Converting Portraits: Repainting as Art Making in the Early Modern Hispanic World

Abstract

When early modern individuals commissioned portraits, they likely hoped for stable and long-lasting commemoration. However, portraiture was highly mutable, susceptible of acquiring meanings that diverged from its original patrons’ intentions. Later owners often had portraits repainted, transforming them into religious images that combined individual likeness with markers of sanctity. Examination of artworks from Spain and colonial New Spain reveals that the fluid, tenuous boundary between sacred and secular imagery in early modernity facilitated such operations. In each case studied, the practice produced new art objects that, while sometimes only minimally retouched, were entirely different in function from their earlier iterations.