Contradictory Representations: Warrior Women in the Seventeenth-century Painting
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5617/acta.5763Abstract
This article considers seventeenth-century portraits of female warriors in the light of women’s participation in a war. Their contribution was far from insignificant, and the article argues that the number of portraits emphasizing women’s military effort may appear surprisingly limited. Contemporary views on women and warfare probably explain the lack of such portraits, but women’s participation was not universally condemned. By comparing historical accounts, contemporary literature as well as the visual arts, the article shows how attitudes were highly ambivalent; women could be praised as defenders of their homes but rarely as aggressors. Rather predictably, then, the warrior portraits tend to emphasize both so-called masculine and feminine qualities, often drawing on Minerva as a model. It is argued here that women’s bellicosity was sometimes modified by references to hunting, and that this may have been a reflection of changing attitudes to was as well as to female combatants in the seventeenth century.How to Cite
Kolrud, K. (2017) “Contradictory Representations: Warrior Women in the Seventeenth-century Painting”, Acta ad archaeologiam et artium historiam pertinentia, 22(8 N.S.), pp. 225–250. doi: 10.5617/acta.5763.
Issue
Section
Articles
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).