A Heroic Successor to St. Teresa of Ávila: Painted Miniatures of Ana de San Bartolomé

Abstract

Since 1990 my research on the iconography of St. Teresa of Ávila has taken me to Spain, where I’ve studied paintings and statues housed in Discalced Carmelite churches and have had the privilege of developing friendships with nuns who continue the monastic way of life that the saint cultivated over four hundred years ago, with its emphasis on constant prayer, strict enclosure, and poverty. 

During a visit to the Convent of St. Teresa in Madrid, after hours of animated conversation about Carmelite history at the iron grille through which the nuns speak with visitors, I mentioned my interest in the lives and writings of Teresa’s close female disciples. They surprised me by sending out into the locutorio a velvet-bound, seventeenth- century book, containing painted miniatures of the life of Ana de San Bartolomé, one of the nuns most favored by Teresa who assumed a powerful leadership role within the Order after the Founding Mother’s death. These images have not been analyzed previously in scholarship, though they are mentioned briefly in Julián Urkiza’s authoritative edition of the complete works of Ana de San Bartolomé. The pictures deserve greater attention, since they reveal much about an important chapter of Carmelite history and about perceptions of female sanctity in Counter-Reformation Europe.