In the Guise of Holiness: Sanctity and Portraiture in the Early Modern Hispanic World

Abstract

This dissertation examines the intersection of sacred and profane imagery in Spanish territories, including Spain, New Spain, and Naples, between 1520 and 1700. In particular, it focuses on so-called sanctified portraits, which explicitly cast their sitters as holy figures; paintings of saints, which drew on the conventions of court portraiture; and portraits that were repainted with halos and other attributes that transformed them into objects of devotion. It brings together official and non-official (or “popular”) examples of making and using such images, and examines cases from Europe and colonial Latin America in tandem. By doing so, it demonstrates that the overlapping of portraiture and religious imagery was not a marginal phenomenon in early modern art, but one that raised some of the period’s most pressing issues, including the mutability of status and identity, the surveillance of religious experience, and the vernacular imitation of official images and image practices.