Albahaquero (basil pot)

Gender and clothing

Gender and social class

Gender roles

The function of an albahaquero within the home was to provide a pot for basil, a plant with culinary uses which also served as a natural air freshener, actions linked to the domestic sphere of the female gender. However, its decoration leads us to go further, among other things, to consider the clothing of the period from which it dates and how women were represented in 15th-century iconography. In this depiction, we see a stereotypical woman with a strongly accentuated figure, reinforcing other feminine attributes. But did she really look like this or does it simply reflect the male mentality with regard to women?