ABSTRACT
In 2004 I began the process of organizing a conference session on women and portraiture in early modern Europe for the annual meeting of the College Art Association.1 Although portraits by and of early modern women had inspired a wealth of publications over the previous three decades, no published study, and no recent conference session known to me, addressed the topic in its own right. It thus seemed urgent to assess the state of the research and to propose some fresh investigative strategies for the future. Among the aims of the session was to explore more deeply the use of portraits by women to negotiate the boundaries of gender. I also wanted to bring fresh questions to some conventional approaches to the study of female agency in portraiture, such as image-making, self-fashioning, and patronage. Alternative means for representing the self through portraits, including collecting and display, could also be investigated, as could the gendered relationships and social anxieties of portraiture revealed by women’s – and men’s – strategies for the appropriation, acquisition, and gifting of portraits. Finally, I hoped to explore the still understudied area of female spectatorship. Attending to these concerns would, I believed, bring us closer to understanding the relationship of visual culture to two areas of immediate interest: gender identity and female agency.
