In 2009, the Getty held a study day to celebrate the completed restoration of Luisa Roldán's San Jinés de la Jara. Its stated aim was to focus on Roldán's artistic contributions and the contexts in which she lived and worked. However, not a single participant actually spoke about her sculptures or even about early modern Spanish sculpture at any length, focusing instead on contemporary painters, collecting practices, and women writers. It was perplexing, but not entirely surprising. Particularly at that time, there were few anglophone scholars of Spanish sculpture, and, even now, the study of early modern Spanish art is heavily weighted toward painting, despite the actual historical importance of sculpture in Spain. (In the same year, however, the ground-breaking exhibition The Sacred Made Real, curated by Xavier Bray and shown in the National Gallery, London, and National Gallery, Washington, introduced audiences in the UK and the US to polychrome sculpture in Spain and brilliantly illustrated its functions, its styles, and the major artists associated with it.)
A lacuna thus remained, especially in anglophone scholarship, of a comprehensive examination of Luisa Roldán's career and works, until the 2021 publication of Cathy Hall-van den Elsen's, Luisa Roldán. The author begins with a letter from Roldán to city officials requesting that she be able to marry despite her father's objections; it is thus Roldán's insistence on autonomy, as a woman and as an artist, that sets the stage for this beautifully and accessibly written biography. In the first chapter, the greater intellectual freedom and the possibilities for careers and for learning in Spain are outlined, while the limits that were circumscribed are also addressed. This is important to set out from the beginning, as the misconception that Spain was a wholly repressive place for women is put to rest, while also acknowledging the challenges women artists faced. Roldán had the advantage of being born to a sculptor, Pedro Roldán, who had an active workshop in Seville. But she went well beyond that training, developing her own style and a more refined technical prowess, and finding greater success and renown.
The next chapter gives a clear survey of the religious, political, artistic, and social contexts in which Roldán worked: Seville in particular, but also the larger context of Spain. It is an excellent introduction for anyone new to the subject of early modern Iberian art, even if one wishes there had been more discussion of sculpture and the taste for it in Spain (beyond polychromed sculptures). In the following chapters, Hall-van Elsen outlines Luisa's domestic life and the start of her independent career, with a careful discussion of what documents do and do not provide and what must be extrapolated from other evidence. She then goes through the documented works and possible attributions of works produced within her father's workshop, her collaborative works with her husband, Luis Antonio de los Arcos, in Seville and Cádiz, and their years in Madrid, where Luisa began working in terracotta in addition to wood, was appointed as escultora de cámara, and signed sculptures as entirely her own. Her career took off there, and her husband assisted in marketing her work to clients at the court and abroad. Contemporary accounts and her entry into the Roman Accademia de San Luca evidence her renown in her own day. In the final chapter, Hall-van Elsen interrogates Luisa's critical fortune in Spanish art historical texts and especially how she is discussed in them because of her womanhood.
Hall-van Elsen's close study of Luisa's sculptures provides invaluably rich information for further study and a more comprehensive understanding of her oeuvre. (Additionally, the author includes a list of Roldán's works in churches and public collections following the main text, as well as a chronology of Luisa's life and sculptures.) Thankfully, the images are of as high quality as the text, which is particularly important since many of them are not well known outside of specialized circles. In sum, as the inaugural volume of the Lund Humphries series, Illuminating Women Artists: Renaissance and Baroque, Hall-van Elsen's study sets a high bar for future works, and serves as a seminal volume not only on this great sculptor but also on the contexts in which she flourished.
