Art and Material Culture as Instruments of Gendered Self-fashioning in the Life of Isabel Farnesio (1692-1766)

Aoife Cosgrove
Rosemarie Mulcahy Scholar 2019-2023

Supervisor: Peter Cherry
Department of the History of Art and Architecture
School of Histories and Humanities
The University of Dublin, Trinity College

My thesis explores the art and material culture which surrounded the eighteenth-century queen of Spain Isabel Farnesio, examining how Isabel’s engagement with the world of art contributed to the formation of her personal image. Born Elisabetta Farnese in the Duchy of Parma, and married in 1714 to King Felipe V of Spain as his second wife, Isabel moved to Madrid in her early twenties to sit on one of the most powerful thrones of Europe. Isabel was a life-long admirer and collector of art: from antique sculptures to Dutch landscapes, from jewel-encrusted snuff-boxes to porcelain figures. Isabel’s collection was both eclectic and of extraordinary quality, but was also a product of a centuries-long European collecting tradition. My thesis seeks to re-contextualise Isabel’s activities in this regard, while also analysing Isabel’s well-documented collection through the lens of gender, exploring how her collecting practice and commissioning of works can provide insight into her taste, her relationship with noble status, and her outward projection of the ideal self.

My study of Isabel’s portraiture foregrounds her construction of self through a visual medium and elucidates her perception of her role in the Spanish monarchy, while my research on the queen’s activities as an amateur artist allows for a re-evaluation of her relationship with art as practice in a gendered world. By cataloguing and conducting visual analysis of extant works in Isabel’s collection, a new paradigm can be constructed regarding her use of art as an instrument of self-fashioning. Sections studying Isabel’s collecting of both fine art and material culture provide new ways of understanding the significance of her acquisitions to the construction of her self-image and contextualise her activities among much larger European trends of the eighteenth century. In sum, this research aims to assess Isabel’s collecting practices in the context of her intersecting identities – Italian, woman, queen, mother, widow, and so forth – revealing how she used her engagement with the world of art to mythologise herself on the international stage.