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Keynote Helen Watanabe O’Kelly: Images of Female Power from Elizabeth I of England to Angela Merkel

Thursday, November 24, 2022, 09:00 - 10:00

This talk will interrogate the official portraits of powerful women from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. It will ask in what way the iconography of the male ruler as warrior or Roman emperor was adapted to depict the female ruler. It will ask whether the female ruler was usually depicted as an honorary her as the Mother of the Nation. It will ask to what extent depictions of the female ruler emphasized what were thought of as particularly female virtues such as mercy, compassion and piety and what messages were conveyed in portraits by such external elements such as clothing or interiors. It will ask how the stages in the life cycle of powerful women were depicted as they moved from princess to consort to widowed regent. It will ask what difference the change of medium from oils to photography made and what is expected of a modern oil painting of a female ruler. Finally, it will ask whether the iconographic patterns established in the early modern period are still valid in our own day.