PhD upgrade: Aoife Stables

This paper offers a case study of the Puridad Altarpiece, a work dedicated to the Immaculate Conception that is today housed in the Museo de Bellas Artes in Valencia. While previous scholarship has focused largely on questions of style and authorship, this paper examines another, hitherto overlooked participant in its creation: its commissioner, Damiata de Mompalau, abbess of the Puridad Monastery. In the face of reputational damage and the curtailment of religious freedoms, the Puridad Altarpiece enabled Damiata to project a more favourable image of her community by aligning it with an iconography that emphasized sexual and spiritual purity. Yet in Iberia at the turn of the sixteenth century, ‘purity’ carried increasingly racialized as well as gendered connotations. This paper therefore explores the intersection of gender and race in the premodern period, and, in particular, how certain elite women could leverage their racial identity to strengthen their position within a patriarchal system.

Open only to UCL History of Art staff and PhD students.