ABSTRACT
Sofonisba Anguissola’s self-portrait (Figure 3.1) and Josefa de Ayala’s St Catherine (Figure 3.6) directly look out of their space, fixing you – the viewer – with self-aware, mirroring gazes. María Eugenia de Beer fondly addresses Crown Prince Balthasar Carlos of Spain in a verse on the front page of her book of engravings (Figure 4.6). María Eugenia, María Josefa Sánchez, and Luisa Rafaela de Valdés include the honorific “Doña” on their work (Figures 3.5, 4.8 and 4.31). The signatures of Soror Joana Baptista (Figure 5.4) and Soror Andrea de la Encarnación (Figure 5.9) are clearly visible. Luisa Roldán includes her royal title, “Escultora de Cámara” on her most significant sculpture (Figure 4.25). By asserting their identity and/or their status, these creative women let us know that they, and their work, were worthy of attention. These signals reinforce the now-obvious fact that women artists were present, active, and valued in the early modern Iberian social environments they inhabited. Yet in the patriarchal hegemony that wrote history, these women were invisible, their actions unnoticed.
