Exemplary Women: Portraits of Female Patrons in Oxford and Cambridge Colleges

这个博士项目将调查16和17世纪妇女肖像在制度背景下的功能和遗产。本论文将讨论在牛津大学和剑桥大学的学院中收集、展示和保存这些画作的问题，包括委托制作这些肖像的副本和印刷品以供更广泛的传播。早期现代妇女在赞助艺术和教育机构方面所起的作用已日益得到承认。然而，尽管目前的理解包括艺术品的委托、融资和生产，以及对学术机构的建立和捐赠，但女性赞助的这两种途径通常被分开考虑。该项目将提供一项综合评估，评估妇女在大学中以绘画和印刷形式传播自己形象的情况，以期更全面地了解这些妇女所构建的身份和议程，以及她们参与对她们所支持的机构的影响。最初的研究发现，在16世纪和17世纪，牛津大学和剑桥大学都有大量的女性赞助人，这是两所大学快速发展的时期。女性捐赠者通过肖像展示她们参与的证据并不罕见。许多这样的肖像仍然保存在大学和他们的档案中。案例研究将构成该项目来源基础的很大一部分，包括与捐助者肖像有关的学院档案记录，他们的获取，展示和保护。将利用国家肖像画廊海因茨档案中有关肖像的国家记录进行进一步的研究。该项目将考虑这些肖像的功能，采用一种方法，结合文艺复兴时期自我研究的当前趋势，其中肖像被视为不仅仅是简单的纪念，以及艺术史的方法。通过发展对这些肖像中涉及的图像学的理解，我希望解开有意识创造的身份竞争的复杂网络。对家庭的提及是否意味着女性是更大的王朝努力的代表？对宗教的虔诚可能会激励女性向公众展示女性美德的典范。此外，在一个禁止女性积极参与的空间里，肖像也是一种有效的工具，可以投射出一种稳定的、理想化的公共女性形象。肖像画可能会积极地颠覆他们所占据的同性社会空间，或者他们的肖像强化了性别社会角色。该项目将探讨肖像与其悬挂空间之间的相互关系。16世纪和17世纪女性赞助人的肖像在画作被移走、其他画作被放置在附近、或者随着时间的推移学院发生变化时，是否发挥了它们原来的作用？在原画中，与复制品、印刷品和复制品相比，人们可能会对模特多变的身份有不同的看法。对这些肖像的遗产和后世的调查将旨在揭示观察者对这些肖像的理解方式，以及这种理解随时间变化的程度。该项目旨在展示这是如何影响牛津大学和剑桥大学的机构身份。这个项目是一个令人兴奋的机会，可以对一个很少有学术研究的主题采用多学科方法。本文结合地方高校档案和国家肖像记录，旨在扩大我们对这一时期早期现代女性自身身份的表达，以及她们与大学和制度身份的复杂关系的理解。

This doctoral project will investigate the function and legacy of portraits of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women in an institutional context. The thesis will address issues of acquisition, display, and conservation of such paintings in colleges at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, including the commissioning of copies and prints of the portraits for wider dissemination. The extent of early modern women's role in patronage of both the arts and educational institutions has been increasingly recognised. However, whilst current understanding includes both the commissioning, financing, and production of art objects, and the foundation of and donation to scholarly institutions, these two avenues of female patronage are often considered separately. This project will provide an integrated assessment, evaluating women's circulation of their own images in both painting and print in universities, moving towards a more comprehensive understanding of the identities and agendas constructed by these women, and the impact of their involvement on the institutions they supported.Initial research identifies a broad range of female patronage at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a time of rapid growth for both institutions. It was not uncommon for women donors to include evidence of their involvement through portraiture. Many of these portraits remain in colleges and their archives. Case studies will form a large part of the source base for this project, including the colleges' archival records relating to benefactors' portraits, their acquisition, display and conservation. Further study will be undertaken using the national records relating to portraiture in the Heinz Archive at the National Portrait Gallery.The project will consider the function of these portraits, using an approach that integrates current trends in scholarship on Renaissance selfhood, where portraits are seen as more than simple commemorations, with the methodologies of art history. By developing an understanding of the iconography involved in these portraits, I hope to untangle the complex web of competing consciously created identities. Do references to family suggest women were proxies for larger dynastic endeavours? Religious devotion might motivate women to present an public model of female virtue. Portraits could additionally be a useful device to project a stable, idealised image of public womanhood, in a space in which their active involvement was prohibited. Portraits might actively subvert the homosocial spaces they occupied, or perhaps their iconography reinforced gendered societal roles.The project will address the reciprocal relationship between portraits and the spaces in which they are hung. Did portraits of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century female patrons perform their original function when the paintings were moved, with other paintings placed in proximity, or with changes to the colleges over time? The mutable identities of the sitters might have been perceived differently in the original painting in comparison to its copies, prints, and reproductions.An investigation into the legacy and afterlives of these portraits will aim to uncover the ways in which these portraits were understood by observers, and the extent to which this changed over time. The project aims to demonstrate how this has impacted the institutional identity of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge.This project is an exciting opportunity to pursue a multidisciplinary approach to a subject on which there is very little scholarship. Combining local collegiate archives and the national records on portraiture, this thesis aims to expand our understanding of early modern women's articulation of their own identity and their complicated relationship with universities and institutional identity in this period.