Mary of Burgundy, the last Valois ruler of the state, wife of Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, chose to have herself depicted as a hunter and horsewoman, an active, powerful ruler, an only slightly feminised version (she’s sidesaddle) of the traditional knightly portrait of a duke holding a falcon.
There were a few images of her performing traditionally female acts of piety, but only a few. Her posthumous (she died at just 25) portraits, are, however, according to in “The Posthumous Image of Mary of Burgundy” by Ann Roberts (in Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe, by Andrea Pearson, ed), in she becomes a traditional religious, pious, submissive female. (Maximilian was using her for his own propaganda purposes, he wanted her, and made her appear to hsitory “as a virtuous, passive bride, whose wealth he possesses to do with as he will”.)
How many women must have been rewritten such ways…
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