ABSTRACT
Portraits of old women did not offer a single meaning or purpose to the families for which they were created. In the “fiction of the pose” of female old age, they performed memories of family honor, virtue, and redemption within the early modern domestic interior. In this chapter, we explore the meaning of the visible signs of female old age in portraits of old women and their relationship to the Christian cult of suffering, mortification, and fasting. Scholars have remarked that some of the subjects lack teeth, such as the sitter in Passerotti’s Portrait of a Seated Old Woman (Plate 1). 1 As well, the faces of the women represented in these images exhibit hollow, sunken cheeks and thin lips, and their bodies evoke an impression of slimness if not emaciation accentuated through the use of clothing that envelops rather than emphasizes the body (Plates 1, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14). 2 Although it could be argued that the portraits simply reflect the physical effects of age on the female body, the chapter contends that for viewers who were steeped in the spiritual and prescriptive literature on widowhood, and who were engaged with Catholic devotional practices, such physical attributes would be perceived as the visible manifestations of the prescribed regime of mortification and fasting which received its greatest refinement when it was allied with the suffering that is old age.
