Praying to Portraits

Adam Jasienski's Praying to Portraits provides an ambitious and wide-ranging analysis of a largely understudied art category of portraiture a lo divino—sacred portraiture. Heterogeneous in nature, sacred portraiture included donor portraits, portraits of sitters in the guise of saints, “true portraits” of recently deceased canonized individuals, portraits that had been repainted, and, in some instances, royal portraits. Living individuals were portrayed as holy figures that viewers addressed in their devotions to experience the divine. Such images, not surprisingly, elicited scrutiny from ecclesiastical authorities and decrees that condemned pollution of the sacred with the profane. Although the broader geographic context is the Hispanic world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the main focus is on Spain and the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Jasienski considers how two ostensibly distinct categories of portraiture and religious painting combined in distinctive ways and often pushed up against the Council of Trent's regulatory decrees on religious imagery. The author draws on a wide range of primary sources, including a robust corpus of sacred portraits, as well as art treatises, religious sermons, satirical works, and Inquisition trials that are mined for information about the creation, patronage, appearance, interpretation, and use of such images.Jasienski reassesses sacred portraiture to critique its marginalization in traditional scholarship and makes the case for the ubiquity of these images among early modern viewers. His central arguments weave their way throughout four chapters. Critical of traditional historiography on portraiture, he asserts that early modern portraiture did not follow a straight, inevitable line from the sacred to the secular or to expressions of unchanging selfhood. The concept of portraiture “was much more accommodating than the constrained definition of portraiture commonly used today” (p. 151). Moreover, sacred portraiture was mutable, flexible, unstable, and a unique space “for mediating an individual's relationship to the sphere of the sacred” (p. 4). The boundaries between portraiture and religious imagery were porous, which made ecclesiastical control exceedingly difficult. Perhaps the author's boldest claim is that any early modern portrait “possessed the capacity to, at some stage in its life history, function as a sacred image” (p. 153).Chapter 1 examines “sanctified portraits”—patrons represented as holy figures—and how we might understand their desire for such a representation. Rather than expressions of vanity, these images, Jasienski suggests, promoted reflections on self-debasement in a patron's religious meditations. Such images, however, proved vulnerable to condemnation from ecclesiastical censors given their ambiguity. Chapter 2 addresses “true portraits” focused on the cults of Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Ávila. Individuals knew what both saints actually looked like, which was not the case for many holy figures. Even though Teresa agreed to have her portrait painted—unlike Ignatius, who refused—in both cases, descriptions of them guaranteed neither uniformity nor stability in their portraits. The debates over such images offer important insights into expressions of early modern sanctity and what exactly constituted a “true portrait.” Jasienski turns to the afterlives of portrait likenesses in the third chapter to analyze how they might be transformed into sacred images and their owners’ motivations to make such changes. The addition of familiar markers of sanctity such as wings and halos or textual descriptions that identified the sitters as saints facilitated such changes and so resignified the portrait's meaning. A central case study analyzes portraits of the controversial bishop of Puebla Juan de Palafox y Mendoza (some of which adorned him with seraphic wings) and an Inquisition trial focused on unsanctioned veneration of the bishop. Given the inquisitors’ concerns about the portraits’ impact on Indigenous parishioners, Jasienski uses this case to widen his discussions on viewership to include the multiethnic and multilingual audiences for such images based on “culturally bound forms of seeing” (p. 13). The fourth chapter reassesses royal portraits, reflecting on the “unrecognizability” of royal portraits given their similarity to nonroyal portraits and their “functional similarity to sacred images” (pp. 123, 125). Bishop Palafox reemerges as an example of how such slippage might work. During the celebrations of Corpus Christi in Puebla, both Palafox's portrait and those of the king and queen were displayed close to each other. Palafox's portrait, however, was elevated with the addition of prestigious signifiers such as a baldachin, whereas the royal portraits of the king and queen were not. Jasienski maps interpretations of such images in a particularly revealing analysis of viewers’ divergent responses. Less persuasive, perhaps, is his assertion of a “perpetually threatening powerlessness” of the king's image given its dependence on its forms of display (p. 127). This seems to be contradicted by his reference to the “violence” that royal portraits exerted on their viewers, due to the gestures that viewers were expected to perform before them (p. 129). Given the heavy lifting that the figure of Bishop Palafox plays in these two chapters, Jasienski's nuanced insights could have been further strengthened by a deeper discussion of his life, especially his proximity to his parishioners, performative practices as bishop, and pastoral tours of inspection.Praying to Portraits is beautifully illustrated, clearly written, and cogently argued. It is a significant contribution that will be of interest to scholars and students of the early modern world, not just the Hispanic world, and especially for those engaged in understanding early modern visual culture and practice

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Identity (music) · Literature · Portrait · Sociology · Visual arts · Early Modern Spanish Literature · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American history and culture