Friday, March 31, 2023, 01:22
‘Herederas de Eva’ is a scientific outreach group that emerged from a research team from the University of Murcia made up of Patricia María Castiñeyra Fernández, María Victoria Zaragoza and María del Mar Albero. The latter has directed their respective doctoral theses: ‘The female religious portrait in the Spanish Baroque: design, application and evaluation of a didactic unit on the Golden Age’, Zaragoza’s thesis, while Castiñeyra’s is called ‘Religious, holy and women of the Bible. Creation of a feminine imaginary in the religious painting of the Spanish Renaissance’.
The challenge was to study and learn about the circumstances of women’s lives and what was the imaginary and ideal created around them from the masculine powers of the time. To do this, they contextualize and analyze the works of art in which women are represented, from a multidisciplinary and gender perspective.
The image of women has been a ‘created’ image, represented for centuries from the male gaze, influenced by the ideas of Antiquity, and later reinforced by the Christian concepts of Original Sin and the guilt of Eve, which spread the inferiority of women. women, their lesser abilities and the need to be under male surveillance.
Contextualizing the works provides clues to see how the history of women is or has been at certain times
For this they have focused fundamentally on the representations of religious women, such as saints, portraits of nuns, the image of the Virgin Mary and other female characters of Christianity. Both doctoral students thought that these issues would be studied and developed, but their surprise was great when they realized, as a result of their research, that there were still many issues to be addressed and on which progress could be made. Those religious images were the starting point for many lines of research to open up before them and that is what their research is currently focused on.
María del Mar Albero, professor of Art History at the University of Murcia, had already worked on issues related to the image of women, especially through their gestures, physiognomy, the expression of passions and their emotions, and in iconographic themes such as the look of the perverse woman or the appearance of the prudent woman.
The group studies different visual themes ranging from the 16th to the 19th century. The idea of the research and the scientific dissemination group arose from the two doctoral students through social networks, especially Instagram.
Both emphasize that, as a result of the research carried out in their doctoral theses, they realized that everything they studied about the image of women through Art History was a very current topic and that “many concepts and social norms of then we have inherited it and they continue to this day».
A very topical topic
They realized that the image of today’s women is built in a very similar way to how it was done in past centuries, and they considered it interesting to bring it to light and talk about it.
‘Herederas de Eva’ is based on academics, but they want it to be an outreach group, reaching the widest possible public, and disseminating it to society in general, publicizing their research.
The group focuses on Renaissance and Baroque painting, and how through it you can see what daily life women led at that time. They are convinced that even, masked in religious or mythological themes, it is possible to study or glimpse what the day-to-day life of women in past times was like. In the past, women, being relegated to the private sphere of the home, were not considered interesting subjects to be represented in everyday moments, but only as characters within a scene or as sensual objects for aesthetic pleasure.
Plato vs. Aristotle
In our culture, the idea of Eve as a tempting, lustful woman who incites the sin of Adam, that is, of man as a whole, has always accompanied us. Men are descendants of Adam, while women are of Eve, so she is also heir to her own sin. This also occurs in other cultures. In classical mythology, the first woman is Pandora, the woman who opened the box that contained all the evils of humanity. In other words, comments María del Mar Albero: “No matter what the culture, women are beautiful and necessary evil.” Aristotle spoke of women as an imperfect being, he said that they were men who had not developed well. And yet, Plato does defend them, and says that if the woman has not intellectually become like a man, it is because she has not had the opportunity to develop and educate herself. For a long time this struggle between the ideas of Aristotle and Plato remained. That brings us to the difference between Scholasticism and Neoplatonism. In the Renaissance the philosophical tradition continues, especially in the universities that follow Aristotle, where they continue to think of women as an imperfect being. Neoplatonic ideas broaden the sights and there is a certain opening for women to access education and culture.
They all point out that women, despite occupying a very close position in Art, and being the most represented subject in painting and sculpture, their role has been secondary with respect to men, who were considered the really important figure.
Women in their daily life according to the painting
They think that, by contextualizing the works and studying their image, they can obtain very interesting material to address the history of women and, on the other hand, they want to show that these women are not objects as traditionally they have wanted us to believe in the history of art by cornering them a purely aesthetic or sensual plane: «The truth is that these women are talking subjects who transmit a lot of information to us, because we must not forget that artists are children of their time and finally, even if unconsciously, they reflect it in their paintings» .
To demonstrate this, they refer to Velázquez’s painting ‘Las hilanderas’. Through this group of workers from a 17th century workshop in Madrid, it is possible to understand how they worked, how they dressed and what their daily life was like, something that, as María del Mar Albero assures, can be followed in more detail in other latitudes, as in the work of Flemish artists (for example, Vermeer himself) who mainly worked on genre painting, recreating himself inside Dutch homes.
Actually, the history of art provides us with a lot of information to know the history of women at any time.
the births
Also the representation of births, especially those other than the baby Jesus, who always has a very specific iconography. Unlike this, that of the Virgin Mary or Saint John the Baptist, are births of which there is no description in the sources. They were represented as any birth that occurred within the court environment of the time, providing a lot of information about the lives of women at that time, as they illustrate what a birth was like in the case of women of certain resources. In these cases women appear around, with towels, offering a broth for the mother to recover, sometimes the wet nurses appear taking care of the child, etc.
The images allow us to make a comparison between the lives of women and the social constructs that were established in the Modern Age and that have been inherited through generations, and that are still valid today in our society or that of relatively recently.
The works of art address, for example, how marriage is configured as an institution and the patrimonialization of women, since at the moment a woman got married she became under the guardianship of her husband and, at home, she had a great lack of protection
The virgin of milk and the role of a good mother
The contextualization of the works provides them with the clues to see how the history of women is or has been at certain times. They cite the case of ‘La Virgen de la leche’, which has its origins in the Roman catacombs, but then gradually develops until it reaches a point, at the beginning of the 16th century, in which a hatching is witnessed, on everything in Spain.
After studying and contextualizing the works of those years, they verified that they were in a time of change: the birth of the Modern State, a time in which the Regime was interested in couples marrying and creating families, since these were the center of the new economy.
It had stopped being interesting for people to enter convents, which was a typically medieval purpose. Now we had to instill in women the desire to be mothers. It was also a time of high infant mortality, and there was a tradition that the well-positioned mother, as soon as she gave birth, gave the child to the wet nurse, and through the Virgin of the milk they showed the convenience that the mother should take charge of their children and take care of them very carefully. The state wanted women to assume that their role as mothers was the fundamental task of their lives, since if the Virgin had done it, they should also take care of her offspring.
The Holy Family
Another figure that also expresses the ideal of a good mother is ‘Santa Ana, teaching the virgin to read’. In Murcia you can see it in the Dominican women, who have this carving on an altarpiece and it is the example of a good mother who, in addition to giving nutritious food, provides education.
The men always had a tutor, and in this case it is exposed that the women should also have those who educate them. This theme is seen very well in the Holy Family, an iconography that did not appear in the Middle Ages and which nevertheless appears in the Renaissance, just at the moment when the modern state wanted to promote families and promote procreation.
In the Baroque there is also another change: Saint Joseph is no longer represented as an elderly man and always in the background within the family, as was the case in the Renaissance. He takes on more prominence, he is represented closer to the child and rejuvenates. This can be verified in a work by Murillo such as the Sagrada Familia del pajarito, in which he looks young and attentive to the child. This occurs at a time when Saint John of the Cross or Saint Teresa are talking about the father figure so that men begin to be part of the family and the more domestic care within it. The figure of Saint Joseph is used to show what a good father is. At that moment, San José goes from being in the background and aging to being a young, handsome man who helps take care of the child.
Old women and ‘influencers’
The members of this popular science group like to compare images of ancient women with images of current women. The results are often unexpected. One of her initiatives was to contrast the figure of the singer and influencer Lola Indigo as a singer who dictates trends in clothing, hairstyle, etc., with Titian’s Eva. The first ‘influencers’, who portrayed themselves in the 19th century, wonderful, all from high society, did it in a similar way. They also wanted to represent what was fashionable, what was beautiful. Or the image of Queen Elizabeth II, who used the model and example of her predecessor, Elizabeth I, throughout her reign to create her image. In her portrait, she uses the Orb and the crown, with the ermine, the same background and in a pose that tells us the importance of the monarch for her country. “We take references from iconographies of women,” they say. Today there are many girls who follow Lola Índigo, a singer who has a song entitled ‘Curse, which is about the seductive woman who made the man fall into her temptation and is represented in the same way that Eva was represented («Bad, I I’m a sinner/ Bad, you follow’ falling in love/ Bad, I’m a curse/ I’m bad, very bad»). Adolescents and young university students today are very struck by these similarities when they have the opportunity to verify them at university events.
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