Ebook: Spain’s Toledo Virgen Abridera: Revelations of Castile’s shift in Marian iconography from Medieval to Isabelline

For what secular purposes did Spanish artists absorb into Marian Immaculate Conception devotional art the attributes of the Apocalyptic Woman from the Book of Revelation? In this absorption of a traditionally active Apocalypse motif into a traditionally inactive Marian motif, were artists and patrons responding to religious, political, and cultural turmoil of multi-faith Iberian societies? I argue that a shift in Marian iconography paralleled consolidation of Castilian national identity in the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. This consolidation manifests in the Virgen Abridera at the Convent of the Concepción de las Madres Agustinas, dated 1520 in Toledo, Spain. This mutable sculpture, also called a Shrine Madonna, Triptych Virgin, or Vierge Ouvrante, is an example of the tota pulchra Immaculate Conception motif, the absorption of Apocalyptic Woman imagery, and the transference in narratives from the Joys of Mary to the Sorrows of Mary—all the products of contemporary Franciscan and Spanish worldviews.