September 18 - January 15, 2022
From the Meadows Museum:
“Opening in September is an exploration of the role of holy women in Spain and throughout its empire, told through engravings, drawings, rare books, and more. The exhibition showcases the women as they worked within—and against—the limitations imposed by the Catholic Church and the wider society between 1620 to 1800.
Picturing Holy Women in the Spanish Empire, 1620–1800 will be the first exhibition organized by the Meadows Museum to explore the momentous and varied roles that female biblical figures, saints, and monastics played in the early modern Spain and the Americas. The artworks on view will examine how an idealized model of female sanctity was promoted through visual culture while at the same time reveal how women, in spite of patriarchal institutions, managed to break with gender norms and become active spiritual leaders, mystics, authors, and patrons.
In early modern Spain it was widely believed that women, as the descendants of Eve, were morally inferior, susceptible to temptation, and even a threat to man’s salvation.
To restrain this perceived hazard, the Spanish monarchy and the Catholic Church restricted the public life of women. Those who professed as nuns were more strictly regulated than male monks, as Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand imposed reforms that gave male ecclesiastics oversight of their female counterparts, enacted codes of claustration, and limited convents’ autonomy. In 1563 the Council of Trent expanded upon on these disciplinary measures by barring nuns from venturing outside the convent. St. Paul’s statements against women addressing church congregations was routinely cited as justification to prohibit women from speaking publicly in any form. Even secular women were expected to lead an insulated domestic life and eventually marry. Guidebooks such as Fray Luis de León’s The Perfect Wife (La perfecta casada, 1583) likewise insisted that, “as men are made to speak and go outside, women are made to enclose and cover themselves.”
As the presence of women in the public sphere became increasingly restricted, images of female sanctity abounded. These works provided models of purity and piety for viewers to emulate. Visual representations of the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, Saint Teresa of Ávila, and Saint Rosa of Lima, among others, will be featured. These images accompanied prayerbooks, hagiographies, and nuns’ biographies, circulating widely thanks to the proliferation of print as a medium. Artists emphasized these women’s exemplary status by infusing the compositions with symbols of feminine virtue and enclosing the bodies of their subjects within insulated spaces such as a convent cell. Images of holy women reveal a more complicated picture of their lives beyond the ideal of the isolation and chastity, however. Many show the dynamic roles of women as monastic leaders, mystic visionaries, and brilliant intellectuals, all imbued with divine wisdom.
Largely drawn from the collection of SMU’s Bridwell Library, the exhibition is curated by the Meadows Museum’s Center for Spain in America (CSA) Curatorial Fellow, Miranda Saylor. Highlights include an extraordinary engraving representing Saint Teresa preaching (1679), a frontispiece featuring the Mexican nun Sor Sebastiana Josefa de la Santísima Trinidad (1765), and a rare illuminated manuscript commissioned for the Convent of Santa Clara in Palma de Mallorca (c. 1780–1800).
These will be joined by works from the Meadows’s collection, as well as loans from SMU’s DeGolyer Library and a private collection.
This exhibition has been organized by the Meadows Museum and is funded by a generous gift from The Meadows Foundation.”
Artist talk: September 26, 2022
Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University
5900 Bishop Boulevard
Dallas, 75275-0357 TX
214-768-2516
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