Staging a woman’s lineage: memory and legitimation of Duchess Aldonza de Mendoza (d. 1435)

Abstract

ABSTRACT An exhaustive analysis of the very last words drafted by one of the most powerful noblewomen of the fifteenth century, Duchess Aldonza de Mendoza (d. 1435), reveals that her project to transform the Hieronymite monastery of Lupiana into a pantheon might have been connected to the birth of a child outside her marriage, more precisely, to a son who had remained hidden until the moment of Aldonza’s death. The aim of this study is to offer a new reading of the Duchess’s mausoleum, a pantheon planned to showcase her lineage by focusing exclusively on the female line. Further, this paper rediscovers two panels of the lost main altarpiece of the monastery of Lupiana commissioned by Aldonza de Mendoza and proposes an allegorical portrait of the Duchess represented as the wife of Pontius Pilate. Aldonza’s project reveals itself as crucial for understanding the self-fashioning mechanisms employed by late medieval women, as well as the ways in which visual culture was used in the shaping of female memorial programmes.