ABSTRACT
Portraits of women represent a fruitful avenue from which to approach the study of women’s lives and agencies in the early modern period. When taken seriously as objects which function independently of their sitters or makers, portraits reveal themselves as active, affective components of women’s lives. Portraits negotiate between sitter and viewer but also between viewers in the absence of the sitter in order to create social bonds and cement dynastic claims. Using case studies culled from a range of times and places through the early modern period, we argue for a site-specific, viewer-response based method of examining portraits that foregrounds the cultural work accomplished by the object itself.
