Luisa Roldan

Woman's Art Journal, 2022

Issues are shipped in May and November. Missed issues must be reported no later than three months after shipping date or we cannot be responsible for replacements. All rights reserved. Indexed in Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA), Art Bibliographies Modern, Arts and Humanities Citation Index (ISI) and Wilson Full Text. The full text is also available through JSTOR's Arts & Sciences III Collection, www.jstor.org. Except as permitted under national laws or under the photocopy license described below, no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system of any nature, without the advance written permission of the publisher.

Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, 2020

In 2018 the Detroit Institute of Arts (hereinafter the DIA) acquired a fascinating polychromed terracotta relief by the Spanish sculptor Luisa Roldán (1652–1706). A major woman artist, Roldán achieved celebrity in her life, but today few people know her work, in part because only a handful of museums outside Spain hold examples of her sculpture, a consideration that makes the present acquisition even more notable. In this piece, Roldán revealed her technical mastery and consummate artistry, proudly signing it with her title as royal sculptor (escultora de cámara) and including the date 1705. The terracotta depicts the Virgin of Solitude (Virgen de la Soledad), the Virgin Mary mourning the death of Christ on the Cross. More than a representation of an iconographic type, it portrays a celebrated sixteenth-century statue. It affords both a breathtaking example of the sculptor’s talent and a record of a major statue now lost. Because of this rich context, the sculpture raises many questions. As a replica in relief of a famous devotional image, it differs from most of Roldán’s known terracottas—figural groups depicting religious scenes from the life of Christ, the Virgin, or various saints. Studying the work closely reveals much about the artist’s methods as a sculptor, while a review of her remarkable career underscores its distinctive place in her output. Finally, the religious history and context of the statue it copies suggest how a contemporary audience might have viewed it.

2022

2022

Renaissance Quarterly, 2022

This is a nuanced study of a complex and protean topic, and it covers a lot of ground, both theoretical and material. As is inevitable with such an ambitious project, there are a few wrinkles. One problematic term in the book is "tonal" eroticism (sometimes "intoned" in Pearson's formulation). In the introduction, Pearson explains that this term refers to subtle, slightly ambiguous, and indirect representations of sexual acts, and as an example gives a detail from the central panel of Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights triptych, in which "a man pulls bouquets from another man's anus in an oblique yet probable allusion to sodomy" (2). It is hard to understand this as anything other than an act of anal penetration, frankly, and "subtle" or "indirect" are not the words that spring to mind here. The term then vanishes for almost two thirds of the book, finally resurfacing in chapter 5, concerning the incunable edition on the soul's pursuit of the infant Christ, "a resource for exploring the limits of morality as shaped by tonal eroticism" (198). The term crops up repeatedly in the following discussion of the imagery (both literary and visual) of wounds and wounding, but it does not seem strictly necessary-Pearson's analysis of the religious erotics of pain and its relationship to the garden/wilderness dyad could stand on its own without the aid of this vaguely defined notion of tonality. Also distracting are the editorial errors that sprinkle the text, beginning on the first page, where the word "taut" is rendered as "taught" (an eggcorn repeated on page 299). The misattribution of The Garden of Earthly Delights to the Second Gouda Woodcutter on page 2 and the substitution of "epithelium" for "epithalamium" on page 14 get the reader off to a rough start and detract from the complex argument that Pearson lays out in the introduction. The erudition, scope, and analytical rigor of the book deserve better, but in the end, the editorial missteps do not seriously compromise the integrity of this valuable contribution to understanding the nuances of Marian and Christological imagery in the early modern Netherlands.

2007

Linda Hinners (ed.): Nordic Women Sculptors at the Turn of the 20th Century Formation, Visibility, Self-Creation, 2022