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

这个博士项目将调查十六世纪和十七世纪女性肖像在机构背景下的作用和遗产。这篇论文将讨论牛津大学和剑桥大学学院中此类画作的获取、展示和保护问题，包括委托制作肖像画的复制品和印刷品以供更广泛的传播。早期现代女性在资助艺术和教育机构方面的作用得到了越来越多的认可。然而，虽然目前的理解既包括委托、资助和制作艺术品，也包括建立和捐赠学术机构，但这两种女性赞助的途径往往被分开考虑。该项目将提供一个综合评估，评估女性在大学绘画和印刷品中传播自己的形象，逐步更全面地了解这些女性构建的身份和议程，以及她们参与其中对她们所支持的机构的影响。初步研究发现，16世纪和17世纪牛津大学和剑桥大学的女性赞助人范围广泛，这两个大学都处于快速增长时期。女性捐赠者通过肖像提供她们参与的证据的情况并不少见。这些肖像中的许多仍然保存在大学及其档案馆中。案例研究将构成该项目的很大一部分来源基础，包括与捐赠者肖像的获取、展示和保护有关的学院档案记录。将利用国家肖像美术馆亨氏档案馆与肖像相关的国家记录进行进一步研究。该项目将考虑这些肖像的功能，采用一种将文艺复兴时期自我研究的当前趋势与艺术史方法论相结合的方法。在文艺复兴时期，肖像被视为不仅仅是简单的纪念。通过发展对这些肖像所涉及的肖像学的理解，我希望解开相互竞争的有意识地创造的身份的复杂网络。提到家庭是否意味着女性是更大王朝努力的代言人？宗教信仰可能会激励女性展示女性美德的公共典范。此外，肖像画还可以成为一种有用的工具，在一个禁止积极参与的空间里，投射出一个稳定的、理想化的公共女性形象。肖像画可能会积极地颠覆他们占据的同性恋社会空间，或者可能是他们的肖像强化了性别社会角色。该项目将解决肖像画和它们悬挂的空间之间的相互关系。当画作被移动时，16世纪和17世纪女性赞助人的肖像是否发挥了最初的作用，或者与其他画作放在一起，或者随着时间的推移，学院发生了变化？与其复制品、版画和复制品相比，原始画作中千变万化的身份可能会被不同地感知。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，以及这种情况随着时间的推移发生了多大程度的变化。该项目旨在展示这如何影响牛津和剑桥学院的机构身份。这个项目是一个令人兴奋的机会，可以寻求一个多学科的方法来研究一个学术研究很少的学科。本文结合地方大学档案和国家肖像画档案，旨在扩大我们对这一时期早期现代女性对自身身份的表达以及她们与大学和机构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.