la Nueva, appears half-length in her habit, her velo negro embroidered in vegetal motifs. She wears a flowered crown and holds in her left hand a candle adorned with flowers and ornamental cutouts. Her right hand grasps a small book, which the young Carmelite holds with her index finger inserted between its pages. The second portrait, attributed to Andrés López, shows the Reverend Mother María Antonia de Rivera of Mexico City's convent of María Santísima (Figure 2), better known as La Enseñanza. The crowned nun gazes at the viewer from inside a simulated oval frame and undescribed space. Rather than holding a candle, both of Mother María's hands are occupied by a book, which she holds before her. Her thumbs rest between the book's semi-closed covers. An inscription details her profession, with notes added later describing her election as prioress and her death in 1806. In the third example, Nicolás Enríquez de Vargas paints Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz as an author (Figure 3) rather than a professing nun, justifying the presence of three books. The first is a small volume Sor Juana holds close to her body with her left index finger held tightly by its partially closed covers. The second is a larger volume on the table beside her. It bears the inscription 'Obras de la Unica Poetisa Soror Juana Ynés de la Cruz,' an authorship reified by the nun's hand resting on its leather cover. The third book appears on the escudo de monja or nun's shield on Sor Juana's chest. Picturing the Annunciation, the escudo locates a book on Mary's lectern, with Christ's surprised Mother touching the page with one hand and her heart with the other as she learns of her miraculous new role. The books in these and many other nuns' portraits offer an array of meanings. At the broadest level, the painted tomes reference Christianity as a religion of the book. Metaphors abound in Christian writings of God as a divine author and of Christ as God's Word made flesh to be read in the sacred texts. This metaphor became a visualized physical book as of the eleventh century in Europe, when the divine authorial act that impregnated Mary and led to man's salvation was signified by the presence of the book at the
Female society portraits: representing the elite woman in eighteenth-century New Spain
2012
Since the early stages of the colonization of Mexico, the production of portraits in this territory had been limited to the representation of prelates, viceroys and other government officials. By 1700, however, the boom in the mining industry extended the production and circulation of portraiture beyond to a new and growing class of elites. This project examines the production and circulation of secular female portraiture in eighteenth-century New Spain. Focusing on the role of portraiture as an agent in the formation of individual and collective identities, this study delves into the ways in which portraits construct identity by mobilizing and representing values and ideas related to class, status and gender that circulated in eighteenthcentury New Spanish culture. Specifically, this essay analyses how while mobilizing a visual formula borrowed from male official portraiture, society portraits of elite women engage viewers into an interpretation of pictorial conventions that is specific to the female gender, thus promoting a model of the Christian ideal woman. Finally, this essay explores the effects of the portrait's display, in the construction of meaning by proposing the New Hispanic domestic interiors, specifically the salón de estrado, as a site where seemingly contradicting ideas about womanhood are negotiated.
Comitatus, 2022
Through analyzing the close context of a rural parish church and the iconographic program of the mural paintings located inside the building, this paper explores the implications of the matronage of these murals by noble women in the immediate period after the Black Death. Based on strong documentary evidence, I contend that the most plausible date of completion of these paintings, located in the Navarrese village of Ardanaz, was circa 1361-1363. The economic crisis created by the pandemic seems to have moved the local rural nobility to seek positions of power in the administrative structure of the kingdom, close to the royal court. Indeed, a relationship between the noble Grez family and the prince is recorded visually in the mural paintings of Ardanaz. This fact plus the presence of noblewomen depicted in the surviving murals suggests female matronage of the work. Probably moved by piousness and fear in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death, the visual program in Ardanaz was designed by their patrons to express the advancement of time toward the Last Judgment and the unavoidable destiny of Christian souls between Heaven or Hell.