Visitation

As far as we can tell from the paintings that have survived, Josefa painted the theme of the Visitation only twice, on this small copper¹ and on the large central panel of the Misericórdia de Peniche, in 1679. In both cases, she preferred to represent the theme against a background of trees, with only a suggestion of architecture, but she followed very different models of composition in each. In Peniche, the Virgin appears almost face-on, receiving the kneeling Saint Elizabeth in her arms; the figures of Zechariah and St Joseph are placed on either side of the main group, accompanied by one of the female saints. In this small copper, the encounter between the two women is seen side-on, and the two men greet each other in the left-hand part of the painting, in the background. With this arrangement of figures, Josefa undoubtedly had in mind the large central panel of the altarpiece that André Reinoso – one of the painters who greatly influenced her work – had made in 1628 for the church of Misericórdia de Óbidos. Josefa clearly highlights the difference in age of the two pairs and, as was her custom, always depicts St Joseph as a virile man, still relatively young, rather than as an old man. Both the Virgin and, more markedly, St Joseph have reddish hair, which is also in keeping with the models Josefa used, thus expressing their link to the house of David, described in Samuel (16:12) as “ruddy, with bright eyes and good-looking”.

From the vibrant colouring and the facial features of the figures, it is likely that the painting dates from the late 1660s, made around the same time as canvases such as Lactation of St. Bernard and the Pentecost at the Museu Machado de Castro in Coimbra. This composition model, with a cartouche, also recalls a work that has not been shown in public for some time, which belonged to the Soares Andrea collection and represents a Nativity, within a cartouche similar to the one used here, with groups of flowers at the sides. Floral cartouches or floral borders around sacred images were commonly used in both Flemish painting and Spanish art, where they were popularised by Juan de Arellano, surrounding busts of Christ and the Virgin, as we can see in Portugal in the two paintings that belonged to the collection of Friar Manuel do Cenáculo on display at the Museu Rainha Dona Leonor, in Beja. On these borders, the flowers are given meanings that symbolically unite and reinforce the main theme, as happens very explicitly in the Agnus Dei at the Museu de Évora, also previously in the Cenáculo collection, with the obvious Eucharist associations of its wheat sheaves and grapes. But, as Luis de Moura Sobral proved, we also find this in other works by Josefa. The seventeenth-century and Portuguese baroque is full of symbolic literature of flowers and plants associated with the holy story, in ingenious poetry with sacred references. These floral crowns and cartouches were given the name ‘pancarpius’, which spiritual literature ‘offered’ in various titles as part of the baroque game of presenting references to be decoded by a pious readership. Josefa’s paintings thus combine visual and symbolic effects with a relationship to spiritual texts of the day, an influence that extended to the essence of the painter’s work, where popular and erudite, sacred and profane interweave, as Diogo Ramada Curto suggested.

In the case of this Visitation, in terms of its structure, uniting text and image, it is likely to have belonged to a series that, following the same model, multiplied within that structure various stages of the Childhood of Christ, but, if any other works from that possible series survive, they have not yet been discovered.

One of the interesting aspects of this painting is the fact that it was executed on a copper plate that had already been used for an engraving (FIG. 1), as was discovered in 2015 during the installation of the exhibition at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon, when the copper support was removed from its frame². That engraving can be identified as a work by Balthasar Moncornet (c. 1600-1668), probably based on a drawing by Della Bella, which represents a rural scene inside a complex cartouche (FIG. 2), of which various copies are known.

It is believed that Josefa also used the other half of the plate, probably in another painting from the same series, but we do not know how this matrix by Moncornet, a well-known engraver based in Paris, came into the painter’s possession. We know very little of Moncornet’s relationship with Portugal, and only in respect of a portrait of King João IV, which scarcely resembles any other known representations of the king. Her possession of this plate, however, reinforces Josefa’s connection with the world of engravers and printers; she is likely to have come into contact with some of the foreigners who came to Portugal after the Restoration. What is equally interesting is the fact that Moncornet published, in 1645, a large album entitled Livre Nouveau de Fleurs très útil pour l’art d’orfevrerie, et autres (New Book of Flowers very useful for the art of silversmithery, and others), a series of plates with reproductions of various flowers, models that would certainly have interested Josefa.