María Luisa de Toledo with her indigenous companion
Ca. 1670. Oil on canvas.On display elsewhere
Lady María Luisa de Toledo y Carreto (1656-1707), portrayed on this canvas, was the only daughter of the Marquis of Mancera, Antonio Sebastián de Toledo, viceroy of New Spain between 1664 and 1673, spent her childhood and teenage years in Mexico. When girls made the transition from "meninas" to adult noblewomen, at 14 or 15 years old, they were already prepared for marriage. Some began to wear chopines, including this young woman, judging by the proportions of her body.
The painting, dated from 1670, lets us give an account of the overlapping and contrasting worlds in America under the viceregency - the Hispanic and the indigenous - with a female perspective, demonstrating relationships of power and conflict, but also emotional attachment and a symbolic weight that hint at the portrait’s origins and circumstances. The detailed description of the objects in their inventories lets us not only gain an idea of the nature of Lady María Luisa’s bountiful belongings, many of which came from Asia or America, but also of the family’s way of life, worries and preoccupations, allowing us to approach a better understanding of a long-lost Baroque world. We discover the indigenous universe, parallel and equidistant from its Hispanic counterpart, through the figure of the small woman, whose tattoos suggest she came from the Chichimeca area.
The painting forms part of the collections confiscated in 1835 from the Madrid convent of Nuestra Señora de la Salutación (Our Lady of Salutation), better known as the "Constantinopla Convent", wich Lady Maria Luisa joined in the early 1700s after finding herself, widowed and childless.
Gutiérrez Usillos, Andrés, La hija del virrey. El mundo femenino novohispano en el siglo XVII. https://sede.educacion.gob.es/publiventa/la-hija-del-virrey/america-historia-museos/21543C, Ministerio de Cultura, 2018
