“Like a doll …”

Abstract

Abstract In the 1990s there was a growing and renewed interest on the practice of clothing images of saints after, as Richard Trexler put it, the negligence demonstrated towards it by art historians until then. In 2018, following the publication of new and unprejudiced studies about it, the presence of two dresses belonging to statues of the Virgin Mary in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” testified to the impact clothed images had on fashion creators and, according to David Morgan, the Church’s ritual and performative life. While focusing on the miraculous image of Nossa Senhora da Lapa from Quintela, Portugal, this article aims to acknowledge the many roles played by its clothes and jewels, assessing the complexity of this phenomenon and aiming for a wider understanding of how the faithful engaged with devotional sculpture.