Although some of the women who lived or were travelling in the lands of Aragon, Navarre and Catalonia between the 11th and 12th centuries, promoted some of the most important works of art and architecture during this artistic period, and despite that this drew considerable historiographical attention on them, the studies on female artistic agency in these space-time contexts have always prioritized one of the two realities of the phenomenon –art or agency. When emerging from Sociology, the accent is often placed on the woman as a social subject and the work of art is granted certain autonomy, just as another cultural manifestation, without paying attention to what distinguishes it from other forms of human expression. When emerging from Art History, the opposite often happens, the emphasis is placed on the artistic values of the work, and women are just a pretext to explain how the intervention of some subjects allows justifying certain processes associated with artistic creation, such as the circulation of themes or the genesis and diffusion of particular aesthetics. The axis on which the fundamental objective of this Doctoral Thesis is based, is the understanding of the social interrelation between the female agents and the works of art that they promote according to the model defined by Alfred Gell around the causality of art and its being affected by the agent’s action (agency). Although this is a research in History of Art, in the study of female artistic agency as a phenomenon inherent to the creation of works of art and architecture, the sociological method prevails, since it is the one considered of best application in order not to polarize the authority over the creations to the detriment of female creators. As a binomial reality, half social, half artistic, the effective and transformative capacity of both the works and the agency is associated with social phenomenologies such as appropriation, acculturation or transculturation. Consequently, those that are connected with the artistic, such as those derived from the semiotic, such as those of representation and recognition that are instrumentalized in the work of art through a graphic or visual vehicle that refers to the female agent. The introduction of the gender element allows to apply the theoretical-methodological approaches of the so-called "gender studies" to well-theorized premises within their framework. This is the case of those resulting from an ontological vision of medieval women and they involve notions of female specificity, shared responsibility, marginality and liminality, according to which the protection of women’s monasteries, the custody of memory, anonymity and hierarchisation of roles are linked to artistic female agency. This Thesis is divided in two parts. The first one is focused on the conceptualization of the phenomenon according to Navarrese, Catalan and Aragonese reality between 1000 and 1200, the analysis of the questionable or irrefutable extremes of documentary sources, the individualization of specific motivations and the information of the dynamics related to female artistic agency concerning the same premises pre-established by gender studies and the phenomenology of art and sociology. On the contrary, the second part analyses seven case studies representative of the phenomenon – Arsenda de Fluvià’s artistic agency, that of Ermesenda of Carcassone, Estefanía de Foix, and the Ramírez sisters (Aragonese infantas) on the convent of Santa María de Santa Cruz de Serós, as well as the female monasteries of Santa María de Vallbona de les Monges and Santa María de Sigena, and the renown Estandarte de san Odón.
EGO REGINA. Patronazgo y promoción artística femenina en Aragón, Navarra y Cataluña, 1000-1200
Abenza Soria, V. C. (Author). 29 Oct 2018
Student thesis: Doctoral thesis
Student thesis: Doctoral thesis