This thesis traces the construction of popular images of the veiled female figure in Spain and Peru, through the eyes of male artists and writers. I focus on the creation of two distinct archetypes of veiled women, the Morisca in sixteenth-century Spain and the Tapada in nineteenth-century Peru, and how these male-constructed identities increasingly reinforced notions of sexuality and eroticism of the forbidden in the popular imagination. I examine how these distinct identities centered on very different uses of the veil, and how the women's perceived sense of agency through manipulation of the garment created ambivalent elements of desire and anxiety, contributing to male fascination with their images, while also cementing preconceived notions of the veiled female "Other" in the European imagination. By analyzing costume books, travel narratives, paintings, and photographs of these types, I demonstrate how the veil not only shaped the artists' perceptions of these women, but also how the viewer, or consumer of the artists' works understood these types in a much broader context, allowing the exaggerated characterizations of these women to represent entire populations and nations as the exotic Other.

The veil became an interchangeable symbol of femininity and modesty, and, for some women, an emblem of freedom from surveillance in a highly patriarchal world. The varying degree that women used the veil to obscure their faces (in whole or in part) would lead to scandal and official censure, as well as a great deal of attention from male artists and writers. The men who drew, painted, and wrote about veiled women increasingly altered and shaped their images, an evolution I identify in the shifting textual and pictorial representations of the veil itself. The fantasy (or fear) of what lies beneath the veil prompted many male artists to expose the faces of their veiled subjects, if only on the surface of their canvases or the pages of their travel journals. All of these elements of exoticism derived from the presence of the veil, the element that would lead to the construction of the recognizable archetypes of the Spanish Morisca and the Peruvian Tapada.