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Art Review of Josefa de Óbidos exhibition at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon
Citation preview
Josefa de Óbidos
Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon
Rua das Janelas Verdes
Published at Hyperallergic as
Jesus Look Like a Lady: A Female Baroque Artist’s Mystical Vision
http://hyperallergic.com/231225/jesus-look-like-a-lady-a-female-baroque-artists-
mystical-vision/
Josefa de Óbidos partial exhibition view
Even as she was the subject of the exhibition The Sacred and the Profane in 1997 at the
National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, I had never heard of the
Counter-Reformation Baroque (and Bodegón) painter Josefa de Óbidos (1630–1684),
before a trip to Lisbon. But apparently she has had something of an inferior reputation
there that this exhibition at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga seeks to correct: the idea
that she is an unusual and interesting oddity, but ultimately a provincial painter of trite
and lugubrious spirituality. Although I do somewhat agree with the first half of the
assessment, and it lends her work an uncertain charm, I am not at all in agreement with
the second proposition.
Born in Seville in 1630, de Óbidos was the daughter of the accomplished painter Baltazar
Gomes Figueira (1604–1674) (some of his paintings are in the show). Her father moved
the family back to Portugal in 1634, his native country, where Figueira continued his
career as an artist and where de Óbidos spent most of her life being educated by
Augustinian nuns.
But she was hardly a backcountry bumpkin. Of aristocracy, she grew up under the
tutelage of her father and had access to the works of the great masters of Flemish,
Spanish, Italian, and French art through her mother’s father, an avid art collector. At 31
she emancipated herself (with parental consent) acquiring administrative independence
over her life and work, which enabled her to become an artist of both secular and
religious subjects. She died in Óbidos, Portugal, and was buried in the Church of Saint
Peter there. She is considered to be one of the most accomplished painters of 17th-
century Portugal and is especially significant because of the recognition she gained in an
art period dominated by men.
“Still life with Watermelon and Pears “ (ca. 1670), Oil on canvas, Collection Museu
Nacional de Arte Antiga
Throughout her life, de Óbidos executed several religious altarpieces for churches and
convents in central Portugal, as well as paintings for private collections. Her mid-career
works, such as the sensuous “Still life with Watermelon and Pears” (ca. 1670), are
visually alluring, charming, darkly entertaining, and technically cultivated in the Baroque
way of rendering bucolic experience as seductive and opulent. Among her chief religious
works are the five panels for the “Saint Catherine” altarpiece of the Church of the Holy
Mary (Santa Maria) (1661) in Óbidos, and the altarpiece of “Saint Theresa of Ávila” for
the Carmelite Convent (1673) in Cascais.
Though she certainly executed her fair share of trite religious paintings, such as
“Marriage of St. Catherine” (1647) and “Faustino das Neves” (c.1670), two of de
Óbidos’s paintings are quite frankly kinky: “La lactation de Saint Bernard” (1648) and
“S. Bernardo e a Virgem” (1648). In them she depicts the Virgin Mary squirting breast
milk into the mouth of Saint Bernad. In other paintings, the bare feet of her religious
subjects take on an enlarged proportion that was quite profound and disturbing in a funny
way.
Inspired by the Counter-Reformation of the Council of Trent (1545–63) and the reform
wings of the Jesuit and Carmelite orders, all of her work was commissioned by religious
houses or churches, or for the private chapels of wealthy patrons. As such, she did at
times fill her art with stock religious sentimentality (she frequently paints St. Joseph as
strikingly heroic and robust) but also painted numinous scenes of fear-provoking
penitence and mystical weddings, as in her melancholy “St. Teresa of Avila, Mystic
Spouse of Christ” (1672) that reflects the ecstasies of St. Teresa of Avila.
The splendid “Child Jesus Salvator Mundi” (1680) disproves de Obidos’s trite spirituality
and is one in a series of paintings where, as I see it, she paints Jesus as a girl. Astounding,
these trans-spiritual paintings sent a chill up my spine. Poised in balanced contrapposto,
Josefa found an extravagant tone for an old theme that is exhilaratingly contemporary: an
apparently feminine depiction of Jesus that is without irony, sentiment, shock, or strain.
Looking at it feels like a fantasy.
“Child Jesus Salvator Mundi” (1680), Oil on canvas, 110 ~ 73 cm, Collection Coimbra,
Venerável Ordem Terceira
There is an unspeakable, slightly terrifying, sensation in the divine presence of this
perfect, seemingly hermaphroditic beauty. The gentle youth — liberated from sex and
time — is healthy and calm, with flirtatious, rosy cheeks. The earthly is re-established
through the dainty flowers sprouting from the ground. The world has briefly revealed
itself as mythic, perfect, eternal, and chaste.
The Baroque is saturated with the power of deception and with make-believe and trompe
l’oeil effects. Looking at “Child Jesus Salvator Mundi,” I found myself tipsy with a
peculiar Baroque vision: overwhelmed, engulfed, and supersaturated by a magical,
metaphysical space — one I recently encountered at the Baroque Underworld: Vice and
Destitution in Rome show at the Petit Palais. “Child Jesus Salvator Mundi” demonstrates
to me perfectly that the Baroque is the product of passionate Catholicism rather than
sober Protestantism. Her other paintings (more than 130 works from several Portuguese
and international institutions like the Prado Museum and the Escorial Monastery) are
packed with ethereal flowers, throbbing stars, false arches, dripping fruit, twisting leaves,
winding columns, floating virgins, spinning clouds, and resplendent angels. Her mystical,
Baroque artistic expression may produce mild ecstasy in some (moi) or befuddlement in
others. The important point is that de Óbidos’s version of Baroque, mysterious sensation
undermined conventional religious and pictorial clarity.
“St. Teresa of Avila, Mystic Spouse of Christ” (1672) Oil on canvas, 158,5 ~ 113 cm,
Collection Parish of Cascais
Despite the confused reception her work has garnered over the years, the esteem with
which Josefa’s work has been held has continued over time so that a large quantity of her
work has indeed survived. This is quite unusual among Portuguese artists, and
particularly so for a woman who was confined to a small town like Obidos, where she
remained almost all her life. Nonetheless, she became a highly reputed exponent of the
Portuguese Baroque, particularly following the restoration of Portugal from Spanish rule,
which brought to her work an exaggerated and festive, theatrical component.
“St. John the Baptist” (ca. 1670-1675), Oil on canvas, 109 ~ 88 cm, Private Collection
In “St. Teresa of Avila, Mystic Spouse of Christ” (1672), de Óbidos liberally employs
phantasmagorical illusions particular to the Baroque: for example, the fruit and flower
petals that hover around Teresa’s head, symbolizing her otherworldly consciousness as a
way to boost the beholder’s faith in the supernatural. Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s deservingly
famous “Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” (1652) exemplifies de Óbidos’s intent to inspire a sense
of intense wonderment that verges on the euphoric. Philosophically, the painting “St.
Teresa of Avila, Mystic Spouse of Christ” is indicative of the Baroque language of
multiple ambiguities and excesses.
This associative imagery that is constantly in flux can also be seen in the sexually
ambiguous “St. John the Baptist” (ca. 1670–1675). Through exposing John the Baptist’s
right breast, typical in religious feminine iconography, this painting displays an
enchantment with nebulous sexuality. Though the right side of John the Baptist’s torso is
frequently shown in paintings, here, his bare breast is sensually represented with the same
sense of nourishment and loving care — God’s provision for the Christian — that is seen
in depictions of the Virgin Mary. Josefa de Óbidos’s painterly decisions helped wean art
away from the fiction of a classical “true” vision and reveal instead the possibilities
which open up for inventing new arrangements of form.
Joseph Nechvatal