Las hijas de Felipe at The National Gallery

In this special live episode of the podcast Las Hijas de Felipe, Ana and Carmen approach the figure of Francisco de Zurbarán from an unexpected yet necessary perspective: a feminist and queer reading of his work, of his relationship with painting, and of the bodies—real, idealised, silenced—that inhabit his canvases. 

Far removed from the canonical view of the Baroque master as an ascetic and severe painter, the conversation proposes a critical rereading of Zurbarán that attends to the tensions between spirituality, desire, and representation. What kinds of gazes are activated in his saints, virgins, and martyrs? What do those bodies, suspended on the threshold between devotion, suffering, and beauty, tell us? Where are women—muses, models, allegorical figures—positioned within a deeply patriarchal artistic system? Ana and Carmen open up a space for dialogue in which Zurbarán emerges not only as a painter of silences, fabrics, and shadows, but also as a creator shaped by contradictions, ambiguities, and possibilities for dissident interpretation. From an analysis of painterly materiality to the erotic and symbolic suggestion of certain gestures, faces, and textures, the episode invites listeners to rethink Golden Age art through contemporary questions of gender, the gaze, and power. 

This live podcast is both an intimate conversation and an invitation to the audience to question inherited narratives of art history, to listen to what is left unsaid, and to imagine alternative ways of engaging with the great masters of the canon from critical, inclusive, and radically contemporary perspectives.