The alabaster effigy of Donna María de Perea, wife of Don García Osorio, forms the serene counterpart to her husband’s monument. Together, the pair once lay side by side in a Toledan chapel, eternalized in the luminous stone favored by Castilian sculptors of the late fifteenth century. Now preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, her effigy stands among the most graceful examples of Spanish sepulchral art, uniting Gothic piety with the nascent sentiment of the Renaissance.

Donna María is depicted reclining upon a pair of cushions, her body enveloped in the soft, rhythmic folds of a long gown and veil. Her hands are clasped around a rosary, the beads delicately carved, her head gently inclined in meditation. The sculptor’s attention to texture—the crisp edges of drapery, the polished surface of the fabric, the fine incised veil—reveals both technical mastery and an acute sensitivity to the quiet dignity of the deceased. The slight turn of the head and the parted lips introduce a tender naturalism rare in Spanish effigies of this period.

At her feet reclines a smaller mourning figure, a young woman whose hand supports her head in an attitude of weary sorrow. Whether an allegory of Dolor or a symbolic representation of filial grief, she provides an emotional echo to the repose above, transforming the monument into a dialogue between peace and mourning.

The effigy’s combination of spiritual devotion and gentle realism suggests a sculptor trained in the same Toledan circle as that responsible for Don García’s tomb, possibly influenced by Egas Cueman or Sebastián de Almonacid. Her rosary, carved in her clasped hands, testifies to the growing prominence of personal devotion among Castilian nobles in the decades around 1500.

Though displaced from its original chapel, the effigy of Donna María de Perea remains a deeply human image: a noblewoman portrayed not as a distant emblem of virtue, but as a soul at prayer. The artist’s subtle rendering of repose, combined with the marble’s warm translucence, captures the essence of Spanish funerary art at its most intimate—where faith, memory, and tenderness endure beyond death.