Renaissance Women: Roles and Images

Transcription

1 Renaissance Women: Roles and Images Humanism as a philosophy focused on the importance of the individual, and this emphasis on individualism led to new ideas about education, some of which affected the education of young girls, anad also to new ideas about women. As artistic, architectural, philosophical and literary influences from antiquity began to infiltrate the thinking of Renaissance humanists, there was an increasing awareness of the need for new ideas about education. One of these new ideas was more extensive education of women. Consequently, schools for girls were started practically throughout Europe, with the reason at least in part being the goal of making women into better companions for men. Still, this was not quite so condescending a goal as it might seem--because the idea of what type of woman would be an ideal mate had changed. Previously, the qualities desired in the female partner were silence and solicitousness for her husband; now she was expected to be a virtuous person, and education was considered to be a route to virtue. To be fair, we should note that education was not the only desired attribute of women. The ideal woman was also expected to be beautiful, and not surprisingly, this beauty was also prescribed and expected to follow a particular standard: "the hair must be long, thick and fair, of a soft yellow turning brown, the skin light and clear, but not pale; the eyes dark brown, large and somewhat vaulted... The nose ought not be curved...the mouth should be small, the lips round, the chin round with a dimple, the neck rounded and fairly long, the Adams' apple not protruding..." Also not surprising, women spent many hours in pursuit of this ideal, and they deliberately cultivated hairstyles that would make them look more intelligent by baring their foreheads. But all the same, education for women did receive an impetus from the rise of humanism. There was some disagreement as to where a woman should receive her education and what it should specifically consist of. One scholar, for example, wrote in the early 16th century against the idea of girls studying in schools and being taught by women. They should be instructed by their father while children, and the grown woman, the wife,

2 should be instructed by her husband who was, he wrote, "the woman's head, mind, the father, the Christ." The well-instructed woman would be an asset to the management of the home and would contribute to the children's education and overall, she would enable all to live together in "tranquility and virtue." But in contrast to the education of men, he did not believe that women should study grammar, logic, history, romantic and military literature, or the poetry of the Greeks and Latins. They were to read the holy books, the Christian poets, and moral philosophy. In this way they would be able to control their passions and minds and they would not be competitive with men. This limited prescription for the education of girls and women was not universal it was more predominant in England and western European countries, less so in Italy where women were expected to study Latin, Greek, astrology, geometry, and arithmetic. With their improved education, some women went on to become poets and writer and patrons of the arts. In addition to expectations for education, there was another and more visible sign of the changed status of women in the Renaissance. Many treatises emerged in the 15th and 16th centuries describing the status of women. There were several leading types of these treatises: one type consisted of those written for popular audiences, some were written for scholars, some were intended for wives and husbands, and some were written for the clergy. Of these treatises, some had the goal of demonstrating that men and women equally possessed the cardinal virtues, and could equally participate in civic life. Some did not dispute the notion of subservient place for women in society but focused instead on the woman's capacity for intelligent action in the context of the home, of familial activities. Some actually insisted on women's superiority to men, focusing on the demonstration of their ability to act decisively in all the areas in which men acted: government, the military, scholarship, and the arts. To some extent these treatises are a sort of "after-the fact" kind of testimony women had begun to be visible, to achieve, to move into significant positions in society, and so these treatises were really justifications and even derived part of their argument

3 from the successes which had already occurred. Women had been rulers at least since the Roman empire; they had been patrons of art in ancient Rome although now they were more prominent in this role, and in some cases, they were artists. Even this was not new although being a female artist in the Renaissance did not always mean being born into the role. With this in mind, we should return to the portraits which Leonardo made of women. We saw that Leonardo's portrait of Ginevra de Benci was unusual, not only in its almost full profile view of its female subject, but also in that it was a portrait celebrating a woman for her intellectual and cultural accomplishments, her virtu, rather than an image of a woman as commodity, as the newly acquired possession of the man who is marrying her. This fact also makes the painting quite novel, because women at this time were still praised for their modesty, their chastity, and overall, their silence. Silence and being solicitous of her husband were the pre-renaissance attributes of a virtuous woman; although these expectations were changing, the change was by no means complete at the time of Leonardo's painting. But the painting of Ginevera is not unique for Leonardo he continues in this unconventional portrait tradition, expanding and developing its implications. Cecilia Gallerani was also a poet, like Ginevra. Unlike Ginevra, she was believed to be a courtesan as well, but this may actually have been a higher status, socially and culturally, than being a wife. She was known for her brilliance, and later, after she did marry a count, she began to hold court gatherings of writers, philosophers, musicians, and poets, who later referred to her as their muse. Of special interest in this portrait is the confluence of symbols radiating a sense of self-possession. She holds in her arms an ermine, and the upper hand parallels, or "rhymes" with the shape of the animal, suggesting a parallel fierceness between animal and woman. Her body is turned in the direction away from the angle of her head's turn, suggesting that she is engaged in an interaction with someone to her side, outside the painting. This interaction is not with the

4 spectator, however. Oddly, given her renown as a brilliant conversationalist, she is shown here to be listening. But it is not the type of listening that suggests enthrallment, or rapt attention. More to the point, it is almost a condescending listening as she seems about to move on to her own world. The painting was praised by contemporaries because in the image of a beautiful woman, it made beauty eternal, more eternal than reality. In Leonardo's own argument of poetry versus painting, he believed that a painting such as this demonstrated the lasting power of the painter, a purer power than that of the poet because the personality of the subject shone through the canvas more radiantly than it would in a poem. Cecilia, like Ginevra, was a friend of Leonardo's. She was also, whether courtesan, mistress, or bride, a very independent woman who was living a transitional role for women. Just as we suggested that Leonardo may have had some identification with Ginevra, the same may have been true here as well the independence of her personality may have been what Leonardo identified with, as he himself was helping to change the status and role of visual artists. And this may explain the unusual position in which Cecilia is painted, because the type of interaction she is engaged in actually suggests more independence than most other positions. She is not a passive subject. In a portrait of Lucrezia Crivelli, La Bella Ferroniere, Leonardo once again paints a woman of self-possession. Her eyes are looking off to the side, rather than facing the viewer, and just as with Cecilia, this act of gazing away from the viewer frees her from the viewer's possession as well as from the possession of the man who commissioned the portrait. Leonardo is known to have painted six portraits, five of which are of women. In contrast to the typical Florentine portraits of women, these are psychologically complex figures and they generate other portraits in that vein. And this fact, too, the female portrait as a progressive form, meaning that it influences other portraits, is in itself novel and significant. The influence of Leonardo's portraits extends to portraits of male subjects, so

5 the depiction of a speaking person or a non-speaking person who in either case is turning and moving in space and interacting in some form with outsiders is generated by Leonardo's female portrait tradition. He may also have inadvertently generated the tradition of the painting of the courtesan. The Courtesan Painting If the Renaissance was a time when "man created man," it was also the time when at least one type of woman was created: the courtesan. This was a woman whose role, in art and in life, revolved around her self-image which serves as her trade or profession, and as an ideal of feminine beauty. The image of the courtesan can be said to begin in the image of the woman as a copy of divine beauty, "heaven on earth," but the courtesan is not a shadow of divinity or a religious refuge she is an image of desire expressed in terms of ideal beauty. But as an image of desire, she offers herself as the means of reaching some transcendent real. As an image of ideal beauty, but as the embodiment of desire, the courtesan becomes another manifestation of the attempt to put into artistic forms a synthesis of reality and ideal. and consistent with Renaissance art, the origins of courtesan imagery go back to antiquity. Ancient statues of Venus were "hoarded" by men--cardinals and poets were known to have fought over the possession of such statues, and the statues were worshiped and loved, not always as a purely mental act. From ancient Venuses, it is not a long step to the Renaissance Venus, such as that painted by Titian (1538) or to the portrait of the ideal woman who could be possessed and worshiped at least in visual form. Nor is it that far to the painting of the real life mistress in the form of a goddess. Hans Holbein painted two portraits of a woman named Magdalena Offenburg, one as Venus and one as Lais of Corinth, a courtesan of ancient times who posed for Greek sculptors and painters. As a courtesan she was known to have been wealthy and scornful, inaccessible to all but the wealthiest. But as she aged and as her profession took its toll on her body, she was said to have held out her hand to anyone, to take anything that was offered her. Holbein fused the image of Lais as a young courtesan with the gesture of Lais as

6 a courtesan who is reduced to begging. It is also a gesture which mimics the hand of Christ in Leonardo's Last Supper an ironic conflation of the courtesan who offers her body for sale with Christ's gesture of offering his body to save humanity. Although we cannot say which meaning was intended by Holbein, the similarity of gestures between Magdalena and Christ would have been recognized by Renaissance viewers. Images of courtesans with their breasts bared have several meanings were another image type with specific meaning: antiquity and the image of Aphrodite and Venus is one, but the most obvious, of course, reflects the erotic relationship between courtesan and the man who possesses her in the form of a painting. Almost directly contrary to the erotic interpretation is the relationship of the courtesan with bared breasts to the image of the nursing Mary with one breast bared. After the black plague, in the early renaissance, the nursing virgin became a symbol of nourishment, and Christ, dependent on his mother, became an acceptable model for the idea of dependence. It was also believed that the milk of the mother was the only milk fit for an infant; the milk of a goat or sheep would result in a child who wasn't right in the head. But some families then employed wet-nurses and the wet-nurse was a sign of gentility, of the aristocracy although in some cases, the wet-nurse was a slave woman, so there were ambivalent feelings regarding nursing by a wet-nurse versus nursing by the mother. The image of the nursing virgin would communicate to other women the idea that they should be like the mother of Christ. This virgin with her bare breast would be accessible in a way that the virgin depicted as a byzantine empress had not been. Yet, conversely, partial nudity denies the virgin of the divinity which sets her apart from mortals, and it raises the issue of eroticism, which again denies the immaculate, sin-free nature of the virgin. But the virgin with one breast bared is not presented as a fully erotic individual ultimately, she is a person who has the ability to nourish, the power to nourish civilization, but she is weakened in some ways by this ambivalent sexual portrayal, and may actually represent a male attempt to present women in this deliberately ambiguous state powerful but weak,

7 not able to threaten the status quo. But there are many stories during the Renaissance about the power of beauty to play a civilizing role and to save the life of a threatened woman, and in these stories, it is almost as though the nursing Mary and the erotic courtesan combine to become a sexual narrative of uplifting morality. With Leonardo, first, and closely followed by Raphael and Titian, courtesans, concubines, and mistresses begin to be portrayed as themselves, no longer in the guise of mythological or moral icons. But the courtesan as myth, no longer the Virgin Mary but not yet a courtesan, will make reference to reality, to the role of the courtesan as a model for the aristocratic woman even as the aristocratic woman models herself on the courtesan, and will continue to make references to antiquity. In Raphael s early paintings, we find a fusion of references to Leonardo--in particular his use of sfumato, the pyramidal composition of Leonardo's paintings of the Madonna and child, references to the muscularity and grandeur of Michelangelo's figures, and a longstanding evocation of antiquity. The Cowper Madonna and the Madonna of the Meadows remain in the Leonardesque vein for Raphael. It is not until after he begins to work on the rooms in the Vatican Palace that he seems to leave Leonardo for Michelangelo, a transition which can be seen in the development from the painting of the Three Graces to the painting of Galatea. Galatea is believed to have been inspired by a real courtesan but it remains tied to Raphael's interest in antiquity. Yet we can recognize a dynamism of composition which actually goes beyond the hierarchical compositional structures of his paintings for the Vatican, the Disputa and the School of Athens. The Galatea painting was part of a commission to decorate the Villa Farnesina. All the paintings which Raphael did for this villa were based on Ovid s tales of the loves of the gods. Yet Raphael doesn't really narrate the story so much as evoke the sense of the myth, often inserting references to the patron and the patron's life. The image of Galatea and the other myths portrayed at the Villa became almost standard poses for later artists.

8 A related painting to the imagery of the three graces, although one in which the artist has clearly moved a great deal closer to the representation of reality, is the painting by Palma Vecchio, Three Sisters. The realism of this painting is prefigured by Leonardo's portraits, in particular the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani or La Bella Ferroniere. Raphael more boldly than Leonardo combines a real woman with a courtesan. Whereas Leonardo's painting is that of a courtesan becoming a mistress, Raphael's painting La Fornarina is that of a courtesan as courtesan. Generally, in his portraits, Raphael was influenced by Leonardo's painting of the Mona Lisa; he combined an accurate likeness with the softening achieved by the sfumato which is characteristic of so much of Leonardo's paintings. In this way he raises the portrait beyond the everyday and idealizes the sitter; yet the sitter is not generalized to the degree that Leonardo usually generalizes. In La Fornarina we find classical references in the pose of the figure references to the pose of a "modest" venus, an image which often suggested impending marriage. The figure is combined here with the natural background of a Leonardo painting, a background which tends to symbolize the humanistic setting for intellectual exchange. The figure is crowded into the space of the painting by the foliage which frames her as an icon of desire. If the model is a modest venus, a model for brides, how does that really coordinate with this image? This image does not seem to connote purity. It may more accurately be an image of the courtesan as the imitation of an aristocratic woman, which was how the courtesan seemed to function in Italian life at that time. And to the extent that courtesans were modeled on aristocratic women, there was ambivalence about their position. If the courtesan image initially represents another fusion of the real and the ideal, it serves eventually to signal their separation. At first, religious and mythological figures such as Magdalena, Flora, Venus, and Leda were infused with the qualities of courtesans or become compositional frames for the characteristics of a real-life courtesan. But to the viewer who recognizes the mythological framework and the presence of the real woman, a discontinuity or rupture between the real and the ideal may be sensed. Another way of

9 expressing this discontinuity is to say that the viewer could see one image through another, the viewer could look through the real to see the ideal or look through the ideal to see the real. Fnally, the courtesan herself (as was true of almost any woman) can be seen to be a work of art. More than other women, though, she gives herself to the business of selfpresentation; she creates herself as an image of appeal and desire. But if the subject of a painting precedes the painting as a work of art, can we say that we are once again dealing with painting which is about painting as a constructed image, a mental construct? And in this case, not only is the painting perhaps about the idea of painting, but the theme of the painting, the woman as courtesan, is but one idea about woman. Because simultaneous with the image of the woman as courtesan is the image of the woman as saint. Saint Catherine, for example, served as a model for women and for men. She succeeds in converting an Empress and a group of philosophers to Christianity, all of whom are later put to death. As is Catherine, who first survives torture and then is beheaded. She is generally portrayed as a woman who stands firm and sure, a woman of strength, who defends her faith with her intellectual gifts. She is also frequently shown as she marries Christ, in paintings referred to as the mystic marriage of St. Catherine. In this role, she becomes the model for a religious order for women. In one of Hans Memling's 15th century paintings, we find the enthroned Mary in a throne which resembles a patterned tapestry and halo, set in the landscape, and framed by saints, such that the composition of the painting becomes an internal altarpiece. In addition to Catherine kneeling to the left there is another female saint to the right with a book. This painting therefore provides three role models for women: the Virgin, a mystic bride, and a woman who pursues knowledge and prayer. Correggio's version, made somewhat later, is more typically Italian in the less fantastic landscape, idealized more through the treatment of light and the atmospheric rendering than through the suggestion of unreality. This grouping of Mary and the holy child and other saints in a landscape idealized more through sfumato and color than through a Flemish mixture of descriptive reality and unreality seems to become a standard model for mystic

10 marriages which themselves may be seen as model of virtue for the woman. But the saint who appears to serve as a model for a fusion of pious mysticism and the secular courtesan is Mary Magdalena. A prostitute who atones for her sins through penance, she is shown at times as a hermit, gaunt, and unkempt, as Donatello portrayed her in his statue of the mid- 15th century. In the fifteenth century she is most often shown as someone who is ragged and bedraggled, skeletal and weak, an image which fit with the tenor of the period when the influence of Savonarola was strong and much of Italy was in despair. In contrast to the pitiable, almost mad Magdalena is one who is no longer ascetic but presented more in the guise of a seductive beauty the woman who wins pardon through her beauty, another Renaissance image of women, as we have seen. These are the images in which she becomes a courtesan. In these paintings, Mary is shown in the desert or in a landscape, imploring for help and forgiveness, a face which has become ennobled by grief and beauty. Titian painted two versions of a woman in a pose of begging for forgiveness, looking upward, one with her breasts bared and one where she is presented fully clothed, but the face and pose are identical as are the eyes cast upward, the tears on the face, the hint of a landscaped background. Sources Primary source for the courtesan: Lynne Lawner, Lives of the Courtesans. (NY: 1987). On women in portraits: Mary D. Garrard, Leonardo da Vinci. Female Portraits, Female Nature. Patricia Simons. Women in Frames. The Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraits. Both in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds., The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History. (NY: 1992).