the historical sources

Over the centuries, the stone monument of Isabel of Aragon Queen Consort of Portugal (c. 1270-1336), a masterpiece of Portuguese Gothic sculpture from the first half of the 14th century, has been the subject of different types of interventions. They were intended to preserve the integrity and decorum of the sarcophagus which had held the ‘holy body’, found intact inside the sepulchre, of the queen proclaimed blessed in 1516 and saint in 1625. Through the study of the historical sources (literary and iconographic), it was possible to reconstruct the sequence and the chronology of various actions, which focused mainly on the pictorial surface rather than on the structure of the tomb; to identify the areas of intervention; to reflect on their motivations, modalities and techniques; and to advance hypotheses about a new reading of the iconography of the queen’s effigy and the permanence of the medieval polychromy.