ABSTRACT
As self-professed defenders of the Catholic faith, devotion to the tenets of the Counter-Reformation, and notorious home of the Spanish Inquisition, scholars have assumed that nudes, or works of art otherwise potentially deemed ‘lascivious’, had a very restricted audience in early modern Spain. However, these ideas about the Spanish context are outdated and lack the appropriate nuance to address the complexities of taste, display, and audience of art in Spain. In this chapter, I interrogate these notions with regard to the display and viewership of nude sculptures in early modern Spain and, specifically, their consumption by women. The sculptures were not tucked away out of view but were, instead, in higher-traffic areas of the house and in the semi-public areas of gardens, despite warnings written by contemporary writers about their potential danger.
