Josefa de obidos biography definition
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1 January 2015. Theatro heroino, abecedaria historico, e catalogo das mulheres illustres em armas, letras, accoens heroicas, e artes liberaes.. Her birth name was Josefa de Ayala Figueira, but she signed her work as "Josefa em Óbidos" or "Josefa de Ayalla". Vitor Serrão has noted that in many of these writings, "Josefa de Ayala took on mythic proportions by authors awed by the fact that the artist was a woman." In his 1696 treatise on painting, Félix da Costa Meesen counted Josefa among the most important Portuguese artists, writing that she was "acclaimed far and wide, especially in the neighboring countries..."[6] In 1736, Damião de Froes Perym praised her "talent, beauty, and honesty," as well as her "attractiveness."[7] In the nineteenth-century unpublished text Memorias historicas e diferentes apontamentos acerca das antiguidades de Óbidos, by an anonymous author, Josefa is described as being "well known in and outside the kingdom for her paintings, in which she was unique during the time she flourished, as someone who practiced the perfections of art to notable applause and honest praise, living all her life in chaste celibacy." This text also describes how Josefa had a close relationship with the queen of Portugal, D.
Maria Francisca of Savoy.
In many of these sources, the authors attributed various paintings, which are now known to be by different authors, to Josefa. In fact, its influence on Josefa’s own painting can be seen, who also adopted the Baroque and the perfection of its expressions as a bulwark of her creation”. She also made a shrewd businesswoman, purchasing and leasing land and acting as a money lender.
Referring to Damiao de Froes Perym’s (the pseudonym for the monk, Fray Joao de San Pedro) 18th century publication, Life Stories of Woman Artists, critic Julia K.
Dobbs writes, Óbidos “is justifiably included in Froes Perym’s catalogue of illustrious women since she was, and still is, the best-known artist of seventeenth-century Portugal”. The artist's birthplace—Seville—was no accident: her father, the painter Baltazar Gomes Figueira, had relocated there from Portugal, immersing the family in the vibrant artistic milieu of Andalusia.
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Francis and Saint Clare Adoring the Newborn Christ (private collection).
Sometime before 1653, she and her family left Coimbra and settled in Óbidos, where she contributed an allegory of Wisdom to the Novos estatutos da Universidade de Coimbra, the book of rules for the University of Coimbra, whose frontispiece was being decorated by her father.
During the decades that followed, Josefa executed several religious altarpieces for churches and convents in central Portugal, as well as paintings of portraits and still-life for private customers.
Josefa's will is dated 13 June 1684.
Modern exhibitions, such as the 2015 retrospective at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, have underscored her role in redefining still life as a vehicle for spiritual contemplation—a theme that resonates with contemporary audiences.
She adds, however, that an “intriguing and somewhat puzzling” aspect of her life story is that “the artist is said to have been invited to serve the Queen at the Portuguese court [yet] despite the advantages of such a position [she] evidently turned it down”. this Portuguese race that does not deliver a painter who is worth the while” – as the century progressed, critical interest in her work increased dramatically with further retrospectives held to acclaim in Europe and America.
Josefa de. Taken as a whole, these paintings represent the passage of time, the inevitability of death, and the possibility of rebirth.
Her best known portrait is that of Faustino das Neves, dated c. 1 January 1967. Today, her works are held in major collections, including the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon and the Prado in Madrid, though attributions remain debated for some pieces.
Her influence on later Portuguese artists is difficult to trace directly, but her fusion of Spanish tenebrism with local devotional traditions prefigured the restrained Baroque that flourished in Portugal through the eighteenth century.
en.