Portrait of Lozana: The Lusty Andalusian Woman

Portrait of Andalucian Lozana
Retrato de la Loçana andaluza..., Venice, 1528.
AuthorFrancisco Delicado
Original titleRetrato de la Loçana andaluza
TranslatorBruno M. Damiani
LanguageSpanish
GenreNovel
PublisherScripta Humanistica
Publication date
1528 (English trans. August 1987)
Publication placeSpain
Media typePrint (Hardback)
Pages301 pp (Eng. Trans. hardback edition)
ISBN0-916379-41-8 (Eng. Trans. hardback edition)
OCLC15695720
863/.3 19
LC ClassPQ6388.D2 E5 1987

The Portrait of Andalucian Lozana (original title in Spanish: Retrato de la Loçana andaluza, translated into English by Bruno Damiani in 1987 as Portrait of Lozana: The Lusty Andalusian Woman) was published in Venice by the Spanish Renaissance writer, Francisco Delicado, in 1528, after he escaped from Rome due to the anti-Spanish sentiment that uprose after the sack of Rome a year earlier. Published anonymously, the book contains a description of the life in Rome's underworld during the first third of the 16th century, focussing particularly on the world of immigrant women from Spain and Spanish Southern Italy. It includes one of the first accounts of women making beauty products, and working as beauty technicians. It is considered a book descendant of Celestina (written some thirty years before by Fernando de Rojas) because of the literary genre, the novel in dialogue, and one of the earliest manifestations of the picaresque novel. There is only one extant copy of the book, now in the National Library of Austria, Vienna.