Hispanic Research Journal Iberian and Latin American Studies
ISSN: 1468-2737 (Print) 1745-820X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yhrj20
Josefa de Óbidos e a Invenção do Barroco Português Carmen Ripollés To cite this article: Carmen Ripollés (2016) Josefa de Óbidos e a Invenção do Barroco Português, Hispanic Research Journal, 17:6, 558-560, DOI: 10.1080/14682737.2016.1238224 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14682737.2016.1238224
Published online: 29 Nov 2016.
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Date: 29 November 2016, At: 07:58
558 REVIEWS response would be a series of supposed diabolical possessions, notice of which soon reached the Inquisition. The testimony of the nuns involved is priceless, especially when it appeared that each nun had her own personal devil (all with a particular name: Galalón, Herodes, Peregrino, Altaroth, Barrabás, Fortaleza, etc.) who came each night to torment her. However, the involvement of the Inquisition was not something Olivares and his close ally Villanueva wanted or needed, especially at a time when the Count-Duke’s role as King’s favourite was being contested and there were plenty of enemies ready to make the most of his misfortunes. The whole affair soon became the stuff of satirical poetry circulating around the court, and Muñoz Pérez dedicates most of chapter 4 to analysing it, a large part of which was previously unknown. The title of the book — Poder y escritura femenina — refers, of course, to the interplay of politics and religion, in this case between the King’s favourite, who desperately wanted a son, and a nun, who in her mystical trances, convinced herself and Olivares that he would shortly have one. Eighty-nine letters written by Teresa to Olivares have survived among the Inquisition papers to do with the case (unsurprisingly, none of his have), and they give us a unique glimpse into how a relatively young and still unknown nun was able to communicate with the most important politician of the period, dealing with him on almost equal terms and using their epistolary friendship to further her ambitions for San Plácido. One is inevitably reminded here of the later epistolary ‘friendship’ between Philip IV and Sor María de Ágreda. As well as her letters, the three memorials Teresa wrote to the Inquisition in her defence form the central plank of what Muñoz Pérez terms ‘escritura femenina’. These are: Memorial de faltas (Autumn–Winter 1629); Descargos contra fray Francisco García (February 1630), and Memorial apologético (1637). Muñoz Pérez skilfully analyses the three texts and shows how Teresa grew in confidence from one memorial to the next. Indeed, she became so good that the Inquisition was obliged to overturn its earlier decision and in 1638 absolve the convent of any wrongdoing. Undoubtedly, the pressure applied in the background by Olivares and his circle played a large part in this, but Teresa’s own role, through her writings, should not be underestimated, as the author makes clear. After 1638, Teresa disappears from view and, no doubt to Olivares’s immense satisfaction, so did San Plácido with all its inner conflicts, turmoil, nightly visitations by a host of devils, and a prior who took his confessional role with the nuns rather too personally and intimately. This is an excellent book, well written, richly documented, and a worthy winner of the AHGBI’s 2014 publication prize. Queen Mary University of London
Trevor J. Dadson
[email protected]
Josefa de Óbidos e a Invenção do Barroco Português. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional–Casa da Moeda. 2015. Pp. 248, 194 illus. (most col.). $65 (PB). ISBN 9789722723749. Published to accompany the exhibition ‘Josefa de Óbidos e a Invenção do Barroco Português’ at the Museu Nacional da Arte Antigua, Lisbon, 15 May–6 September 2015. Through its lavish display of 133 objects, including painting, sculpture, and decorative arts, and a beautifully illustrated catalogue comprising over twenty brief essays by major local scholars (although regrettably without catalogue entries, and in Portuguese only), this exhibition achieved the goal of presenting the Portuguese Baroque as an idiosyncratic artistic expression and established Josefa de Óbidos as one of its most effective interpreters. Josefa de Óbidos (1630–1684) lived and worked during a period of political and economic decline for Portugal that, nonetheless, witnessed a significant increase in the demand for sacred and profane images. Born Josefa de Ayala Figueira in Seville, where her father, Baltazar Gomes Figueira (1604–1674) specialized in still-life and landscape painting, Josefa was able to capitalize on her familiarity with Sevillian naturalism, becoming a successful independent artist who keenly responded to the specific religious, socio-economic, and artistic needs of her Portuguese context.
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The exhibition was divided into eight sections, paralleled in the accompanying catalogue; however, they were presented without a clear order, and only two of them — the third and last — related to the notion of a ‘Portuguese Baroque’, as the exhibition title suggested. These two sections underscored Portugal’s artistic originality, here celebrated for its sensorial, ornamental, and uniquely global appeal, achieved through the display of Persian rugs, Chinese porcelain, Indian woods, and ivories alongside objects manufactured in seventeenth-century Portugal — including polychrome sculptures, tile altar frontals, and one of Josefa’s famous ‘Christ Childs’ (Menino Jesus Salvador do Mundo, c. 1680). These displays highlighted the visual richness resulting from the circulation of materials, techniques, and visual motifs on both sides of the Lusophone Atlantic, and illustrated the notion that the Portuguese Baroque was a ‘baroque of artifice’ informed by the work of carvers, tile craftsmen, and goldsmiths. In the catalogue, several essays also dealt with the unique features of this region’s Baroque (especially illuminating is António Filipe Pimentel’s essay, ‘Que Coisa é o “Barroco Português”?’). The rest of the exhibition centred more specifically on Josefa de Óbidos’ career itself, showcasing her crucial contribution — if not necessarily invention, as claimed in the exhibition’s title — to this artistic context, particularly in her religious compositions. Nevertheless, more examples by other contemporary Portuguese painters other than her father (featured, however, in several essays of the catalogue) would have strengthened the exhibition’s fundamental premise. In addition to calling attention to the representation of lavish materials in her paintings, the exhibition emphasized Josefa’s engagement with the period’s devotional literature, here presented as instrumental to understand the spirituality that informs her religious paintings. As an introduction, the first section focused mainly on Josefa’s engravings and small copper paintings, demonstrating her stylistic evolution — from the early tenebrism of Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Claire adoring the Christ Child (1647) to the luminosity and Zurbaranesque colouring of later compositions such as Mary Magdalene (1679) — and revealing some of her major formal and iconographic themes: rich oriental fabrics, dazzling jewels, and large figures with sweet androgynous faces representing recurrent subjects such as Saint Catherine, Mary Magdalene, and the Holy Family. Josefa’s patrons played a major role in her religious commissions, which were the subject of the last three of the eight sections of the exhibition. While the seventh section was dedicated mostly to the artist’s famous Christ Childs, the sixth and eighth sections focused on her large altarpieces for Augustinian, Cistercian, and especially Carmelite convents, to which Josefa devoted much of her efforts after the 1660s, when she became a fully independent professional painter. Paintings such as the Adoration of the Shepherds (1669), originally for the Convent of Santa Madalena de Évora de Alcobaça, exemplify Josefa’s distinctive portrayal of divinity, a combination of naturalism in the depiction of material reality — fabrics, jewels, and domestic objects — and idealization of facial features, with which she interpreted contemporary religious trends. In particular, Josefa seems to have been an avid follower of Saint Teresa of Avila, who provided a model for female spirituality and autonomy through work. The saint is the subject of an interesting cycle of paintings for the Carmelite Convent of Cascais, which visitors were able to examine in the last section of the exhibition. Qualifying the notion of Josefa’s spirituality, Luisa Penalva’s and Joaquim Oliveira Caetano’s essays, which focus on the painter’s jewels and her investments in real estate respectively, demonstrate that she was also preoccupied with worldly matters. Sections 2, 4, and 5, devoted to still life — one of Josefa’s most popular subjects — reinforced the profane aspect of Josefa’s career: Section 4 acknowledged the role of the Spanish bodegón with a small but significant number of examples by Juan Sánchez Cotán, Tomás Hiepes, Juan van der Hamen y León, Juan de Espinosa, and Francisco Barrera. Section two emphasized the pivotal role of her father Baltazar — credited for introducing the genre in Portugal after practising it in Seville — as a source of pictorial models for Josefa’s more decorative still lifes (the exhibition even proposes their collaboration in four large pictures representing the months). Most interesting, section 5 offered a poignant revision of Josefa’s still lifes by placing them in the context of her father’s workshop. Including examples of various formats and levels of quality, along with a list of works recorded in Baltazar’s will of 1675 (reproduced in one of the wall texts), the section revealed the existence
560 REVIEWS of preparatory drawings and of small pictures that could be repeatedly used as models for larger compositions, practices also common in Spain at the time. These working methods help explain the paintings’ archaic look and force us to reconsider early symbolic interpretations, which deemed Josefa’s still lifes as extensions of her religious works (a view put forward in The Sacred and the Profane: Josefa de Óbidos of Portugal, National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1997), bringing attention, instead, to Josefa’s and her father’s commercial capitalization on a novel genre. One of the questions not sufficiently examined in the exhibition is that of the audience for these pictures, of a status comparable to Josefa’s, and with a similar penchant for expensive objects, as well as the function these still lifes may have played in wealthy Portuguese households. It is unusual for a female artist to be the focus of a major exhibition, let alone to be hailed as the inventor of the style of an entire period in an important European country. The show’s main goal was to debunk the myth of Josefa de Óbidos as a ‘curious, but ultimately provincial painter, and instead to show her as an artist who clearly reflected the spirituality of that time’, while, at the same time, placing her within the larger context of Baroque art in Portugal. In reassessing Josefa’s career, the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue thus offered new perspectives on the artist and sought to re-evaluate seventeenth-century Portuguese artistic culture. Portland State University, Oregon
Carmen Ripollés
[email protected]
España ante sus críticos: las claves de la Leyenda Negra. Edited by Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez, Antonio Sánchez Jiménez, and Harm den Boer. Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert. 2015. Pp. 275. €28 (PB). ISBN 978-84-8489-906-8 In recent years there has been a spate of single-authored books on the Black Legend, but few, if any, multi-authored collected volumes such as the one under review here. Given that many writers stress the fact that the Black Legend has to be viewed both geographically and chronologically, then a multi-authored volume of this sort offers many advantages. After a sound Introduction by two of the three editors (Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez and Antonio Sánchez Jiménez), which looks at the key issues under consideration, and a very useful update on current research by Sánchez Jiménez, there follow a series of chapters that examine the topic geographically — Holland, England, Italy, Portugal — and chronologically — for example, Marian England and Post-Armada England; the origins of the Legend in Italy and Hispanophobia and Hispanophilia in relations between Spain and Genoa in the seventeenth century. Two of the salient features of the Black Legend — the death of don Carlos (attributed to his father Philip II by Spain’s enemies) and the Apologia by William of Orange — also receive detailed consideration. The recent discovery of an Antiapología by Pedro Cornejo, written in 1581 and thus immediately after the circulation of William the Silent’s celebrated attack on Spain and Philip II, makes for an excellent chapter by Rodríguez Pérez, for it reminds us that Spain was not silent or inactive in its own defence but did go on the offensive, especially where the character and honour of the King were concerned. A recent addition to the debate on the Black Legend has been in the area of imagology and national stereotypes, and Fernando Martínez Luna contributes with a valuable chapter on Tommaso Campanella’s Monarquias. ‘Non placet Hispania’, the title of the chapter by Santiago López Moreda, is a welcome reminder that the origins of the Black Legend are to be found in Italy (and not in Protestant Northern Europe) and that they can be traced back as far as the late thirteenth century, when the presence of Spaniards (or, rather, Catalans and Aragonese) was first felt in southern Italy and its island possessions (Sicily and Sardinia). All of the principal characteristics of the Legend were formed then — the supposed innate cruelty and tyranny of Spaniards, their desire for universal dominion, their pride, arrogance, and rapaciousness, and the charge that they were a sort of mongrel race, all mixed up with Jews and Moors — and these would be picked up later by Protestant writers in their
