Reading Between the Stitches

Women's use of visual symbolism was neither accidental nor decorative. It was a survival strategy and a power tool that operated across centuries and social ranks.

Noble women used donor portraits in church commissions to insert themselves into sacred narratives, kneeling beside the saints they paid to honor. Symbolic flowers carried their own grammar — lilies for purity, roses for love, thistles for resilience. Together these formed a visual language women wielded deliberately to make claims they could not speak aloud.