Old women in frames

A truly sensitive cultural history of old age pays close attention to the social rituals that both produce and use representations of aging. Writing about funerary rituals in Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence, Sharon Strocchia underscores that objects become symbols through social relations that take place within specific environments. ¹ Emphasizing the multiple and shifting meanings of symbols, Strocchia tells us that their meaning arises from “the everyday situations in which they are used and from the everyday people who use them.” ² The goal of this book is to show how the genre of portraiture, in the second half of the sixteenth century, under the impact of religious reform, fashioned the old age of women into a multivalent domestic symbol that operated within family rituals to mediate life passages, model virtue, and forge connections between women and honor, family and community. ³ Building on the conclusions of Chapters 2 and 3, the goal of this chapter, and the next, is to continue to excavate the symbolic richness of female old age within the early modern domestic interior.