Philippe de Champaigne (1602-1674) is mostly remembered for his triple portrait of Richelieu and his hieratic series of Jansenist leaders' portraits but rarely considered for his rapport with nature despite his training as a Flemish landscape artist. By introducing the unexpected question of the natural in the context of his artistic practice, I reconsider Champaigne's rich corpus of portraits, which map his contemporary society and provide a new perspective on the evolving web of social identities.

I explore how the concept of the natural, as opposed to artifice, is a shifting term that questions the ability of the painter to imitate nature, create a prototype, and give it "life." I successively qualify Champaigne's artistic praxis in relation to its contemporary reception within different communities – the nobility, the Crown, the Jansenist community, and finally the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Champaigne's approach to portraiture raises the issues of exemplarity, resemblance, and presence of the model. These three problematics offer a chronological and thematic understanding of the painter as a multifaceted artist who leads portraiture into different paths – decoration, diplomacy, and even the sacred.

The position of the portraitist within the complex social and political agenda of the French Grand siècle, provides a particularly interesting and underexamined insight into the intricate relations between power and religion under Louis XIII's reign and later, during the Regency's social unrest. By combining formal analysis with anthropologically rich archival evidence, I consider Champaigne's portraits as active agents in history, thus providing a conceptual framework to analyze the different actors' strategies of representation.

This study follows the austere Catholic reformer Carlo Borromeo (1538-1584) on five different Italian pilgrimages in the decades following the Council of Trent. It aims to address the noticeable gap between theory and practice regarding image devotion in late sixteenth-century Italy. Treatises and decrees tend to rehash the oft-cited position of the Council of Trent, in which images are useful meditative and didactic tools, but must avoid ‘licentiousness’, inaccuracy, and any idolatrous confusion between the devotion to the material image and that owed to its heavenly prototype. However, the reality of religious art during this period bears little resemblance to this official position. It instead witnessed a growth in miraculous image cults, revived devotion toward freestanding sculpture, and placed unprecedented trust in the testimonial and sacramental power of art.

Carlo Borromeo, cardinal-archbishop and later saint, is often considered an archetype of Tridentine piety. Although he wrote no artistic treatises, his use of images became a model to the Italian populace through many celebrated pilgrimages and devotions. This project sketches out a theory of art by looking at Borromeo’s image-based behavior during five broadly defined pilgrimages, each using a particular destination to examine one facet of sacred images. We follow Borromeo as he renovates his titular church of Santa Prassede in Rome, revealing a sacramental definition of art, where images functioned, like ritual instruments, to perpetuate the antiquity of the liturgy. Borromeo’s pilgrimage to the Shroud of Turin shows how narrative artworks were pressured to account for artifacts in this period of reform. We trace his devotions at the polychrome terracotta sculptures of the Sacro Monte of Varallo, which Borromeo viewed as the very antidote to idolatry. Borromeo’s pilgrimages to the Holy House of Loreto demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between artists and replicas of miraculous images. Finally, we trace one final itinerary, carried out not by Borromeo but through his posthumous portraits, agents of his sanctity and witnesses in his trial for canonization. Together, Carlo Borromeo’s itineraries carved out a landscape of sacramental, antique, artistic, and evidentiary sacred images that would direct the next century of Catholic image culture throughout its global territories.

Portuguese manuscript illuminator and art theorist Francisco de Holanda (1517-1585) is the focus of this monographic study. Holanda stands in an ambiguous place within modern art historical scholarship as his treatise, Da Pintura Antigua (1548), is largely utilized as a source in Michelangelo studies. This dissertation aims to expand studies of Holanda into a number of new contexts. It addresses the novel format of Da Pintura Antigua and suggests that this format contributes to how the larger theses and aim of that treatise should be considered, specifically in the context of the reform of religious art in the years between the Reformation and Counter- Reformation. I also address the imperial context of Da Pintura Antigua written as it was within the court of João III. While Holanda’s written and depictive artistic productions are usually addressed within the relatively insular disciplines of aesthetics and art theory, I explore larger geographic contexts. Holanda’s images and texts are tied into the history of science, the activity of navigation and its technologies. Lastly, Holanda’s hexaemeral imagery is placed within the context of medieval traditions of depiction and contemporary cosmological and natural-scientific concerns.

In 1548 Tintoretto delivered the Miracle of the Slave to the Scuola Grande di San Marco. It was the latest in a painting cycle focusing on St. Mark, patron of both the city of Venice and the eponymous confraternity. Each painting in the cycle negotiates the tension of the foreign origins of a saint habitually conflated with the state. Tintoretto's dramatic rendition featured an upturned flying saint and a crowd of spectators gawking at the miracle. In tenor, composition, and tone the painting radically diverged from the established painting tradition that had embedded miraculous occurrences quietly into the quotidian experience of Venetian life. Tintoretto's painting was initially rejected and the painter did not work again at the confraternity for twenty years.

This dissertation argues that the seemingly abrupt pictorial caesura at the Scuola Grande di San Marco in fact continues traditional Venetian pictorial strategies but in an avant-garde visual vocabulary. In the introduction I establish the phenomenological experience of Venice and its invocation in imagery temporally and spatially. I contend that Venetian understanding of the miraculous referenced a multiplicity of time and space. In chapter one I propose that Venetian local identity was intrinsically intertwined with the foreign, a conceptualization readily apparent in the processions, architecture, and pictorial decorations making up the city's spectacle. Chapter two delves into the Venetian practice of using narrative as historical evidence and as a claim to their possession of the body of St. Mark. Chapter three concerns the failure of modernization efforts on Tintoretto's part with the Miracle of the Slave and the more successful examples of Paris Bordone and Palma il Vecchio. Chapter four looks at Tintoretto's paintings at the confraternity from the 1560s that insist on the disruptive power of miracles while retaining venezianità through invocation of local phenomenological experience. Tintoretto's Stealing of the Slave prefigures St. Mark's translatio to come by transposing the historical event in Alexandria onto the Piazza San Marco thus visualizing the body's eventual predestined resting place in the Basilica San Marco.

Though alphabetic script had become a prevailing communicative form for keeping records and recounting histories in New Spain by the turn of the seventeenth century, pre-Columbian and early colonial artistic and scribal traditions, including pictorial, oral, and performative discourses still held great currency for indigenous communities during the later colonial period. The pages of a corpus of indigenous documents created during the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries known as the Techialoyan manuscripts abound with vibrantly painted watercolor depictions, alphabetic inscriptions, and vivid invocations of community elders’ speeches and embodied experiences. Designed in response to challenging viceregal policies that threatened land and autonomy, the Techialoyans sought to protect and preserve indigenous ways of life by fashioning community members as the noble descendants of illustrious rulers from the pre-Columbian past. The documents register significant events in the histories of communities, often creating a sense of continuity between the colonial present and that of antiquity. What is more, they provide the limits of the territory within a depicted landscape using a reflexive, ambulatory model. Representations of place evoke ritual practices of walking the boundaries from the perspective of the ground, enabling readers to acquire different forms of knowledge as they move through the pages of the book and the envisioned landscape to which it points. The different communicative forms evident in the Techialoyans, including pictorial, alphabetic, oral, and performative modes contribute to understandings of indigenous literacies of the later colonial period by demonstrating the diverse resources and methods upon which indigenous leaders drew to preserve community histories and territories.

The Techialoyans present an innovative artistic and scribal tradition that drew upon pre-Columbian, early colonial, and European conventions, as well as the contemporary late-colonial pictorial climate. The artists consciously juxtaposed traditional indigenous materials and conventions with those of the contemporary colonial moment to simultaneously create a sense of both old and new. Not only did the documents recount indigenous communities’ histories and affirm their noble heritages, they also proclaimed possession of an artistic and scribal tradition that was on par with that of their revered ancestors, thereby strengthening corporate identity and demonstrating their legitimacy and autonomy within the colonial regime.

Colonial mural paintings are part of many convents across Latin America, serving as a reminder of their historical past and the women who inhabited these spaces. This study delves into the mural layers of three convents in present-day Ecuador and Colombia that were painted between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries: the choir in the Convents of Santa Clara in Santafé (1647), Santa Clara la Real in Tunja (1571), and the living quarters of the Convent of San José in Quito (1653). It examines the painting remnants, which include religious scenes and figures, landscapes, and ornate patterns that span from comprehensible visual scenes to unintelligible, overlapping, and disjointed fragments, thus creating a palimpsest of paint layers, devotional practices, and memories. Located in the northern Andes, these convents were relatively autonomous from Spanish colonial control, unlike the viceregal metropoles of New Spain (Mexico) and Peru. This geographical isolation fostered a secluded artistic development, where books and images imported from Europe interacted with local Indigenous visual and musical cultures. The comparison of the choir spaces of Santa Clara in Santafé and Tunja provides an overview of the development of conventual institutions in Nueva Granada to meet the increasing need for a uniquely female space to accommodate unmarried women of Spanish origin (criollas). The mural paintings in the choirs and the decoration of the church beyond the nuns’ enclosure were part of a multisensorial space, where sound and sight indicated the cloistered nuns’ presence in the church during ceremonies open to the lay public. Their voices permeated the space, reverberating from the painted walls. The Convent of Santa Clara la Real in Tunja exemplifies the use of ornament as a site of meaning, while the Convent of Santa Clara in Santafé represents Santafé’s preeminence in Nueva Granada and the economic and social power of the convent through the combination of gilded ornaments with animal and saintly figures. In contrast, the Convent of San José in Quito represents a different approach; its living quarters were covered with scenes from The Life of St. Teresa, a printed book engraved by Adrien Collaert and Cornelius Galle in 1613. The paintings symbolize the continuation of sanctity in the convent, from Mariana de Jesús, who was the first Ecuadorian saint, to the arrival of the Carmelite Order in Quito, represented by the image of St. Teresa of Avilá. In this mural program, colonial subjects did not passively copy European prints. Instead, painting was a dynamic artistic and devotional expression, where the nuns, through collective and anonymous manual labor and curatorial decisions, were active participants in Quito’s cultural development. The mural paintings in these convents and the human interactions that took place within them created a unique space where the past and present have come together. These murals are layered upon each other, creating a physical and conceptual palimpsest. The mural paintings in the convents of Santa Clara in Santafé and Tunja, as well as the convent of San José in Quito, represent the different stages in the lives of the women who once inhabited them. The mural paintings embed the memory of these women through their contemplation, interventions, and devotional practices.

This dissertation examines a genre of painting called “true portraits,” or “statue paintings,” to produce new understandings of artistic media in viceregal Peru during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This project treats the relationship between painting and sculpture in the religious and intellectual colonial South American contexts. Painted and printed true portraits, which represented miraculous Catholic cult sculptures, originated in Europe but gained more popularity in South America during the early modern period. These simulated sculptures typically depict an altar occupied by a statue of the Virgin Mary in a large, richly adorned triangular dress. These artworks have been studied in-depth for their individual iconographies, but this dissertation contributes insight into the trans-medial presentations of statues and the resulting artistic hierarchies found within these paintings. My study places true portraits in conversation with European artistic treatises to demonstrate fundamental differences in how Spanish and colonial Peruvian subjects perceived the media of painting and sculpture. In Europe, painting was considered a noble artform, but in these artworks, local (mainly Indigenous) artists use paintings to diffuse the likeness of miracle-working sculptures for devotional and evangelical purposes. This common practice implies that sculpture, as a medium, was as important as the figures represented in that form. I illustrate the reasons for this shift in artistic thinking using Peruvian texts on idolatry, printed books that describe the cult statues these paintings represent, didactic printed images, and manuscript sources such as inventories and ship registries. This dissertation consists of six chapters and is divided into two parts. The first part addresses the visual and textual precedents for painted true portraits and the theological connections between statues and paintings in the Viceroyalty of Peru. Here, I present the contrasts between viceregal Peruvian and Spanish imperial ideas about painting and sculpture as artforms. This part also illustrates how sculptures were perceived in relation to other local artistic media and materials including stone, textiles and Indigenous huacas (devotional objects and elements of the natural environment). The second part uses two chapter-length case studies to demonstrate the ways in which the circulatory patterns of statue paintings and Marian devotional iconographies re-enforced the prominence of the art of sculpture in this colonial religious society.