Description

In Premodern Europe, families played a significant role in commissioning artworks as well as in choosing what iconography was used. The nine essays in this volume highlight the often-overlooked contributions of matriarchs, actual or iconographic, to this process. They look at mothers, wives, mistresses, sisters, and nuns who served as patrons, models of inspiration, and even as artists themselves. While most maternal imagery was positive, occasionally it could reveal motherly instincts that had gone awry, as in the case of the wild woman of Northern European folklore who abducted children. Whether manifesting as portrayals of charity, labour, sacrifice, piety, compassion, or grief, the imagery evoked by spiritual and maternal connections among kinsfolk played an essential role in European iconography and creative output. Based upon investigations in archives and manuscripts, along with written and visual sources, the essays in this volume thus make a vital contribution to the growing body of research on the importance of family matters in artistic development.

ELIZABETH LISOT-NELSON is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Texas at Tyler. She specializes in Renaissance and Baroque art history, in particular Catholic devotional artwork and images of marginalized populations such as illegitimate children, ebrei italiani, conversos, moriscos, refugees, slaves and servants.

325 pp.
ISBN: 9-780-7727-1184-7
Published: 2025

Contents

Introduction
Elizabeth A. Lisot-Nelson

1. Family Strategies: Cesi Men and Women in Early Modern Rome
Carolyn Valone

2. Art and the Dowry of Laura Orsini
Cynthia Stollhans

3. In loco parentis: Aunts as Spiritual Stepmothers in the Convents of Italy
Craig A. Monson

4. Federico Barocci’s Madonna del Popolo: Family Charity and the Theology of St. Bonaventure
Elizabeth A. Lisot-Nelson

5. Elisabetta Sirani’s Allegories of Charity (1664–1665): Drawing from Family
Elizabeth Nogan Ranieri

6. Poland’s Queens and the Reliquaries of St. Stanislaus
Beata Niedzialkowska

7. The Wild Woman as Maternal Monster: Cultural Anxieties and Child Abduction in Early Modern Nuremberg Schembartbuch Imagery
Michelle Moseley-Christian

8. The First Family at Work: Eve as Spinner and Mother
Carlee A. Bradbury

9. “My dear child, goodbye.”: The Adaptation and Continuation of Medieval and Renaissance Religious Imagery in the Work of Käthe Kollwitz
Kaia L. Magnusen

Afterword: Reflections on Kinship and Artistic Patronage
Elizabeth A. Lisot-Nelson

Praise

This intriguing collection of essays on early modern art and relationships—some familial, others associative—presents archivally based patronage studies and perceptive analyses of artworks that reveal novel views of mothers, familial arrangements in atypical family situations, artworks linking generations of women, and the enduring power of early modern religious imagery in case studies ranging from Italy to Germany and Poland. — Sheila Ffolliott, George Mason University

With essays focused on medieval and early modern Italy, England, German speaking lands, and Poland—along with a contribution on the twentieth-century German artist Käthe Kollwitz’s engagement with imagery from the Middle Ages and Renaissance—this important volume considers the intertwined roles of kinship, gender, and religion in the patronage, iconographies, and reception of European visual culture. — Sheryl E. Reiss, The University of Chicago, Graham School