Josefa de Ayala e Cabreira’s St Catherine of Alexandria altarpiece and female empowerment 1

Abstract

This chapter examines an altarpiece created by the Portuguese professional woman painter, Josefa de Ayala, known as Josefa de Obidos, in 1661 for the parish church of Obidos, the town north of Lisbon in which she spent most of her working life. In adulthood, as a painter and businesswoman, Josefa chose to style herself Josefa de Ayala e Cabreira, using the surnames of her maternal grandparents, Ayala and Cabrera with the aristocratic 'de' before and 'e' linking them. The fact that Josefa produced two very significant pictorial biographies of female saints has to be seen as more than just coincidence, particularly as there are obvious political implications in both. Caetano Oliveira believes that the inclusion of Santa Teresa is highly unusual, though he cites ample evidence of the pairing of the Magdalen with St Catherine of Alexandria in Italian, Flemish and German art of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

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