Portrait Paintings Of A Special Time

Portraiture is a form of painting that depicts a specific person,and the artist is required to produce a realistic or retouched image that reflects the status,appearance or spirituality of the subject,in order to help the viewer identify the person.Portraits can be divided into a number of categories,such as portraits of nobility,religious portraits and portraits of family members.The portrait of a nun is a very special type of portrait: it is both a religious portrait and a female portrait,and because of its scarcity,it is very valuable and has important research implications.The portrait of a nun usually served two functions,one as a family bond,commemorating the woman of the family who became a nun;the second was placed in a convent,usually of a nun who had contributed in some way to the cause of the Church,thus commemorating their virtue and glory and providing an exemplary image for the nuns of the institution.This essay takes 17th-century Spanish nuns as its starting point,and selects two types of nuns who experienced vastly different religious lives: the most common ascetic nuns in Spain,represented by Sister Jeronima,who started a great career,and the noble nuns who lived in the material wealth of the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales in Madrid,and through a multifaceted analysis of the portraits created by painters of these two groups of nuns The portraits of nuns in seventeenth-century Spain,as a particular type of portrait of the period,have a special place and importance in religious and female portraiture.