Julia Kristeva cryptically but provocatively personifies the Baroque in the hyperbolically energetic and charismatic (and often obsessively melancholic) Saint Teresa of Avila, the Spanish Counter-Reformation ‘mystic’ or ‘ecstatic’ nun. Elsewhere, Kristeva draws attention to the striking gap in most modern theories of the Baroque, the issue of gender, as in the quotation above. In his study of Baroque ‘self-invention’, Christopher Braider does acknowledge the importance of analysing gender in order to understand the dominant pictorial regime of Baroque Europe, within an important but limited focus. He points to Rembrandt's unusually sympathetic depictions of women victim figures like Susanna or Lucrece as ‘resisting the quasi-pornographic exposure that constitutes the Western norm’. His emphasis on the tradition of objectification and male dominance in Baroque art and culture is, however, broadly, if depressingly, accurate. Apollo's attempted rape of Daphne, for instance, an obsessively popular subject for Baroque artists, inevitably displays Apollo's disappointment and depicts Daphne's reaction to his assault at best as indifferent, or even content: ‘very seldom, if ever, in Italian Renaissance art is Daphne allowed to convey fully the physical and emotional pain that she may have suffered as a result of the metamorphosis’.