Buttressing Our Souls for the Last Judgment: Female Artistic Patronage in a Navarrese Parish Church after 1348

Abstract:Through analyzing the close context of a rural parish church and the iconographic program of the mural paintings located inside the building, this paper explores the implications of the patronage of these murals by noble women in the immediate period after the Black Death. Based on strong documentary evidence, I contend that the most plausible date of completion of these paintings, located in the Navarrese village of Ardanaz, was circa 1361–63. The economic crisis created by the pandemic seems to have moved the local rural nobility to seek positions of power in the administrative structure of the kingdom, close to the royal court. Indeed, a relationship between the noble Grez family and the prince is recorded visually in the mural paintings of Ardanaz. This fact plus the presence of noblewomen depicted in the surviving murals suggests female patronage of the work. Probably moved by piousness and fear in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death, the visual program in Ardanaz was designed by their patrons to express the advancement of time toward the Last Judgment and the unavoidable destiny of Christian souls between Heaven or Hell.