Images to Sacralise, Control and Subdue. The Painting and the Tridentine Matrimonial Discourse in the New Kingdom of Granada. Seventeenth Century

Abstract

This paper studies the matrimonial discourse inscribed in neo-granadian colonial painting of the seventeenth century and the uses that were given to it in the posttridentine context. The study is carried out by means of the iconographic analysis of three colonial paintings centered on the subject of the Marriage of the Virgin, examined regarding documentary sources and moral texts printed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The research is framed within the geographical space of the New Kingdom of Granada, a place of dissemination of the visual discourse, which is the focus of this text. As a result, the analysis enabled to establish that the colonial depicting of the Marriage of the Virgin functioned in New Granada as a disseminating mechanism of the marriage model developed in the Council of Trento. Such an example sought, as the ultimate goal, to control both the attitudes and the sexuality of the contracting parties.