Receptions of antiquity, constructions of gender in European art, 1300-1600 9789004278745, 9004278745

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Receptions of Antiquity, Constructions of Gender in European Art, 1300–1600

Metaforms Studies in the Reception of Classical Antiquity

Editors-in-Chief Almut-Barbara Renger (Freie Universitat Berlin) Jon Solomon (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) John T. Hamilton (Harvard University) Editorial Board Kyriakos Demetriou (University of Cyprus) Constanze Güthenke (Princeton University) Miriam Leonard (University College London) Mira Seo (University of Michigan)

VOLUME 3

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/srca

Receptions of Antiquity, Constructions of Gender in European Art, 1300–1600 Edited by

Marice Rose Alison C. Poe

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Detail, Amico Aspertini, Antiquities in Roman Collections, in the Codex Wolfegg, c. 1500–3, Schloss Wolfegg (Warburg Institute). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Receptions of antiquity, constructions of gender in European art, 1300-1600 / Edited by Marice Rose, Alison C. Poe.   pages cm. -- (Metaforms : studies in the reception of classical antiquity ; volume 3)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-90-04-27874-5 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-28969-7 (e-books) 1. Sex role in art. 2. Civilization, Classical, in art. 3. Civilization, Western--Classical influences. 4. Art and society-Europe--History--To 1500. 5. Art and society--Europe--History--16th century. I. Rose, Marice E., editor. II. Poe, Alison C., editor. N8241.5.R43 2015 704.9’49938--dc23 2015004853

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2212-9405 ISSN 978-90-04-27874-5 (hard back) ISSN 978-90-04-28969-7 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents Acknowledgments vii List of Contributors viii List of Figures XI Introduction: Classical Reception, Gender Studies, and Art History 1 Marice Rose and Alison C. Poe 1 Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel: Giotto’s Virtue Fortitude Re-examined 37 Mary D. Edwards 2 The Liminal Feminine: Illuminating Europa in the Ovide Moralisé 80 K. Sarah-Jane Murray with Ashley A. Simone 3 A Giant Corrupt Body: The Gendering of Renaissance Roma 98 Genevieve S. Gessert 4 Luca Signorelli’s Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome and Viewers in the Palazzo Petrucci, Siena 131 Stephanie C. Leone 5 Queer Fragments: Sodoma, the Belvedere Torso, and Saint Catherine’s Head 169 Timothy B. Smith 6 The Trouble with Pasiphaë: Engendering a Myth at the Gonzaga Court 199 Maria F. Maurer 7 Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water in Lorenzo Lotto’s Venus and Cupid 230 April Oettinger 8 The Crone, the Witch, and the Library: The Intersection of Classical Fantasy with Christian Vice during the Italian Renaissance 264 Patricia Simons

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Picturing Rape and Revenge in Ovid’s Myth of Philomela 305 Hetty E. Joyce

10 Figuring Florence: Gendered Bodies in Sixteenth-Century Personifications and Their Antique Models 350 Claudia Lazzaro 11

Conjugal Piety: Creusa in Barocci’s Aeneas’ Flight from Troy 393 Ian Verstegen

12 Ancient Idols, Lascivious Statues, and Sixteenth-Century Viewers in Roman Gardens 418 Katherine M. Bentz Index 451

Acknowledgments This volume originated in a session chaired by the editors at the 2013 College Art Association Annual Conference in New York, where Mary Edwards, Hetty Joyce, Claudia Lazzaro, Sarah-Jane Murray and Ashley Simone, and Timothy Smith presented papers. We are grateful to the College Art Association for accepting and hosting the session, and to the art historians in attendance for their positive and helpful feedback. Our warm thanks go to the speakers at the caa session, all of whom adapted their papers into chapters, and to the seven other contributors to the volume, Katherine Bentz, Genevieve Gessert, Stephanie Leone, Maria Maurer, April Oettinger, Patricia Simons, and Ian Verstegen. It has been a pleasure to work closely with all of our authors, and we deeply appreciate all that they have done to make this project come to fruition. We also wish to thank Brill for its support, especially editors Tessel Jonquière and Peter Buschman and the editors of the Metaforms series, Almut-Barbara Renger, John Hamilton, and Jon Solomon. The anonymous outside reader’s report was extremely insightful and deeply appreciated. Marice extends her gratitude to Fairfield University for a sabbatical in the spring of 2014. We are happy to thank our colleagues and friends in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts for their support: Professors of Art History Philip Eliasoph and Katherine Schwab, Department Chair Laura Nash, Interim Director of the Bellarmine Museum of Art Carey Weber, and former museum director Jill Deupi. Riham Majeed was invaluable in helping to copyedit the text and notes; Ted Goodman masterfully handled the task of matching page numbers to the index entries. We also appreciate the advice of Mary Edwards, Claudia Lazzaro, and Ronald Davidson on the process of assembling the volume. Jean Alvares of Montclair State University provided his expertise at a critical point. To the Department of Art History at Rutgers University, where we both received our PhD’s, we offer our thanks for bringing the two of us together, and for generally fostering an atmosphere of collaboration and collegiality among the graduate students. Two of our contributors, Stephanie Leone and Ian Verstegen, were in the program with us as well. Finally, we would like to thank our families for their support and loving encouragement.

List of Contributors Katherine M. Bentz is Associate Professor of Art History at Saint Anselm College. Her research centers on landscape and garden history, urbanism, and antiquities collections in early modern Rome. She is currently at work on a book concerning villa gardens built by cardinals in later sixteenth-century Rome, and the role of visitor experience and perception in shaping garden design and decoration. Mary D. Edwards is a professor at Pratt Institute, where she teaches Trecento painting and sculpture as well as Native American art and architecture. She writes on pictorial narrative and iconography, mostly in the art of late medieval Italy. In 2012, McFarland published Gravity in Art: Essays on Weight and Weightlessness in Painting, Sculpture and Photography, a multiauthor volume that she conceived and co-edited. Genevieve S. Gessert is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Classics at Johns Hopkins University, and is the 2014–2016 Director of the Classical Summer School at the American Academy of Rome. Her research specializations are Roman archaeology and classical reception. Hetty E. Joyce teaches Art History at The College of New Jersey. Her research focuses on the afterlife of classical antiquity in the visual arts from the early modern period to the present, with particular attention to the discovery, recording, and influence of ancient painting and decorative arts. Claudia Lazzaro is Professor in the Department of History of Art at Cornell University. Much of her scholarship has focused on gardens, particularly of the Italian Renaissance. Her current research focuses on representing identity, individual and collective, in Florentine art, in several studies including a book-length project on sixteenth-century Florence. Stephanie C. Leone is Associate Professor of Art History at Boston College. Her book The Palazzo Pamphilj in Piazza Navona: Constructing Identity in Early Modern Rome (Harvey

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Miller-Brepols, 2008) considers the intersection between palaces and social rituals and the roles of architects, patrons, and advisors in building. She is currently working on the display of art in Rome in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Maria F. Maurer is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Tulsa. Her current book project, entitled Performing the Palace: Gender and Experience at the Palazzo del Te, examines the dynamic interactions between the Gonzaga dynasty and the Palazzo del Te, and the ways in which such interactions produced gendered and sexual identities. K. Sarah-Jane Murray is Associate Professor of Great Texts and Creative Writing at Baylor University. Her book From Plato to Lancelot: A Preface to Chrétien de Troyes (Syracuse University Press, 2008) explores the origins of vernacular storytelling in twelfth-century France. Her research currently focuses on translating the Ovide moralisé into English for the first time. April Oettinger is Associate Professor of Art History at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. She has written on the art of sixteenth-century Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, and Michelangelo’s snowman. Her current book project explores the art of Lorenzo Lotto and the rise of the contemplative landscape in sixteenth-century Venice. Alison C. Poe is an Adjunct Instructor of Art History at Fairfield University. She specializes in Roman imperial-era and late antique funerary art and architecture; she also works on classical reception in art of various periods and media, including modern children’s book illustrations. Marice Rose is Associate Professor of Art History at Fairfield University. Her scholarship focuses on images of women and slaves in late Roman domestic decoration, as well as classical reception and art history pedagogy. Her latest research concerns hairstyling in ancient Greece and Rome. Ashley A. Simone is a PhD student in Classics at Columbia University. Her main areas of interest are Latin literature of the late Republic and early Empire and its reception in

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the Middle Ages and Renaissance. She is currently researching the impact of astronomical literature on the Roman literary imagination. Patricia Simons is a Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her publications include The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 2011), the co-edited Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy (Clarendon Press, 1987), and numerous essays. Her studies of the visual and material culture of early modern Europe range over such subjects as female homoeroticism, the role of humor, and the visual dynamics of secrecy and scandal. Timothy B. Smith is Associate Professor of Art History at Birmingham-Southern College in Birmingham, Alabama. His research and publications have focused on the architecture and decoration of Renaissance reliquary shrines in Siena, particularly the chapels of Saint John the Baptist in Siena Cathedral and Saint Catherine of Siena in San Domenico, and the reception of images and visual environments created for the Sienese cult of relics. Ian Verstegen is Associate Director of Visual Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of articles and books on early modern art history, art historiography, and aesthetics. His most recent book is Federico Barocci and the Oratorians: Corporate Patronage and Style in the Counter-Reformation (Truman State, 2014).

List of Figures 1.1  Giotto di Bondone, Christ Driving the Moneylenders out of the Temple, c. 1305–6. 42 1.2 Giotto di Bondone, Personification of Fortitude, c. 1305–6. 43 1.3 Bearded Hercules, Roman copy of a Greek original, c. 68-98 ce. 44 1.4 Giotto di Bondone, Personification of Inconstancy, c. 1305–6. 46 1.5  Personification of Patience under attack, from the Psychomachia of Prudentius, c. 900. 48 1.6 Juno Sospita, 2nd century ce. 49 1.7 Mosaic with Omphale and Hercules, 3rd century ce. 55 1.8 Detail, phiale with Omphale asleep, 1st–late 2nd century ce. 56 1.9 Puteal with Omphale and Hercules, 1st–2nd century ce. 57 1.10 Omphale draped in the lion skin of Hercules, c. 200 ce. 64 1.11 Giotto di Bondone, Personification of Folly, c. 1305–6. 68 2.1 Europa carried off by the bull, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1325–50. 83 2.2 Christ carrying the cross, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1325–50. 84 2.3 Red-figure vase with Rape of Europa, c. 480 bce. 86 3.1 Apollo Citharoedos, identified in the Renaissance as Hermaphroditus, 2nd century ce. 105 3.2 Engraving of the Farnese “Hermaphroditus,” from the Speculum Magnificentiae Romanae, 1554. 107 3.3 Drawing after the Farnese “Hermaphroditus” and Crouching Venus, c. 1503. 109 3.4 Standing Hermaphrodite, 1st–2nd century ce, converted into a Venus in the 17th century. 110 3.5 Anonymous, Roma as crone, in Fazio degli Uberti’s Dittamondo, 1447. 113 3.6  Porphyry Apollo, once identified as Roma/Vesta, 2nd century CE with 18th-century restorations in white marble. 118 3.7 Maarten van Heemskerck, Sculpture Court of the Casa Sassi, Rome, 1532–7. 120 3.8 Adventus, Great Trajanic Frieze, 117–20 ce. 121 3.9 Amico Aspertini, drawing after Trajanic Adventus relief, in the Codex Wolfegg, c. 1500–3. 122 3.10 Giovanni Battista Palumba, Roma, 1500–10. 123 3.11 Giulio Bonasone, Roma, in Achille Bocchi’s Book of Emblems, 1555. 124 4.1 Luca Signorelli, Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome, c. 1509–11. 133 4.2 Luca Signorelli, Castigation of Cupid, c. 1509–11. 135 4.3 Andrea del Verrocchio, Putto with Dolphin, early 1480s. 146 4.4 Jacopo della Quercia, Rhea Silvia, 1414–9. 152 5.1 Sodoma, Execution of Niccolò di Tuldo, 1526. 170

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5.2 Detail, Sodoma, Execution of Niccolò di Tuldo, 1526. 171 5.3 Detail, Sodoma, Execution of Niccolò di Tuldo, 1526. 171 5.4 Giovanni di Stefano, Marble tabernacle with relic head of Saint Catherine of Siena, 1470s. 172 5.5 Apollonios of Athens, Belvedere Torso, 1st century bce. 174 5.6 Giovanni Antonio da Brescia, Belvedere Torso, c. 1515. 177 5.7 Maarten van Heemskerck, Belvedere Torso with Fragment of an Obelisk, c. 1532–6. 178 5.8 Amico Aspertini, Antiquities in Roman Collections, in the Codex Wolfegg, c. 1500–3. 179 5.9 Sodoma, Saint Sebastian Pierced with Arrows, c. 1525–6. 184 5.10 Gaddi Torso, c. 2nd century bce. 186 5.11 Bust of Alexander the Great (Dying Alexander), Roman copy of Greek original, c. 2nd century ce. 187 5.12 View of Execution of Niccolò di Tuldo and tabernacle with relic head of Saint Catherine of Siena. 194 6.1 Giulio Romano, Pasiphaë and the Bull, 1526–8. 200 6.2 Nicola da Urbino, plate with Pasiphaë and Daedalus, c. 1530–3. 200 6.3 Workshop of Nicola da Urbino, plate with Pasiphaë and Daedalus, c. 1530. 201 6.4 Roman sarcophagus with Pasiphaë and Daedalus, c. 150 ce. 209 6.5 Follower of Baldassare Peruzzi (possibly Cristoforo Roncalli), study for external decoration of the Villa Farnesina, first quarter of the 16th century. 210 6.6 Giulio Romano, east wall of the Camera di Psiche (left to right, Jupiter and Olympia, Polyphemus, and Pasiphaë and the Bull), 1526–8. 212 6.7 Mithras Slaying a Bull, 3rd century ce. 216 6.8 Giulio Romano, Hercules and the Cretan Bull, 1526–7. 217 6.9 Master of the Campagna Cassone, The Loves of Pasiphaë, 1510–5. 221 7.1 Lorenzo Lotto, Venus and Cupid, late 1520s. 231 7.2 Lorenzo Lotto, Puer mingens, 1524. 235 7.3 Lorenzo Lotto, Andrea Odoni, 1527. 236 7.4 Nymph Fountain, in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499. 239 7.5 Trickster Fountain, in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499. 240 7.6 Francisco de Holanda, Belvedere Cleopatra, 1538–9. 247 7.7 Giovanni Bellini, Feast of the Gods, 1514. 248 7.8 Titian, Bacchanal of the Andrians, 1523–6. 249 7.9 Lucas Cranach the Elder, Nymph of the Spring, after 1537. 251 7.10 Lorenzo Lotto, Allegory of Chastity (“The Maiden’s Dream”), 1505–6. 252 7.11 Jan Van Scorel, Cleopatra, c. 1520–24. 254 7.12 Lorenzo Lotto, The Triumph of Chastity, c. 1530. 256 7.13 Titian, Sacred and Profane Love, c. 1514. 257

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8.1 Circle of Maso Finiguerra or Baccio Baldini, Hostanes, from the Florentine Picture Chronicle, c. 1470–5. 268 8.2 Dosso Dossi, Circe, c. 1511–25. 271 8.3  Agostino Veneziano (after Marcantonio Raimondi?), Lo Stregozzo, 1515–25. 279 8.4 Rosso Fiorentino, Incantation Scene, first half of the 16th century. 281 8.5 Albrecht Dürer, Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat, 1500–1. 283 8.6 Andrea Mantegna, Battle of the Sea Gods (left half), 1470s. 285 8.7 Agostino Veneziano (after Giulio Romano), Bacchante Seated Backwards on a Goat with Herm of Satyr, c. 1520s. 287 8.8 Agostino Veneziano (after Marcantonio Raimondi), Old Woman Approaching the Grave, 1528. 289 9.1  Tereus and Philomela in Pandion’s palace, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1415–25. 311 9.2 Tereus asks Pandion’s permission to take Philomela to Thrace, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1415–25. 312 9.3 Tereus sails with Philomela to Thrace, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1415–25.  313 9.4 Tereus cuts out Philomela’s tongue, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1415–25. 314 9.5 Tereus falsely reports to Procne that Philomela is dead, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1415–25. 315 9.6  Philomela shows Itys’ head to Tereus, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1415–25. 316 9.7 Philomela, Procne, and Tereus transformed into birds, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1415–25. 317 9.8 Tereus cuts out Philomela’s tongue, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1325–50. 318 9.9 Philomela gives the tapestry to the messenger, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1325–50. 319 9.10 The messenger gives Philomela’s tapestry to Procne, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1325–50. 320 9.11 The Myth of Philomela, in John Gower, Confessio Amantis, 1470s. 321 9.12 Bernard Salomon, Tereus, Procne, and the Furies, in La Métamorphose d’Ovide figurée, Lyon, 1557. 323 9.13 Bernard Salomon, Pandion, Tereus, and Philomela, in La Métamorphose d’Ovide figurée, Lyon, 1557. 324 9.14 Bernard Salomon, Pandion forces Philomela, in La Métamorphose d’Ovide figurée, Lyon, 1557. 325 9.15 Bernard Salomon, Procne and her sister; Procne avenges her sister, in La Métamorphose d’Ovide figurée, Lyon, 1557. 326 9.16 Bernard Salomon, Procne avenges her sister, (detail of 9.15). 327 9.17 Giorgio Ghisi, Tarquin and Lucretia, c. 1540. 328

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9.18 Antonio Tempesta, Tarquin Rapes Philomela, from the Metamorphoseon … Ovidianarum, c. 1606. 329 9.19 Antonio Tempesta, Procne kills Itys and shows his head to Tereus, from the Metamorphoseon … Ovidianarum, c. 1606. 330 9.20 First of two embroidered bed valances with the story of Philomela, c. 1600. 330 9.21 Second of two embroidered bed valances with the story of Philomela, c. 1600.  330 9.22 Tereus cuts out Philomela’s tongue (detail of 9.20). 331 9.23 Cornelis Cort after Titian, The Rape of Lucretia, c. 1571. 332 9.24 Tereus introduces Philomela to the old woman (detail of 9.20). 333 9.25 Philomela embroiders (detail of 9.21). 334 9.26 Procne and her companions (detail of 9.21). 335 9.27 Ladies in a garden embroidering, from the Album Amicorum of Gervasius Fabricius, 1603–37. 336 9.28 Luca Bertelli, Lucretia and Her Companions, c. 1575. 337 9.29 Philomela (detail of 9.20). 339 9.30 Philomela’s embroidery (detail of 9.21). 341 10.1 Niccolò Tribolo, Fiesole, c. 1540. 351 10.2 Michelangelo, Night, 1521–34. 352 10.3 Baccio Bandinelli, Relief with scene of triumph on monument to Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, 1540–3. 353 10.4 Gemma Augustea, 9–12 ce. 355 10.5 Sarcophagus with the Abduction of Persephone by Hades, detail, 220–5 ce. 356 10.6 Maenad, detail, 27 bce–68 ce. 357 10.7 Pierino da Vinci, Pisa Restored, c. 1552. 358 10.8 Coin of Hadrian, Hadrian restoring Achaea, reverse, 134–5 ce. 359 10.9 Adventus of Marcus Aurelius, 176–180 ce. 362 10.10 Giorgio Vasari, Apotheosis of Duke Cosimo, c. 1565. 364 10.11 Vasari, study for a frontispiece, c. 1550. 367 10.12 Bartolomeo Ammannati, Flora/ Florence, from Juno Fountain, 1550. 369 10.13 Coin of Vespasian, Roma Resurge[n]s, reverse, 71 ce. 370 10.14 Hora of Autumn (“Pomona”), Roman copy of 1st century bce–1st century ce. 372 10.15 Giambologna, Florence Triumphant over Pisa, c. 1575. 373 10.16 Michelangelo, study of a torso of Aphrodite, c. 1520. 377 10.17 Michelangelo, Nude Female, mid-1520s–early 1530s. 378 10.18 Anonymous after Michelangelo, River God, c. 1530–1600. 380 10.19 Giorgio Vasari, San Gimignano and Colle Val d’Elsa with River Elsa, 1563–5. 382

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10.20 Giambologna, Fiorenza, c. 1560 or 1570. 384 11.1 Federico Barocci, The Flight of Aeneas from Troy, c. 1589. 394 11.2 Girolamo Genga, The Flight of Aeneas from Troy, c. 1510. 402 11.3 Francesco Xanto Avelli, plaque painted with the Flight of Aeneas and the Death of Creusa, c. 1535. 404 11.4 Raphael, “Aeneas” group, from The Fire in the Borgo, 1514. 405 11.5 Federico Barocci, Creusa (detail of 11.1). 407 11.6 Federico Barocci, Annunciation, detail, 1584. 407 12.1  The Toilet of Venus (Venus Felix and Cupid), 2nd-century ce Roman copy after the 4th-century bce Aphrodite of Knidos by Praxiteles. 421 12.2 Hendrick van Cleve III, View of the Vatican Gardens, 1580s. 430 12.3 So-called “Agrippina” (draped female torso), Roman copy after a 5th-century bce original. 434 12.4  Pan and Daphnis, 1st-century ce Roman copy after a c. 100 bce original by Heliodoros of Rhodes. 435 12.5 Gillis van den Vliete, Diana of Ephesus, 1568. 438

Introduction: Classical Reception, Gender Studies, and Art History Marice Rose and Alison C. Poe This volume employs classical reception, gender studies, and art history in concert to reconsider late medieval and early modern visual culture. The collected essays examine ways in which art in Italy, France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries engaged both with Greek and Roman antiquity and with contemporary formulations of gender. The contributors address late medieval and Renaissance works of art that incorporate classical subject matter; drawings and engravings of ancient sculpture; displays of antiquities by collectors; written responses to ancient remains and textual imagery; and acts of viewing classical and classically informed art. These receptions of antiquity, the authors demonstrate, served in part to construct, normalize, complicate, and/or challenge late medieval and early modern conceptions of women, men, and those of intersexual status.

Theoretical Framework

The essays in this book posit a very wide range of responses to ancient physical and written remains among artists, patrons, and viewers from 1300 to 1600, and they look closely at the notions, intentions, and societal mechanisms that underpin those responses. The volume thus follows the definition by Lorna Hardwick of classical reception as “the artistic or intellectual processes involved in selecting, imitating or adapting ancient works,” but it also treats display and viewing as active processes.1 The contributors make use of scholarship on the classical tradition in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance— especially studies that establish when, where, and how widely specific ancient works of art and texts were accessible—but they seek to avoid the positivism that frequently characterizes this scholarship. Much work on the classical tradition rests on the premise that ancient objects and texts bear single, authoritative, “true” meanings that were understood by all ancient audiences and that later viewers and readers either grasped correctly or failed to

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Lorna Hardwick, Reception Studies, Greece and Rome New Surveys in the Classics 33 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004289697_002

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apprehend.2 This book instead considers all received meanings in all periods as constructs that are shaped by the receiver’s “horizon of expectation” (to use the phrase of Hans Robert Jauss), a mindset conditioned by experiences within a particular cultural system.3 Our approach thus harmonizes with the famous formulation by Charles Martindale (in part based on the Rezeptionsästhetik of Jauss), “Meaning is always realized at the point of reception.”4 In the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, this volume maintains, the collective aspects of the audience’s “horizon of expectations” had already been informed by many earlier receptions of classical culture in Europe: during antiquity itself; during the early and high Middle Ages, especially (but not exclusively) under the influence of Christian thought; and during the late medieval and early modern periods under consideration here.5 This model of classical reception, in which 2 Even Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis, eds., The Classical Tradition (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2010), vii, frame ancient Greek and Roman “cultural formations” as fixed entities with a “true” meaning: “The history of the reception of classical antiquity, as of any work of the human spirit, must balance, delicately and not unproblematically, between an unwavering commitment to uncovering as far as possible the truth of both ancient and modern cultural formations on the one hand and an undogmatic appreciation of the endless resourcefulness and inventiveness of human error on the other.” On studies of Renaissance art that fall into the category of classical tradition scholarship, see the review of scholarship below. 3 Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 4 Charles Martindale, Redeeming the Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 3. The editors and authors of the present volume recognize that we, too, bear our own “horizon(s) of expectation,” and that our interpretations of ancient and medieval and Renaissance works of art and texts are “mediated, situated, contingent” (to use the phrasing of Charles Martindale, “Introduction: Thinking Through Reception,” Classics and the Uses of Reception, Blackwell Classical Receptions, eds. Martindale and Richard F. Thomas [Malden, ma: Blackwell, 2006], 1–14, 3). We believe, however, that the material and textual remains of the past permit and even demand scholarship that grapples with “the-past-as-it-really-was,” in this case the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries in Europe. 5 On classical reception within antiquity, see Hardwick 2003, 12–31, and James I. Porter, “Reception Studies: Future Prospects,” in A Companion to Classical Receptions, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World, ed. Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray (Malden, ma: Blackwell, 2011), 469–81, 471–3. On the reception of classical material culture during the full length of the medieval era, see below, “Review of Recent Scholarship.” On the impact of earlier receptions of ancient art within the Renaissance on later ones, see, as a case study, Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 2–16, on the Belvedere Laocoön.

Introduction

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later receptions are affected by earlier ones, is somewhat akin to Martindale’s notion of “transhistoricism.”6 Martindale, however, envisions a linear—and, in effect, patrilinear—relationship among great individual receivers through time (“ourselves reading Milton reading Virgil…”). By contrast, the present volume postulates that receivers in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance confronted ancient objects and texts whose meaning had been imprinted over time by a wide array of direct and indirect cultural forces. These receivers, moreover, interpreted and deployed the products of this transmission within their contemporary cultural matrix. The essays in this collection consider the interaction of classical receptions in the visual arts of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries with the dynamic political, social, intellectual, and artistic circumstances of these periods. In this respect, the collection aligns with the “cultural historical view of reception theory” espoused by Simon Goldhill.7 The contributors acknowledge, furthermore, that different receivers within a single culture may have experienced strongly divergent reactions to works of art and texts (classical or otherwise), based on such factors as gender, social status, education, personal history, and individual taste. This principle derives from recent work in viewer reception theory, in part under the influence of feminist theory.8 This volume also adopts the feminist perspective that the dominant patriarchy at least sometimes deployed ancient art and texts to advance its agenda.9 6 Charles Martindale, “Reception—A New Humanism? Receptivity, Pedagogy, the Transhistorical,” Classical Receptions Journal 5 (2013): 169–83 (quote 172). 7 Simon Goldhill, “Cultural History and Aesthetics: Why Kant Is No Place to Start Reception Studies,” in Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critics’ Practice, eds. Edith Hall and S. Harrop (London: Duckworth, 2010), 56–70 (quote 69). 8 See, for instance, Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, “Introduction: Reclaiming Female Agency,” in Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art After Postmodernism, ed. Broude and Garrard (Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 2005), 1–25, esp. 11–5; and Edith Hall, “Putting the Class into Classical Reception,” in Companion to Classical Receptions, eds. L. Hardwick and C. Stray, 2011, 386–97; see in more depth below under “Review of Recent Scholarship.” 9 Articulating this feminist theoretical position generally for art history are Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, “Introduction: The Expanding Discourse,” in Broude and Garrard, The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (Boulder, co: Westview Press, 1992), 1–26; Ibid., “Reclaiming Female Agency,” 1–25. Specifically addressing the centuries under consideration here, but not primarily concerned with classical reception or visual culture, are Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 3rd ed., New Approaches to European History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. 1–16; and Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). For fundamental studies on the patriarchal use of

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The immense body of ancient visual and literary remains available in the fourteenth to sixteenth century held enormous potential for justifying and strengthening political and social control. In the feminist view, the high-status male culture of this period in Europe invested this classical inheritance with profound authority in part so that it could tap this potential. Of course, the mass of Greek and (mostly) Roman objects, monuments, and texts also posed a great challenge: Given its sheer scale, sweeping heterogeneity, and fragmentary state, the material demanded titanic efforts of categorization, interpretation, and assimilation before it could be marshaled to uphold and enforce patriarchal ideals and norms of conduct. Classical reception by upperclass educated men in these centuries—rulers, prelates, other male members of powerful families, scholars, artists, and authors, alongside women who embraced the prevailing agenda—represents for feminists an effort manage this process, to midwife the delivery of a “reborn” culture in line with the gender constructs that underlay contemporary power structures.10 The project was successful enough for historian Joan Kelly to ask in 1977, “Did women have a Renaissance?”11 Indeed, sixteenth-century art historian Giorgio Vasari’s characterization of his era as a rinascita following a period of decline after antiquity was integral to these masculinist endeavors.12 The continued use of the term “Renaissance” in current scholarship, then, is potentially problematic, since it adheres to an elite male formulation of history. The label “classical” reflects the same ideology, evoking an authoritative past culture to which enlightened men of more recent times have turned for inspiration. Out of convenience (and to avoid taxing the reader’s patience by heavy repetition of “early modern,” “ancient,” and “antique”), the editors and authors of this volume do employ the terms “Renaissance” and “classical,” but we recognize the gendered problematics of these names. 10

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classical culture in fourteenth- to sixteenth-century European art, see below, “Review of Recent Scholarship.” On this process in early modern Italy, see, for example, Marta Ajmar, “Exemplary Women in Renaissance Italy: Ambivalent Models of Behavior?” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. Letizia Panizza (Oxford: University of Oxford European Humanities Research Center, 2000), 244–64. Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 19–51. Reprinted (writing as Joan Kelly-Gradol) from Becoming Visible: Women in European History, eds. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston, ma: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 137–64. Giorgio Vasari, “Proemio delle Vite,” in Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri (Florence: Giunti, 1568). For the scholarship on Vasari’s use of the term rinascita, see below, “Review of Recent Scholarship.”

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In addition, though, this collection of essays shows that powerful men of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries did not all approach classical art in the same way, and that women as patrons and viewers had the opportunity to construct potentially different gendered meanings in their own encounters with the antique. The present volume examines a wide range of dynamics between classical receptions and gender constructs in the late Middle Ages and early modern era. The contributors, Mary D. Edwards, K. Sarah-Jane Murray with Ashley Simone, Genevieve S. Gessert, Stephanie C. Leone, Timothy B. Smith, Maria F. Maurer, April Oettinger, Patricia Simons, Hetty E. Joyce, Claudia Lazzaro, Ian Verstegen, and Katherine M. Bentz, address some of the ways in which artists, patrons, collectors, audiences, critics, and other authors used antiquity as a basis for exploring, reinforcing, and/or unsettling contemporary notions about women and men as well as about individuals outside of these binary categories. The essays by Edwards, Murray and Simone, Leone, Maurer, Oettinger, Simons, Joyce, Lazzaro, and Verstegen uncover late medieval and Renaissance mores regarding gender roles and sexuality that underlie depictions of female figures from antiquity: goddesses, female personifications, mythical mortal women, (ostensibly) historical women, witches. Gessert, Oettinger, Lazzaro, and Bentz analyze how ancient visual and literary imagery was employed in the gendering of cities, fountains, gardens, and other abstract entities. Gessert and Smith consider the sometimes fluid interpretations of the gender of ancient statues and fragments. Leone, Maurer, and Joyce propose possible gendered receptions of ancient and classically informed works of art by individual viewers or groups of viewers. The visual culture of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, this collection contends, participated in myriad ways in the contemporary discourse on gender roles and identity, and the antique served as an important locus of this discourse for artists and their audiences.

Review of Recent Scholarship

This volume represents, to our knowledge, the first collection of essays situated at the nexus of classical reception, gender studies, and the history of European art from 1300 to 1600. It builds on a significant body of recent studies that deal with aspects of this multifaceted topic and also on a small number of groundbreaking publications by individual scholars that treat all three themes—responses to ancient culture, constructions of gender ideologies, and art. This literature review presents the scholarship in these areas that provides the most immediate context for the chapters that follow.

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Numerous resources identify ancient objects that were accessible to artists, patrons, and collectors in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries and provide information about how these objects were known and preserved. Literature treating the survival of antiquities is rarer for late medieval Western Europe than for the early modern period; Michael Greenhalgh’s book (1989) on the existence and recovery of ancient art in the Middle Ages, and the use of this material by medieval artists, remains a key text.13 The publications by Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny (1982), Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein (1986), and, recently, Kathleen Wren Christian (2010) have proved vital for scholars in this volume researching the use of antiquities in the Renaissance.14 Haskell and Penny’s volume catalogued ninety-five canonical ancient sculptures and discussed their discovery, display, and changing reputations from 1500 to 1900. Bober and Rubinstein’s catalogue and its revised edition (2010) are print versions of their Census of Antique Works of Art Known in the Renaissance, which originated at the Warburg Institute in 1947 and is now also online.15 The entries in the census cover a wide array of individual ancient objects, with information about the discoveries and their documentation, about textual references to the objects, and about visual records made by artists working from the year 1400 until the 1527 sack of Rome. In Christian’s book and catalogue of Renaissance antiquities collections specifically in Rome (from the fourteenth century also until the sack of Rome), she presents detailed evidence of the 13 Greenhalgh, The Survival of Roman Antiquities in the Middle Ages (London: Duckworth, 1989). For architectural re-use, see his Marble Past, Monumental Present: Building with Antiquities in the Medieval Mediterranean (Leiden: Brill, 2009). For an older study, see W.S. Heckscher, “Relics of Pagan Antiquity in Medieval Settings,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 1, no. 3 (1938), 204–20. 14 Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982); Phyllis Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, rev. ed. 2010); Kathleen Wren Christian, Empire Without End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome, c. 1350–1527 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). For antiquities in and around Venice, see Irene Favaretto, Arte antica e cultura antiquaria nelle collezione venete al tempo della Serenissima (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2002); in Venice and France, see Pomian Krzysztof, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Porter (Cambridge, uk: Polity Press, 1990); for ancient coins known in the Renaissance, see John Cunnally, Images of the Illustrious: The Numismatic Presence in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 15 The project was conceptualized by Fritz Saxl, Richard Krautheimer, and Karl Lehmann and executed by Bober and Rubinstein. Online as Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance, http://www.census.de/census/home.

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holdings of thirty-seven Roman collections, accompanied by deeply researched contextual chapters that include investigations of the growth of antiquarianism in Rome, shifts in attitudes toward antiquities, and how collections were acquired.16 Establishing the “afterlife” of antiquities and artists’ experiences of them has long been thought crucial in understanding how artistic cultures took shape and also how they changed, especially at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period. In Boccaccio’s Decameron (1348–51), the recently deceased Giotto is characterized as having revived the style of the ancients, bringing “back to light the art which had been buried under others’ errors…for centuries.”17 Two centuries later, Vasari called the era in which he lived a rinascita, presenting a chronological development of individual artists’ styles and responses to ancient visual sources.18 Such founders of today’s art history as Heinrich Wölfflin, Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, and Ernst Gombrich influenced generations by drawing strong distinctions between medieval attitudes toward antiquities and Renaissance responses to these objects.19 Leonard 16 17

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See Bentz, Chapter 12 in this volume, no. 1 for further sources on collections. “Avendo egli quella arte ritornata in luce, che molti secoli sotto gli error d’alcuni, che piú a dilettar gli occhi degl’ignoranti che a compiacere allo ’ntelletto de’ savi dipignendo, era stata sepulta,” Decameron 6.5. This sentiment was echoed by Filippo Villani in his Liber de civitatis Florentiae famosis civibus in 1382. Nearly a century later, Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Commentari (c. 1450) charted a progression in which classical art represented an ideal and medieval art a decline, the latter ending when Giotto had re-introduced nature to art. For a thorough discussion of the concept of “Renaissance,” see the article by Jill Kraye in Grafton, Most, and Settis, The Classical Tradition, 810–5. For a problematization of the term rinascita, see Matteo Burioni, “Vasari’s Rinascita: History, Anthropology, or Art Criticism?” in Renaissance? Perceptions of Continuity and Discontinuity in Europe, c. 1300–1550, ed. Alexander Lee and Pit Péporté (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 115–28. Ian Verstegen offers an analysis of Vasari’s developmental but ahistorical concept of art in “Vasari’s Progressive (But Non-Historicist) Renaissance,” Journal of Art Historiography 5 (2011): 1–19. For valuable historiographical analyses of the constructs of classicism and of the Renaissance itself, see Salvatore Settis, Future of the Classical World, trans. Alan Cameron (Cambridge, uk: Polity, 2006), and Bryan A. Curran, “Teaching (And Thinking About) the High Renaissance: With Some Observations on its Relationship to Classical Antiquity,” in Rethinking the High Renaissance, ed. Jill Burke (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), 27–55. Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); E.H. Gombrich, Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon Press, 1966). Jill Burke, “Inventing the High Renaissance, from Winckelmann to Wikipedia: An Introductory Essay,” in Rethinking the High Renaissance, ed. Burke, 11–3; and Christopher S. Wood, “Art History’s Normative Renaissance,” in The

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Barkan’s recent study, Unearthing the Past (1999), upholds this notion of difference in considering how and why archaeological sculptural finds were reused during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy, and in arguing that the “re-ordered fragments of past culture” contributed on a broad scale to Renaissance aesthetics and culture.20 Unlike most other far-reaching studies of the classical tradition in art, Barkan considers questions of both gender and audience.21 In addition to actual archaeological remains and finds, many artists and patrons experienced ancient works of art through visual intermediaries—some themselves antique, some from more recent centuries, some contemporary— including coins, gems, drawings, manuscripts, printed books, and engravings.22 A theoretically multifaceted case study of this phenomenon is Adrian Randolph’s Engaging Symbols (2002), which looks at small ancient bronzes and cameos as sources of inspiration for Donatello’s David.23 Ancient texts provided information through description and ekphrasis about what ancient art looked like. In The Revival of the Olympian Gods in Renaissance Art (2003) and Classical Myths in Italian Renaissance Painting (2011), Luba Freedman argues that Renaissance painters employed close study of both ancient images and ancient literary descriptions to compose their classicizing artworks.24 For Renaissance readers, Pliny the Elder was the principal resource for the subjects, styles, and techniques of ancient art that no longer survived. Sarah McHam analyzes the relationship of Pliny’s Natural History to early modern Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, eds. Allen J. Grieco, Michael Rocke, and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi (Florence: Olschki), 65–92. 20 Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 271. 21 E.g., in his discussions of hermaphrodite statues (see also Gessert and Smith in this volume, Chapters 3, 5) and of the sleeping Ariadne/Cleopatra statue (see also Oettinger, Chapter 7): Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 164–6, 233–48. 22 In this volume, see Gessert, Chapter 3; Smith, Chapter 5; Lazzaro, Chapter 10; Verstegen, Chapter 11; and Bentz, Chapter 12. Categories of visual transmission in the printed or drawn examples beyond sculpture or architectural remains include allegories, emblemata, and astrology; see Malcolm Bull, The Mirror of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Renaissance Art (London and New York: Penguin, 2005), 7–36, and Ilaria Ramelli, “Ancient Allegory and Its Reception through the Ages,” International Journal of Classical Reception 18, no. 4 (2011): 569–78. 23 Adrian W.B. Randolph, Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in FifteenthCentury Florence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 160–2. 24 Luba Freedman, The Revival of the Olympian Gods in Renaissance Art (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Ibid., Classical Myths in Italian Renaissance Painting (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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culture in a definitive volume published while this collection was coming together.25 Of the many lines of inquiry in McHam’s wide-ranging book, those most germane to the present volume include the reception of the Natural History in antiquity; the impact of the text on thought and art in the Middle Ages; the role of fifteenth-century humanistic editions, translations, and commentaries in the formation of Renaissance culture; and the influence of sixteenth-century printed versions, especially in Northern Europe. Not only a source for what lost ancient art had looked like, the Natural History also helped to shape the development of artistic theory, the competition among artists (with Pliny’s characterization of the painter Apelles as a standard), and the relationships between artists and patrons, not to mention the humanist worldview as a whole. McHam demonstrates that artistic receptions of Pliny went far beyond artists’ simply replicating his descriptions, and art historians today accept that knowledge of actual antiquities was no more important to many Renaissance artists than other sources—perhaps sometimes even less so. Malcolm Bull argues in The Mirror of the Gods (2005) that medieval manuscripts such as the Ovide moralisé and early modern mythographies were more influential on later Renaissance artists than original Greek and Roman art.26 The text and printed illustrations of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili were also important resources for artists, especially in Venice.27 The essays in the present volume also demonstrate that in addition to classical artworks, texts by Ovid, Virgil, Homer, Plato, Plutarch, Horace, Lucan, Livy, Philostratus the Elder, and many other ancient authors—known through medieval versions or “discovered” by humanists— were mined for subject matter by artists and patrons who may have had no intention of replicating actual ancient artworks.28 The textual underpinnings of classicizing art have been a popular topic of scholarly inquiry, although in 25

Sarah McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 26 Bull, The Mirror of the Gods. On the Ovide moralisé, see Murray with Simone, Chapter 2, and Joyce, Chapter 9 in this volume. Murray is currently translating the text into its first English edition and preparing a catalogue of the illuminations. 27 See Oettinger, Chapter 7, in this volume. Rona Goffen, Titian’s Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 107–26 discusses how Venetian painters tended to be more interested in ancient conceptions of art than ancient art itself, and rarely exactly replicated styles or poses of ancient artworks. Patricia Fortini Brown, Venice and Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) explores Venice’s lack of a classical past, and its invention and appropriation of one toward a civic identity. 28 See Edwards, Chapter 1; Murray with Simone, Chapter 2; Leone, Chapter 4; Joyce, Chapter 9; and Verstegen, Chapter 11.

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most cases gender and reception theory are not employed; exceptions will be discussed below.29 In their debate-inspiring work Anachronic Renaissance (2010), Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood question the notion that truly ancient visual culture was at all significant for Renaissance artists. According to Nagel and Wood’s paradigm of substitution, Renaissance artists and viewers often considered medieval and contemporary art to be ancient Greek or Roman; it would be more helpful, the authors argue, to have a resource of works that beholders thought to be Roman, such as the Florence Baptistery.30 Although Nagel and Wood’s argument is compelling, we the volume editors, as scholars of classical art and reception, believe that in addition to knowing what was believed to be ancient, it is important to know when actual antiquities were excavated, known, and studied, and what the “afterlife” of these objects was.31 Often the ancient primary text source material was mediated, as the artwork was. In The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (1989), Michael Camille discusses the contrast between the Gothic conceptualization 29

30 31

For the late medieval period, the scholarly corpus is sparser than for the early modern. Additional mid-twentieth-century and later examples of studies considering ancient subject matter in medieval and/or Renaissance art include Walter Oakeshott, Classical Inspiration in Medieval Art (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1960); Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, 2nd ed. (New York: Humanities Press, 1969, 1988); Salvatore Settis, ed., Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, 3 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1984–6); Nikolaus Himmelmann, Antike Götter im Mittelalter (Mainz am Rhein: P. von Zabern, 1986), Charles Martindale, ed., Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Jane Davidson Reid, ed., The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300–1990s, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford, 1993); Donna Kurtz, ed., Reception of Classical Art: An Introduction, Studies in Classical Archaeology, vol. 3. British Archaeological Reports, International Series 1295 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2004); Karl Kilinski, Greek Myth and Western Art: The Presence of the Past (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). The topics of postclassical mythological subject matter and antique models have also come together in museum exhibitions, for example Brown University’s Survival of the Gods: Classical Mythology in the Middle Ages in 1987; the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance in 2010–2011; and the 2012 exhibition at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt, Zurück zur Klassik: Ein neuer Blick auf das alte Griechenland. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010). For example, Gessert, Smith, and Maurer, Chapters 3, 5, and 6 in this volume, show how the adaptation of forms from ancient objects and fragments by Renaissance painters have important implications for ideas of gender construction.

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of images of ancient deities, “reconstituted from fragments of visual and verbal associations,” and some relatively faithful early modern imitations of ancient subjects, a difference he attributes to medieval artists’ considering various audience responses when composing imagery.32 Camille examines images of pagan idols within the context of the Church reinforcing its power over pagans, Jews, and Muslims, and he focuses on Christians’ negatively associating antiquity with paganism.33 An influential book on the positive reception of ancient myth by medieval mythographers and the influence of these commentaries in the Renaissance was Jean Seznec’s Survival of the Pagan Gods (first English edition 1953). Seznec looked at the transmission of early modern mythological subjects from earlier medieval writings and visual material, such as astrological books and tarot cards. Bull considers the same types of materials in domestic contexts, but he focuses on the decorative and escapist aspects of the imagery.34 By contrast, Joscelyn Godwin in The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance (2005) credits the popularity of images of the gods in early modern Italy, and then in Northern Europe, to a spiritual need for an alternate, “imaginal” world.35 Despite this wealth of scholarship, it is rare for art historians to frame their studies within the theoretical and methodological discourses of classical reception scholarship.36 Work by art historians is largely absent from conferences, journals, and edited volumes devoted to classical reception, even as scholarship regarding other artistic media, such as film, dance, poetry, and theater, has become an increasingly large presence in the field.37 Certainly, as we 32 Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 103, 114. 33 In this volume, see Simons, Chapter 8 and Bentz, Chapter 12 for negative receptions of antiquity. 34 Jean Seznec, Survival of the Pagan Gods, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1953; Bull, The Mirror of the Gods. 35 Joscelyn Godwin, The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance (Boston: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2005). 36 In Alina Payne, Ann Kuttner, and Rebekah Schmicks, eds., Antiquity and Its Interpreters, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), the introduction and some of the contributions show an affinity for the type of scholarship practiced in classical reception studies, but the editors use Barkan’s term “transumption” for the cultural borrowing of classical material or style (2). Most of the essays in Antiquity and its Interpreters focus on architecture or ekphrases, not on gender constructions, although the book is similar to the present volume as a collaborative project among specialists of the arts of ancient Rome and of early modern periods. 37 For example, Hardwick and Stray, Companion to Classical Receptions, includes sections for performing arts and film, but not one for visual arts. The international

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have seen, the study of artists “using” ancient art or subject matter is a deeply ingrained part of art history, but this approach comes from within the discipline, and its practitioners are usually trained in the art of the receiving period but not in classical reception studies.38 There has been a growth in art history studies considering reception in general, however, which has broadened notions of audience and response. In this context, reception is the way a particular viewer or type of viewer reacts to a specific work of art or display. Much art-historical reception theory has arisen in concert with feminist and gender-based theoretical approaches that have expanded the canon and the category “artist.” The present volume owes a significant debt to late twentiethcentury feminist studies that shifted the focus of medieval and early modern scholarship from paintings and sculptures mostly by male artists for elite male patrons to a broader canon that included art produced, commissioned, and/or used by women.39 Feminists examined so-called “popular,” “minor,” or “applied” arts, such as deschi da parto (painted trays given to women upon childbirth), cassoni (painted wedding chests), maiolica, and tapestries. For the medieval period, Jeffrey Hamburger’s publications on previously ignored manuscripts and drawings made by religious women for their own contemplation are essential contributions.40 Important recent scholarship on less-studied media within the early modern period include Christiane Klapisch-Zuber’s work on holy dolls, Jacqueline Marie Musacchio’s book on deschi da parto, and Cristelle Baskins’s milestone study of cassoni (painted wedding chests).41

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conference on two of the themes of this volume, “Classical Greek and Roman Literature: Gendered Perspectives in Reading and Reception,” University of Maryland, College Park, April 1, 2012, included no art history papers. Numerous university Classics departments now offer discrete degrees in Classical Reception, the impact of which will be seen as their graduates become active in the discipline. Two groundbreaking, now classic, texts bringing attention to women artists were Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists,” ARTnews 69 (1971): 22–39, 67–71, and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). Jeffrey Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland Circa 1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press), and Nuns as Artist: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in the Renaissance, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985); Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Cristelle Baskins, Cassone Painting, Humanism, and Gender in Early Modern Italy (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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Feminist art historians have also adopted Laura Mulvey’s conception of the gaze, which postulates an assumed male perspective in viewing, to consider gazes directed toward images of women, as in several essays in Norma Broude and Mary Garrard’s edited collection of feminist art-historical scholarship, The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (1992).42 The essays in Expanding Discourse cover a range of periods, from the early modern era to the late twentieth century, and include several groundbreaking articles on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century art. There is now a substantial corpus of scholarship on female artists, female patronage, and portraits of women in the early modern period, as evidenced by the essays and bibliographies in the 2013 Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe.43 Feminist approaches in late medieval art history have been more rare, although this situation is changing.44 Not only Jeffrey Hamburger but also Madeline Caviness and Linda Seidel consider women’s agency and reception in the Middle Ages, although antique revival is not one of their topics of inquiry.45 Masculinity studies and queer theory have interrogated the gaze in other ways, addressing the assumed heteronormativity of artist, subject, and viewer. In this respect, the inclusion of the term “gender” in the title of Ashgate’s 2013

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Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18; Broude and Garrard, The Expanding Discourse. This was the second in a trilogy; the first book ever to collect feminist art historical scholarship was their Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), and the third volume is Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Allyson M. Poska, Jane Couchman, and Katherine A. McIver, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate), 2013. For patronage, see also Sheryl E. Reiss and David G. Wilkins, eds., Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy (Kirksville, mo: Truman State University Press, 2001). Paola Tinagli, Women in Italian Renaissance Art: Gender, Patronage, and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) considers portraits of women and their receptions by women, but consciously rejects a feminist approach. See Rachel Dressler, “Continuing the Discourse: Feminist Scholarship and the Study of Medieval Visual Culture,” Medieval Feminist Forum 43, no. 1 (2007): 15–34, and Marian Bleeke, “Feminist Approaches to Medieval Visual Culture: An Introduction,” Medieval Feminist Forum 22, no. 2 (2008), 49–52. Major works include Madeline H. Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), and Linda Seidel, Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait: Stories of an Icon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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compilation is telling.46 James Saslow’s Ganymede in the Renaissance, a pioneering work in queer theory, explores early modern attitudes towards homoeroticism and gender through the lens of contemporary Ganymede imagery.47 Patricia Simons, a contributor to the present collection, treats the complicated masculinity of Hercules and potentially homosexualizing receptions of Diana and her nymphs in Renaissance art.48 Their landmark studies have expanded inquiry on the interrelationships of gender, classics, and reception. Queer theory, viewer reception studies, and classical reception also come together in Randolph’s aforementioned study of Donatello’s David, where he considers a homosocial reading.49 Other scholarship in medieval and early modern studies has also considered viewer reception in ways that are relevant here. In his Gothic Idol, Camille rejects Panofsky’s characterization of the relationship between medieval and ancient art as a “disjunction.” Camille presents medieval art as a purposeful reinterpretation that would have been understood in various ways.50 A number of collected volumes on medieval and early modern art and literature include essays on gender and viewership (but not on classical reception), notably Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers’s Rewriting the Renaissance (1986); Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari’s Refiguring Woman (1991); Geraldine Johnson and Sara Matthews Grieco’s Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (1997), many chapters of which consider domestic religious or secular art within the context of power relations in the household; and Sherry Lindquist’s The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art (2012).51 46

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49 50 51

There is also now Ashgate’s Women and Gender in the Early Modern World book series, and the University of Chicago Press’s series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. See Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender, for an overview of gender-based approaches. James Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986); see also his “Michelangelo: Sculpture, Sex, and Gender,” in Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture, ed. Sara Blake McHam (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 223–45. Patricia Simons, “Hercules in Italian Renaissance Art: Masculine Labour and Homoerotic Libido,” Art History 31 (2008), 632–64, and “Lesbian (In)Visibility in Italian Renaissance Culture: Diana and Other Cases of Donna con Donna,” Journal of Homosexuality 27, no. 1–2 (1994): 81–122. Engaging Symbols, 183–90. Chapters in this volume on the Renaissance use of antiquities to destabilize gender include Edwards, Smith, and Maurer, Chapters 1, 5, and 6. Gothic Idol, 101–7. Ferguson, Quilligan, and Vickers, Rewriting the Renaissance; Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari, eds., Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Geraldine A. Johnson and

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Although the present book is the first edited volume to consider antiquity and gender together in late medieval and Renaissance art, some individual studies have pursued this tack in recent decades (even if not expressly adopting the framework of classical reception). Saslow’s work on Ganymede and Simons’s on Hercules and Diana are important examples.52 Other historians of medieval and early modern art have applied feminist or queer theory to examine how male artists and patrons used mythological subject matter or classicizing formal language to define normative gender roles; to maintain or create political dominance through public art; to enforce patriarchal family structures; to attract or meet erotic gazes, oppose paganism, promote ideal marriage, uphold Christianity, or consider beauty, love, or art itself. A few case studies will serve here to illustrate the different avenues of approach that have been taken—avenues explored in this volume as well. An early model of art-historical scholarship on state-sponsored public art promoting female subjugation through classicizing rhetoric, albeit in Augustan Rome and eighteenth-century Europe, was pioneer feminist classicist Natalie Boymel Kampen’s article “The Muted Other” in The Expanding Discourse. Kampen’s essay articulates the theoretical principle, “The classical rhetoric of gender in works of art is, like the choice of the period deemed classic, the staking out of an ideological position.”53 Renaissance public art depicting subjects from antiquity and/or employing a classicizing style has become a locus of scholarship on gender construction. Also in The Expanding Discourse, Yael Even discussed the replacement of Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes by Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus Slaying Medusa (1545–54) in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, and the addition of Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women in 1582, as symbolizing the masculine power of the city’s rulers and the promotion of their aggressive approach to civic duties.54 Geraldine Johnson in Picturing Women looks at how the increase of classical subject matter Sara F. Matthews Grieco, eds., Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Sherry C.M. Lindquist, The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art (Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2012). 52 Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance; Simons, “Hercules in Italian Renaissance Art”; Ibid., “Lesbian (In)Visibility in Italian Renaissance Culture.” 53 Natalie Boymel Kampen, “The Muted Other: Gender and Morality in Augustan Rome and Eighteenth-Century Europe,” in Expanding Discourse, eds. N. Broude and M.D. Garrard, 161–70 (quote 161). 54 Yael Even, “The Loggia dei Lanzi: A Showcase of Female Subjugation,” in Expanding Discourse, eds. N. Broude and M.D. Garrard, 127–37. See also Elena Ciletti, “Patriarchal Ideology in the Renaissance Iconography of Judith,” in Refiguring Women, eds. M. Migiel and J. Schiesari, 35–70.

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concerning male violence against women, including these statue groups, paralleled the increasing limitation of women’s participation in public roles.55 Adrian Randolph accepts the arguments of Even and Johnson as important ones, but he also takes into account possible positive female responses to the statues. His Engaging Symbols examines how fifteenth-century Florentine rulers used ancient sources to create gendered symbols of Florence, of themselves, and of their rule, and considers how differently gendered viewers may have received them.56 Randolph posits the theoretical standpoint that representations of gender, “rather than reflecting socio-historical relations, exist in a complicated mobile pattern of exchange, linking production, reception, and circulation, within particular contexts.” Florentine political art possessed a dialogic function, he contends, in shaping public opinion of the state.57 Another topic of inquiry that has proven fruitful concerning the reception of antiquity and the formulation of gender in early modern art is the conceptualization of the natural realm. Mary Garrard, in her far-reaching Brunelleschi’s Egg (2010), traces the history of the nature-female/culture-male dichotomy from its prehistoric origins in the Ancient Near East to its adoption and interpretation by the patriarchy in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian art, science, and letters. Garrard uses feminist theory to interrogate masculinist biases in traditional art-historical approaches to many canonical artists and artworks. She finds that antiquity played a role in constructing this elite male definition of art and nature both in the Renaissance and in modern art-historical scholarship. The austere style of early Renaissance art as practiced by Masaccio, deemed classicizing by sixteenth-century critics as well as by twentieth-century art historians, provided a “gender-inflected value,” Garrard argues. Associated with humanist values of individualism, progress, and heroism, this style was viewed in contrast to female-gendered nature, and to the decorative International style of Gentile da Fabriano, which accordingly came to be seen as weak and effeminate.58 Among other gendered sites, Garrard looks at gardens, adducing the passivity of female garden statues to show an increasing debasement of images relating to Natura.59 In Garrard’s view, early modern 55

Geraldine Johnson, “Idol or Ideal: The Power and Potency of Female Public Sculpture,” in Picturing Women, eds. G.A. Johnson and S.M. Grieco, 239–44. 56 Randolph, Engaging Symbols. 57 Ibid. (quote 246). Lazzaro, in this volume’s Chapter 10, examines the gendering of personifications of Florence in sixteenth-century sculpture and painting as both male and female. 58 Mary D. Garrard, Brunelleschi’s Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 73. 59 Ibid., 275.

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artists imitated monumental ancient art with idealized styles because these works of art were seen to be examples of man’s perfection of—and therefore displacement of—nature.60 Claudia Lazzaro, another contributor to the present volume, has addressed the interaction of mythological subjects and personifications in Renaissance gardens with contemporary perceptions of gender. In an influential article first published in Refiguring Women, Lazzaro treats the identity of sculpted figures and other signs in gardens as coded female or male, following contemporary gender ideology that accepted Aristotle’s nature-female, culture-male dichotomy.61 Subjects gendered female, such as Tellus, Terra Mater, and Cybele, emphasized sensuality and fertility with their bodies and poses, whereas male personifications and gods, such as Oceanus and Neptune, appeared more powerful and active. Lazzaro argues that gardens did not symbolize man’s domination over nature, as modern scholarship has held, but rather a symbiotic relationship between the two, exemplified by the complementary pairings of statues of different genders.62 The deployment of classicism within the private sphere to express gendered power has also been the subject of studies that consider viewer reception. Stephanie Schrader, for example, discusses Jan Gossart’s use of nude mythological subjects to communicate the sexual and political power of his patron, Philip of Burgundy.63 Titian’s Venus of Urbino, in which the goddess occupies a contemporary domestic interior, has prompted a number of theoretical approaches.64 Most notably, Rona Goffen linked the sensual nude figure to contemporary ideals of wifely love and to notions of possession by patron, artist, and/or audience.65 Luba Freedman treats sixteenth-century images of single pagan deities in statuary and other media within the context of Italian 60 61

Ibid., 241. Claudia Lazzaro, “The Visual Language of Gender in Sixteenth-Century Garden Sculpture,” in Refiguring Women, eds. M. Migiel and J. Schiesari, 71–113; a revised version, “Gendered Nature and Its Representation in Sixteenth-Century Garden Sculpture,” appears in Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture, ed. Sarah McHam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 246–73. 62 See Oettinger, Chapter 7, as gardens as places of inspiration, and Bentz, Chapter 12, for associations between gardens and female sexuality. 63 Stephanie Schrader, “Gossart’s Mythological Nudes and the Shaping of Philip of Burgundy’s Erotic Identity,” in Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance, ed. Maryan W. Ainsworth (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010), 57–67. 64 See the collection edited by Goffen, Titian’s Venus of Urbino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Garrard, Brunelleschi’s Egg, 199–204. 65 Goffen, Titian’s Women, 146–57. Garrard, Brunelleschi’s Egg, 199–204, however, sees in this Venus not only the goddess of the marital bed but also the patron of courtesans.

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male elite patrons displaying their status through art in their homes.66 Cristelle Baskins employs a wide variety of methodologies, including gender and reception theory, in examining non-canonical cassone paintings and their depictions of female “heroines” from ancient literature: Amazons, Dido, Camilla, the Sabine women, Lucretia, and Virginia.67 In a tour de force of interdisciplinary scholarship and theoretical interplay, Baskins looks at the potentially contradictory messages of the imagery—which is often assumed to be moralizing— and proposes multiple readings by audiences of differing social classes, genders, and ages.68 The paintings, Baskins argues, helped to socialize the newlyweds into the male-dominated culture, but they could also challenge male authority and normative gender roles. Stephen Campbell’s Cabinet of Eros (2004) adopts a broad socio-historical approach as well, applying it to the collecting of art by a specific historical individual: Isabella d’Este, marchesa of Mantua.69 In his examination of Isabella’s studiolo and its program of mythological paintings, Campbell addresses female viewership and agency, gendered space, and the adaptation of classical subject matter within the humanistic and literary cultural context of the Gonzaga court.70 Campbell does not explicitly use feminist or reception theory, but his consideration of the studiolo collection as means to inspire reflection on beauty and art calls to mind Leonard Barkan’s statement, “It is not only politics, society, and economics that generate the impulse of art; it is also art itself.”71 The present book therefore emerges out of a vital, methodologically diverse body of scholarship on responses to antiquity in, and/or contributions to contemporary gender discourses by, the artistic cultures of late medieval and early modern Europe. As the first collection of essays on all three of these topics, the present volume illustrates the range of approaches that are possible in

66 Freedman, Revival of the Olympian Gods. 67 Baskins, Cassone Painting. See in this volume Leone, Chapter 4, for a more detailed discussion of Baskins’s methodology. 68 A potentially conflicting view of a wife’s role with regard to the patriline through depiction of a non-heroic classical subject is also discussed by Verstegen in this volume, Chapter 11. Simons, Chapter 8, discusses contradictions in views of women’s sexuality and their presentations as anti-heroines: witches. 69 Stephen Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004). 70 See Maurer’s Chapter 6 in this volume on three later mythological commissions by the Gonzaga family, and see Edwards, Chapter 1, Leone, Chapter 4, and Verstegen, Chapter 11 for studies that concentrate on one patron or one group of patrons and viewers. 71 Barkan, Unearthing the Past, xxxii.

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engaging with this set of questions. It also allows a number of profound thematic interconnections to arise among the individual studies (see “Thematic Threads,” below), delineating avenues of inquiry along which further work in this field might potentially coalesce. Finally, this book represents the product of collaboration among theorists and scholars of the received and receiving cultures. Feminist art historians have long called for scholars to work together, and Lorna Hardwick has recently emphasized the importance of collaboration in classical reception studies.72 The editors and authors of this collection include classical archaeologists, late antique art historians, a medieval literature specialist, medieval art historians, and early modern art historians, some with a background in classical reception, some in feminist or queer theory, and some in both. The strong spirit of collaboration within this group was crucial, we submit, to the success of the project. We hope that the volume spurs further research—perhaps also collaborative in nature—at the convergence of classical reception, gender studies, and the history of art.

The Essays

The present collection focuses most extensively on the artistic culture of the Italian Renaissance, but it also looks at aspects of late medieval and Northern Renaissance art. The arrangement of the chapters is roughly chronological, beginning with the early fourteenth century and concluding with the late sixteenth century (although some essays cover a significant span of time within these parameters). Since the subject of architecture would raise other theoretical and analytical issues, the volume focuses only on art; the authors do, however, consider the relationships between works of art and their architectural contexts. In Chapter 1, “Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel: Giotto’s Virtue Fortitude Re-examined,” Mary D. Edwards argues that the famous fresco cycle by Giotto in the Arena Chapel in Padua (c. 1305–6) assimilates the armed personification of Fortitude to the mythical Omphale by portraying the female Virtue in the lion skin of Hercules. Edwards proposes that for the patron of the Arena Chapel, the money-changer Enrico Scrovegni, Giotto’s Fortitude may have evoked Hercules and Omphale simultaneously. The hero Hercules, compared  by some medieval authors to Christ, but tainted by having killed his 72

Lorna Hardwick, “Editorial,” Classical Receptions Journal 2, no. 1–3 (2010): 1. Natalie Boymel Kampen, “On Writing Histories of Roman Art,” Art Bulletin 85 (2003): 373–83, emphasizes the value of interdisciplinarity and collaboration in art history.

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family (or members of it) in a fit of madness, stood for Enrico the usurer; Omphale, the source of expiation for Hercules through her enslavement of the hero, embodied Enrico’s hopes for Christian salvation. The wealthy male patron thus linked himself visually with a mythical queen as an expression of Christian penance. Edwards looks closely at the vigorous humanist culture of Padua in the early thirteenth century, arguing that at least one of the multiple ancient textual sources of the Omphale myth was likely accessible to Enrico, Giotto, and/or the designer of the Arena Chapel fresco program (Altegrado Cattaneo di Lendinara?). K. Sarah-Jane Murray and Ashley A. Simone consider the role of Europa in early illustrated manuscripts of the Ovide moralisé in Chapter 2, “The Liminal Feminine: Illuminating Europa in the Ovide Moralisé.” A massive text comprising the Metamorphoses and an early fourteenth-century Christian allegorical commentary, the Ovide moralisé provided one of the principal means by which Ovid’s text was received by late medieval and Renaissance thinkers and artists (see, for example, Maurer, Chapter 6, on Renaissance depictions of Pasiphaë, and Joyce, Chapter 9, on late medieval and early modern Philomela imagery). Murray and Simone focus on two early illustrated Ovide Moralisé manuscripts, Rouen Bibliothèque Municipale ms 0.4 and Paris Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal ms 5069, each of which includes a miniature of Europa, the princess of Tyre taken by Jupiter in the guise of a bull. Ultimately derived from ancient images of Europa riding on the bull’s back, the illustration is juxtaposed in both cases with a Christological scene. Murray and Simone closely analyze the Old French text and its gendering of Jupiter, who first transforms into a castrated ox and then, once Europa touches him, into a bull. Such language, they argue, when combined with the imagery of Christ, suggests that the figure of Europa abducted by Jupiter represents the Christian soul in its union with Christ. In Chapter 3, “A Giant Corrupt Body: The Gendering of Renaissance Roma,” Genevieve S. Gessert finds links between representations of the city of Rome in early modern literature and art, such as in Poggio Bracciolini’s De varietate fortunae (second quarter of the fifteenth century), and receptions by contemporary humanists and artists of hermaphroditic figures in ancient sculpture. The varied responses to images of hermaphrodites, and to statues of other figures that were assigned intersexual status, shared a strong desire to investigate and understand—to excavate—the hybrid body. Characteriza­ tions  of Rome, Gessert argues, attributed both male and female qualities to the city as well: The trope of Roma as a corpse (instar gigantei cadaveris corrupti, in Poggio’s words) left the gender of the city open to intersexual readings. Like hermaphroditic statues, this mixed-gender body demanded exploration.

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Stephanie C. Leone considers the potential meanings for elite viewers Vittoria Piccolomini, Borghese Petrucci, and Aurelia Petrucci of Luca Signorelli’s fresco Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome (c. 1509–11) in their family palace in Siena. In Chapter 4, “Luca Signorelli’s Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome and Viewers in the Palazzo Petrucci, Siena,” Leone draws on reader and viewer reception theory to postulate disparate responses to Signorelli’s rendering of this possibly legendary event in early Roman history. Leone notes that the active role played in this scene by the matron Veturia in admonishing her son Coriolanus not to attack his native city departs from ideals of women’s submissiveness in early modern Italy. For the newly married Vittoria, Leone argues, the figure of Veturia may have offered a nuanced picture of women’s agency within the elite family, and even within the public sphere. For her groom, Borghese Petrucci, the story of Coriolanus may have resonated with contemporary expectations that the marrying man tame his innate wildness and become an upstanding citizen. A generation later, for their daughter Aurelia, who garnered recognition as a poet, the painting may have celebrated the power of female speech. Timothy B. Smith discerns gender ambiguity in some Cinquecento drawings and engravings of the Belvedere Torso and in a figure dependent on this famous ancient fragment: the decapitated criminal in Sodoma’s fresco The Execution of Niccolò di Tuldo (completed 1526). Smith proposes in Chapter 5, “Queer Fragments: Sodoma, the Belvedere Torso, and Saint Catherine’s Head,” that the incomplete state of the Torso may have encouraged Renaissance receivers to see gender slippage in the statue, despite its bulging musculature. The Renaissance identification of the Torso as Hercules, Smith submits, may have sometimes called to mind the hero’s deviation from conventional male roles in his submission to Omphale (a subject also invoked, according to Edwards in Chapter 1, by Giotto’s Fortitude). Sodoma exploited this gender fluidity of the Torso, Smith argues, to downplay the masculinity of his headless Niccolò. The decapitation scene, which decorates the chapel of Saint Catherine of Siena in her hometown, invites viewers to associate Niccolò’s body with the female saint’s head relic, displayed in the same space. In this context, Smith contends, Sodoma’s fresco resonates with a letter by Catherine describing the execution in language that inverts the gender of the convict and of the saint. Maria F. Maurer examines a fresco in the Palazzo del Te by Giulio Romano and two maiolica dishes attributed to Nicola da Urbino (all 1520s) depicting the myth of Pasiphaë, the Cretan queen who commissioned a wooden cow costume from the craftsman Daedalus to consummate her love for a bull. In Chapter 6, “The Trouble with Pasiphaë: Engendering a Myth at the Gonzaga Court,” Maurer discusses the multiple possible responses to this imagery

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among the elite men and women dining with Federico II Gonzaga in his palace at Mantua. The artists, Maurer suggests, drew on a wide range of sources, among them numerous ancient literary versions of the Pasiphaë myth; more recent translations of and commentaries on these works, including the Ovide moralisé; an antique Pasiphaë sarcophagus relief in Rome; a fresco by Baldassare Peruzzi on the façade of the Villa Farnesina in Rome; and, for the wall painting, ancient images of male figures subjugating wild beasts, including a relief of Mithras and the Bull that was frequently identified by contemporaries as a Hercules scene. Like Edwards (Chapter 1) and Smith (Chapter 5), Maurer finds a likely use of ancient Hercules imagery to complicate the gender of a figure, in this case to highlight Pasiphaë’s deviation from traditional sexual roles for women. The Mantuan fresco and maiolica plates, Maurer proposes, could serve as a warning against lustfulness in women, as a source of titillation for men, and as a basis for thoughts and conversation on—perhaps even engagement in—a range of behaviors, including the exploration of various sexual roles by both men and women. April Oettinger links Lorenzo Lotto’s panel painting Venus and Cupid (Venice, late 1520s) with the trope of the fountain nymph in classicizing Renaissance texts and images. In Chapter 7, “Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water in Lorenzo Lotto’s Venus and Cupid,” Oettinger argues that the image of Cupid urinating on the nude Venus, who reclines on a blue cloth, evokes two fountains in the antiquarian romance Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499, the first fed by a sleeping female statue, the second by a puer mingens figure. Oettinger also connects Lotto’s image to the nymph lulled to sleep by trickling waters in the fifteenth-century pseudo-classical epigram Huius Nympha Loci. The Nymph of the Spring motif recurs, Oettinger argues, not only in Renaissance fountain displays but also in paintings by Italian and northern European artists that depict recumbent female figures in mythological landscapes with springs. Oettinger interprets the Nymph of the Spring and, by extension, the Venus and Cupid as allegorizing poetic inspiration: Lotto’s Venus embodies the pleasure, the voluptas, of a beholder’s encounter with art. In engaging with and reinforcing the early modern understanding of fountains and springs as feminine, the Venus and Cupid joined an array of Renaissance classical receptions that contributed to a gendered view of nature (another being the criticism of antique statues in gardens: See Bentz, Chapter 12). In Chapter 8, “The Crone, the Witch, and the Library: The Intersection of Classical Fantasy with Christian Vice during the Italian Renaissance,” Patricia Simons brings into focus the roles played by ancient witches and other fearsome female figures from antiquity in the construction of early modern stereotypes of the witch, particularly in Italian art and texts of the decades

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around 1500. The pagan world, Simons notes, was not always a font of inspiration and beauty for Renaissance artists and authors; it could also hold danger and ugliness. The art of witchcraft was “ancient in essence,” according to Giovanfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (Strix, 1523). Simons looks closely at the horrid, aged witches in Italian Renaissance paintings and prints set within classical contexts, such as the Stregozzo engraved by Agostino Veneziano in c. 1515–25, finding in these figures a mingling of attributes that in antiquity had been associated with the crone (the grotesque old woman without supernatural powers), personified Envy, the Fates, the Furies, and Medusa. Such visual and literary portrayals, Simons reminds the reader, appeared against a backdrop of actual trials and executions of accused witches, and the classical allusions helped to create a distancing effect for the viewer from these “dangerous” women. On the other hand, some witches with ancient origins could be young, lovely figures, objects of fascination and of the desiring male gaze, such as Dosso Dossi’s Circe of c. 1511–25. Hetty E. Joyce, in Chapter 9, “Picturing Rape and Revenge in Ovid’s Myth of Philomela,” traces the history of Ovidian Philomela scenes from the late Middle Ages through the end of the sixteenth century in manuscripts (including the Rouen and Arsenal copies of the Ovide moralisé discussed by Murray and Simone in Chapter 2), in printed books, and in a set of English or French Renaissance embroidered bed valances of c. 1600. Joyce analyzes the ways in which these images, usually composing cycles of two or more episodes, relate to Ovid’s version of the myth of Philomela, the Athenian princess whose brother-in-law, King Tereus of Thrace, imprisoned and raped her, then cut out her tongue. In Ovid’s telling, Philomela alerted her sister, Queen Procne, by weaving a tapestry with an encoded message; Procne liberated her, and the sisters served Tereus his dismembered son in revenge. Recent feminist scholarship focuses on Philomela’s weaving, but except for the bed hangings, Joyce points out, the late medieval and early modern images do not include this scene. The rape also appears quite late, the tongue-cutting serving in its place in earlier illustrations to convey Tereus’ brutality. On the bed valances, likely embroidered by and for a woman of high rank, the representation of Philomela’s tapestry with its secret notae for Procne may have offered its artist, patron, or both a celebration of the agency and solidarity of needleworking noble ladies. Maurer in Chapter 6 and Verstegen in Chapter 11 also consider the possibility of viewers ascribing agency to mythological women who do not adopt traditionally heroic roles: Pasiphaë at Mantua (Maurer) and Creusa in Barocci’s Aeneas’ Flight from Troy (Verstegen). Claudia Lazzaro explores the gendering of sixteenth-century personifications of Florence in art in relation to gendered Renaissance conceptions of

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the city generally in Chapter 10, “Figuring Florence: Gendered Bodies in Sixteenth-Century Personifications and their Antique Models.” At the height of its power, Lazzaro shows, Florence was presented very differently both from the dying or deceased Rome of the fourteenth to early sixteenth century (Gessert, Chapter 3) and from the armed figure of the goddess Roma in ancient Roman art, even if some aspects of the imagery, including the convention of representing cities in bodily form, bore Roman origins. Sixteenthcentury artists emphasized sexual power in female as well as male personifications of Florence: Both idealized female figures and virile male river gods, Lazzaro argues, served to characterize the city as a bountiful nurturer and impregnable military power. Artists imbued their personifications with the signature expressive torsion of Michelangelo to convey the qualities of strength and grace, as exemplified by Giambologna’s fountain statue Fiorenza (possibly c. 1560 or c. 1570). In Chapter 11, “Conjugal Piety: Creusa in Barocci’s Aeneas’ Flight from Troy,” Ian Verstegen addresses the role played by Creusa in Federico Barocci’s 1586 painting of Aeneas and his family leaving their home city, a lost work of which a copy by the artist survives. In Verstegen’s interpretation, Barocci’s painting, sent by Duke Francesco Maria II of Urbino to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, depicts Creusa accepting her divinely ordained disappearance from the family (as in Virgil’s Aeneid 2.776–89) and thereby enabling Aeneas to fulfill his destiny as founder of Rome. In the aristocratic ambit of Francesco Maria II and Rudolf II (who claimed Trojan descent), Verstegen contends, Creusa could be read as a model for sixteenth-century noble wives: They were crucially important in bonding family lines, but their husbands sometimes needed to leave them behind to create new alliances. Katherine M. Bentz parses the negative reactions to displays of ancient statuary in the gardens of wealthy collectors in Cinquecento Rome in Chapter 12, “Ancient Idols, Lascivious Statues, and Sixteenth-Century Viewers in Roman Gardens.” Bentz identifies concerns among a minority of viewers—all elite men, most Church prelates and/or reformers—that such displays violated Christian principles by glorifying the idols of pagan gods. In the wake of the Council of Trent, Bentz observes, these critics further denounced the sensuality of the classical nudes on display. The perceived eroticism of these images in their garden settings was exacerbated by, and in turn served to strengthen, contemporary associations between gardens and female sexuality. Another cause for anxiety was the accessibility of elite gardens to foreigners, common people, and women, who might interpret the displays incorrectly. Like Simons (Chapter 8), Bentz reveals an aspect of Renaissance classical reception that was shot through with fear and repugnance, partly because of the perceived

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threat of titillation. Like many of the contributors, moreover, Bentz demonstrates that receptions of ancient art in the early modern era were markedly heterogeneous—and that contemporaries recognized this diversity.

Thematic Threads

Weaving these chapters together are not only their chronological and theoretical parameters but also a number of recurring themes, themselves interrelated. Many of the contributors, for example, find manifestations of the notion that control of the body bears on the ordering of society. The images discussed here, whether ancient, late medieval, or early modern, present human bodies managed by multiple agents: by their artists and patrons; within the narrative frame, by themselves and by any figures that watch them; and, in their reception, by their owners and audience. In all of these contexts, the gaze is a crucial force in imposing norms upon the body, a paradigm articulated by Michel Foucault.73 One site for this disciplining of the body is the hair, a subject of recent theoretical work.74 The lush, well-groomed tresses of a beautiful young woman can serve as a badge of fertility: Giambologna’s hair-wringing Fiorenza, her pose derived from the ancient Venus Anadyomene image type, embodies the fecundity of Florence (Lazzaro). The long hair of witches, on the other hand, is streaming and wild, as in the Stregozzo and in Dürer’s Witch riding backwards on a goat. Evoking the flying hair of raving Bacchantes/maenads and even the tangled snakes of the Medusa, the unfettered tresses of hags signify that these old women are repugnant and unnatural in their sexual desires and in their erotic hold over young men (Simons). Personifications of conquered cities, too, can have long, disheveled locks, but here the dishabille has been imposed upon the figure. The tumbling hair of the most prominent female captive in Baccio Bandinelli’s relief for the monument to Giovanni dalle Bande Nere—a detail mentioned by Vasari—gives visual form to the poetic topos of conquest as 73 74

Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth, uk: Penguin Books, 1977). Roberta Milliken, Ambiguous Locks: An Iconology of Hair in Medieval Art and Literature (Jefferson, nc: McFarland, 2012); Geraldine Biddle-Perry and Sarah Cheang, eds., Hair: Styling, Culture and Fashion (Oxford: Berg, 2008); Elizabeth Bartman, “Hair and the Artifice of Roman Female Adornment,” American Journal of Archaeology 105 (2001): 1–25. A fundamental early study is C.R. Hallpike, “Social Hair,” Man 4 (1969): 256–64. Some of these themes will be presented in the forthcoming October–December 2015 exhibition Hair in the Classical World, Bellarmine Museum of Art, Fairfield University.

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sexual domination (Lazzaro). Other hairstyling conventions convey the moral rectitude of potentially problematic female figures. Signorelli’s Veturia makes the adlocutio gesture of ancient male orators and possesses a level of persuasive power generally associated in early modern thought with men rather than women, but she is veiled as a properly modest Roman matron (Leone). In the bed valances depicting the myth of Philomela, Queen Procne and her companions are bona fide Bacchantes with thyrsi, but their hair is meticulously pinned up; together with their impeccably elegant attire, the figures’ well-tended, of-the-moment coiffures suggest that the mission to liberate Philomela is worthy of the most noble of women, even contemporary ones (Joyce). Clothing is, of course, another powerful means of expressing conformance with or departure from societal gender roles. Cross-dressing a figure in garb conventionally associated with the opposite sex does not always cast him or her in a negative light, however. Giotto’s Fortitude at the Arena Chapel is a woman with breastplate, lion skin, mace, and battleworn full-body shield who nonetheless embodies a Virtue. In Edwards’s reading, furthermore, this figure represents the absolution of Hercules by Omphale and of Enrico Scrovegni by the Virgin Mary. The ancient fragment of a statue group in Rome known as the Pasquino, to which thousands of Latin verses satirizing contemporary politics and pedagogy were affixed from the end of the fifteenth century onward, could be costumed on the feast day of St. Mark as either a male or a female pagan deity or personification to invite the composition of poetry on related themes (Smith). The reception of ancient art requires any culture to engage with the use of nudity in signifying the individual’s relationship to gendered social ideals.75 For Kenneth Clark, the embrace of the beautiful classical nude was a defining aspect of the Renaissance.76 This volume demonstrates, though, that antique nude statues, and nude figures adapted from ancient imagery and literature in early modern art, interacted in complex and diverse ways with contemporary gender norms. Certainly, the alluring nudity of Venus, and of some other female mythological figures and personifications, could serve to glorify the patriarchally defined roles of women as erotic objects of the male gaze and, in some cases, as the muses of male artists and authors. The reclining nude goddess in Lorenzo Lotto’s Venus and Cupid likely plays both parts (Oettinger). On the other hand, the nude Pasiphaë copulating with the bull on one of the maiolica dishes from Mantua is not classically idealized: She has the pro75 76

Michael Squire, The Art of the Body: Antiquity and Its Legacy (London: Tauris, 2011), esp. 69–153. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Pantheon, 1956).

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nounced musculature of a man, a visual cue that her act is unnatural. When the plate was viewed at banquets, Federico II Gonzaga and the men of his court may well have enjoyed a laugh at Pasiphaë’s expense, but female guests may have appreciated Pasiphaë’s sexual agency (Maurer). The naked bodies of old witches, with their sagging, dried-up breasts, represent repellent inversions of the classical ideal, but they nevertheless form part of the vocabulary of “Renaissance” art, which, pace Clark, does not merely elevate the beautiful (Simons). Not all witches are hideous, either: Dosso Dossi’s Circe is a highly idealized nude with long, soft, goldspun tresses. She offers viewers a metaphor, Simons argues, for the enchanting nature of artistry. Early modern artists studying ancient male nude statues perceived a range of physical types, from the powerful to the feminized—sometimes even in the same work of art. As Smith shows, sixteenth-century drawings of the Belvedere Torso demonstrate the fluidity of gender in receptions of this famous sculptural fragment. In the pen-and-ink sketch by Amico Aspertini that appears on this volume’s cover, for example, the angled view of the Torso conceals its genitalia and lends a feminine curve to the breast. Sodoma’s adaptation of this model for the figure of Niccolò di Tuldo, Smith contends, allows the beholder to map onto the decapitated body the full range of male and female metaphors employed by St. Catherine to characterize Niccolò in her letter about his execution. This combination of male and female physical qualities also permits the viewer to reconstruct the figure in the mind’s eye with Catherine’s own head, a relic housed in the same space, and thus to recast Niccolò’s death as the saint’s wished-for martyrdom. Renaissance audiences also received some classical nude statues as fully intersexual, including not only sculptures originally carved as hermaphrodites but also two ancient Apollos in the Sassi collection. The display of the Apollo statues in the Sassi palace courtyard and their repeated copying by artists, as well Lorenzo Ghiberti’s effusive praise of a hermaphroditic statue, testify to the high status of these images (Gessert). Both Smith and Gessert thus support and expand upon Leonard Barkan’s thesis that early modern audiences did not automatically perceive the gender of ancient sculptures in fixed, binary terms.77 For some sixteenth-century viewers, however, any nude antique statuary was problematic. A minority of conservative clerics and other elite male critics objected to ancient works of art not only because of their believed connection to pagan idolatry but also because they could possess great erotic power (Bentz). The display of nude statues in gardens was especially troublesome, 77 Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 164–84.

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Bentz notes, since the lush natural setting, gendered female in Renaissance thought, amplified their sensuousness. The “Renaissance” admiration of the classical nude was not universal. Pose and gesture are also crucial to gendered expectations of, and performances by, the body. In Barocci’s Aeneas’ Flight from Troy, Creusa’s lowered head, deep bow, and outstretched hand convey the same resignation as the downcast gaze and open hand of Barocci’s dutiful Annunciate Virgin (Verstegen). Like Mary expressing her submission to the will of God, Creusa signals her acceptance of the destiny that will propel Aeneas and his line to greatness without her. She thus embodies the ideal of a pious wife in an early modern dynastic marriage, Verstegen contends. Alternatively, pose can mark a figure as a negative exemplar: The figure of Pasiphaë entering the cow costume in Giulio Romano’s fresco assumes the ancient bent-knee pose of the male hero wrangling a beast. The appropriation of this iconography characterizes Pasiphaë as transgressing the natural order, although the painting, like the maiolica dishes probably used in the same room of the Palazzo del Te, may have elicited differing reactions between its male and female viewers (Maurer). The oratorical gesture of Veturia in Signorelli’s fresco is the force that controls the encounter of the Roman matrons with Coriolanus and his armed companions. Because Veturia’s act of persuasion put her at odds with contemporary ideals of female passivity, her status as model of motherly virtue was not always secure in the receiving literature, but Vittoria Piccolomini and Aurelia Petrucci may well have viewed Signorelli’s speaking figure positively (Leone). Other poses identified as masculine could be acceptable and even desirable in female personifications, as Michelangelo’s Night in the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo assured later Florentine sculptors. The Florence of Giambologna’s Florence Triumphant over Pisa, a classical nude with artfully styled hair, twists her body to subjugate the kneeling male Pisa, recasting this conquest as an amorous one, but nonetheless glorifying the military might of the victorious city (Lazzaro). Another recurring theme in these essays is the violation of the body and its meanings within classical reception in late medieval and early modern visual contexts. The act today known as rape, namely the forcing of an unwilling partner into sexual intercourse, is one such violation, although it was not always viewed as such in the periods under discussion here.78 As Diane Wolfthal points out, fourteenth- to seventeenth-century images that depict ancient 78

On the dependence upon cultural context of definitions of sexual violence, see Mieke Bal, “Scared to Death,” in The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis, ed. Bal and Inge E. Boer (New York: Continuum, 1994), 37–8.

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gods or heroes committing sexual violence often employ formal and narrative means to lionize the perpetrators as “heroic,” or at least to downplay the negative impact of their acts. Some modern art historians, Wolfthal observes, perpetuate the notion of the “heroic” rape by using terms for these subjects that do not connote sexual violence, such as “abduction,” and by lauding the genius of the (male) artist.79 Euphemisms for rape occur in the present volume as well, but in the context of deconstructing images that celebrate men’s metaphorical or actual sexual subjugations of women. The triumphal relief by Baccio Bandinelli of Giovanni dalle Bande Nere receiving prisoners, Lazzaro shows, is this type of scene: It assimilates victory to rape not only through the disarray of the main female captive’s hair, as noted above, but also through the pose of the soldier who restrains her, jutting a knee between her legs. Here, as in “heroic” scenes with explicitly mythological or legendary subject matter, the borrowings from antiquity—in this case, among other things, the dependence on Roman mythological rape scenes, such as Hades sweeping Persephone onto his chariot—help to normalize the equation of glorious victory with unwanted sex (Lazzaro). The case studies by Murray/Simone and Joyce of two different mythological rapes in the fourteenth-century Rouen and Paris Arsenal manuscripts of the Ovide moralisé together illustrate how widely attitudes towards victims could vary within a single receiving context. Murray and Simone follow Rachel Jacoff in seeing two characterizations of Europa’s rape by Jupiter as a bull in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the first looking ahead toward Europa’s triumphs (Book 2), the second expressing more sympathy for the fearful girl (Book 6); in both versions, they argue, Europa occupies a space partway between the mortal and the divine. The Ovide moralisé also renders her liminal, Murray and Simone maintain, situating her as a link between paganism and Christianity. In Rouen MS 0.4 and Paris MS 5069, the pairing of the Europa miniature with images of Christ on the road to Calvary or of the Ascension emphasize the allegorical interpretation of Europa as the soul ravished by Christ. The miniatures rely on the Greek and Roman iconography of Europa riding on the bull’s back, the integrity of her fully clothed body still intact. By contrast, the paintings of Philomela in the same manuscripts vividly convey the violation of her body, even though they do not show the rape: They depict Tereus approaching Philomela from behind—a sign that she is not complicit—and pulling out her tongue to slice it off. Here and in later printed book illustrations, Joyce argues, the tongue-cutting replaces the rape to underscore the savagery of Tereus’ 79

Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The “Heroic” Tradition and Its Alternatives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 7–35.

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crime. Unlike the allegorizing commentary in the text, the pictorial cycles present Philomela’s rape as a heinous act, and they include a scene of the sisters’ righteous revenge. Another kind of violated body, the decomposed or dismembered corpse, is a metaphor for the city of Rome in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian humanistic texts, evoking the ravages effected by time on the great ancient city (Gessert). The disintegration of this body has rendered even its gender uncertain. This very ambiguity, however, excites a desire to investigate, to discover more, to complete the picture—the same kinds of desires, Gessert observes, that were directed toward ancient sculptures identified as hermaphrodites. The same analogy perhaps applies to the reception of antique statue fragments: Like the gigantei cadaveris corrupti of Rome, these sculpted bodies despoiled by time held the intriguing potential for reanimation through restoration, copying, adaptation, and viewing.80 Even when their sexual characteristics survive, fragmentary statues seem to have been particularly ripe for re-gendering, as Smith’s analysis of the Belvedere Torso and Sodoma’s figure of Niccolò di Tuldo makes clear. In summary, then, this collection of essays treats some of the artists, patrons, collectors, critics, and viewers of the thirteenth to sixteenth century in Europe who grappled with the manifold mass of ancient works of art, iconographic motifs, texts, and other survivals and discoveries to produce an array of often patriarchal but sometimes alternative or even subversive constructions of gender. The cultural agents under discussion here, most of them male but some of them female, drew upon the widely upheld authority of antiquity to engage with gender roles in their own society, some normative, others less so: women as sex objects, desirable brides, fecund procreators, submissive wives, persuasive mothers, grotesque witches, beautiful witches, inspiring muses, sexual aggressors, rape victims, saints, savers of men’s souls, brides of Christ; men as heads of state, heads of families, good husbands, bad husbands, victors in battle, sexual conquerors, rapists, sinners needing expiation, brides of Christ; those of dual sexuality as objects of fascination; and many more. The reception of antiquity in late medieval and early modern art, these essays reveal, interacted in a myriad of ways with the understandings and lived experiences of gender in these periods.

80 Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 1999, 119–207, but without connecting the reception of fragments to the topos of Rome as corpse. Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994), sees kinship between dismembered bodies and ancient sculptural fragments, although her focus is on the French Revolution to the postmodern era.

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chapter 1

Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel: Giotto’s Virtue Fortitude Re-examined Mary D. Edwards The Arena Chapel in Padua, commissioned by the Paduan moneylender Enrico Scrovegni in the first decade of the fourteenth century, has often been characterized as a project intended to expiate the Scrovegni family sin of usury. This chapter will explore Enrico’s remorse for his self-described male ablata (illgotten gains) from a new perspective. More specifically, it will focus on Giotto’s personification of the virtue Fortitude in the dado on the right wall of the chapel, offering a new identification and reading of this classically informed figure.

Enrico Scrovegni and His Project

Enrico Scrovegni, his father Reginaldo, and other family members were guilty of usury.1 Indeed, Enrico’s father’s crime was so infamous that in the Divine

I would like to thank the following librarians at Columbia University for assisting me in conducting research for this essay: Sarah Witte, Robert Scott, and Kitty Chibnik. Two clerks in Avery Library, Richard Walters and Ian Valentine, were helpful on many occasions. Thanks to Aaron Heinrich for translating a passage from the Chiliades by Tzetzes and to James Coulter and Emil Polak for advice. Special gratitude goes to Alison Poe and Marice Rose for organizing the session at the 2013 meeting of the College Art Association on the theme of this book and then carrying the project through to its conclusion. A short version of this paper was read at the Thirty-eighth Conference on Patristic, Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania, October 19, 2013. The images included here were made possible by an award made in 2014 by the Pratt Institute Faculty Development Fund. In its present form, this essay is dedicated to Richard H. Rouse, Nancy Siraisi, William P. Sisler, Philip A. Stadter, and R.G. Witt, whose footsteps I benefit from, appreciate and admire. 1 For a thorough discussion of the monetary culpability of the Scrovegni family and Enrico’s probable desire for expiation through the commission of the chapel, see Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona, The Usurer’s Heart: Giotto, Enrico Scrovegni, and the Arena Chapel in Padua (University Park, pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 23–6 and 31–6. For a recent argument against Enrico having commissioned the chapel out of a desire for expiation for his and his family’s crimes of usury, see Laura Jacobus, Giotto and the Arena Chapel: Art, Architecture and Experience (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2008), especially 192–7.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004289697_003

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Comedy Dante consigns Reginaldo to one of the warmer parts of hell: the inner ring of the Seventh Circle, the province of usurers (Inferno 17.64–70).2 Giovanni da Nono (c. 1275–1346) reports in his Liber de generatione aliquorum civium urbis Padue that Reginaldo “ex usuris fecit vallorem quingentarum millium [sic] librarum” (made five hundred thousand lire through usury).3 The Chronica Patavina, written between 1315 and 1335, states not only that Reginaldo “foenoribus infinitis est functus” (occupied himself with infinite usuries) but also that Enrico “videlicet Miles arte paterna usus fuit” (evidently a knight, adopted the profession of his father).4 In his will of 1336, Enrico himself makes reference to his male ablata as well as to those of his father, grandfather, brother, and nephew, stipulating that the gains “ought to be restored and paid with any expenses incurred at the time, to all petitioners without any lawsuit, controversy, trial, condition, or pact.”5 In this period canon law considered even inheriting such monies to be a damnable offense.6 The Chronica Patavina offers a possible instance of Enrico paying for expiation: Prompted by regret, Enrico traveled to Rome to confess to Pope Benedict XI, whom he had hosted often in Padua when the pontiff had been bishop of Treviso. The chronicle then implies that Enrico gained absolution “per pecuniam” (with money).7 2 Dante does not identify Reginaldo by name, but a figure in the Seventh Circle carries the Scrovegni family emblem on his purse (a blue pregnant sow against a field of gold) and calls himself a Paduan. See The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. John D. Sinclair (1961; repr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 216–9, for both the Italian and the English. 3 On this passage, see Jacobus, Arena Chapel, Appendix 13, 377–8. In the same passage, da Nono writes that Reginaldo was called Sow Vulva and that he sang “coarse songs” at night in Padua. 4 On these excerpts from the chronicle, see Derbes and Sandona, Usurer’s Heart, 33; for the Latin and for the translation for Reginaldo, 169, n. 115, and for Enrico 169, n. 117. See also Jacobus, Arena Chapel, Appendix  14, 379–81, who refers to the chronicle as the PseudoFavasochi, after the surname of the father and son authors believed by some scholars to have written the text. 5 For the excerpts from the will, see Benjamin G. Kohl, “The Scrovegni in Carrara Padua and Enrico’s Will,” Apollo 142 (1995): 45. See also Derbes and Sandona, Usurer’s Heart, 35–6. 6 For a laude by Jacopone da Todi urging the renunciation of the “maltolletto” one may inherit, see Derbes and Sandona, Usurer’s Heart, 36 and 171, n. 137. On ill-gotten gains in the Middle Ages generally, and on the need to repay such gains when inherited, see Derbes and Sandona, 59–61 (citing Gratian’s Decretum 1.47.8 on usury, 60), and Jacques Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 21–3 and 43. Biblical verses on usury: Lev 25:35–7; Ps 15:5; Lk 6:35. 7 See Jacobus, Arena Chapel, Appendix 14, 381, and Derbes and Sandona, Usurer’s Heart, 32–5. Sources refer to other negative aspects of Enrico’s personality as well: Da Nono writes in his Liber de generatione that Enrico was a “hypocrite” because he joined the confraternity at the

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The endowment document for the Arena Chapel of January 1, 1317 may suggest that Enrico likewise commissioned the chapel as expiation for financial misdeeds. Referring to the chapel as S.M. della Carità, a passage states that Enrico built it “in honorem … virginis et … Jesu Christi … civitatis et Communis Paduae et anime sue suorumque predecessorum remedium et salutem dote destitui” (in honour [of the] … Virgin … and Jesus Christ … [and of] the city and commune of Padua, as an aid to salvation for his own soul and that of his predecessors).8 A now-lost inscription over Enrico’s tomb, recorded in the mid-sixteenth century by Bernardino Scardeone, also indicated that Enrico’s project was motivated by a desire to spare himself damnation in the afterlife: DE SCROVEGNIS HENRICUS MILES HONESTUM CONSERVANS ANIMUM FACIT HIC VENERABILE FESTUM. NAMQUE DEI MATRI TEMPLUM SOLEMNE DICARI FECIT UT AETERNA POSSIT MERCEDE BEARI Enrico Scrovegni, knight, saving his honest soul here celebrates the venerable feast day. For he caused this temple to be dedicated to the Mother of God, so that he would be blessed with eternal grace.9 According to the document of sale, on February 6, 1300 Scrovegni bought the land for the chapel, on which stood several buildings and the remains of a Roman amphitheater (hence the term “Arena”).10 The chapel was dedicated in March of 1303, in what James Stubblebine has interpreted as a “groundbreaking ceremony.”11 The chapel was consecrated at some point after March 16, 1305, when Enrico requested “pannis” (probably wall hangings or tapestries) from San Marco in Venice as he “intendat facere consecrari quodam suam

8 9

10 11

Arena Chapel itself for one year and then renounced it. Da Nono continues as follows: “[Enrico] tried to deceive whomsoever was connected with him …, [including Pope Benedict XI, and when Enrico sought success in a] business deal in the Paduan Grand Council … he would start to weep a little bit and dab his eyes so that he would be able to get his way.” See Jacobus, Arena Chapel, Appendix 13, 378. Text and translation in Jacobus, Arena Chapel, Appendix 10, 368. Bernardino Scardeone, De antiquitate urbis Patavii, et claris civibus Patavinis (Basel: Episcopius, 1560), 332–3. See Jacobus, Arena Chapel, Appendix  16, 384–5. No doubt Scardeone’s uppercase transcription imitates the lettering on the lost plaque. See Jacobus, Arena Chapel, Appendix 4, 350–3 for the copy of the February 6, 1300 document of the sale (from one Manfredo Dalesman), which was made on September 4, 1320. See James H. Stubblebine, ed., Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes (New York: Norton, 1969), 110. Stubblebine suggests that the ceremony of 1303 took place on the Feast of the Annunciation.

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capellam Paduae” (intend[ed] to have his chapel at Padua consecrated at some time).12 Some speculate that the consecration ceremony occurred nine days later, March 25, on the Feast of the Annunciation.13 For certain it took place no later than August 8, 1307, when the chapel fell under a priest’s jurisdiction, and by which time the interior painted decoration was probably complete— indeed, the frescoes are traditionally dated 1305–6. As for the authorship of the paintings, two early documents not only attribute them to Giotto but also indicate that the chapel’s name was already associated with the amphitheater: Francesco da Barberino wrote in his Documenti d’Amore (c. 1308–12) that “Giotto painted [Envy] excellently in the Arena at Padua” (invidia … Padue in Arena optime pinsit Giottus).14 Between 1312 and 1318, the chronicler Riccobaldo Ferrarese recorded that the Florentine painter Giotto had created works “in the church of the Arena in Padua” (in ecclesia arene Padue).15 There is not complete agreement as to who the programmer for the frescoes was. To my mind, the most likely candidate is the jurist Altegrado Cattaneo di Lendinara. As other scholars note, this extremely intelligent individual taught canon law at Bologna in 1289 and at Padua from 1290 to 1299; he was archpriest of the cathedral of Padua from 1301 to 1304; and, in addition, he was the chaplain of Pope Bonifazio VIII and a papal notary under Benedict XI. Moreover, he was a guest of Enrico on many occasions, and would even be given refuge by Enrico when Altegrado fled from Vicenza upon its breaking free from Padua in 1311. He thus possessed the education and intellect required of a programmer of such an ambitious pictorial scheme and was personally close to the patron, in my view making him the most plausible candidate.16 12

For the text and translation, see Jacobus, Arena Chapel, Appendix 8, 359, where she renders pannis as “textiles.” See Stubblebine, Giotto, 107–8 for the suggestion that pannis refers to wall hangings or tapestries. Jacobus suggests that the term might refer to “hangings, cloths, or vestments” in her earlier article, “Giotto’s Annunciation in the Arena Chapel, Padua,” Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 106, n. 5. 13 See Jacobus, “Giotto’s Annunciation,” 106, n. 5. See Stubblebine, Giotto, 73 for the dating, which is similar to that found in most recent literature on the chapel. 14 Stubblebine, Giotto, 109 for the text and translation. 15 Ibid., 110. 16 See Derbes and Sandona, Usurer’s Heart, 24–5, and 164, n. 63, who build their arguments on Claudio Bellinati’s work, in particular “Iconografia, iconologia e iconica nell’arte nuova di Giotto alla Cappella Scrovegni dell’Arena di Padova,” Padova e il suo territorio 4 (1989): 16–21. For the argument that the programmer was Ubertino da Casale, see Hans Thomas, “Die Frage nach Giottos Berater in Padua,” Bollettino del Museo Civico di Padova 63 (1974): 61–101; for the suggestion that he might have been the Dominican Giovannino da Mantova, see Emma Simi Varanelli, Giotto e Tommaso: I fondamenti dell’estetica tomista e la ‘renovatio’ delle arti nel Duecento italiano (Rome: Atena, 1988), as cited by Derbes and

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Giotto’s frescoes fill the space between the entrance and the chancel arch of the chapel. The program includes a Last Judgment on the entry wall and three registers of narrative scenes on the chancel arch and side walls: a Marian cycle in the uppermost zone, and a Christological cycle in the two registers below. Beneath the narrative frescoes is a trompe l’oeil dado featuring seven personified Virtues and Vices that confront each other across the nave. These figures are monochromatic and presumably intended to be taken for sculpted images set into shallow niches; trompe l’oeil panels of marble separate the fictive niches from one another. Nearly all of these personifications are accompanied by tituli (above) and captions in verse (below), all in Latin. Despite the loss of bits of text from these inscriptions, most are complete enough to be understood. As for their author, however, he lacked a “high level of understanding of the imagery” and most likely did not converse with Giotto before devising them; in fact, he may have painted them after Giotto had returned to Florence.17 Nonetheless, to a certain extent they reflect the local understanding of the images in fourteenth-century Padua. A scene within the Christological cycle depicts Jesus driving the merchants from the Temple (Fig. 1.1). This subject is rare in the late medieval period in Italy, perhaps because it portrays Jesus acting with violence.18 The scene may visually express qualms that the patron felt over his family’s profession; in particular, the presence of an upside-down table at the feet of Jesus of the type used in both money changing and money lending has led some scholars to believe that it alludes to the means by which the Scrovegni amassed their wealth.19 But I believe that Enrico was remorseful about not just the family’s usury but also his own, and sought to refer openly to the source of the Scrovegni Sandona, Usurer’s Heart, 164, no. 64. For the proposal of an Augustinian canon, see Irene Hueck, “Enrico Scrovegnis Veranderung der Arenakapelle,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthisto­ risches Institutes in Florenz 17 (1973): 277–94. 17 See Jacobus, Arena Chapel, Appendix 9, 360 on the inscriptions. 18 No one else composed an image of the Expulsion in the Trecento: Leonetto Tintori and Millard Meiss, “Observations on the Arena Chapel,” in Stubblebine, Giotto, 209–10; Derbes and Sandona, Usurer’s Heart, 52. 19 In his lectures at Columbia University in the 1970s, the late Howard McP. Davis commented on the possibility that inclusion of the Expulsion was deliberately intended to refer to the practice of usury on the part of the Scrovegni. Davis also suggested that the money bags in the Last Judgment and at the feet of the personification of Charity who stomps on them carried the identical significance. The classic discussion on the matter is that by Ursula Schlegel, “On the Picture Program of the Arena Chapel,” in Stubblebine, Giotto, 182–202. Tintori and Meiss, “Observations on the Arena Chapel,” 209–10, discuss the same references to usury. Derbes and Sandona, Usurer’s Heart, 52–4, 106, and 111–3 write at length on the Expulsion and its association with the Scrovegni sin of usury.

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Figure 1.1  Giotto di Bondone, Christ Driving the Moneylenders out of the Temple, c. 1305–6. Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy (Alinari/Art Resource, ny)

fortune in order to further his chances for good fortune of another kind in the afterlife. I further believe that the personification of the virtue Fortitude on the right wall of the dado (Fig.  1.2) should be considered within the context of Enrico Scrovegni’s hopes for expiation.

Giotto’s Fortitude

Giotto’s figure of Fortitude bears a four-edged mace and stands behind a shield emblazoned with a rampant lion. The shield has obviously witnessed combat, as fragments of weapons are embedded in it. The figure wears a long-sleeved, floor-length gown underneath not only a Roman cuirass but also a lion-skin cape of the type associated with the Greco-Roman mythic hero Hercules. In the arrangement of the cape, the image adheres to a widespread ancient iconographic type of Hercules: The former face of the flayed lion fits snugly on the figure’s head, and the paws are tied at the neck and waist, as seen on an

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Figure 1.2  Giotto di Bondone, Personification of Fortitude, c. 1305–6. Scrovegni Chapel (Scala/Art Resource, ny)

imperial Roman statue (Fig. 1.3).20 But as the painted figure’s small hand, the soft flesh of the face, and the absence of an Adam’s apple make clear, Giotto’s 20

See Carlos A. Picón et al., Art of the Classical World in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007), 387, 494. The type originated in Greece in the fourth century bce.

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Figure 1.3  Bearded Hercules, Roman copy of a Greek original, c. 68–98 ce. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (© The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

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figure is not male; it is female. On account of the combination of her gender, cape, breast plate, weapon, shield, and gown, she is a highly original interpretation of the virtue Fortitude in Italian art. The caption beneath Giotto’s figure even mentions some of her attributes: Cuncta sternit fortitudo…superando … Et armata clavam gerens, prava quoque deprimit. En occidit vi leonem eius pelle tegitur. Omnem superat agonem et in nullo frangitur. Fortitude casts down everything…overcoming…And armed, carrying a mace, she also comes down on depravity. Behold, she has killed a lion by force [and] wears its skin. She wins in every contest and is subdued by none.21 Until now, scholars have fallen into two camps in interpreting the significance of the lion-skin cape of Giotto’s Virtue: Some believe that he meant it to allude to Hercules himself; others suggest that he intended it to evoke Juno Sospita, whom ancient artists depicted wearing a goat hide in the same way that Hercules wore his cape. This essay argues that while Giotto may well have intended such references, he primarily had in mind an altogether different figure from classical culture, one that eliminates some of the problems inherent in the other two interpretations. In her 1966 dissertation on Giotto’s Virtues and Vices, Selma Pfeiffenberger links Giotto’s Fortitude to two Italian carvings: Nicola Pisano’s Hercules/ Fortitude of 1260 on the pulpit in the Baptistery at Pisa, a male nude who wears a lion-skin cape across his arm, carries a cub on his shoulder, and pushes against an adult female lion with his left hand; and Giovanni Pisano’s Fortitude below the pulpit in Pisa Cathedral, completed in 1310, a female figure in a gown who holds an inverted lion by its hind leg.22 Pfeiffenberger also considers the figure on the opposite wall that confronts Giotto’s Fortitude—the Vice Inconstancy, who slips backwards as she spins on a wheel, her pose, drapery, and attribute rendering her unique in Italian art (Fig. 1.4). She notes that the pairing of these two personifications has no known precedent, for the

21 22

See Jacobus, Arena Chapel, Appendix 9, 361 for the caption and the translation by Joseph Spooner. See Selma Pfeiffenberger, “The Iconology of Giotto’s Virtues and Vices at Padua” (PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1966), Ch. V:11.

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Figure 1.4  Giotto di Bondone. Personification of Inconstancy, c. 1305–6. Scrovegni Chapel (Alfredo Dagli Orti/Art Resource, ny)

Edwards

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traditional pendant to Fortitude is Cowardice.23 Pfeiffenberger contends that Giotto’s Fortitude and Inconstancy “oppose one another not merely as the subjects named by their tituli, but as famous ancient antagonists from pagan antiquity, Hercules and Fortuna,” the latter identified with Inconstancy by the motif of the wheel. She argues that the weapon-studded shield of Giotto’s figure refers to lines of Ovid: “I am pierced by the unjust shafts of Fortune” (Ex Ponto 2.7.15).24 Since illustrated codices of the Psychomachia by Prudentius depict weapons flying toward the shield of the cuirassed personification of Patience (Fig. 1.5), Pfeiffenberger reasons that Giotto may have derived inspiration from an illustration of this type.25 Pfeiffenberger’s interpretation is not completely satisfying for several reasons. Nicola Pisano’s Hercules/Fortitude is male and nude, not female and clothed in a dress, while Giovanni Pisano’s figure, though female and gowned, wears no lion skin. Moreover, neither carved figure wields a mace or stands behind a shield. The link between the Pisani figures and Giotto’s personification is therefore tenuous at best. In the Ex Ponto, Ovid indicates that the speaker’s body—not a shield—receives the “shafts.” Finally, the illustration from Prudentius portrays a male Patience, not a female Fortitude (nor a male Hercules), with missiles hurtling toward his shield, not embedded within it. Alastair Smart maintains that Giotto’s “ultimate source” for the lion skin motif was an ancient image of Hercules, and that an image of Juno Sospita helped him adapt the hide to the female form.26 In their 2008 monograph on the Arena Chapel, Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona also suggest that Juno

23

24 25

26

According to James Paxson, “Personification’s Gender,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 16, no. 2 (1998): 149–79, Virtues are typically female in medieval art. However, the figure of Fortitude, sometime called Courage, on the façade of Amiens Cathedral is male and holds a shield decorated with a lion-emblazoned shield; see http://www .medievalart.org.uk/Amiens/West_Facade/VirtuesAndVices/AmiensWest _Quatrefoil_02U_Courage.html. Patience, described below, also is male. See Pfeiffenberger, “The Iconology,” Ch. V:9 and Ch. V:11, for the unprecedented pairing of Fortitude and Inconstancy, which she calls unique, and Ch. V:12 on Roman literature treating Fortuna and Hercules. “Sic ego Fortunae telis confixus iniquis.” Pfeiffenberger, Iconology, Ch. V:13. Ibid., 13; Richard Stettiner, Die illustrierten Prudentiushandschriften (Berlin: Druck von J.S. Preuss, 1895), 70–102, and Stettiner, Die illustrierten Prudentiushandschriften—Tafelband (Berlin: Grote, 1905), Plate 143. For a color image, see http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/ bbb/0264/77/medium. See Alastair Smart, The Assisi Problem and the Art of Giotto: A Study of the Legend of St. Francis in the Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 97.

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Figure 1.5  Personification of Patience under attack, from the Psychomachia of Prudentius, c. 900. codex 264, fol.39r, Burgerbibliothek, Bern (Richard Stettiner, Die illustrierten Prudentiushandschriften [Berlin: Grote, 1905], Plate 143)

Sospita was a source for Giotto’s Fortitude.27 All three scholars cite a statue currently in the Vatican (Fig. 1.6) that depicts Juno Sospita with a goat-skin cape worn belted over a short-sleeved chiton, with the goat’s head worn over the goddess’s head, the hooved forelegs knotted at the collarbone, and the rear legs hanging down at her sides. She once held a spear in her raised right hand and a shield on her left forearm. Within their discussion of the chapel’s fertilityrelated motifs, Derbes and Sandona argue that the goat skin links Juno Sospita to Juno Februata (from februum, or goatskin), the protector of women in childbirth, and that the similarity of Giotto’s Fortitude to this figure “would have been pertinent to the chapel, given its emphasis both on fertility and on penitence.”28 Fortitude’s pelt is not a goat’s, however, but a lion’s; and the only lion-skin cape in ancient myth is that from Nemea. If Giotto had sought to refer to Juno Sospita/Februata for any reason, surely he would have covered his Fortitude—or another figure—with a goat skin. 27 28

Derbes and Sandona, Usurer’s Heart, 100–1, and the following note. Ibid., 194–5, n. 61. For Juno Sospita and Juno Februata, they cite Robert Turcan, The Gods of Ancient Rome: Religion in Everyday Life from Archaic to Imperial Times (Edinburgh: University Press, 2000), 35 and 63.

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Figure 1.6  Juno Sospita, 2nd century ce. Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican Museums, Vatican State (© Vanni Archive/Art Resource, ny)

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The differences in iconography between Giotto’s figure and ancient images of both Hercules and Juno Sospita demand another consideration of the classical resonances in the fresco and the significance of his Fortitude. I would like to suggest here that Giotto makes deliberate reference in his personification to Omphale, the mythic Lydian queen with whom Hercules stayed for a short time—a woman who actually wore a lion skin, that of Hercules.

Hercules and Omphale in Myth

The story of Hercules and Omphale is scattered throughout ancient and early medieval literature, written in both Greek and Latin (See Appendix 2). Most references to the tale are only a sentence or two in length. Few accounts are long enough to provide a true narrative. Complicating matters, the longer versions differ from one another both in the focus of the story and in many key details. The sequence of events, moreover, is not always consistent from one account to the next. Therefore, only those parts of the story that are related to this paper will be considered here. These pertain to the madness of Hercules, the murders he committed, and the command that Hercules become Omphale’s slave, leading to Hercules’ and Omphale’s cross-dressing and/or gender role changing between Hercules and Omphale. In examining these passages, we will see that attitudes toward the relationship between Hercules and Omphale in the different texts vary enormously—in general, and in particular with regard to their cross-dressing and exchange of attributes. The madness of Hercules refers to the temporary insanity visited upon the hero by Juno that causes Hercules to murder his first wife, Megara, and/or their children, which in some versions leads to his enslavement by Omphale. The fullest account of this madness is provided by Seneca in his tragedy Hercules Furens. Here the gory details of the slaughter by the hero, who thinks Megara and his children are the widow and offspring of his slain enemy, Lycus, are revealed in dialogue form (lines 987–1013).29 When Hercules comes to his senses and sees that he has killed his own family, he fleetingly believes that he must erect a funeral pyre and immolate himself, given the horrific nature of the deeds (1216–8).30 He bemoans the fact that he cannot hide anywhere as he is so well known, after which his kinsman Theseus says he should come to his

29 30

For the Latin and English, see Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Seneca’s Tragedies, trans. Frank Justus Miller, vol. 2 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1968), 86–91. Ibid., 106–7.

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land (1322–41).31 In this version, there is no enslavement, but as is discussed in more detail below, there is reference to Hercules’ cross-dressing after his madness. In Hyginus’ version in his Fabulae, he succinctly states that after Hercules kills Lycus, Juno makes him mad, and he murders Megara and their two sons (32). When he realizes what he has done, Hercules asks Apollo to wash away the sin. Apollo denies the request, and an angry Hercules steals the god’s tripod, whereupon Jupiter demands that Hercules return the ritual object. Apollo then asks Mercury to give Hercules to Omphale as a slave.32 In some accounts, Hercules’ murder of Iphitus, son of King Eurytus, is the reason for his enslavement. Pseudo-Apollodorus in the Bibliotheca recounts that though Juno drives the hero mad and he throws his children into a fire before the Labors, he is later purified (2.4.12). After the Labors, Hercules gives Megara away but then kills Iphitus in a second burst of madness; once again he is purified, only to contract a disease because of that murder. Hoping to rid himself of the disease, he steals the tripod. Zeus then decrees he will be cured only after he is sold as a slave to Omphale with the purchase price given as compensation to the father of Iphitus (2.6.1–2). Diodorus Siculus in Bibliotheca historica relates that the madness of Hercules caused by Juno results in the murder of his children but not of Megara (4.11.1–2). He does not attribute the murder of Iphitus to madness, however, and though the crime is followed by disease, Hercules does not steal the tripod. Apollo promises a cure if Hercules is sold to Omphale, with the sum going to the heirs of Iphitus (4.31.3–5). A number of writers tell of cross-dressing and/or the exchange of roles between Hercules and Omphale after Hercules’ arrival in Lydia. Some judge Hercules negatively as being effeminate or weak compared to Omphale; Ovid in the Heroides (9.47–136) highlights the role-reversing and cross-dressing in a monologue delivered to Hercules by Deianira, his second wife. Deianira relates that according to hearsay, Omphale carries the hero’s club and arrows and covers herself with his lion skin, while Hercules himself holds a wool basket among girls and wears jewelry, a Sidonian gown, and a woman’s turban. In a climactic insult, Deianira rebukes him incisively, stating that he conquered a lion, but Omphale has conquered him. In the view of Deianira, then, Hercules

31 32

Ibid., 116–9. For the passage in English, see R. Scott Smith and Stephen M. Trzaskoma, trans., Apollodorus’ Library and Hyginus’ Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), 111. For the text in Latin, see Gaius Julius Hyginus, Fabulae, ed. Peter K. Marshall (Munich: K.G. Saur, 2002), 46–7.

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is a hapless sissy overpowered by a browbeating queen.33 In Hercules Furens, Seneca gives Lycus a short speech in which he refers to Hercules having given his lion skin and club to a girl who is not named; Lycus then notes that the hero anoints his hair with nard (a costly perfume), wears a turban on his head, sports a Sidonian robe, and strums the tambourine.34 Fulgentius, in the Mythologies, is indignant about Omphale’s role in the relationship. He omits the cross-dressing but does describe Hercules spinning wool. Then he plays on the queen’s name, which to him is like the Greek word for navel, onfalon [sic]. Finally he states that the virtuous Hercules was conquered by lust, for women rule over lust in the navel, since the womb is attached to the navel (2.2).35 In the Parallel Lives, Plutarch refers to Hercules and Omphale twice. In his comparison of the lives of Demetrius and Antony, the author presents Hercules in a negative fashion: He ridicules Antony by suggesting that he sacrificed victory on the battlefield by giving into the love of Cleopatra. Then, as an analogy, he states that this is comparable to Hercules allowing Omphale to strip him of not only his lion skin but also his club (3.3).36 Plutarch’s second mention of the couple, in a more favorable light, is discussed below. A number of references to the story, in fact, have a positive bent. Ovid in the Fasti (2.303–58) portrays Hercules and Omphale as a lusty couple attending a Bacchic festival in a grove. Hercules is so smitten with the queen that he solicitously shields her from the sun with a parasol. As they approach, Faunus looks on, filled with desire for Omphale. The couple enters a cave, exchanges clothes, and begins to feast. The scene is comic but not humiliating to Hercules. In fact, the hero is so brawny that he breaks Omphale’s bracelets and splits her shoes. And though the queen appropriates her lover’s lion skin, club, and

33 34

35

36

For the text in Latin and English, see Ovid, Heroides and Amores, 2nd ed., trans. Grant Showerman and rev. G.P. Goold (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1977), 112–9. See Seneca, Tragedies, trans. Frank Justus Miller, vol. 1, p. 45 (lines 465–71). In two other plays Seneca has characters refer to Hercules in drag: In Hercules Oetaeus (lines 371–7), when he is described as madly in love with the “Lydian woman,” having discarded his lion skin, wearing ointment in his hair, and working her distaff; and in Hippolytus (lines 317–29), where he exchanges weapons for a spindle, wears emeralds on his fingers, and covers his body in a gauzy cloak, no mention of Omphale being made. For the English, see Leslie George Whitbread, trans., Fulgentius the Mythographer (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971), 67–8. For the Latin, see http://www.hs -augsburg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost06/Fulgentius/ful_myt2.html. For the pertinent sections in Greek and English, see Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, vol. 3, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1920), 336–9 (Life of Antony).

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arrows, she does not use them to overpower him. At midnight, once they have fallen asleep, Faunus slips into the cave seeking Omphale. Confused by the switched attire, he gropes the wrong person. When he does, Hercules shoves him away, knocking him onto the floor.37 Statius in the Thebaid refers to the Lydian wife of Hercules laughing to see the hero stripped of his lion skin and ruining her clothes with brawny shoulders, while also breaking drums and disturbing the distaffs (10.646–9).38 What is noteworthy about the reference, in addition to the focus on Hercules’ strength, is that Statius parallels this cross-dressing with the goddess Virtue’s disguising herself. She does so in order to descend unnoticed from her position by Jupiter’s throne to inspire Menoeceus to fulfill the oracle’s request and save the city of Thebes by throwing himself from its walls. The wearing of a dress by Hercules, in a sense, is virtuous here. In his positive reference, Plutarch commends Hercules for his behavior while in Lydia. He writes that after Hercules murdered Iphitus and was a slave for a long while to Omphale, the queen’s realm enjoyed peace and security.39 The Second Vatican Mythographer echoes Fulgentius’ criticism somewhat, mentioning Hercules’ spinning, and he repeats the Omphale-navel pun, blaming women for the lust within them (178); like Plutarch, however, he alludes to the security Hercules brought to the kingdom. After explaining that Hercules killed a snake that was destroying crops and people in Lydia, he states that Omphale rewarded the hero greatly for the feat.40 Pseudo-Apollodorus in the Bibliotheca (2.6.3) and Diodorus Siculus in his Bibliotheca Historica (4.31.1–8) also present Hercules as a positive figure during his time with Omphale. Neither writer mentions the role-reversing or exchange of clothing but both, especially Diodorus, show Hercules to be helpful while serving the Lydian queen. His account is worth quoting at length because of the detail it provides of Hercules’ strength and bravery:

37

For the Latin and English, see Ovid, Fasti, trans. James George Frazer (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1976), 78–83. 38 For the Latin and English text, see Statius, Thebaid, Books 8–12; Achilleid, trans. and ed. D.R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2003), 172-81. For the full account of the episode, from Virtue’s descent to the suicide of Menoeceus, see lines 632–754. 39 Plutarch, Parallel Lives, vol. 1, 14–6 (Life of Theseus). 40 For the English, see Ronald E. Pepin, trans., The Vatican Mythographers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 173 (paragraph 178). The Third Mythographer repeats the phrases regarding lust but does not include the part about killing the snake, 322 (paragraph 13).

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[While] serving Omphale as her slave … [Hercules meted] out punishment upon the robbers who infested the land. As for the Cercopes, for instance … who were robbing and committing many evil acts, some of them he put to death and others he took captive and delivered in chains to Omphale. Syleus, who was seizing any strangers who passed by and forcing them to hoe his vineyards, he slew by a blow with his own hoe; and from the Itoni, who had been plundering a large part of the land of Omphale, he took away their booty, and the city which they had made the base of their raids was sacked, and enslaving its inhabitants razed it to the ground. Omphale was pleased with the courage [Hercules] displayed, and on learning who he was and who had been his parents she marvelled at his valour, set him free, and marrying him bore him Lamus.41 To Diodorus, then (and to Pseudo-Apollodorus, whose text parallels his), Hercules remains heroic even in servitude.

Hercules and Omphale in Ancient Art

Just as the diverse authors cited above emphasize disparate aspects of the mythic relationship between Hercules and Omphale, so too do different ancient artists. A review of four works of art produced in the Roman period will provide a sense of how varied the iconography of this myth could be. A thirdcentury Roman floor mosaic from Llíria in the province of Valencia, Spain (Fig. 1.7), for example, displays both role reversal and cross-dressing. Set within a border comprising smaller framed scenes of the Twelve Labors is a large white-ground rectangular panel of Hercules and Omphale. The queen sits on a high-backed, cushioned throne with footstool, drapery covering her right thigh, her torso naked from neck to groin. The face of the lion skin rests on her head, ears pricked up, mane bristling; Hercules’ club leans against her left shoulder. Though her young body reclines as if available, her persona is forbidding: she glares at Hercules and disdainfully extends her right arm toward him to proffer 41

See C.H. Oldfather, trans., Diodorus of Sicily [Library of History], vol. 2 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1979), 443–5. Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 2.6.3, presents a briefer account of the Cercopes but a longer one of Syleus, stating that Hercules also killed Syleus’ daughter. He makes no reference to the Itoni or to the marriage to Omphale. He tells us that while with Omphale, Hercules came upon the body of Icarus and buried it, for which act of kindness Daedalus made a statue of Hercules so realistic that the hero threw a stone at it. See Smith and Trzaskoma, Apollodorus and Hyginus, 16, 38, and 42.

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Figure 1.7  Mosaic with Omphale and Hercules, 3rd century ce. Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid (Album/Art Resource, ny)

loops of wool [?] on a stick. Hercules, in a floor-length garment, stands with his body shifted away from the queen. His eyes glancing toward her fearfully, he holds a distaff in his left hand, a spindle in his right. Thus it is the servitude of the hero—his humiliation, even—and the cross-dressing of the couple that is in the center of the narrative section, rather than one of the Labors. Precisely because the figures are aggrandized in this central scene, the emphasis on the hero’s emasculation is all the greater. A Gallo-Roman silver and gold phiale (drinking or libation vessel) from the first to late second century ce, found in Normandy in 1830, contains an image of Omphale asleep on Hercules’ lion skin, her knees partially drawn up so that she will fit within the tondo (Fig.  1.8).42 She is the picture of sensuality, for her bare buttocks thrust upwards alluringly. Except for a strap below her shoulder blades, her back and shoulders are also bare. With naked arms, she embraces the club of Hercules. Three tiny erotes nestle against her, one each at her knees, feet, and right arm. An urn lies nearby, perhaps alluding to her 42

It was found in Normandy in 1830. See Ernest Babelon, Le trésor d’argenterie de Berthouville, près Bernay (Eure), conservé au Departement des médailles et antiques de la Bibliothèque nationale (Paris: Lévy, 1916), 102–3 and Plate XV. My thanks to Desiree Zenowich of the Getty Institute for providing me with a scan of this text.

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Figure 1.8  Detail, phiale with Omphale asleep, 1st–late 2nd century ce. Cabinet des Medailles, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, ny)

having drunk wine during a Bacchic festival. The phiale itself was probably used for pouring libations in a cult dedicated to Mercury. A thin drapery covers Omphale’s thighs and calves as she slumbers on top of the skin, of which the paws, face, ears, and mane are visible. This is the voluptuous Omphale decried by Fulgentius. In contrast, a Roman puteal (well head) from the first or second century, said to be from Capri, portrays the lusty Hercules that Ovid describes in the Fasti (Fig. 1.9).43 Although he wears a woman’s dress, the hero is clearly enjoying a 43

It is now in the British Museum. For its reported discovery on Capri, see the museum’s website, http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details .aspx?objectId=460028&partId=1.

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Figure 1.9  Puteal with Omphale and Hercules, 1st–2nd century ce. British Museum, London (© The Trustees of the British Museum/ Art Resource, ny)

romp with Omphale, from whose body his lion skin drops. The two gaze into each other’s eyes. Omphale gently places one hand on her lover’s waist, the other on his veil-covered head, as if to stroke him, not push him away. Hercules grasps each of her fleshy arms, taking the lead in the amorous dance that has become more than foreplay: The hero is aroused to the extent that his male member supports the rolled-up hem of his garment. To the right, Eros holding a scepter flies in the air as if to say, “Love reigns supreme.” The three other couples on the well head consist of a satyr and a hermaphrodite, a satyr and a nymph, and, possibly, Hercules and Omphale at a different moment, again engaged in a clumsy, perhaps drunken dance: The bearded male figure wears an animal hide

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on his shoulders, and the woman’s drapery reveals her backside as the two figures engage each other.44 Lastly, a marble funerary marker dedicated by a daughter to her mother in the second century ce shows the mythic couple standing side by side, the Twelve Labors in smaller scale framing them on three sides to remind the viewer of Hercules’ valor.45 Drapery covers Omphale’s legs and part of one shoulder, leaving her breasts—and perhaps even part of her groin—bare, while Hercules is nude, his lion skin falling across one of his arms. The hero grasps the butt end of his club in his right hand, using the weapon as partial support. In the border below the pair are a bow and quiver on the queen’s side, a basket of wool and a spindle on that of Hercules—references to their exchanged roles. Though Omphale rests her hand on Hercules’ shoulder, there is an easy egalitarianism expressed in their relaxed postures as they gaze at each other. Surely this sculpted block, probably from Rome, emphasizes the moment described by Diodorus when the servitude is complete and the life as a married couple is about to begin.46

Access to Ancient Texts in Padua

How did Enrico come to know the stories of Hercules and Omphale? Most likely through his contacts in Padua itself. In the late thirteenth century, the city was the locus not only of a university but of a humanist circle whose leading proponents were still alive when the chapel was being erected and decorated: Lovato Lovati (1241–1309), Geremia da Montagnone (c. 1250–1321), and Albertino Mussato (1261–1329), all of whom read and made references to the texts of ancient writers, in some cases liberally.47 Foremost among them was Lovato. In all four of his extant poetic epistles, Lovato paraphrases brief passages from the texts of numerous ancient authors. Most essential to this essay 44

45 46

47

This second woman lacks the head band worn by Omphale, however, and may represent the deceased in her guise. Paul Zanker, “Eine römische Matrone als Omphale,” Römische Mitteilungen 106 (1999): 123, fig. 6. For a drawing, see http://www.wikiart.org/en/giovanni-battista-piranesi/other-greek-marble -bas-relief-with-hercules-and-omphale-exists-in-the-same-museum-inc-f. For a discussion of the marble block, see Natalie Boymel Kampen, “Omphale and the Instability of Gender,” in Sexuality in Ancient Art: Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Italy, ed. Kampen (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 239–40. For the rise of humanism in Padua, see Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Boston: Brill, 2000), 81–116. Witt defines Geremia as a pre-humanist.

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are Lovato’s references to Ovid’s Fasti and Heroides and to the Thebaid of Statius. He also wrote a 250-word long analysis on meter in the tragedies of Seneca that was most likely originally appended to his own, now lost, copy of Seneca’s plays.48 In his Compendium, Geremia da Montagnone refers to the texts of Catullus, Martial, Horace, and many others. He was also familiar with Plato’s Meno and Phaedo in a twelfth-century Latin translation, as well as the Chalcidius version of the Timaeus of the fourth century. He possessed a vast knowledge of Aristotle and had at his disposal the latest translations into Latin by William of Moerbeke. Important to this article is his extensive knowledge of Seneca and of Ovid, whose Fasti he cited. He also referred to the Mythologies of Fulgentius, and he cited the Thebaid of Statius, although he did so rarely.49 As for Mussato, he wrote two histories about Henry VII in the style of Livy (referring to the emperor as Caesar), and—at the request of Marsiglio of Padua—he created a dialogue on Seneca’s meter featuring Lovato as master and himself as pupil. He also composed poetry in Latin and was familiar with Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, and Catullus. His most famous work is the Ecerinis, a tragedy in the Senecan mode about the tyrant Ezzelino who oppressed Padua in the thirteenth century.50 I cannot demonstrate that all of the texts related to Hercules and Omphale cited above were available to these three men around 1300, especially the Greek works (whether in the original or in undocumented translations); nor can I show that any of the three (or others) read them or had them translated, but as Appendix  1 shows, manuscripts of Ovid, Hyginus, Statius, Fulgentius, 48

49

50

Now in the Vatican (Ms. Vat. Lat. 1769). See William P. Sisler, “An Edition and Translation of Lovato Lovato’s Metrical Epistles, with Parallel Passages from Ancient Authors” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1977), 7 for Lovato’s analysis of Seneca’s meter. For Lovato’s paraphrasing the Latin texts, see 31, 48, 104 (Fasti); 32, 71, 76, 79, 100, 103, two times (Heroides); and 29, 47, 48 (Thebaid). This despite the fact that Statius was very popular in the medieval period, according to Roberto Weiss. See Weiss, Il primo secolo dell’umanesimo: Studi e testi (Rome: Storia e letteratura, 1949), 33–42. For the translations of the Meno and Phaedo into Latin, also see Kenneth M. Setton, “The Byzantine Background to the Italian Renaissance,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 100, no. 1 (1956): 18–20. This long article provides an overview of the knowledge of Greek in the West during the Middle Ages. According to Weiss, 18–9, da Nono wrote that Geremia was a usurer. But Weiss is not sure how valid the statement is; while he notes that Geremia inveighed against usury, he admits that this does not prove him innocent of that sin. See Nancy G. Siraisi, Arts and Sciences at Padua: The Studium of Padua before 1350 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1973), 45–8. For Mussato in the context of his generation, see Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients, 118–73.

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and the Second Vatican Mythographer were well known across Europe in the Middle Ages, and the Tragedies of Seneca attracted interest in the midthirteenth century. Moreover, in the Dugento, Greek manuscripts had been produced in Grottaferrata, and translations of Greek texts had been made in Sicily. Greek manuscripts have been linked to the court of Frederick II in southern Italy as well. Greek literati migrated into Padua itself in the 1290s, some bringing Greek manuscripts with them. But the argument presented here does not depend on the provable presence in Padua of extant manuscripts of all of the texts cited above that mention Hercules and Omphale. Many manuscripts have been lost to us. Indeed, two manuscripts known to have been used by Lovato are now missing—his own copy of Seneca’s tragedies and a copy of Tibullus, an author whom he cited and for whom the earliest extant copy dates to 1374.51 And the Fabulae of Hyginus survives in but a single ninth-century manuscript, portions of which were lost after being discovered in the sixteenth century (see Appendix 1). As any archivist knows, manuscripts face a variety of threats to their existence. For example, two well-documented events destroyed numerous manuscripts in Florence alone: the burning of codices at the instigation of Savonarola in 1497, and the obliteration of texts by the flood of 1966. Nor does this argument require that only the works of the ancient authors noted here, extant or not, were those that had to have been consulted. For example, one author not yet mentioned who could have been essential to Lovato’s research is Theodontius. Versed in both Latin and Greek and probably living in the twelfth century at the latest, Theodontius wrote in Latin on mythology and was cited by Boccaccio nearly two hundred times, but none of his work survives.52 Finally, the argument presented here does not even require that Latin translations of Greek texts had to have been available in Padua for people ignorant of that language to learn what Greek authors wrote. Just as Boccaccio benefited from the help of the Greek-speaking Leontius Pilatus in understanding Homer (see Appendix 1), so too might a curious person in Padua have found such assistance in deciphering Diodorus or the Pseudo-Apollodorus, if texts by these authors were available. 51 52

For Lovato’s now lost manuscript, see Sisler, “Lovati’s Metrical Epistles,” 7 (Seneca’s tragedies) and 15 (Tibullus). For Theodontius, see Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, trans. Jon Solomon (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2011), xiv, and Marianne Pade, “The Fragments of Theodontius in Boccaccio’s Genealogie deorum gentilium libri,” in Avignon and Naples: Italy in France, France in Italy in the Fourteenth Century, ed. Pade, Hannemarie Ragn Jensen, and Lene Waage Petersen (Rome: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, 1997), 149–82.

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In fact, such an individual might well have been the scholar Pietro d’Abano (c. 1250–1316). Pietro grew up ten kilometers from Padua; spent many years in Constantinople, where he learned Greek; and then c. 1298 moved to Paris, where he became a doctor of medicine and philosophy. In 1306 he was appointed to the faculty of Padua University, with Lovato serving on the committee that hired him. Perhaps Pietro and Lovato knew each other before that occasion and shared their interest in Greek myths; en route to Paris from Greece, could Pietro not have visited friends and family and at that time conveyed the content of various Greek manuscripts to Lovato?53 Taking all of this into account, it is my belief that Lovato Lovati provided a version of the story of Hercules and Omphale based on his research to Enrico, Giotto, or the programmer of the frescoes in the Arena Chapel. Lovato’s few surviving epistles show that he was familiar with a wealth of ancient texts; surely he knew many more, perhaps texts by Plutarch or Diodorus translated to him by someone knowledgeable in Greek, such as Pietro d’Abano. Perhaps he even knew the more recent work of Theodontius on mythology. As to how Lovato could have come in contact with Enrico, his painter, or his programmer, there are three possibilities. First, Pietro d’Abano could have introduced Lovato to Giotto, for it has been argued that Pietro instructed the artist on how to portray the comet in the Nativity in the chapel—a fresco high on the wall and therefore painted long before the Virtues and Vices in the dado. It has also been argued that Pietro inspired Giotto’s astrological interpretation of his Virtue Justice and that Pietro shared his ideas on physiognomy with Giotto while the frescoes were in progress.54 For certain, Pietro was aware of the artist’s paintings, for in his written commentary on portraiture, he refers to 53

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For Lovato’s role in adding Pietro to the University faculty, see Sisler, “Lovati’s Metrical Epistles,” 2. A second possible candidate for help in translating Greek is Guglielmo da Santa Sofia, who came from Constantinople to Venice by 1292 and shortly thereafter married in Padua. His sons, Niccolò, Giovanni, and Marsilio were affiliated with the university when grown. See Franco Alessio, “Filosofia e Scienza. Pietro d’Abano,” in Storia della cultura veneta, vol. 2 (Vicenza: N. Pozza, 1976), 175, n. 12. For the suggestion that Pietro instructed Giotto on his portrayal of the comet in one fresco, see J.M. Massing, “Der Stern des Giotto,” in Die Kunst und das Studium der Natur vom 14. zum 16. Jahrhundert, ed. Wolfram Prinz and Andreas Beyer (Weinheim: vch; Acta Humaniora, 1987), 171. For Pietro’s possible input on the iconography of Justice as Venus, see Eleonora M. Beck, Giotto’s Harmony: Music and Art in Padua at the Crossroads of the Renaissance (Florence: European Press Academic Publishing, 2005), 113–7. For the suggestion that Pietro advised Giotto in person on physiognomy, see Hubert Steinke, “Giotto und die Physiognomik,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 59, no. 4 (1996): 523–47, esp. 545.

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Giotto’s art, using the Venetian version of his name—Zoto.55 Since the commentary was begun in the late Dugento and completed in 1310, Pietro may have been responding to the finished cycle, or he may have been referring to panel paintings made before the frescoes were begun. In any event, the reference to Zoto shows an interest in Giotto and perhaps an acquaintance with him at some point. The second possible way that Lovato could have brought his research to bear on the commission relates to the practice on the part of professors in Italy of reading their learned texts before audiences at their universities. In 1262 Rolandinus of Padua shared his interpretation of the Trevisan Mark before his colleagues and students. At a much later date, Lovato may also have shared scholarly work of his own, and Enrico’s programmer might well have been in the audience as his guest, as the guest of another professor, or, if the programmer was Altegrado Cattaneo di Lendinara, then as a member of the faculty of the University from 1290 to 1299, as noted above.56 The third way that Lovato could have become involved in the project pertains to a tradition dating back to Roman times whereby authors recited their lyrics in public, often at small gatherings.57 Perhaps Lovato did the same toward the end of the Dugento. While reading his poetry, he may have been heard by those planning the chapel’s program, even Enrico Scrovegni. If so, could not one of his lost poems made reference to Omphale and Hercules? As his fourth epistle makes clear, Lovato himself identified with Hercules—and not the Hercules who had already been forgiven, but the Hercules newly tormented for his sins by Juno. The poetic epistle describes the hero as being pursued by Juno, who has transferred his misery to Lovato. A hopeful note is struck in that Lovato reminds us that Jupiter allowed the soul of Hercules to ascend to heaven. Could not a lost epistle by Lovato have described Hercules in Lydia enjoying a positive relationship with Omphale, paralleling the characterization of the relationship by Diodorus? Owing to the obvious Hellenism in Italy in the Dugento, in my view it is more than possible that Greek mythological texts—such as those by Diodorus 55 56 57

For Pietro d’Abano’s commentary on portraiture, see J. Thomann, “Pietro d’Abano on Giotto,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54 (1991): 238–44. For professorial readings in Padua, see Lynn Thorndike, “Public Readings of New Works in Mediaeval Universities,” Speculum 1, no. 1 (1926): 101–3. For the public readings, see Ruth Crosby, “Oral Delivery in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 11, no. 1 (1936): 88–110. For the epistle in which Lovato identifies with Hercules, see Sisler, Lovati’s Metrical Epistles, 92–6 (the Latin) and 106–10 (the translation). Lovato wrote this epistle to a friend before his wedding in 1268. Perhaps prenuptial anxiety is behind the tenor of the communication.

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or Pseudo-Apollodorus—were acquired by the humanists in Padua even though we do not have hard evidence in the form of extant copies. Once such texts were in hand, a translator could be found rather easily and the myths conveyed to those seeking to understand them. Thus Lovatao Lovati (or possibly Geremia da Montagnone, Albertino Mussato, or still another humanist) would have been capable of transmitting to Enrico Scrovegni and his circle not just Latin myths pertaining to Hercules and Omphale but Greek ones as well. These variant stories also could have helped bring about Giotto’s interpretation of Fortitude.

Giotto’s Visual Inspiration

If Giotto required an ancient formal prototype for his Fortitude, what might it have been? Though the four images of the Lydian queen discussed above testify both to the iconographic diversity of ancient Omphale imagery and to its wide diffusion in a variety of media in antiquity, none could have served as a model for the artist: He never travelled to Spain, France, or even Capri, where the mosaic, phiale, and (reportedly) puteal were respectively found; and the block thought to be from Rome does not show Omphale wearing the lion skin. Indeed, in most ancient depictions that may have been available to Giotto, including numerous carvings and gems, it is the lion skin that is Omphale’s identifying attribute.58 Given the widespread occurrence of Greco-Roman representations of Omphale wearing the hide, it is possible therefore that an ancient cameo or other classical visual source was available to Giotto. For example, he may even have known the Roman white marble statue of Omphale now in the Vatican (Fig. 1.10), where the queen wears the lion skin tied in the manner typical of Hercules—in the same configuration as Giotto’s Fortitude.59 The statue was once owned by the Gaetano family, whose first prominent member was none other than Pope Boniface VIII, a patron of Giotto during his reign on the throne of St. Peter (December 24, 1294–October 11, 1303). Whether His Holiness himself owned the work, and whether Giotto saw the statue while working for Boniface in Rome, is not certain. It is very tempting to speculate on such a pos58

Gemma Sena Chiesa, “Myth Revisited: The Re-use of Mythological Cameos and Intaglios in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages,” in “Gems of Heaven”: Recent Research on Engraved Gemstones in Late Antiquity c. ad 200–600, ed. Chris Entwistle and Noël Adams (London: British Museum Press, 2011), 229–38, 231–4. 59 See The Vatican Collections: The Papacy and Art: Official Publication Authorized by the Vatican Museums (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1983), 214.

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Omphale draped in the lion skin of Hercules, c. 200 ce. Museo Gregoriano Profano, Vatican Museums, Vatican City (Scala/Art Resource, ny)

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sibility, however, or to at least wonder if another similar statue, now lost, may have been available to the painter.60 For viewers in imperial Rome, Natalie Kampen proposes, the sensual, nude Omphale in the Vatican carried a positive connotation, likely portraying a Roman matron in the Lydian queen’s guise.61 For Giotto, if this work did provide a model, then the martial garb of Fortitude replaced the nudity of the sculpted figure. But perhaps no model was required. Perhaps the artist conjured up his image of Fortitude in a lion-skin cape purely in response to those aspects of the myth of Hercules and Omphale that were presented to him by the programmer, or by Enrico, or by someone else, such as Lovato or one of the other Paduan humanists of the era.

Hercules, Omphale, and Enrico Scrovegni

We must now ask why the story of Hercules and Omphale was drawn upon in the planning of the program of the Arena Chapel in the first place. What did Giotto find of interest in this mythic couple? More importantly, what did his programmer, whoever he may have been, find of interest? Above all, what did Giotto’s patron, Enrico Scrovegni, see in one or more of these (or even other) versions of the tale that was relevant to him? And why? Just as each author and artist mentioned here viewed both Hercules and Omphale differently, so too would Enrico. Thus I believe that a number of 60

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The precise dating of Giotto’s time in Rome during the reign of Boniface is problematic, but Julian Gardner places the painter there c. 1300. See his “The Stefaneschi Altarpiece: A Reconsideration,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974): 103, where Gardner calls the panel painting “a fitting prelude to the astonishing mastery of the Arena Chapel frescoes.” For the limited provenance of the Vatican Omphale, see The Vatican Collections, 214. The statue was subsequently owned by two other noble Roman families, the Ruspoli and the Vitali. It entered the Vatican collections in the early nineteenth century. Of course, Giotto may well have been inspired by gems depicting Omphale in her Herculean attire; such items are easily transported. Many show her to be even more obviously sensual than the statue in the Vatican, however, and often in contorted poses not seen in Giotto’s figure. But the notion of inspiration through a gem is still worth considering. For such images of Omphale, see Sena Chiesa, “Myth Revisited,” 229–38, esp. 231–4. See Kampen, “Omphale and the Instability of Gender,” 233–4. Kampen notes that the pose evokes that of the Medici Venus. For another positive interpretation of Omphale, now in connection with a medieval queen, see Genevra Kornbluth, “Richildis and Her Seal: Carolingian Self-Reference and the Imagery of Power,” in Saints, Sinners, and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Jane L. Carroll and Alison G. Stewart (Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington: Ashgate, 2003), 161–81.

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things would have resonated with him meaningfully—especially when he, a prominent citizen in a state of remorse, was dedicating a chapel to the Virgin Mary: a hero whom he would like to resemble, one who had performed twelve awe-inspiring tasks and had then taken a terrible moral fall by committing murder. Once. Or twice. Or many times. Murder—the most grievous of sins—was even worse than Enrico’s sin, usury. But, as Enrico might note, the pagan gods had been compassionate, and they had given the hero Hercules an opportunity for penance by serving as a slave to a woman of high station—a queen, no less. Given Omphale’s positive role in many versions of the myth, Enrico himself might well have suggested that Omphale figure in the program of the frescoes, despite the unsavory characterization of the queen in some texts. He may have requested that Omphale, who never “killed a lion by force,” be merged with the mighty Fortitude, who clearly has. By adding Omphale to the mix, Giotto was able to paint a Fortitude based on a mythic figure who was actually female, not male, and one whose shoulders were once covered with a lion skin. With this mantle, of course, Omphale-Fortitude brings into the frescoes a reminder of all the heroic deeds that Hercules performed. Among them are two that made him a Christ type in the eyes of those living in the late Middle Ages: his conquest of Antaeus, who symbolized the devil whom Jesus fought and then defeated on the mountain and on the cross; and his descent into the underworld to overpower Cerberus, representing death, which paralleled Jesus’ descent into Limbo to vanquish Satan and his rise from the realm of the dead. In addition, the lion skin could remind one of the hero’s ascent from a mountaintop to heaven after death and his subsequent apotheosis thanks to his divine father, Jupiter, which was seen as the equivalent of Christ’s Ascension from a mountaintop to heaven forty days after his crucifixion.62 Truly any Christian 62

For Hercules as a Christ type with respect to Antaeus, see Guido da Pisa (flourished 1320–30), Expositiones et Glose super Comediam Dantis, ed. Vincenzo Cioffari (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974), 652; with respect to his descent into the underworld, see Petrus Berchorius (died 1362), Ovidius Moralizatus, 287–8; and with respect to his apotheosis, see Justin Martyr (c. 100–65), Apologies, 1.20–2. See Alexander Ross (1590–1654), Mystagogus Poeticus, 171–2, for a long passage arguing that Hercules is a pagan Christ type, where the Nemean lion is the Devil, the hydra is sin, Antaeus is earthly affections, Cacus is Satan, and the Augean stables represent Jewish superstition. Ross also notes that both Hercules and Christ descended into the underworld and experienced a glorious ascension. For the view that the three heads of Cerberus represented the three ages of man or the three known continents for many in the Middle Ages, see J.J.H. Savage, “The Medieval Tradition of Cerberus,” Traditio 7 (1949–51): 405–10. For depictions of Hercules in paintings in early Christian catacombs, where he is also paralleled with Christ, see Gregory H. Snyder, “Pictures in Dialogue: A Viewer-Centered Approach to the Hypogeum

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would wish to identify with such a hero—and upon death, to experience the same rise to heaven that both Hercules and Christ knew. Indeed, a reference to Christ is not only made indirectly via the allusion to Hercules; it is also suggested by the weapon wielded by Fortitude, the four-edged mace in place of the usual wooden club of Hercules. The very tip of the weapon resembles a small cross, as the four blades appear to intersect, investing the image of Fortitude herself with Christian overtones. The wooden club is not absent from the chapel, however. Across the small nave, the figure of Folly, the last in the line of Vices, bears such a club (Fig. 1.11). One of only two male figures in the set of fourteen personifications (the other is Injustice), Folly is barefoot and pot-bellied, his eyes gazing up at nothing in particular. He wears a skirt with a crudely scalloped hem that falls above his knees, except in the back, where a train resembling tail feathers touches the floor of his niche. On his cranium sits a crown of actual feathers. Scholars have interpreted Folly in a variety of ways. Milton Gendel argues he not only illustrates “purposelessness and lack of direction in the absence of Prudence”—the very Virtue that he opposes in the chapel—but also suggests the vice of gluttony.63 To Osvald Sirén, Folly is a “clown setting forth to fight imaginary fools.”64 Jacobus sees him as alluding to an accumulation of vices associated

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on Via Dino Compagni,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 13, no. 3 (2005): 349–86. Not everyone agrees, though, that the frescoes in the Catacomb of via Dino Compagni (also sometimes known as the Via Latina Catacomb) link Hercules to Christ. As Alison Poe notes, it is also possible that the single chamber in which all of the Hercules paintings are found belonged to a pagan patron who wished to see Hercules in his own right, with no Christian overtones: See Janet Huskinson, “Some Pagan Mythological Figures and their Significance in Early Christian Art,” Papers of the British School at Rome 42 (1974), 81–2, and more recently Antonio Ferrua, Catacombe Sconosciute (Florence: Nardini, 1990), and Mark Johnson, “Pagan-Christian Burial Practices of the Fourth Century: Shared Tombs?” Journal of Early Christian Studies 5, no. 1 (1997), 37–59. Also of interest is Clarence H. Miller, “Hercules and His Labors as Allegories of Christ and His Victory over Sin in Dante’s Inferno,” Quaderni d’italianistica 5 (1984): 1–17. For the argument that the images of Hercules performing his Twelve Labors on the Carolingian Cathedra Petri carry negative significance, see Lawrence Nees, A Tainted Mantle: Hercules and the Classical Tradition at the Carolingian Court (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). For a recent article on Hercules and Antaeus in the art of early modern Italy, see Patricia Simons, “Hercules in Italian Renaissance Art: Masculine Labour and Homoerotic Libido,” Art History 31, no. 5 (2008), 632–64. Milton L. Gendel, “Giotto’s Representation of the Seven Virtues and Vices in the Arena Chapel at Padua” (ma Thesis, Columbia University, 1940), 1: 4, nn. 2 and 5. Osvald Sirén, Giotto and Some of His Followers, trans. Frederic Schenck (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1917), 53.

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Giotto di Bondone, Personification of Folly, c. 1305–6. Scrovegni Chapel, padua, italy (Alfredo Dagli Orti/Art Resource, ny)

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with the wealthy: pomposity, gluttony, vanity, luxury, and pride.65 Pfeiffenberger interprets him as a mock king carrying a crude club instead of a scepter.66 Basil de Sélincourt describes him as expressing an “idiot’s elation” as he expects to “subdue the world with a club he has not yet learned to hold.”67 Finally, both Maria Luisa Bonifazi and I.B. Supino believe that he is a pazzo (crazy man). The former places the pazzo in the context of a carnival; the latter cogently connects him with the comment made by Jacopone da Todi (c. 1230–1306) upon arriving at a nephew’s wedding clad in a mass of feathers: “Io vo’ farla chiara la mia pazzia” (I want to make my madness clear).68 In short, in Giotto’s general time and place, a feathered costume could have been associated with insanity. The painter, programmer, or patron may thus have intended this Folly to allude to Hercules, and to the fits of madness that had caused him to commit murder, by portraying this Vice holding a wooden club while wearing a crown of feathers and a skirt with a plume-like train. Like Hercules, who completed his Twelve Labors, Enrico Scrovegni was an accomplished man. But also like the hero, he was a man burdened with guilt. Enrico had not committed murder or even stolen a tripod, but he lived a sumptuous life on profits taken illegally. In identifying with Hercules, as I believe he did, perhaps he thought that he too could gain not only redemption but immortality in heaven through his gift to the Virgin of his chapel. By executing the intriguing formal and iconographical blend that became the chapel’s Fortitude, Giotto provided his patron with the image of a powerful queen to gaze upon each time Enrico stepped into the nave—not the queen of heaven, to be sure, but another queen, Omphale, who had helped to redeem Hercules. 65 Jacobus, Arena Chapel, 187. 66 Pfeiffenberger, Iconology, Ch. V: 6–9. 67 Basil De Sélincourt, Giotto (London; New York: Duckworth; C. Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 153. 68 Maria Luisa Bonifazi, “Giotto e le figurazioni allegoriche delle virtù e dei vizi: nel centenario giottesco,” L’illustrazione vaticana, 8 (1937), 627; I.B. Supino, Giotto (Florence: Istituto di edizioni artistiche, 1920), 145.

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Appendix 1

Classical Texts and Learning in Europe and Italy in the Late Middle Ages

The acquisition of specific classical texts by contemporary Paduan humanists was critical to the iconographic formulation of the virtue Fortitude in the guise of Omphale. So too was their ability to comprehend the texts, especially those written in Greek. A brief discussion of the availability of these texts and the understanding of Greek in the late Middle Ages, especially in Italy, is thus in order here.



Latin Texts in Europe

The text of the Fabulae by Hyginus that we know today derives from a unique manuscript dating from the late ninth century and written in the Beneventan script used in Italy at the time the manuscript was produced. The mythic content was transcribed and then printed in 1535 by Jacob Micyllus; soon thereafter the manuscript was dismantled and most of its leaves lost. Despite the lack of extant manuscripts today, a fair number must have existed in the Middle Ages, because the Fabulae were influential then. According to Jane Chance, the text (together with parts of the Astronomica attributed to Hyginus) ranks second only to the Metamorphoses in importance among Latin works on myth used as sources by First Vatican Mythographer (c. ninth–eleventh century). That anonymous author apparently borrowed the genealogical data that prefaces the Fabulae; he also took Fable 259 from Hyginus wholesale. Later, in the twelfth century, the Digby Mythographer stated that the Fabulae had been a source for him. In that same century, Chrétien de Troyes was inspired by the Fabulae when writing his Philomène, and Arnulfus of Orléans took from the fables when composing a commentary on the Fasti. Finally, Boccaccio drew heavily on the Fabulae when writing De mulieribus claris in Tuscany between 1355 and 1359.69 69

For the history of the manuscript, see Smith and Trzaskoma, Apollodorus and Hyginus, xlii and xlix–li. For the connection of the First Vatican Mythographer to Hyginus, as well as the effect of the Fabulae on Digby, see Jane Chance, Medieval Mythography, vol. 1, 158, 159, 259, 540, n. 31 (First Mythographer) and vol. 2, 117 (Digby). For the dating of the manuscript of the First Mythographer to the years between 875 and 1075, see Nevio Zorzetti and Jacques Berlioz, Le Premier Mythographe du Vatican, Collection des universités de France, Série latine (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995), vol. 12. For Hyginus and Chrétien de Troyes, see Edith Joyce Benkov, “Hyginus’ Contribution to Chrétien’s Philomène,” Romance Philology 36, no. 3 (1983): 403–6, and Gregory Hays, “Did Chrétien de Troyes know Hyginus’ Fabulae?” Romance Philology 62, no. 1 (2008): 75–82. For the relationship of Arnulfus to Hyginus, see Jean Holzworth, “Light from a Medieval Commentary on the Text of the Fabulae and Astronomica of Hyginus,” Classical Philology 38, no. 2 (1943): 126–31. For the hypothetical impact of the Fabulae on an English chronicler whose life dates were 1378–1465, see Lisa M. Ruch, “A Possible Identity for

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It has been stated that Ovid was “known and admired” in Europe continuously throughout the Roman imperial era and the Middle Ages, “although not always by all segments of society.”70 Not just the Metamorphoses but also the Heroides and Fasti were popular in the medieval era. In the ninth century, Rabanus Maurus (d. 856) quoted the Fasti in his theological writings, while in the twelfth, Arnulfus of Orléans lectured on the same work. As for the Heroides, Baudry de Bourgueil (d. 1130) based his metrical Epistles on the text, and Conrad of Wurzburg (d. 1287) drew from it in writing his poem on the Trojan War.71 Various works by Ovid were used as schoolbooks in the Middle Ages, and a late twelfth-century Italian example of the Heroides and the Fasti are known, the latter having been produced in Northern Italy, “possibly Padua.”72 In the thirteenth century, Rolandino of Padua made reference to numerous Latin texts between 1260 and 1262, among them Ovid’s Heroides.73 Still later and elsewhere in Italy, Dante quoted Ovid in his work more than any other writer except Virgil.74 The tragedies of Seneca began to emerge in Orléans, Paris, and Oxford in the middle of the thirteenth century, having been “unknown before 1200” in medieval northern Europe.75 It has been suggested that the new interest in the tragedies owed to the fact that they were “providing exempla for moralists and preachers.”76 A thirteenth-century copy of the tragedies produced in Italy is now in the Library of the Escorial. It was owned by

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Hugh of Genesis in John Hardyng’s Chronicle,” Notes and Queries 53, no. 2 (2006): 150. For the chapters of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris that contain passages inspired by the Fabulae of Hyginus, see On Famous Women, trans. Guido A. Guarino, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Italica Press, 2011), 253–4, and for the period that Boccaccio worked on the manuscript, xxxi. Dorothy M. Robathan, “Ovid in the Middle Ages,” in Ovid, ed. J.W. Binns (London: Boston, Routledge and K. Paul, [1973]), 201–7. Robathan, 193 (Arnolfus and Baudry), 194 (Conrad), and 200 (Rabanus.) Robert Black, “Ovid in Medieval Italy,” in Ovid in the Middle Ages, ed. James G. Clark, Frank T. Coulson, and Kathryn L. McKinley (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 137. Ronald G. Witt, The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in Medieval Italy (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 446. For Witt on the Paduan humanists, see Chapter 12, “The Return to Antiquity,” 438–71. Robathan, 203. R.H. Rouse and A.C. de la Mare, “New Light on the Circulation of the A-Text of Seneca’s Tragedies,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977): 283, 286. Rouse believes that not just one but two copies of the Tragedies existed in Oxford in the thirteenth century, 286. R.H. Philp, “The Manuscript Tradition of Seneca’s Tragedies,” The Classical Quarterly, New Series 18, no. 1 (1968): 155, n. 2. For the knowledge of Seneca between the Roman period and the late Middle Ages, see G.G. Meerseman, “Seneca maestro di spiritualità nei suoi opuscoli apocrifi dal II al XI secolo,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 16 (1973): 43–135, and Ezio Franceschini, “Glosse e commenti medievali a Seneca tragico,” in Studi e note di

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Petrarch, who listed Seneca as one of his favorite writers. Though Petrarch wrote later in the fourteenth century, it is noteworthy that his most concentrated glosses in the manuscript occur in the section containing Hercules Furens, and that he also glossed Hercules Oetaeus, for the notations attest to the continued interest in Hercules in Italy.77 Indeed, in 1315–6, not ten years after the completion of the frescoes in Padua, the English Dominican Nicholas Trevet wrote a commentary on Seneca’s tragedies for Cardinal Niccolò Albertini da Prato.78 The Thebaid of Statius is considered “one of the most widely read classical texts of the Latin Middle Ages.” About 300 manuscripts of this work survive. Of these copies, only a small portion have glosses, largely from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which suggests an increased interest in the Thebaid just before and during the period of the Paduan humanists.79 Fulgentius also was well known in the Middle Ages. For example, Isidore of Seville cites him in his glosses in the Etymologies. Rabanus Maurus and other Carolingian scholars were also familiar with his texts, as were the twelfth-century Platonist Bernard Silvestris and the Vatican Mythographers. Boccaccio refers to Fulgentius as “doctor atque pontifex catholicus,” though he expresses wariness about some of the author’s methods.80 Only the Second and Third Vatican Mythographers mention the story of Hercules and Omphale, not the First. The Second Mythographer probably lived in the early twelfth century, for his text was used by William of Conches (c. 1090–1150s) in his exposition of Hymen in the Philosophia Mundi. In addition, Bernard Silvestris drew from him in writing his commentary on Martianus Capella, as did Papias the Lombard (flourished 1040s– 60s) in narrating a passage on the Sirens. Finally, Jean de Meun (c. 1240–1305) benefitted from the Second Mythographer’s text as he composed the Roman de la Rose.81 77

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filologica latina medievale, Pubblicazioni dell’Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 4th Series, Scienze filologiche, vol. 30 (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1938–46): 1–105. Rouse and de la Mare, 287–9. Petrarch made “cross-references” between Hercules Furens and Seneca’s Agamemnon. De la Mare notes, 288, that the copy of Seneca’s tragedies that Lovato found in Pomposa was used by the Paduan Humanists for readings. Philp, 164. Brian Stock, “A Note on ‘Thebaid’ Commentaries: Paris, B.N., lat. 3012,” Traditio 27 (1971): 468–71. For Statius in the Commedia, see Carlo Landi, “Intorno a Stazio nel Medio Evo e nel Purgatorio Dantesco,” Atti e Memorie della R. Accademia di Scienze, Lettere, ed Arti in Padova, n.s. 37 (1920–1): 201–37. See Robert G. Edwards, “The Heritage of Fulgentius,” in The Classics in the Middle Ages: Papers of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies (Binghamton, ny: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1990), 141–2, who devotes most of his article to the impact of Fulgentius on Bernardus Silvestris. For references in connection with the Second Mythographer to William of Conches and Bernard Silvestris, see Chance, Medieval Mythology, vol. 1, 433 and 473. For those to Papias, see Chance, Medieval Mythology, vol. 2, 221. For those to Jean de Meun, see Ronald E. Pepin, The Vatican Mythographers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 4.

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As for the Third Vatican Mythographer, Alexander Neckam (1157–1217) drew heavily on his text in composing his commentary on Martianus Capella, as did Bersuire (c. 1290–1362) in writing the Ovidius Moralizatus and Petrarch in composing Africa. Extant today are over forty copies of this mythographer’s compilation ranging in date from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, indicating, in Ronald Pepin’s view, the popularity of this text.82 Thus most of the Latin works cited in this chapter as possibly contributing to the creation of Fortitude as Omphale were available in Europe and specifically in Italy, and therefore could have been known to the Paduan humanists of Giotto’s day.



Knowledge of Greek Language and Literature in Italy in the Late Middle Ages

It is widely assumed that in the year 1300, very few people residing in Italy knew Greek. Moreover, the manuscripts written in Greek and produced before that year with a proven Italian provenance are not plentiful. We must therefore address the extent to which Greek was read in Italy when it comes to suggesting that the Bibliotheca histor­ ica of Diodorus Siculus, the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus, or the Parallel Lives of Plutarch were known in Padua when the frescoes in the Arena Chapel were executed. In fact, knowledge of Greek was common in southern Italy in the late medieval period among those who followed the Byzantine rite. In the thirteenth century, John of Salisbury traveled to Santa Severina in Calabria and learned enough Greek to converse with his teacher about Aristotle; similarly, Robert Grosseteste was aided by Italian Greeks when translating Greek texts. At that time legal documents, charters, and inscriptions were still issued in Greek in the south; in fact, Frederick II employed Greek notaries. At Grottaferrata in central Italy, where many likewise adhered to the Byzantine rite, Greek texts were also produced in the thirteenth century. Greeks of Sicily even produced translations of ancient Greek classics for the Normans and Hohenstaufen, while Italians in the southern peninsula provided translations to the later Angevins, with royal patronage offered by Charles II. Indeed, in the mid-twentieth century, Greek was still spoken in parts of Calabria.83 82

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For the influence of the Third Mythographer on Neckham, see Chance, Medieval Mythology, vol. 2, 188 and 190–1, and on Bersuire and Petrarch, see Pepin, The Vatican Mythographers, 4. For the number of surviving texts of the Third Mythographer and its apparent popularity, see Pepin, 11, where it is noted that just eleven by the Second Mythographer survive and only one by the First Mythographer. See Roberto Weiss, Medieval and Humanist Greek: Collected Essays (Padua: Antenore, 1977), 13–8 and 36. See also Alexander Turyn, Dated Greek Manuscripts of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries in the Libraries of Italy, vol. 1 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 4–11; 15–7; 20–2; and 96–8 for discussion of early manuscripts from Grottaferrata, and vol. 2, Plates 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, and 75. The texts range in date from 1214 to 1299/1300 and are religious in nature.

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Frederick II and Classical Culture

Frederick II had a taste not only for Greek notaries but also for Hellenic culture, and Greek was one of the six languages that he spoke. A manuscript in Florence (Biblioteca Laurenziana ms Conventi soppressi 152), the bulk of which was written in south Italy in 1281, contains within it letters composed in Greek by the emperor. The manuscript also includes four plays of Sophocles in Greek. Perhaps they were copies of plays that were performed at the Hohenstaufen court before the emperor’s death in 1250. More relevant here, a portion of the Bibliotheca historica by Diodorus in a manuscript dated to the tenth or eleventh century (Paris Bibliotheque Nationale ms gr. 1665), which is connected directly to the Emperor’s court through a scholia written in it by a royal notary, one who had command of Greek, Latin, and Italian.84



Interest in Greek Texts in Central Italy in the Late Middle Ages

In central Italy, a late medieval desire to know Homer is suggested by an extant copy of the Iliad in Milan (Biblioteca Ambrosiana ms I 4 supp.). Written in Greek in 1275– 6, it was inscribed in 1452 by Francesco Castiglioni of Florence. Unfortunately, there is no indication as to when or how the manuscript came to the region. A manuscript produced in 1280 containing Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days is now in Florence itself (Laurenziana ms Plut. 3 2, 16). It was bought in Constantinople by an Italian, but not until the fifteenth century; nonetheless, its acquisition also gives proof of the interest in Tuscany in Greek mythology. This interest was dramatized by Boccaccio, who not only wrote the Genealogy of the Pagan Gods across many decades but also learned at least some Greek from Leontius Pilatus so as to access Homer’s works.85

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For Frederick’s knowledge of not only Greek but Italian, Latin, French, German, and Arabic, see Rose E. Selfe, trans., Philip H. Wicksteed, ed., Villani’s Chronicle; Being Selections from the First Nine Books of the Croniche Fiorentine by Giovanni Villani (London: Archibald Constable 1906), 128–9. For the passage in Villani, see Book VI e.1. For the manuscript with plays by Sophocles, see Turyn, Dated Greek Manuscripts, vol. 1, 42–7 and vol. 2, Plates  26–7. For the scholia on Diodorus in Paris bnf ms gr. 1665, see Aubrey Diller, “Diodorus in Terra D’Otranto,” Classical Philology 49, no. 4 (1954): 257–8. According to Weiss, Collected Essays, 28, Frederick had a library of Greek texts augmented by his son Manfred that passed into the hands of Pope Clement IV (d. 1268) shortly after the death of Manfred in the Battle of Benevento in 1266. For the Hesiod manuscripts in Florence, see Turyn, Greek Manuscripts, vol. 1, 28–39 and vol. 2, Plate 23. For the twelfth-century copy in Greek of the Iliad in Milan, see ibid., vol. 1, 23–5 and vol. 2, Plate  12a. Boccaccio apparently began the Genealogy in the 1330s and brought it nearly to completion in 1372. For his timetable, and on his lessons in Greek, see Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, ed. Solomon, viii–ix and xiii.

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The Presence of Greek Texts in Padua in the Dugento or Trecento

In the mid-1290s, Max Planudes supervised the production of a manuscript of parts of Plutarch’s Moralia in Constantinople, now in Milan (Ambrosiana ms C 126 inf.). At some point before his death in 1305, Planudes gave the manuscript to a pupil; within the first quarter of the fourteenth century, this copy of the Moralia came into the possession of Pace di Ferrara, a professor at the University of Padua and a member of the Lovato circle. In 1296, meanwhile, a scribe completed for Planudes a copy of the entire Moralia, adding to it a copy of the Parallel Lives—a double manuscript that is now in Paris (Paris bnf ms gr. 1671). Whether the Paris manuscript containing the Parallel Lives passed through Padua on its own is not known.86

Appendix 2

Major Ancient, Byzantine, and Medieval Texts that Refer to the Myth of Hercules and Omphale (Some Only Slightly)

Greek Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1024–5 Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica 4.31.1–8 (madness of H., 4.11.1–2) Herodotus, The Histories 1.7 Johannes Lydus, Magistracies of the Roman State 3.64 Lucian, Dialogues of the Gods 13.2 Musaeus (also called Grammaticus), Loves of Hero and Leander 223–30 Palaephatus, On Unbelievable Tales 44 Pausanias, Description of Greece 2.21.3 ———, Moralia 785 E–F Plutarch, Parallel Lives: Demetrius and Antony 3.3; Theseus 6.5 Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 2.6.1–3 (madness of H., 2.4.12 and 2.6.1–2) 86

For the Moralia and Pace, see Philip A. Stadter, “Planudes, Plutarch, and Pace of Ferrara,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 16 (1973): 137–41. A second double manuscript of the Moralia and Lives also in Paris was produced later, but it remained in Greece until 1438 (Paris bnf ms gr. 1672), for which see 140, n. 1. According to Stadter, 158–9, Planudes translated numerous texts by Roman authors into Greek for his own countrymen and can be characterized as a man who desired cultural “cross-fertilization” between Greece and Italy. Stadter notes that Planudes was in Venice on a diplomatic mission in 1296 and might have made contact with Paduan professors at that time, for which see 160.

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Sophocles, Women of Trachis (Trachiniae) 247–91; 351–74 Strabo, Geography 5.2.2 Tzetzes, Johannes, Book of Histories (Chiliades) 2.424–42

Latin Fulgentius, Mythologies 2.2 Hyginus, Fabulae 32 Ovid, Fasti 2.303–56 ———, Heroides 9.50–118 Propertius, Elegies 3.11.1–72 Pseudo-Seneca, Hercules Oetaeus 371–7 Second Vatican Mythographer 178 Seneca, Hercules Furens 465–71; 987–1013 (madness of H.) ———, Hippolytus (also called Phaedra) 317–29 Statius, Thebaid 10.632–49 Terence, The Eunuch 1027–8 Tertullian, The Mantle (De pallio) 4 Third Vatican Mythographer, On the Gods of the Pagan Nations and Their Allegories 13.1

Select Bibliography Alessio, Franco. “Filosofia e Scienza. Pietro d’Abano.” In Storia della cultura veneta, vol. 2, 175. Vicenza: N. Pozza, 1976. Babelon, Ernest. Le trésor d’argenterie de Berthouville, près Bernay (Eure), conservé au Departement des médailles et antiques de la Bibliothèque nationale. Paris: Lévy, 1916. Beck, Eleonora M. Giotto’s Harmony: Music and Art in Padua at the Crossroads of the Renaissance. Florence, Italy: European Press Academic Publishing, 2005. Bober, Phyllis Pray, and Ruth Rubinstein. Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources. New York: Harvey Miller, 2010. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Genealogy of the Pagan Gods. Translated by Jon Solomon. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2011. Bonifazi, Maria Luisa. “Giotto e le figurazioni allegoriche delle virtù e dei vizi: Nel centenario giottesco.” L’illustrazione vaticana 8 (1937): 627. Chance, Jane. Medieval Mythography. 2 vols. Gainesville, fl: University Press of Florida, 1994. De Sélincourt, Basil. Giotto. London, New York: Duckworth and Company, C. Scribner’s Sons, 1905.

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Derbes, Anne, and Mark Sandona. The Usurer’s Heart: Giotto, Enrico Scrovegni, and the Arena Chapel in Padua. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Gendel, Milton L. “Giotto’s Representation of the Seven Virtues and Vices in the Arena Chapel at Padua.” ma Thesis, Columbia University, 1940. Guido da Pisa. Expositiones et glose super Comediam Dantis or Commentary on Dante’s Inferno. Edited by Vincenzo Cioffari. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974. Hueck, Irene. “Enrico Scrovegnis Veränderungen der Arenakapelle.” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorisches Institutes in Florenz 17 (1973): 277–94. Hunink, Vincent. De Pallio: A Commentary. Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben, 2005. Hyginus, Julius Gaius. Fabulae. Edited by Peter K. Marshall. Munich: K.G. Saur, 2002. Jacobus, Laura. “Giotto’s Annunciation in the Arena Chapel, Padua.” Art Bulletin 81, no. 1 (1999): 93–107. ———. Giotto and the Arena Chapel: Art, Architecture and Experience. London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2008. Kampen, Natalie Boymel. “Omphale and the Instability of Gender.” In Sexuality in Ancient Art: Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Italy, edited by Natalie Boymel Kampen, 233–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Klemm, Matthew. “Medicine and Moral Virtue in the Expositio Problematum Aristotelis of Peter of Abano.” Early Science and Medicine 11, no. 3 (2006): 302–35. Kohl, Benjamin G. “The Scrovegni in Carrara Padua and Enrico’s Will.” Apollo 142, no. 406 (December 1995): 43–7. Kornbluth, Genevra. “Richildis and Her Seal: Carolingian Self-Reference and the Imagery of Power.” In Saints, Sinners, and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Jane L. Carroll and Alison G. Stewart, 161–81. Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2003. Le Goff, Jacques. Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages. New York: Zone Books, 1990. Massing, J.M. “Der Stern des Giotto.” In Die Kunst und das Studium der Natur vom 14. zum 16. Jahrhundert, edited by Wolfram Prinz and Andreas Beyer, 159–79. Weinheim: VCH, Acta Humaniora, 1987. Miller, Clarence H. “Hercules and his Labors as Allegories of Christ and His Victory over Sin in Dante’s Inferno.” Quaderni d’italianistica 5 (1984): 1–17. Ovid. Fasti. Translated by Sir James George Frazer and edited by G.P. Goold. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1976. ———. Heroides and Amores. Translated by Grant Showerman. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1914. Pade, Marianne. “The Fragments of Theodontius in Boccaccio’s Genealogie deorum gentilium libri.” In Avignon and Naples: Italy in France, France in Italy in the Fourteenth Century, edited by Marianne Pade, Hannemarie Ragn Jensen, and Lene Waage Petersen, 149–82. Rome: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, 1997.

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Paxson, James. “Personification’s Gender.” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 16, no. 2 (1998): 149–79. Pepin, Ronald E. The Vatican Mythographers. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Pfeiffenberger, Selma. “The Iconology of Giotto’s Virtues and Vices at Padua.” PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1966. Picón, Carlos A., Joan R. Mertens, Elizabeth J. Milleker, Christopher S. Lightfoot, and Seàn Hemingway. Art of the Classical World in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007. Plutarch. Plutarch’s Lives, vol. 3. Translated by Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1920. Robathan, Dorothy M. “Ovid in the Middle Ages.” In Ovid, edited by J.W. Binns 201–7. London, Boston: Routledge and K. Paul, 1973. Savage, J.J.H. “The Medieval Tradition of Cerberus.” Traditio 7 (1949–51): 405–10. Scardeone, Bernardini. De antiqvitate vrbis Patavii, et claris ciuibus patauinis. Basel: Episcopius, 1560. Schlegel, Ursula. “On the Picture Program of the Arena Chapel.” In Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes, edited by James H. Stubblebine, 182–202. New York: Norton, 1969. Sena Chiesa, Gemma. “Myth Revisited: The Re-use of Mythological Cameos and Intaglios in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.” In ‘Gems of Heaven’, Recent Research on Engraved Gemstones in Late Antiquity c. AD 200–600, edited by Chris Entwistle and Noël Adam, 229–38. London: British Museum Press, 2011. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Seneca’s Tragedies. Translated by Frank Justus Miller, vol. 2. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1968. Setton, Kenneth M. “The Byzantine Background to the Italian Renaissance.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 100, no. 1 (1956): 18–20. Siculus, Diodorus. Library of History. Translated by C.H. Oldfather. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1979. Simons, Patricia. “Hercules in Italian Renaissance Art: Masculine Labour and Homoerotic Libido.” Art History 31, no. 5 (2008), 632–64. Siraisi, Nancy G. Arts and Sciences at Padua: The Studium of Padua before 1350. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1973. Sirén, Osvald. Giotto and Some of His Followers. Translated by Frederic Schenck. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1917. Sisler, William P. “An Edition and Translation of Lovato Lovati’s Metrical Epistles: With Parallel Passages from Ancient Authors.” PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1977. Smart, Alastair. The Assisi Problem and the Art of Giotto: A Study of the Legend of St. Francis in the Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Smith, R. Scott, and Stephen M. Trzaskoma, trans. Apollodorus’ Library and Hyginus’ Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007. Snyder, Gregory H. “Pictures in Dialogue: A Viewer-Centered Approach to the Hypogeum on Via Dino Compagni.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 13, no. 3 (2005): 349–86.

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Stadter, Philip A. “Planudes, Plutarch, and Pace of Ferrara.” Italia medioevale e umanis­ tica 16 (1973): 137–62. Statius. Thebaid, Books 8–12; Achilleid. Translated and edited by D.R. Shackleton Bailey. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2003. Steinke, Hubert. “Giotto und die Physiognomik.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 59, no. 4 (1996): 523–47. Stettiner, Richard. Die illustrierten Prudentiushandschriften. Berlin: Druck von J.S. Preuss, 1895. ———. Die illustrierten Prudentiushandschriften—Tafelband. Berlin: Grote, 1905. Stubblebine, James H., ed. Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes. New York: Norton, 1969. Supino, I.B. Giotto. Florence: Istituto di edizioni artistiche, 1920. Thomann, J. “Pietro d’Abano on Giotto.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54 (1991): 238–44. Thomas, Hans. “Die Frage nach Giottos Berater in Padua.” Bollettino del Museo Civico di Padova 63 (1974): 61–101. Thorndike, Lynn. A History of Magic and Experimental Science. 8 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1923–58. Tintori, Leonetto, and Millard Meiss. “Observations on the Arena Chapel.” In Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes, edited by James H. Stubblebine, 203–14. New York: Norton, 1969. Turcan, Robert. The Gods of Ancient Rome: Religion in Everyday Life from Archaic to Imperial Times. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Varanelli, Emma Simi. Giotto e Tommaso: I fondamenti dell’estetica tomista e la ‘renovatio’ delle arti nel Duecento italiano. Rome: Atena, 1988. The Vatican Collections: The Papacy and Art: Official Publication Authorized by the Vatican Museums. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Harry N. Abrams, 1983. Weiss, Roberto. Il primo secolo dell’umanesimo: Studi e testi. Rome: Storia e letteratura, 1949. ———. Medieval and Humanist Greek: Collected Essays. Padua: Antenore, 1977. Whitbread, Leslie George, trans. Fulgentius the Mythographer. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971. Witt, Ronald G. In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni. Boston: Brill, 2000. ———. The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in Medieval Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Zanker, Paul. “Eine römische Matrone als Omphale.” Römische Mitteilungen 106 (1999): 119–31.

chapter 2

The Liminal Feminine: Illuminating Europa in the Ovide Moralisé K. Sarah-Jane Murray with Ashley A. Simone In the late Middle Ages, one of the most famous articulations of the process of reception and transmission of ancient culture across time and space, or translatio, occurs in the prologue to the romance of Cligés (c. 1170) by Chrétien de Troyes.1 While Chrétien was primarily interested in the transmission of stories and intellectual achievements in written form, the concept of translatio is equally useful to those of us concerned with the reception of the visual arts. The concept is simple: Chrétien explains that the seat of chivalry and learning was once Greece. From there, it passed to Rome. Now, the highest form of learning has come to France. God only lent it to the others, he adds, and their glowing embers have gone out; whereas, by the grace of God, it will remain in France and flourish for years to come.2 Chrétien’s very name is itself indicative of the cultural arc from the ancient world to Christian medieval France (“Christian from Troy”). The preeminence he accords to the Judeo-Christian God in the creative process of preserving and transmitting knowledge is emblematic of broader trends at work in the reception of Greco-Roman antiquity during the High Middle Ages, and as such it provides a meaningful context for our discussion in this chapter. After the fall of Rome, encyclopedists (e.g., Martianus Capella, fl. 430, in the De nuptiis and Isidore of Seville, flourished 560–636, in his Etymologies) recorded and preserved the tenets of Greco-Roman learning as these authors understood them to be. The classical canon further shaped the curriculum in  the  Palace School and monasteries under Charlemagne, and a rich tradition  of  commentary and glossing arose in cathedral schools and medieval 1 K. Sarah-Jane Murray explores the process in detail in From Plato to Lancelot: A Preface to Chrétien de Troyes (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008), esp. 3–47. This romance has been discussed at length by numerous scholars. For the most thorough overview, see Michelle A. Freeman’s The Poetics of Translatio Studii and Conjointure (Lexington, ky: French Forum, 1979) and Douglas Kelly’s “Honor, Debate, and Translatio imperii in Cligés,” Arthuriana 1, no. 3 (2008): 33–47. In the famous prologue, the author articulates the transmission of classical learning and culture (as well as imperial power) from Greece to Rome and from Rome to France (and, by extension, to Western Christendom), a process referred to as translatio studii (and translatio imperii). 2 William Kibler, trans., Arthurian Romances (London and New York: Penguin, 2004), 123.

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universities.3 The emergence of vernacular stories inspired by classical authors culminated in such notable works as the Romance of Eneas of the mid-twelfth century, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Romance of the Rose,4 and, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the anonymous Ovide moralisé (or Moralized Ovid) in verse. Such developments in writing, of course, spurred and accompanied equally rich developments in art and visual culture.5 Almost a century ago, C.H. Haskins noted that few, if any, poets had influenced medieval writers more than Ovid and Virgil.6 As medieval readers and authors received and reworked classical myths for their contemporaries, Ovid surpassed Virgil, it is safe to say, in shaping receptions of antiquity in art.7 The collection of myths preserved in the Metamorphoses, coupled with  the myths in the widely circulated Fasti, Amores, Ars Amatoria, Tristia, and Heroides, provided endless fodder for artists of all media, and permeated the artistic landscape of Europe well into the Renaissance and beyond.8 Given  Ovid’s widespread influence on the creative imagination of western Europe during the Middle 3 For a detailed overview of this process, see Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and  Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and L.D.  Reynolds and N.G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Jane Chance offers an in-depth study of the Latin commentary traditions and mythographers in Medieval Mythography: From Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres, AD 433–1177 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994). 4 Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski provides a useful and comprehensive discussion of the reception of classical mythology in French vernacular literature in Reading Myth: Classical Mythology and Its Interpretations in Medieval French Literature (Palo Alto, ca: Stanford University Press, 1998). 5 For a useful resource, see the exhibition catalogue for Survival of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Medieval Art (Providence: Brown University Bell Gallery, 1987). 6 C.H. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1955), 107. Haskins’s work, first published in 1927, is still considered seminal, as is Richard W. Southern’s The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). It is important to note that Haskins is to all intents and purposes responsible for scholars’ embracing the idea that a Renaissance of learning did in fact occur in the twelfth century. 7 See Charles Martindale, ed., Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). William S. Anderson argues, however, that Virgil’s impact upon written literature surpassed Ovid’s: “The books of the Metamorphoses yielded to the hexameter verses of Virgil’s Aeneid alone” (versibus autem hexametris soli Vergilii Aeneidi cesserunt Metamorphoseon libri, praefatio). All quotations from Ovid are provided from P. Ovidii Nasonis Metamorphoses, ed. William S. Anderson (Leipzig: Teubner, 1977). The English of the Latin translations is provided by Ashley Simone. 8 See, for example, Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953). Seznec’s influential work, originally published in French in

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Ages,9 it is fitting that this volume on the reception of classical antiquity and gender in art pay due regard to the artistic influence of the poet whom Dante memorialized in his Divine Comedy alongside such notable figures as Homer, Virgil, Horace, Plato, and Aristotle (whose shades the  pilgrim encounters in Limbo before plunging into the lower spheres of the Inferno). We have chosen to focus our discussion on a series of images preserved in the manuscripts of the early fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé. Due to its breadth, the Ovide moralisé presents numerous obstacles to scholars. It constitutes a hybrid of translation and commentary, transmitting in Old French the entire fifteen books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with an additional 60,000 lines of philosophical and theological commentary. Moreover, over nine hundred illuminations—many depicting scenes of classical mythology and pagan gods and goddesses—codified Ovidian mythology in medieval visual culture, within a deeply allegorical (and Christian) context.10 In the following pages we take a close look at the illuminations that accompany the myth of Europa. Carla Lord first drew the attention of art historians towards them almost forty years ago, voicing her surprise at the juxtaposition of the classical maiden to illuminations of Christ on his way to Calvary (Rouen Bibliothèque Municipale ms 0.4) and the Ascension (Paris Arsenal ms 5069) (Figs. 2.1 and 2.2).11 Still lacking is a clear understanding of how these seemingly strange juxtapositions of classical and Christian imagery collaborate within the context of the Ovide moralisé codices. Art historians and Old French scholars alike are apt to conclude simply that the earliest copies of the Ovide moralisé (those that mix Christian and pagan iconographies) are curious, multi-headed beasts, trapped somewhere in the midst of their own metamorphosis from classical myth to Christianized

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1940, explores the far-reaching impact of mythology in Renaissance intellectual life and art. For an overview of more recent publications, see the introduction to this volume. See Alison Keith and Stephen Rupp, eds., Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2007). All medieval readers and illuminators were not as enthusiastic about the Christian interpretations provided by the Old French translator, however. Later manuscripts tend to eliminate in part (Bern Municipal Library ms 10, Lyons Municipal Library ms 742) or completely (Paris Bibliothèque Nationale mss fr. 870 and fr. 19121) the allegorical commentary, reducing the text to a narrative rendition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the vernacular, probably for the entertainment of court audiences. Lord, “Three Manuscripts of the Ovide Moralisé,” Art Bulletin 57, no. 2 (1975): 161–75. This article and the images we discuss in the present study are available online at http://www .jstor.org/stable/3049367. A complete digital facsimile of the Rouen manuscript is available online via the “base d’images” at http://bibliotheque.rouen.fr.

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Figure 2.1 Europa carried off by the bull, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1325–50. Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, ms 5069, fol. 27r

medieval copies. We believe the situation is more complex and, indeed, more interesting.12 We propose that the visual reception of the Europa myth and its juxtaposition to Biblical narrative, as embodied in the Ovide moralisé, exemplifies the 12

For a differing perspective on the relation of the illuminations to the Old French text, see Hetty Joyce, “Picturing Rape and Revenge in Ovid’s Myth of Philomela,” Chapter 9 in this volume.

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Figure 2.2 Christ carrying the cross, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1325–50. Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, ms 5069, fol. 27v

very tensions at work at the heart of the medieval translation of Ovid. Moreover, we contend that any understanding of the illuminations must be anchored in a close reading of the text they illuminate. As we will show in this chapter, the images of Europa on the bull in the Ovide moralisé can only be truly understood within a dynamic text-image relationship: They both invoke the classical myth they represent and, simultaneously, visually embody the moralization to which Ovid’s tale is subject in the Old French text. In so doing, the images of Europa carve out a deeply liminal and feminine space that becomes a fitting

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metaphor for the reception and transmission of classical culture in the Ovide moralisé.13 Following Chrétien’s process, let us turn to the Greek origins of Europa’s rape. A maiden astride a bull became synonymous with Europa and Zeus early on in the mythological tradition. While it is quite possible that the Europa tale has its origin in Near Eastern mythology,14 the Greeks promulgated her story. Most scholars agree that by the sixth century bce, the image of a young girl mounted upon a steer had become the standard Western iconography for Europa.15 Europa’s popularity is evidenced not only by the literary tradition, but also by the sheer quantity of visual depictions: from vases to mosaics, from coins to frescoes.16 The image of a woman on the back of a beast of burden is so deeply inscribed in the visual tradition that neither Europa nor the bull needs to be fully recognizable to be identified. The story of Europa became so famous, in fact, that the mere juxtaposition of bull and maiden, even when dismounted, is sufficient for her identification (Fig. 2.3). Fourth-century bce Apulian vases, for example, depict the maiden gesturing towards the bull as it kneels before her in submission, and capture her moment of hesitation before she, swept away to Crete, becomes the submitted one.17 Nevertheless, the most common portrayal of Europa throughout the classical period and beyond remains that of her mounted on the back of the bull or swimming 13

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This discussion will be taken up again in a subsequent, and lengthier, study on the relationship of Christian and pagan imagery in the entire corpus of illuminations of the Ovide moralisé. For a more detailed discussion of the relationship between Greek and Near Eastern myth, see M.L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Many thanks to Molly Allen for sharing her thesis discussing Phoenician influence upon the Europa myth (“How Phoenician was Europa?,” University of Otago, New Zealand, 2008). Although we have lost many literary sources (such as Eumelos’ eponymous epic, Epicorum Graecorum Fragmenta fr. 2), extant ancient Greek texts point to all the familiar elements of the story: Zeus in taurine form carries an innocent maiden away to Crete. For a survey of the Greek sources, see Martin Robertson, “Europe,” in the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, vol. 4, part 1 (Zurich, Munich, Dusseldorf: Artemis & Winkler Verlag, 1988), 76–92, henceforth abbreviated limc. See also Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), 210–1. For an excellent treatment of the literary and visual sources from antiquity to modernity, see Cristina Acidini Luchinat and Elena Capretti, Il mito di Europa: Da fanciulla rapita a continente (Florence: Giunti, 2002). limc, vol. 4, part 1, nos. 1.4 and 1.8.

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Figure 2.3 Red-figure vase with Rape of Europa, c. 480 bce. Tarquinia Museum (Album/Art Resource, ny)

alongside him, holding his horns and using his back and/or neck for support.18 Yet the question remains: Why did the myth of Europa gain such popularity in the visual and literary imaginations of fourteenth-century France? The answer lies in Rome. Ovid provides the fullest and most compelling extant rendition of Europa’s story. Indeed, Europa’s rape by Jupiter is one of Ovid’s most beloved tales.19 We encounter the subject twice in the 18 See limc, vol. 4, part 1, nos. 21–213 for Europa on the bull’s back. There are only twenty examples of Europa with the bull but not mounted upon it (nos. 1–20). 19 It might surprise us modern readers that Ovid became one of the most celebrated poets of the Middle Ages. After all, what could Christian moralizing poets possibly see in Ovid’s flippant works and tales of sex? Ovid’s treatment of women is especially jarring to modern readers. On the one hand, he is a sort of proto-feminist who gives voice to the voiceless in the Heroides. On the other hand, he tends to belittle women, for example

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Metamorphoses: once in Book Two as a sort of aeitiology for Thebes (833–75), and once in Book Six as a part of Arachne’s tapestry (103–7).20 In Book Two, Ovid introduces the maiden (who is not yet re-named) as the daughter of King Agenor. Taken by her beauty, the king of the gods transforms himself into a white bull: … Sceptri gravitate relicta ille pater rectorque deum, cui dextra trisulcis ignibus armata est, qui nutu concutit orbem, induitur faciem tauri mixtusque iuvencis mugit et in teneris formosus obambulat herbis. Quippe color nivis est, quam nec vestigia duri calcavere pedis nec solvit aquaticus auster. (2.847–53) That father and ruler of gods, whose right hand is armed with triple forked fire and who shakes the world with his command, with the dignity of his scepter set aside, assumes the figure of a bull. After mixing with the cattle, he lows and walks about on the tender grass, a handsome steer. To be sure, his color is of snow, which neither the steps of heavy feet have trodden nor the rainy south wind has melted. Ovid then draws attention to the virility of the bull and its bulging muscles (colla toris exstant, 2.851–2), his long-hanging dewlaps (armis palearia pendent, 2.854), and his perfectly formed horns (cornua parva quidem, sed quae contendere possis/ facta manu, puraque magis perlucida gemma, 2.855–6), signaling the sexually charged undertones of the whole passage. The maiden was powerless to resist Jupiter’s advances, Ovid suggests, “because he was so comely, because he threatened no attacks, but still she was afraid to touch him first, even though he was gentle” (quod tam formosus, quod proelia nulla minetur,/ sed quamvis mitem metuit contingere primo, 2.859–60). Her innocence is emphasized; yet, she is drawn in by the snowy coat of the bull, and by his sweet lickings and (seemingly) chaste advances beckoning her to mount him. As she

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Corinna in the Ars Amatoria seems little more than a figure for Ovid’s narrator to objectify. Europa also figures in Book Five of the Fasti, where the violence of her rape is downplayed, and her coupling with Jupiter (rather than with the bull) is emphasized, as the god drops his disguise prior to making love to her. Essentially, however, the outcome is the same: Jupiter returns to Olympus, leaving Europa with child, and a third of the world is subsequently named after her (5.617–8).

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feeds him wild flowers, Jupiter can scarcely restrain his passion and leaps around on the grass. He lies down and lets her scratch his chest, and she adorns his horns with flowers: “And now he frolics and leaps about in the green grass; now he lays his snowy side on the yellow shore” (Et nunc adludit viridique exsultat in herba,/ nunc latus in fulvis niveum deponit harenis, 2.864–5). The sexual innuendo could not be more obvious. Finally, the princess dares to sit upon the bull’s back, giving rise to the distinct iconography: cum deus a terra siccoque a litore sensim falsa pedum primo vestigia ponit in undis, inde abit ulterius mediique per aequora ponti fert praedam. Pavet haec litusque ablata relictum respicit et dextra cornum tenet, altera dorso inposita est; tremulae sinuantur flamine vestes. (2.870–5) First the god places the false tracks of his feet in the waves, moving little by little away from the land and from the dry shore; from there he goes off further and bears his booty through the waters of the middle sea. The stolen maid trembles and looks back at the shore left behind; her right hand holds his horn, the other is placed on his back. Her tremulous robes are pulled into billows by the gales. It is precisely this scene that is immortalized in so many media and periods. In fact, Ovid’s description is so vivid at this point that it is almost as if he is describing a work of art.21 We should note that if in Book Two, Ovid emphasizes Europa as the beautiful maiden chosen by Jupiter for a mate who bears his child and triumphantly becomes the eponymous heroine of one third of the world, Arachne’s vision in Book Six is deeply pessimistic: Maeonis elusam designat imagine tauri Europam: verum taurum, freta vera putares. Ipsa videbatur terras spectare relictas 21

Ovid’s very visual portrayal is all the more striking, given that his Greek predecessors tend to emphasize the great progeny that result from the union of the princess and God (Pseudo-Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women, fragments 19-19a, and Pseudo-Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca, 3.1.1-2; Moschus’ Europa is a notable exception); artistic depictions, however, focus on the moment when Zeus carries the maiden across the sea.

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et comites clamare suas tactumque vereri adsilientis aquae timidasque reducere plantas. (6.103–7) She portrays Europa cheated by the likeness of the bull: You would think that it was a true bull, true waves. Europa herself seemed to look at the land left behind, to shout out to her own companions, to fear the touch of the water splashing up, and to pull back her timid heels. Rachel Jacoff points out this scene’s pitiable themes: “Arachne’s tapestry emphasizes Europa’s loss of her home and friends, her fear and fragility; nothing positive about the abduction or its outcome is even hinted at here.”22 Rather than portraying the bull as a gentle suitor, Arachne instead underscores Jupiter’s treachery and trickery: He dupes the maiden and uses her.23 Thus, each version of the myth “shifts the emphasis of the story somewhat, allowing it to be interpreted in a slightly different way.”24 What is significant in both of these accounts, however, is that Europa’s space and place in the Metamorphoses is by definition a transitional one. Her abduction by the bull operates at a threshold between two worlds, balanced between the poles of rapture and rape, earthly and divine.25 It is precisely for this reason, Jacoff notes, that Dante will introduce a reference to her as his pilgrim looks back for a final glance 22

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Jacoff, “The Rape/Rapture of Europa: Paradiso 27,” in The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante’s Divine Comedy, ed. Jacoff and Jeffrey Thompson Schnapp (Palo Alto, ca: Stanford University Press, 1991), 236–7. This dark portrayal of Europa reflects Arachne’s own dire position in the face of Minerva. Within the Ovidian framework, while Arachne’s femininity no doubt contributes to shaping and informing the artistic choices she makes in crafting her tapestry, her point of view is likely even more informed by her transgressive nature and, in the Ovide moralisé, by the sin of pride to which she succumbs. But that is the subject of another discussion. Jacoff, 234. Jacoff’s interpretation goes hand in hand with M. Catherine Boulton’s argument in “Gendered Spaces in Ovid’s Heroides,” Classical World 102, no. 3 (2009): 273–90. Boulton notes that the Roman woman traditionally inhabited the private space of the house, and that those mythological women (like Deianira or, we might add, Europa) who escape the boundaries of the house via rape or abduction do not find freedom and adventure, but are turned into transgressive figures, both morally and sexually, and become subjected to extreme penalties. Although Europa is the daughter of a mortal, she is more than a mere human; she was worshipped in Crete as a goddess, and scholars have suggested that the mythology concerning Europa and her brother Cadmus is connected to astral phenomena. The stars, of course, were considered to be divine in the ancient mind. See West, The East Face of Helicon, 443–7.

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prior to contemplating the Beatific Vision in the Paradiso (canto 27, lines 67–96). Therefore, already in Ovid, the tale of Europa serves as a bridge: between the east and west, between Greek and Roman, and, as the coniunx of a god, between the realms of divine and mortal. Within Ovid’s narrative, Europa serves to connect the old and the new.26 The author of the Old French Ovide moralisé, with a sensitivity to Ovid’s aims, glosses the tale of Europa by taking it one step further and using Ovid’s bridge between the human and divine as one between the pagan and Christian. In France around the beginning of the fourteenth century, the author of the Ovide moralisé took up the myth of Europa in his immense translation and commentary project.27 An inscription in Paris bnf ms fr. 24306 notes it was compiled for queen “Johanne,” most likely Jeanne de Bourgogne, who married the future Philippe V in 1307.28 Twenty manuscripts of the Ovide moralisé have survived;29 fifteen of them are illustrated. A number of the manuscripts bear witness to attentive study by learned readers, who left interlinear and marginal glosses in Latin (Rouen Municipal Library ms 0.4, Paris bnf ms fr. 373) or—in the case of Copenhagen Royal Library ms Thott. 399—in both Latin and French. Moreover, since most (perhaps all) of the manuscripts of the Ovide moralisé were commissioned and owned by noble patrons, we know it was well received in court circles. Its popularity endured well into the fifteenth century, 26

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The myth of Europa serves as a bridge narratively in the transition between the second and third books, moving from a more global perspective (the cosmology at the beginning, the inundation and subsequent rebirth of the human race, and the inflagration of Phaethon’s chariot) to the Theban cycle of Ovid’s opus, which serves simultaneously as a commentary upon and a proleptic version of the founding of Rome. See also Micaela Janan, Reflections in a Serpent’s Eye: Thebes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). For a solid introduction to recent scholarship on the Ovide moralisé, see the collection of essays edited by Laurence Harf-Lancner, Laurence Mathey-Maille, and Michelle Szkilnik, Ovide Metamorphose: Les lecteurs medievaux d’Ovide (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2009). Philippe was crowned on January 6, 1317. The full Latin inscription reads: “Qui secuntur hic habentur, scilicet Liber in gallico et rithmice editus a magistro Philippo de Vitriaco quondam Meldensis episcopo ad requestam domine Johanne quondam regine Francie.” If, as Pierre Bersuire implies, the Ovide moralisé was composed at Jeanne’s command, it must have been completed after her coronation in 1317. Of course, it is also possible that the title “regine Francie” was simply added when this particular fourteenth-century manuscript of the Ovide moralisé was executed, and that the poem was begun before the coronation. Twenty-one, if one counts London British Library ms Cotton Julius F. VII, which contains only pen drawings of figures of the pagan gods and a list of rubrications.

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as the single illumination of New York Pierpont Morgan ms 443 (c. 1400–10) attests: On the opening folio, the scribe presents his manuscript of the Ovide moralisé to King Charles V of France, with the Duc de Berry and Jean sans Peur looking on. Given the Ovide moralisé’s presence in royal courts, it is tempting to hypothesize that the author may have been a court confessor.30 This study focuses on the images of Europa in the Rouen (fol. 71r) and Arsenal (fol. 27r) manuscripts. The Rouen manuscript, dated 1315–20, is the earliest surviving copy. It also contains the most extensive illumination program, with 453 miniatures (90 of these are devoted to Christian, allegorical scenes). The Arsenal manuscript, of 1325–50, originally contained 340 miniatures, with one-tenth of the images dedicated to the Christian moralizations. In each of these cases, the Europa scene is immediately followed by an image of Christ: on the road to Calvary (in the Arsenal copy, fol. 27v), and at the moment of the Ascension (in the Rouen version, fol. 72r). Our goal here is to clarify, especially for those interested in medieval illuminations of Ovid, that the very juxtaposition of Ovidian and Christian themes as they are presented visually in the codex can be understood only through the interpretation provided by the text, which reveals the importance of Europa’s feminine and liminal role in the Old French translation.31 The author of the Ovide moralisé makes an interesting move at the beginning of the tale: He castrates the bull. In the Metamorphoses, as we have seen, Jupiter is a bull (Lat. taurus, of toriel), with all his manly parts intact— appropriate given the god’s sexual potency and his lustful hunting of Europa. But, for the author of the Ovide moralisé, Jupiter’s embodiment becomes initially not that of a toriel (as the god will in fact be described twice, later in the poem), but of a bues or buef, that is, a castrated bull, also known as a bullock or ox. This is, for example, the word used for “ox” in the Old French Psalter ms Cambridge LXV.13, where Christ himself “deigned to become an ox (bues), … white in coloring.” The dual identity of the metamorphosed Jupiter as toriel (bull) and bues (ox) seems impossible: How can the animal be both highly eroticized and impotent at the same time? The precise moment in the Old French text where the transformation of Jupiter from bues to toriel (bull) occurs is significant. 30

31

Educated in theological controversies of his day, the author of the Moralized Ovid probably studied at the University of Paris. Given affinities with neo-Platonism and writings of St. Bonaventure, he was likely a Franciscan, well-versed in Biblical exegesis as well as in the classical and medieval literary traditions. In other words, the careful placement of the images within the two manuscripts serves to convey meaning.

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The switch happens when Europa approaches and touches the beast. In return he licks and kisses her hands: “She approaches the bull (toriel), holding in her hands the luscious grass, that she gives it to eat …. He licks the beautiful hands and kisses them” (2.5034–7 and 5039).32 The maiden eventually becomes so comfortable that she mounts him and the bull-qua-Jupiter carries his prey (proie, 2.5057) away on his back.33 The transition from ox to bull is associated with the passionate, carnal tension between Jupiter and the maiden. Quite literally, Europa’s female touch sexualizes him and sets in motion the events that carry her off through a transitional space. Europa is constantly portrayed in the in-between: leaving her land, and not yet grounded in a new one. Hardly surprising, then, that the Old French version is more graphic than Ovid when it comes to the rape scene. Whereas Ovid avoids any explicit allusion to the rape whatsoever and merely implies it,34 the Old French translator expounds that “[Jupiter] came to Crete and changed back into his normal shape …. He took her maidenhood (pucelage), and this made him very happy and joyful” (2.5069–73).35 The translator notes at this point the birth of Minos—the union bears fruit—and introduces, as he does so often throughout the work, the theme of the final judgment of souls after death: “Thus was engendered Minos, who exacted justice over the whole of Crete. He was such a good judge that, if the fable does not lie, he conducts the judgments in Hell and judges the felons” (2.5074–80).36 The Old French version of the Europa tale concludes more explicitly than Ovid’s. Whereas Ovid leaves up to the reader to make the connection between the maiden’s name and the continent to which 32

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“Dou toriel s’est aproucie./ A ses mains quieult l’erbe deugie,/ Qu’el donne au toriel a mengier. …/ Les beles mains li leche et baise.” All translations from the Ovide moralisé are by K. SarahJane Murray, based on the French text (emended as necessary) established by Cornelius De Boer, Ovide moralisé: Poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle (Amsterdam: J. Müller, 1915–38). At the time we are writing, the edition is out of print and not easily available to readers. “He so enchanted the beauty that she, who did not know him, mounted on his back. The god carried her away step by step” (“Tant a cil la bele enchantee/ Que sor le dos li est montee/ Cele, qui ne le cognoist pas./ Li dieus l’emporte pas pour pas,” 2.5051–4). William S. Anderson notes that “Since Ovid stops before the predictable rape and the despair of Europa that ensues, the tone of the narration remains light.” See Ovid’s Metamorphoses Books 1–5 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 333. “En Crete vient/ En sa droite forme revient/ Descouvert li a son corage/ S’a de lui pris le pucelage/ Dont molt fu liez et esjoïs.” “Lors fu Mynos engenoïs/ Qui toute ot Crete a justisier./ Molt ot en lui bon justisier/ Tant que, se la fable ne ment,/ Par lui sont fet li jugement/ D’enfer, et li felon jugié/ Lonc ce que chascuns a pechié.”

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she lends it, the medieval translator adds, “Jupiter name[d] the third part of the world after his lover and called it Europe, and he gifted it to her” (2.5081–4). We hold that the dual nature of Jupiter in the text, as both erotic bull and castrated ox, provides the key to interpreting the deliberate juxtaposition of  pagan and Christian imagery within the Rouen and Arsenal manuscript miniatures of Europa. Medieval bestiaries are of further help in exploring and grounding the connection. In the bestiary tradition, bull and bullock always appear together, as in the Aberdeen codex: “The bullock is called juvencus because it undertakes to help man in his work of tilling the ground, or because among pagans it was always a bullock which was sacrificed to Jove, never a bull. … The word for bull, taurus, is [of] Greek [origin], as is the word for ox, bos” (fol. 21v).37 The Oxford Bestiary adds, “The bull is Christ.” Of course, much like medieval numbers, animal typologies carry with them both  intentio bona and intentio mala (positive and negative meanings), depending on the context. In the Oxford Bestiary, bulls are also “the world, tossing the common people on the backs of their pride, as in Jeremiah, ‘Ye have ­bellowed as bulls’, or Isaiah, ‘And bulls with the princes.’”38 Thus, the bull can represent both Christ and sin, especially pride.39 All of these systems of ­meaning are simultaneously wrapped up in the Europa illuminations of the Moralized Ovid. Moreover, we know that the reading of the bull as Christ is supported by the text of the moralization itself. The Old French translator-commentator explains that the bull signifies Christ, who lowered himself (abessier) and took on the sins of humanity so that all Christians would benefit from salvation and eternal life: “For the love of human nature, he was willing to come down and 37 38

39

A fully searchable version of the Aberdeen Bestiary in text (Latin and English translation) and images is available online: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/. Bestiary: Being an English Version of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms Bodley 764, trans. Richard Barber (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2006). The first reference is to Jeremiah 50:11; the second is to Isaiah 34:7, which in the Douay-Rheims and King James Bible earns the unfortunate translation, “And the unicorns shall come down with them, and the bullocks with the bulls, and their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust made fat with fatness.” Distracted by the description of the horned beast, the translator unfortunately opted for “unicorn” instead of “ox.” The error is corrected in the New International Version to “And the wild oxen will fall with them, the bull calves and the great bulls. Their land will be drenched with blood, and the dust will be soaked with fat.” This association between the bull and pride is especially interesting given the moralization of Arachne in Book Six of the Ovide moralisé as the prideful soul.

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lower himself, without leaving behind his divinity” (2.5103–16).40 This very process of incarnation is (albeit imperfectly) mirrored in the poetic ­ rendering of Jupiter’s metamorphosis into the bull in the translation: “Jupiter loved the maiden, for her he left his divine form. … He left his divine form for the beauty, and lowered himself so, that he deigned to become an ox” (2.4967–8 and 2.5005–7).41 Read on an allegorical level, then, Europa represents the human soul ravished by God, swept away to become the bride of Christ. The image of the soulqua-bride is reflected not only within the scope of the Ovide moralisé and the bestiary tradition, but also in the writings of medieval theologians like Bonaventure and Bernard of Clairvaux. The soul (and sometimes the Church) is the sponsa; Christ is the sponsus. A selection from Bernard’s sixty-seventh sermon on the Song of Songs offers a glimpse into such discussions. On the verse, “My beloved is mine, and I am his” (Song of Sol. 2:16), Bernard expounds, There can be no doubt that in this passage is apparent the flame of an ardent and reciprocal love of two persons, one for the other; while in this love appears also the supreme felicity of the one and the marvelous condescension of the other. For it is not an attachment and union between two persons who are of equal condition. Now, who could venture to lay claim to the full knowledge of what she glories in having received in this prerogative of love, and in having repaid it in turn by an affection so great, if not she, who by her eminent purity and holiness of body and of mind, has been found worthy to have experience in her own self of a fortune so exalted? It is in the sphere of the affections that this takes place; it is not attained to by reason, but by conformity of spirit. But how few there are who are enabled to say: “We all with open face, beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:18).42 In light of the “shared love” that “blazes up” between sponsa and sponsus, it makes commensurate sense that it is precisely in the moment that the lovers touch that the author of the Moralized Ovid renders Jupiter as the highly 40 41 42

“Por l’amour d’umaine nature/ Se vault descendre et abessier/ Sans sa divinité lessier.” “La divine forme lessa/ Pour la bele, et tant s’abessa/ Qu’il en deigna bues devenir.” Bernard of Clairvaux, Cantica Canticorum, Sermon 67. Translation from Life and Works of Saint Bernard, ed. Dom John Mabillon and trans. Samuel J. Eales (London: John Hodges, 1896), vol. 1, 413, with slight modifications by Ashley Simone.

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sexualized toriel (bull). And it is entirely fitting that Europa’s name (as stressed by the Old French poet) is given to Europe, which, since Carolingian times, had been identified with the lands of Latin Christendom.43 Seen in this light, the pairing of images in the Rouen and Arsenal manuscripts—that is, of Europa swept away on the back of the bull with either the Ascension or Christ carrying the cross to the Calvary—is logical. Just as Europa-qua-soul carried away on the back of the bull-qua-Jupiter-qua-Christ leads to the founding of a new world and a new order, so too does the carrying of the cross on Christ’s back culminate in the creation of a new order(ing of the world) and the opening of a space between this world and the next. The voluptuous rapture of Europa-qua-soul, joined to Christ and therefore transcending this world, is mirrored in the Arsenal’s miniature of the Ascension. In conclusion, the pagan lands to which Europa lends her name only implicitly in Ovid have been explicitly metamorphosed by the author of the Ovide moralisé into Western Christendom on a literal level and, on a more allegorical level, into the city of God. The author of the Old French translation suggests that the charge of each human soul is to submit humbly, as Europa does, to being swept away in a Song of Songs-like passionate love affair with the Creator, one made possible by the Incarnation and fully redeemed in the sacrifice of the Crucifixion. The master illuminator(s) responsible for illustrating the Rouen and Arsenal manuscripts reinforced this notion, we argue, by juxtaposing the image of Europa’s abduction by the bull with a scene from the life of Christ. In the medieval translation of Ovid, Europa becomes a guide. She plays, visually, a role similar to that occupied by Beatrice in Dante’s Divine Comedy (composed, we note, around the same time in neighboring Italy). Europa is the figural embodiment of the sponsa of the Song of Songs and of the (feminine) soul seeking Christ (the sponsus). Her example ushers the pilgrim reader along the path to salvation, beyond the confines of this world, and into the liminal space—the threshold between this world and the next. Many of her counterparts throughout the text (e.g., Io, as another study will show) perform a similar function, while others, like Medea, remind medieval readers of the punishments awaiting the unrepentant soul after death. 43

This idea coalesced in the eighth century and is one of the lasting legacies of the Carolingian Renaissance. Europa often figures in the letters of Charlemagne’s head of the Palace School, Alcuin (see Steven Allott, Alcuin of York, c. ad 732 to 804: His Life and Letters [York: William Sessions, 1974]), and the understanding of the designation as representing the Christian West continued well into the late Middle Ages.

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In this sense, although the image of Europa sitting on the back of the bull in the Ovide moralisé incorporates, visually, the same components and elements present in ancient Greek and Roman art, its iconographic significance underwent by the early fourteenth century, a profound change (or metamorphosis) that can only be understood within the manuscript and within the theological context of its time. The illuminations reflect the extraordinary role the Old French poet accords to the women of Ovid’s world. Throughout the Ovide moralisé, women like Europa become narrative and visual embodiments of the soul and its liminal, eternal nature: coupled with the body in this world, and yet entirely of the next. Through their very real placement in the storybook world, conjoined with the Christian allegories to which they point and through which they transcend that world, Ovid’s heroines, thus transformed, invited its elite medieval patrons into a liminal feminine space in the manuscripts, engaging them in the very process of metamorphosis, or conversion, to which the Old French translation beckoned them. Bibliography The Aberdeen Bestiary. Accessed August 20, 2013. http://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary. Allen, Molly. “How Phoenician was Europa?” ma thesis, University of Otago, New Zealand, 2008. Allott, Steven. Alcuin of York, c. ad 732 to 804: His Life and Letters. York: William Sessions, 1974. Anderson, William S., ed. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Books 1–5. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Bestiary: Being an English Version of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms Bodley 764. Translated by Richard Barber. Woodbridge, uk: Boydell Press, 2006. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate. Reading Myth: Classical Mythology and Its Interpretations in Medieval French Literature. Palo Alto, ca: Stanford University Press, 1998. Boulton, M. Catherine. “Gendered Spaces in Ovid’s Heroides.” Classical World 102, no. 3 (2009): 273–90. Chance, Jane. Medieval Mythography: From Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres 433–1177. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Chrétien de Troyes. Arthurian Romances. Translated by William Kibler and Carleton Carroll. London, New York: Penguin, 2004. Copeland, Rita. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. De Boer, Cornelius, ed. Ovide moralisé: Poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle. Amsterdam: J. Müller, 1915–38. Freeman, Michelle A. The Poetics of Translatio Studii and Conjointure. Lexington, ky: French Forum, 1979.

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Gantz, Timothy. Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1993. Harf-Lancner, Laurence et al., eds. Ovide métamorphosé: Les lecteurs médievaux d’Ovide. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2009. Haskins, C.H. The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955. Jacoff, Rachel. “The Rape/Rapture of Europa: Paradiso 27.” In The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante’s Divine Comedy, edited by Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey Thompson Schnapp, 233–46. Palo Alto, ca: Stanford University Press, 1991. Janan, Micaela. Reflections in a Serpent’s Eye: Thebes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Keith, Alison, and Stephen Rupp, eds. Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2007. Kelly, Douglas. “Honor, Debate, and Translatio imperii in Cligés.” Arthuriana 18, vol. 3 (2008): 33–47. Lord, Carla. “Three Manuscripts of the Ovide Moralisé.” Art Bulletin 57, no. 2 (1975): 161–75. Luchinat, Cristina Acidini, and Elena Capretti. Il mito di Europa: Da fanciulla rapita a continente. Florence: Giunti, 2002. Martindale, Charles, ed. Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Murray, K. Sarah-Jane. From Plato to Lancelot: A Preface to Chrétien de Troyes. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Edited by William S. Anderson. Leipzig: Teubner, 1977. Reynolds, L.D., and N.G. Wilson. Scribes and Scholars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Robertson, Martin. “Europe.” In Lexicon Iconographum Mythologiae Classicae. Vol. 4, part 1, 76–92. Zurich, Munich, Dusseldorf: Artemis & Winkler Verlag, 1988. Mabillon, John, ed., and Samuel J. Eales, trans. Life and Works of Saint Bernard. 4 vols. London: John Hodges, 1896. Seznec, Jean. The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art. Translated by Barbara F. Sessions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. Southern, Richard W. The Making of the Middle Ages. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967. Survival of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Medieval Art. Exhibition catalogue. Providence: Brown University Bell Gallery, 1987. West, M.L. The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

chapter 3

A Giant Corrupt Body: The Gendering of Renaissance Roma Genevieve S. Gessert Quo magis dictu mirabile est et acerbum aspectu, adeo speciem formamque ipsius immutasse fortunae crudelitatem, ut nunc omni decore nudata, prostrata iaceat instar gigantei cadaveris corrupti, atque undique exesi: deflendum quippe est hanc urbem tot quondam illustrium virorum atque imperatorum foetam, tot belli ducum, tot principum excellentissimorum altricem, tot tantarumque virtutum parentem, tot bonarum artium procreatricem. How much more wondrous to speak of and bitter to observe: the appearance and beauty of Zthe city changed by the cruelty of fortune, so that now denuded of all grace, she lies prostrate like a giant corrupt body, and worn away everywhere: one must surely weep over this city once fertile with so many illustrious men and emperors, of so many leaders of war, the nursemaid of so many most excellent leaders, the parent of so many and such great (masculine) virtues, the procreator of so many good arts.1 In the pontificate of Martin v (1417–31), Poggio Bracciolini and his papal colleague Antonio Loschi took a tour of the monuments of ancient Rome, pausing to ponder the panoramic ruins from the heights of the Campidoglio. In this passage of his De varietate fortunae (On the Vicissitudes of Fortune), Poggio recounts his friend’s reaction to the sight: Loschi was overwhelmed both by what had been lost and by what remained, and he used his knowledge of Roman history and literature to reconstruct those components no longer ­visible. While this account has been closely studied for its description of the surviving ancient monuments, and more recently for its tension between the accomplishments of man versus the ravages of nature,2 it is also remarkable for the gendered and physical terms used to dramatize the view. Significantly, the city is rendered corporeal in the description, as a giant corrupt cadaver now denuded and splayed across the landscape. This is no generic body, but one struggling for definition in 1 Poggio Bracciolini, Historia de varietate fortunae (Paris: Constelier, 1723) 1.6–7, translation by the author. 2 Mary D. Garrard, Brunelleschi’s Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 33–4. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004289697_005

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terms of gender and purpose. This body is invested with the feminine ideals of fertility and nurturing by its characterization as fertile (foeta) and as a nursemaid (altrix), but at the same time it engenders masculine qualities ­(virtutes) and dominant men: illustrious men and emperors (illustri viri atque imperatores) and leaders of war (belli duces). This uncertain status, on the border between masculine and feminine, combined with the city’s fragmentary appearance, inspires the viewer (and reader) toward a desire for comprehension and reconstruction. Thus this gender tension is at once a vivid description of the ruined state of antiquity, and a vivid metaphor for conceptualizing the Italian Renaissance desire to view, complete, and revivify Roman material remains. Using Poggio’s account as a touchstone, this chapter focuses on the interpretation in Renaissance Italy of ancient sculptures with intersexual status, namely those depicting hermaphrodites. The first section explores the theme of the hermaphrodite in Italian humanistic thought and artistic output of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Drawing from antiquity’s varied accounts of the intersexual quasi-deity Hermaphroditus, Renaissance thinkers and artists crafted heterogeneous responses to perceived blending of genders in both ancient and contemporary art. The range of reactions, from prurient desire to disgusted abjection, from admiration of potential to rejection of corruption, parallels the attitude towards the ruins of Rome described by Poggio and promulgated by later Renaissance popes and antiquarians. The second section of the chapter turns to literary descriptions and visual renderings of Roma, which significantly are subject to the same heterogeneous methodologies of interpretation as the overtly intersexual hermaphrodite. Both in literary descriptions of ancient sculptures and in contemporary artworks, the iconography, attitude, and even gender of Roma are open to interpretation, developing and changing as the Renaissance both reveals more of antiquity and comes to grips with its response to it. Kathleen Long’s characterization of the image of the hermaphrodite in Renaissance France could also easily be applied to the image of Roma in this formative period: “It can be read as a descent into chaos that lies outside of carefully categorized culture; yet it is also a symbol of harmony, of generation, of corruption, and of renewal… It is the perfect figure for troubled times.”3

Parte un sottil velo ha circuita: Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Italy

Around the same time as their contemplation of the ruins of Rome, Loschi and Poggio received and read a notorious volume of neo-Latin poetry by Antonio 3 Kathleen P. Long, Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 27.

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Beccadelli (also known as Panormita): a collection of bawdy epigrams p ­ ublished as The Hermaphrodite in 1425.4 Although the work had been condemned by ­others as morally reprehensible, Poggio penned a letter to Beccadelli expressing a favorable reaction to the artistry and antiquity of the poetry, but he cautioned the young poet to choose his future subject matter more appropriately: So I praise your learning, the pleasantness of the poetry, the jokes and the wit, and I give you whatever small thanks I can that you have roused from sleep the Latin Muses that have been so long dormant. Nevertheless, in view of the kindly concern we all owe to each other, there is one thing on which I must and want to advise you, and that is that you next turn your mind to more serious matters.5 Another contemporary humanist, the influential collector and teacher Guarino da Verona, couched his praise of The Hermaphrodite similarly in reference to its subject matter: Would you therefore praise Apelles, Fabius, and other painters the less because they painted naked and open to view those parts of the body which by nature prefer to be hidden? What if they painted worms, snakes, mice, scorpions, frogs, flies, and disgusting vermin? Wouldn’t you admire and praise their art and the skill of the artist?6 Beccadelli included both Guarino’s and Poggio’s letters in later editions of the work, with the former as the frontispiece and the latter between the two books of the collection. He added his respectful response letter to Poggio as the epilogue: 4 Antonio Beccadelli, The Hermaphrodite, ed. and trans. Holt Parker, I Tatti Renaissance Library 42 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2010). All translations of Beccadelli and related letters are from this volume. 5 Poggio Bracciolini, “Letter to Beccadelli,” 3–4, in Beccadelli, Hermaphrodite, 56–9: “Laudo igitur doctrinam tuam, iocunditatem carminis, iocos ac sales tibique gratias ago, pro portiuncula mea, qui Latinas musas, quae iam diu nimium dormierunt, a somno excitas. Pro caritate tamen qua omnes debitores sumus omnibus, unum est quod te monere et debeo et volo, ut scilicet deinceps graviora uaedam mediteris.” 6 Guarino da Verona, Guarini in Hermaphroditon iudicium 1, in Parker, Hermaphrodite, 2–3: “An ideo minus laudabis Apellem, Fabium ceterosve pictores quia nudas et apertas pinxerunt in corpore particulas natura latere volentes? Quid si vermes, angues, mures, scorpiones, ranas, muscas fastidiosasque bestiolas expresserint? Num ipsam admiraberis et extolles artem artificisque solertiam?”

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Many learned, serious, and venerable men, both Greek and our own Latins, have written such things, … exceptional Latin poets who often exhibit words so blunt and indecent to utter that you scarcely know whether they’re more suitable to the stage or the brothel.7 This literary episode is extremely illustrative of the charged potential of the hermaphrodite in this period. The Hermaphrodite did not take an actual intersexual individual as its subject, rather a broad range of male-female and male-male sexual experience, which gave Beccadelli the possibility of exercising his poetic art to its greatest expression. The poet’s use of this title also underscores the broad application of the term “hermaphrodite,” which was applied in legal contexts to any individuals who presented non-standard gender attitude: cross-dressers, homosexuals, or bisexuals.8 The inclusion of these varied reactions in Beccadelli’s volume lastly acknowledges both the Lacanian desire and the Kristevan abjection that such aberrant concepts could engender.9 Guarino’s statement essentially equates the revelation of the genitalia with the representation of animals associated with transgression and corruption; in turn both objects of disgust have the potential of transcending their abject status by aesthetic means.10 Yet a later moment in The Hermaphrodite’s reception is also telling. In 1435 Beccadelli was forced to recant his association with his youthful work: “I am now ashamed that I taught various filthy acts and/impious ways of Venus, which nature shuns.”11 What had once been the vehicle for display of artistic skill and learned antiquity became fodder for his critics and a hindrance to Beccadelli’s career. 7

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9 10 11

Antonio Beccadelli, Reply to Poggio 2, in Parker, Hermaphrodite, 114–5: “Plurimos norint [doctissimi homines] viros doctos, graves, sanctos, et Graecos et nostros, talia scriptitasse,  …poetas egregios et Latinos, qui plerumque verba adeo nuda proferunt et dictu foeda ut hand scias scaenane magis an lupanari digna sint.” Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, “The Hermaphrodite and the Orders of Nature: Sexual Ambiguity in Early Modern France,” in Premodern Sexualities, eds. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1996), 122; Long, Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe, 4 and 26. See also Michael Rocke, “Gender and Sexual Culture in Renaissance Italy,” in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis (London and New York: Longman, 1996), 150–70 for an overview of the legal situation in Italy. See for example Kelly Oliver, Subjectivity without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers (Lanham, md: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 55. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). Antonio Beccadelli, Recantation, lines 3–4, in Parker, Hermaphrodite, 124–5: “Hic faeces varias Veneris moresque profanos/quos natura fugit, me docuisse piget.”

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Over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this variegated response to the intersexual would crystalize around two ancient accounts of the hermaphrodite, derived from texts “discovered” and vigorously interpreted in Renaissance Italy:12 Plato’s Symposium and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.13 In the famous allegory by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, the hermaphrodite ­represented the original perfect being, an exact balance of the genders, bisected by the jealousy of the gods and forever seeking reunification. This ideal and seemingly unattainable entity, possessing the sexual characteristics of both male and female, had a double identity overtly displayed in one unified body. In contrast, the Ovidian account in Metamorphoses 4.285−415 of Hermaphroditus, the male offspring of Aphrodite and Hermes rendered intersexual at the wish of the amorous nymph Salmacis, described the male-female combination as fraught with uncertainty. Kathleen Long states, “Whereas, to a large extent, the Aristophanic myth represented the search for the origins of the self, as distinct from the other, the Ovidian myth expresses the fear of the dissolution into the other, the fear that those boundaries created at the dawn of time may at any moment be transgressed.”14 Yet the Renaissance reaction cannot be simplified into simply Aristophanic versus Ovidian views of the hermaphrodite; contemporary mythographers interpreted Ovid’s Hermaphroditus variously as an allegory of the incarnation (Christ containing the masculine nature of God and the feminine nature of humanity) or as a cautionary tale regarding the sensual world,15 while the birth of actual hermaphroditic individuals like the so-called Monster of Ravenna were seen as harbingers of specific disastrous events.16 What is most illustrative about this range of responses is the ways that the hermaphrodite was used allegorically to explore significant 12

The first full Latin translation of Plato’s Symposium was published by Marsilio Ficino in 1484, but the Greek text was certainly circulating in Italy throughout the fifteenth century, and partially and loosely translated by Leonardo Bruni in 1435. See James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990), 80. 13 It is important to note that the ancient cult role of Hermaphroditus was seemingly based on neither of these literary accounts. See Aileen Ajootian, “Hermaphroditus,” in Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, vol. 5 (Zürich and Munich: Artemis Verlag, 1990), 268–85. 14 Long, Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe, 11. 15 Lauren Silberman, “Mythographic Transformations of Ovid’s Hermaphrodite,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 19, no. 4 (1988): 643–52. 16 Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 35–51; Long, Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe, 32–8. The birth of the severely deformed Maria Malatendi in Bologna in 1514 provides another interesting comparandum, especially in relation to the ideas explored below; an anonymous Roman

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binary oppositions in contemporary society, and thus contained both the desired outcome of those tensions and their potential transgressions. This coexistence of fearfulness about and admiration for the intersexual body is also replicated in the Renaissance reaction to ancient images of the hermaphrodite, particularly regarding the ability of a single image to evoke this complicated dialectic. Sometime between 1420 and 1445, a statue of a hermaphrodite was discovered in a drain in Rome and brought to Lorenzo Ghiberti as he was working on a tomb at Santa Cecilia in Trastevere.17 I saw in Rome … the statue of an hermaphrodite, the size of a thirteenyear-old girl, which had been made with admirable skill. …It is impossible for the tongue to tell the perfection and knowledge, art and skill of that statue. … The figure was on the linen cloth and was turned in a way to show both the masculine and the feminine characteristics …. One of the legs was stretched out and the large toe had caught the cloth, and the pulling of the cloth was shown with wonderful skill. The statue was without a head but nothing else was missing. In this state were the greatest refinements. The eye perceived nothing if the hand had not found it by touch.18 Though the actual sculpture viewed by Ghiberti disappeared following this episode, he seems to be describing an example of a type known from other surviving examples (most notably in the Galleria Borghese) in which a youthful figure sleeping on its stomach on drapery presents female features 17

18

observer interpreted each element of the child’s anatomy as representative of the political and social situation in contemporary Italy (Niccoli, Prophecy and People, 51–9). Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources, 2nd ed. (New York: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2010), no. 98; Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 165. Lorenzo Ghiberti, Commentari 3.1: “Vidi in Roma … una statua d’uno Ermofrodito di grandeza d’una fanciulla d’anni tredici, la quale statua era stata fatta con mirabile ingegno… La quale statua, doctrina et arte et magisterio non è possibile con la lingua potere dire la perfectione d’essa…essa statua era in su detto pannolino et era svolta in modo mostrava la natura virile et la natura feminile…distesa tiene l’una delle gambe col ditto grosso del piè. Aveva preso el pannolino, in quella tirata del panno mostrava mirabile arte. Era sanza testa, nessuna altra cosa aveva manco. In questa era moltissime dolceze, nessuna cosa il viso scorgeva, se non col tatto la mano la trovava.” Translation in Elizabeth G. Holt, ed. and trans., A Documentary History of Art, vol. 1: The Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 163–4.

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when viewed from the front; the male genitalia are apparent only when the work is viewed from the other side. Ghiberti’s description of and reaction to the work bring out some of the key themes that repeatedly arise in relation to the hermaphrodite: the awe-inspiring skill required to render duality; the combination of revelation and deception perpetrated by the drapery and by the orientation of the body; and the desire to capture the figure in words, gaze, and touch. His response resonates with Pirro Ligorio’s later description of the Aracoeli sarcophagus depicting a cross-dressing Achilles among maidens at Skyros. Ligorio also marveled at the ancient artist’s ability to capture gender transition: “What betrays him is the clothing which he is holding stretched out on his side, which reveals part of the masculine thigh, along with his whole rather muscular leg, such that he differs from the rest of his female companions.”19 The hermaphrodite of the discovered statue is a perfect image from the past, balancing male and female, never to be equaled but ­nevertheless to be constantly sought. Other responses can be tracked via receptions of extant ancient sculptures and via Renaissance drawings. By the end of the fifteenth century, when both inventories of sculpture collections and sketchbooks of Roman artworks began to be produced, the stereotypical elements of hermaphrodite sculptures— high artistry, dramatic revealing drapery, and seamless androgyny—inspired some significant interpretations. A notable example of this phenomenon is the basalt Apollo once in the Sassi collection, now in the Farnese Collection of the Naples Museum (Fig. 3.1).20 The work is a variant of an ancient statue type, possibly originated by Praxiteles, that depicts Apollo with the kithara.21 Leaning languidly towards a pillar that catches part of his slipping drapery (the left arm and upper part of the kithara are later additions), the figure thrusts out his right hip and drapes his arm over his head in a sinuous Praxitelean composition. Though the figure clearly exhibits male genitalia and musculature, both the Sassi collection inventory of the early sixteenth century and Ulisse Aldrovandi in his Delle statue antiche (1550) describe this statue as a 19

20

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Translation in Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 163. For the original Italian, see Hermann Dessau, “Römische Reliefs beschrieben von Pirro Ligorio,” Sitzungbericht der Berliner Akademie 40 (1883): 1093. On the sarcophagus, see also Bober and Rubenstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, no. 121. Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance, BerlinBrandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, accessed August 11, 2014, CensusID 153877. http://census.bbaw.de. On this type, the Apollo Citharoedos, see Bober and Rubenstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, no. 35.

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Figure 3.1 Apollo Citharoedos, identified in the Renaissance as Hermaphroditus, 2nd century ce. Farnese Collection, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (The Warburg Institute Photographic Collection)

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hermaphrodite.22 Engravers of the mid-sixteenth century also label the figure as such, while rendering the male attributes of the torso with faithful detail (Fig. 3.2). The suggestive drapery and feminine tresses could have inspired the intersexual definition,23 but the use of a hard stone that was difficult to work without high levels of knowledge and artistry may have also contributed, as both hybrid images and hard stone required an advanced level of artistic accomplishment.24 The one securely hermaphroditic ancient sculpture known in the Renaissance and still extant received yet another treatment. This standing marble statue, in which drapery covered the back and right leg but exposed the rest of the body, likely echoes the statue type of Venus Pudica (Venus covering herself), although by the early modern era the lower arms of the figure had been lost, as had the head.25 The work was described by the pseudonymous Prospectivo Milanese in the collection of Mario Astalli in Rome around 1500: Ecci un inclita po hermafrodita producta fu dalli superni dei e parte un sottil velo ha circuita .… Here is a famous hermaphrodite offspring of the eternal gods and surrounded in part by a thin veil .…26 Again the visual and conceptual themes are reiterated, and the Ovidian version of the story is alluded to, in the characterization of the hermaphrodite as the 22

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25 26

Ulisse Aldrovandi, Delle statue antiche che per tutta Roma in diversi luoghi…si veggono, in Lucio Mauro, Le antichità della città di Roma (Venice, 1556), 155; Phyllis Pray Bober, Drawings after the Antique by Amico Aspertini: Sketchbooks in the British Museum (London: Warburg Institute, 1957), 71. Barkan proposes that Aldrovandi “may have imagined some straightforwardly gendered figures to be hermaphrodites simply because they were suggestively covered” (Unearthing the Past, 166), but in the absence of a head, Aldrovandi also used the remnants of long hair as justification for his attribution (CensusID 57174, for example). A seated Apollo once in the Cesi collection and now in the Palazzo Altemps also retained a Hermaphrodite label due to Aldrovandi’s interpretation (CensusID 159467). The epigraph of the statue as recorded in 1554 in the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae series describes the statue as “ex basalte duritatis colorisque ferrei,” while another anonymous engraver uses the phrase “ex indice lapide” (British Museum 1947,0319.26.136 and Y,6.315). Bober and Rubenstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, no. 97. Prospectivo Milanese, Antiquarie prospettiche romane 18, in Bober and Rubenstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, no. 97.

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Figure 3.2 Engraving of the Farnese “Hermaphroditus,” from the Speculum Magnificentiae Romanae, 1554. British Museum, London (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

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offspring of the superni dei. This hermaphrodite is famous not for its a­ rtistry, but for its barely concealed monstrosity. This darker interpretation is delineated by the Renaissance drawings of the sculpture, several of which combine the hermaphrodite with another figure gazing with surprise, interest, or horror at the figure’s fragmentary male genitalia (Fig.  3.3).27 Significantly, once the sculpture arrived in the Pamphili collection in the seventeenth c­ entury, its problematic aspects were obscured by more expansive drapery, thereby covering Hermaphroditus and revealing Venus (Fig. 3.4).28 This brief survey elucidates the broad application of the concept of the ­hermaphrodite in the Italian Renaissance, from broadly intersexual being to specific mythological figure, as well as the heterogeneity of responses. The ideas that link all of these receptions are that the hermaphroditic figure contains great potentiality, whether for perfection or corruption, and that its definition and categorization is a worthwhile if dangerous pursuit. For hermaphroditic images are like the objects of sacred initiation, designed to focus attention on the fleeting moment of revelation and transition. But the revelation was not fully illuminating—as the viewing of the external hybridity continued, the process of interpretation became more elaborate, willing the viewer to delve deeper to achieve understanding of the inner essence. Barkan analyzes these images in a meditation upon the artistic process,29 but they could also be considered for their bearing upon the origins of classification and archaeology. To put it another way, the difference between images of Venus and Hermaphro­ditus are in the action as interpreted by its audience: Venus coyly covers her secrets, while Hermaphroditus demonstrates, and this dichotomy is borne out in the  nomenclature assigned to ancient feminine statues (Venus Pudica, for example), with no such modesty associated with the hermaphrodite.30 The ­straightforwardly gendered body resists investigation, while the intersexual one necessitates and invites further exploration. In this regard, the gendering of Roma, both as personification and as city, can be seen as a significant piece in the puzzle of the Renaissance rediscovery of antiquity. 27 Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 166. See also Frans Floris, Basel Sketchbook, folio 29v (CensusID 46564; Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, fig. 97b). 28 CensusID 151674. 29 Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 166. 30 Interestingly, there is a large corpus of ancient images of Hermaphroditos Anasyromenos (Hermaphrodite Lifting Up Garment) that was apparently not directly known to the Renaissance (Ajootian, “Hermaphroditus,” 274–6) but that could be seen as the latent influence for these interpretations.

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Figure 3.3 Drawing after the Farnese “Hermaphroditus” and Crouching Venus, c. 1503. British Museum, London (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

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Figure 3.4 Standing Hermaphrodite, 1st–2nd century ce, converted into a Venus in the 17th century. Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome (The Warburg Institute Photographic Collection)

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L’ossa del corpo senza carne: Re-covering the Gender of Ancient Roma

Since antiquity, the city of Rome has been portrayed in a variety of guises. During times of accomplishment, she is Roma triumphans or Roma caput mundi, as in Ovid’s exile poetry31 and on numerous Roman coins starting in the late republic;32 in times of strife, she is a suppliant or mourning figure, as portrayed in Lucan’s Pharsalia (1.185–203) or in Claudian’s late antique consular panegyric Panegyricus dictus Probino et Olybrio (lines 87–97).33 Though both literary traditions inspired textual and visual images of Roma in medieval Italy, the latter depiction of Roma became increasingly dominant after the departure of the papal court for Avignon in 1309, casting the city in the role of a pathetic widow abandoned by the popes.34 To cite an evocative example from Rome itself, in 1344 Cola di Rienzo commissioned a fresco for the façade of the Palazzo dei Conservatori that culminated in the depiction of Roma as a widow with rent clothing and streaming hair, foundering in a damaged boat and praying for salvation.35 Yet as Cristelle Baskins has shown, this image of Roma would evoke not simply pity in the medieval Roman viewer, but a certain state of revulsion. “In the early modern period, widows represent … extreme states of want and wanting; they lack husbands and, thus, are wanting for male companionship and authority, but their desires grow excessive, and their wants 31

32

33

34 35

Catharine Edwards, Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 114–25. On receptions of Ovid’s exile poetry in the Renaissance, see Colin Burrow, “Re-embodying Ovid: Renaissance Afterlives,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 301–19. Cornelius Vermeule, The Goddess Roma in the Art of the Roman Empire (London: Spink and Son, 1959), 29–62; Clive Foss, Roman Historical Coins (London: Seaby, 1990), 9 for the earliest type depicting Roma as an entire figure (70 bce). For Lucan, see Cristelle Baskins, “Trecento Rome: The Poetics and Politics of Widowhood,” in Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Allison Mary Levy (Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2003), 198–9; for Claudian, see Caroline Vout, The Hills of Rome: Signature of an Eternal City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 109. On an ancient Roman coin type with the unusual image of the kneeling personified city of Rome in a hand-clasp with the emperor, and on the relationship of classical imagery to personifications of Tuscan cities in sixteenth-century Italian art, see Claudia Lazzaro, “Figuring Florence: Gendered Bodies in Sixteenth-Century Personifications and Their Antique Models,” Chapter 10 in this volume. Natalia Costa-Zalessow, “The Personification of Italy from Dante through the Trecento,” Italica 68, no. 3 (1991), 316–31; Baskins, “Trecento Rome,” 197–210. Baskins, “Trecento Rome,” 201.

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become too great.”36 Like the hermaphrodite, the widow is a potentially transgressive sexual being, one whose excessive feminine needs can be ­ tempered only by the restraining presence of the masculine. Certainly, this image provides a useful allegory for the absence of the ­masculine papacy from feminine Roma. The image of Roma in Renaissance Rome is not ameliorated after the Western Schism’s end in 1417, however; it instead grows old and dies, thereby losing its connection with the present and symbolizing the past glory of the city. In the well-known illumination from Fazio degli Uberti’s Dittamondo of 1447, Roma is reduced to a withered crone sitting among the crumbling ancient monuments, waiting disconsolately for death or restoration (Fig.  3.5).37 Indeed, most Renaissance descriptions of Roma complete the implied process: For Poggio and many other Renaissance writers, as seen above, Roma is a corpse, deprived of the identifying features of life. This image was not simply poetic; Martin V’s bull Etsi in cunctarum of March 30, 1425 lamented the “entrails, viscera, heads, feet, bones, blood, and skins, besides rotten meat and fish, refuse excrement, and other fetid and rotting cadavers” that Romans were throwing into the streets and piazzas, and called for a return to the “City of Gold” heralded in the 1423 Jubilee.38 As we shall see, though, this corpse could be thought to bear the potential for ­discovery and rebirth. The uses of the trope of Roma as cadaver are legion in this period, particularly in the works of authors with autoptic experience of the city.39 The most vivid images were produced by those who had the most investment in and exposure to the ruins of the ancient city, namely papal employees like Poggio and Loschi and, later, artist-archaeologists like Raphael and his circle. In his 1519 letter to Pope Leo x on the state of ancient remains in the city, likely ghostwritten by Baldassare Castiglione, Raphael makes heavy use of the Romaas-corpse metaphor, and he further elaborates the gendered potential of city’s prostrate body. 36 37

38 39

Baskins, “Trecento Rome,” 207. Ibid., 209. On Italian Renaissance images of withered old women as witches, also with classical underpinnings, see Patricia Simons, “The Crone, the Witch, and the Library: The Intersection of Classical Fantasy with Christian Vice during the Italian Renaissance,” Chapter 8 in this volume. Loren W. Partridge, The Art of Renaissance Rome, 1400–1600 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 19. See for example Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (from 1458, Pope Pius ii), “The Ruins of Rome,” in Renaissance Latin Verse: An Anthology, ed. and trans. Alessandro Perosa and John Sparrow (Duckworth: London, 1979), 32–3, and Conradus Celtis, “Degenerate Rome and Roman Vultures,” in Perosa and Sparrow, Renaissance Latin Verse, 417–8.

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Figure 3.5 Anonymous Roma as crone, in Fazio degli Uberti’s Dittamondo, 1447. Bibliothèque nationale, Paris

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In un punto mi dà grandissimo satisfatione, per la cognitione di cosa tanto excellente, e grandissimo dolore, vedendo quasi un cadavero di quella nobil patria, che è stata regina del mondo, così miseramente ­lacerato. … Onde quelle famose opere, che hoggidì più che mai serebbono in fiore e belle, forno dalla scellerata rabbia e crudele impeto di malvaggi homini, arse e distrutte, ma non però tanto, che non vi restasse quasi la machina del tutto, ma senza ornamenti e, per dir così, l’ossa del corpo senza carne. On the one hand, this knowledge of so many excellent things has given me the greatest pleasure: on the other hand, the greatest grief. For I behold this noble city, which was the queen of the world, so wretchedly wounded as to be almost a corpse … So the famous works which now more than ever should appear in the flower of their beauty, were burned and destroyed by the brutal rage and savage passions of men wicked as wild beasts. Yet not completely so, for there still remains to us the skeleton of those things, though without their ornament—the bones of the body without the flesh, one might say.40 Owing to the wild ravages of men upon her body, the city is no longer truly identifiable as male or female, but is now just a skeleton (machina), in need of new flesh and new identity. Yet this horrible state is also an opportunity; underlying this report is the conviction that the ravaged body can and must be revivified, if only imperfectly. As Thomas Greene characterizes this notion in reference to another resonant passage of the letter, “It is the obligation of modern men to restore and flesh out [Rome], even if this reanimated city were only a faint image, scarcely a shadow—‘un poco della immagine, e quasi l’ombra’—of the original body.”41 This drive for the reanimation of Roma is also a significant theme in the poetry written to eulogize Raphael after his premature death in 1520. In the poems by Castiglione and Francesco Maria Molza, the cadaver metaphor and the mixed-gender imagery are developed further, to dramatize the pathos of the artist’s death. Castiglione draws a mythological parallel: Quod lacerum corpus medica sanaverit arte, Hippolytum, stygiis et revocarit aquis, 40

41

Raphael (with Baldassare Castiglione), Letter to Leo x (first version, MS Mantua, Archivio Privato Castiglione), in Raphael in Early Modern Sources 1483–1602, vol. 1, ed. John Shearman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 501–2; trans. in Holt, Documentary History of Art, vol. 1, 290–1 (italics mine). See also Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 38–9. Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 233.

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Ad stygias ipse est raptus Epidaurius undas.  Sic precium vitae mors fuit artifici. Tu quoque dum toto laniatam corpore Romam  Componis miro Raphael ingenio, Atque Vrbis lacerum ferro, ignis, annisque cadaver,  Ad vitam, antiquum iam revocasque decus, … Sic miser heu prima cadis intercepte iuventa,  Deberi et morti nostraque nosque mones. Because he cured with medical skill and recalled Hippolytus from the Stygian waters, the Epidaurian [Asclepius] was himself carried off to Stygian waves. Thus for the craftsman of life the reward was death. You too, Raphael, while with your wondrous talent you construct Rome, mutilated throughout her body, and recall to life and to its ancient beauty the city’s body, mangled by the sword, fire, and the years .… Thus you fall, alas! O wretched one cut off in the prime of life, and you warn that both our things and ourselves are subject to death.42 Like Asclepius, Raphael attempted to restore a mutilated body and was seemingly punished with death for his transgression. By extension, the city of Rome is likened to Hippolytus, the son of Theseus who had chastely spurned any association with women only to be gored by Neptune’s bull from the sea following a false accusation of rape by his lustful stepmother—the ultimate mythological example of unfair and untimely death. In Molza’s poem, the disiecta membra of Roma are correlated with those of Raphael himself; the city and her savior have shared a similar fate: Nel M.D. e xx il sexto Giorno de’aprile, a voi duro e funesto. Cadde con Raphael’ la vostra gloria, … Spesse volte piagate Sue belle membra, hor salda et immortale Si vedea riuscire, posta fuori 42

Baldassare Castiglione, Carmen, in Shearman, Raphael, vol. 1, 650–3, with trans.; see also Kim Butler, “‘Reddita lux est’: Raphael and the Pursuit of Sacred Eloquence in Leonine Rome,” in Artists at Court: Image-Making and Identity, 1300–1550, ed. Stephen J. Campbell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 139, and Garrard, Brunelleschi’s Egg, 240.

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D’ogni ingiuria di tempo e di fortuna. On the sixth day of April in 1520, for you [Rome] bitter and mournful, since your glory fell with him … his beautiful limbs torn many times, now one sees them become safe and immortal, and removed from every injury of time and fortune.43 Now Raphael is like Hippolytus, his limbs intermingled with those of Roma, made safe from corruption only by death and fame. The image of the city of Rome as a corpse of indeterminate gender thus inspired both pleasure and horror in the minds of Renaissance humanists (for Raphael, grandissimo satisfatione … e grandissimo dolore). The corpse of Rome’s past glory reminds the living of their own mortality, as Castiglione himself declares at the end of his poem.44 The city’s ravaged state, however, notably described with both masculine and feminine attributes, contains many potentialities for further knowledge and discovery, and thus necessitates exploration and disinterment.45 It is an artist who is deemed most capable of bringing sterile Roma back from the dead. In addition, as with the investigation of any intersexual body, the revelation of Roma’s true nature via archaeology may be perilous, as the death of Raphael seems to imply. Yet the categorization of Roma within this liminal status was essential to conceptualize and facilitate both excavation of and building upon ancient remains. The city was in a state of transition, with the potential in the present to become more than it was, but this process required that the past become “safe and immortal” through new definition. The effect of this “hermaphroditic” view of Roma is also visible in the interpretation and reconstruction of ancient sculptures of the goddess Roma, and in contemporary visual allegories of the city. Numerous images of Roma had been visible since antiquity on imperial monuments like the triumphal arches of Titus and Constantine in Rome, and coins depicting Roma are recorded in several Renaissance numismatic collections that were catalogued in the mid-sixteenth century but that had originated in the previous century.46 The 43

Francesco Maria Molza, In mortem Raphaelis Vrbini pictoris et architectus ad Leonem x. P. Max. Canzone, in Shearman, Raphael, vol. 1, 657; trans. Butler, “Reddita lux est,” 140. 44 This line is itself a classical reference to Horace, Ars Poetica 63: “debemur morti nos nostraque,” “we’re destined for death, we and ours” (Shearman, Raphael, vol. 1, 652). 45 Greene, The Light in Troy, 92. 46 John Cunnally, Images of the Illustrious: The Numismatic Presence in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 9, 47. On the figure of Roma as embodying additional entities at times as well, including the Roman state or its people, and on the

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­attributes of Roma in these various ancient media were far from consistent, for the personification of the city in art, like the literary Roma, was a hybrid creation, in this case with aspects of her iconography derived from various cultural sources. In the simplest terms, the “standard” depiction of Roma, seated on a pile of shields and holding a Victory, dressed in a short tunic or armor often with a bared breast and crested helmet, amalgamated aspects of the iconography of Athena Nikephoros (Athena Bearer of Victory) with those of an Amazon (Figs. 3.10 and 10.9).47 This imagery had its origins in the east, where the personification of the city was worshipped as early as the 190s bce,48 and was only imported into official Roman imagery in the Augustan period, perhaps making its first appearance on the Ara Pacis Augustae. Over the course of the imperial period, Roma’s iconography was refined and modified depending on the context, becoming closely aligned with personifications of virtus, to the point that a standing Amazon figure with crested helmet could be seen to embody both Roma and Virtus. As Ronald Mellor cautions, “The identification of the figure in each individual case must depend on the general interpretation of the scene, and scenes of arrival and departure from the capital seem to demand the presence of Roma rather than Virtus…. All such identifications remain somewhat subjective as do our interpretations of these scenes.”49 Certainly Renaissance viewers were not aware of the cultural and iconographic hybridity of Roma in this detail, but the calculated ambiguity of the ancient image also led them to varied interpretations. Whereas the Romans conceived of the attributes of Roma as an interplay of religious and cultural associations, the writers and artists of Renaissance Italy often recast this dialectic in gendered terms. In perhaps the most notable case, a draped male body became the foundation for a widely disseminated image of Roma (Fig.  3.6). The seated porphyry Apollo, once in the Sassi collection with the standing basalt Apollo/Hermaphrodite described above (Fig. 3.1), was consistently identified as female in the sixteenth century, most often as Roma or Vesta.50 As evidenced by several contemporary drawings, including those 47 48 49 50

relationship between ancient images of Roma and sixteenth-century personifications of cities in Tuscany, see Lazzaro, “Figuring Florence.” Ronald Mellor, “The Goddess Roma,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt 17, no. 2 (1981) 1012–6; see also Vermeule, The Goddess Roma. Mellor, “The Goddess Roma,” 958. Ibid., 1014. Aldrovandi, who saw the statue in the Farnese collection in 1550, called it “un bellissimo simulacro di una Roma trionfante assisa,” “a most beautiful statue of a seated Roma in triumph” (Delle statue antiche, 150). Bober and Rubinstein (Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, no. 36) indicate that the statue was not correctly interpreted as Apollo

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Figure 3.6 Porphyry Apollo, once identified as Roma/Vesta, 2nd century ce with 18th-century restorations in white marble. Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Farnese Collection

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encyclopedic sketchbooks of Maarten van Heemskerck created in the 1530s, the two intersexual figures were displayed in close proximity in the sculpture court of the Sassi palace, and the seated figure was often drawn and copied with feminine head and breasts to underscore the identification as Roma/ Vesta (Fig. 3.7).51 Interpretations of ancient images of the standing Amazon-type Roma were even more heterogeneous. An examination of drawings of the internal bay panels of the arches of Titus and Constantine is particularly illustrative, for these reliefs were easily visible to Renaissance artists and make use of a “standard” iconography of Roma familiar from imperial coinage. While several Renaissance artists saw the standing helmeted figure in the relief panels as female, and depicted her with Amazonian bared breast,52 others rendered the gender of the figure as ambiguous or male. In the sketchbook of Giovanni Antonio Dosio now in Berlin, an anonymous early sixteenth-century artist depicted the Roma of the triumphal procession scene on the Arch of Titus as an androgynous waif, without helmet or any physical attributes.53 A drawing attributed to Baldassare Peruzzi now in the Louvre similarly presents the Roma of the reused Trajanic relief of the emperor on horseback on the Arch of Constantine as an uncertain figure, more akin to the surrounding male soldiers than the pendant figure of Victory.54 Even more notable is Amico Aspertini’s version of this same relief in the Codex Wolfegg of c. 1500–3, where the Amazonian Roma/Virtus (Fig. 3.8) is transformed into a fully armored Roman soldier (Fig. 3.9).55 The variability of response indicates not simply the misreading of an image by a single artist, but an uncertainty or openness in the reading of a highly charged ancient symbol, one whose interpretation had direct bearing on the Renaissance enterprise. The fact that the images were fragmentary and imperfect, thus resonating with the city itself and with the

51 52

53 54 55

until the late eighteenth century, with Albacini’s replacement of the hands and feet and addition of the laurel crown and lyre, all in white marble. Like the Sassi Apollo Citharoedos, the statue is now in the Museo Nazionale, Naples. See also Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 184. Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, 505–6 and nos. 35, 36. See for example Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving of the Great Trajanic Relief on the Arch of Constantine (Konrad Oberhuber, ed., The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 26, The Works of Marcantonio Raimondi and of His School [New York: Abaris, 1978], 275, no. 361). Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, no. 178c. Ibid., no. 158b. Gunter Schweikart, Der Codex Wolfegg: Zeichnungen nach der Antike von Amico Aspertini (London: Warburg Institute, 1986), 94, folios 40v–41r in the sketchbook.

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Figure 3.7  Maarten van Heemskerck, Sculpture Court of the Casa Sassi, Rome, 1532–7. Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (The Warburg Institute Photographic Collection)

Renaissance knowledge of antiquity, gave the interpretations of the personification of Roma increased importance. Significantly, Roma’s Renaissance mutability is also clearly evidenced in contemporary renderings of the city as allegory, most frequently as Roma Triumphans. By the mid-sixteenth century, aristocratic collection catalogues and synthesizing works on Rome, such as the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae collections of prints, Ligorio’s Antiquae Urbis Imago map,56 and similar works, 56

David R. Coffin, Pirro Ligorio: The Renaissance Artist, Architect, and Antiquarian (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 17–9.

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Figure 3.8 Adventus, Great Trajanic Frieze, 117–20 ce. Arch of Constantine, Rome (dair 37.329A)

included frontispieces and accompanying illustrations with positive allegorical images of Roma partly based on ancient models.57 Like the drawings of the triumphal arch reliefs, these new allegorical portrayals depict Roma within the same fundamental framework, surrounded by familiar symbols (piles of weapons, crested helmet, she-wolf and twins), but the figure’s gender is open to interpretation. One of the most prevalent images was created by Giovanni Battista Palumba around 1510; it survives in several versions and inspired copies by other artists outside Italy (Fig. 3.10). Here the seated Roma displays all the detailed musculature and attributes of a male figure, with only the rather unconvincing bare breast indicating otherwise.58 Other artists when 57

58

In the case of the Speculum, this purpose was served by an engraving of the Roma Cesi, a Roma Triumphans type created c.1540 from a seated Minerva torso (The British Museum Collection Online, Trustees of the British Museum, no. 1947, 0319.26.117, last updated July 28, 2013, http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online). The Roma Cesi now serves as the centerpiece of the Palazzo dei Conservatori courtyard, Musei Capitolini. Arthur M. Hind, Early Italian Engraving: A Critical Catalogue, vol. 5 (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1948), 255–6; Cunnally, Images of the Illustrious, 79–86. A comparison with

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Figure 3.9 Amico Aspertini, drawing of Trajanic Adventus relief, in the Codex Wolfegg, c. 1500–3. Princely Collection, Wolfegg Castle (The Warburg Institute Photographic Collection)

allegorizing Roma also eliminated her feminine qualities, most notably by covering the Amazonian breast with a male breastplate. For example, the only image of Roma in Achille Bocchi’s book of emblems, published in 1555 in Bologna, shows a labeled, seated Roma as an androgyne, with gender somewhere between the bearded Epimetheus on the left and the buxom Pandora above (Fig. 3.11).59 This influential representation may have been the inspiration for Étienne Delaune’s Roma in his series The Four Ancient Monarchies, likely created in Paris between 1557 and 1572, which depicts the ancient empires of Graecia, Asiria, and Persia as bearded mature men, while Roma is a smoothfaced youth, dressed in male armor but surrounded by the billowing drapery of a female goddess.60

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other engravings and woodcuts by Palumba (also known as Master I.B. with a Bird) aligns Roma’s sinewy musculature and flat breast much more closely with the artist’s male figures. The copy of Palumba’s Roma by the German printer Hieronymus Hopfer (1536–63) is identified in the British Museum catalogue as male (1845,0809.1456). Achilles Bocchius (Achille Bocchi), Symbolicarum quaestionum de universo genere quas serio ludebat, pl. 124. British Museum Collection Online H,5.86. A later print by Delaune (1580) shows the same four monarchies surrounded by a globe (British Museum 1834,0804.116); here Roma’s heavily shadowed face appears to have a

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Figure 3.10



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Giovanni Battista Palumba, Roma, 1500–10. British Museum, London (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

mustache. On Delaune see Christophe Pollet, Les Gravures d’Etienne Delaune (1518–1583), 2 vols. (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2001). For an interesting contemporary comparandum, see also the Roma in the title page engraving of Palma Giovane’s Camei trumphi ornamenta animalia of 1550–1628 (British Museum 1969,0719.5).

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Giulio Bonasone, Roma, in Achille Bocchi’s Book of Emblems, 1555. British Museum, London (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

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In his seminal article on personification, James Paxson has suggested that the virtually exclusive use of the female for personifications in the classical and medieval periods is rooted in the ability of the female body to serve as a “figure of figuration,” an appropriate rhetorical trope for the exploration of concepts.61 As a figure that could be ornamented, disrobed, changed, and generally formed by the process of thought, the idea of personification (figura) was itself ­grammatically feminine and therefore actually female for preRenaissance ­thinkers.62 But for Renaissance writers and artists, the ancient conventions were not convincingly straightforward,63 nor perhaps correspondent with contemporary cultural and political programs, especially in the case of city personifications. To cite but one rather late example, Giambologna made daring use of a male figure to represent subjugated Pisa in his Florence Triumphant Over Pisa, commissioned in 1565.64 As Baskins writes of this statue’s possible contradictory interpretations, “In Mieke Bal’s terms, such inversions are inherent to the semiotics of allegorical representation: ‘Small elements turned into signs can subvert the overt, overall meaning so as to inscribe something that didn’t seem to be there, yet appropriates the image for a counter-message, a counter-coherence’.”65 Yet the “hermaphroditic” vision of Roma formed in the Renaissance imparted even more possibility to the image of the personified city, a sense that further study and exploration were warranted by the figuration itself. To envision ancient Roma as a singularly categorized entity would close off the process of discovery; by covering her traditional femininity with masculine trappings, she was ironically subject to the same prurient fascination and intervention as other intersexual beings. 61 62 63

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James J. Paxson, “Personification’s Gender,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 16, no. 2 (1998): 149–79. Paxson, “Personification’s Gender,” 168, 175 (“individual personifications are women because personification is a woman”). See for example Mary Edwards, “Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel: Giotto’s Virtue Fortitude Re-examined,” Chapter 1 in this volume, which identifies the figure of Fortitude in the series of Virtues and Vices in Giotto’s early fourteenth-century frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua as a cross-dressing Omphale. The series incorporates male personifications as well. On the personifications of Florence and Pisa in this statue, see also Lazzaro, “Figuring Florence”; for an image, see Fig. 10.15. Cristelle Baskins, “Shaping Civic Personification: Pisa Sforzata, Pisa Salvata,” in Early Modern Visual Allegory: Embodying Meaning, ed. Baskins and Lisa Rosenthal (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), 103, citing Mieke Bal, “Reading Art,” in Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollock (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 39.

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Conclusions The duality inherent in an intersexual interpretation of Roma also encapsulates the bipolar attitude towards the ancient city itself in the Renaissance, namely the tension between the desire to excavate and the need to build. This struggle is clear in Raphael’s letter to Pope Leo x, which vacillates between the creative plans of an artist/builder and the pleas for preservation of an antiquarian, and it reverberates and is refracted even in later poetic descriptions of the ancient city, such as Joachim Du Bellay’s Antiquitez de Rome (1558): Celle qui de son chef les étoiles passait, Et d’un pied sur Thétis, l’autre dessous l’Aurore, D’une main sur le Scythe, et l’autre sur le More, De la terre et du ciel la rondeur compassait: Jupiter ayant peur, si plus elle croissait, Que l’orgueil des Géants se relevât encore, L’accabla sous ces monts, ces sept monts qui sont ore Tombeaux de la grandeur qui le ciel menaçait. She, who with her head the stars surpassed, One foot on Dawn, the other on the Main, One hand on Scythia, the other Spain, Held the round of earth and sky encompassed: Jupiter fearing, if higher she was classed, That the old Giants’ pride might rise again, Piled these hills on her, these seven that soar, Tombs of her greatness at the heavens cast.66 In Du Bellay’s vision of the creation of the city, a masculine god pins down feminine Roma by means of her famed hills, thereby forming the strata that would be later excavated and in turn built upon—a mirror image to the Renaissance process. Though intensely personal and idiosyncratic in its details, Du Bellay’s poem reflects the opposition between archaeology and 66

Joachim Du Bellay, Les Antiquités de Rome (1558), sonnet 4, in Les Regrets, et autres oeuvres poetiques; suivis des Antiquitez de Rome, ed. J. Jolliffe and M.A. Screech (Geneva: Droz, 1974). Trans. A.S. Kline, adapted from Edmund Spenser’s 1591 translation, The Ruines of Rome, http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/RuinsOfRome.htm.

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architecture that was being cast in gendered terms: the female earth yielding the cultural material to inspire the male process of building, a process that was also designed to organize and interpret the past. As Greene writes of Du Bellay, “Perhaps [the duality of his response to ruins] is not in itself very surprising: one first stoops, digs, gropes downward into the disorder of the past and then one rises and constructs upward by imitation.”67 This dialectic was constant and necessary for the Renaissance rediscovery of antiquity and the resurrection of Rome as a European capital, and it still has a profound effect on archaeological interpretation and policy. The contrast between the female and male aspects of the city, and their multivalent presence, continues to surface in modern scholarly interpretations of the city. Following his description of the cadaverous degradation of Renais­ sance Rome, Loren Partridge characterizes the obelisks erected by popes as “Christianized phallic beacons”68 signaling the city’s renewal. Cristina Mazzoni has compared the curvilinear domes and hills of Rome to the she-wolf’s udders, contrasting with the masculine history descending from Romulus.69 These organic curvaceous elements could also be contrasted with the rectilinear slashes carved by papal avenues, and so on. Thus the balance attempted between these gendered elements still stands in for many other difficult oppositions within the city: Christian/secular, new/old, progressive/static, living/ dead. As with the study of the hermaphrodite, the precise combination of these oppositions within an ancient Roman framework has the potential for perfection, but wayward attempts to use the dialectic can also be dangerous. The Fascist regime’s use of romanità to classify numerous cultural oppositions, including gender roles, is a particularly vivid example.70 Bibliography Ajootian, Aileen. “Hermaphroditus.” In Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, vol. 5, 268–85. Zürich and Munich: Artemis Verlag, 1990. 67 Greene, The Light in Troy, 233. 68 Partridge, The Art of Renaissance Rome, 36. 69 Cristina Mazzoni, She-Wolf: The Story of a Roman Icon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 171. 70 Genevieve Gessert, “Enacting Empire: Ancient Roman Rituals in Fascist Italy” (paper presented at the College Art Association Annual Conference, Boston, ma, February 23, 2006). See also Lucia Re, “Fascist Theories of ‘Woman’ and the Construction of Gender,” in Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture, ed. Robin Pickering-Iazzi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 76–99.

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Barkan, Leonard. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Baskins, Cristelle. “Trecento Rome: The Poetics and Politics of Widowhood.” In Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe, edited by Allison Mary Lévy, 197–210. Burlington: Ashgate, 2003. ———. “Shaping Civic Personification: Pisa Sforzata, Pisa Salvata.” In Early Modern Visual Allegory: Embodying Meaning, edited by Baskins and Lisa Rosenthal, 91–108. Burlington: Ashgate, 2007. Beccadelli, Antonio. The Hermaphrodite. Translated by Holt Parker. I Tatti Renaissance Library 42. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2010. Bober, Phyllis Pray. Drawings after the Antique by Amico Aspertini: Sketchbooks in the British Museum. London: Warburg Institute, 1957. ———, and Ruth Rubinstein. Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources. New York: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2010. The British Museum Collection Online. Trustees of the British Museum. Last modified July 28, 2013. https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/search.aspx. Burrow, Colin. “Re-embodying Ovid: Renaissance Afterlives.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, edited by Philip Hardie, 301–19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Butler, Kim. “‘Reddita lux est’: Raphael and the Pursuit of Sacred Eloquence in Leonine Rome.” In Artists at Court: Image-Making and Identity, 1300–1550, edited by Stephen J. Campbell, 138–48. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Canedy, Norman W. The Roman Sketchbook of Girolamo da Carpi. London: Warburg Institute, 1976. Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance. BerlinBrandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2007–14. http://census.bbaw.de/. Coffin, David R. Pirro Ligorio: The Renaissance Artist, Architect, and Antiquarian. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. Costa-Zalessow, Natalia. “The Personification of Italy from Dante through the Trecento.” Italica 68, no. 3 (1991), 316–31. Cunnally, John. Images of the Illustrious: The Numismatic Presence in the Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. “The Hermaphrodite and the Orders of Nature: Sexual Ambiguity in Early Modern France.” In Premodern Sexualities, edited by Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, 117–36. New York: Routledge, 1996. Du Bellay, Joachim. “Les Antiquités de Rome.” In Les Regrets, et autres oeuvres poetiques; suivis des Antiquitez de Rome, edited by J. Jolliffe and M.A. Screech. Geneva: Droz, 1974.

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———. The Ruins of Rome. Translated by A.S. Kline, 2009. http://www.poetryintransla tion.com. Edwards, Catharine. Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Garrard, Mary D. Brunelleschi’s Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Greene, Thomas M. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Hankins, James. Plato in the Italian Renaissance. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990. Hind, Arthur M. Early Italian Engraving: A Critical Catalogue. Vol. 5. London: Bernard Quaritch, 1948. Holt, Elizabeth G., ed. A Documentary History of Art. Vol. 1, The Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Kristeva, Julie. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Long, Kathleen P. Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Mazzoni, Cristina. She-Wolf: The Story of a Roman Icon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Mellor, Ronald. “The Goddess Roma.” Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt 17, no. 2 (1981): 950–1030. Niccoli, Ottavia. Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Oberhuber, Konrad, ed. The Illustrated Bartsch. Vol. 26, The Works of Marcantonio Raimondi and of His School. New York: Abaris, 1978. Oliver, Kelly. Subjectivity without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers. Lanham, md: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. Partridge, Loren W. The Art of Renaissance Rome, 1400–1600. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996. Paxson, James J. “Personification’s Gender.” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 16, no. 2 (1998): 149–79. Perosa, Alessandro, and John Sparrow eds. Renaissance Latin Verse: An Anthology. Duckworth: London, 1979. Re, Lucia. “Fascist Theories of ‘Woman’ and the Construction of Gender.” In Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture, edited by Robin Pickering-Iazzi, 76–99. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Rocke, Michael. “Gender and Sexual Culture in Renaissance Italy.” In Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, edited by Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis, 150–70. London and New York: Longman, 1996.

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Schweikart, Gunter. Der Codex Wolfegg: Zeichnungen nach der Antike von Amico Aspertini. London: Warburg Institute, 1986. Shearman, John. Raphael in Early Modern Sources 1483–1602. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Silberman, Lauren. “Mythographic Transformations of Ovid’s Hermaphrodite.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 19, no. 4 (1988): 643–52. Vermeule, Cornelius. The Goddess Roma in the Art of the Roman Empire. London: Spink and Son, 1959. Vout, Caroline. The Hills of Rome: Signature of an Eternal City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

chapter 4

Luca Signorelli’s Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome and Viewers in the Palazzo Petrucci, Siena Stephanie C. Leone

Introduction: Methodology and Renaissance Domestic Painting

With a focus on the fresco Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome (c. 1509–11), attributed to Luca Signorelli, this essay investigates the multiple responses of viewers to depictions of ancient Roman history and the impact of gender on spectatorship of Renaissance domestic art. Now detached from its original context, the painting was once part of a decorative ensemble in the so-called camera bella of the Palazzo Petrucci in Siena.1 The full ensemble comprised eight narrative wall paintings from ancient history, literature, and mythology attributed to Pinturicchio, Luca Signorelli, and Girolamo Genga; carved woodwork pilasters between the narrative scenes, with a carved woodwork cornice above and benches below; an all’antica stucco-framework ceiling with frescoed panels of ancient gods, goddesses and heroes by Pinturicchio; and a majolica tile floor. This reception room appears to have been decorated for the 1511 marriage between Borghese Petrucci (1490–1526) and Vittoria Todeschini Piccolomini (1494–1570).2 No satisfactory programmatic meaning

* I wish to thank Cristelle Baskins, Elizabeth Mellyn, Vernon Hyde Minor, Sarah Gwenyth Ross, and editors Alison Poe and Marice Rose for their insightful suggestions that have improved my essay. I am also grateful for the helpful comments of the participants in the Radical Readings Workshop, organized by Virginia Reinburg and Sarah Gwenyth Ross at Boston College in May 2013. 1 The history of and bibliography on the painting is available in Tom Henry and Laurence B. Kanter, Luca Signorelli: The Complete Paintings (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 224–5. It was detached by 1876, and now resides in the National Gallery, London, inv. no. NG3929. 2 In most sources the date of marriage is given as 1509, as recorded by the contemporary historian Sigismondo Tizio (Historiarum Senensium ab initio urbis Senarum usque ad annum 1528, published as Historiae senenses [Rome: Istituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1992], vii, 152) and repeated by such early historians as G.A. Pecci, Memorie storico-critiche della città di Siena che servono alla vita civile di Pandolfo Petrucci (Siena: 1755), 241–2. The marriage contract, however, is dated 1511; see “Agnese Farnese,” Dizionario biografico degli ­italiani, 1995, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/agnese-farnese_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/; © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004289697_006

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has been discerned for the complex iconography of the paintings, a problem exacerbated by the dismantling of the room. Rather than pursuing the positivist aim of decoding a single programmatic meaning as intended by artist and patron, I am interested in the concept of Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (1994): how a work of art “… actively engages in organizing and structuring the social and cultural environment in which it was located.”3 Reception theory and recent studies of Renaissance domestic art offer an alternative model of interpretation by privileging the responses of original viewers as conditioned by individual predispositions and preconceptions. In this essay I analyze one scene from the camera bella—the Roman matron Veturia’s intercession to save Rome from the attack of her son, Coriolanus (Fig. 4.1)—to test the value of investigating the responses of sixteenth-century viewers as a means of understanding how the work of art interacts with its original socio-cultural context. Since Hans Robert Jauss coined the phrase Rezeptionsästhetik in 1967, there has been much discussion about the uses, interpretations, and adaptations of reception theory in his field of literature and in other disciplines. Across the debate, however, it is generally agreed that the “point of reception,” that is, the subjectivity of the reader, plays an essential and active role in the process of making meaning, and that as a result, meaning is not fixed and stable but rather changeable, mediated, and contingent.4 Stanley Fish has expanded the reader-response discourse by addressing the differences among readers and and Konrad Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen: Women, Politics, and Poetry in SixteenthCentury Siena (Notre Dame, in: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 59. 3 Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, “Introduction,” in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. Bryson, Holly, and Moxey (Middletown, ct: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), xviii. The editors argue against a work of art as a simple mirror of its culture in which the context serves as a mere background to the work of art and instead seek to interpret the object as fully integrated into its socio-cultural context. Moxey, “Hieronymus Bosch and the ‘World Upside Down’,” in Bryson, Holly, and Moxey, Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, 104–40, offers an instructive example in his essay on Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Rather than trying to identify and interpret symbols in the painting, as scholars have done since Erwin Panofsky, Moxey argues that Bosch used the notion of “world upside down,” represented through inverting the natural scale and order of things, to satirize the very class of people, the aristocracy, for whom he worked. As such, Bosch sought to demonstrate his inimitable genius as an appeal to patrons in this educated and wealthy milieu. 4 Charles Martindale, “Introduction,” in Classics and the Uses of Reception, ed. Martindale and Richard F. Thomas (Malden, ma: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 1–13; William W. Batstone, “Provocation: The Point of Reception Theory,” in Martindale and Thomas, Classics and the Uses of Reception, 14–20.

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Figure 4.1  Luca Signorelli, Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome, c. 1509–11. National Gallery, London (© National Gallery, London/Art Resource, ny)

the potential for multiple responses. He defines groups of like-minded individuals as “interpretive communities” who interpret a text according to similar  “interpretive conventions” due to shared socio-cultural characteristics.5 A ­contested issue in reader-response theory—and one that is germane to my use of it—is the relationship between history and reception, between past and present. Even Jauss, in reexamining his “horizon of expectations” concept that posits a common perspective shared by persons living in the same time, place, and circumstances, acknowledges the problem of understanding reader response in the past: “[W]hat did one have to do to gain access to the sort of 5 Stanley E. Fish, “Interpreting the ‘Variorum’,” Critical Inquiry 2 (1976): 465–85; Fish, “Yet Once More,” Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies (2001): 29–38.

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experience which the historically first addressee may have had in his reading?”6 For the art historian, Jauss’s search for the viewpoint of the first reader calls to mind Ernst Gombrich’s notions of “schemata” and “beholder’s share,” which imply that the shared worldview of artists and their contemporary viewers made the works of art understandable in their original context.7 In discussing the use of reception theory in Classics, Charles Martindale laments that the search to understand the response of original viewers ultimately leads back to “positivistic forms of historical inquiry, the attempt through the accumulation of supposedly factual data to establish the past-as-it-reallywas.”8 Although I agree with Martindale that reconstructing the past as a singular and absolute entity is unattainable, there is value in searching for the original attitude implied by works of art (to paraphrase Jauss) as long as we allow for a variety of initial interpretations and acknowledge the mediating presence of the present-day interpreter.9 The studies of John R. Clarke and  Cristelle Baskins offer models for the effective use of reader-response theory in analyzing works of art in their original context.10 Baskins’s work on early modern Italian domestic art merits further discussion in the context of this essay. In Cassone Painting, Humanism, and Gender in Early Modern Italy (1998), Cristelle Baskins offers an alternative to the prevailing method of “humanist  iconography” that interprets narrative paintings on cassoni (wedding

6

7

8 9 10

For criticism of his own definition of “horizon of expectations,” Hans Robert Jauss, “The Identity of the Poetic Text in the Changing Horizon of Understanding,” in Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies, eds. James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 19. Robert Holub, Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (London and New York: Methuen, 1984), 59–63. For discussion of Gombrich’s work in relation to historical interpretation, Paola Tinagli, Women in Italian Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation, and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University, 1997), 7. Holub, Reception Theory, 59, connects Jauss’s theory to Gombrich’s ideas in Art and Illusion (1960). Martindale, “Introduction,” in Martindale and Thomas, Classics and the Uses of Reception, 2, 9–13. Jauss, “The Identity of the Poetic Text,” 21, discussing “the attitude implied by the text.” Martindale, “Introduction,” in Martindale and Thomas, Classics and the Uses of Reception, 4–9. John R. Clarke, Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans: Visual Representation and Non-Elite Viewers in Italy, 100 b.c.–a.d. 315 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), focuses on the category of “non-elite” viewers in ancient Rome.

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chests)  according to “stoic themes, republican sentiments, and, above all, ­self-abnegating virtue” and results in “fixed, stable readings, regardless of individual viewers and disparate audiences.”11 Instead, she unites historical context and critical theory to offer multivalent readings of cassone panels depicting ancient heroines based on multiple audiences and the potential for conflicting meanings. Baskins also applies this heuristic methodology to the narrative painting of Signorelli’s Castigation of Cupid from the Petrucci camera bella (Fig. 4.2). The subject derives from Francesco Petrarca’s Triumph of Chastity, which is part of his poem cycle of the Trionfi (1340s). As the most discussed concept

Figure 4.2 Luca Signorelli, Castigation of Cupid, c. 1509–11. national gallery, london (© National Gallery, London/Art Resource, ny) 11 Cristelle Baskins, Cassone Painting, Humanism, and Gender in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 17–8.

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in Renaissance writings on women, which proclaimed it the greatest ­feminine virtue, chastity was a popular theme for domestic paintings, but the monumental scale of the Petrucci fresco is uncommon.12 Also notable is the violence of the Petrucci painting. The narrative progresses from the scene in the left background, where a frenzied crowd of maenad-like women brutally captures Cupid, to the foreground, where a group of Chastity’s followers aggressively disarm and bind the kneeling Cupid, plucking the plumes from his wings and forcing his body into a visibly uncomfortable position. The belief that women exercised agency in history, including as spectators of art, and that such agency destabilizes constructions of gender is central to Baskins’s interpretation.13 In considering female spectatorship, she places the theme in the liminal space between a bride’s virginity and her new roles of wife and mother that require conjugal sexuality. Male spectators may have identified with the figures of Scipio, Hippolytus, and Joseph (pictured in the right foreground), who exemplify the husband’s role of guarding his wife’s chastity. In sum, the story underscores “the commodification of virginity in a culture driven by dowry exchange and patrician alliance” and suggests that in the context of marriage a resistant virgin was as much a threat to a stable patrilineal society as a promiscuous woman.14 I employ Baskins’s nuanced hermeneutical approach in interpreting another scene from the same room, Signorelli’s Vetu­ria Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome, which is also a narrative painting of a classical theme with a female protagonist. To explore the reception of antiquity in the Renaissance, I demonstrate how this painting intersects with its original context of domestic space, marriage, gender roles, and elite viewers. In positing how such viewers

12

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Cristelle Baskins, “Il trionfo della pudicizia: Menacing Virgins in Italian Renaissance Domestic Painting,” in Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 15–25. For further discussion of chastity, see also Kelly and Leslie, “Intro­ duction,” to Menacing Virgins, esp. 20–1, who maintain its preeminence as a feminine virtue while discussing ambivalent attitudes toward it, and Tinagli, Women in Italian Renaissance Art, 23–4. See April Oettinger, “Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water in Lorenzo Lotto’s Venus and Cupid,” Chapter 7 in this volume, for a discussion of Lorenzo Lotto’s painting The Triumph of Chastity and her interpretation of the imagery as potentially glorifying Venus as well as Chastity. For a historiography of “woman” as a social construct (and the opposing view of essentialism) and woman’s agency as an issue in art history, Norma Broude and Mary Garrard, “Introduction,” in Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism, ed. Broude and Garrard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1–25. Baskins, “Il trionfo della pudicizia,” 125–7 (quotation 131).

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might have responded to this painting, I differentiate between female and male spectators. While I speak generally about the social constructs of these gender roles, I also use two original spectators as historical exemplars of these categories: the newlyweds Vittoria Piccolomini and Borghese Petrucci, for whom the camera bella was made. I end with a discussion about the reception of this ancient theme at a slightly later moment in the Renaissance and by another audience category—learned women—to which the couple’s daughter Aurelia (1511–42) belonged.

The Petrucci, the Camera Bella, and Existing Interpretations

The decoration of the camera bella coincided with the height of the Petrucci family’s power in Siena. Pandolfo Petrucci was a leading member of the Nove, the political party that increasingly controlled the government after a group of its members forcibly returned from exile in 1487. Using his own wealth, as well as alliances within and beyond Siena, Petrucci expanded his authority to a point that by 1503 he was the de facto signore of the city. The city’s long-standing Republican system—albeit one that was riddled with discord—was transformed into an oligarchic government that maintained, however, the same republican structures and required constant vigilance on Petrucci’s part.15 Pandolfo’s predominance in Sienese politics was matched with an equally ambitious program of patronage that expressed his status and earned him the epithet of Il Magnifico.16 A major component was the expansion and

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See Maurizio Gattoni da Camogli, Pandolfo Petrucci e la politica estera della Repubblica di Siena (1487–1512) (Siena: Edizioni Cantagalli, 1997); A. Lawrence Jenkens, ed., Renaissance Siena: Art in Context (Kirksville, mo: Truman State University Press, 2005), 5–12, for a historiography of Renaissance Siena that outlines the various interpretations of historians; Fabrizio Nevola, Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 157–8, with extensive bibliography on Pandolfo Petrucci; Philippa Jackson, “Pomp or Piety? The Funeral of Pandolfo Petrucci,” in Beyond the Palio: Urbanism and Ritual in Renaissance Siena, ed. Jackson and Fabrizio Nevola (Malden, ma: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 104; and Jackson, “The Patronage of Pandolfo Petrucci,” in Renaissance Siena: Art for a City, ed. Luke Syson (London: National Gallery of Art, 2007), 61–73. Giovanni Agosti and Vincenzo Farinella, “Interni senesi all’antica,” in Domenico Beccafumi e il suo tempo, ed. P. Torriti (Milan: Electa, 1990), 590; Cecil H. Clough, “Pandolfo Petrucci e il concetto di ‘magnificenza’,” in Arte, commitenza ed economia a Roma e nelle corti del Rinascimento, ed. Arnold Esch and Christoph Luitpold Frommel (Turin: Einaudi, 1995),

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renovation of his palace, which was located in his family’s traditional neighborhood. To the house he had inherited from his father, he added enough new properties that by 1504 he owned a large site with a visible presence on the prominent piazza of the Baptistery.17 The work of restructuring the existing properties and decorating the interior spaces seems to have been largely finished by late 1507, but the precise date of completion is unknown.18 Fabrizio Nevola has recently characterized the palace as featuring “stylistic choices that dignified the palace as a princely residence…with the most innovative and sophisticated all’antica façade solutions that were beginning to be used in early sixteenth-century Rome.”19 Though the palace today is a pale reflection of what it once was, the stylistic connection to antiquity visualized the Petrucci’s claimed descent from the ancient senatorial family of the Petrei. The Sienese humanist Francesco Patrizi, who was a fellow member of the Nove, solidified the claim in writing, and Pandolfo and his descendants gave ancient names to some of their children.20 Borghese and Vittoria named two daughters respectively Aurelia and Giulia. With its variety of materials from floor to ceiling, the camera bella on the second piano nobile has been identified as the most ornate room in the palace. Based on its appearance, the room must have held an important representational value.21 Before turning to the narrative wall frescoes, some ambiguous details about the room’s patronage, function, and date must be addressed. 383–97; Susan E. Wegner, “The Rise of St. Catherine of Siena as an Intercessor for the Sienese,” in Jenkens, Renaissance Siena: Art in Context, 173–93; Jackson, “The Patronage of Pandolfo the Magnificent,” 61–73. 17 Nevola, Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City, 198. Prior to Nevola’s recent work, the standard history of the palace was Alessandro Ferrari, Rolando Valentini, and Massimo Vivi, “Il palazzo del Magnifico a Siena,” Bollettino senese di storia patria 92 (1985): 107–53. 18 On the dating, Nevola, Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City, 198; Jackson, “The Patronage of Pandolfo the Magnificent,” 64. 19 Nevola, Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City, 200–1. The architect was probably Giacomo Cozzarelli, Francesco di Giorgio’s chief assistant; see Jackson, “The Patronage of Pandolfo the Magnificent,” 64. 20 Nevola, Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City, 159; Jackson, “The Patronage of Pandolfo the Magnificent,” 62. On Francesco Patrizi’s life and writings, Felice Battaglia, Enea Silvio Piccolomini e Francesco Patrizi. Due politici senese del quattrocento (Siena: Instituto comunale d’arte e di storia, 1936), 73–154. 21 Ferrari, Valentini, and Vivi, “Il palazzo del Magnifico a Siena,” 135; Agosti and Farinella, “Interni senesi all’antica,” 590–2; Jackson, “The Patronage of Pandolfo the Magnificent,” 64. The palace has undergone numerous modifications, which began with its partitioning for multiple owners in 1568. The palace remained in the hands of the Petrucci and families

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The scholarship on the palace typically identifies the patron of the decoration as Pandolfo Petrucci but links the room symbolically to Borghese Petrucci’s marriage to Vittoria Piccolomini because of the presence of the quartered Petrucci-Piccolomini arms on two wooden pilasters and many floor tiles. Since no contracts or payments between the Petrucci and the artists have been found, direct evidence of patronage is lacking. But it is reasonable to assume that Pandolfo, as the capofamiglia and the patron of the recently built palace, was involved in the room’s decoration. It was common practice during the period for either the groom or his father to commission new furnishings for the family palace on the occasion of the younger man’s marriage.22 Although scholarship on the palace acknowledges the symbolic presence of Borghese Petrucci and Vittoria Piccolomini in this room, and iconographic interpre­ tations of the paintings feature marital themes, greater emphasis must be placed on accessing the “horizons of expectations” of the bride and groom as recipients. In the current scholarship, the function of the camera bella is not precisely defined, but the room is generally associated with Pandolfo’s living space.23 I  would argue, however, that the symbolic presence of the newlyweds must ­indicate their physical presence too, for the coats-of-arms of women normally

related to it through marriage until 1583, when a portion of it was sold to the Savini family, which acquired full possession of it during the course of the seventeenth century. The ceiling of the room is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the five extant frescoes are in The National Gallery, London and the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena; a large group of floor tiles are in the Victoria and Albert Museum. For the history of the palace’s ownership, Ferrari, Valentini, and Vivi, “Il Palazzo del Magnifico a Siena,” 113–7, and for the location of the parts of the camera bella, ibid., 135–53. For the location of the floor tiles, Elizabeth Miller and Alun Graves, “Rethinking the Petrucci Pavement,” Renaissance Studies 24 (2010): 96–7. 22 Tinagli, Women in Italian Renaissance Art, 22. 23 As evidence that the floor belonged to Pandolfo, Ferrari, Valentini, and Vivi, “Il palazzo del Magnifico a Siena,” 126–8, cite the acts of a notary that took place there in 1510. Laurence Kanter, “The Late Works of Luca Signorelli and His Followers, 1498–1559” (PhD diss., New York University, 1989), 181, calls the room Pandolfo’s study. Clough, “Pandolfo Petrucci e il concetto di magnificenza,” 392, suggests that it was Pandolfo’s audience room. Jackson, “The Patronage of Pandolfo the Magnificent,” 64–5, writes that the room was decorated to celebrate the marriage but leaves the question of function unanswered. Julie Holmquist, “The Iconography of a Ceiling by Pinturicchio from the Palazzo Del Magnifico, Siena” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 1984), 51, suggests that the second piano nobile might have been reserved for the newlyweds, but says there is no documentary proof.

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appear in rooms used by them.24 It is possible that Pandolfo originally occupied the whole second piano nobile, as Ferrari, Valentini, and Vivi assert, but that at the time of the marriage, he divided this floor with his son and new daughter-in-law. The furnishings of the camera bella, especially the wooden benches lining the walls, suggest that the room functioned as a reception space where guests were received. Although the evidence points to the use of the room by the newlyweds, it is impossible to say precisely how they used it because we know too little about the living spaces of women. It is known that men used the reception room called the sala to receive guests, but did Vittoria also receive female visitors here? Might the couple have received guests together on certain occasions? Despite the uncertainties, their implied presence in this space indicates that they were a primary audience of the ­narrative imagery. That changes might have taken place even in the short period between the habitation of the palace (late 1507?) and the marriage (early 1511) leads us to the next question: When was the decoration carried out and completed? There is no definitive answer, and the circumstantial evidence is contradictory. The work has been dated to about 1509 for several reasons: this date is painted on three floor tiles; Pinturicchio was encouraged to return to Siena to work for Pandolfo the year before; Signorelli is documented in Siena in 1509; and the historian Sigismondo Tizio in his Historiarum Senensium gives the year of the marriage as 1509.25 But three pieces of additional evidence suggest the campaign could have extended beyond 1509: the marriage contract demonstrates that Tizio erred, and the union in fact took place on February 25, 1511; a

24

Too little is known about the living spaces of women in the Renaissance to say whether Borghese or Vittoria or both of them would have received guests in this room. But what seems clear from the presence of the quartered coat of arms is that the room was used by them rather than Pandolfo. On women’s spaces in Italian Renaissance palaces, Brenda Preyer, “The Florentine Casa,” in At Home in Renaissance Italy, ed. Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis (London: V&A Publications, 2006), 46–7. 25 Tizio, Historarium Senensium, reprinted as Historiae Senenses, 1992. Ferrari, Valentini, and Vivi, “Il palazzo del Magnifico a Siena,” 111; Holmquist, “The Iconography of a Ceiling by Pinturicchio,” 51; Nevola, Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City, 198; Jackson, “The Patronage of Pandolfo the Magnificent,” 64, 270. Henry and Kanter, Luca Signorelli, 224, note that Signorelli’s documented presence in Siena coincides with the 1509 date. For the floor tile dates, Miller and Graves, “Rethinking the Petrucci Pavement,” 96. Further evidence is that Antonio Barili, the woodworker, claimed he was in debt to Pandolfo Petrucci for 400 florins in 1509, suggesting that he had been paid in advance for work not yet finished; see Kanter, “The Late Works of Luca Signorelli,” 183, n. 71.

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nineteenth-century description of Antonio Barili’s woodwork for the room dates it to 1511;26 and 1513 is written on one floor tile.27 We know that negotiations for the marriage were underway by early 1510 since Pandolfo received a portion of the dowry on March 25 in that year,28 and certainly the elaborate decorations would have taken some time to complete even with a team of artists. Given the varied evidence, I would suggest a broader date of 1509–February 1511, which might indeed have left time for changes to the use of the room. The eight narrative paintings originally on the walls of the camera bella depict subjects from ancient history, mythology, and epic poetry: The Calumny of Apelles (lost), The Festival of Pan (lost), The Castigation of Cupid (Signorelli), Veturia Persuades Corionalus to Spare Rome (Signorelli), The Continence of Scipio (lost), Penelope and Telemachus (Genga), Fabius Maximus Ransoming Roman Prisoners from Hannibal (Genga), and Aeneas Fleeing Troy (Genga).29 Philippa Jackson has recently suggested that the all’antica decoration of the room “proclaimed the Petrucci family’s preeminence and classical antecedents,” which likely goes a long way in explaining the choice of wall narratives in a city whose governing class was obsessed with claiming ancient lineage.30 The avid humanist culture of Renaissance Siena fostered a penchant for subjects from ancient history and literature, including themes that were obscure and rarely depicted outside the city. Attempts to determine a unified programmatic meaning for the eight wall narratives in the camera bella have ultimately 26

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Ferrari, Valentini, and Vivi, “Il palazzo del Magnifico a Siena,” 149. The entry, “Farnese, Agnese,” in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, refutes the traditional claim that Agnese Farnese died upon the marriage of her daughter, due to her opposition to the match, by citing documents that while Farnese did in fact die in October 1509, the marriage contract is dated 1511. Miller and Graves, “Rethinking the Petrucci Pavement,” 96. Ferrari, Valentini, and Vivi, “Il palazzo del Magnifico a Siena,” 111, n. 20. Two eighteenth-century descriptions of the paintings in situ, respectively by Abbot Giovanni Girolamo Carli and Guglielmo Della Valle, are the basis for the interpretations of the frescoes. I give the scenes in the order described by these authors, but the original sequence is unknown. The subject matter of The Festival of Pan and The Continence of Scipio is disputed, and The Castigation of Cupid is also called The Triumph of Chastity. The primary interpretations of the frescoes are Vilmos Tátrai, “Gli affreschi del Palazzo Petrucci a Siena: Una precisazione iconografica e un ipotesi sul programma,” Acta historiae artium 24 (1978): 177–83; Holmquist, “The Iconography of a Ceiling by Pinturicchio,” 51–63; Kanter, “The Late Works of Luca Signorelli,” 184–200; Clough, “Pandolfo Petrucci e  il  ­concetto di magnificenza,” 392–4; and Jackson, “The Patronage of Pandolfo the Magnificent,” 65–7. Jackson, “The Patronage of Pandolfo the Magnificent,” 62, 67 (quotation). Kanter, “The Late Works of Luca Signorelli,” 197, makes a similar point.

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proven unsatisfactory, but the iconographic interpretations can be grouped into three overlapping categories: political, marital/dynastic, and civic. Vilmos Tátrai (1978) devised the most intricate interpretation by reading the narratives as reflecting specific moments in Pandolfo Petrucci’s political career, his virtues as a leader, and his dynastic ambitions for his son Borghese.31 In this scheme, the Coriolanus narrative reflects the importance of establishing a dynasty and illustrates the moral lesson of duty to one’s family and country. Julie Holmquist (1984) expands upon Tátrai’s discussion of the narratives as representing Pandolfo’s virtues. Following the approach of “humanist iconography,” she finds evidence in all of the scenes for interdependent familial and civic virtues like chastity, magnanimity, prudence, piety, and patience. The story of Coriolanus exemplifies clemency and the virtue of marriage with its aim of progeny as a mechanism for political stability.32 Laurence B. Kanter (1989) and Cecil H. Clough (1990) present interpretations that relate to the ­previous two.33 The latter argues for a specific allegorical interpretation of the narratives as representing the virtues associated with good government. For Marilena Caciorgna and Roberto Guerrini, Coriolanus embodies ancient pietas, devotion to one’s mother, family, and country.34

Spectatorship and New Ways to Read Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome

These “humanistic iconography” interpretations of marital, familial, and civic virtues certainly have merit, but they assume a universal meaning and homogenous audience. Furthermore, when applied to the story of Veturia and 31

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Tátrai, “Gli affreschi del Palazzo Petrucci a Siena.” I agree with Kanter, “The Late Works of Luca Signorelli,” 199, who has argued that Tátrai’s insistence on reading an allusion in every scene to a particular moment in the life of the Petrucci is ultimately unconvincing. Holmquist, “The Iconography of a Ceiling by Pinturicchio,” Ch. 2, esp. 55–6 on Coriolanus. In Chs. 3 and 4, Holmquist links the walls to the ceiling’s twenty-one frescoed panels depicting deities, which she interprets as the masculine and feminine forces of the universe that are united by virtue and love. Kanter, “The Late Works of Luca Signorelli,” 197–9, rejects the specificity of Tátrai’s historical interpretation but concludes that the narratives could function broadly as models of political, dynastic, and marital virtues. Clough, “Pandolfo Petrucci e il concetto di magnificenza,” 393–4. Marilena Caciorgna and Roberto Guerrini, La virtù figurata. Eroi ed eroine dall’antichità nell’arte senese tra Medioevo e Rinascimento (Siena: Protagon Editori Toscani, 2003), 139–43.

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Coriolanus, they place primacy on the male protagonist while diminishing the woman’s part.35 On the contrary, Livy, who was well known in the Italian Renaissance, gives Veturia the leading role in the culminating events of Coriolanus’s life (History of Rome, 2.33–40). After Coriolanus is exiled from Rome for tyranny, he joins the enemy Volscian tribe and, because of his military skill, is named the general of its army. He leads the Volscian attack against his homeland, successfully taking Latin towns that Rome has recently conquered. With good reason to fear Coriolanus’s advance, Rome sends ambassadors and priests to the Volscian camp to attempt to broker a peace, but without success. At this point, the Roman matrons turn for help to Coriolanus’s mother, Veturia, and his wife, Volumnia, imploring them to intercede with “prayers and tears” where the arms of men have failed.36 The women go to the enemy camp outside Rome. When Coriolanus becomes aware of his mother’s presence, he is startled and runs to meet her. But before he can embrace her, Veturia stops him with unflinching words that challenge his abandonment of filial and patriotic piety: Sine, priusquam complexum accipio, sciam ad hostem an ad filium venerim, captiva materne in castris tuis sim. In hoc me longa vita et infelix senecta traxit, ut exsulem te, deinde hostem viderem? Potuisti populari hanc terram, quae te genuit atque aluit? Non tibi quamvis infesto animo et minaci perveneras ingredienti fines ira cecidit? Non, cum in conspectu Roma fuit, succurrit: ‘Intra illa moenia domus ac penates mei sunt, mater coniunx liberique’? Ergo ego nisi peperissem, Roma non oppugnaretur; nisi filium haberem, libera in libera patria mortua essem. Sed ego nihil iam pati nec tibi turpius nec mihi miserius possum nec, ut sum miserrima, diu futura sum: de his videris, quos, si pergis, aut immatura mors aut longa servitus manet. (Liv. 2:40) 35

36

In noting the iconography of the camera bella, Henry and Kanter, Luca Signorelli, 224, suggest “it is possible that the theme was the virtues of women,” but they do not elaborate. Two other scenes, Penelope and Telemachus and the Castigation of Cupid, also feature exemplary women. Petrarch first revived Livy’s History of Rome in the fourteenth century: Paul F. Grendler, ed., “History, Writing of,” in The Renaissance: An Encyclopedia for Students, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004), 154. Caciorgna and Guerrini, La virtù figurata, 139–43, discuss the ancient literary sources for the depiction of Coriolanus and Veturia in Renaissance art (besides Livy: Plutarch, Vitae Parallelae: Marcius Coriolanus; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Storia di Roma arcaica; and Valerius Maximus, Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri novem) and their Renaissance editions (all were available by the late fifteenth century). Of the four authors, Livy is most relevant to Signorelli’s depiction of Veturia because he gives her a pivotal role with extensive speech.

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Suffer me to learn, before I accept your embrace, whether I have come to an enemy or a son; whether I am a captive or a mother in your camp. Is it this to which long life and an unhappy old age have brought me, that I should behold in you an exile and then an enemy? Could you bring yourself to ravage this country, which gave you birth and reared you? Did not your anger fall from you, no matter how hostile and threatening your spirit when you came, as you passed the boundary? Did it not come over you, when Rome lay before your eyes: ‘Within those walls are my home and my gods, my mother, my wife and my children?’ So then, had I not been a mother, Rome would not now be besieged! Had I no son, I should have died a free woman, in a free land! But I can have nothing now to suffer which could be more disgraceful to you or more miserable to myself; nor, wretched though I am, shall I be so for long: it is these you must consider, for whom, if you keep on, untimely death or long enslavement is in store.37 This “tough love” speech breaks Coriolanus’s resolve. He embraces his family before calling his troops back to Volsci, where, as Livy tells us, he meets an uncertain end: either death or, worse yet, exile. For Livy, Veturia is a model of civic virtue. She sacrifices her son, but Rome is spared, its continuity ensured.38 Like Livy, Signorelli gives Veturia the pivotal role and Volumnia the supporting part (Fig. 4.1). But before analyzing the main protagonists in the foreground, let us turn to the auxiliary figures and setting in the middle and background, which allow us to read the narrative chronologically from the far distance to the foreground. Far in the distance sits Coriolanus’ target, the city of Rome, identifiable by her classicizing buildings and surrounding walls. Closer to the viewer, before the Tiber River, the Volscians prepare to attack from their encampment nestled between the v-shaped juncture of two hills. One plane closer to the protagonists, in the middle ground to the right, the Roman ambassadors on horseback engage in discussion, perhaps over their failure to persuade Coriolanus to give up the fight. To the left are their counterparts, the turbaned Roman priests, who have also failed to save their city.39 One priest looks 37 Livy, History of Rome, trans. B.O. Foster, vol. 1 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1919–59, t.p.1964–76), 349–51. 38 Catherine La Courreye Blecki, “An Intertextual Study of Volumnia: From Legend to Character in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus,” in Privileging Gender in Early Modern England, ed. Jean R. Brink (Kirksville, mo: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, Inc., 1993), 81–3, makes the point that both Livy and Plutarch treated her in this way. 39 Caciorgna and Guerrini, La virtù figurata, 141, identify the setting and figures in the middle ground.

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sharply at his companion who raises his hand in a seeming gesture of disagreement. The two groups of figures in the middle ground enhance the magnitude of the foreground encounter. The action of the protagonists in the foreground pivots around the dynamic child, Coriolanus’ son, who probably occupied the precise center of the composition before the fresco was cut on the right side.40 The viewer’s eye is drawn to the boy by the figures encircling him, the soldier’s staff behind him, and his figura serpentinata. His pose is one of extreme rotation: His upper body and arms twist to the left, while his right leg extends in the opposite direction where he also turns his head, all of which is balanced on the straight left leg. As Andrew Butterfield asserts, Andrea del Verrocchio created the first figura serpentinata of the Renaissance in his Putto with Dolphin (early 1480s), made for a fountain at the Medici villa of Careggi (Fig. 4.3).41 Although the pose of Coriolanus’s son is strikingly similar, one cannot know if Signorelli sought to recall this specific model or the numerous known examples of ancient putto statues that Verrocchio assimilated into his statue. Nevertheless, through the overtly classicizing pose chosen by Signorelli, learned viewers probably understood Coriolanus’ son as embodying the chronological moment of the narrative and demonstrating the painter’s artistic lineage.42 Reaching toward his father but looking back questioningly at his mother and grandmother, the child links the two principal figure groups while expressing the tension between them. His figura serpentinata conveys movement forward and backward but ultimately fixes him in equilibrium in the middle. Veturia, surrounded by Volumnia and other women, stands to the left, whereas Coriolanus and a half-dozen soldiers occupy the right side. Although the men are larger in scale than the women, Veturia is the agent who controls the action. With her head tilted downward, she recoils ever so slightly from her son’s advance and raises her right hand. Her emphatic gesture stops Coriolanus’s forward motion as several of his companions intently watch the unfolding scene. Her closed pose counters his open body, denying his spread arms the 40

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Kanter, “The Late Works of Luca Signorelli,” 191, on the cutting of the fresco. A plaque in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which is based on the fresco, shows the child at the center of the composition. The painting and plaque differ in that the latter places the figures farther back in space and in a broader landscape setting. Pierre Verlet, “A Faenza Plaque at the Victoria and Albert Museum,” Burlington Magazine 71 (1937): 182–4. Andrew Butterfield, The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 126–35, 222. This idea is indebted to Leonard Barkan’s “independent history of art,” as discussed in his Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 8.

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Figure 4.3 Andrea del Verrocchio, Putto with Dolphin, early 1480s. Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (Scala/Art Resource, ny)

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desired embrace. Instead, with mouth slightly parted, she is on the verge of speech. Her movements convey a rational, rather than emotional, response to her son, while her expression reveals an underlying sadness. Volumnia, with another son in hand, stands next to her mother-in-law but closer to her husband. The gentle curve of her body and her lowered head imply a more demure comportment than her mother-in-law’s erect body, as she takes a potentially unifying step toward her spouse. All figures contribute to the narrative, but Veturia’s critical role, and specifically her political agency, has led me to probe beyond attempts to find a single interpretation of the painting relating to the virtue of marriage and family as a stabilizing force in society. Reception theory opens the door to multiple potential readings by the bride, groom, and their peers in the socio-cultural context of Renaissance marriage. In the Italian Renaissance, ancient Roman women like Veturia were considered exemplary for the virtues they embodied—and were presented as models to emulate in writings on female moral education—but were ambiguous models because their actions often contradicted early modern societal mores.43 In Veturia’s case, her act of self-expression contradicts the norms set forth in treatises like Francesco Barbaro’s De re uxoria (1416) that advocate female silence, and her use of speech results in subversive ends: the persuasion of a man and, in consequence, the power of a woman.44 Catherine La Courreye Blecki argues that Veturia’s actions as recounted in ancient texts lose their moral clarity in Boccaccio’s retelling of her story. In De mulieribus claris (c.  1380), Boccaccio presents Veturia as an angry mother who casts aside 43

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On exemplary women as ambiguous models of behavior, Constance Jordan, “Boccaccio’s In-Famous Women: Gender and Civic Virtue in the De Mulieribus claris,” in Ambiguous Realities: Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Carole Levin and Jeanie Watson (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 25–47; Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1990), 34–40; Blecki, “An Intertextual Study of Volumnia,” 80–91; Marta Ajmar, “Exemplary Women in Renaissance Italy: Ambivalent Models of Behavior?” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. Letizia Panizza (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), 244–64. Margaret W. Ferguson, “A Room Not Their Own: Renaissance Women as Readers and Writers,” in The Comparative Perspective on Literature: Approaches to Theory and Practice, ed. Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 39, 45–7. Francesco Barbaro, “On Wifely Duties (1416),” in The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society, ed. Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 177–228. On Barbaro’s treatise and education within the context of marriage, Maria Ludovica Lenzi, Donne e madonne: L’educazione femminile nel primo Rinascimento italiano (Turin: Loescher, 1982), 70–9.

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maternal love, an action that rejects the normative roles of wife and mother.45 But Christine de Pizan, in Le livre de la cite des dames (1405), restores Veturia’s moral clarity. The mere presence of Veturia, who is described as a good and noble lady, is enough to move her son to instant humility and total compliance, and her achievement is unambiguous: “She alone was able to do what Rome’s most prominent citizens had been unable to do.”46 In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, Veturia was on the minds of learned individuals. In a letter to Pietro Zecchi (1486), the writer Laura Cereta evokes Veturia as an exemplar of the great power of maternal authority: “For when Coriolanus’ mother approached him, these powers softened her obdurate son’s anger when he was laying siege to Rome; for Roman plebs had not been able to appease this anger of his with entreaties, and neither had they been able to do so with the pleas of their envoys nor their priests swathed in veils.”47 In 1509, Henricus Cornelius Agrippa included Veturia in a lecture he delivered at the University of Dole, Burgundy, that was published twenty years later in Antwerp under the title Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex: “When Rome was besieged by the Volscians commanded by Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus and the men were not able to defend their city by arms, Veturia, an elderly woman and the mother of Coriolanus, saved the city by scolding her son.”48 Given the sophisticated culture of Renaissance Siena,49 it is reasonable to think that learned spectators were aware of Veturia’s e­ xemplary status and could read various messages in the painting of Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome. This type of multifaceted reading accords  with Benjamin 45

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Blecki, “An Intertextual Study of Volumnia,” 87–8; Giovanni Boccaccio, On Famous Women, trans. Virginia Brown (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2001), 223–31. On the normative roles of women, Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 40–54. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant (London: Penguin, 1999), 137–8. Diana Maury Robin, ed. and trans., Laura Cereta: Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 68. I thank Sarah Gwenyth Ross for this reference. Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, ed. and trans. Albert Rabil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 88. I thank Sarah Gwenyth Ross for this reference. For the historiography of Renaissance Siena, Jenkens, “Introduction,” in Renaissance City, 1–20. Jenkens argues that the problem for Siena is that its history and art have traditionally been viewed through the lens of Renaissance Florence. More recently, Jenkens concludes, scholars have analyzed the city’s art and architecture within its own political, social, cultural, and religious contexts, reaching the conclusion that Siena did indeed have a renaissance that was fueled in part by a classical revival.

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David’s recent analysis of narrative in Siena, in which he argues that patrons and artists used the literary tradition in a flexible and inventive way.50 While the broad socio-cultural context contributed to forming Vittoria Piccolomini (1494–1570), the scant details of her biography offer a few additional insights. Vittoria hailed from one of the most powerful and learned families in Siena. She was the grandniece of the famous humanist Pope Pius ii (Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, r. 1458–64) and niece of the short-ruling Pope Pius iii (Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini, r. 1503). The former had been at the forefront of employing private building in Siena to construct identity, and it was this model that Pandolfo Petrucci followed in building his own palace.51 Vittoria’s father, Andrea Todeschini Piccolomini (1445–1505), had benefited from the nepotism of his uncle, Pius ii, to gain positions and titles commensurate with a leading citizen of Siena. He was the family member who commissioned Pinturicchio to fresco the Piccolomini Library, which was done at the initiative of Pius iii.52 Vittoria’s mother, Agnese Farnese (c. 1460–1509), a cousin of Alessandro Farnese (the future Paul iii), tied the family to the Papal States through both her father and her Orsini mother. Although we know nothing about the education of Agnese Farnese, four letters written by her demonstrate that she wrote notably well in both penmanship and content. And there is evidence that she acted as capofamiglia after her husband’s death, arranging marriages for two of her sons and paying Pinturicchio for the altarpiece for her family’s funerary chapel.53 Agnese Farnese offered a model for her daughter Vittoria, who was to fulfill the role of capofamiglia in her own family after Borghese Petrucci was exiled in 1516. At that point, Vittoria took her four daughters to live in the Palazzo Piccolomini in Sarteano, 40 miles outside Siena. She retained her lands and wealth and seems to have been instrumental in arranging good marriages for her four daughters.54 To be sure, at the time of her marriage to Borghese Petrucci in 1511, Vittoria could not have known what

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Benjamin David, “Narrative in Context. The Cassoni of Francesco di Giorgio,” in Jenkens, Renaissance Siena: Art in Context, 109–37. 51 Clough, “Pandolfo Petrucci e il concetto di magnificenza,” 390; Jenkens, Renaissance City, 16–7. 52 Fabrizio Nevola, “‘Lieto e trionphante per la città’: Experiencing a Mid-Fifteenth-Century Imperial Triumph Along Siena’s Strada Romana,” Renaissance Studies 17 (2003): 583–4; Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen, 59–60. Andrea Piccolomini’s positions included capitano del popolo, signore of Castiglione della Pescaia and the Isola del Giglio, consignore of Camposervoli, and knight of the Order of Santiago. 53 Dizionario biografico degli italiani, “Agnese Farnese.” 54 Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen, 61–3.

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the future was to hold, but the scant biographical evidence suggests that she, like her mother, belonged to the category of privileged Renaissance women who competently stepped into typically male gender roles when compelled by circumstances. As the examples of Agnese Farnese and Vittoria Piccolomini reveal, at times the reality of women’s lives in the Italian Renaissance ran counter to the ideal woman prescribed in treatises, who was above all chaste, obedient, and silent.55 Even the genre of writing that defends women—whether texts that praise women for fulfilling conventional female virtues, such as Vespasiano da Bisticci’s Il Libro delle lode e commendazione delle donne, or those that praise women for attaining “masculine” qualities like intelligence, such as Agostino Strozzi’s Defensio mulierum—do not argue for systemic societal change.56 Major conditions of women’s lives remained intractable: Chastity prevailed as an indisputable female virtue, the main purpose of most patrician women in republican city-states was to marry and reproduce, and non-ruling women by law lacked political rights. On the other hand, women could wield what Maria Ludovica Lenzi has called oblique power through their maternal role and even the wealth of their dowries.57 Patrician women’s lives were more complicated, and likely more interesting, than ideal conceptions. Though too little is known about Vittoria Piccolomini to characterize her with specificity, these conflicting expectations and possibilities must have shaped her horizon of expectations. The painting of Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome engages in the socio-cultural world of a spectator like Vittoria Piccolomini by representing three permeable gender roles that she was to fulfill during her long lifetime: wife, mother, and matron. Volumnia, who is the supporting actress in both the painting and its textual sources, is the ideal wife who fulfills her main purpose of producing progeny for her husband. She represents an ideal of female 55

On the discursive tradition of the ideal woman, Ferguson, “A Room Not Their Own,” 93–116. See also Paola Tinagli, “Womanly Virtues in Quattrocento Florentine Marriage Furnishings,” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. Letizia Panizza (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), 266–7. 56 Pamela Joseph Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 33–64. 57 Lenzi, Donne e madonne, esp. Introduction and Ch. 3. On the authority of women in the household, see also Merry Wiesner-Hanks, “Women’s Authority in the State and Household in Early Modern Europe,” in Women Who Ruled: Queens, Goddesses, Amazons in Renaissance and Baroque Art, ed. Annette Dixon (Ann Arbor and London: University of Michigan Museum of Art and Merrell Publishers, 2002), 35–8.

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beauty, one that Vittoria’s great-uncle Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (before becoming pope) extolled in his romance, Storia delle due amanti (1444), where he describes the beautiful women of Siena as blond and Venus-like.58 In Signorelli’s painting the youthful, beautiful, and blond Volumnia looks demurely at her husband while displaying devotion to her sons through her pose, which is based on Jacopo della Quercia’s statue of a female figure with two children (1414–19), identified by Francesco Patrizi as Rhea Silvia with her twin sons Romulus and Remus (Fig. 4.4). As Rhea Silvia, Volumnia evokes the mother who gave birth to Siena, because local tradition held that when Remus was killed, his sons Senius and Aschinus left Rome, wandered north, and founded Siena. As scholars have argued, Jacopo della Quercia’s Rhea Silvia doubles as a personification of Charity, with one child in her embracing left arm and the other held by her right hand as he stands at her feet.59 The child reaching for Volumnia’s breast reinforces the evocation of Charity. The figure of Volumnia/Rhea Silva/Charity is a model of familial devotion, both beautiful wife and nurturing mother. Volumnia’s adornment associates her with contemporary brides like Vittoria Piccolomini. The gold brocade fabric of her dress evokes the luxurious clothing that a bride received from her groom as part of the counter-donora (trousseau).60 The style of her dress, however, bears only a vague resemblance to Italian Renaissance clothing, and her voluminous draped cloak and sandals evoke ancient costume.61 This mixture of ancient and contemporary clothing 58 59

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David, “Cassoni of Francesco di Giorgio,” 133. On the foundation myth of Siena, and on Jacopo della Quercia’s sculpture as Rhea Silvia and as a source for Volumnia, Luke Syson, ed., Renaissance Siena: Art for a City (London: National Gallery of Art, 2007), 18, 248–9, 272. On the counter-donora, Joanna Woods-Marsden, “Portrait of A Lady, 1430–1520,” in Virtue  and Beauty: Leonardo’s Ginevra de’ Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women, ed. David Alan Brown (Washington and Princeton: National Gallery of Art, Princeton University Press, 2001), 65; Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, Art, Marriage, and Family in the Florentine  Renaissance Palace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 4–5. On gold brocade fabric, Jacqueline Herald, Renaissance Dress in Italy 1400–1500 (London: Bell & Hyman, 1981), 78–9. Her dress is less tailored than the typical Renaissance gamurra, but she does appear to wear a white shirt underneath as was common in Renaissance dress. I have compared her dress to the many examples in the portraits of women in Brown, Virtue and Beauty. For discussions of clothing in this catalogue, Woods-Marsden, “Portrait of a Lady,” 63–87, and Roberta Orsi Landini and Mary Westerman Bulgarella, “Costume in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Portraits of Women,” in Brown, Virtue and Beauty,

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Figure 4.4 Jacopo della Quercia, Rhea Silvia, 1414–9. Palazzo Pubblico, Siena (Scala/Art Resource, ny)

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styles continues a fifteenth-century tradition for depicting ancient figures in domestic painting, serving to mediate between the historical narrative and the contemporary spectator.62 Her hairstyle—visible blond locks, but bound, neat, and ornamented—is the respectable style of married women in the Italian Renaissance.63 While the adornment of the ancient Volumnia visually connects her to elite female viewers, especially brides like Vittoria, her message of familial and civic virtue likely resonated with both newlyweds. The marriage between Vittoria and Borghese was a political alliance between two families in opposing parties,64 and it was surely expected that this couple would continue the Petrucci lineage, producing sons to govern the city. Volumnia provides a model for the maiden Vittoria, who had to transition to the roles of wife and eventually mother as she moved from her natal to conjugal family.65 At the time of her matrimony, the seventeen-year-old Vittoria was already an orphan, so, as recorded in the marriage contract, her brother Pierfrancesco enacted her transition from her role as Piccolomini daughter to Petrucci wife. It is recorded that after the nuptials the bride and groom were brought back to the Palazzo Petrucci, where they must have viewed this fresco.66 And from that point, Pierfrancesco Piccolomini was closely allied with the Petrucci despite the ­families’ traditional opposition.67

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89–97. Other Italian Renaissance depictions of ancient Roman women also show them in sandals, such as the panels by Domenico Beccafumi of Tanaquil and Cornelia (ca. 1519), made for Pandolfo’s nephew, Francesco di Camillo Petrucci: Syson, Renaissance Siena, 323–6. Caroline Campbell, “Revaluing Dress in History Paintings for Quattrocento Florence,” in Revaluing Renaissance Art, ed. Gabriele Neher and Rupert Shepherd (Brookfield, vt: Ashgate, 2000), 137–45. Long, flowing hair signified innocence for virgins but eroticism for married women. Mary Rogers, “The Decorum of Women’s Beauty: Trissino, Firenzuola, Luigini and the Representation of Women in Sixteenth-Century Painting,” Renaissance Studies 2 (1988): 62–3; Woods-Marsden, “Portrait of a Lady,” 65–7; Musacchio, Art, Marriage, and Family, 162–4; Alison C. Fleming, “Maiden or Matron: The Unusual Iconography of the Virgin Mary with the Long Flowing Hair,” Nierika 2 (2012): 32–41. The marriage is commonly described as such; for instance, Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen, 60. On the transitional stages in a woman’s life, Baskins, Cassone Painting, Humanism, and Gender, Ch. 2, esp. 28, 48–9; Anne Jacobson-Shutte, “‘Trionfo delle donne’: Tematiche di rovesciamento dei ruoli nella Firenze rinascimentale,” Quaderni Storici 44 (1980): 474–96. Kanter, “The Late Works of Luca Signorelli,” 198. On Pierfrancesco Piccolomini’s role in Vittoria’s marriage, Dizionario biografico degli italiani, “Agnese Farnese.” On humanists’ writings of marriage as a political entity, Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 54–5.

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Whereas painted series of donne illustri, a popular type of domestic decoration, depicted isolated figures of historic women as representations of stereotypical female virtues, narrative paintings are inherently different because the figures are shown in action.68 Both Volumnia and Veturia enact a role in the narrative, but in contrast to her silent daughter-in-law, the matron Veturia acts outside conventional female boundaries by employing speech to produce political change. As most famously explained by Francesco Barbaro, female speech was a transgression of societal norms, as silence was inextricably linked to chastity, and its opposite, female loquacity, was associated with sexual desire, which was viewed as a natural female characteristic that had to be controlled. Margaret Ferguson has argued that the anxiety over female utterance resulted in the defensive rhetoric found in the writings of women. Even Christine de Pizan, who succeeded in disassociating speech from sexual sin, implies through her stories that female speech leads to self-destruction.69 Furthermore, Veturia appropriates the male gesture of adlocutio, used in ancient oratory and known most famously in the Renaissance from the Capitoline equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius.70 Veturia’s story, then, sends a conflicted message: She merits praise for her accomplishment of saving Rome, but she had to employ subversive means to achieve it. Indeed, her act leads to a form of self-destruction, the loss of her son. Signorelli seems to mediate this contested terrain by depicting Veturia as a veiled, matronly—decidedly not nubile—woman who acts decisively but with restraint. Her straight posture and rhetorical gesture communicate resolve, but her bowed head and sad expression suggest she takes on this politically active role with some reluctance. This Veturia is not the angry mother of Boccaccio’s tale but rather Livy’s rational matron. In her rationality, she possesses a behavioral trait associated with male, not female, character.71 The role of matron was a state to which many women transitioned in their lives, and which Vittoria entered at a young age. The representation of her ancient counterpart in this domestic space 68 Baskins, Cassone Painting, Humanism, and Gender, 34–6, makes the point in discussing the sequential narratives on cassoni. For an example of a Sienese Virtuous Men and Women series, Syson, Renaissance Siena, 234–44. 69 Ferguson, “A Room Not Their Own,” esp. 99–100, 104–5. 70 In the late medieval period and early Renaissance, this figure was also called Constantine and other names. On the Renaissance reception of this statue, Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 51–3; Kathleen Wren Christian, Empire without End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome, c. 1350–1527 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 98–9, 105. 71 Wiesner-Hanks, “Women’s Authority in the State and Household,” 34.

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helped to structure the social expectations about the permeable, and sometimes conflicting, roles that women filled. Spectators brought contemporary experience of female speech to their viewing of this ancient exemplar. Despite the societal condemnation, there were occasions—including in Siena—when women acted as orators and earned praise for their speech. Chroniclers record that for the wedding festivities of Frederick iii and Leonora of Portugal, celebrated in Siena in 1452, educated women delivered public speeches on the stage erected before the Palazzo Pubblico.72 There was more room for female oratory at the Italian courts— where nuptial oratories sometimes praised the bride for her intellect—but this courtly world intersected with Siena. The learned Ippolita Maria Sforza of Milan attracted the attention of two Sienese humanists. After hearing the fourteen-year-old Sforza give a public Latin oration, Pius ii “not only praised her but was in awe of her.”73 At Ippolita’s wedding in 1465, Francesco Patrizi delivered an oration praising her intellect and literary studies as comparable to “the most eloquent men.”74 To be sure, Patrizi did not think all women merited such praise, for he noted that intelligence was rare among women. Moreover, there were different expectations and possibilities for noble versus non-noble women.75 But Patrizi and Pius’s respective remarks allow us to envision cases in which female utterance was acceptable to Sienese recipients. The representation of Veturia’s speech may have conjured such real occasions in the viewer’s mind and, in turn, provided a normative model for women as active agents. Renaissance domestic paintings represent an intertwining of family and civic virtues and of male and female messages. As Paola Tinagli has argued, “Even the stories that have female characters as protagonists deal in fact with the predicament of both sexes, and seem therefore to be addressed to both husband and wife.”76 The scene of Coriolanus and Veturia presents a male and 72

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Nevola, “Lieto e trionphante per la città,” 601; Cristelle Baskins, “The Triumph of Marriage: Frederick iii and Leonora of Portugal,” in The Triumph of Marriage. Painted Cassoni of the Renaissance, ed. Baskins (Boston, ma: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Gutenberg Periscope Publishing, Ltd., 2008), 55. About one of the women participants, Oronata Orsini, see Syson, Renaissance Siena, 204. Anthony F. D’Elia, “Marriage, Sexual Pleasure, and Learned Brides in the Wedding Orations of Fifteenth-Century Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002): 418–9 (D’Elia’s translation). D’Elia, “Marriage, Sexual Pleasure, and Learned Brides,” 416. Julia L. Hairston, “Skirting the Issue: Machiavelli’s Caterina Sforza,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 692–94. On the early modern debate about the authority of ruling women, WiesnerHanks, “Women’s Authority in the State and Household,” 27–60. Tinagli, “Womanly Virtues in Quattrocento Florentine Marriage Furnishings,” 265–84. For another case study of the likely interactions of female and male viewers with an Italian

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a female protagonist. How did the story complement the groom in his living quarters? Men too experienced transitional states in early modern Italy, and the most significant transformation, from unwed to married, was deemed a social necessity. Unmarried men were thought to be naturally unruly, antisocial, dominated by passion over reason, prone to lust—in sum, a threat to the social order. Marriage was the final act in a taming process that began in childhood; the responsibilities of a wife and children were believed to transform the irresponsible young man into a virtuous member of society who was ready to participate in the politics and economy of his city. According to Leon Battista Alberti, cherishing the family was not natural to young men who enjoyed freedom and feared responsibility; they had to be taught by example.77 The story of Coriolanus intersects with the transformation of Borghese Petrucci into husband, father, and citizen upon his marriage. In the painting the ancient hero bows deferentially to his mother and wife, as the centrality of children is embodied in the young son reaching instinctively for his father. It is for them, and especially his children, that Coriolanus makes the responsible decision of self-sacrifice. As Caciorgna and Guerrini argue, Signorelli’s painting represents Coriolanus as described by Valerius Maximus in his Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri novem: an example of pietas, or piety, toward his family and country.78 To Borghese Petrucci and other elite male spectators in the Renaissance, Coriolanus offered a model of choosing to become a devoted husband and citizen. Besides reinforcing the positive effects of marriage, however, Coriolanus also serves as a warning to young men not to become “womanish.” Boccaccio added a codicil to the story: As a reward for Veturia’s actions, the Senate granted women the right to wear jewelry and “clothing of royal purple,” to deleterious effects. Men became impoverished and feminine, for which they had only themselves to blame. According to Pamela Joseph Benson, the anecdote and others like it might have reminded men of their duty to maintain the social order with its prescribed gender roles.79 In Signorelli’s painting, both women Renaissance domestic painting featuring a female protagonist, see Maurer, “The Trouble with Pasiphaë,” Chapter 6 in this volume. 77 My description of the transformation from unmarried to married man, and Alberti’s discussion of it, relies on Tinagli, “Womanly Virtues in Quattrocento Florentine Marriage Furnishings,” 267–8. 78 Caciorgna and Guerrini, La virtù figurata, 141. Maximus was printed with a commentary by Oliverius in Venice in 1487 and repeatedly printed thereafter. For the text, Valerio Massimo, Detti e fatti memorabilia, trans. Rino Faranda (Turin: Unione tipograficoeditrice torinese, 1971), v,4,1. 79 Boccaccio, On Famous Women, 229–31. Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman, 20–2, does not interpret Boccaccio’s addition to the story as diminishing the praise for

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and men wear ornate clothing: The men are dressed in sumptuous Roman-like cuirasses embellished in gold leaf. In viewers’ minds, the sumptuous costumes might have conflated the detail of the story’s aftereffects with the climactic moment represented and, thereby, served as a warning against gender inversion. In the context of Renaissance Siena, the depiction of rich clothing also engages with the conspicuous-consumption activities of the elite that included building, art, and dress. Such magnificent display evokes Pandolfo Petrucci’s epithet of Il Magnifico. But whether the representation of such display reinforces or undermines this practice of conspicuous consumption (or both) is thus unclear.80 A year after Vittoria Piccolomini and Borghese Petrucci married, the groom stepped into his anticipated role in Sienese politics, when he substituted for his father in the governing body of the Balía. Pandolfo Petrucci died three months later, on May 12, 1512. Borghese Petrucci was at the center of Sienese politics for only four years. On March 16, 1516, he was suddenly ousted from office in a coup led by his cousin and nemesis, Bishop Raffaele Petrucci. Although Borghese has traditionally been portrayed as incompetent, Maurizio Gattoni proposes that he was instead the victim of international and familial politics.81 The sixteenth-century historian Giugurta Tommasi describes his dramatic departure as an forced abandonment of all that was dear to him: his state, country, house, wife, and four small daughters.82 As it turned out, then, the young couple lived for only a short time in their nuptial setting. One wonders if Borghese and Vittoria thought about the parallels between Coriolanus’ story and their own. Coriolanus’ exile was on the minds of political theorists in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. According to Livy, Coriolanus had refused to give corn to the plebs because he believed they had acquired too

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Veturia and places the blame squarely on the shoulders of the indulgent men. On the contrary, for Blecki, “An Intertextual Study of Volumnia,” 88, the addition of this passage “trivializes Veturia’s victory,” emphasizing the damage she caused over her achievement. To explore this issue further, one might study contemporary sumptuary laws. Interestingly, in 1509, the Balía revoked sumptuary laws for Petrucci women; Clough, “Pandolfo Petrucci e il concetto di magnificenza,” 383. Maurizio Gattoni da Camogli, La Titanomachia: L’età dei Nove e dei Petrucci a Siena e le guerre d’Italia (1477–1524) (Siena: Cantagalli, 2010), 123–41; and Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen, 60. Giugurta Tommasi, Dell’historie di Siena: Deca seconda, ed. Mario De Gregorio, vol. 3 (Siena: Accademia Senese degli Intronati, 2006), 20: “Così ristrettosi con alcuni suoi i più cari e con altri suo fratello, fanciulletto, e prese quante gio[i]e quanti più denari li fu possibile, abbandonando lo stato, la patria, la casa propria, …[e] la moglie con quattro ­piccolo sue fanciulline.”

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much power. The plebs reacted with anger, and would have killed him, but he was brought before the tribune, which resulted in his exile.83 In the 1480s the Sienese humanist Francesco Patrizi wrote De regno et regis institutione on princely rule, which followed his earlier De institutione reipublicae (1465–71) on republican governments, both of which were much read in Italy in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.84 In the former, he uses Coriolanus as an example of the negative results of a populace’s opposition to its rulers. He exonerates Coriolanus for befriending the enemy and taking up arms against his motherland because he blames the “popolo ingrata” for forcing Coriolanus to take these actions.85 A few decades later, Machiavelli wrote about Coriolanus in the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy (written c. 1514–7). The author must have been known to the Petrucci, because Pandolfo figures in several of his writings: In the Discourses Pandolfo exemplifies the use of deception and ingenuity in acquiring princely power in a republic; in The Prince he serves as an example of a ruler who gains the loyalty of former enemies and intelligently chooses a competent minister; and in The History of Florence he is praised for his wisdom.86 In the Discourses Coriolanus’ story offers an example of the beneficial role of laws and courts in maintaining peace in a republic because they mediate dissent and correct abuses. Machiavelli argues that if a legal system had not been in place to try Coriolanus, the plebeian anger would have led to unrest and ultimately worse results than the sacrifice of one citizen.87 Borghese Petrucci’s story is the negation of Machiavelli’s lesson of Coriolanus, because Borghese received no trial. Civic order was upended. This meeting of ancient history, Renaissance painting, political theory, and contemporary events was occurring at the very time that the definition of a republic, or respublica, was being redefined “to refer to popular or oligarchic government—governments by a 83 History of Rome 2.34–35. 84 Battaglia, Enea Silvia Piccolomini e Francesco Patrizi, 101–2. 85 Francesco Patrizi, Il sacro regno de’l gran’ Patritio: de’l uero reggimento, e de la uera felicità de’l principe, e beatitudine humana … (Vinegia, 1547), ix, 203. 86 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan Gilbert (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1965), vol. 1, 79 and 85 (The Prince, Chs. 20 and 22); Machiavelli, The Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli, ed. Leslie Joseph Walker and Cecil H. Clough (London; Boston: Routledge and K. Paul, 1975), 1432 (The History of Florence). I thank Christopher Celenza for help with these references. 87 Machiavelli, Discourses, 1. I thank Elizabeth Mellyn for this reference. For the dating of the Discourses, John M. Najemy, “Society, Class, and State in Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy,” in Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, Cambridge Companions Online, ed. Najemy (2010), http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521861250.007, 97.

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plurality of persons—and not to princely governments.”88 Tommasi writes that the Popolari faction had always opposed the marriage of Vittoria Piccolomini, a daughter of one of its party’s leading families, to a son of the aristocratic Nove, which suggests that the disruption of her marriage pleased some in Siena.89 If spectators from the Popolari faction were able to view the fresco after Borghese’s exile, they might have thought the representation of a famous ancient exemplar of exile in the Palazzo Petrucci was justifiably prescient. But Borghese Petrucci, and his wife, probably thought differently of the abrogation of legal process in their respublica in contradistinction to Coriolanus’ example given by Machiavelli.

Aurelia Petrucci (1511–42) and the Afterlife of Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome

As stated in the introduction of this essay, one of the tenets of reception theory is the essential role of the recipient in the production of meaning. In this section I will investigate potential meanings of Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome for a later viewer, Aurelia Petrucci, and for the viewer category of learned women that she represents. The wedding celebration for Frederick iii and Leonora of Portugal in 1452 indicates that Siena was home to learned women in the early Renaissance. Another example relates directly to the Petrucci: In 1451, the wife of Achille Petrucci gave an oration against the relaxation of sumptuary laws.90 In The Birth of Feminism (2009), Sarah Ross contributes substantially to overturning the notion that intellectual capabilities necessarily compromised the reputation of early modern women.91 She convincingly argues that, on the contrary, through the household academy in which women learned from fathers and other male relatives, female writers in Venice, the Veneto, and London established productive careers as intellectuals. By fashioning themselves as part of the “family business of education,” early 88

James Hankins, “Exclusivist Republicanism and the Non-Monarchical Republic,” Political Theory, no. 38 (2010): 453–82, doi: 10.1177/0090591710366369. 89 Tommasi, Dell’historie di Siena, Deca seconda, vol. 3, 4–5. 90 G. Gigli, Diario senese, vol. 1 (Siena, 1854), 71. 91 For an earlier assessment of women intellectuals that characterizes them as compromised individuals in Renaissance society, Margaret L. King, “Book-Lined Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance,” in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of  the European Past, ed. Patricia Labalme (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 66–90.

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modern Italian women like Isotta Nogarola (1418–66), Laura Cereta (1469–99), and Cassandra Fedele (1465?–1558) avoided condemnation and even gained their contemporaries’ respect, burnishing the reputation of their families and cities. Refuting Boccaccio’s characterization of donne illustri, Ross’s revisionist study argues that learned women were not exceptional—a point also made by Laura Cereta—and embodied both traditional “feminine” virtues and intellectual faculties.92 Ross’s book does not consider Siena, but Diana Robin has included this city in her study of women writers and early print culture in Italy from 1530 to 1570. In her chapter on the poet Laudomia Forteguerri (b. 1515), Robin argues that “by the 1540s the participation of women in the intellectual life of the city was taken for granted” (which means it had begun earlier), and that relations between the sexes were “characterized by an unprecedented openness,” which unfolded, at least in part, at the veglie or salons where elite men and women gathered for conversations, debates, and readings.93 Aurelia Petrucci, Borghese and Vittoria’s eldest daughter, was a participant in this literary culture. Only four years old when she left Siena with her mother and sisters after her father’s exile, Aurelia returned to the city in 1524 for her first marriage, which occurred during the brief period (1523–4) of restored Petrucci authority under Borghese’s youngest brother, Fabio. Her marriage to her second cousin, Iacopo di Giovfrancesco di Iacopo Petrucci, was meant to unite the two opposing sides of the Petrucci consortium.94 One wonders how she might have read the scene of Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome in the ancestral palace, which remained in the family’s possession. Did she identify with the separation between male and female family members, since it seems Aurelia never saw her father again after his forced departure from the city in 1516? According to Tommasi, Borghese lost his mind after the 1517 execution of his brother, Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci, who was charged with conspiring to kill Leo x.95

92

Sarah Gwyneth Ross, The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2009), esp. Introduction and Part i, on the ideas discussed herein; 96, for her use of the term “the family business of education.” She presents Giuseppe Betussi’s translation of Boccaccio’s On Famous Women (first published in 1545), to which he added the biographies of recent women, as illustrating the conceptual shift in the perception of learned women away from exceptional and morally compromised and toward virtuous and learned; see 96–111. 93 Diana Maury Robin, Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 127–30. 94 Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen, 62. 95 Tommasi, Dell’historie di Siena, Deca seconda, vol. 3, 42.

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A decade later, the fresco intersected with Aurelia’s “horizon of expectations” in another way. By the mid-1530s, when she was married for a second time (her first husband had died in 1531), she was involved in Sienese literary circles. In 1535, Mariano Lenzi dedicated his publication of Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore, a Neoplatonic discussion of love, to Aurelia, describing her as both intelligent and virtuous.96 She was also the dedicatee of two other humanist writings: Antonio Vignali’s Dulpisto in 1540 and Bartolomeo Carli Piccolomini’s translation of Aeneid 4 (written in the 1530s), which was part of a larger project by six men to translate the first six books of Virgil’s work. One of the other translations was dedicated to Aurelia’s sister Giulia, and another to Giulia Gonzaga (1513?–58), thereby connecting the Petrucci sisters to a woman at the center of Italian literary culture in these years.97 Vignali’s dedication tells us that Aurelia was engaged in “more demanding studies,” but Piccolomini’s reveals that she did not read Latin because the aim of his translation was to allow her to read Virgil.98 Not only did these dedications bring public recognition of her literary interests, but Aurelia was also developing a reputation as a poet in her own right. Only two of her poems survive, but one accrued her lasting fame, as it was included in standard compilations of poetry by women writers published in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.99 Eisenbichler has interpreted the poem, “Dove sta il tuo valor, Patria mia cara?” as the work of an intelligent and politically astute woman. The poem is a lament for her city, which suffers in turmoil because of discord, and the poet warns that only concord will save it from woe: “Draw your scattered limbs into a single body,/And let one just will be everyone’s law,/For only then will I call you worthy of valor.”100 Her words describe the factionalism that plagued Sienese politics after her father’s exile and eerily foretell the grief to come: In 1555, Siena was to lose its independence to Florence after a devastating thirty-six-month siege by the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles v and Duke Cosimo i. 96 Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen, 64. While acknowledging that the circumstances of the publication and of the dedication to Aurelia are unknown, Eisenbichler has suggested that the publication of “an important philosophical work composed by an expatriate Iberian Jew and edited by a minor Sienese intellectual … may have been advancing the political interests of Aurelia Petrucci’s [hispanophile] natal or marital clans.” 97 On the dedications to Aurelia, Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen, 66–71. On Giulia Gonzaga, Robin, Publishing Women, 15–26. 98 Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen, 68–9. 99 Ibid., 71–6. 100 Ibid., 73: “Fa delle membra sparse un corpo solo/Ed un giusto voler sia legge a tutti,/Ché allora io ti diró di valor degna.”

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The focus on discord in Aurelia’s poem brings to mind Machiavelli’s use of Coriolanus as an example of the role of discord, and its corrective of laws, in maintaining political stability.101 One wonders if the learned and informed Aurelia might have linked her words to the example of Coriolanus in the painting and Machiavelli’s political theory in the Discourses. It is not unrealistic to think that Aurelia knew Machiavelli’s writings, since he wrote about her grandfather. Did Aurelia understand Coriolanus’ story as did Machiavelli in the Discourses, as an example of laws at work to ensure a stable society? One line in her poem tells its readers to learn from others. If she read the painting in relation to her words, she might have seen an example of how to achieve harmony by choosing one will or body (the state) over its parts (its citizens). This is indeed the sacrifice that Coriolanus and his family had made and, according to Aurelia’s poem, one that Siena’s citizens had to make. As a learned early modern woman who wielded oblique power through words, Aurelia Petrucci might have looked admiringly at the representation of Veturia, as she thought about Livy’s version of her eloquent and persuasive speech. Veturia was an apt exemplar for Aurelia. The Petrucci daughter/maiden was now both mother/matron and “woman as intellect,”102 who successfully negotiated gender boundaries to subvert static definitions of social roles. She used her intellect to burnish the reputation of Siena, a city that she, and both sides of her family, held dear. My positing of Aurelia, her mother, and her father as viewer-agents of Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome is possible only in our world of postmodern and feminist hermeneutics. My “horizon of expectations” is not one to which they had access, and theirs is merely fragmentary to me. Nevertheless, I have used this hermeneutical framework as a means to mediate between past and present spectatorship in order to suggest potential attitudes implied by the painting (to paraphrase Jauss) for some of its original viewers and the painting’s active engagement in the social, political, and cultural discourses of its day (to paraphrase Bryson, Holly, and Moxey). The ancient story intersects with Renaissance attitudes about male and female gender roles, the permeable borders between them, and the transitions between stages within male and female lives. To be sure, the ancient narrative and its representation by Signorelli offered a model for its Renaissance audience, but the meaning 101 Ibid., 74–5, argues that “Machiavelli would have been proud of Aurelia’s grasp of history and political science” and connects her call for “a single body” to his advice for princely rule. He does not connect her poem to the Discourses. 102 Ross, The Birth of Feminism, 16, defines “woman as intellect” as a new construction of female identity.

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was more complex than a simple exhortation to virtue, and the messages were shaped by the horizons of expectations of the individual viewers. It is evident that the story of Veturia and Coriolanus as told by ancient authors was much on the minds of intellectuals and political theorists of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Signorelli’s Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome is not merely a reflection of its socio-politico-cultural context, but it seems to solicit the very discourses about the nature of rule and querelle des femmes that were rife during this period. Bibliography Agosti, Giovanni, and Vincenzo Farinella. “Interni senesi all’antica.” In Domenico Beccafumi e il suo tempo, edited by P. Torriti, 578–99. Milan: Electa, 1990. Agrippa, Henricus Cornelius. Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex. Edited and translated by Albert Rabil. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Ajmar, Marta. “Exemplary Women in Renaissance Italy: Ambivalent Models of Behavior?” In Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, edited by Letizia Panizza, 244–64. Oxford: Legenda, 2000. Barbaro, Francesco. “On Wifely Duties (1416).” In The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society, edited by Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt, 177–228. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978. Barkan, Leonard. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Baskins, Cristelle. Cassone Painting, Humanism, and Gender in Early Modern Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. “Il trionfo della pudicizia: Menacing Virgins in Italian Renaissance Domestic Painting.” In Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, edited by Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie, 117–26. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998. ———. “The Triumph of Marriage: Frederick iii and Leonora of Portugal.” In The Triumph of Marriage: Painted Cassoni of the Renaissance, edited by Cristelle Baskins, 47–65. Boston, ma: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Gutenberg Periscope Publishing, Ltd., 2008. Batstone, William W. “Provocation: The Point of Reception Theory.” In Classics and the Uses of Reception, edited by Charles Martindale and Richard Thomas, 14–20. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Battaglia, Felice. Enea Silvio Piccolomini e Francesco Patrizi. Due politici senese del quattrocento. Siena: Instituto comunale d’arte e di storia, 1936.

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chapter 5

Queer Fragments: Sodoma, the Belvedere Torso, and Saint Catherine’s Head Timothy B. Smith In 1526, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, better known today as Il Sodoma, completed a series of frescoes for the chapel of Saint Catherine of Siena in the Sienese church of San Domenico.1 The paintings depict scenes from the saint’s life, including, in an image covering the entire left wall, the beheading of Niccolò di Tuldo, a political prisoner who came under Catherine’s ministry during his final days (Figs. 5.1–5.3).2 In this fresco, framed illusionistically by a painted arch on piers, a crowd of witnesses in a deep landscape setting pushes the main protagonists to the shallow foreground while angels and demons fly above. Catherine, who attended the execution, is included at the far left of the composition. The central focus of the image, however, is not the saint and her mission to save the soul of the condemned, but rather the gruesome execution, complete with the decapitated corpse and the severed head held aloft by a confraternity member. Niccolò’s painted body and head share the chapel’s space with the actual relic head of

I am very grateful to this volume’s editors, David Areford, Joanna Gardner-Huggett, Katherine McIver, and Kathleen Spies for their feedback on earlier versions of this essay; I also appreciate the suggestions, comments, and support of James Saslow and Susan Wegner. 1 For the chapel in San Domenico, see Peter Anselm Riedl and Max Seidel, Die Kirchen von Siena (Munich: Bruckmann, 1985), vol. 2.1.2, 562–88, especially 579–80 for the fresco depicting Niccolò di Tuldo, and Susan E. Wegner, “Heroizing Saint Catherine: Francesco Vanni’s Saint Catherine of Siena Liberating a Possessed Woman,” Woman’s Art Journal 19 (1998): 31–7. 2 The scholarship on Catherine of Siena is extensive, but in general see Gerald Parsons, The Cult of Saint Catherine of Siena (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); and for images Lidia Bianchi and Diega Giunta, Iconografia di S. Caterina da Siena (Rome: Città nuova editrice, 1988); Susan E. Wegner, “The Rise of Saint Catherine of Siena as an Intercessor for the Sienese,” in Renaissance Siena: Art in Context, ed. A. Lawrence Jenkens (Kirksville, mo: Truman State University Press, 2005), 173–93; and Emily A. Moerer, “A Visual Canonization: Images of Catherine of Siena During the Time of Pius ii,” in Pio ii Piccolomini: Il Papa del Rinascimento a Siena, ed. Fabrizio Nevola (Siena: Protagon, 2009), 411–39. The scene of Niccolò di Tuldo’s execution was only rarely depicted, and the chapel’s fresco appears to be the first instance. For Niccolò di Tuldo, see F. Thomas Luongo, The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 91–6.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004289697_007

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Figure 5.1  Sodoma, Execution of Niccolò di Tuldo, 1526. Chapel of Saint Catherine of Siena, San Domenico, Siena (Foto Lensini, Siena)

Saint Catherine, ensconced over the adjacent altar in a fifteenth-century marble tabernacle (Fig. 5.4).3 As we shall see, these bodily fragments, both sacred and profane, both real and fictive, are crucial to the martyrial content 3 With papal permission, Catherine’s head was removed from her tomb at Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome in 1384 and translated to Siena, where it was deposited in the sacristy of San

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Figure 5.2  Sodoma, Detail of Execution of Niccolò di Tuldo, 1526. Chapel of Saint Catherine of Siena (Foto Lensini, Siena)

Figure 5.3  Sodoma, Detail of Execution of Niccolò di Tuldo, 1526. Chapel of Saint Catherine of Siena (Foto Lensini, Siena)

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Figure 5.4 Giovanni di Stefano, Marble tabernacle with relic head of Saint Catherine of Siena, 1470s. Chapel of Saint Catherine of Siena (Foto Lensini, Siena)

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of the execution narrative and the meaning of the chapel as a whole for a sixteenth-century viewer familiar with the life of Catherine. The visual key to conveying such meaning lies in the subtle artistic transformation of an ancient sculptural model into a site of gender neutrality or androgyny, as well as in the viewer’s ability to conceptually reconstitute the fragmented body. Sodoma’s well-known predilection for the use of all’antica details in his works is evident throughout the chapel, as seen, for example, in the Romaninspired elements of the military attire worn by the soldiers who frame the execution. Most importantly, scholars have also noted a very specific reference to antiquity in the depiction of Niccolò’s body, modeled upon arguably the most famous ancient sculptural fragment known in the Renaissance: the Belvedere Torso (Fig. 5.5).4 But what motivated Sodoma to choose this particular model? While the obvious answer may lie in the convenience of a headless body—complete with jagged edges along the severed neck—that was perfect for a decapitation scene, the use of the Torso may well be more complicated, revealing the broader implications of artistic response to ancient fragments in the early Cinquecento. In particular, this essay will explore Sodoma’s recasting of the fragmentary Torso as a freshly decapitated body capable of communicating the gender ambiguity required by its devotional setting while also reflecting the artist’s own personal reception of gender in ancient art. The chapel’s painted and actual bodily fragments will be viewed through a lens that queers, or destabilizes our confidence in, the relationship of representation to identity.

The Belvedere Torso and the Reception of Gender

Consideration of the Belvedere Torso’s reception in the sixteenth century raises a number of issues, primary among them the meaning of the unrestored

Domenico in 1385; the head was placed in the newly-built reliquary chapel in the same church in 1468. The marble tabernacle has been attributed to Giovanni di Stefano and dated to the 1470s. For the relic of Catherine’s head, see Caterina Gazzi, Le reliquie di S. Caterina da Siena (Rome: Edizioni cateriniane, 1935), 45–67; Vicenzo Mazzi, La sacra testa di S. Caterina da Siena (Siena: Basilica Cateriniana, 1952); and Carlo Bellugi, La testa di Santa Caterina (Siena: Tipografia senese, 2007). For the marble tabernacle, see Riedl and Seidel, Die Kirchen von Siena, 571–4; and Wolfgang Loseries, “Un theatrum sacrum del Sodoma: La cappella di Santa Caterina,” in L’ultimo secolo della Repubblica di Siena: Arti, cultura e società, ed. Mario Ascheri, Gianni Mazzoni, and Fabrizio Nevola (Siena: Accademia senese degli Intronati, 2008), 329. 4 Andrée Hayum, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi—“Il Sodoma” (New York: Garland, 1976), 49–50; Wolfgang Loseries, “Sodoma e la scultura antica,” in Umanesimo a Siena: Letteratura, arti figurative, musica, ed. Elisabetta Cioni and Daniela Fausti (Siena: Scandicci, 1994), 358–9.

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Figure 5.5  Apollonios of Athens, Belvedere Torso, 1st century bce. Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican Museums, Vatican City (Scala/Art Resource, ny)

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fragment.5 Though many other ancient sculptural works were modified to make them complete, to our knowledge the Torso was left as it had been found, allowing artists free rein to exploit the mutability of a figure lacking a head and extremities in order to create a range of identities for innumerable narrative settings.6 The muscular marble fragment, dramatically rotated at the waist, sits on an animal pelt, part of which covers the right thigh; this detail (interpreted as the skin of the Nemean lion), along with the heroic physique, no doubt explains the Renaissance identification of the original subject of the work as Hercules.7 Such an identification, however, did not prevent artists from utilizing the Torso as inspiration for a variety of figural depictions. Scholarly investigation of this work’s impact on a­ rtists is extensive, but here I will focus on the fragment’s perceived gender and artistic responses to this seemingly fixed aspect of an otherwise flexible model. In fact, the gender of ancient statuary, especially in the case of uncertain fragments but also when clearly evident, was apparently far from fixed in Renaissance interpretations. Some artists inverted the gender of wellpreserved or slightly fragmented sculptures, altering these stone bodies perhaps for narrative reasons, though the exact rationale is not always clear.8 Most famously, the Pasquino—a battered fragment of an ancient statue group that was set up on public view in Rome and became a locus for posting passion­ ate critical commentary on current events—was dressed on the feast day of Saint Mark usually as a male figure, such as Janus, Hercules, or Mars, but occasionally as a female one, including Venus, Minerva, Ceres, and Peace.9 Other ancient figures were so incomplete that recovery of the original gender was 5 For the Renaissance reception of the Belvedere Torso, see among others Christa Schwinn, Die Bedeutung des Torso vom Belvedere für Theorie und Praxis der Bildenden Kunst vom 16. Jahrhundert bis Winckelmann (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1973); Raimund Wünsche, “Torso vom Belvedere,” in Il Cortile delle Statue. Der Statuenhof des Belvedere im Vatikan, ed. Matthias Winner, Bernard Andreae, and Carlo Pietrangeli (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1998), 287–314; and Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 191–201. 6 For the question of restoration of the Belvedere Torso, see Wünsche, “Torso vom Belvedere,” 292. 7 The first mention of the Belvedere Torso, by Cyriac of Ancona in the early 1430s, included the identification as Hercules, which persisted for several hundred years. See Wünsche, “Torso vom Belvedere,” 289–90. 8 See, for example, Amico Aspertini’s gender inversion of the reclining figure in the so-called Icarus Relief in his Codex Wolfegg, fols. 46v–47r. Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 170–1 and 376–7, n. 116. 9 Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 217; Denise la Monica, “Ex aere, ex marmore: Una sola statua,” in Ex marmore: Pasquini, Pasquinisti, Pasquinate, nell’Europa moderna, ed. Chrysa Damianaki, Paolo Procaccioli, and Angelo Romano (Manziana: Vecchiarelli, 2006), 305–20; Kathleen

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impossible, leading to artistic restorations, both in two and three dimensions, that often varied the sex as the image made its way between artists and workshops.10 It is in this rather fluid artistic environment that the Belvedere Torso’s reception should be considered. A number of the earliest depictions of the Belvedere Torso, such as an anonymous drawing from the so-called Umbrian Sketchbook (c. 1500) and Giovanni Antonio da Brescia’s engraving with reconstructed legs (c. 1515), support the traditional Renaissance identification of the figure as a heroic type, clearly rendered male by means of superhuman musculature and appropriate genitalia that are obvious in the frontal view afforded by both images (Fig. 5.6).11 The artists may have reinforced a masculine identity in these images by reconstructing the penis, which is missing today in the actual sculpture, and which may have been lost already by the fifteenth century. Maarten van Heemskerck’s drawing (c. 1533), on the other hand, depicts the Torso without a penis (but with testicles intact) and locates the figure on its back, in a position similar to Sodoma’s painted body of Niccolò di Tuldo (Fig. 5.7; compare Fig. 5.3).12 In a sense, the drawing reveals a figure that has been partially neutered, having lost a significant part of its genitalia, so that its masculinity is incomplete or compromised. This anatomical absence may have suggested to the viewer the sculpture’s potential for gender slippage, or at least gender neutrality. Thus, while most early sixteenth-century representations of the Belvedere Torso support a masculine identity for the original figure, this does not mean that the statue’s mutability, whether or not the genitalia were complete, could not extend to gender when the fragment was transformed by artists in the ways discussed above. Perhaps most famous in this respect are Michelangelo’s gender-bending interpretations of the Belvedere Torso in his ignudi on the Sistine Chapel Ceiling and his allegorical

Wren Christian, Empire Without End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome, c. ­1350–1527 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 185–7. 10 Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 181–7. See also the discussion of the Sassi Apollo Citharoedos (and the seated Apollo in the same collection) in Genevieve S. Gessert, “A Giant Corrupt Body: The Gendering of Renaissance Roma,” Chapter 3 in this volume. 11 For the anonymous sheet in the Umbrian Sketchbook, formerly Calenzano, Bertini Collection, fol. 10v, see Annegrit Schmitt, “Römische Antikensammlungen im Spiegel eines Musterbuchs der Renaissance,” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 21 (1970): 100, and Christian, Empire Without End, 279. For Giovanni Antonio da Brescia’s engraving, see Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 193–4. 12 Maarten van Heemskerck, Sketchbook 1.63, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. For the drawing, see Wünsche, “Torso vom Belvedere,” 292, and Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 192–3.

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Figure 5.6 Giovanni Antonio da Brescia, Belvedere Torso, c. 1515. British Museum, London (© Trustees of the British Museum)

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Figure 5.7 Maarten van Heemskerck, Belvedere Torso with Fragment of an Obelisk, c. 1532–6. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin (Staatliche Museen/Art Resource, ny)

figures of Night and Dawn in the Medici Chapel (Sagrestia Nuova) at San Lorenzo in Florence.13 Earlier Cinquecento artistic responses to the Torso also appear to have played with gender and androgyny, most notably Amico Aspertini’s drawing of ancient sculptures from various Roman collections, a folio of the Codex Wolfegg datable to 1500–3 (Fig. 5.8).14 As one of the first known depictions of the Belvedere Torso, this page has accompanied nearly every major examination of the sculpture in modern scholarship. Yet there has been little discussion of the way that the artist has manipulated his model, through form and juxtaposition, to render ambiguous the gender of the figure portrayed in this statue. Situated at the center of the drawing, the Belvedere Torso is presented here in 13 James Saslow, “Michelangelo: Sculpture, Sex, and Gender,” in Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture, ed. Sarah Blake McHam (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 223–45; Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 197–8. 14 Amico Aspertini, Codex Wolfegg, fol. 42r, Schloss Wolfegg. For the drawing, see Phyllis Pray Bober, Drawings After the Antique by Amico Aspertini (London: The Warburg Institute, 1957), 11–7, 34; and Gunter Schweikhart, Der Codex Wolfegg. Zeichnungen nach der Antike von Amico Aspertini (London: The Warburg Institute, 1986), 27–8, 96–100.

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Figure 5.8 Amico Aspertini, Antiquities in Roman Collections, in the Codex Wolfegg, c. 1500–3. Schloss Wolfegg (Warburg Institute)

profile, with the overt musculature of the original statue muted. The possible presence of male genitalia is hidden by the right leg, and the curve of the right breast, with its pronounced nipple, appears feminine. While the inclusion of some type of animal tail descending from the drapery below the figure could

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confirm a reference to the Belvedere Torso as Hercules, this aspect is ­downplayed, and thus Amico Aspertini’s version could be read as male, female, or even a hermaphroditic blend. Furthermore, the choice and depiction of a number of other antique torsos around the central specimen appears to reflect the artist’s interest in the sex of ancient sculptural fragments. The selection includes, in the lower left corner, a female torso whose frontality is in direct counterpoint to the profile view of the Belvedere Torso. Among the three torsos along the top of the sheet, the one on the right has male genitalia, but its breasts are indeterminate, allowing for a male or hermaphroditic identification.15 The gender of the standing figure next to the pedestal is likewise uncertain, as the body is androgynous and the head feminized. Exactly where the gender of the Belvedere Torso falls is unclear and was perhaps intentionally made ambiguous as the artist explored a range of gender identities ­provided by fragmentary models. Even if the articulated musculature marked it as masculine, the Belvedere Torso may have been a site for gender negotiation in its adoption by artists given its (possibly incorrect) identification during the Renaissance as Hercules. Scholars have noted that in ancient texts and images this hero was a complex figure when it came to sexuality and gender, embodying masculine virtues while also transgressing traditional masculine roles.16 Most famous is the cross-dressing episode when Hercules succumbed for a year to the Lydian queen Omphale, donning women’s garb and performing women’s work in submission while she wore his lion skin, a story well known in the Renaissance from Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (24.2–7, where Omphale is identified as Iole) as well as Ovid’s Fasti (2.305–58).17 Equally complex was the late medieval 15

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The torsos represented here may be sculptural fragments held during the Renaissance in the collection of the Roman Frangipani family. Another drawing by Amico Aspertini, now in the Baltimore Museum of Art, depicts the same works in sharper focus and more detail. Although the torsos in the Baltimore drawing are labeled as male, I would argue the one to the far right still appears to have breasts that are more feminine than masculine. See Schweikhart, Die Codex Wolfegg, 96–7; Christian, Empire Without End, 315. See, for example, Nicole Loraux, “Herakles: The Super-Male and the Feminine,” in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, ed. David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 21–52, and Patricia Simons, “Hercules in Italian Renaissance Art: Masculine Labour and Homoerotic Libido,” Art History 31 (2008): 632–64. Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women, ed. and trans. Virginia Brown (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2001), 94–5; Ovid, Fasti, 2nd ed., trans. James George Frazer (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1987), 79–83. Hercules dressed as a woman was illustrated on a number of occasions in Roman art, including on Arretine bowls that may have been

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and Renaissance artistic reception of Hercules as a sexually ambivalent character who loved men as well as women, with responses ranging from a reaffirmation of his status as a masculine ideal to his feminization as allegory.18 An artist’s view of the Belvedere Torso, when the sculpture was interpreted as Hercules, may therefore have been colored by the complicated understanding of this mythological figure. The inclusion of the animal pelt in the sculpture could have been read as reference to his courageous defeat of the fierce Nemean Lion, an act requiring tremendous strength as embodied in his powerful physique, but it could just as easily have underscored his state of undress. He sits on the pelt rather than, as is more often the case in ancient visual depictions, wearing it as a trophy. Thus, the viewer is invited to not only admire his idealized body but also to clothe it mentally, with Omphale’s feminizing garb as a possible alternative to the lion skin.

Sodoma and Antiquity

The impact of the art of antiquity, particularly relief and freestanding sculpture, on the paintings of Sodoma has been well established in studies by Andrée Hayum and Wolfgang Loseries.19 Yet the artist’s use of the Belvedere Torso in the context of the Sienese chapel frescoes demands a fuller investigation. The artist certainly had access to a large corpus of Roman antiquities from which to draw inspiration, including those in the private collections of prominent patrons for whom he worked on a number of sojourns to Rome between 1507 and 1525.20 At exactly what point and in what context Sodoma

known during the Renaissance; see Natalie Kampen, “Omphale and the Instability of Gender,” in Sexuality in Ancient Art, ed. Kampen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 233–46. For a more extensive review of the ancient literary references to and iconography of Omphale, and for an interpretation of Giotto’s figure of Fortitude as Omphale in the frescoes of the Arena Chapel in Padua, see Mary D. Edwards, “Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel: Giotto’s Virtue Fortitude Re-examined,” Chapter 1 in this volume. 18 See Simons, “Hercules in Italian Renaissance Art,” 632–64. For Nicolo Pisano’s casting of Hercules in the role of Fortitude, traditionally feminine, on his Pisa Baptistery pulpit, see Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 155. 19 Hayum, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, 6, 23–4, 28, 35–6; Loseries, “Sodoma e la scultura antica,” 345–81. 20 Hayum, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, 16–7, 29, 50. It is possible that Sodoma made at least three trips to Rome between these dates: in 1507–8, when he worked on the ceiling of the Stanza della Segnatura at the Vatican; in 1516–7, when decorating the Villa Farnesina for

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encountered the Belvedere Torso is difficult to reconstruct, given that the whereabouts of the statue are undocumented from 1503, when it was last in the possession of the sculptor Andrea Bregno, until the 1530s, when it appeared in the papal collection of the Belvedere Courtyard.21 Contemporaneous sources also attest to the personal collection of antiquities owned by Sodoma and displayed in his studio and house.22 Among the objects mentioned in inventories are a number of sculptural fragments, including a marble body without arms and legs and a headless terracotta ignudo missing one leg. Perhaps significant for this discussion is the mention of a terracotta relief of Hercules, nude except for his lion skin and carrying a bull in the company of a female attendant identifiable as one of the Seasons.23 If Sodoma’s general access to antiquities is well established, less often examined has been the influence of ancient sculpture on the artist’s famous androgynous figural style, reflecting perhaps a very personal reaction to the legacy of antiquity. The artist’s flamboyant personality and affection for young boys, as well as his embrace of a self-proclaimed appellation referring to sodomy, were first made famous by the sixteenth-century artist and critic Giorgio Vasari. Yet scholarly efforts to understand how Sodoma’s assumed bisexuality may have shaped his aesthetics and response to ancient art are still nascent.24

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Agostino Chigi; and at some point between 1519 and 1525, perhaps to attend Chigi’s wedding in June of 1519. Hayum speculates that the enthusiastic references to ancient and Cinquecento models in the decoration of the Catherine chapel may have been inspired by a recent visit to Rome. Wünsche, “Torso vom Belvedere,” 290–1. The readily visible influence of the Belvedere Torso on artists such as Raphael and Michelangelo in the first two decades of the sixteenth century implies that the sculpture was accessible to artists, even if its exact location before entering the Vatican collection, perhaps under Pope Clement vii (1523–4) or Paul iii (1534–49), is uncertain. Inventories of antique objects in the artist’s studio and home were drawn up on the occasion of theft by his pupil Girolamo Magagni in 1529, included in Sodoma’s will of 1549, and referred to in a letter written to Alessandro Corvini in 1551. For Sodoma’s collection, see G.F. Hill, “Sodoma’s Collection of Antiquities,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 26 (1906): 288–9; Loseries, “Sodoma e la scultura antica,” 345; and Alessandra De Romanis, “Tra Siena e Roma: La collezione di Giovanni Antonio Bazzi detto il Sodoma,” in Collezioni di antichità a Roma tra ’400 e ’500, ed. Anna Cavallaro (Rome: De Lucca, 2007), 233–9. De Romanis, “Tra Siena e Roma,” 235–6: “Una tegola di terra antiqua drentovi uno Hercole con uno toro et una donna con polli in uno bastone.” For Sodoma’s sexuality and its relation to his art, see James Saslow, Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999), 97–101; and Christopher Reed, Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 45–7.

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His ­combination of youthful male bodies with overtly feminized heads were clearly inspired by specific statue types from antiquity, as well as by Quattrocento painted precedents and Leonardo’s sfumato. The result was a series of sensual, androgynous figures, as exemplified by a painted banner of Saint Sebastian, commissioned by the saint’s Sienese confraternity in May of 1525 (Fig. 5.9).25 As explained by Elizabeth Bartman, ancient Roman homoerotic attraction to androgynous or “Ephebic” bodies stemmed from of a distinct corpus of statue types of boys or adolescents originating in fourth-century bce Greece.26 It is possible, given his sexuality, that Sodoma was likewise drawn to such works in collections in Rome. The artist often employed similar so-called “Praxitelean” models for his painted figures, such as the Apollo Belvedere for possibly both Alexander and Hymen in The Marriage of Alexander (c. 1517) at the Villa Farnesina.27 It should be noted, however, that he also produced images of men based upon more muscular ancient sculptural models, like the father in the famous statue group Laocoön and his Sons, which he evoked in the figure of Vulcan painted below the Tent of Darius at the Villa Farnesina.28 Sodoma’s Christ at the Column (c. 1511–4), a fresco fragment originally in the cloister of San Francesco in Siena, belongs to this category as well, and although the exact ancient prototype has not been identified, the artist’s use of ideal musculature, a twisted torso, and a vulnerable position ­ created an image as sensual and erotic as his Saint Sebastian.29 It is possible, then, that a range of antique sculptures may have resonated intimately with Sodoma, including the Belvedere Torso. The artist’s choice of this work as a model for the body of Niccolò di Tuldo in the chapel in Siena may be due not only to the convenience of a fragment that fit the narrative bill but also to the way it appealed to his own complex sexual reception of the male body and interest in contingent questions of gender as presented by ancient sculptures. Furthermore, Sodoma’s selective appropriation and synthesis of ancient fragments in his paintings seems to have played an important role in the formation of his androgynous figural style. Some scholars have suggested that in creating the painted confraternity banner of Saint Sebastian (Fig. 5.9), the artist looked to two separate ancient sculptural works, both fragmentary in the sense that they 25 Saslow, Pictures and Passions, 99; Hayum, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, 45, 191–5. 26 Elizabeth Bartman, “Eros’s Flame: Images of Sexy Boys in Roman Ideal Sculpture,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. Supplementary Volumes 1 (2002): 249–71. 27 Saslow, 98–9. 28 Hayum, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, 35. 29 Ibid., 27; Piero Torriti, La Pinacoteca nazionale di Siena: I dipinti (Genoa: Sagep, 1990), 362.

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Figure 5.9 Sodoma, Saint Sebastian Pierced with Arrows, c. 1525–6. Palazzo Pitti, Florence (Alfredo Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, ny)

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do not depict the entire body.30 Specifically, Sodoma appears to have combined a Hellenistic Greek torso of a satyr or centaur, known today as the Gaddi Torso, with a second-century ce Roman bust often referred to as the Dying Alexander the Great, whose visage is softened by his flowing locks and idealized features (Figs. 5.10 and 5.11).31 In the painting, the addition of drapery over only the genitalia of the saint calls attention to the pubic area while occluding definitive identification of the figure’s sex, which is rendered uncertain by the delicate features and by the shading of the upwardly turned head.32 Significantly, this conceptual assembling of ancient sculptural fragments to produce an andro­gynous saintly figure occurred around 1525, just a year before the artist executed the frescoes in the reliquary chapel of Saint Catherine in San Domenico. Our knowledge of the extent of Sodoma’s consideration of ancient sculpture in the development of his paintings is limited by the relatively few extant drawings by the artist that feature antiquities. One rare example, however, illustrates not only his interest in ancient sculptures of trangressive sex but also the negotiation of gender in his final product. A sheet attributed to the artist and now in Christ Church, Oxford includes studies on both sides in red chalk.33 On the verso, a partially draped figure holding a cord appears at first 30

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Loseries, “Sodoma e la scultura antica,” 359; Erkinger Schwarzenberg, “From Alexander Morente to the Alexander Richelieu: The Portraiture of Alexander the Great in Seventeenth-Century Italy and France,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 (1969): 405. Both of these ancient sculptures were likely found in Rome and are now in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. The Gaddi Torso was already in the collection of the Florentine Gaddi family by the early sixteenth century; see Giovanni di Pasquale and Fabrizio Paolucci, Uffizi: The Ancient Sculpture (Florence: Giunti, 2001), 20. For the Dying Alexander the Great, see Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 134–6. It is possible that Sodoma, or other Renaissance artists, were aware of Plutarch’s description of Lysippos’ portrait of Alexander that balanced male and female aspects: “For only Lysippos, it seems, brought out the real character in the bronze and gave form to his essential excellence. For others, in their eagerness to imitate the turn of the neck and the expressive, liquid glance of his eyes, failed to preserve his manly and leonine quality.” Plutarch, de Alexandri Magni Fortuna aut Virtute, 2.2.3, in Frank Cole Babbitt, ed. and trans., Plutarch’s Moralia, Loeb Classical Library 305, vol. 4 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1936). The text was well known in Renaissance Italy, both in Latin and in Italian: Robert Lamberton, “Plutarch,” in The Classical Tradition, ed. Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis (Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010): 748–9. I am grateful to Alison Poe and Marice Rose for pointing out this passage to me. James Byram Shaw, Drawings By Old Masters at Christ Church Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), vol. 1, 107.

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Gaddi Torso, c. 2nd century bce. Uffizi, Florence (Scala/Art Resource, ny)

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Bust of Alexander the Great (Dying Alexander), Roman copy of Greek original, c. 2nd century ce. Uffizi, Florence (Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, ny)

glance to be female due to the rounded breasts, but the upper portion of male genitalia is discernible just above the fall of the drapery. James Byram Shaw and others have noted this figure’s similarity to a well-known marble statue of a standing hermaphrodite, a Roman copy of a Hellenistic original recorded around 1540 in a famous drawing by Frans Floris.34 In the late 1490s, this statue, 34

Ibid.; Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture (New York: Harvey Miller, 2010), 141–2, no. 97. The work is also depicted in a Northern

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or one like it, was known to be in the antiquities collection of Mariano Astalli in Rome, and was described by Prospectivo Milanese as a famous “hermaphrodite…surrounded in part by a thin veil.”35 Sodoma’s drawing of the statue is not an exact replication, however, as Renaissance descriptions indicate that the head and arms were missing, and that drapery clung to the right thigh, leaving the male genitalia exposed. Loseries has noted that Sodoma utilized this figure as a model for Eve in his frescoes of Christ in Limbo, executed for the Sienese church of Santa Croce in the 1520s and now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena.36 Any hint of male genitalia has disappeared in the fresco, as the figure’s sex is decidedly female, a choice by the artist paralleled by the fate of the sculptural model, which was transformed in the seventeenth century into a Venus by the addition of a female head and drapery over the penis.37

Queering Fragments in the Chapel of Saint Catherine of Siena

Sodoma’s apparent consideration of ancient sculpture in terms of gender and androgyny, taken together with the history of the Belvedere Torso’s broader reception, provides an important context for understanding the artist’s choice and manipulation of an ancient model when depicting a decapitated body in the reliquary chapel in Siena. A closer look at the chapel’s fresco and its textual source will further elucidate its possible meaning and reception for both the artist and devout viewers. The Execution of Niccolò di Tuldo illustrates Catherine of Siena’s ministry to a condemned prisoner, but it also provides a visual, vicarious martyrdom for 35

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Italian drawing, perhaps datable to the first decade of the Cinquecento, in the British Museum. See also Gessert, “A Giant Corrupt Body,” Chapter 3 in this volume. Antiquarie Prospettiche romane composte per Prospectivo Melanese Depictore, stanza 18: “Hermaphrodita…e parte un sottil velo ha circuita.” See D. Fienga, “The Antiquarie Prospettiche romane composte per Prospectivo Melanese Depictore: A Document for the Study of the Relationship Between Bramante and Leonardo da Vinci” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles), 1970; Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, 142, no. 97; Barkan, 165–6. Loseries, “Sodoma e la scultura antica,” 361. For the fresco, see Torriti, La Pinacoteca nazionale di Siena, 362–4. By the early Seicento, the statue was in the collection at the Villa Pamphili, where it was apparently subsequently transformed. See Friedrich Matz and F. von Duhn, Antike Bildwerke in Rom (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Hàrtel, 1881), no. 845; Raissa Calza, Antichità di Villa Doria Pamphili (Rome: E Luca, 1977), no. 75; and Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 376, n. 103.

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the saint in a space where the main focus is her relic head (Figures 5.1, 5.4). The source for the painting is a letter written by Catherine to her confessor, Raymond of Capua, shortly after June 13, 1375. The episode recounted in the letter and represented in the chapel’s fresco is not found in the Legenda maior, the official biography that Raymond penned between 1385 and 1395. Copies of  the letter appear in at least three manuscript collections assembled by Catherine’s followers, the earliest datable before 1406; abbreviated versions also feature in depositions offered in 1414 in support of Catherine’s canonization and in Tommaso Caffarini’s biography of the saint, completed by 1417. Thus, despite the omission of Niccolò di Tuldo’s story from Raymond’s official account of the saint’s life, the text of Catherine’s letter was obviously accessible and known at the time of the fresco’s execution.38 As literary and religious scholars have long noted, the famous letter essentially describes a criminal execution but transforms the event into a saintly martyrdom accompanied by a vision of the dead man’s apotheosis.39 The letter recounts how Catherine visited Niccolò in jail, heard his confession of sin and of love for God, and promised to be with him at the time of his death. She took him to hear Mass and to receive Holy Communion, then waited for him at the place of execution. When Niccolò arrived, he knelt submissively beside Catherine, and his severed, bloody head fell into her hands after the executioner’s blow. In the text, the repentant Niccolò is recast as a martyr and his execution compared to Christ’s sacrifice, a link made physically manifest through the 38

39

The first printed edition of Catherine’s letters appeared in 1500, allowing even broader access to her writings in advance of Sodoma’s painting of the fresco some 26 years later. For a history of the specific letter regarding Niccolò di Tuldo, see Luongo, Saintly Politics, 91–4; for the early reception of Catherine’s letters in general, see Luongo, “Saintly Authorship in the Italian Renaissance: The Quattrocento Reception of the Letters of Catherine of Siena,” Journal of the Early Book Society 9 (2005): 1–29. For the text of the letter, identified as T273/G97/DT31, see Catherine of Siena, Epistolario, ed. Umberto Meattino (Rome: Edizioni Paolini, 1979), 1298–1302; for the English translations used here, see Catherine of Siena, The Letters of St. Catherine of Siena, trans. Suzanne Noffke (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000), vol. 1, 82–90. Scholarly discussions of the letter include Kathleen Falvey, “Early Italian Dramatic Traditions and Comforting Rituals: Some Initial Considerations,” in Crossing the Boundaries: Christian Piety and the Arts in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Confraternities, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991), 33–55; Daniel Bornstein, “Spiritual Kinship and Domestic Devotions,” in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. Judith Brown and Robert Davis (New York: Longman, 1998), 177–9; Joan P. Del Pozzo, “The Apotheosis of Niccolò di Tuldo: An Execution ‘Love Story,’” Modern Language Notes 110 (1995): 164–77; and Luongo, Saintly Politics, 90–122.

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recurrent invocation of the Savior’s blood. Catherine describes Niccolò as a “meek lamb” when he arrives at the execution, and reminds him to think of the “blood of the Lamb” as he bends down just before his decapitation.40 Upon his death, Christ appears and receives Niccolò’s “blood into his own blood,” taking Niccolò’s soul into his side wound.41 Furthermore, at the beginning and end of the letter, Catherine specifically recalls Christ’s crucifixion through additional, broader references to his blood and side wound. She thus characterizes Niccolò’s execution as an imitation of the Passion of Christ. The text also underscores Catherine’s unfulfilled desire to be martyred herself, often expressed through her interest in the mingling of bodies and blood. While consoling Niccolò after Mass, the letter recounts, Catherine rested his head upon her breast and sensed the “fragrance of his blood, not separate from the fragrance of my own, which I am waiting to shed for my gentle spouse Jesus.”42 Most revealing is Catherine’s admission that, having arrived early at the place of execution, she knelt down and stretched out her neck on the block; when nothing happened, she lamented that she “did not succeed in getting what I longed for.”43 Indeed, it was Niccolò who achieved the actual martyrdom that Catherine had wished for but did not receive. She had to settle for the roles of witness, savoring the blood splattered on her clothing, which she could not bear to wash away, and of stigmatic, indicated in the fresco by the wound on her hand.44 On a spiritual level, however, the letter implies that Niccolò and Catherine are joined, and that the martyrdom of one is therefore shared by both. In this regard, 40

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“Poi egli gionse, come uno agnello mansueto …. Posesi giù con grande mansuetudine, e io gli distesi el collo, e chinà’mi giù ramentà’li el sangue de l’Agnello”: Catherine of Siena, Letters, vol. 1, 88. “Allora si vedeva Dio e Uomo, come si vedesse la chiarità del sole, e stave aperto e riceveva sangue nel sangue suo …. Poi che ebbe ricevuto el sangue e ‘l desiderio suo, ed egli ricevette l’anima sua e la misse nella bottiga aperta del costato suo”: Catherine of Siena, Letters, vol. 1, 88. “E teneva el capo suo in sul petto mio. Io sentivo uno giubilo, uno odore del sangue suo, e non era senza l’odore mio, el quale io aspetto di spandere per lo dolce sposo Gesù”: Catherine of Siena, Letters, vol. 1, 87. “Aspettà’lo al luogo de la giustita, e aspettai ine con continua orazione e presenzia di Maria e di Caterina vergine e martire. Inanzi che giognesse elli, posimi giù, e distesi el collo in sul ceppo; ma non mi venne fatto che io avessi l’effetto pieno di me ine su”: Catherine of Siena, Letters, vol. 1, 87. Despite dying of natural causes in 1380, Catherine was subsequently depicted with the palm and crown of martyrdom, and early unsuccessful attempts at canonization framed her as a stigmatic saint comparable to Christ and a number of specific martyrs. See Emily Moerer, “The Visual Hagiography of a Stigmatic Saint: Drawings of Catherine of Siena in the Libellus de supplement,” Gesta 44, no. 2 (2005): 89–102.

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Catherine employs a matrimonial metaphor to comfort her charge and to glorify his apotheosis. To console Niccolò, she relates, she urged courage, saying “soon we shall reach the wedding feast,” referring to the execution, where she then told him to kneel “down for the wedding, my dear brother, for soon you will be in everlasting life.”45 Their union seems affirmed by Catherine’s receipt of the bloody, severed head into her arms and her response with a vow, “I will.”46 The execution narrative’s references to martyrdom and marriage as well as its limited cast of characters have led scholars to read the letter in terms of a complex web of “fluctuating identities” that conflates the two protagonists with each other and with Christ.47 Niccolò becomes Christ both as sacrificial lamb and as mystical spouse to Catherine. Furthermore, at the moment of Niccolò’s entry into the side wound of Christ, Catherine writes, he “turned as does a bride when, having reached her husband’s threshold, she turns her head and looks back, nods to those who have attended her, and so expresses her thanks.”48 In the fresco, Catherine gazes at the summit of the fictive arch in the foreground, where the tiny soul of Niccolò ascends with the aid of angels through a circular opening, an appropriate if abstracted version of the side wound (Fig.  5.1). With his apotheosis and entry into Christ’s side, Niccolò becomes the “bride”—his gender inverted—and thus assumes the identity of Catherine herself, who was often referred to as the dolce sposa, the sweet bride of the Song of Songs. Indeed, Catherine’s mystical marriage to Christ was among the most often represented moments of her vita.49 For her part, Catherine’s gender is inverted in the letter, too, as she becomes Christ through the imitatio Christi, the shared martyrdom that was effected by Niccolò’s execution, which she had longed to experience and had theatrically rehearsed 45

“Confortati, fratello mio dolce, chè tosto giognaremo alle nozze; … e, ricevuto el segno, dissi: ‘Giuso alle nozze, fratello mio dolce, chè testè sarai all vita durabile’”: Catherine of Siena, Letters, vol. 1, 87, 88. 46 “E così dicendo recevetti el capo ne le mani mie, fermando l’occhio nella divina bontà, dicendo: ‘Io voglio’”: Catherine of Siena, Letters, vol. 1, 88. 47 For a more comprehensive discussion of this conflation, see Luongo, Saintly Politics, especially 113. 48 “Volsesi come fa la sposa quando è gionta all’uscio dello sposo, che volle l’occhio e’ l capo adietro, inchinando chi l’à acompagnata, e con l’atto dimostra segni di ringratiamento”: Catherine of Siena, Letters, vol. 1, 89. 49 Luongo, Saintly Politics, 107–11; George Kaftal, Saint Catherine in Tuscan Painting (Oxford: Blackfriars Press, 1949), 46–51. For a broader discussion of mystic marriages, including a number of males who become “brides” to Christ as represented in northern Europe, see Carolyn D. Muir, Saintly Brides and Bridegrooms: The Mystic Marriage in Northern Renaissance Art (London: Harvey Miller, 2012).

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upon her early arrival at the chopping block. Catherine, Niccolò, and Christ are thus perceived to be one and interchangeable, united through marriage and martyrdom; fittingly, Niccolò’s last words before the fall of the axe were “Jesus” and “Catherine.”50 The fragmented body of Niccolò painted in Catherine’s chapel at San Domenico may have provided a site where viewers familiar with the letter’s complicated play of gender could project the merging of both male and female, Niccolò and Catherine, into a single figure (Fig. 5.3). Ultimately, it is Sodoma’s very subtle transformation of the Belvedere Torso that allows such a projection onto Niccolò’s corpse. Close inspection of the decapitated body reveals that here, as elsewhere in his oeuvre, the artist did not slavishly copy his ancient model but rather reinterpreted it through a lens of gender ambiguity. The rippling and defined musculature of the statue has been relatively deemphasized, although the articulation of the reconstructed arms, shoulders, and upper back still provides a sense of masculine power. By contrast, the lower body—where the artist has also reconstructed the extremities missing from the model—takes on a softer, more pliant fleshiness at odds with the hardness of dense muscle. This malleable quality is made clear in the rendering of Niccolò’s left thigh, where the fingers of the executioner’s assistant dig into the leg, and of his right foot, which is turned awkwardly back towards the body. Most notably, Sodoma has covered the groin with drapery in direct opposition to the Belvedere Torso, where the animal pelt falls over the left thigh and leaves the male genitalia visible. While the addition of drapery may have been dictated by the requirements of decorum in a place of worship, this act of veiling nonetheless precludes the definitive assignment of sex to the fragmented body and leaves open other possibilities. Finally, the corpse is positioned in such a way that complicates easy gender identification. The gaping stump of a neck, still vigorously spewing blood, is rendered nearly parallel to the picture plane, while the foreshortened upper body, tilted and twisting towards the viewer, is cast in shadow. Though the chest and abdomen appear masculine, the angle of the depiction combined with the shadow creates a level of uncertainty, bringing into question whether pectoral muscles or female breasts are represented. Viewed within the context of a decapitation scene and in a religious setting, Niccolò’s mutilated body also may have recalled visual and hagiographic traditions of saintly torture and martyrdom that involve elements of gender transgression. The near-nudity of the corpse and its fleshy aspects “de-virilified” and perhaps even feminized the body, while the very act of decapitation would 50

“La bocca sua non diceva, se non ‘Gesù e ‘Caterina’”: Catherine of Siena, Letters, vol. 1, 88.

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have marked this body as castrated and emasculated through mutilation, as Robert Mills has discussed in reference to beheaded male martyrs in the Middle Ages.51 The shape of the neck wound, furthermore, seems almost vaginal, and the blood that issues from it resonates with menstruation as well. Viewers familiar with similar aspects of religious images may have thus been preconditioned to expect the ambiguous nature of Sodoma’s headless body and to understand it as appropriate. Other bodily fragments in the chapel, namely the painted head of Niccolò and the relic head of Catherine, also have a part to play in the meaning of the bloody corpse. Niccolò’s head is held aloft in the fresco, confirming the fragmentary nature of his body below; it also visually parallels Catherine’s actual disembodied head over the nearby altar (Fig. 5.4). The fact that the gaze of the confraternity member holding Niccolò’s head is turned towards the relic further underscores the connection between the two heads (Figs.  5.2, and 5.12).52 It is worth recalling that one of the miracles mentioned in the saint’s vita involved the gender inversion of the saint’s face before the eyes of her confessor, Raymond of Capua.53 While visiting a sick Catherine in a convent, Raymond began to doubt the authenticity of her visionary experiences. As he was thinking such thoughts, he glanced at her face and saw not Catherine’s visage but that of a middle-aged, bearded man. Terrified, he inquired who was looking at him; the reply, “He who is,” made clear that it was Christ. Displayed in the chapel, the relic of Catherine’s head and face provided a continuous and concrete reminder of her miraculous ability to shift gender. This conflation of identities and genders is underscored in the chapel’s formal and spatial configuration. Indeed, the fresco’s illusionistic

51

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Robert Mills, “‘Whatever You Do is a Delight to Me!’ Masculinity, Masochism, and Queer Play in Representations of Male Martyrdom,” Exemplaria 13 (2001): 15–8; Martha Easton, “Pain, Torture and Death in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea,” in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women, and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Samantha Riches and Sarah Salih (New York: Routledge, 2002), 49–65. Loseries, “Un theatrum sacrum del Sodoma,” 329. Raimondo da Capua, S. Caterina da Siena: Legenda maior, trans. P. Giuseppe Tinagli (Siena: Edizioni Cantagalli, 1994), 95; Martha Easton, “‘Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?’ Transforming and Transcending Gender in the Lives of Female Saints,” in The Four Modes of Seeing, ed. E.S. Lane, E.C. Pastan, and E.M. Shortell (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 338–9; Caroline W. Bynum, “‘… And Women His Humanity’: Female Imagery in the Religious Writings of the Later Middle Ages,” in Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. Bynum and Stevan Harrell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 257–88.

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Figure 5.12

View of Execution of Niccolò di Tuldo and tabernacle with relic head of Saint Catherine of Siena. Chapel of Saint Catherine of Siena, San Domenico, Siena (Author)

perspective allowed the chapel’s real and fictive spaces to merge. Further, on the saint’s feast day, the handling of the head relic as it was removed from the altar and processed may have replicated the raising of Niccolò’s head in the painting.54 Ultimately, the viewer had an opportunity here to restore the ­fragment conceptually, substituting Catherine’s head for Niccolò’s on the decapitated body. The resultant composite figure, much in line with Sodoma’s interests in ancient sculpture and androgyny, may have been the artist’s goal as he sought to visualize the complicated meaning of Catherine’s letter about Niccolò’s execution. 54

For ritual activities on Catherine’s feast day, the first Sunday of May, see Girolamo Gigli, Diario senese (1854; reprint, Bologna: Arnaldo Forni editore, 1974), vol. 1, 169–70; and Parsons, The Cult of Saint Catherine of Siena, 27–8.

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Conclusion The instability of gender in the bodily fragments of the chapel of Saint Catherine in Siena truly defines them as “queer,” and parallels the apparent mutability of the Belvedere Torso as reflected in its reception by Renaissance artists.55 As we have seen, Sodoma’s choice of this famous sculpture as model for Niccolò’s body may have been motivated by a number of factors. In general, the incomplete status of ancient fragments appears to have permitted broad artistic license, including slippage of gender, in a transformation of models that was often uninterested in the original context or identity. The Belvedere Torso was apparently the ultimate ancient fragment: It was drawn innumerable times from various viewpoints, utilized as a figural model for countless works, and prominently displayed in the Belvedere Courtyard; by the midCinquecento, its aesthetic value was deemed substantial enough to dissuade any interest in restoration. With the commission for the frescoes of Catherine’s chapel, Sodoma no doubt saw in the Torso the perfect, pliable vehicle for mapping a text that played with gender onto the fragmented body in a spatial and iconographic dialogue between the fictive and real. Finally, the artist’s use of the Torso should be tied to the possibilities inherent in his own personal reception of the sculpture. In this regard, the ancient fragment becomes more than just another inspiration for his androgynous figural style. Rather, it is a rich site of erotic projection and self-construction. Bibliography Babbitt, Frank Cole. Plutarch’s Moralia. Loeb Classical Library 305. Vol. 4. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1936. Barkan, Leonard. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Bartman, Elizabeth. “Eros’s Flame: Images of Sexy Boys in Roman Ideal Sculpture.” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. Supplementary Volumes 1 (2002): 249–71. Bellugi, Carlo. La testa di Santa Caterina. Siena: Tipografia senese, 2007. Bianchi, Lidia, and Diega Giunta. Iconografia di S. Caterina da Siena. Rome: Città nuova editrice, 1988. Bober, Phyllis Pray. Drawings after the Antique by Amico Aspertini. London: The Warburg Institute, 1957. 55

For further discussion of the term “queer,” see Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1996), especially 72–100.

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———, and Ruth Rubinstein. Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture. New York: Harvey Miller, 2010. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Famous Women. Edited and translated by Virginia Brown. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2001. Bornstein, Daniel. “Spiritual Kinship and Domestic Devotions.” In Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, edited by Judith Brown and Robert Davis, 177–9. New York: Longman, 1998. Bynum, Caroline W. “‘… And Women His Humanity’: Female Imagery in the Religious Writings of the Later Middle Ages.” In Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, edited by Caroline W. Bynum and Stevan Harrell, 257–88. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. Calza, Raissa. Antichità di Villa Doria Pamphili. Rome: De Luca, 1977. Catherine of Siena. The Letters of St. Catherine of Siena. Vol. 1. Translated by Suzanne Noffke. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000. Christian, Kathleen Wren. Empire Without End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome, c. 1350–1527. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. De Romanis, Alessandra. “Tra Siena e Roma: La collezione di Giovanni Antonio Bazzi detto il Sodoma.” In Collezioni di antichità a Roma tra ’400 e ’500, edited by Anna Cavallaro, 233–9. Rome: De Luca, 2007. Del Pozzo, Joan. D. “The Apotheosis of Niccolò di Tuldo: An Execution ‘Love Story.’” Modern Language Notes 110 (1995): 164–77. Easton, Martha. “Pain, Torture and Death in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea.” In Gender and Holiness. Men, Women, and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, edited by Samantha Riches and Sarah Salih, 49–65. New York: Routledge, 2002. ———. “‘Why Can’t a Woman be More Like a Man?’ Transforming and Transcending Gender in the Lives of Female Saints.” In The Four Modes of Seeing, edited by E.S. Lane, E.C. Pastan, and E.M. Shortell, 333–47. Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2009. Falvey, Kathleen. “Early Italian Dramatic Traditions and Comforting Rituals: Some Initial Considerations.” In Crossing the Boundaries: Christian Piety and the Arts in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Confraternities, edited by Konrad Eisenbichler, 33–55. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991. Fienga, D. “The Antiquarie Prospettiche romane composte per Prospectivo Melanese Depictore: A Document for the Study of the Relationship between Bramante and Leonardo da Vinci.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1970. Frazer, James George, ed. and trans. Ovid’s Fasti. 2nd ed. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1987. Gazzi, Caterina. Le reliquie di S. Caterina da Siena. Rome: Edizioni cateriniane, 1935. Haskell, Francis, and Nicholas Penny. Taste and the Antique. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Hayum, Andrée. Giovanni Antonio Bazzi—“Il Sodoma.” New York: Garland Press, 1976.

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Hill, G.F. “Sodoma’s Collection of Antiquities.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 26 (1906): 288–9. Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Kaftal, George. Saint Catherine in Tuscan Painting. Oxford: Blackfriars Press, 1949. Kampen, Natalie. “Omphale and the Instability of Gender.” In Sexuality in Ancient Art, edited by Natalie Kampen, 233–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. La Monica, Denise. “Ex aere, ex marmore: Una sola statua.” In Ex marmore: Pasquini, Pasquinisti, Pasquinate, nell’ Europa moderna, edited by Chrysa Damianaki, Paolo Procaccioli, and Angelo Romano, 305–20. Manziana: Vecchiarelli, 2006. Lamberton, Robert. “Plutarch.” In The Classical Tradition, edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis, 748–9. Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010. Loraux, Nicole. “Herakles: The Super-Male and the Feminine.” In Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, edited by David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma Zeitlin, 21–52. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Loseries, Wolfgang. “Sodoma e la scultura antica.” In Umanesimo a Siena: Letteratura, arti figurative, musica, edited by Elisabetta Cioni and Daniela Fausti, 345–81. Siena: Scandicci, 1994. Loseries, Wolfgang. “Un theatrum sacrum del Sodoma: La cappella di Santa Caterina.” In L’ultimo secolo della Repubblica di Siena: Arti, cultura e società, edited by Mario Ascheri, Gianni Mazzoni, and Fabrizio Nevola, 320–38. Siena: Accademia senese degli Intronati, 2008. Luongo, F. Thomas. “Saintly Authorship in the Italian Renaissance: The Quattrocento Reception of the Letters of Catherine of Siena.” Journal of the Early Book Society 9 (2005): 1–29. Luongo, F. Thomas. The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Matz, Friedrich, and F. von Duhn. Antike Bildwerke in Rom. Leipzig: Breitkopf and Hàrtel, 1881. Mazzi, Vicenzo, La sacra testa di S. Caterina da Siena. Siena: Basilica Cateriniana, 1952. Mills, Robert. “‘Whatever You Do Is a Delight to Me!’ Masculinity, Masochism, and Queer Play in Representations of Male Martyrdom.” Exemplaria 13 (2001): 1–37. Moerer, Emily A. “The Visual Hagiography of a Stigmatic Saint: Drawings of Catherine of Siena in the Libellus de supplement.” Gesta 44, no. 2 (2005): 89–102. ———. “A Visual Canonization: Images of Catherine of Siena During the Time of Pius ii .” In Pio ii Piccolomini: Il Papa del Rinascimento a Siena, edited by Fabrizio Nevola, 411–39. Siena: Protagon, 2009. Muir, Carolyn D. Saintly Brides and Bridegrooms: The Mystic Marriage in Northern Renaissance Art. London: Harvey Miller 2012.

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Panofsky, Erwin. Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Parsons, Gerald. The Cult of Saint Catherine of Siena. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Raimondo da Capua. S. Caterina da Siena: Legenda maior. Translated by P. Giuseppe Tinagli. Siena: Edizioni Cantagalli, 1994. Reed, Christopher. Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Riedl, Peter Anselm, and Max Seidel. Die Kirchen von Siena. Munich: Bruckmann, 1985. Saslow, James. “Michelangelo: Sculpture, Sex, and Gender.” In Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture, edited by Sara Blake McHam, 223–45. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. Pictures and Passions. A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts. New York: Viking Penguin, 1999. Schmitt, Annegrit. “Römische Antikensammlungen im Spiegel eines Musterbuchs der Renaissance.” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 21 (1970): 88–103. Schwarzenberg, Erkinger. “From Alexander Morente to the Alexander Richelieu: The Portraiture of Alexander the Great in Seventeenth-Century Italy and France.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 (1969): 398–415. Schweikhart, Gunter. Der Codex Wolfegg. Zeichnungen nach der Antike von Amico Aspertini. London: The Warburg Institute, 1986. Schwinn, Christa. Die Bedeutung des Torso vom Belvedere für Theorie und Praxis der Bildenden Kunst vom 16. Jahrhundert bis Winckelmann. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1973. Shaw, James Byram. Drawings By Old Masters at Christ Church Oxford. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Simons, Patricia. “Hercules in Italian Renaissance Art: Masculine Labour and Homoerotic Libido.” Art History 31 (2008): 632–64. Torriti, Piero. La Pinacoteca nazionale di Siena: I dipinti. Genoa: Sagep, 1990. Wegner, Susan. “Heroizing Saint Catherine: Francesco Vanni’s Saint Catherine of Siena Liberating a Possessed Woman.” Woman’s Art Journal 19 (1998): 31–7. ———. “The Rise of Saint Catherine of Siena as an Intercessor for the Sienese.” In Renaissance Siena. Art in Context, edited by A. Lawrence Jenkens, 173–93. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2005. Wünsche, Raimund. “Torso vom Belvedere.” In Il Cortile delle Statue. Der Statuenhof des Belvedere im Vatikan, edited by Matthias Winner, Bernard Andreae, and Carlo Pietrangeli, 287–314. Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1998.

chapter 6

The Trouble with Pasiphaë: Engendering a Myth at the Gonzaga Court Maria F. Maurer The story of Pasiphaë and her insatiable lust for a bull occurs widely in classical art and literature, yet she was rarely depicted in Renaissance art before the sixteenth century.1 Beginning in the 1520s, the Cretan queen enjoyed a newfound popularity, particularly at the court of Federico II Gonzaga in Mantua, where she was depicted in a fresco by Giulio Romano at the Palazzo del Te (Fig. 6.1), and on two maiolica dishes produced by Nicola da Urbino (Figs. 6.2 and 6.3).2 In creating their images of Pasiphaë, Giulio and Nicola entered into a transhistorical dialogue with literary accounts from antiquity and the medieval period, as well as with classical visual representations and contemporary frescoes, all of which offered different interpretations of the myth.3 While images created under the aegis of Federico II Gonzaga are indebted to earlier accounts and depictions, neither Giulio nor Nicola adhered precisely to previous works. Instead, they wove together classical literary and visual characterizations of Pasiphaë with contemporary attitudes towards gender in order to re-imagine

A version of this essay was presented in a session entitled “Gender and Artistic Practice in Early Modern Europe: Media, Genres, and Formats,” organized by Andrea Pearson and Melissa Hyde at the 2013 annual meeting of the College Art Conference. My thanks to Giles Knox, Katherine McIver, Heather Coffey, Lisa Boutin, James Grantham Turner, and Alison Poe for insightful discussions and comments through various versions. 1 For classical depictions of Pasiphaë, see Karl Scherling, “Pasiphaë,” Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, ed. A. Pauly, G. Wissowa, and W. Kroll, vol. 18 (1949), cols. 2077–82; Euripides, I cretesi, trans. Raffaele Cantarella (Milan: Istituto Editoriale Italiano, 1964), 37–41 and plates I–X. For Pasiphaë in Greek and Latin literature, see Rebecca Armstrong, Cretan Women: Pasiphaë, Ariadne, and Phaedra in Latin Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 75–8, 125–7, and 169–87. 2 At least two other plates from Nicola da Urbino’s workshop depict Pasiphaë and the bull. Neither can be concretely connected to the Gonzaga court. The plates are currently at the Hermitage and the Victoria and Albert Museum: Elena Ivanova, ed., Il secolo d’oro della maiolica: Ceramica italiana dei secoli XV–XVI dalla raccolta del Museo Statale dell’Ermitage (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2003), no. 32. 3 For the concept of transhistoricism within the discipline of reception studies, see Charles Martindale, “Reception—a New Humanism? Receptivity, Pedagogy, the Transhistorical,” Classical Receptions Journal 5, no. 2 (2013): 169–83.

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Figure 6.1  Giulio Romano, Pasiphaë and the Bull, 1526–8. Camera di Psiche, Palazzo del Te, Mantua (Permission of the Museo Civico di Palazzo Te)

Figure 6.2 Nicola da Urbino, plate with Pasiphaë and Daedalus, c. 1530–3. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (© The State Hermitage Museum, photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets)

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Figure 6.3 Workshop of Nicola da Urbino, plate with Pasiphaë and Daedalus, c. 1530. Louvre, Paris (© rmn-Grand Palais/Art Resource, ny)

her sexual agency as distinctly masculine, and therefore all the more disruptive to sixteenth-century notions of gender. Although they depicted Pasiphaë as dangerously unfeminine and even salaciously humorous, Giulio and Nicola also portrayed her as a desirable and powerful woman who bent men to her will. Rather than constructing and sustaining normative masculine and feminine gender roles, I want to suggest, these images challenged such binaries and  reveal a measure of instability within Renaissance gender identities.4 Pasiphaë signified the consequences of uncontrolled female sexuality, yet because her outrageous behavior made other desires appear tame, images of

4 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). I am referring specifically to Butler’s argument that gender is not a static essence, but a  contingent, performative construction that can be challenged and manipulated.

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her also afforded women and men a certain amount of license and blurred the boundaries between licit and illicit behavior.

The Taste for Myth at the Gonzaga Court

By the 1520s the Gonzaga rulers had an established tradition of artistic and architectural patronage that drew upon classical myths and styles.5 It is therefore not surprising that Federico II Gonzaga would choose in 1525 to decorate his new palace on the Isle of Te with primarily mythological subject matter executed in a classicizing style by Giulio Romano and his workshop, or that he would own and display maiolica dishes painted with similar themes.6 Giulio’s fresco at the Palazzo del Te, included amongst the numerous classicizing scenes in the Camera di Psiche, depicts Pasiphaë agilely climbing into the cow suit with the aid of Daedalus (Fig. 6.1). The queen looks over her shoulder at the bull, which lies docilely on the ground while its gaze is directed toward the cow by a putto. The slightly later maiolica dish by Nicola da Urbino represents the queen standing in a pasture with Daedalus and gesturing toward the object of her affection; it bears the Paleologo arms, which belonged to Federico’s wife, Margherita Paleologa (Fig. 6.2). The second dish, which is attributed to Nicola’s workshop and currently located at the Louvre, also shows Pasiphaë and Daedalus in a field, with the addition of a scene in which Pasiphaë copulates with the bull (Fig. 6.3).7 The depictions of Pasiphaë and the bull created by Giulio Romano and Nicola da Urbino for the Gonzaga court have never been examined as a group, 5 Federico’s mother, Isabella d’Este, formed a collection of mythological paintings, which date from the years 1497 to after 1506. The imperial busts in Andrea Mantegna’s Camera Picta (1465–74), his Triumphs of Caesar (c. 1486–1506), and Leon Battista Alberti’s use of classical architectural elements at the Basilica of Sant’Andrea (designed 1470) show a long-lived taste for the antique in Mantua. A useful overview of the dynasty’s art and architectural projects can be found in Molly Bourne, “The Art of Diplomacy: Mantua and the Gonzaga, 1328–1630,” in Court Cities of Northern Italy: Milan, Parma, Piacenza, Mantua, Ferrara, Bologna, Urbino, Pesaro, and Rimini, ed. Charles M. Rosenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 138–95. 6 Lisa Boutin has shown that the subject matter of the Palazzo del Te corresponds to several maiolica dishes created for Federico and his mother, Isabella d’Este. Boutin, “Displaying Identity in the Mantua Court: The Maiolica of Isabella d’Este, Federico II Gonzaga, and Margherita Paleologa” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2011), 150–66. 7 For the dating and attribution of Nicola’s dishes, see the appendix in J.V.G. Mallet, “Nicola da Urbino and Francesco Xanto Avelli,” Faenza 93 (2007): 199–250.

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and previous scholarly interpretations have been more concerned with narrative or allegorical meaning than with the complex interplay between classical myth and sixteenth-century gender roles that occurred in the making and viewing of the works. Giulio’s fresco has generally been interpreted as a Neoplatonic excursus on animal passions intended for the building’s lusty patron, Federico II.8 Nicola da Urbino’s dish with the Paleologo arms has been understood as a warning to the bride to maintain her chastity lest she suffer monstrous consequences.9 The dish now in the Louvre has received little scholarly attention, but its explicit sexual content has been seen as an attempt to stimulate the male viewer.10 Examining the three images of Pasiphaë in the context of their use at the Gonzaga court reveals that these were multivalent works that wove together classical literary and visual sources, moral allegories, and bawdy humor in ways that encouraged viewers to satiate their appetites.

Myths and Morals: The Literary Representation of Pasiphaë

While classical accounts of Pasiphaë’s love for the bull vary somewhat, authors agree that she was the daughter of the sun god, Helios, and the sea nymph Perseis. She married Minos, the king of Crete, who was himself the son of Jupiter and Europa. Besides Asterion, the Minotaur, Pasiphaë gave birth to a number of legitimate, human children, among them Ariadne and Phaedra. Her lust for the bull is often attributed to Neptune, who cursed Pasiphaë after Minos failed to sacrifice the bull, though in some versions Venus is the cause of Pasiphaë’s woes.11 Her story is recounted in several classical and medieval texts that would have been available to members of the Gonzaga court, among them Virgil’s Eclogues, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Ars amatoria, Apuleius’ Golden Ass, Philostratus the Elder’s Imagines, and the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé.12 8

Frederick Hartt, Giulio Romano (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), vol. 1, 136–8; Konrad Oberhuber, “Palazzo Te: L’apparato decorativo,” in Giulio Romano, ed. Manfredo Tafuri (Milan: Electa, 1989), 343–6. 9 Boutin, “Displaying Identity,” 194–5. 10 Catherine Hess, “Getting Lucky: Renaissance Maiolica,” in Sex Pots: Eroticism in Ceramics, ed. Paul Mathieu (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 66–7. Hess reproduces but does not analyze the Louvre dish, and she identifies it as “Plate with the Bull of Pasinhac.” 11 Armstrong, Cretan Women, 75 and n. 10. 12 For the Gonzaga library, see Alessandro Luzio and Rodolfo Renier, “La coltura e le ­relazioni letterarie di Isabella d’Este Gonzaga. La coltura,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana

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Virgil’s treatment of the Cretan queen appears designed to elicit the reader’s sympathy. He refers to Pasiphaë as a virgo infelix, or unhappy girl, on more than one occasion in his short narration of her story.13 In the Eclogues Virgil attributes Pasiphaë’s desire to insanity (6.41–60). At one point he calls out to her, “Ah, unhappy girl, what a madness has gripped you!” (6.47).14 Virgil portrays Pasiphae not as a woman indulging her basest desires, but as an unfortunate soul whose actions are caused by a loss of reason. In contrast to Virgil’s more sympathetic approach, classical and medieval authors generally represented Pasiphaë as a negative example of unbridled female sexuality; Ovid and Apuleius in particular used her story to shock and titillate their audiences.15 In Ovid’s Ars amatoria, Pasiphaë’s passion for the bull is inflamed by its physical beauty (1.289–96). Moreover, when the bull continues to prefer the company of cows despite her attempts to woo the animal, Pasiphaë orders the slaughter of her bovine rivals, and then commands Daedalus to devise a wooden cow so that she may satiate her lust. Briefly in his Metamorphoses (8.131–3; 9.736–41), and at greater length in the Ars amatoria (1.289–327), Ovid characterizes Pasiphaë as a woman beset by animal passions, but also describes her actions as simply extreme expressions of the lust experienced by all women.16 In the Metamorphoses, Pasiphaë’s story serves as a moralistic warning against female lust, yet the author also emphasizes the bawdiness of female desire. Ovid also characterizes Pasiphaë and all desirous women as unnatural. At the opening of her tale in the Ars amatoria, he mockingly contrasts female ardor with the “less primitive, less raw,” male desire (1.281).17 Moreover, Ovid plays upon female vanity in his description of Pasiphaë’s inability to transform herself: 33 (1899): 7; Daniela Ferrari, Le collezioni Gonzaga: l’inventario dei beni del 1540–1542 (Milan: Silvana, 2003), 316–24. Pasiphaë’s story is also recounted in several other texts which do not appear to have been known to the court: Euripides, Cretans fr. 472e; PseudoApollodorus, Bibliotheca historica 3.14; and Hyginus, Fabulae 40. She is also allegorized as the sense of sight by Fulgentius in his Mythologies (2.7), and she appears in Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othéa, neither of which I can securely trace to the court of Federico II. 13 Armstrong, Cretan Women, 177. 14 “A, virgo infelix, quae te dementia cepit!” Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–IV, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library 63 (1916; reprint, Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1999). 15 Armstrong, Cretan Women, 167–77. The author of the Ovide moralisé appears to have been more ambivalent in his recounting of Pasiphaë’s story. See below. 16 Ibid., 85. 17 “Parcior in nobis nec tam furiosa libido.” Here and below, translations from Ovid, The Art of Love, trans. James Michie (New York: Modern Library, 2002) 21.

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Quid tibi cum speculo montana armenta petenti? Quid totiens positas fingis inepta comas? Crede tamen speculo, quod te negat esse iuvencam: Quam cuperes fronti cornua nata tuae! (Ars am. 1.305–8) If you want to live like a mountain beast Why the mirror, the pointless fussing with your hair? You can trust the glass, though, for one thing—there You’re no heifer. But goodness, how You wish you could be a plump, horned cow! Pasiphaë’s beauty is worthless to her, and unlike Io or Europa, she cannot attain the object of her desire through metamorphosis. Yet Ovid does not seek to inspire pity; rather he invites the reader to laugh at Pasiphaë’s perverse desire and her ineffective attempts to attract the bull. The bawdy aspect of Pasiphaë’s tale also appealed to Apuleius, whose description of a similar bestial act in his Metamorphoses draws on her tale (10.18–35).18 Having transformed himself into an ass during a magical accident, Lucius eventually becomes the property of the magistrate Thiasus. A freedman of Thiasus begins to charge gawkers a fee to marvel at the astounding performances of Lucius the ass. Among the viewers is a wealthy matron who, Lucius reports, “like some asinine Pasiphaë, ardently yearned for my embraces” (10.19), and who contrives to spend the night with Lucius.19 Even more than Ovid, Apuleius revels in describing the matron’s beauty, which serves as a foil for her bestial passions. She had skin of “milk and honey,” and “fine lips reddened by ambrosial dew,” yet her ardor was so inflamed that even though Lucius attempted to hold himself back, “she would push closer with a mad thrust, grab  my spine, and cling in an even closer embrace” (10.22).20 Realizing the 18 Apuleius, Metamorphoses, vol. 2, trans. J. Arthur Hanson, Loeb Classical Library 453 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 204–37. Also known as the Golden Ass, the text was especially popular at the courts of Ferrara and Mantua. It was certainly known to Giulio Romano, whose depiction of the story of Cupid and Psyche at the Palazzo del Te is based upon Apuleius and is located in the same room as his image of Pasiphaë and the bull. Julia Haig Gaisser, The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass: A Study in Transmission and Reception (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 171–96. 19 “Ad instar asinariae Pasiphaae complexus meos ardenter exspectabat.” Apuleius, Metamorphoses, trans. Hanson, 208–9. 20 “Sed angebar plane non exili metu reputans quem ad modum tantis tamque magnis cruribus possem delicatam matronam inscendere, vel tam lucida tamque tenera et lacte ac  melle confecta membra duris ungulis complecti, labiasque modicas ambroseo rore

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titillating potential of the matron’s performance with Lucius, Thiasus accepts his freedman’s suggestion to include a live sex show in Lucius’ act, yet, like Pasiphaë’s bull, the ass is not eager to copulate with the woman selected for him (10.34–35). In contrast to these earlier narrative descriptions of Pasiphaë, the Imagines of Philostratus the Elder provides an ekphrasis of a painted image of her story (1.16).21 Philostratus describes a painting which depicts Daedalus’ workshop, where “he sits before the framework of the cow and he uses erotes as his assistants.”22 Outside the workshop Pasiphaë gazes mournfully at the bull, but the animal takes no notice of his human lover and instead looks toward a cow. Philostratus does not sympathize, moralize, or mock; instead he praises the artistry of the painting, especially a pair of erotes who are represented at a saw “straightening up and bending forward in turn.”23 In the view of sixteenthcentury humanists, Philostratus’ evocative descriptions provided artists with a guide to the fundamental elements of classical painting, affording them the opportunity to compete with and surpass antiquity, and also served as a handbook on art appreciation for viewers.24 Although sixteenth-century court artists and viewers would have had access to ancient texts, their interpretations of the stories was also influenced by purpurantes tam amplo ore tamque enormi et saxeis dentibus deformi saviari…. Accedens totiens nisu rabido et spinam prehendens meam applicitiore nexu inhaerebat.” Ibid., 210–3. 21 Arthur Fairbanks, trans., Elder Philostratus, Imagines, Younger Philostratus, Imagines, Callistratus, Descriptions, Loeb Classical Library 256 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1931), 64–9. 22 Ibid., 65. Federico’s mother, Isabella d’Este, commissioned an Italian translation from the original Greek of Philostratus’ Imagines sometime between 1508 and 1515. Latin translations appear in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, but Philostratus’ text was not widely available in Latin until Stefano Negri’s 1521 publication. It therefore seems likely that Peruzzi and Giulio knew the text from the Latin or from programs created for them by humanist scholars, while Federico and the Gonzaga court knew the story from the Italian translation. Neither Isabella d’Este’s manuscript nor Negri’s publication have been transcribed in their entirety. See Michael Koortbojian and Ruth Webb, “Isabella d’Este’s Philostratus,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 56 (1993): 260–7. 23 Fairbanks, Elder Philostratus, Imagines, 67. 24 For the Imagines as a source of inspiration and competition with antiquity see Rona Goffen, Titian’s Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 107–26, and Luba Freedman, Classical Myths in Italian Renaissance Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 122. For the role of ekphrasis in Renaissance art criticism, see David Rosand, “Ekphrasis and the Generation of Images,” Arion 1 (1990): 61–105; Norman E. Land, The Viewer as Poet: The Renaissance Response to Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 101–77.

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vernacular translations, most notably the Ovide moralisé, an early fourteenthcentury French text that relates the stories of the Metamorphoses and interprets them within a Christian allegorical framework.25 In Ovid’s Metamorphoses the story of Pasiphaë occupies only a few lines, yet the author of the Ovide moralisé expanded the narrative by incorporating elements from the Ars amatoria as well as from the tradition of courtly romance.26 Yet, according to Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, because Pasiphaë’s act ruptured the boundaries between human and animal natures, the author of the text shortened and simplified the interpretive section of her myth.27 In contrast to the narrative portion of the text, the interpretive section does not mention Pasiphaë by name. It focuses instead on the baseness of human nature, and discusses those who deny the true religion and souls that are consigned to the devil because they have given themselves over to fleshly desires.28 At one level, Pasiphaë’s transgressive sexuality appears to have fascinated the author of the Ovide moralisé, who lingers over her beauty and the symptoms of her love, while at another Pasiphaë’s bestiality made Christian allegorical interpretation difficult.29 The story of Pasiphaë represents female behavior at the limits of society. Unlike many mythological women, such as Europa and Leda, neither Pasiphaë nor her lover undergoes a metamorphosis; instead, her transformation is temporary, and effected only through the artifice of a wooden cow. She engages in deception, adultery, and bestiality in order to satisfy her desires. Both ancient and medieval authors portrayed her as unnatural, and in Christian thought her 25

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On manuscripts of this text, and on illustrations in these manuscripts of other myths and their constructions of gender roles, see K. Sarah-Jane Murray with Ashley A. Simone, “The Liminal Feminine: Illuminating Europa in the Ovide Moralisé,” Chapter 2 in this volume, and Hetty E. Joyce, “Picturing Rape and Revenge in Ovid’s Myth of Philomela,” Chapter 9 in this volume. Two early modern receptions of the Metamorphoses also influenced the use of Ovidian themes in Italian Renaissance art but do not contain the story of Pasiphaë and the bull: Giovanni di Bonsignori, Ovidio Metamorphoseos vulgare, with accompanying woodcuts (Venice, 1497), and Niccolò di Agostini, Ovidio Metamorphoseos in verso vulgar (1522). Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, “The Scandal of Pasiphaë: Narration and Interpretation in the Ovide moralisé,” Modern Philology 93 (1996): 309–10. Ibid., 319–21. Ibid., 316–7. Ibid., 322–5. Blumenfeld-Kosinski does not discuss the author’s apparent fascination with Pasiphaë’s lustful gaze, which is briefly analyzed by Marilynn Desmond and Pamela Sheingorn, “Queering Ovidian Myth: Bestiality and Desire in Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea,” in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 11–2.

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bestiality constituted the most serious of all sexual sins.30 Her story readily lent itself to moralizing because it graphically warned of the dangers of female sexuality, and thereby reminded viewers of the importance of female chastity. Additionally, Pasiphaë could be allegorized as the soul, thereby allowing Christian and even Neoplatonic interpretations that focused on the differences between animal and human natures.31 Yet the myth of Pasiphaë was also an apt vehicle for crude humor, and therefore in art the queen could be eroticized in ways that encouraged viewers to indulge their passions. Pasiphaë’s story thus offered multiple interpretations to Renaissance artists and viewers.

Initial Receptions: Pasiphaë in Rome

By depicting a sexual relationship so far outside acceptable boundaries, Renaissance artists and patrons attempted to cast female sexuality as dangerous and even lewdly humorous. At the same time, they represented the Cretan queen both as an object of desire and as a woman who actively pursued her own passions, allowing viewers to engage in alternative interpretations. While the ribald humor of Ovid and Apuleius and the allegorical approach of the Ovide moralisé influenced sixteenth-century depictions of Pasiphaë and the bull, neither Giulio Romano nor Nicola da Urbino directly illustrated extant texts by these or other authors. Daedalus is a prominent figure in the works of both Giulio and Nicola, but he is not mentioned by Virgil, nor in the Ars amatoria, and appears only briefly in the Metamorphoses as the builder of the wooden cow.32 The inclusion of Daedalus in sixteenth-century images of Pasiphaë appears to be indebted to Philostratus’ Imagines, as well as to a c. 150 ce Roman sarcophagus relief (Fig. 6.4) that was known by at least the early sixteenth century, when Giovanni Maria Falconetto saw it in Rome and adapted it for a fresco on a Verona house façade.33 The front of the Roman 30 31 32 33

Joyce E. Salisbury, “Bestiality in the Middle Ages,” in Sex in the Middle Ages, ed. Salisbury (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991), 178–82. This is precisely the interpretation that Hartt, using the Ovide moralisé, proposed for Giulio’s fresco at the Palazzo del Te. Hartt, Giulio Romano, vol. 1, 136. Compare Ovid, Metamorphoses 9.739–40 to Ars amatoria 1.324, and Virgil, Eclogues 6.41–60. Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources (London: Harvey Miller, 2010), no. 44. Following Carl Robert, Bober and Rubinstein date the sarcophagus to the end of the first century ce, but it has more recently been dated to c. 150 ce. See Carl Robert, Die antiken Sarkophagreliefs, vol. 3, pt. 1, no. 35; Hellmut Sichtermann, Die antiken Sarkophagreliefs, vol. 12, pt. 2, no. 4.

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Figure 6.4 Roman sarcophagus with Pasiphaë and Daedalus, c. 150 ce. Louvre, Paris (© rmn-Grand Palais/Art Resource, ny)

sarcophagus depicts three scenes from the myth of Pasiphaë bracketed by a pair of putti holding garlands: in the first Daedalus, accompanied by a putto, stands before a seated Pasiphaë, presumably receiving instructions from her; in the second Daedalus directs the workmen building the cow; and in the final scene Daedalus shows the finished cow to Pasiphaë while a putto playfully pokes his head out of the opening of the apparatus.34 Giulio likely saw the sarcophagus in his native city of Rome, but he and Nicola da Urbino were also familiar with a fresco of Pasiphaë by Baldassare Peruzzi that shows a familiarity with both the ancient sarcophagus and Philostratus’ text (Fig.  6.5).35 Peruzzi’s fresco was located on exterior of the 34

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The portion of the sarcophagus where the putto bursts out of the cow has been damaged, but the original appearance is preserved in Falconetto’s fresco and a drawing by Giovanni  Antonio Dosio dated c. 1559–65. See Carl Robert, Der Pasiphaë-sarkophag (Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1890), 3; Gunter Schweikhart, “Eine Fassendekoration des Giovanni Maria Falconetto in Verona,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 13 (1968): 335. The inclusion of the putti cannot be attributed to Philostratus’ Imagines, which was written after the creation of the sarcophagus, but the two may have shared a common literary source. Scherling, “Pasiphaë,” col. 2079. Giulio certainly saw Peruzzi’s work in Rome, where he worked at the Farnesina with Raphael. Hartt, Giulio Romano, vol. 1, 32–3. Nicola da Urbino must have obtained drawings of the Farnesina composition, likely from Giulio, who passed through Urbino on his way to Mantua in 1524. Dora Thornton and Timothy Wilson, Italian Renaissance Ceramics: A Catalogue of the British Museum Collection (London: British Museum, 2009), vol. 1, 232. A second fresco at the Villa Madama, which survives as a drawing, bears an even closer relationship to the Imagines than the Farnesina composition. The Madama image, however, does not appear to have had much, if any, influence on Giulio Romano or Nicola da Urbino and so will not be discussed here. For the attribution of the drawings and likely

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Figure 6.5 Follower of Baldassare Peruzzi (possibly Cristoforo Roncalli), study for external decoration of the Villa Farnesina, first quarter of the 16th century. Louvre, Paris (© rmn-Grand Palais/Art Resource, ny)

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Villa Farnesina, and today survives only in a drawing.36 In the Farnesina composition, Pasiphaë stands with Daedalus and extends her arm across her body to point toward the bull she desires. The image appears to conflate Philostratus’ text and the narrative thrust of the sarcophagus. The drawing depicts Pasiphaë in a field longing for the bull as in Philostratus’ ekphrasis, and Pasiphaë’s ­gesture evokes the narrative moment of the sarcophagus in that both show the  Cretan queen giving directions to Daedalus.37 While it is possible that Peruzzi did not know the Pasiphaë sarcophagus, and that he drew his images exclusively from Philostratus’ description, the depiction of Pasiphaë giving orders to Daedalus in the Farnesina drawing suggests a familiarity with the relief. In the Peruzzi drawing, Pasiphaë is more forceful than in either the sarcophagus or Philostratus’ Imagines, and thus her culpability in planning and directing her bestial act is more clearly articulated. Peruzzi’s inclusion of the figure of Daedalus and his emphasis on Pasiphaë’s agency created a double lens through which the Gonzaga court viewed classical texts and images of the Cretan queen.

Gendered Receptions: Pasiphaë in Mantua

Although Peruzzi was influential in the depiction of Pasiphaë at the Gonzaga court, Giulio Romano and Nicola da Urbino combined Peruzzi’s designs with classical literary and artistic representations to create a multifaceted image of a woman who is both dangerous and desirable. In the final sarcophagus scene, Daedalus shows Pasiphaë the cow he has constructed. Rather than drawing upon the Pasiphaë sarcophagus as a visual source, Giulio exploited its narrative possibilities by depicting the next moment in the sequence of events in his fresco at the Palazzo del Te. He continued the story by showing Pasiphaë 36

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locations of the frescoes, see Christoph L. Frommel, Baldassare Peruzzi als Maler und Zeichner (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1967), 64–5, 101–4. The drawing has recently been attributed to Cristoforo Roncalli, called Pomarancio (1553–1626). Eric Pagliano, Dessins italiens. Collection du Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon (Paris: Somogy, 2008), 68. The fresco also informed a print by Leon Davent. See Henry Zerner, ed., The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 33, Italian Artists of the Sixteenth Century (New York: Abaris, 1979), 36. Peruzzi often mixed and transformed his antique sources in such a way that the ancient model might be partially or totally inverted. Rolf Quednau, “Aemulatio veterum: Lo studio e la recezione dell’antichità in Peruzzi e Raffaello,” in Baldassarre Peruzzi: Pittura, scene, e architettura nel Cinquecento, ed. Marcello Fagiolo and Maria Luisa Madonna (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1987), 426.

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entering the apparatus with an eagerness that betrays the influence of Peruzzi’s decisive queen. She turns her gaze toward the bull in ardent anticipation. The fresco is located above a window on the east wall of the Camera di Psiche, next to a larger central image of Galatea and Polyphemus that is flanked on the other side by a framed scene of the lovers Jupiter and Olympia above another window (Fig.  6.6).38 On the neighboring north wall, Giulio and his assistants painted scenes of Mars and Venus bathing, Mars chasing Adonis out of Venus’ bedchamber, and, in a smaller image over a third window, Bacchus and Ariadne. On the south and west walls, which contain doors to the Camera

Figure 6.6 Giulio Romano, east wall of the Camera di Psiche (left to right, Jupiter and Olympia, Polyphemus, and Pasiphaë and the Bull), 1526–8 Palazzo del Te, Mantua (With permission of the Museo Civico di Palazzo Te)

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Jupiter and Olympia was an unusual choice, and Giulio’s fresco may, in fact, be the first Renaissance depiction of the myth. The story of Olympia’s union with Jupiter and the blinding of her husband, Philip of Macedon, who dared to gaze upon the couple, is told in Plutarch’s Life of Alexander. Plutarch’s Lives were “rediscovered” in Western Europe in the late fourteenth century. Marianne Pade, The Reception of Plutarch’s Lives in FifteenthCentury Italy (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2007), vol. 1, 76–94, 172–7.

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dei Venti and Sala dei Cavalli, nymphs, satyrs, gods, and goddesses enjoy a lavish banquet, while the story of Cupid and Psyche unfolds in the lunettes and on the vault above in a dizzying progression of frescoes. An inscription that runs around the room forms the visual transition between the lovers and revelers below and the images of Cupid and Psyche above. It lists Federico’s titles and states that he “ordered this palace built for virtuous leisure after work to restore rest and quiet.”39 The inscription refers to both the active and the contemplative life, and thus seems to suggest that the Palazzo del Te was envisioned to function as both a private retreat and a ceremonial center.40 The painted decoration of the Camera di Psiche does not form one narrative program, and it has generally been interpreted iconographically as a Neoplatonic allegory or an allusion to Federico’s relationship with his mistress.41 Yet the room’s complex, disjointed, and often erotic images call for a more nuanced approach. The scenes of Bacchus and Ariadne, Jupiter and Olympia, and Pasiphaë and the Bull appear to be framed as independent panel paintings over each of the three windows. In each image the female figure violates the frame of the painting to invade the viewer’s space: Ariadne’s dress drapes over the frame, while Olympia grips it in the throes of her passionate encounter with Jupiter, and the tail of Pasiphaë’s cow curves outward across it. The painted frames remind the viewer that the images are works of art, while the illusionism of the women’s bodies gives them a claim to physicality. Their white skin strikingly differentiates them from their male lovers. Iconographically, the three scenes have little in common, but these visual similarities suggest unity, and art historians have thus attempted to find narrative or allegorical connections.42 In addition 39

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FEDERICUS GONZAGA II MAR[CHIO] V S[ANCTAE] R[OMANAE] E[CCLESIAE] ET REIP[UBLICAE] FLOR[ENTINAE] CAPITANVS GENERALIS HONESTO OCIO POST LABORES AD REPARANDAM VIRT[UTEM] QUIETI COSTRVI MANDAVIT. Maria Maurer, “The Palazzo del Te and the Spaces of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2012), 38–9. Hartt describes the frescoes as a Neoplatonic ascent of the soul from the earthly realm where men and gods are overcome by lust, to the glories of the heavens represented in the vault above: Giulio Romano, vol. 1, 134–8. Verheyen reads the images biographically, and sees Federico as Cupid, who is torn between his mother, Isabella d’Este/Venus, and his lover, Isabella Boschetti/Psyche: The Palazzo del Te in Mantua: Images of Love and Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 19–21. Despite the fact that Verheyen’s arguments have been refuted numerous times, his remains the dominant interpretation of the room. See Maurer, “Spaces of Masculinity,” 41–5. For an implausible narrative connection based on a fresco of Apollo that was never executed, see Verheyen, The Palazzo del Te in Mantua, 26. For an allegorical interpretation, see Hartt, Giulio Romano, 134–8.

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to any allegorical message, though, the figures were surely meant to seduce the male viewer. The sinuous forms of Ariadne and Pasiphaë offer teasing glimpses of bare limbs, while the nude figure of Olympia, reclining yet frontal and shown in the midst of the sex act with Jupiter, piques the viewer’s erotic desire. Giulio Romano’s depiction of Pasiphaë differs markedly from that found in his other eroticized images of women in the room. At the Palazzo del Te, Olympia and Jupiter assume normative sexual positions, approved by church and lay authorities, in which the man is the superior and active participant while the woman lies beneath him in a more passive posture.43 Olympia obliging opens her legs, hooks her left leg around Jupiter’s torso, and grips the fictive frame of the image in the throes of ecstasy. Although Ariadne and Bacchus are not engaged in the sex act, their forms are physically entangled, and she rests on the ground beneath him and leans against his leg as she gracefully twists in space. In his designs for the Modi, a series of lascivious prints that were engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi in 1524, Giulio frankly depicted human beings in various and complex sexual postures.44 While the Modi show both partners actively engaged in and enjoying the sex act, and while several of the positions cast the female as the more active or even dominant participant, the images avoid the prohibited sexual posture in which a man kneels behind a woman.45 Pasiphaë, on the other hand, is shown in an unmistakably superior and active position. The bull lies passively in the background, while in the foreground Pasiphaë agilely climbs into her new guise with the aid of its inventor, Daedalus. Pasiphaë thus actively initiates sex with a passive male partner, and penetrates a female partner in the form of the cow costume. Moreover, the cow is located extremely close to the picture plane, and its rear end protrudes into 43 44

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James A. Brundage, “Let Me Count the Ways: Canonists and Theologians Contemplate Coital Positions,” Journal of Medieval History 10, no. 2 (1984): 86. While painted erotic images of the Olympian gods were sanctioned, the print medium and human subjects of the Modi led to their almost immediate censorship by the Catholic Church, and thus knowledge of their creation, publication, and audience is fragmentary. For an insightful reconstruction of Modi’s history, see Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 21–47. Ibid., 64–5. Note particularly figs. 11 and 12, which show women guiding their male partners, and figs. 17 and 21, which depict women on top. Talvacchia argues that Giulio was aware of ancient images of the prohibited position found on spintriae, but that he purposefully chose not to use them in the Modi designs. It is worth noting that while the Modi eschew the sexual posture most offensive to the Church, several of the other positions that Giulio depicted, as well as the obvious enjoyment of the couples, were severely prohibited. See Brundage, “Let Me Count the Ways,” 81–93.

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the viewer’s space, thus displaying a decidedly transgressive sexual position. The viewer is, in effect, invited to mount and penetrate the cow, just as Pasiphaë does as she ascends into the apparatus Daedalus has designed.46 The cow’s tail whips out of the picture and across the painted frame, a device that collapses the space between the viewer and the image, implicating the viewer-cumvoyeur in the violation of sexual norms that Pasiphaë performs. Pasiphaë’s pose is not derived from the Pasiphaë sarcophagus, where the queen appears demure and veiled as befits a proper Roman wife. Instead, Giulio modeled Pasiphaë after ancient reliefs that depict a male hero subduing a wild animal with his knee. While the pose may have originated with a figure of Hercules vanquishing the Ceryneian Hind from the Athenian Treasury at Delphi, it became extremely popular in Greek and Roman art, and also appears in the Centauromachy metopes on the Parthenon, on vases and coins depicting Theseus battling the Minotaur, and in reliefs and paintings of Mithras slaying a bull.47 The pose was well known in Raphael’s workshop through at least two classical sources: a third-century ce Roman sarcophagus depicting the Labors of Hercules that clearly shows Hercules subduing the hind with his knee, and a third-century ce relief of Mithras and the bull (Fig. 6.7).48 Until the mid-sixteenth century, the latter was located in a cave under the hill of the Aracoeli near the Capitoline, a space that was only later understood to be a Mithraeum. Not until 1615 was the figure identified as Mithras; in the sixteenth century, the figure was often identified as Hercules.49 That Giulio also identified the Aracoeli relief as a depiction of Hercules is attested to by his use of the figure’s pose as a model for the hero at the Palazzo del Te. Hercules and the Cretan Bull is one of six fictive bronze reliefs depicting the hero’s exploits in 46

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For the protruding rear end as an invitation to sexual intercourse, see Will Fisher, “Peaches and Figs: Bisexual Eroticism in the Paintings and Burlesque Poetry of Bronzino,” in Sex Acts in Early Modern Italy: Practice, Performance, Perversion, and Punishment, ed. Allison Levy (Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2010), 154–6. For the origins of the pose, see Karl Schefold, Gods and Heroes in Late Archaic Greek Art, trans. Alan Griffiths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 106–9. For Roman, late antique, and medieval appearances of the pose, see Fritz Saxl, A Heritage of Images: A Selection of Lectures (Harmondsworth, uk: Penguin, 1979), 17–21. Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, nos. 134 and 46 respectively. The Hercules sarcophagus appears in a drawing in the Fossombrone Sketchbook by a member of Raphael’s workshop. The Mithras relief appears as Hercules wrestling with the Bull in a fresco by Peruzzi in the Sala del Fregio at the Villa Farnesina and in a stucco relief executed by Raphael’s workshop in the Vatican Logge. Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1960), 96–100; Saxl, Lectures, 18.

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Figure 6.7  Mithras Slaying the Bull, 3rd century ce. Louvre, Paris (© rmn-Grand Palais/Philippe Fuzeau/Art Resource, ny)

the Sala dei Cavalli, the largest of the rooms at the palace (Fig. 6.8).50 Giulio depicts the hero almost astride the bull, his right knee pinning the animal down, his left leg anchoring his body to the ground as he wrenches the bull’s horns backwards. The position of the bull’s head and its open, bellowing mouth recall the Aracoeli relief, though Giulio has altered the placement of the hero’s outstretched leg and arms (compare Figs. 6.7 and 6.8).51 Yet, as Leonard Barkan has noted, there was no consensus on the identity or even the gender of the figure from the cave under the Aracoeli.52 Writing under 50 51

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For the other Herculean images See Hartt, Giulio Romano, vol. 1, 113–4. The Sala dei Cavalli Hercules and the Cretan Bull could also be based upon the thirdcentury Roman sarcophagus mentioned above, which unequivocally depicts Hercules subduing the hind with his knee, but the formal similarities to the Mithras relief are greater. Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renais­ sance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 171–3. While Barkan’s text refers to the Aracoeli relief, he illustrates a slightly different sculpture, which attests to the popularity of the type and further demonstrates the likelihood that Giulio was familiar with it.

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Figure 6.8 Giulio Romano, Hercules and the Cretan Bull, 1526–7. Sala dei Cavalli, Palazzo del Te, Mantua (With permission of the Museo Civico di Palazzo Te)

the pseudonym Prospectivo Milanese, one author identified the relief as a nymph slaying a bull, while the artist Vincenzo de’ Rossi reportedly classified the relief as the Rape of Europa.53 The figure lacked both its head and arms in the sixteenth century, yet the fact that a male god could so easily be mistaken for a mythic female may explain precisely why the Mithras relief appealed to Giulio Romano.54 While Hercules was a paragon of Renaissance masculine virtue, images of his Labors and battles also show the constant struggle entailed in crafting ideal masculinity.55 Giulio’s image of Hercules, highlighting the hero’s straining 53 54 55

Ibid., 173–4. For the sixteenth-century condition of the relief, see Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists, no. 46. Patricia Simons, “Hercules in Italian Renaissance Art: Masculine Labour and Homoerotic Libido,” Art History 31 (2008): 632–4. On other challenges to the masculinity of Hercules in

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muscles, his streaming lion-skin cloak, and the distress of the bull, powerfully visualizes the masculine struggle, and differs markedly from the graceful calm of Pasiphaë located in the neighboring Camera di Psiche. Like her male antecedents, Giulio’s Pasiphaë stands with one foot on the ground and the other bent and resting on her bovine support as she leans into the animal (compare Figs.  6.1 and 6.7). Giulio, however, transforms the figure. Pasiphaë does not wrestle with or subdue the cow, but is helped into the animal by Daedalus; her knee bends to penetrate the beast and join with it. The Mithras relief, like Giulio’s Hercules, is full of swift movement and violence: Mithras’ streaming cloak indicates the speed with which he has pounced upon the bull, and the animal’s death throes are forcefully rendered. By contrast, in the figure of Pasiphaë, Giulio created an elegant balance through the queen’s backward glance at the bull. Her easy domination of both animal and machine, both nature and culture, contrasts with Hercules’ agonizing battle. She is all the more threatening because her triumph is so effortlessly accomplished. Giulio’s ability to modernize classical forms appears to have been a skill that he consciously cultivated, and one that was prized by patrons and viewers. Pietro Aretino wrote that even Apelles and Vitruvius would recognize Giulio’s art as “anticamente moderno e modernamente antico,”56 thereby comparing Giulio to the great artists and architects of antiquity, while also proclaiming his superiority.57 In Pasiphaë and the Bull, Giulio uses the Mithras relief to depict not a male hero, but a female figure who both subdues and subverts Nature. The purposeful transformation of male to female, hero to anti-hero, and struggle to submission may have been intended to clarify the narrative relationship between the scenes. In some versions of Hercules’ Labors, the Cretan

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late medieval and early modern Italian art, see Mary D. Edwards, “Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel: Giotto’s Virtue Fortitude Re-examined,” Chapter 1 in this volume, and Timothy B. Smith, “Queer Fragments: Sodoma, the Belvedere Torso, and Saint Catherine’s Head,” Chapter 5 in this volume. This phrase can be loosely translated as “classically modern and modernly classical.” Ettore Camesasca, ed., Lettere sull’arte di Pietro Aretino (Milan: Milione, 1957), vol. 1, 215. For Giulio’s relationship to the antique see also Ernst H. Gombrich, “The Style all’antica: Imitation and Assimilation,” in Norm and Form (London and New York: Phaidon, 1970), 122–8; Toby Yuen, “Giulio Romano, Giovanni da Udine and Raphael: Some Influences from the Minor Arts of Antiquity,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 42 (1979): 263–72; Howard Burns, “‘Quelle cose antique et moderne belle di Roma’: Giulio Romano, il teatro, l’antico,” in Giulio Romano, ed. Manfredo Tafuri (Milan: Electa, 1989), 227–43.

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Bull that the hero subdues is the same bull that enchanted Pasiphaë.58 Giulio’s use of a similar pose for both figures makes visible the possible textual relationship between them. Giulio may also have intended to make Pasiphaë’s offense clear to his viewers. By using a male visual trope to depict her, Giulio represents Pasiphaë as a woman who has contravened nature by taking on a male role. In addition, Pasiphaë’s gender inversion, the transgressive sexual position of the cow, and even the docility of the male bull share a sense of humor reminiscent of sixteenth-century burlesque poetry and theatre.59 Although her actions violate established gender roles, the humorous visual presentation of the queen in Giulio’s fresco also makes her less threatening. In contrast to the humorously suggestive content of Giulio’s fresco, the Paleologo dish painted by Nicola da Urbino offers an interpretation that imagines the story of Pasiphaë as a caution against female sexuality (Fig. 6.2). Like Peruzzi’s fresco, the dish depicts Pasiphaë standing in a field accompanied by Daedalus and gesturing towards the bull. The plate bears the arms of Margherita Paleologa of Monferrato, the wife of Federico II Gonzaga, and was commissioned sometime between 1530 and 1533, likely in connection with their 1531 wedding.60 To the left a putto points toward Pasiphaë, and a volcano in the 58

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See Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica 4.13.4, and Hyginus, Fabulae 30. PseudoApollodorus, Bibliotheca 2.5.7 does not explicitly mention Pasiphaë but relates that the Cretan Bull of Hercules is the same bull that Minos failed to sacrifice. At 3.1.14 the Bibliotheca describes Minos’ sacrificial bull as the animal loved by Pasiphaë. For the texts in English, see Diodorus of Sicily [Library of History], trans. C.H. Oldfather, vol. 3 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1979), and Apollodorus’ Library and Hyginus’ Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology, trans. R. Scott Smith and Stephen M. Trzaskoma (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007). The play of gender, sexuality, and humor is evocative of the antics in Bernardo Dovizzi da Bibbiena’s La Calandria, first performed in Urbino in 1513, and known to both Giulio Romano and Federico II Gonzaga. For La Calandria, see Valeria Finucci, The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 189–223. For connections between burlesque poetry and sixteenth-century art, see Linda Wolk-Simon, “‘Rapture to the Greedy Eyes’: Profane Love in the Renaissance,” in Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, ed. Andrea Bayer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 49–53. Thornton and Wilson, Italian Renaissance Ceramics, vol. 1, 240–3. Thornton and Wilson argue that the dish was part of a service possibly commissioned to celebrate the birth of the couple’s first son. They explain the lack of paired Gonzaga and Paleologo arms as an indication that the dish was directed toward the bride, although they also explore the possibility that the service was commissioned by Margherita herself. It has recently been suggested, however, that the Paleologo dish may have been part of a separate service commissioned by Federico II as a gift to Giovanni Giorgio Paleologo, Marquis of

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background spews smoke, a comment on Pasiphaë’s fiery passions. While in Peruzzi’s composition the bull appears oblivious to his fate, in Nicola’s dish the animal casts its eye out of the plate, thereby engaging the viewer’s sympathy. Nicola has slightly altered Peruzzi’s composition so that Pasiphaë’s gesturing hand no longer sweeps across her torso, but extends outward from her body in another assertive, and therefore masculine, gesture. As Sharon Fermor has argued, women’s bodies and movements were expected to be restrained, with limbs kept close to the body.61 On Nicola’s dish Pasiphaë’s lack of bodily control gives visual form to her lack of sexual control and even unsexes her. Vincenzo Calmeta observes in his Della ostentazione, written between 1497 and 1500, that a woman who abandoned restraint “should no longer be called a woman, but a new a monstrous creation.”62 Pasiphaë also wears toeless boots, normally an article of male attire in Nicola’s oeuvre (compare Figs. 6.2 and 6.3), and her skirts are raised to display her well-muscled legs. Like Giulio Romano, Nicola da Urbino masculinized Pasiphaë in order to communicate her status as an unnatural woman. In the context of the Gonzaga-Paleologo nuptials, Pasiphaë’s monstrous masculinity also emphatically reminds viewers of the importance of female chastity. The myth of Pasiphaë had previously been envisioned as a message for the bride on a Franco-Italian cassone panel dated to c. 1510–5 (later part of the Giampietro Campana collection) where the queen is likewise infatuated with the bull and takes steps to secure its affections by ordering the slaughter of her rivals (Fig. 6.9).63 The narrative of the cassone panel draws heavily on Ovid, but

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Monferrato and Margherita’s uncle. Christie’s, The Exceptional Sale 2012 (London: 5 July, 2012), lot 4, http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/LotDetailsPrintable.aspx?intobjectID= 5585038, accessed February 9, 2015. In this case, the service would have been intended either to tempt Giovanni into accepting a union with the house of Gonzaga or to celebrate the forthcoming marriage. While the specific circumstances of the dish’s commission remain speculative, its connection to Federico’s marriage to the Paleologo line is not in dispute. It therefore seems likely that Federico and Nicola intended viewers to interpret the images in light of notions of female chastity. Sharon Fermor, “Movement and Gender in Sixteenth-Century Painting,” in The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture since the Renaissance, ed. Kathleen Adler and Marcia R. Pointon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 137. “Imperocchè, essendo la venustà e la continenza quelle che sopra l’altre cose il muliebre sesso adornano, ogni volta che la donna da quelle si aliena, contrafà la sua natura, né più donna ma nuovo mostro si doveria appellare.” Prose e lettere edite e inedite, ed. Cecil Grayson (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1959), 40–1. Translated by Fermor, “Movement and Gender,” 134. A.P. de Mirmonde, “Cinq cassoni mythologiques de la collection Campana,” La Revue du Louvre et des musées de France 28 (1978): 84–97.

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Figure 6.9 Master of the Campana Cassone, The Loves of Pasiphaë, 1510–5. Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon (© rmn-Grand Palais/Art Resource, ny)

the presence of Neptune also references a version of the myth that attributes Pasiphaë’s lust for the bull to divine retribution for her husband’s failure to sacrifice the bull to the sea god.64 The Campana cassone foregrounds Pasiphaë’s role in the story in order to warn the bride of the consequences of unrestrained female sexuality, but the inclusion of Neptune also alludes to the groom’s marital duties and the consequences of not fulfilling them. Depictions of negative female exemplars, failed marriages, and dire warnings to both bride and groom were quite common on Renaissance mythological cassoni.65 In contrast, the Paleologo dish addresses only Pasiphaë’s actions. Pasiphaë actively chooses to break both her marriage vows and the laws of nature by pursuing the bull. There is no suggestion that she has been cursed, driven mad, or otherwise impaired. The Paleologo dish reminds viewers of both sexes of the dangers of female sexuality and admonishes them to safeguard feminine chastity. Although there is no evidence that either Federico Gonzaga or Nicola were familiar with the cassone, the object suggests an association between the myth of Pasiphaë and marriage in Renaissance society.66 64

See for example, Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica 4.77.2 and Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3.1.3–4. It should be noted that the artist appears to have conflated Neptune and Daedalus. In the center and right middle ground, a male figure wearing a crown and holding a trident appears with Pasiphaë. In the center he appears to be cursing her with lust for the bull, but to the right he helps her into the cow costume, a task more suited to Daedalus. 65 Cristelle Baskins, Cassone Painting, Humanism, and Gender in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially 50–74 and 128–59. 66 It should also be noted that the artist who decorated the Campana cassone does not appear to have utilized classical visual sources in his composition, and thus the ­purposeful

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A second dish from Nicola’s workshop, which was created in the 1530s and is currently in the Louvre, appears to be a humorous re-envisioning of the Paleologo dish, for it transforms an exhortation to chastity into a depiction of lechery (Fig. 6.3). The repetition and inversion engender the humor here. Both objects illustrate the moment when Pasiphaë shows Daedalus the bull. In the Paleologo dish, Pasiphaë’s gesture draws the viewer’s gaze to the bull and then across to the putto; in the Louvre dish, her arm sweeps across her body in an echo of Peruzzi’s Farnesina composition and directs our attention to a vignette in which she copulates with the bull, but without the cow apparatus that was part of every literary rendition of the myth.67 While it is tempting to speculate that Nicola drew upon Apuleius’ narrative of an unmediated bestial sexual encounter, it is more likely that Nicola omitted the cow suit in order to avoid depicting the “unnatural” position that would result from the copulating forms of a bull and cow. Instead, a nude Pasiphaë wraps her body around that of the bull and pulls it toward her as the couple lock eyes. Little is known of this work’s provenance, and there are no arms to link it to a particular dynasty, but the high quality of the images and mythological subject argue for a wealthy and possibly noble patron. Furthermore, the use of a rather obscure myth that was enjoying a new vogue in Mantua makes it likely that the patron was a member of the Gonzaga court, or perhaps a court closely affiliated with the Gonzaga. The lascivious nature of the image, including the bull’s lolling and somewhat phallic tongue, suggests a viewer familiar with the licentious tone of Giulio Romano’s mythological paintings in the Camera di Psiche. Moreover, the body type and facial features of the copulating Pasiphaë on the Louvre dish are masculine, or at the very least ambiguous, suggesting a further link to the Gonzaga court. Pasiphaë has prominent sculpted muscles and a chiseled profile, visual features more commonly associated with masculine imagery.68 As in the

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appropriation of classical forms for the depiction of Pasiphaë should be traced to the Roman ethos of Peruzzi and Giulio Romano. Erotic subjects appear to have been as common in Renaissance maiolica as in other media, and mythological subjects are by no means the only genre in which erotica appears. It does seem, however, that depictions of copulation were somewhat rarer than nudity, fondling, or phallic images. See Catherine Hess, “Pleasure, Shame and Healing: Erotic Imagery on Maiolica Drug Jars,” in Sex Acts in Early Modern Italy: Practice, Performance, Perversion, Punishment, ed. Allison Levy (Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2010), 13–24; Marta Ajmar-Wollheim, “‘The Spirit is Ready, but the Flesh Is Tired’: Erotic Objects and Marriage in Early Modern Italy,” in Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy, ed. Sara F. Matthews-Grieco (Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2010), 141–69. A slightly later dish from the workshop of Orazio Fontana depicts Saturn in the form of a  horse copulating with a human woman who must be Philyra. Unlike on the Louvre

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gender-bending fresco at the Palazzo del Te and Nicola’s Paleologo dish, the metamorphosis of Pasiphaë from female to male on the Louvre dish emphasizes the transgressive nature of her act. It also adds a further layer of lascivious humor to the image.

Dining and Desire: Pasiphaë and her Viewers

Although the Palazzo del Te was used by the Gonzaga family as a suburban retreat, it also served as a place to entertain foreign visitors and local courtiers, and was thus designed as a space wherein Federico and his heirs would enact their dynastic and gender identities before both foreigners and locals.69 Images of Pasiphaë created at Federico’s behest were not for the marchese’s enjoyment alone; instead they participated in a wider Renaissance negotiation of gender roles wherein the authority of antiquity could be used to strengthen or subvert established norms. While it appears that the overtly suggestive images at the Palazzo del Te and in Nicola’s Louvre dish are directed at a male viewer and that the moralizing sentiments of the Paleologo dish were intended to speak to female concerns, at the Gonzaga court images of Pasiphaë would have been used and experienced by both sexes within the context of Renaissance dining practices. The Camera di Psiche, where Giulio’s fresco is located, served as the palace’s banquet chamber.70 The degree to which maiolica was actively employed in dining is still a matter of debate, but Nicola’s dishes would certainly have been viewed and perhaps even used during important banquets.71 In imagining Pasiphaë’s sexually disruptive actions, Renaissance artists appear to have expected women to interpret the story differently than men: Women would be exhorted to maintain their chastity, and while men were encouraged to guard the sexual behavior of their wives, they were also invited to enjoy the humorous and erotic aspects of the story. In practice, however, the images were widely available to both sexes. Entertainments and banquets held

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plate, Philyra does not reach urgently for her bestial lover, and is clearly marked as female by an exposed breast and softly modeled musculature. The plate is illustrated in Hess, “Getting Lucky,” 67. For the use of the Palazzo del Te and its role in crafting masculine gender roles at the Gonzaga court, see Maurer, “Spaces of Masculinity,” especially 1–2 and 68–99. For an account of a banquet arranged in the Camera di Psiche for Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, see Giacinto Romano, ed., Cronaca del soggiorno di Carlo V in Italia (dal 26 luglio 1529 al 25 aprile 1530): Documento di storia italiana estratto da un codice della Regia biblioteca universitaria di Pavia (Milan: U. Hoepli, 1892), 265–6. Boutin, “Displaying Identity,” 60–5.

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at the Palazzo del Te for visiting dignitaries included both men and women, and correspondence from the Gonzaga court during the 1530s shows that Margherita Paleologa, her children, and even Federico’s mother, Isabella d’Este, were frequent visitors to the Palazzo del Te.72 While the patronage of the Paleologo dish is still under debate, it was certainly displayed and probably used in conjunction with other dishes in the service, and was therefore widely available to members of the court and their guests. The use of the Louvre dish is somewhat more difficult to trace, but given the relatively large number of surviving objects from early modern Italy that contained overtly sexual imagery and that were displayed in shops, marriage chambers, dining rooms, and studioli, it seems probable that this dish was also seen by members of both sexes, very possibly within the context of contemporary dining practices.73 In both classical and Christian literature, there are many references to the relationship between the appetite for food and drink and sexual appetites.74 The Renaissance received opposing discourses concerning dining: The medieval Christian tradition deplored the indulgence of the senses, while treatises such as De honesta voluptate et valetudine, written by the Mantuan humanist Bartolomeo Sacchi, known as Platina, drew on classical sources and legitimized the physical and emotional enjoyment of the banquet through the healthfulness of the meal.75 Platina further argued that good conversation and an aesthetically pleasing table were as important to the virtuous delight in the meal as healthy food.76 Mythological images created the appropriate visual environment and encouraged the intellectual discourse that justified the physical delectations of the banquet. Depictions of Pasiphaë and the bull also celebrated the pleasures of the flesh, and enticed viewers of both sexes to enjoy the food and drink before them with the same abandon. Rather than encouraging a denial of appetites, within the context of dining, Nicola’s dishes and Giulio’s fresco could have incited a loosening of sexual and social mores. Like Pasiphaë, viewers were invited to cross boundaries and indulge in their passions. 72 Romano, Cronaca del soggiorno di Carlo V, 256; Daniela Ferrari, ed., Giulio Romano. Repertorio di fonti documentarie (Rome: Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, Ufficio centrale per i beni archivistici, 1992), vol. 1, 556. 73 Ajmar-Wollheim, “‘The Spirit is Ready, but the Flesh is Tired’,” 143, 156. 74 Roy Strong, Feast: A History of Grand Eating (Orlando: Harcourt, 2002), 8–38. 75 Ibid., 47–55, 140–61. 76 Mary Ella Milham, ed. and trans., Platina, On Right Pleasure and Good Health: A Critical Edition and Translation of De honesta voluptate et valetudine (Tempe, az: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998), 109.

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Far from constructing and reinforcing normative gender roles, images of Pasiphaë at the Gonzaga court in fact trouble binary conceptions of masculinity and femininity. At first glance, Giulio Romano’s fresco at the Palazzo del Te visualizes female desire as transgressive and even lewd, yet it also shows Pasiphaë as a female partner who actively takes part in and directs the sexual act. She is the central figure around which the narrative and the composition of the image turn, and is the object of amorous gazes from both the bull and the male viewer. A female viewer such as Margherita Paleologa could identify less with Pasiphaë’s aberrant sexuality and more with her agency. While Pasiphaë can embody the dangers of female libido, at the Palazzo del Te she also constitutes a dynamic and powerful figure who subjects male desire to her own wishes. Likewise, the Paleologo dish places Pasiphaë’s desire at the center of the image, as she indicates her wishes by pointing assertively toward the bull, a gesture that is encircled by the well of the dish and echoed by both Daedalus and the putto. The Louvre dish, which repositions Pasiphaë as a submissive sexual partner, envisions her more as an object of desire. In classical art and literature, Pasiphaë must disguise herself as a cow to attract the bull, but on the Louvre dish, the bull’s ardor appears to have been excited by her human form. While artists and patrons at the Gonzaga court may have ostensibly wanted images of Pasiphaë to remind women of the importance of chastity and men of the delights of indulgence, the works actually encouraged multiple interpretations. Pasiphaë symbolized the consequences of female desire, yet her actions could be entertaining and even arousing. Although she clearly communicated a moral message about the importance of female chastity, the Cretan queen also opened up possibilities for women’s sexual agency. Far from reifying normative sexual roles, images of Pasiphaë and the bull visualized the limits of human sexuality, and encouraged an exploration of alternative roles for men and women. Bibliography Ajmar-Wollheim, Marta. “‘The Spirit is Ready, but the Flesh is Tired’: Erotic Objects and Marriage in Early Modern Italy.” In Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy, edited by Sara F. Matthews-Grieco, 141–69. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2010. Apuleius. Metamorphoses. Translated and edited by J. Arthur Hanson. Loeb Classical Library 256. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Armstrong, Rebecca. Cretan Women: Pasiphaë, Ariadne, and Phaedra in Latin Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

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Barkan, Leonard. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Baskins, Cristelle. Cassone Painting, Humanism, and Gender in Early Modern Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate. “The Scandal of Pasiphaë: Narration and Interpretation in the Ovide moralisé.” Modern Philology 93 (1996): 307–26. Bober, Phyllis Pray, and Ruth Rubinstein. Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources. London: Harvey Miller, 2010. Bourne, Molly. “The Art of Diplomacy: Mantua and the Gonzaga, 1328–1630.” In Court Cities of Northern Italy: Milan, Parma, Piacenza, Mantua, Ferrara, Bologna, Urbino, Pesaro, and Rimini, edited by Charles M. Rosenberg, 138–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Boutin, Lisa. “Displaying Identity in the Mantuan Court: The Maiolica of Isabella d’Este, Federico II Gonzaga, and Margherita Paleologa.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2011. Brundage, James A. “Let Me Count the Ways: Canonists and Theologians Contemplate Coital Positions.” Journal of Medieval History 10, no. 2 (1984): 81–93. Burns, Howard. “‘Quelle cose antique et moderne belle di Roma’: Giulio Romano, il  teatro, l’antico.” In Giulio Romano, edited by Manfredo Tafuri, 227–43. Milan: Electa, 1989. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Calmeta, Vincenzo. Prose e lettere edite e inedite (con due appendici di altri inediti), edited by Cecil Grayson. Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1959. Camesasca, Ettore, ed. Lettere sull’arte di Pietro Aretino. 3 vols. Milan: Milione, 1957. Christie’s. The Exceptional Sale 2012. Lot 4. London: 5 July, 2012. http://www.christies .com/LotDetailsPrintable.aspx?intobjectID=5585038, accessed February 9, 2015. Desmond, Marilynn, and Pamela Sheingorn. “Queering Ovidian Myth: Bestiality and Desire in Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea.” In Queering the Middle Ages, edited by Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, 3–27. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Diodorus Siculus. Library of History. Translated by C.H. Oldfather. Vol. 3. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1979. Euripides. I cretesi. Translated by Raffaele Cantarella. Milan: Istituto Editoriale Italiano, 1964. Fairbanks, Arthur, trans. Elder Philostratus, Imagines, Younger Philostratus, Imagines, Callistratus, Descriptions. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1931.

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Fermor, Sharon. “Movement and Gender in Sixteenth–Century Painting.” In The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture Since the Renaissance, edited by Kathleen Adler and Marcia R. Pointon, 129–45. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Ferrari, Daniela. Le collezioni Gonzaga: L’inventario dei beni del 1540–1542. Milan: Silvana, 2003. ———. Giulio Romano. Repertorio di fonti documentarie. 2 vols. Rome: Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, Ufficio centrale per i beni archivistici, 1992. Finucci, Valeria. The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2003. Fisher, Will. “Peaches and Figs: Bisexual Eroticism in the Paintings and Burlesque Poetry of Bronzino.” In Sex Acts in Early Modern Italy: Practice, Performance, Perversion, and Punishment, edited by Allison Levy, 151–64. Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2010. Freedman, Luba. Classical Myths in Italian Renaissance Painting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Frommel, Christoph L. Baldassare Peruzzi als Maler und Zeichner. Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1967. Gaisser, Julia Haig. The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass: A Study in Transmission and Reception. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Goffen, Rona. Titian’s Women. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Gombrich, Ernst H. “The Style all’antica: Imitation and Assimilation.” In Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, 122–8. London and New York: Phaidon, 1970. Hartt, Frederick. Giulio Romano. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958. Hess, Catherine. “Getting Lucky: Renaissance Maiolica.” In Sex Pots: Eroticism in Ceramics, edited by Paul Mathieu, 64–79. New Brunswick, nj: Rutgers University Press, 2003. ———. “Pleasure, Shame and Healing: Erotic Imagery on Maiolica Drug Jars.” In Sex Acts in Early Modern Italy: Practice, Performance, Perversion, Punishment, edited by Allison Levy, 13–24. Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2010. Ivanova, Elena, ed. Il secolo d’oro della maiolica: Ceramica italiana dei secoli XV–XVI dalla raccolta del Museo Statale dell’Ermitage. Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2003. Koortbojian, Michael, and Ruth Webb. “Isabella d’Este’s Philostratus.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 56 (1993): 260–7. Land, Norman E. The Viewer as Poet: The Renaissance Response to Art. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Luzio, Alessandro, and Rodolfo Renier. “La coltura e le relazioni letterarie di Isabella d’Este Gonzaga. La coltura.” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 33 (1899): 1–62. Mallet, J.V.G. “Nicola da Urbino and Francesco Xanto Avelli.” Faenza 93 (2007): 199–250.

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Martindale, Charles. “Reception—A New Humanism? Receptivity, Pedagogy, the Transhistorical.” Classical Receptions Journal 5, no. 2 (2013): 169–83. Maurer, Maria. “The Palazzo del Te and the Spaces of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy.” PhD diss., Indiana University, 2012. Milham, Mary Ella, ed. and trans. Platina, On Right Pleasure and Good Health: A Critical Edition and Translation of De honesta voluptate et valetudine. Tempe, az: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998. de Mirmonde, A.P. “Cinq cassoni mythologiques de la collection Campana.” La Revue du Louvre et des musées de France 28 (1978): 84–97. Oberhuber, Konrad. “Palazzo Te: L’apparato decorativo.” In Giulio Romano, edited by Manfredo Tafuri, 336–79. Milan: Electa, 1989. Ovid. The Art of Love. Translated by James Michie. New York: Modern Library, 2002. ———. Metamorphoses. Translated by David Raeburn. London: Penguin, 2004. Pade, Marianne. The Reception of Plutarch’s Lives in Fifteenth-Century Italy. 2 vols. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2007. Pagliano, Eric. Dessins italiens. Collection du Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. Paris: Somogy, 2008. Panofsky, Erwin. Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art. Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1960. Quednau, Rolf. “Aemulatio veterum. Lo studio e la recezione dell’antichità in Peruzzi e Raffaello.” In Baldassarre Peruzzi: pittura, scene, e architettura nel Cinquecento, edited by Marcello Fagiolo and Maria Luisa Madonna, 399–431. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1987. Robert, Carl. Der Pasiphaë-sarkophag. Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1890. ———. Die antiken Sarkophagreliefs. Vol. 3, no. 1. Berlin: Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, 1897. Romano, Giacinto, ed. Cronaca del soggiorno di Carlo V in Italia (dal 26 luglio 1529 al 25 aprile 1530): Documento di storia italiana estratto da un codice della Regia biblioteca universitaria di Pavia. Milan: U. Hoepli, 1892. Rosand, David. “Ekphrasis and the Generation of Images.” Arion 1 (1990): 61–105. Salisbury, Joyce E. “Bestiality in the Middle Ages.” In Sex in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, edited by Joyce E. Salisbury, 173–86. New York: Garland Publishing, 1991. Saxl, Fritz. A Heritage of Images: A Selection of Lectures. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. Schefold, Karl. Gods and Heroes in Late Archaic Greek Art. Translated by Alan Griffiths. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Scherling, Karl. “Pasiphaë.” In Real-Encyclopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, edited by A. Pauly, G. Wissowa, and W. Kroll. Vol. 18. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlerscher, 1949. Schweikhart, Gunter. “Eine Fassendekoration des Giovanni Maria Falconetto in Verona.” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 13 (1968): 325–42.

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Sichtermann, Hellmut. Die antiken Sarkophagreliefs. Vol. 12, no. 2. Berlin: Mann, 1992. Simons, Patricia. “Hercules in Italian Renaissance Art: Masculine Labour and Homoerotic Libido.” Art History 31 (2008): 632–64. Smith, R. Scott, and Stephen M. Trzaskoma, trans. Apollodorus’ Library and Hyginus’ Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007. Strong, Roy. Feast: A History of Grand Eating. Orlando: Harcourt, 2002. Talvacchia, Bette. Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Thornton, Dora, and Timothy Wilson. Italian Renaissance Ceramics: A Catalogue of the British Museum Collection. London: British Museum, 2009. Verheyen, Egon. The Palazzo del Te in Mantua. Images of Love and Politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. Virgil. Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid. Translated by H. Rushton Fairclough. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1916. Wolk-Simon, Linda. “‘Rapture to the Greedy Eyes’: Profane Love in the Renaissance.” In Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, edited by Andrea Bayer, 43–58. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. Yuen, Toby. “Giulio Romano, Giovanni da Udine and Raphael: Some Influences from the Minor Arts of Antiquity.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 42 (1979): 263–72. Zerner, Henry, ed. The Illustrated Bartsch. Vol. 33, Italian Artists of the Sixteenth Century. New York: Abaris, 1979.

chapter 7

Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water in Lorenzo Lotto’s Venus and Cupid April Oettinger We both came to sit by the edge of a cool and limpid spring that welled forth in that valley. Disturbed by neither beast nor bird, it kept its clarity so lovely in that forest place that it made manifest the secrets of the translucent deeps not otherwise than if it had been of purest crystal. There, … she began again with new entreaties to constrain and conjure me, by the love I bore her, to show her the promised image. … I answered that she could see it in the lovely pool.1 jacopo sannazaro, Arcadia 8.11 (Naples, 1504)

[In the garden was] a delightful fountain carved with consummate art out of the living rock … A little stream of clear, fresh water, gushing from the slope, fell into the fountain … descended with a gentle sound into a miniature canal of marble; here the murmur of the water stimulates discourse.2 pietro bembo, Gli Asolani (1505)



I wish to express my deepest gratitude to the editors of the present volume for their ­invaluable suggestions as this paper developed. 1 Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia di M. Jacopo Sannazaro, ed. Luigi Portirelli (Milano: Società Tipografica de’ Classici Italiani, 1806), 90–1: “Ne ponemmo ambeduo a sedere alla margine d’un fresco e limpidissimo fonte, che in quella sorgea: il quale nè da ucello, nè da fiera turbato, sì bella la sua chiarezza nel salvatico luogo conservava, che non altrimenti, che se di purissimo cristallo stato fosse, i secreti del traslucido fondo manifestava. … Ove poi che alquanto avemmo refrigerato il caldo, ella con novi preghi mi ricominciò da capo a stringere, a scongiurare per lo amore, che io le portava, che la promessa effigie le mostrassi …. Risposi, che nella bella Fontana la vedrebbe.” For the English translation, see Sannazaro, Arcadia, trans. Ralph Nash (Detroit, mi: Wayne State University Press, 1966), 81. Arcadia was composed in the late 1480s, and the first authorized printed edition appeared in 1504 in Naples. 2 Pietro Bembo, Gli Asolani di Cardinale M. Pietro Bembo (Milano: Società Tipografica de’ Classici Italiani, 1808), vol. 1, 13–5: “... una bellissima fonte nel sasso vivo della montagna, … maestrevolmente cavata, nella quale una vena non molto grande di chiara e fresca acqua, che del monte usciva, cadendo, e di lei che guari alta non era dal terreno, in un canalin di marmo,  … scendendo soavemente si facea sentire e nel canale ricevuta, … col mormorio dell’acque, che c’invitano a ragionare.” For the English translation, see Bembo, Gli Asolani, trans. Rudolf Gottfried (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1954), 14–5.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004289697_009

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Beneath the dappled shade of an ivy-fringed oak, Venus, adorned with a ­bejeweled crown, a white veil, and a single earring, smiles tentatively at her beholder (Fig.  7.1). Scattered rose petals lie gently on her hips, thighs, and pudenda, while a few stray petals and two roses are strewn on the blue cloth spread across the soft greenery where she lies. Alongside her outstretched leg, a rod extends onto the verdure, calling attention to a snake whose spiral form echoes the sinuous folds of the fabric beneath her. The serpent directs its gaze toward her hand, which she places upon her chest above a diaphanous ­strophion (a breast-band, here worn below the breasts) whose lightness echoes the grace with which she suspends a wreath of myrtle from a blue ribbon held between her thumb and index finger. From the wreath dangles a fine golden chain attached to an oil lamp set alight, suffusing the grove with smoke. The delicate choreography of Venus’ posture reverberates in the soft trickle of urine that issues from a wry Cupid, who takes aim through the opening of the myrtle wreath held firmly in his chubby fist. His outstretched arm is begirt in a band of gauzy gilt cloth that billows behind him in the gentle breeze.

Figure 7.1 Lorenzo Lotto, Venus and Cupid, late 1520s. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Art Resource, ny)

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Directly opposite the sheath of arrows strung over Cupid’s shoulder, a conch shell with a flesh-like opening hangs obliquely above Venus’ head from a white ribbon whose cascading tassels caress her hair and dangle tantalizingly close to her ears, neck, and shoulders, threatening to tickle her with the next breath  of wind. This sensuous symphony takes place before a red curtain suspended by blue cords from the phallic limb of the tree, Venus’ arboreal companion in this, the most erotic of Lotto’s landscapes. Of the few mythological allegories that Lorenzo Lotto (c. 1480–1557) produced in the course of his fifty-year career, the Venus and Cupid is widely regarded as the most alluring—and enigmatic. Although the artist has been identified by his Latinate signature, “LAURENT. LOTO,” at the base of the tree trunk behind Venus’ left elbow, the precise date of the painting, its provenance, and the circumstances of its production are still obscure.3 On the basis of stylistic analysis and scant documentary evidence, scholars have dated the painting to sometime between 1526, the year after Lotto’s return to Venice following his eleven-year residence in Bergamo, and the early 1540s, when the artist lodged at the Venetian residence of his nephew, Mario d’Armano, for whom he made paintings of a Venus and Susannah and the Elders, according to an entry in his Libro di Spese.4 In addition to speculating on the painting’s origins, scholarship has focused on its iconography. Francesca Cortesi Bosco’s work treated Lotto’s painting in light of hermetic symbolism and alchemy, while Keith Christiansen’s suggestive article was the first to locate the canvas within the emergent genre of epithalamic painting in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Italy.5 According to Christiansen, the painting possesses details described in the epithalamic verses of Latin poets Statius, Catullus, Claudian, and others—including plants associated with marriage (myrtle and ivy) and Venus with her bridal crown. 3 For the most recent assessment and bibliography, see Margaret Binotto, “‘Lotto al bivio’: La dialettica di virtus e voluptas nella pittura profana,” in Lorenzo Lotto, ed. Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa et al. (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2011), 252–4. 4 Berenson, who first attributed the Venus and Cupid to Lorenzo Lotto in his 1932 and 1936 lists of the artist’s work, dated the canvas to 1536 on the basis of a photograph; see Peter Humfrey, Lorenzo Lotto (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 140, 177–8 (Appendix B). Humfrey’s speculation that the Venus and Cupid now housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the same Venus that Lotto painted while he resided with his nephew remains inconclusive. For the 1526 dating of the painting and a summary of discussions regarding the provenance of the painting, see Keith Christiansen, “Lorenzo Lotto and the Tradition of Epithalamic Paintings,” Apollo 124 (1986): 166–73. 5 Francesca Cortesi Bosco, Gli affreschi dell’oratorio Suardi a Trescore: Lorenzo Lotto nella crisi della Riforma (Bergamo: Bolis, 1980); Christiansen, “Lorenzo Lotto.”

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Christiansen also addressed Lotto’s micturating Cupid, connecting the puer mingens (urinating child) motif with the generative power of semen, a metaphor that took a variety of forms in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century epithalamic painting, from putti that urinate silver and gold on deschi da parto (birth trays) to a putto holding an uccellino (a little bird with fluttering wings, later painted over) at the feet of Giorgione’s Dresden Venus.6 Lotto’s urinating putto may well celebrate the virility of Lotto’s Venetian patron, yet the visionary dimensions of the puer mingens and its watery interplay with the reclining Venus—another polyvalent image in Lotto’s age—have not been fully appreciated. Lotto’s Venus recalls the vast tradition of reclining nudes who populated the sixteenth-century mythological paintings of his contemporaries, yet the artist’s decision to place the figure upon blue fabric, rather than the red and white textiles that typically adorned the hillocks and bedsteads of reclining Venetian ladies, represents a diversion from the Venetian tradition that was typical of Lotto, a highly experimental Venetian artist who, for the majority of his career, painted in regional towns in the Veneto and the Marche. I argue that Lotto’s Venus and Cupid alludes to fountain images that originated in the literature and art of the fifteenth century and circulated in a variety of forms in the sixteenth century: in particular, two fountains (one a nymph and the other a urinating boy) adorning a bath house in the 1499 editio princeps of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, and the Huius Nympha Loci epigram. These fountain motifs, distantly derived from antique statuary, were grafted onto medieval allegories of water, reemerging in the antiquarian imaginations of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanists in the form of speaking fountains of desire, inspiration, and art. The following explores the role of Lotto’s water poetics in rendering an allegory of vision consonant with the epithalamic function of the Venus and Cupid, a painting which celebrated not only early modern marriage but also the fertile imagination. 6 Christiansen, “Lorenzo Lotto,” 170, n. 15, linked the urinating putti depicted on two Florentine deschi da parto with fertility. One of the birth trays includes an inscription that elaborates on the metaphor: “May God grant health to every woman who gives birth and to their father. … May [the child] be born without fatigue or peril. I am an infant who lives on a rock (?) and I make urine of the silver and gold.” See also Patricia Simons, “Manliness and the Visual Semiotics of Bodily Fluids in Early Modern Culture,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 39, no. 2 (2009): 342, n. 41. In Giorgione’s painting, the little bird would have been understood as a phallic allusion. The motif can be found in the art of antiquity and the Renaissance, and it sometimes embellished epithalamic painting, as in Giorgione’s Dresden Venus. On the putto with the uccellino at the feet of the sleeping figure in the Dresden Venus, see Jaynie Anderson, “Giorgione, Titian, and the Sleeping Venus,” in Tiziano e Venezia: Convegno internazionale di studi (Vicenza: N. Pozza, 1980), 337–42.

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The Puer Mingens and the Nymph of the Spring As Patricia Simons has shown, the puer mingens, a motif derived from classical reliefs, could embody a complex array of meanings in early modern art, from the celebration of marriage to masculinity, sexual desire, metamorphoses, laughter, and wit.7 Indeed, Lotto had experimented elsewhere in his oeuvre with the puer mingens in contexts beyond epithalamic painting. For instance, in the frescoes of the Oratorio Suardi (1524), a villa oratory on the outskirts of Bergamo, a pissing putto inspires devotional contemplation (Fig. 7.2).8 Perched in illusionistic grapevines wrapped on a fictive pergola, the mischievous toddler relieves himself on viewers standing below. Metaphorically inseminated by liquid inspiration, so to speak, Lotto’s audience—either the sophisticated owners of the villa engaged in their villeggiatura or travelers who stopped to pray in the oratory en route to or from nearby Bergamo—could then reflect on the miracles of saints from the Golden Legend depicted on the walls, a meditation enhanced by Biblical excerpts about wine inscribed on banners interwoven throughout the leafy vault. Thus Lotto’s urinating putto in the Oratorio Suardi induced devotional otium (contemplation), personifying the revelatory act of Lotto himself, who gazes intently at the beholder from his position on the wall, just beneath the putto.9 A puer mingens similarly invigorates Lotto’s portrait of Andrea Odoni and his antiquarian collection (1527) (Fig. 7.3). The sophisticated Venetian cittadino presides over a storied array of classical fragments and statuettes strewn around him on a cloth of deep green, where a bronze Hercules mingens in the background to the right urinates into a basin at the feet of a sandal-removing 7 For Simons’s analysis of the puer mingens in Lotto’s Venus and Cupid, see “Manliness and the Visual Semiotics,” 359–61. In addition to Simons’s evocative discussion of the potential meanings of the puer mingens motif, see Paul Barolsky, Infinite Jest: Wit and Humor in Italian Renaissance Art (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978), 161–5; for a more general study of Renaissance putti, see Charles Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). On the puer mingens and the related Hercules mingens in classical art, see Marilyn Lavin, “Art of the Misbegotten: Physicality and the Divine in Renaissance Images,” Artibus et Historiae 60 (2009): 198–202. 8 Cortesi Bosco’s study, Gli affreschi, focuses on Lotto’s hermetic symbolism and places the fresco cycle within the context of anxieties in the age of the Reformation. It still remains to discuss the intellectual dimensions of Lotto’s frescoes in light of the culture of the villeggiatura and villa oratories. 9 For the concept of devotional otium, see Ronald Witt, “Introduction,” in De otio religioso, ed. F. Petrarch, trans. Susan Schearer (New York: Italica Press, 2002), ix–xxiii.

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Figure 7.2 Lorenzo Lotto, Puer mingens, 1524. Trescore Balnearia, Oratorio Suardi (Commune di Trescore Balneario)

Venus.10 Since these particular statuettes appeared nowhere in the d­ ocumented inventory of Odoni’s belongings, it has been suggested that Lotto included 10

As Marilyn Lavin, “Art of the Misbegotten,” 202, points out, the puer mingens type likely derived from the drunk Hercules mingens, who, having imbibed too much wine, relieves himself.

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Figure 7.3 Lorenzo Lotto, Andrea Odoni, 1527. Hampton Court, London (Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014)

them for symbolic effect.11 If indeed the Diana of Ephesus that Odoni holds in his right hand provides an important key to the painting’s significance, as Peter Humfrey has suggested, then her power of fecundity and her entreaty to the senses might be “activated” by the Hercules mingens found at the other end of the diagonal axis traced by Odoni’s left arm.12 As in the Oratorio Suardi, where the beholder plays a role in making sense of the interlaced hagiographies on the walls, the narrative of Odoni’s fragments relies on the creative imagination of the viewer, personified by the Hercules mingens, whose generative 11 Humfrey, Lorenzo Lotto, 107. For Odoni’s inventory, see D. Battilotti and M.T. Franco, “Regesti di committenti e dei primi collezionisti di Giorgione,” Antichità Viva 17, no. 4–5 (1978): 58–86. 12 Humfrey, Lorenzo Lotto, 107; Andrea Goesch, Diana Ephesia: Ikonographische Studien zur Allegorie der Natur in der Kunst vom 16.–19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 1996).

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powers bring the collection of classical fragments to life. The green cloth that sets the stage for Odoni’s collection, a color that “foments the sight,” as humanist ­philosopher Marsilio Ficino put it in the second book of De Vita (1489), transforms the intimate room into a domesticated sculpture garden, a potent space of vision that alludes to the villa gardens of Odini’s sophisticated contemporaries.13 The green cloth also functions to unveil more fragments— another Venus and a sculpted head of Hadrian—that seem to take on a life of their own as they emerge from beneath it. The metamorphic function of Lotto’s micturating Cupid can be understood in relation to the urinating figures who activate the hagiographies in the Oratorio Suardi and Andrea Odoni’s “sculpture garden,” but it still remains to explore the nature of the lady upon whom he acts: the reclining Venus. When Lotto conceived of the Venus and Cupid, recumbent nudes had already populated the paintings of Bellini, Giorgione, and Titian, but the pairing of the lady with a putto who urinates directly onto the goddess’ lap, perhaps the most ­curious detail of the painting to modern eyes, was Lotto’s invention.14 Lotto’s inspiration most likely derived from an antiquarian romance that the artist knew well: the 1499 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Poliphilo’s Struggle for Love in a Dream), a masterpiece of early printing produced at the Venetian press of 13

14

Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, trans. Carol Kaske and John Clarke (Binghamton, ny: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998), 213–4 (2.14, lines 19–21): “Inter virentia vero deambulantes interim causam perquiremus, ob quam color viridis visum prae ceteris foveat salubriterque delectet” (“While we are walking among the green things, let us figure out why the color green more than others foments the sight and healthfully delights it”). The chapter is entitled “Confabulatio senum sub Venere per virentia prata” (“The ­conversation of old people traversing the green fields under the leadership of Venus”). For a discussion of Ficino’s discourse on green in relation to the visionary dimensions of gardens, see Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto, The Medici Gardens: From Making to Design (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). The early modern invention of the sleeping Venus developed out of a confluence of recumbent Ariadnes, supposed Cleopatras, and a host of river gods; a useful entrée into the vast tradition is Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (London: Yale University Press, 1999), 233–47. For a seminal study on the emergence of this type in Venice, see Millard Meiss, “Sleep in Venice: Ancient Myths and Renaissance Proclivities,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 110, no. 5 (1960): 348–82. There is also a vast scholarship on the motif of the reclining nude in Venetian painting that is centered around Titian’s Venus of Urbino. See Anderson, “Giorgione, Titian, and the Sleeping Venus,” 337–42, and David Rosand, “Venereal Hermeneutics: Reading Titian’s Venus of Urbino,” in Renaissance Society and Cultures: Essays in Honor of Eugene F. Rice, ed. J. Monfasani and R.G. Musto (New York: Italica Press, 1991), 263–80.

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Aldus Manutius.15 The text, whose attribution to Francesco Colonna remains a matter of debate, tells of a humanist Everyman, Poliphilo, “lover of all” and “lover of Polia,” whose quest in a dream for his missing Polia leads him through a protean landscape abounding with fragmentary relics—architectural ornaments, monumental sculpture, and enigmatic inscriptions—from an imagined classical past. The hero’s search for Polia, and his animation of these scattered fragments by means of his fertile imagination, culminates with his mystic marriage to his beloved “Idea,” the spectanda imagine (remarkable image) of Polia, under the auspices of Venus and Cupid. A playground for the imagination, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili can be understood as an allegory of art that appealed to the creative faculties of its readers, who, following in the footsteps of Poliphilo, could delight in conjuring visions of antiquity.16 The passage that provides an important precedent for the coupling of the reclining Venus with the urinating Cupid in Lotto’s Venus and Cupid appears in the first book of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, when the lone Poliphilo, still searching for Polia, encounters fountain sculptures of a reclining nude and a puer mingens, both illustrated in the book by woodcuts (Figs. 7.4 and 7.5). The text elucidates the close connection between the two sculptures in terms of their physical context as well as their conceptual relationship with each other. The two marble fountains adorn an octagonal bathing pavilion: A sleeping nymph appears on the exterior wall, and on the corresponding interior wall is the puer mingens. In his ekphrasis of the sculpture of the sleeping nymph, a beauty identified only as ΠΑΝΤΩΝ ΤΟΚΑΔΙ (“The Mother of All”), according to an inscription above her, Poliphilo lavishes praise on the artful sculptor who produced the relief (in Poliphilo’s humorously contrived language, a l­ithoglypho) depicting the drowsy nude and a satyr who, drawing aside a curtain, longs to wake her: I thought that, in his exceedingly keen genius, the sculptor seemed to have most skillfully crafted the appearance of nature inherent in his Idea. The said satyr violently seized the wild arbutus tree by the branches with his left hand, bending it down over the drowsy nymph to produce p ­ leasant 15

16

For modern translations of the text in English and Italian, see, respectively, Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, ubi humana omnia non nisi somnium esse docet, trans. Joscelyn Godwin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), and Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, ubi humana omnia non nisi somnium esse docet, trans. Marco Ariani and Mino Gabriele (Milano: Adelphi, 1998). For recent bibliography and discussion of Poliphilo’s Dream as a courtly game of poetry and art, see April Oettinger, “The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Art and Play in a Renaissance Romance,” Journal of Word and Image 27, no. 1 (2011): 15–30.

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Figure 7.4 Nymph Fountain, in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499. (The George Peabody Library, Sheridan Libraries, The Johns Hopkins University)

shade; and with his other arm he drew aside the extreme edge of a little curtain that was tied to the nearby branches of a tree trunk.17 17 Colonna, Hypnerotomachia (1998), 72, and Hypnerotomachia (1999), 72. “Excogitai che al suo acutissimo ingegno il lithoglypho habilissimamente et al libito havesse l’opificio

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Figure 7.5 Trickster Fountain, in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499. (The George Peabody Library, Sheridan Libraries, The Johns Hopkins University)

dilla natura praesente nella Idea. Il dicto satyro havea l’arboro Arbuto per gli rami cum la sinistra mano violente rapto, et, al suo valore sopra la soporata Nympha flectendolo, indicava di farli gratiosa umbra. Et cum l’altro brachio traheva lo extremo di una cortinetta, che era negli rami al tronco proximi innodata.”

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Streams of hot and cold water issue from each breast of the Mother of All, an early modern goddess Natura.18 As Poliphilo drinks in her nutritive vision, so to speak, he delights in her flowing tresses, plump thighs, and dimpled knees, and he barely resists the urge to tickle her feet: Poliphilo the dreamer personifies the lascivious satyr who longs to awaken the nymph. Just at that moment, the Nymphs of the Five Senses interrupt Poliphilo’s rapture and beckon him to join them in the octagonal bathing pavilion. It is in the convivial company of the nymphs that Poliphilo enters the pavilion, where he activates his own senses before a puer mingens, a watery personification of laughter: a ΓΕΛΟΙΑΣΤΟΣ (“trickster”) that spurts liquid upon Poliphilo’s head when the hero steps on a marble slab before it. The little Priapus (priapulo), as Poliphilo calls him, fulfills the role of the garden god himself, inseminating Poliphilo’s imagination. Now the hero, his senses awakened by the profane baptism, progresses ever further into a dreamscape of antique fragments, reverently described in vivid ekphrasis akin to the description of the sleeping nymph fountain. As in other instances when Poliphilo encounters fountains in his dream, water stimulates and nurtures the protagonist’s visionary imagination and, in turn, the imaginative powers of the reader as he or she vicariously experiences the dream.19 The Huius Nympha Loci and Fountains of Desire Poliphilo’s interplay with the two fountains recalls early modern statue poetry, a genre that ascended to popularity in the circle of Pomponeo Leto’s Roman Academy during the latter half of the fifteenth century.20 Inspired by an array of classical statues assembled in the sculpture gardens of their elite patrons, humanist poets brought life to mute stone through poetic verse. Among the 18

19

20

On the goddess Natura as an inspirational force, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 106–27. In his account of the primeval Earth, Lucretius wrote that “the flow of nourishment is directed toward the breasts.” See De rerum natura 5.801–36. In the redesigned and expanded woodcuts for the 1546 French edition, the artist added streams of water issuing from the lady’s breasts, as well as Poliphilo’s bath with the Nymphs of the Five Senses inside the bathing pavilion. See Hypnerotomachie, ou Discours du songe de Poliphile (Paris: Jacques Kerver, 1546), vol. 1, 23. Kathleen Wren Christian, Empire without End (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 134–42; Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 103–28.

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most famous examples was the Huius Nympha Loci, a pseudo-classical epigram once believed to be ancient but now attributed to a fifteenth-century humanist.21 The epigram, possibly inspired by a statue (a sleeping nymph?) in a Roman sculpture garden and displayed in close proximity to that statue, described a nymph lying in a marble grotto who, lulled into sweet slumber by the gentle trickle of a stream, admonishes to silence anyone who happens upon her: The nymph of the place, guardian of the sacred font: I sleep as I listen to the murmur of the enchanting waters. Be careful, whoever approaches this marble cave, Not to disturb my slumber: drink or bathe in silence.22 By the last quarter of the Quattrocento, the epigram had been “collected” in Renaissance syllogai and in at least one instance appeared in a sculpture ­garden in close proximity to an ancient statue that remains to be identified. The speaking fountains that fueled the imaginations of Renaissance antiquarians owed their inspirational powers in part to the enchanted waters that adorned the pleasure gardens of late medieval dream poetry. These waters, which took the form of marble fountains or bubbling brooks, functioned as mirrors of desire and pathways toward inspiration.23 In the opening passage of the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose, for instance, a stream guides the Lover’s initial progression from a waking to a dreaming state. His journey 21

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23

For an excellent summary of the origins and fortunes of the Huius Nympha Loci epigram, see Christian, Empire, 134–42 and 231–6. Building on Zita Pataki’s discovery that Giovanni Campano wrote the epigram for Cardinal Jacopo Ammannati Piccolomini, who displayed it in proximity to a statue (unspecified), Christian adds that Campano may have composed the epigram in response to the statue in Cardinal Piccolomini’s sculpture garden or perhaps collaborated with Piccolomini when he penned it. See Christian, Empire, 135, 238–9, n. 57. On the legacy of the motif in the visual arts, see Otto Kurz, “Huius Nympha Loci: A Pseudo-Classical Inscription and a Drawing by Dürer,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16 (1953): 171–7; Phyllis Pray Bober, “The Coryciana and the Nymph Corycia,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977): 2­ 23–39; and Elisabeth B. MacDougall, “The Sleeping Nymph: Origins of a Humanist Fountain Type,” Art Bulletin 57 (1975): 357–65. “Huius nympha loci, sacri custodia fontis./Dormio dum blandae sentio murmur aquae./ Parce meum quisquis tangis cava marmora somnum/Rumpere: sive bibas, sive lavere taces.” I have used Christian’s translation and transcription. See Empire, 134, 238, n. 55. Hester Lees-Jeffries, “Sacred and Profane Love: Four Fountains in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) and the Roman de la Rose,” Journal of Word and Image 22, no. 1 (2006): 1–13.

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begins when he leaves his bedchamber and enters into a landscape. He descends from a hilltop, treads carefully along the banks of a stream, and finds himself in a meadow with a “large and roomy garden, entirely enclosed by a high crenellated wall, sculptured outside and laid out with many fine inscriptions.”24 After describing an array of Vices that decorate the exterior walls of the Garden of Diversion (Deduit), the Lover encounters Lady Idleness, who guides him to the gate. Once inside, the Lover finds himself in an earthly paradise teeming with flowering and fruit-bearing trees, conifers, and hardwoods, which provide shade for the tender grass and shelter for a variety of animals that roam within the walls. Limpid fountains and rivulets nourish the garden and heighten its pleasure: They produce “a sweet and pleasing murmur and nurture the grasses along their banks,” which are “so sweet and moist on account of the fountains” that “one could couch his mistress as though on a feather bed.”25 At last, the Lover arrives at a pine tree and discovers at its base a marble fountain bearing an inscription identifying this place as the one where Narcissus died. Following an account of the tragic story of Narcissus, the Lover resumes his fountain ekphrasis, lavishing praise on the eternal nature of the fountain, which never ceases to flow. By the end of the first chapter, the Lover assumes the role of Narcissus, as he gazes deep into the fountain and discovers marvelous crystals that refract the light: At the bottom of the fountain were two crystal stones upon which I gazed with great attention. … Just as the mirror shows things that are in front of it, without cover, in their true color and shapes, just so, I tell you truly, do the crystals reveal the whole condition of the garden, without deception, to those who gaze in the water. … There is nothing so small, however hidden or shut up, that is not shown there in the crystal as if it were painted in detail.26 24

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26

“Quant j’oi ung poi avant alé,/Si vi ung vergié grant et lé,/Tot clos d’ung haut mur bataillié,/Portrait defors et entaillié/A maintes riches escritures,/Les ymages et les paintures/Ai moult volentiers remiré.” Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Daniel Poiron (Paris: Flammarion, 1999), 1.129–31; de Lorris and de Meun, Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 32. “... Une noise douce et plesant./Entor les ruissiaus et les rives/Des fontainnes sainnes et vives/Poignoit l’erbe espesse et drue;/Aussi y peüst l’en sa drue/Couchier comme so rune coite,/Car la terre estoit douce et moite/Por la fontainne, et y venoit/Tant d’erbe cum il convenoit.” De Lorris and de Meun, Roman, 1.1390–8, and Romance, 49. “Ou fons de la fontainne aval/Avoit dues pierres de cristal/Qu’a grant entente remirai. … Aussi cum li mirëoirs montre/Les choses qui li sont encontre/Et y voit l’en sans couverture/Et

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Gazing ever deeper into the fountain of Narcissus, the Lover discerns roses that emanate sweet perfume. He is especially attracted by one rose of such allure that he barely resists the urge to reach out to pluck it; he pulls back for fear of hurting himself on the razor-sharp thorns. At that moment, the God of Love shoots him through the eyes and heart with a series of arrows that enhance the Lover’s sight.27 Medieval fountains of desire, as in the Narcissus fountain from the Roman de la Rose, shaped fleeting visions out of water—a space of desire and longing inhabited by an elusive and often unattainable beloved—in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century literature and art.28 For instance, Book 1 of Angelo ­ Poliziano’s Stanze cominciate per la giostra del Magnifico Giuliano de’ Medici

27

28

lor color et lor faiture,/Tretout aussi vous di por voir/Que li cristal, sans decevoir,/Tout l’estre du vergier accusent/A cues qui dedens l’iaue musent; … Si n’i a si petite chose,/Tant soit repote ne enclose,/Dont demonstrance n’i soi faite/Com s’el ert es cristaus portraite.” De Lorris and de Meun, Roman 1.1537–71, and Romance, 51. The power of water to nurture desire and vision, a major theme in the opening passage of the Romance of the Rose, is a theme to which the Lover returns in Book 2, where the Lover debates the virtues of the different fountains in the Garden of Desire. See de Lorris and de Meun, Roman, lines 20,369–20,695 and Romance, 334–8. On medieval fountains as metaphors, see Erich Köhler, “Narcisse, la fontaine d’Amour, et Guillaume de Lorris,” Journal des Savants 2 (1963): 86–103; Naomi Miller, “Paradise Regained: Medieval Garden Fountains,” in Medieval Gardens, ed. Elisabeth MacDougall (Washington, dc: Dumbarton Oaks, 1986), 137–53. Watery visions descended from the tradition of the Roman de la Rose are poignantly woven throughout Petrarch’s verse, as in Standomi un giorno solo alla finestra (Anthony Mortimer, ed., Petrarch’s Canzoniere in the English Renaissance [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005], Canzoniere 323: lines 36–48), when the poet envisions a crystal fountain that has enveloped the memory of his unattainable beloved, Laura: “Chiara fontana in quel medesmo bosco/sorgea d’un sasso, et acque fresche et dolci/spargea, soavemente mormorando;/al bel seggio, riposto, ombroso et fosco,/né pastori appressavan né bifolci,/ma nimphe et muse a quel tenor cantando:/ivi m’assisi; et quando/più dolcezza prendea di tal concento/et di tal vista, aprir vidi uno speco,/et portarsene secola fonte e ’l loco: ond’anchor doglia sento,/et sol de la memoria mi sgomento.” (“In that same grove a crystal fountain sprang/from beneath a stone, and sprinkled/sweet fresh water, murmuring gently:/no shepherd or flocks ever approached/that lovely place, secret, shadowy and dark,/but nymphs and Muses singing to its tones:/there I sat: and while/I absorbed the sweetness of that harmony,/and of the sight, I saw a cave yawn wide,/and carry with it/the fountain and its site: so I feel the grief,/and the memory alone dismays me”: A.S. Kline, trans., The Complete Canzoniere, Petrarch, 2002.) On the theological dimensions of Petrarch’s water metaphors, see Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Petrarch’s Genius: Pentimento and Prophesy (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991). For a broader study of water allegories, see Terry Comito, “Beauty Bare: Speaking Waters and Fountains in Renaissance Literature,” in Fons Sapientiae: Renaissance Garden Fountains, ed. Elisabeth MacDougall (Washington, dc: Dumbarton Oaks, 1978): 17–58. www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Italian/Petrarchhome.htm., Section 6.

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(1475) offers a glimpse of a nymph by a spring who inspires love and, ultimately, art. The poem opens when the young protagonist, Giuliano, who spurns love in favor of hunting, goes in pursuit of a white deer. The deer lures him into a forest grove and subsequently transforms into the beautiful nymph Simonetta who, as she puts it, likes to wander alone and rest “in the shade beside some cool and limpid stream, often in the company of some other nymph” (1.52).29 Cupid shoots Giuliano with an arrow, and the youth falls madly in love. The image of a nymph resting by a stream may have conjured for Poliziano’s sophisticated readers medieval fountains of desire, or the more recently fabricated Huius Nympha Loci, a fountain of desire in classical garb. Book 1 culminates in one of the most evocative ekphrastic passages in Renaissance art and literature: Poliziano’s description of the richly carved doors of Venus’ palace, which depict the Loves of the Gods. Desire, triggered by Giulio’s vision of the beautiful Simonetta by the stream, has inspired art.30 Inspirational fountains in classicizing garb appeared elsewhere in the verse of sixteenth-century poets. In Book 8 of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504), quoted at the head of this essay, the shepherd Carino describes to his beloved a stream in Arcadia that reveals “secrets of the translucent deeps (i secreti del traslucido fondo) [clear as the] purest crystal”; in Pietro Bembo’s Gli Asolani (1505), also quoted above, the murmuring waters that stimulate discourse gurgle from a marble fountain on the grounds of a palace.31 These fountains and springs of inspiration, whether set in the pleasure gardens of Asolo or in an imagined Arcadian wilderness, functioned as “stations en route to illumination … along an allegorically saturated path” leading to the ultimate source of inspiration, Nature herself.32 By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Nymph of the Spring informed a fountain type that invigorated Renaissance gardens as well as mythological

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31 32

“Qui lieta mi dimoro Simonetta,/all’ombre, a qualche chiara e fresca linfa,/e spesso in compagnia d’alcuna ninfa.” David Quint, ed. and trans., The Stanze of Angelo Poliziano (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 26–7. On the ekphrasis of the palace doors in Poliziano’s Stanze, inspiration, and art, see Stephen Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 117. See nn. 1, 2. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: Harper Collins, 1995), 268–81, (quote 275). Claudia Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 131–66; and Lazzaro, “The Visual Language of Gender in SixteenthCentury Garden Sculpture,” in Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, ed. Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1991), 71–113.

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paintings with her inspirational powers.33 Among the best-known examples is the Vatican Ariadne, which was installed in 1512 as a fountain in the Belvedere sculpture garden and understood to represent Cleopatra.34 Francisco de Holanda’s drawing of the fountain (1538–9) alludes to the reclining nymph’s power to foment vision (Fig. 7.6). Water issues from two stony spouts below the nymph and into a rectangular cistern, where the small figure of a male spectator gazes up at the drowsy nymph and stirs the waters with his arm. Much like Poliphilo, the young man pauses to bathe in the waters of inspiration, thereby anointing his senses as he wanders through the storied sculpture garden of the villa, a place of otium on the grounds of the papal palace.35 Inspirational water nymphs, often accompanied by priapine satyrs or urinating putti, also inhabited the studioli of courtly patrons.36 In Giovanni Bellini’s Feast of the Gods (1514), which once adorned the Camerino of Alfonso d’Este, a water nymph sleeps beside a stream barely visible at the lower edge of 33

Christian convincingly argues that the statues, very possibly accompanied by the epigram and certainly understood as Nymphs of the Spring, appeared in Rome and Venice during the last quarter of the fifteenth century. See Christian, Empire, 135. MacDougall provides a detailed description of two sleeping nymph sculptures that were displayed in fountains together with the epigram in two Roman sculpture gardens by the second decade of the sixteenth century. These fountains were assembled by the humanist collectors Angelo Colocci and Hans Goritz. See MacDougall, “The Sleeping Nymph,” 361–2. 34 Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 233–47; Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 114, no. 79. 35 On the culture of otium and the villa, see Amanda Lillie, “The Humanist Villa Revisited,” in Language and Images of Renaissance Italy, ed. A. Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 193–215. 36 An early sixteenth-century example appears in the ceiling vault of the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican Palace. Around 1508, several years prior to the installation of the Belvedere “Cleopatra,” Sodoma’s water nymph in the vault of the Stanza della Segnatura propagates a similar spirit of inspiration. The tiny vignette appears amid grotteschi, small Roman battle scenes and tales from the Old Testament, and Raphael’s more famous roundels with the personifications of Philosophy, Poetry, Justice, and Theology. Between the figures of Justice and Philosophy (who sits on a throne carved with busts of the Diana of Ephesus, including her life-giving breasts), a small image depicts a female nude reclining by the bank of a stream. She is accompanied by two putti and two satyrs, one of whom reaches over a red curtain tied to a tree behind her to pour water onto her head. This small image of inspiration embellished the allegorical Virtues in the vault and, more generally, the ideals of vision that characterized the culture of Julius’ studiolo, a place of solitary contemplation where Christian virtues governed humanistic learning. On the culture of Renaissance studioli, see Stephen Campbell, Cabinet of Eros.

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Figure 7.6 Francisco de Holanda, Belvedere Cleopatra, 1538–9. San Lorenzo del Escorial MS a-e ii 6, fol. 8v (El Escorial)

the painting, within a forest grove populated by Bacchic characters (Fig. 7.7). In a gesture reminiscent of the desirous satyr pictured in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a priapine figure—possibly the garden god himself—reaches out to

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Figure 7.7 Giovanni Bellini, Feast of the Gods, 1514. National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc (Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington)

lift the nymph’s garment, an action that probably identifies the nymph as Lotis just at the moment when Silenus’ ass brays and wakes her, causing her to run away (Ovid, Fasti, 1.391–440). The sleeping nymph in Bellini’s painting, a reinterpretation of the program given to him by humanist Mario Equicola and his princely patron, Alfonso d’Este, also drew upon the inspirational aspects of the fountain nymph pictured in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and evoked in the Huius Nympha Loci.37 Like Poliphilo, and like the contemporary humanists who delighted in the idea of animating the Huius Nympha Loci, the beholder 37

There have been numerous interpretations of the Feast of the Gods and the possible sources that informed its iconographic program. For bibliography, see Anthony Colantuono, Titian, Colonna, and the Renaissance Science of Procreation (Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2010), and David Bull and Joyce Plesters, The Feast of the Gods: Conservation, Examination, and Interpretation (Washington, dc: National Gallery of Art, 1990).

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i­maginatively fulfills the act of Lotis’ priapine lover, bringing to life the sequence of events that follows. Similarly, in Titian’s Bacchanal of the Andrians (1523–6), a painting that originally decorated the same room, a sleeping nymph akin to the figure in Bellini’s painting reclines beside a river transformed into wine through the powers of a puer mingens who urinates into the flowing waters (Fig. 7.8).38 Behind the micturating child, the nude’s marmoreal form seems to metamorphose into flesh, while on the opposite bank, two reclining beauties in modern garb lie beside the stream.39 Titian’s Nymph of the Spring, her urinating companion, and her clothed counterparts—court

Figure 7.8 Titian, Bacchanal of the Andrians, 1523–6. Prado, Madrid (Art Resource, ny) 38

39

Wine inspires not only pleasure but also poetry (or image-making). E.R. Curtius has noted that the “divine frenzy” of the poet, what Horace called the “amabilis insania” (Carmina 3.25), is often wine-induced. See Curtius, European Literature, 474–5. Phillip Fehl first discussed Titian’s poetics of sight and revelation. See Decorum and Wit (Vienna: irsa Verlag, 1992), 46–87.

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ladies possibly cast as early modern Nymphs of the Spring—activate the ­viewer’s desire and nurture the senses, inducing a playful, visionary riff on the Bacchanalian reverie on Andros.40 By the second decade of the Cinquecento, such northern painters as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, and Jan Van Scorel had begun experimenting with the visionary quality of water in compositions inspired by the spirit of the Huius Nympha Loci, the fountains in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (a book that Dürer owned), and the reclining nymph fountains that by then graced many Renaissance sculpture gardens.41 In Cranach’s Nymph of the Spring (after 1537), one of at least sixteen versions inspired by the Huius Nympha Loci, a recumbent nymph reclines by the green bank of a spring (Fig. 7.9). Yet Cranach’s Nymph of the Spring no longer sleeps: Roused by the advance of the beholder, she drowsily opens her eyes. The puer mingens, now transformed into a stony outcropping with a phallic spout from which the water issues, has merged with an untamed landscape alive with wild underbrush and pointed firs, a verdant mirror of the beholder’s active imagination that has now been awakened by the vision of the nymph, who, in concert with the beholder, wakes.

Lorenzo Lotto’s Nymph of the Spring

Lorenzo Lotto first experimented with water and inspiration in the so-called Maiden’s Dream (1505–6), a mythological allegory closely associated with the traditions that shaped the Huius Nympha Loci and the visionary fountains of Poliphilo’s antiquarian romance (Fig. 7.10). In a forest grove bathed in twilight’s warm glow, a drowsy figure reminiscent of the Nymph of the Spring reclines 40

41

The subject comes from Philostratus the Elder, Imagines 1.25: See Arthur Fairbanks, trans., Elder Philostratus, Imagines, Younger Philostratus, Imagines, Callistratus, Descriptions, Loeb Classical Library 256 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1931); Harry Murutes, “Person­ ifications of Laughter and Drunken Sleep in Titian’s Andrians,” Burlington Magazine, 115, no. 845 (1973): 518–25. As Murutes observed, the nymph and puer mingens are not mentioned in Philostratus’ ekphrasis. I thank Jeffrey Chipps Smith for kindly confirming that Dürer owned a copy of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. For an early study on the topic of Dürer and this text, see Georg Leidinger, Albrecht Dürer und die “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili” (Munich: Verlag der Bayer, 1929). On Dürer and the nymph, see Otto Kurz, “Huius Nympha Loci,” 171–7. Fritz Saxl first pointed out that the late fifteenth-century concept of the Huius Nympha Loci likely shaped the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, but that the woodcut of the sleeping nymph fountain in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili likely informed the fountain at the Church of St. Wolfgang in Mondsee (Austria). See Saxl, “A Heathenish Fountain in St. Wolfgang,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 1 (1937): 182–3.

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Figure 7.9 Lucas Cranach the Elder, Nymph of the Spring, after 1537. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington)

against a stump, head in hand—a gesture common to solitary ­visionaries— beside a bubbling brook that wends its way through Giorgionesque hillocks that soften the meadow.42 A female satyr peers from behind a tree, while a male satyr kneels in the stream and pours wine into his mouth. A putto hovers above the reclining figure, sprinkling white flowers on her head, an act of inspiration to which Lotto would return in the Cingoli Altarpiece of 1539, where playful putti toss handfuls of rose petals outward from a basket, directly onto the beholder.43 As in the Cingoli Altarpiece, the blossoms activate sight and vision, a dynamic moment suggested by the young fronds of a tree— variously identified as a laurel or an olive; a symbol of victory, knowledge, and wisdom (or a poetic conflation of all three, as was typical of Lotto)—that sprouts out of the stump behind the drowsy figure. The vertical trajectory of the vigorous 42 43

Ursula Hoff, “Meditation in Solitude,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 1 (1938): 292–4. In Lotto’s Cingoli Altarpiece (Madonna del Rosario), the beholder more directly gains inspiration from the illusionistic flowers. In this case, the flowers inspire meditation, literally propagated by roses on a trellis with roundels of the fifteen mysteries of the rosary. For the most recent analysis and bibliography, see Marta Paraventi, “Madonna del Rosario,” in Lotto nelle Marche, ed. Vittoria Garibaldi and Giovanni C.F. Villa (Milano: Silvano Editoriale, 2011), 176–85.

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Lorenzo Lotto, Allegory of Chastity (“The Maiden’s Dream”), 1505-6. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington)

young tree echoes the upward thrust of the jagged mountain peaks that spring up directly behind the lady in the distant background, another landscape feature that heightens the dynamic moment of vision. Though Lotto’s precise sources for Maiden’s Dream are still debated, the painting is widely understood as an allegory of Chastity in which the lady, clad in white, contrasts with the

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unfettered desire of the male and female satyrs. The stream running diagonally through the painting emphasizes this division by distinguishing the marshy terrain of the frolicking satyrs from the grassy knoll where the lady resides, governing her Arcadian paradise from an elevated plain. A relative of the Nymph of the Spring and the nutritive Mother of All in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Lotto’s lady stimulates an imaginary discourse between the image and the beholder, a vision nurtured by the ethereal landscape.44 After his return to Venice in 1525, Lotto revisited the theme of water and inspiration on a larger scale in the Venus and Cupid, a fountain-inspired vision set in a forest grove. In place of the putto that sprinkles flowers over the drowsy maiden’s head, Cupid urinates onto the lap of a nude Venus. Reclining, but now fully awake, Venus invites her audience to meet her gaze. The gentle spray conjures the imaginary murmur of a fountain as it makes contact with the silken flesh of the Goddess of Love, whose watery origins are suggested by the conch shell dangling above her and by the blue cloth where she lies. Given the widespread popularity of the Huius Nympha Loci and its progeny in the visual arts, it is plausible that Lotto’s unidentified patron—presumably a sophisticated cittadino and romantic antiquarian much like Andrea Odoni— would have understood Lotto’s Venus as an allusion to the “speaking” fountains that populated sculpture gardens. In a poetic synthesis that conflates the Nymph of the Spring with the Goddess of Love, Lotto’s reclining Venus inhabits an erotic landscape where inspirational waters, suggested by the blue cloth beneath the lady, flow through the verdure of her pleasant grove, a locus amoenus. Those familiar with the Belvedere sculpture garden may have also recognized the snake emerging from under Venus’ blue cloth as a clever reference to the (so-called) Cleopatra fountain in the Belvedere. Indeed, Lotto’s northern associate Jan van Scorel, inspired by his travels to Venice and his residence in Rome, where he served as superintendent of the papal collection of antiquities, assimilated the Giorgionesque Dresden Venus type and the Belvedere “Cleopatra” fountain. In his Death of Cleopatra (c. 1524), the nude queen, venomous snake in hand, lies dying on a blue cloth inspired by the waters of the fountain in the Belvedere sculpture court (Fig. 7.11).45 44

45

Given that the panel likely functioned as a cover of a portrait, Lotto’s allegory of vision also invigorated the portrait of a lady (presumably the panel now housed in Dijon) whose likeness, as in an icon, conjures her presence. Jennifer Fletcher, “The Renaissance Portrait: Functions, Uses and Display,” in Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian, ed. Lorne Campbell et al. (London: Yale University Press, 2008), 46–65. Bernard Aikema and Beverly Louise Brown, eds., Il Rinascimento a Venezia e la pittura del Nord ai tempi di Bellini, Dürer, Tiziano (Milan: Bompiani, 1999), no. 141.

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Figure 7.11

Jan van Scorel, Cleopatra, c. 1520–4. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)

Lotto’s Venus invites her beholder to meet her gaze and vicariously caress her flesh (like the ribbons that dangle by her neck). His Goddess of Love, who both inspires and celebrates sensation, echoes ideals that informed voluptas (sensual pleasure), a concept shaped by a renewed interest in the Epicurean doctrine of pleasure, the writings of Lucretius, and the humanist commentaries of Lorenzo Valla, Ficino, and others.46 The delight of beholding Lotto’s voluptuous Venus is consonant with the praise lavished on courtly brides in early modern epithalamic oration, which ­celebrated a positive view of the body and corporeal pleasure.47 A visual translation of voluptas and the delights of nuptial bliss, Lotto’s sensual Venus was in keeping with shifting attitudes toward marriage as “a civic and ethical duty …, the force that binds nations, guarantees personal 46

47

On the revival of Lucretius’ De rerum natura and Epicurean philosophy, see Gerard Passannante, The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Alison Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2010); Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Anthony d’Elia argues that early modern commentaries on the Epicurean doctrine and early modern epithalamic oratory revised medieval views that warned against corporeal pleasure. For a discussion of the concept of voluptas and epithalamia, see The Renaissance of Marriage in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2004), 105–7. See also d’Elia, “Marriage, Sexual Pleasure, and Learned Brides in the Wedding Orations of Fifteenth-Century Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 55, no. 2 (2002): 379–433.

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and  civic welfare, reforms the corrupt, and provides the greatest pleasures  in life,” as Anthony d’Elia has argued in his work on early modern ephithalamia.48 Lotto’s Venus and Cupid not only praises bridal voluptas but also celebrates the pleasurable consummation of the union between viewer and image, between sensuality and the poetic imagination. The red curtain suspended behind Venus suggests as much. Derived from the woodcut of the fountain nymph from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Lotto’s curtain at once functions to reveal the beholder’s vision—a beautiful woman—and alludes to the curtain of Hymen, or Hymenaeus, the Roman god of marital union.49 A lengthy passage at the end of Book 1 of Poliphilo’s Dream elaborates on the blissful consummation and its resulting vision. Poliphilo has found his beloved Polia, and the two lovers enter Venus’ temple where, at the edge of the “mysterious fountain of the divine Mother,” Cupid gives an arrow to the nymph Synesia (Union), who passes it to Poliphilo. The protagonist takes the arrow and penetrates a curtain “the color of sandalwood,” thereby consummating his desire for Polia. At that moment, “the most holy mother” (la Sanctissima genitrice) materializes out of the watery depths of the fountain, filling the lovers with ecstasy: And behold! I saw clearly the divine form of her venerable majesty as she issued from the springing fountain, the delicious source of every beauty. No sooner had the unexpected and divine sight met my eyes than both of us were filled with extreme sweetness, and invaded by the novel pleasure that we had desired daily for so long, so that we both remained as though in an ecstasy of divine awe.50 A goddess closely related to, if not inspired by, Poliphilo’s watery Sanctissima genitrice, Lotto’s Venus can be understood as the inexhaustible Mother of All, a goddess invested with the power not only to heighten the senses but also to inspire vision.51

48 D’Elia, Renaissance of Marriage, 135–7. 49 For a discussion of the god Hymen in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and in relation to Titian’s painting, see Paul Hills, “Titian’s Veils,” Art History 29 (2006): 771–95. 50 Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1998), 361, and Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1999), 361. 51 See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 106–7, on the goddess Natura.

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Lotto and the Two Venuses

Lotto would explore the many facets of love and image-making at other points in his career, as in the so-called Triumph of Chastity (c. 1527–8), a mythological painting sometimes taken to be a pendant to the Venus and Cupid (Fig. 7.12). Although there is no evidence that Lotto created the paintings in tandem, the two images are related to each other by their scale, their mythological subject matter, and their connection to contemporary discussions of the nature of love.52 In the Triumph of Chastity, a woman clothed in green flushes the nude Venus and her little son out of a verdant landscape. The placid Goddess of Love rises out of the terrestrial paradise to the Cosmos, undeterred by the disenchanted “Mrs. Grundy,” as Berenson wryly characterized the lady in green, whose outrage has led to her smashing Cupid’s bow and flinging his torch out of his chubby fist.53 Carrying a tray with objects from her toilet, Venus hovers above a panoramic landscape seen

Figure 7.12  Lorenzo Lotto, The Triumph of Chastity, c. 1530. Rospigliosi Pallavicini Collection, Rome (Alinari/Art Resource ny)

52

53

For instance, Mario Equicola’s treatise on the subject, Libro de natura de amore, first published in Venice in 1525 and dedicated to Isabella d’Este. See Laura Ricci, ed., La redazione manoscritta del Libro de natura de amore di Mario Equicola (Rome: Bulzoni, 1999). Bernard Berenson, Lorenzo Lotto (London: George Bell & Sons, 1901), 261; Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa, ed., Lorenzo Lotto, 274–7, no. 53.

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from a bird’s-eye view, landscape language with which Lotto experimented elsewhere—most famously in his San Nicola Altarpiece (1527)—to suggest the theme of divine transcendence.54 The painting has been read as a triumph of virtue (Chastity—the woman in green) over voluptas (personified by Venus), but Lotto’s divine Venus, ennobled by the star above her head, the white dove behind her, and her idealized countenance and detached sprezzatura, together with her position high above the landscape, hints at a more subtle reading.55 We might instead understand Lotto’s sensuous Creatrix Natura in the Venus and Cupid and her ethereal counterpart in the Triumph of Chastity as meditations on the multifaceted nature of love, a theme that informed Titian’s more famous—and enigmatic—painting, the so-called Sacred and Profane Love (c. 1524) (Fig. 7.13).56 In Titian’s epithalamium, another reflection on love and

Figure 7.13 Titian, Sacred and Profane Love, c. 1514. Galleria Borghese, Rome (Art Resource, ny) 54

For the most recent anaylsis and bibliography on Lotto’s San Nicola altarpiece (1527–9) in the church of Santa Maria dei Carmini, see Roberta Battaglia, “San Nicola in Gloria tra i santi Giovanni Battista e Lucia (pala dei Carmini), in Lorenzo Lotto in Veneto, ed. Gianluca Poldi and Giovanni C.F. Villa (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2011): 70–81. 55 Maurizio Calvesi first noted the resemblance of the Triumph of Chastity to a woodcut in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which depicts Venus in her triumphal chariot chasing away Diana’s chariot. See Calvesi, “Venere effimera e Venere perenne. I. Botticelli, Bronzino, Rubens, Piero di Cosimo, Lotto,” Storia dell’Arte 108 (2004): 5–44, in particular 22–3. 56 Rona Goffen, “Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love: Individuality and Sexuality in a Renaissance Marriage Picture,” in Titian 500, ed. Joseph Manca (Washington, dc: National Gallery of Art, 1993), 131. Goffen asserted that, unlike Titian’s women, “Lotto has reduced this bride’s individuality to her reproductive function […].” Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love has inspired a scholarship too vast to summarize here. For bibliography, see Charles Hope and Jennifer Fletcher, Titian (London: Chaucer Press, 2003); on the epithalamic dimensions of Titian’s painting, see Brian D. Steele, “Water and Fire: Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love and Ancient Marriage Customs,” Source 15, no. 4 (1996): 22–9.

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poetry mediated by a fountain of desire, two beauties—interpreted as a terrestrial Venus in white garb and a nude celestial Venus—engage the beholder. A fountain with a phallic spout, an image related to the puer mingens, sprinkles water onto a rose bush—Venus’ flower—that illusionistically takes root in the realm of the viewer, while a putto reaches into the fountain to stir the inspirational waters in a gesture reminiscent of the young man in Francisco De Holanda’s drawing of the Belvedere Cleopatra. Titian’s fountain, a cistern all’antica carved with scenes that recount the tale of Venus, Adonis, and the Tinting of the Rose, also derived its inspiration from the woodcuts and text of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, as Max Friedländer long ago pointed out.57 As in Titian’s painting, where the nude beauty raises an oil lamp that emanates smoke, Lotto invoked a similarly ritualistic flourish with the small lamp dangling from the myrtle wreath, an allusion to the divine sacrament of marriage and to the sacred moment when Nature inspires Art. The fleeting nature of this diaphanous vapor echoes that other changeable, elusive, and mesmerizing substance to which Lotto alluded in the Venus and Cupid: water.58 Two generations earlier, Jacopo Bellini had experimented with the visionary dimensions of water, the “hydraulics of imagination,” and the language of artistic virtuosity in his famous drawings, in which fountain sculpture decorated with urinating putti and nude beauties invigorated elaborate Biblical narratives and the imaginative experience of beholding the ­stories.59 Just as Bellini invoked fountains as a metaphor of the beholder’s 57

58

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Walter Friedlander, “La Tintura delle Rose,” Art Bulletin 20, no. 3 (1938): 320–4. On the Sacred and Profane Love, poetry, and the romance tradition, see Paul Barolsky, “Sacred and Profane Love,” Source 17, no. 3 (1998): 25–8. The story of the Tinting of the Rose in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Z VIb and woodcut Z, VIIa) recounts how Venus leapt from a bath and pricked her leg on a thorn as she ran to stop Mars from flogging her beloved Adonis. After Adonis’ death, the goddess and her son enacted an annual ritual of sprinkling the white roses at the same bath with her blood. The curtain behind Venus makes reference not only to the breaking of the hymen, the physical consummation of the marriage, but also to the revelation of the vision. It may be that a black curtain also covered the Venus and Cupid. Although it remains unclear whether the Venus and Cupid now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the same Venus that Lotto painted for Mario d’Armano, it is suggestive that the Venus that Lotto produced for his nephew included an inscription on “black Lyons cloth with the lettering he (Mario d’Armano) requested.” See Humfrey, Lorenzo Lotto, 178 (Appendix B). On water ingenuity and fantastical fountains as a metaphor for art, see Marisa Anne Bass, “The Hydraulics of Imagination: Fantastical Fountains in the Drawing Books of Jacopo Bellini,” in Imagination und Repräsentation: Zwei Bildsphären der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Horst Bredekamp, Christiane Kruse, and Pablo Schneider (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2010), 149–60.

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creativity and as a vehicle for demonstrating his own creative abilities, as Marisa Bass has ­suggested, so Lotto also may have employed fountain imagery to demonstrate his own virtuosity. By transforming a well-known fountain sculpture into a painted image, Lotto was celebrating the triumph of painting over sculpture, a well-worn paragone in sixteenth-century discussions about art.60 And by writing the Latinate version of his name, “LAURENT,” just above the roots of the hardwood tree that shelters Venus in its dappled shade, Lotto at once alluded to a vast tradition of metaphors about trees and regeneration (and the artist’s role in propagating images) and associated himself, through his abbreviated name, “Laurent,” with Apollo’s most sacred and beloved tree.61 Conclusion A painting likely made to commemorate an early modern marriage, Lotto’s Venus and Cupid also celebrates the creative imagination. Lotto’s Nymph of the Spring-turned-Goddess of Love—a medieval fountain of vision and desire in classicizing guise—belongs to a generation of sixteenth-century images that transformed the recumbent nude into a powerful visual metaphor of the awakening senses and poetic inspiration. To engage Lotto’s water nymph, to conjure her sensuous form from the limpid stream suggested by the blue 60

61

For treatments of the paragone between sculpture versus painting in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century art theory, see Leatrice Mendelsohn, Benedetto Varchi’s Due Lezzioni and Cinquecento Art Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982), and Francis Ames-Lewis, “Image and Text: The Paragone,” in The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Lotto returned to the themes of Apollo, the Hippocrene fountain and the Muses toward the end of his career in Apollo Asleep on Parnassus (c. 1545–9), now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. The figure of the dreaming Apollo, who sleeps in an upright position in the sylvan grove of Mount Parnassus, is nearly identical to an abandoned composition discovered underneath the Maiden’s Dream. See Fern Rusk Shapley, Catalogue of the Italian Paintings, (London: National Gallery, 1968), vol. 1, 158–9, and David Alan Brown et al., Lorenzo Lotto: Rediscovered Master of the Renaissance (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 85–7, no. 5. On the Parnassas genre, and more specifically on the connection between fountains and the authority of the ancients, see Campbell, Renaissance Faces, 129–31. For a discussion of the metaphorical tradition of trees and regeneration, see Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: Harper Collins, 1995), 37–240.

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cloth, is to fulfill the role of the puer mingens, whose life-giving spray effects a metamorphosis of Nature into Art. Venus, the personification of Lotto’s erotic landscape of inspiration, celebrates both the corporeal pleasures of early modern marriage and the power of desire to inspire the senses and vision: the pleasurable union of the myrtle with the laurel. Bibliography Aikema, Bernard, and Beverly Louise Brown, eds. Il Rinascimento a Venezia e la pittura del Nord ai tempi di Bellini, Dürer, Tiziano. Milan: Bompiani, 1999. Anderson, Jaynie. “Giorgione, Titian, and the Sleeping Venus.” In Tiziano e Venezia: Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Venezia, 1976, 337–42. Vicenza: N. Pozza, 1980. Barkan, Leonard. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. London: Yale University Press, 1999. Barolsky, Paul. “Sacred and Profane Love.” Source 17, no. 3 (1998): 25–8. ———. Infinite Jest: Wit and Humor in Italian Renaissance Art. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978. Bass, Marisa Ann. “The Hydraulics of Imagination: Fantastical Fountains in the Drawing Books of Jacopo Bellini.” In Imagination und Repräsentation: Zwei Bildsphären der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Horst Bredekamp, Christiane Kruse, and Pablo Schneider, 149–60. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2010. Battaglia, Roberta, “San Nicola in Gloria tra i santi Govanni Battista e Lucia (pala dei Carmini).” In Lorenzo Lotto in Veneto, edited by Gianluca Poldi and Giovanni C.F. Villa, 70–81. Milan: Silvana, 2011. Battilotti, D., and M.T. Franco. “Regesti di committenti e dei primi collezionisti di Giorgione.” Antichità Viva 17, no. 4–5 (1978): 58–86. Bayer, Andrea, et al. eds. Art and Love in Renaissance Italy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Bembo, Pietro. Gli Asolani. Translated by Rudolf Gottfried. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1954. ———. Gli Asolani di Cardinale M. Pietro Bembo. Milano: Società Tipografica de’ Classici Italiani, 1808. Berenson, Bernard. Lorenzo Lotto. London: George Bell & Sons, 1901. Binotto, Margaret. “‘Lotto al bivio’: La dialettica di virtus e voluptas nella pittura profana.” In Lorenzo Lotto, edited by Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa, 249–59. Milan: Silvana Editore, 2011. Bober, Phyllis Pray. “The Coryciana and the Nymph Corycia.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977): 223–39. ———, and Ruth Rubinstein. Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

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———. “The Sleeping Nymph: Origins of a Humanist Fountain Type.” Art Bulletin 57 (1975): 357–65. Meiss, Millard. “Sleep in Venice: Ancient Myths and Renaissance Proclivities.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 100, no. 5 (1966): 348–82. Miller, Naomi. “Paradise Regained: Medieval Garden Fountains.” In Medieval Gardens, edited by Elisabeth MacDougall, 137–53. Washington, dc: Dumbarton Oaks, 1986. Mortimer, Anthony, ed. Petrarch’s Canzoniere in the English Renaissance. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. Murutes, Harry. “Personifications of Laughter and Drunken Sleep in Titian’s Andrians.” Burlington Magazine, 115, no. 845 (1973): 518–25. Nagel, Alexander. The Controversy of Renaissance Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Oettinger, April. “The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Art and Play in a Renaissance Romance.” Journal of Word and Image 27, no. 1 (2011): 15–30. Passannante, Gerard. The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Quint, David, ed. and trans. The Stanze of Angelo Poliziano. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. Ricci, Laura, ed. La redazione manoscritto del Libro de natura de amore di Mario Equicola. Rome: Bulzoni, 1999. Rosand, David. “Venereal Hermeneutics: Reading Titian’s Venus of Urbino.” In Renaissance Society and Cultures: Essays in Honor of Eugene F. Rice, edited by J. Monfasani and R.G. Musto, 263–80. New York: Italica Press, 1991. Sannazaro, Jacopo. Arcadia. Translated by Ralph Nash. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966. ———. Arcadia di M. Jacopo Sannazaro. Edited by Luigi Partirelli. Milan: Società Tipografica de’ Classici Italiani, 1806. Saxl, Fritz. “A Heathenish Fountain in St. Wolfgang.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 1 (1937): 182–3. Shapley, Fern Rusk. Catalogue of the Italian Paintings. 2 vols. London: National Gallery, 1968. Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. London: Harper Collins, 1995. Simons, Patricia. “Manliness and the Visual Semiotics of Bodily Fluids in Early Modern Culture.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 39, no. 2 (2009): 331–73. Spearing, A.C. Medieval Dream Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Steele, Brian D. “Water and Fire: Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love and Ancient Marriage Customs.” Source 15, no. 4 (1996): 22–9. Villa, Giovanni Carlo Federico, et al., eds. Lorenzo Lotto. Milan: Silvano Editoriale, 2011. Wilson, Catherine. Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Witt, Ronald. “Introduction.” In De otio religioso, edited by Francesco Petrarch, translated by Susan Schearer, ix–xxiii. New York: Italica Press, 2002.

chapter 8

The Crone, the Witch, and the Library: The Intersection of Classical Fantasy with Christian Vice during the Italian Renaissance Patricia Simons When one thinks of the visual adaptation of classical culture during the Renaissance, what first comes to mind are beautiful goddesses like Venus and Diana, exemplars such as chaste Lucretia and continent Scipio, images of military and imperial might, or pleasurable Arcadian scenes populated by amorini and nymphs. In the influential terms of Kenneth Clark, first proposed in 1956, the classical body was nude, idealized, and artistic, the alternative merely naked, realistic, and ugly.1 He confidently mapped this contrast, which resembles aspects of Mikhail Bakhtin’s separation of the grotesque and subversive from the classical and official, onto a presumed polarity between “Gothic” and “Renaissance” art, chiefly between the culture of Northern Europe and Italy.2 By contrast, this essay explores ways in which the renewed attention to supposedly idealizing antiquity in Renaissance Italy, with its expansion of visual vocabulary and amplification of narrative and figurative repertoires, also reinvigorated misogynist stereotypes of ugly old women as well as bringing what was considered powerful new evidence to the increasing discourse about witches, hence shaping for the hag a vivid pictorial presence.3 While classical culture inspired many erotic images drawn from visual and literary sources, it also fed the development of the decidedly un-erotic crone and hag, chiefly driven by the textual heritage. The pagan past provided an especially intense, rich, and malleable repertoire for representations of ever-present evil. 1 Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Pantheon, 1956). 2 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Written in the late 1930s, the book was first published in 1965. 3 The intersection between ancient culture and early modern witches is of growing interest, though scholarship focuses on German images. See Margaret A. Sullivan, “The Witches of Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 332–401; Linda C. Hults, The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 27–56; Charles Zika, The Appearance of Witchcraft: Print and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Routledge, 2007), 125–55. This essay uses the term “crone” to designate the figure of an ugly old woman who is not a witch, and the term “hag” for the figure of an ugly, threatening old woman, often a witch.

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The late medieval and early modern witch emerged from the geographical crossroads of Switzerland, France, and northern Italy, evident in trials in cities like Brescia, Perugia, Milan, and Lausanne, and in texts written in Savoy or the Aosta valley of northern Italy, the Dauphiné of southeastern France, and German-speaking Switzerland. Gene Brucker concluded from his study of trials conducted in Florence over the period 1375 to 1430 that “the advent of humanism coincided with a revival of sorcery persecution.”4 One factor in the rise of the witchcraze was better education of magistrates and inquisitors, who had access to a wider range of classical sources as well as more printed books that guided and validated their work. The “Renaissance” of learning and classical culture amongst the ruling, ecclesiastical, and administrative men of Italy fueled the pursuit of witches, three-quarters of whom were women, and nearly all of whom were under-educated and marginalized, and sometimes aging as well.5 Over the course of the late fourteenth and through the fifteenth century, the chief characteristics of witches developed into a more unified picture.6 Central to many treatises, accusations, and confessions was the secret gathering or witches’ Sabbath, often in a remote location, at which loyalty was pledged to the devil. On occasion the conventicle was accompanied by indulgence in banquets and orgies, which derive from early invective exchanged between pagans and Christians as well as from medieval charges against some heretics.7 Common too were stories of night flight, infanticide, and cannibalism, the use of potions, the manipulation of impotence or fertility or desire, sexual intercourse with incubi or succubi, the rousing of storms, the killing of animals, or instruction in magic, all of which appear in varying degrees in classical accounts as well, though in more scattered passages and primarily in literary rather than historical contexts. During the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church and its Inquisition established a less numerous, more moderated, and milder persecution in Italy than that seen in northern and Protestant Europe; here I chiefly consider the first phase of the witchcraze in Italy up to c. 1530.8 4 Gene Brucker, “Sorcery in Early Renaissance Florence,” Studies in the Renaissance 10 (1963): 8. 5 Michael Bailey, “The Medieval Concept of the Witches’ Sabbath,” Exemplaria 8 (1996): 420–1, 431 argues that authorities were concerned that illiterate people were seeking access to knowledge by demonic means and thus were a threat to the restricted privilege of learned magic. 6 Bailey, “Medieval Concept,” 419–39; Richard Kieckhefer, “Mythologies of Witchcraft in the Fifteenth Century,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 1 (2006): 79–108. 7 Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons (St. Albans: Paladin, 1976), 1–15 and passim. 8 For an overview see Oscar di Simplicio, “Italy,” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, ed. Richard M. Golden (Santa Barbara, ca: abc-clio, 2006), 574–9. I try to take ­chronology into account and avoid applying later texts back to earlier images.

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Studies of classical reception during the Renaissance have to be balanced with an investigation of cultural continuities alongside reinvigoration and discovery, in order to arrive at interpretative complexity and also to understand the preconditions for the surge in interest. From its early days, the Church associated non-believers with demon worshippers, later casting them as ­heretics.9 The text later known as the Capitulum Episcopi or Canon Episcopi, first recorded around 906 and influential when it was reiterated several times in canon law, stated that “wicked women” (sceleratae mulieres) who believed they went on night rides accompanying their pagan mistress (domina) Diana were deluded by mere dreams and phantasms inspired by the devil.10 During the emergence of commentaries on witches in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, this Canon Episcopi was much debated, with some authors upholding it, some rejecting it outright in favor of the actuality of nocturnal witchery (occasionally said to have taken root only after the text was written). Most adapted its meaning to argue that demonic illusion and Satan’s power were so dangerous that witches had to be dealt with severely.11 The author and supporters of the Canon Episcopi found it plausible that nocturnal gatherings of women were held under the auspices of the pagan deity Diana, goddess of the moon, queen of a band of nymphs and, in her aspect as Hecate, goddess of magic and witchcraft.12 Horace’s witch Canidia had invoked the assistance of “Night and Diana, mistress of the silent hour when mystic rites are wrought.”13 Other ancient pagan practitioners condemned by numerous Christian authors, chiefly once witches were a topic in 9 Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 64, 66–7, 155–7. 10 Joseph Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter (Bonn: Carl Georgi, 1901), 38–9 (the Latin); Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters, eds., Witchcraft in Europe 400–1700: A Documentary History, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 60–3; Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 210–3, noting that in Burchard of Worms’s Decretum of the eleventh century, Diana was joined by the alternative “or Herodias,” and that the German “Holda” was named in his Corrector, all names frequently repeated thereafter. 11 See Hansen, Quellen, passim. 12 Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 212 has sixth- and seventh-century churchmen on local worship of Diana; see also Patricia Simons, “Lesbian (In)Visibility in Italian Renaissance Culture: Diana and Other Cases of donna con donna,” Journal of Homosexuality 27, nos. 1–2 (1994): 81–122. Diana, Luna, and Hecate are named together by Giovanfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, Strix sive de ludificatione daemonum (Bologna, 1523), E i verso. 13 Horace Epode 5.51–2: “Nox et Diana, quae silentium regis,/arcana cum fiunt sacra.” Canidia working at night also features in Horace, Satire 1.21–50. All translations of ancient sources are either mine or taken from the Loeb Classical Library series.

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Latin discourse during the fifteenth century, included Erictho, Hecate, Medea, Meroe, and Pamphile, all to demonstrate the dangerous actuality of women who threaten children, engage in obscene acts, manipulate impotence, and haunt the underworld.14 Other than Diana, however, reports of confessions very rarely name ancient figures, with the occasional exception of Venus or “Sibilla,” the term, of Greek and Latin ancestry, for any female prophet.15 Ancient male characters, cited less often by authorities and never in confessions, are instead learned magicians, astrologers, and necromancers, like Asclepius, Hermes Trismegistus, and Hostanes (Fig. 8.1), all drawn in a picture chronicle produced during the 1470s in Florence.16 With the necessary exception of ever-young Apollo Medicus, these are bearded, heavily cloaked (and often exotic) elders, venerable and wise, whereas old age makes of a witch a mad or melancholy hag (Figs. 8.3–8.5, 8.8). Somewhat like male magicians, the sorceress and temptress Circe was not always regarded as a witch. Yet her transformation of Ulysses’ companions into animals by way of potion and wand was an example frequently cited in medieval and Renaissance texts on witches, including the influential manual Malleus Maleficarum, first published in 1487.17 Following Augustine (City of God 18.17–8), the Malleus and most other texts on witchcraft considered the 14 Lucan, Bellum civile 6.507–830 (Erictho); Apuleius, Metamorphoses 1.7–13 (Meroe) and 2.5, 3.15–21 (the love magician Pamphile, who does not threaten children); Kimberly B. Stratton, Naming the Witch: Magic, Ideology, and Stereotype in the Ancient World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Pico names Canidia, Circe, Erictho, and Medea: Strix, B vi recto, E iv verso. 15 In 1392 a man accused of Waldensian heresy admitted that his sect conducted orgies and worshipped Sibilla and Bacchus: Euan Cameron, The Reformation of the Heretics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 112. For witches and Sibilla, especially in Ferrara, see Bartolommeo Spina, Quaestio di strigibus (Venice, 1523, repr. Rome, 1576), 3; Giuseppe Bonomo, Caccia alle streghe (Palermo: Palumbo, 1959), 71–3, 78–84; Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon, 1991), 96, 108, 132, 302. The word is used mockingly of the witch Pamphile in Apuleius, Metamorphoses 2.11. 16 Zika, Appearance, 53–4. The picture chronicle has no text. Hostanes, or Osthanes, was identified in antiquity as a magus (magician) of the Persian court under Xerxes i (Pliny, Natural History 30.2; Minucius Felix, Octavius 26.10). 17 Homer, Odyssey, 10.210–57; Ovid, Metamorphoses 14.247–307; Virgil, Aeneid 7.10–20; Christopher S. Mackay, The Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the “Malleus Maleficarum” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 204 (1.10); Pico, Strix, B vi recto and E iv verso, H iv verso, I i recto; Spina, Strigibus, 48; Charles Zika, “Images of Circe and Discourses of Witchcraft, 1480–1580,” Zeitenblicke 1, no. 1 (2002), http://www.zeitenblicke .historicum.net/2002/01/zika/zika.html; Zika, Appearance, 133–41. Guy Tal, “Witches on Top: Magic, Power, and Imagination in the Art of Early Modern Italy” (PhD diss.,

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Figure 8.1 Circle of Maso Finiguerra or Baccio Baldini, Hostanes, from the Florentine Picture Chronicle, c. 1470–5. British Museum, London (© Trustees of the British Museum)

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story of Circe as a literal truth, distinguishing between the power to wreak physical changes, which was reserved to God alone, and a devilish capacity to conjure and manipulate human fantasies. How to read ancient writers and tales about supernatural events, in a literal, historical, or figurative sense, was a central problem in the discourse on witches, as was evident too in the debate about the Canon Episcopi and, as we shall see, in the dialogue between two leading characters in Giovanfrancesco Pico della Mirandola’s dialogue Strix (1523).18 The most common move was to follow Augustine’s lead, strengthened by training in the process of interpreting allegorically. Notably, Ovid’s popular Metamorphoses familiarized a wide range of readers and viewers with the concept of supernatural alteration as a vivid yet poetic rather than physical mode, augmented by the moralizing reading of Ovid that arose in ­medieval culture. In literal, allegorical, and fictional modes, the seductive, deceitful Circe was often cast as a whore, dangerously bewitching, an outstanding example of the eroticized sorceress.19 Pico’s leading character Phronimus notes that contemporary enchantresses are named after an ancient sorceress (magas), saying that one city alone has 600 Medeas and 1200 Circes, a claim made earlier by Boccaccio, each implying that the women are prostitutes.20 Many accused

Indiana University, 2006), 214–58, discusses the theme of melancholy in relation to works by Alessandro Allori (1575–6) and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1650–5). 18 Pico, Strix; Albano Biondi, ed., Libro detto Strega o della illusioni del demonio del Signore Giovanfrancesco Pico dalla Mirandola nel volgarizzamento di Leandro Alberti (Venice: Marsilio Editore, 1989); La Strega ovvero degli inganni de’ demoni dialogo di Giovan Francesco Pico della Mirandola tradotto in lingua Toscana da Turino Turini (Milan: G. Daelli, 1864). It has been partially translated into English: Kors and Peters, Witchcraft in Europe 400–1700, 239–45; Peter Elmer, Nick Webb, and Roberta Wood, eds., The Renaissance in Europe: An Anthology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 366–94. 19 A fictional courtesan boasts of having the powers of Circe, transforming men into lustful animals: Eureta Misoscolo (Francesco Pona), La Lucerna (Venice: 1627), 65 (first printed 1625). The point had already been made in a fourth-century epigram by Palladas, which denies the role of magic and refers to Circe as a courtesan, Ulysses as a mature man who comprehends her cunning (Anthologia Graeca 10.50). For Circe as a meretrix see also, for instance, Horace, Epistle 1.2.25, and Ambrogio Vignati of Lodi’s Tractatus de haereticis of c. 1468 in Hansen, Quellen, 219, 221, 222. 20 Pico, Strix, E iv verso; Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women, ed. and trans. Virginia Brown (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2001), 152–3: “Multas ubique Cyrces esse et longe plures homines lascivia et crimine suo versos in beluas” (“There are many Circes everywhere, and many more men whose lust and vice change them into beasts”). Bewitching Italian women would corrupt the traveling Englishman: Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster (1570), in English Works, ed. W.A. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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witches in Italy were called prostitutes, whose work easily overlapped with the practice of supposed love magic (binding another’s passion), though in some cases the appellation “prostitute” may have been a condemnation rather than a fact.21 But Circe appears clothed and commanding in Renaissance book illustrations and single-sheet prints. Andrea Alciato, founder of the popular European genre of the emblem book upon publication of his unillustrated Emblemata in 1531, cited Circe as an exemplary warning against prostitutes.22 From 1546, illustrations in his much-reprinted and translated manual followed the visual tradition of marking Circe’s magic with such attributes as a wand and a poisoned cup but not with a sensual body. Circe is instead enticingly yet decorously naked in Dosso Dossi’s oil painting of c. 1511–25 (Fig. 8.2), situated in Homer’s forest glade, surrounded by transformed animals, and in the act of a learned incantation.23 Her flesh glows against the dark woods, alluding to her status as bedazzling daughter of the Sun but also drawing the eye to her alluring beauty and marking her isolation.24 Her long blond hair bedecked with colorful flowers recalls Homer’s emphasis on Circe’s glorious tresses (Odyssey 10.220, 10.310, 11.6), a detail that indicates the painter’s contact with humanists learned in Greek. Renaissance scholars, however, allegorized Circe in terms of Virgil’s dea saeva, “cruel goddess” (Aeneid 7.19), to be avoided as the embodiment of “voluptuous pleasure” 21

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Press, 1904), 225, 227–8, 235 (“Some Circes shall make him, of a plaine English man, a right Italian” and the “inchantments of Circes [are] the vanitie of licencious pleasure”). Matteo Duni, Under the Devil’s Spell: Witches, Sorcerers, and the Inquisition in Renaissance Italy (Florence: Syracuse University in Florence, 2007), 71–5, with further references, and 48, 83 for a woman denounced as a procuress in 1499. Horace, Epode 17.20 characterizes Canidia as “much beloved of sailors and of traders” (amata nautis multum et institoribus). Andrea Alciato, Emblematum libellus (Venice, 1546), 10 verso, “Cavendum à meretricibus.” Circe occupies a glade (Homer, Odyssey 10.210) or grove (Virgil, Aeneid 7.11). On the painting in Washington, and on Dossi’s painting in the Galleria Borghese that probably depicts Ariosto’s spell-breaking Melissa and that overshadows the Circe in the literature, see Peter Humfrey and Mauro Lucco, Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara, ed. Andrea Bayer (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 75–6, 89–92, no. 3, 114–8, n. 12; Zika, Appearance, 138–41, 255, n. 41; Giancarlo Fiorenza, Dosso Dossi: Paintings of Myth, Magic, and the Antique (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 1­01–26. The change from the lions, wolves, and swine of the Odyssey to Dosso’s dogs, birds, and stag has not been explained (it may, on one level, refer to the allure of hunting). Her shining beauty is stressed in Homer (Odyssey 10.400, 10.455, 10.487). For Circe as daughter of the sun, see Hesiod, Theogony, lines 957, 1011; Virgil, Aeneid 7.11; and Boccaccio, Famous Women, 150–1.

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Figure 8.2 Dosso Dossi, Circe, c. 1511–25. Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc (Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington)

who deprived men of their manly reason because she “changeth us…into the likeness of unreasonable beasts,” as Giovanni Pico put it in a letter to his nephew Giovanfrancesco.25 Dossi, on the other hand, presents pictorial poetry rather than moralizing allegory, forcing viewers to acknowledge not so much Circe’s cruelty as her enchantment.26 The animals are all stoic; she is a lovelorn love magician. Embracing her inscribed tablet while gazing wistfully in the opposite direction, lonely Circe yearns for Ulysses, calling him to shore or longing for his return (or alluding to both moods). When she worked her spells on Ulysses’ men, her aim was sexual union with the hero, and in return for her releasing 25 26

Cited from the translation of 1510 by Thomas More, in Merritt Y. Hughes, “Spenser’s Acrasia and the Circe of the Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 4 (1943): 388. Circe was not always fearsome. Taking their lead from Plutarch’s humorous “Bruta animalia ratione uti,” Moralia 985D–92E, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote a satire (1517) and Giambattista Gelli a dialogue (1548) in which most of the animals refuse to revert to human form: Machiavelli, L’Asino 7.115–8.151; Gelli, Circe; Tal, “Witches on Top,” 248–9 (which does not discuss the humorous aspect).

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his men from the hex, he reluctantly stayed for a year or more.27 The Odyssey associates her desire with breaking her spells and establishing loving trust, but in the painting that hope is forever, enticingly promised but not shown fulfilled, for she is a solitary figure.28 The torsion of her upper body is inspired by Leonardo’s Standing Leda, and the arrangement of her legs and the suggestion of a pastoral dream is reminiscent of Giulio Campagnola’s engraving of a Young Shepherd, while the masking of the genitals and one leg recalls the Venus Felix statue, a second-century work showing largely naked Venus and Cupid with a dedication to Venus Felix.29 From a range of ancient and contemporary images and texts, Dosso fashions a strikingly unusual sorceress whose contradictory axes of attention indicate melancholy or hope rather than satisfaction or reality. Mouth slightly open, tenderly holding the tablet and gently stroking it, stretching her neck and head in aching reverie, Circe not only presents the torsion of a figura serpentinata but makes of that artificial contrivance an affective display of desire. Her love magic, the sottratto or secret deceit that kept Ulysses with her for more than a year, noted by Dante (Inferno, 26.91–2), did not work forever. But Dossi’s viewers, female and male, can be safely beguiled again and again, captivated like the animals listening to Orpheus’ music, a poetic topic familiar to Renaissance viewers in various prints and paintings that follow the ancient pattern of focusing on the youthful player seated amidst a throng of charmed animals.30 Whereas Orpheus entranced and civilized by means of beautiful music, however, Circe’s magical allure threatened bestial conversion for all 27

Emphasized in Pseudo-Apollodorus, Biblioteca 7.17, the story was well enough known during the Renaissance. Some versions of the story have her bear one or two sons. Hyginus, Fabulae 125, for instance, names Nausithous and Telegonus. Dante notes that Ulysses stayed over a year (Inferno 26.91–2). Ulysses’ reluctance, due to loyalty to his wife Penelope, is emphasized in Plutarch, Moralia 988F. 28 Homer, Odyssey 9.30–3, 10.295–300, 335; for her desire see also, for instance, Hesiod, Theogony, lines 1011–2. 29 The first two are cited in Peter Humfrey, “Two Moments in Dosso’s Career as a Landscape Painter,” in Dosso’s Fate, ed. Luisa Ciammitti et al. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1998), 204. On the Venus Felix (Fig. 12.1 in this volume), see Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources (London: Harvey Miller, 2010), 66–7, no. 16. 30 Giuseppe Scavizzi, “The Myth of Orpheus in Italian Renaissance Art,” in Orpheus: The Metamorphosis of a Myth, ed. John Warden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 136–46; Patricia Simons, “Homosociality and Erotics in Italian Renaissance Portraiture,” in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 31–2.

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those not as wily as Ulysses. Viewers are fascinated, like the knight Orlando focusing in admiration upon a painting of “Circella” in a poem from Dosso’s North Italian courtly circles, Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato.31 They are under the spell of the painter’s love magic. To take the painting as a literal report of historical fact would have been heretical, because only God could physically change men into animals. To believe otherwise made one an infidel, according to the Canon Episcopi, a specific accusation reiterated in canon law and by commentators into the sixteenth century.32 The pious and sophisticated members of Dossi’s audience understood that Circe’s animals were delusions and that viewers were looking at a work of clever artistry rather than demonic trickery. Conversations amongst spectators could debate how to characterize the nature and process of witchcraft’s fantasy, and come to no clear, single conclusion. The painting’s efficacy and impact lay in its allusion and ambiguity. Such an image reinvigorates classical culture in order to make a sophisticated, thought-provoking contribution to discourses on sorcery, witchcraft, and delusion. A few modern scholars of witchcraft mention Dosso’s Circe, only in passing terms, and art-historical discussion is brief too, perhaps partly due to what I see as its challenging ambiguity. But the bases of Clark’s assumption also ­continue to affect our inability to recognize certain classicizing “nudes” as references to witchcraft. The underlying premise remains that images of witches are predominantly ugly and from Northern Europe. As with Dosso’s Circe, if we acknowledge the presence of witchcraft in the legal and cultural landscape of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, especially the preponderance of love magic, then it is possible to discern various ways in which it was visually infused with the peninsula’s classical heritage. Ancient literature and art provided exemplars both ideal and diabolical, and in the case of witches, types both youthfully beautiful and hideously old. Alongside the “humanist dreamland” envisioned by Fritz Saxl, an ideal place founded in antiquity and inspiring to artists, there was an underworld, then, and the two realms were not always far apart.33 As Erwin Panofsky understood, 31

Matteo Maria Boiardo, Orlando Innamorato 1.6.50–3; Humfrey and Lucco, Dossi, 90; Fiorenza, Dossi, 105–6. 32 Hansen, Quellen, 39 (the Canon Episcopi) and 148 (Alphonso de Spina, Fortalitium Fidei, written c. 1459); Burchard of Worms, Decretum 10.1.3 (Patrologia Latina 140, 833B); Gratian, Decretum 26.5.12; Mackay, Hammer of Witches, 201; Bernardo Rategno da Como, De Strigiis, in his Lucerna Inquisitorum (Rome, 1584), 156–7 (written by the Lombard inquisitor in c. 1505–13); Spina, Strigibus, 2, 75. 33 The phrase is from a chapter heading: Fritz Saxl, A Heritage of Images (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 89.

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when writing during the rise of Nazism (which embraced the timeless, i­ mperial connotations of classicism), “classical art bestowed beauty … even upon the demoniacal.”34 Nymphs gathered around their domina Diana: Palma il Vecchio’s painting in Vienna, called by scholars either Bathing Nymphs or Diana and Callisto and dated around 1525, shows a secluded group of women who, due to their activity of bathing naked in pastoral ease, are probably members of Diana’s band.35 Twelve women at water’s edge are about to be joined by two more emerging from the bushes in the central middle ground (disturbingly faceless in one case and almost hidden in the other). They congregate, probably at the end of the day since some of the hills are lit by rosy hues, and they do not perform heinous deeds, so this is clearly not a witches’ Sabbath in progress. But the thrill of voyeurism, always present in tales of Diana’s bathing coterie given the well-known story of Actaeon, might be heightened by a trace of the demonic, for two satyrs trotting along an open path at the far left are soon to be in their midst, with results potentially comic or wicked. The setting, with several low weirs, is a flowing river, not a closed lake or pond. It might allude to the witches’ meeting place at the river “Jordan.”36 Those who mistrusted pagan tales would remember that satyrs and fauns were incubi that assaulted or seduced women, and that the lusty beasts were commonly shown leering at and accosting nymphs. Humanists and churchmen alike were familiar with the idea that satyrs and fauns were incubi.37 Pico, for instance, not only knows that satyrs are incubi but also makes nymphs important players in his scenario of witchcraft because they are Diana’s devotees.38 Once Palma’s satyrs intrude on the sylvan gathering, viewers could pleasurably anticipate 34

Erwin Panofsky, “Albrecht Dürer and Classical Antiquity,” in his Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955; repr., Harmondsworth, uk: Penguin, 1970), 315, and see 322, n. 17 for his passing acknowledgement of the essay’s history. 35 Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, “Pictures of Women, Pictures of Love,” in Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, ed. David Alan Brown and Ferino-Pagden (Washington, dc: National Gallery of Art, 2006), 184–7, no. 35. It is associated in passing with the night rides of Diana by Eugenio Battisti, L’antirinascimento (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962), 143. 36 Pico, Strix, Eii recto; Spina, Strigibus, 3, 58. 37 See for instance Augustine, City of God 15.23; Burchard of Worms, De Poenitentia 19.5 (Patrologia Latina 140, 965C, 971C); Mackay, Hammer of Witches, 126; Spina, Strigibus, 47; Pico, Strix, B iv verso and B vi verso; Hansen, Quellen, 189, 218, 309, 620–1, 666; Annibal Caro, Lettere familiari, vol. 3, ed. Aulo Greco (Florence: Le Monnier, 1961), 215 (3.743); Patricia Simons, “The Incubus and Italian Renaissance Art,” Source 34, no. 1 (2014), 1–8. 38 Pico, Strix, D iii recto; Armando Maggi, In the Company of Demons: Unnatural Beings, Love, and Identity in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 50–2. Diana is dea silvarum: Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.163.

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that Diana’s inviolable followers would scatter to comedic effect, or they might imagine the conjoining of incubi with followers of the pagan domina. Early tales of witch gatherings describe an abundance of food and sexual pleasure, partly derived from late antique accusations of promiscuity and ­cannibalism against the meetings of early Christians, accentuated by folkloric ­traditions and stories, probably heightened in the case of so-called confessions by the utopian dreams of the poor.39 Pico’s witch reported that “we eat, drink, and enjoy carnal pleasures,” imbibing whole casks of wine, feasting on meat, and receiving lovers’ promises of unceasing riches and enjoyment.40 Such ­idealistic excess was boisterously adapted in Pietro Aretino’s 1534 description of the feast and orgy in a convent, to which “flocked all sorts of nuns and monks as all sorts of witches and warlocks gather under the walnut tree at Benevento” (legendarily a site for the Sabbath in Italy).41 His irreverent tone highlights the degree to which not all Italians found witchcraft real or threatening, a response evident in the explanation by Pico’s first translator that the Strix was written to answer those who thought the recent trials and executions unwarranted.42 But the widespread imagining of idyllic yet sinister banquets was appealing, and permeated high art as much as “popular” fantasy. A Bacchanal attributed to Dosso Dossi, for instance, presents a lavish repast set in the evening, attended by satyrs as well as damsels and naked men.43 The demonic always lurked in characters from antiquity, according to learned Pico. Supporter and biographer of the strict reforming monk Savonarola and nephew of the renowned philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, he was a well-read scholar familiar with both religious and humanist modes. Supposed proof for the uncontrolled, excessive, and threatening witch was drawn from the humanist’s library, particularly works by Homer, Horace, Lucan, Ovid, Seneca, and Virgil.44 His book, first published in 1523 in Latin, translated into 39 Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 1–15, 214–6; Boccaccio, Decameron 8.9. 40 Pico, Strix, E ii verso, E v recto; Elmer, Webb, and Wood, Renaissance in Europe, 381, 384. 41 Pietro Aretino, Sei Giornate, ed. Giovanni Aquilecchia (Bari: Laterza, 1969), 45; Aretino’s Dialogues, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Stein and Day, 1971), 54. 42 As stated by his translator Leandro Alberti in the dedicatory letter addressed to Pico’s wife Giovanna Caraffa: Biondi, Libro detto Strega, 51–2. 43 Christopher Baker and Tom Henry, The National Gallery: Complete Illustrated Catalogue (London: National Gallery, 1995), 194. The satyr standing in intimate contact with a woman at the left is perhaps an incubus. See also a painting sometimes called Stregoneria: Humfrey and Lucco, Dossi, 218–24. 44 Pico’s citations of Greek and Latin texts are too numerous to mention here but include Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, Catullus’ Carmina, various works by Cicero, the Histories of Herodotus, Hesiod’s Theogony, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, a Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite,

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Italian the following year and again in 1555, took the title Strix as a reference to the nocturnal screech-owl, represented in ancient literature as a witch who transforms into the blood-sucking bird, especially threatening infants.45 Thus strix was by Pico’s time a common term for witch, adapted as strega in Italian. The dialogue opens with two men hurrying to see a witch who has been arrested, and they exchange numerous quotations from Ovid and other ancient sources on the strix such as Lucan, Seneca, and Pliny.46 Skeptical Apistius is eager to see the witch, but he notes that the ancients had never seen the bird and he doubts laughable (ridiculum) tales from the mob (vulgas) regarding flying witches— called harlots (meretiriculas)—who ride goats or rams, eat children, and gather for illicit pleasures. Pico’s mouthpiece Phronimus, however, asserts that learned experts are convinced of their reality, for witches are explained not through a fable (fabula) but by the acts of wicked demons aiding the old women (anus).47 Asking whether the practices of the witch whom they later meet accords with the medieval Canon Episcopi or is the sign of a “new heresy,” Phronimus decides that “it must be both, part ancient and partly a new superstition, … ancient in essence and new in accidents,” a phrase that aptly characterizes the syncretistic classicism that informed Renaissance humanism and artistic strategies.48 Pico’s chronological distinction calls to mind only slightly earlier statements by two Italian Dominican inquisitors: Bernardo Rategno da Como’s claim that he had found inquisitorial records going back 150 years, that is, to the mid-fourteenth century, and Silvestro Mazzolini da Prierio’s assertion in 1520 that the modern “sect of the witches” had only arisen shortly before a papal bull of 1484.49 In a more fundamental sense, Pico discerns both ­continuity

various poems by Horace, Lucan’s Bellum civile, Ovid’s Fasti and Metamorphoses, Lucius Flavius Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius, Pindar’s poetry, Pliny’s Natural History, essays by Plutarch, various plays by Seneca, and Virgil’s various works. A few examples are referred to in my footnotes. For more detail, see the notes in Biondi, Libro detto Strega, 202–16. 45 See esp. Ovid, Fasti 6.131–68; Samuel Grant Oliphant, “The Story of the Strix: Ancient,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 44 (1913): 133–49; Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 206–10. Pamphile’s use of an unguent turns her into an owl (bubo) for the purposes of love magic: Apuleius, Metamorphoses 3.21. 46 Pico, Strix, Bi recto-Bii recto. Quotations are from Ovid, Metamorphoses 7.269 and Fasti 6.131–48; Lucan, Bellum civile 6.689; Seneca, Hercules furens 688 and Medea 733; and Quintus Serenus, Liber Medicinalis 58.1035–6, and reference is made to Pliny, Natural History 11.95. 47 Pico, Strix, B i recto–B ii recto; Elmer, Webb, and Wood, Renaissance in Europe, 367–70. 48 Pico, Strix, Diii recto; trans. Kors and Peters, Witchcraft, 243. 49 Rategno da Como, De Strigiis, 145; Silvestro Mazzolini da Prierio, De strigamagarum, daemonumque mirandis (Rome, 1575), 139; Hansen, Quellen, 282, 319; Michael Tavuzzi,

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in diabolical history and an emerging resurgence built on that pagan past, a conception partly informed by his personal experience examining the testimony of local witches at recent trials (1522–3).50 In the words of Dicastes, the inquisitor in Pico’s dialogue, “all the pagan gods are demons.”51 Pico’s conviction that antiquity was imbued with fiendish evil meant that he could not subscribe to the common interpretative assumption, represented in his dialogue by Apistius, that ancient culture contained hidden philosophy of syncretistic and allegorical application.52 Rather, to Pico it provided only false knowledge. Describing his visit to the Belvedere’s grove of renowned ancient statuary in a letter of August 1512, he hinted at the display’s irreligiosity, each sculpture on “its little altar,” reminding him of “futile cults,” in a setting swarming with brutes, Circes, and Sirens.53 In particular, Pico was inspired, negatively, by the recent arrival in the garden of the Venus Felix.54 He penned a Latin poem, De Venere et Cupidine expellendis, on the expulsion from the mind of the libidinous flames and furors of Venus and Cupid, supplanted by Divine Love, especially in the form of the Virgin Mary and her child.55 Learned Latin poetry, Neoplatonic philosophy, and citations from Plato, Homer, Pindar, Plutarch, and other ancients who are named in the poem’s printed marginalia go hand in hand with the demonization of pagan deities and dismissal of the “innumerable monsters” filling ancient poetry.56 Pico’s

Renaissance Inquisitors: Dominican Inquisitors and Inquisitorial Districts in Northern Italy, 1474–1527 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 33, 151 n. 5, 156, 220–1. Mazzolini several times dates the papal bull to 1404, which brings his chronology more in line with Bernardo’s. 50 For the trials, see Biondi, Libro detto Strega, 13–27, 217–22. 51 Pico, Strix, G ii recto (“omnes dii gentiuim daemonia”), trans. Elmer, Webb, and Wood, Renaissance in Europe, 388. 52 Pico, Strix, B ii verso; Maggi, Company of Demons, 30, 40–1. 53 Giovanfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, letter to Lilius Gyraldus, in his De Venere et Cupidine expellendis (Rome, 1513), B iv recto–C i recto (“Omni autem ex parte antiquae imagines, suis quaeque arulis super impositae. … Ad hunc ego lucum saepe cum diverterem, non philosophandi gratia … minus aut adorandi aut mactandi pecudes ergo, ut vani culto, res ritus consuevere,” B iv recto). E.H. Gombrich, “The Belvedere Garden as a Grove of Venus,” in his Symbolic Images (London: Phaidon, 1972), 105–8; Maggi, Company of Demons, 64–5. 54 It was displayed in the Belvedere by 1509: Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, 66–7, no. 16. See Fig. 12.1 in the present volume. 55 Pico, De Venere et Cupidine expellendis (Rome, 1513), A i recto–B iii verso. The poem is dated September 1512. 56 Pico, De Venere et Cupidine expellendis, line 22, “Variis implere poemata monstris.” See above, n. 44, on Pico’s classical references.

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reference to amorini as “demented deities that insane antiquity shaped as winged brothers” and to the way in which Daphne was harmed due to Cupid’s attack on Apollo recall commentary by the early ninth-century bishop and mythographer Theodulf of Orléans.57 But Pico offers much more than a return to medieval patterns. He knows the enemy, as it were, using his deep knowledge of ancient Greek and Roman literature as compelling evidence to convert classicists amongst his learned circles like those represented by the fictional but nuanced character Apistius, with whom he shares a cultural language, poetic practice, and authoritative library. Both would agree that Venus’ bewitching charms attract the eye, but to Pico, at least, her siren call was demonic.58 Indeed, the women supposedly riding off with Diana were sometimes imagined to be instead joining Venus, goddess of sexuality, and tales of the witches’ Sabbath frequently included indiscriminate sex.59 When discussing in another letter the physical evidence of the Venus Felix, Pico combined attitudes “new” and “old” (medieval). He admired the sculptor’s artistic skill (artificis ingenium) in proper Renaissance fashion, yet held that the statue’s fragmentary state proved that “the darkness of the false superstition” had been vanquished by the light of his own “true religion.”60 Pico’s firm belief in demons and witches disturbs a clear-cut distinction between supposed “superstition” and apparently “rational” humanism that Jacob Burckhardt tried to maintain when defining the Renaissance in 1860. The Swiss cultural historian acknowledged that “antiquity…imparted to the

57 Pico, De Venere et Cupidine expellendis, lines 6–7 (“quos male, fana vetustas/Aligeros finxis dementia numina fratres”), 27–8; Jane Chance, Medieval Mythography from Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres, a.d. 433–1177, vol. 1 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), 133–9, quoting Theodulf’s poem De libris quos legere solebam, 33–62. 58 Pico, Strix, H i recto; expanded a little in Alberti’s translation, Biondi, Libro detto Strega, 175. 59 Hansen, Quellen, 90, 308, 346. The destination of the mythical mountain of Venusberg is primarily German (Hansen, 284; Zika, Appearance, 103–6, 110–13), but Italian examples include Hansen, 348, 597; Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore, ed. Irene Gordon (New York: Mentor, 1960), 368 (a letter of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius ii); Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 108–9, 121; Zika, Appearance, 106. 60 Giovanfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, letter to Konrad Peutinger, in the Strasburg edition of his De Venere et Cupidine expellendis (1513): “Sed sane eo in simulacro simul et artificis ingenium licebat suspicere: et simul admirari vanae superstitionis tenebras verae luce religionis ita fugatas.” Gombrich, “Belvedere Garden,” 221, n. 33.

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Renaissance its own kind of superstition,” by which he chiefly meant astrology and magic.61 But he distinguished between “the hysterical dreams of the Northern witch” and Italian sensuality marked by women plying a trade and earning income, especially in love magic. His language imposed gendered and social values that still informed Clark’s distinction between Italianate classical beauty and Northern European ugliness. Rather than a straightforward binary contrast, however, it is now understood that the stereotype of the Renaissance witch blended several different regional strands and various heresies.62 Despite the traditional interpretation of the impact of classical culture ­during the Renaissance, represented by Burckhardt and Clark, Eugenio Battisti pointed out many years ago that Italian art was replete with “naked” hybridity, irrationality and excess, striking in the engraving Stregozzo of c. 1515–25 (Fig.  8.3), but evident also in paintings by Salvator Rosa or prints after Parmigianino’s designs, amongst others.63 In most cases, the ugly witch is at the center of wild, forbidding, and exaggerated acts. Images of hags, demons,

Figure 8.3 Agostino Veneziano (after Marcantonio Raimondi?), Lo Stregozzo, 1515–25. British Museum, London (© Trustees of the British Museum) 61 Burckhardt, Civilization, 356 (hereafter quoted from 370). Tal’s abstract of 2006 succinctly states the prevailing view: Italian images of witches “may seem to deviate from the humanist and rationalist aura ascribed to early modern Italy,” but they “enrich our understanding of the surprisingly interconnected worlds of humanism and witchcraft” (Tal, “Witches on Top,” v, my emphases). 62 Bailey, “Medieval Concept,” 419–39; Kieckhefer, “Mythologies of Witchcraft,” 79–108. 63 Battisti, L’antirinascimento, esp. “Nascita dela strega,” 138–57. For various possible, indirect allusions to witches in sixteenth-century Italian art, see Mary D. Garrard, Brunelleschi’s Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 86–8, 259–61, 282, 286.

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and other horrors were attractive venues for the exercise of artistic license and exploration of the pleasingly bizarre.64 Rosso Fiorentino is one artist whose studies in this vein have not been discussed much in the context of witchcraft. Yet, for instance, foul fumes billow from the vessel held by a wiry, windblown witch in a pen and wash drawing plausibly attributed to him, perhaps from the 1530s (Fig. 8.4).65 Two younger women watch the hag from the left, probably learning as they join the incantation, and two putti behind her at the far right indicate the endangerment of infants. Set against a backdrop of shrubs and a decaying, overgrown portico, the drawing situates sorcery on the margins of ancient culture, perhaps evoking the dread places where figures such as Horace’s Canidia offered incantations.66 Rosso’s designs for engravings include winged skeletons and emaciated, screeching figures in dark woods and cemeteries, tinged with cultural imaginings of Sabbaths and necromancy; another probably shows Hercules visited by a succubus.67 The Stregozzo engraving (Fig. 8.3) has, on the other hand, attracted considerable attention.68 Probably instigated by Marcantonio Raimondi or Battista Dossi but engraved by Agostino Veneziano, it presents a nightmare with naked male youths escorting a witch seated high atop a skeletal, hybrid monster. She concocts her potion in a fuming vessel from the bodies of innocent babes, as her long hair flies, mingling with the vile smoke rising against a background of windswept reeds at the edge of a marsh. Below her, a smaller bony hybrid is ridden awkwardly by another naked man, who holds a forked stick with sausages. That detail of drooping sausages, along with forked sticks, bones, smoke, hag high above, goats, and dark, violent setting, are all so reminiscent of Hans Baldung Grien’s recent woodcut Witches’ Sabbath (1510) that the Italian print must partly be a response to it. Baldung’s female coterie has become in the

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Stephen J. Campbell, “Michelangelo, Rosso, and the (Un)Divinity of Art,” Art Bulletin 84 (2002): 596–620; Michael Cole, “The Demonic Arts and the Origin of the Medium,” Art Bulletin 84 (2002): 621–40; Hults, Witch as Muse, 27–56; Tal, “Witches on Top.” 65 Emmanuelle Brugerolles and David Guillet, The Renaissance in France: Drawings from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Art Museums, 1995), 40–2, no. 15. It does not feature in scholarship on witchcraft. 66 Horace, Epodes 5 and 17, Satire 1.8, with minor mentions in 2.1.48 and 2.8.95. 67 Eugene A. Carroll, Rosso Fiorentino: Drawings, Prints, and Decorative Arts (Washington: National Galley of Art, 1987), 54–8, no. 2 (Allegory of Death and Fame), 72–4, no. 8 (Fury), 344–6, cat. no. 108 (the drawing and engraving by René Boyvin of The Dream of Hercules). 68 Patricia A. Emison, “Truth and Bizzarria in an Engraving of Lo Stregozzo,” Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 623–33; Campbell, “(Un)Divinity of Art”; Hults, Witch as Muse, 39–46; Zika, Appearance, 125–7, 231; Tal, “Witches on Top,” 160–214.

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Figure 8.4 Rosso Fiorentino, Incantation Scene, first half of the 16th century. Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris (Art Resource, ny)

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Italian rendition a band of frenzied male attendants of various ages, cast in the classical language of idealized male bodies. The print is a tour de force in composition, tonal depths, and dynamic movement, impressive enough to be credited to Michelangelo by the artistturned-writer Gian Paolo Lomazzo when he published his Trattato in 1585. He was thinking in particular of the muscular men from Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina and the rear view of a crouching man that refers to the foreshortened God creating plant life on the Sistine ceiling.69 Although the engraving has been taken as visual propaganda in support of Pico’s argument about the danger of witchcraft, it concentrates far more on invention, horror, and effect than on documentation, and none of its details derive from Pico’s text alone or bear a close relationship to the book, which may have been published later.70 The hybrid monsters in the Stregozzo are the types of creations condemned by Horace in the opening lines of his Ars poetica, where he argues that even the license of poets and painters should not extend to bizarre composites (lines 1–13); such hybrids were appreciated by Renaissance critics, however, as expressions of inventiveness.71 The desirable male bodies and the focus on buttocks allude to sodomy, a vice Pico linked to witches, but they also indicate that the world is upside down, unnaturally ruled by an old hag who is the domina of vigorous men who should, but cannot, resist bewitchment and temptation.72 Ironic self-consciousness marks its Horatian hybrids and numerous citations, not only from Michelangelo but also from a sarcophagus fragment with the Labors of Hercules (whence derives the rightmost figure, striding, arching his neck, stretching his arm high), drawings by Raphael, and Dürer’s engraved Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat of 1500–1 (Fig.  8.5).73 While it might be regarded as an “anti-classical” triumph of death, the Stregozzo is nevertheless profoundly informed by and makes an almost parodic nod to ancient sources as well as contemporary art. The frieze-like display of the horn-blowing youth riding a goat (wearing Bacchus’ leopard skin?) and frenetic acolytes, all 69 70 71 72

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Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato (Milan, 1585), 678 (732); Emison, “Truth and Bizzarria,” 626–7. Emison, “Truth and Bizzarria,” 630–3 draws a direct connection with Pico’s Strix. Tal, “Witches on Top,” 173–200. For sodomy see Pico, Strix, Giv verso; Emison, “Truth and Bizzarria,” 626; Tamar Herzig, “The Demons’ Reaction to Sodomy: Witchcraft and Homosexuality in Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola’s Strix,” Sixteenth Century Journal 34 (2003): 53–72. Gioconda Albricci, “Lo Stregozzo di Agostino Veneziano,” Arte Veneta 36 (1982): 55–61; Tal, “Witches on Top,” 200.

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Figure 8.5 Albrecht Dürer, Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat, 1500–1. London, British Museum (© Trustees of the British Museum)

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idealized in classical terms, recall familiar Bacchic processions or Triumphs.74 For instance, trumpeting, heads-thrown-back bodies exuberantly moving forward and two riders, one on a smaller beast beneath a chariot, appear on a third-century sarcophagus of the Indian Triumph of Bacchus and Hercules known in the Quattrocento, possibly on display at the stairs of the Aracoeli.75 The baby-threatening hag is a staple of ancient as well as contemporary literature about witches, as is the swamp.76 On the far left, the birds rising up in a cluster represent Ovid’s version of striges, “old women transformed into fowl by a Marsian spell.”77 Other elements recall the author’s vivid, lengthy treatment of Medea, the woman who infamously killed her children, including the lunar light, her “streaming hair after the fashion of the Bacchantes,” and a pot “boiling and frothing white with the swelling foam.”78 In its response to Dürer’s engraving, the Italian print injects numerous, ­crucial changes, including the monstrous hybrids and virtual absence of flight, representing instead a wild ride.79 Rather than flying, the skeletal chariot is held up not far from the ground by a string attached to the equine leg brandished by one of the leading men.80 This is a claustrophobic, 74

Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, 123–5, nos. 76–8 for Indian Triumphs, 127–31, nos. 81–3 for Bacchic processions. 75 Ibid., 124–5, no. 78. 76 For the swamp, see Seneca, Hercules furens 686–8. Especially due to her sanctuary at Brauron, Artemis/Diana was associated with swamps and marshes. According to Rategno da Como, Strigiis, 141, the term strix was derived from Styx, Latin for “hell or infernal swamp, because these people are diabolical and infernal.” For ancient baby-threatening witches, see n. 14. 77 Ovid, Fasti 6.142 (“neniaque in volucres Marsa figurat anus”). Pliny notes that the cursed strix is not necessarily the screech-owl: Natural History 11.95. 78 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 7.176–403, esp. 7.181, 183, 257–8 (“passis Medea capillis/bacchantum ritu flagrantis circuit aras”), 7.262–3 (“Interea validum posito medicamen aeno/fervet et exsultat spumisque tumentibus albet”), 7.282. Medea’s car drawn by dragons that have sloughed off their skins (7.234–7) may have inspired the skeletal structure in the print. Bacchus admired Medea’s magic (7.294–6). Her murder of her sons is only mentioned in passing (7.396). For smoking pots, and for streaming or disheveled hair, sometimes entwined with vipers, see also, for instance, Horace, Epode 5.13, 5.27, 5.81, Satire 1.8.24; Lucan, Bellum civile 6.518, 655–6. A witch suggests tearing a man limb from limb in Bacchic frenzy: Apuleius, Metamorphoses 1.13. 79 On the Wild Ride, chiefly in Germany, see Zika, Appearance, 99–124, 127. 80 Parmigianino similarly designed a hybrid monster that has to be supported on its way: Zika, Appearance, 123–4, wisely notes that it is “somewhat bizarre and almost ­comical.” A sliver of crescent moon to the left of a large owl and above the rider’s head associates the horde with followers of Diana/Hecate.

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grounded view rather than Dürer’s panoramic vista. What the two prints most obviously share is the hag, characterized by wild hair, shrieking mouth, wiry body, and aging breasts, though they also each mix female ugliness with classical male figures in the form of appealing putti or idealized youths, who dance or lope in fervent attendance. Love magic and sexual vice are central to Dürer’s conception, indicated by the cavorting amorini and by the reference to Aphrodite Pandemos (Vulgar Venus, goddess of base sexuality), especially known at the time from cameos where she rides a lusty goat accompanied by an amorino.81 That naked witch is also developed from Andrea Mantegna’s figure of Envy in his ambitious engraving of the Battle of the Sea Gods (c. 1475–88) (Fig. 8.6). The designers of such prints were exploring issues of illusion and deception too, by way of fantasy, hybridity, and exaggeration. Lomazzo admired that very enterprise, praising images of “infernal furies,” “Satanic spirits,” chimeras, and hybrids by Dürer, Mantegna, and others, such as the Stregozzo, various “monsters described by the ancients” as well as by modern romance writers such as

Figure 8.6 Andrea Mantegna, Battle of the Sea Gods (left half ), 1470s. London, British Museum (© Trustees of the British Museum) 81

Charmain Mesenzeva, “Zum Problem: Dürer und die Antike. Albrecht Dürers Kupferstich ‘Die Hexe’,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 46 (1983): 187–202 (one of the cameos was owned by Lorenzo de’ Medici); Zika, Appearance, 27–9.

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Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto, all of which “have outdone whatever was thinkable to imagine ­concerning such monsters and serpents.”82 In Clark’s terms, the attractive, youthful, and vigorous bodies in the Stregozzo are distinctly classicized, idealized, and “nude,” but far from representing exempla of manly virtue, they embody Clarkian “nakedness” in their rampant lack of control and evil indecency. The engraving also crosses Clark’s clear-cut boundaries, located as it is at the intersection of Italian and German imagery and amalgamating classical and contemporary visual language with contemporary notions of witchcraft and its believed horrors. That type of interchange is witnessed around 1507 by Benedetto Montagna’s copy in reverse of Dürer’s engraving, and by a small Paduan bronze from the same decade similarly depicting an old witch with pendulous breasts and long hair riding a goat.83 Instead, a firm-bodied young Bacchante rides a goat backwards (and anchors herself by grasping one horn each of the goat and a priapic satyr-herm) in Giulio Romano’s fresco in the Palazzo del Te and in an engraving of the scene (Fig. 8.7), probably each from the same drawing.84 This image remembers the Vulgar Venus too and concentrates on the lack of sexual control, but redirects fears about dominant, lusting women into a safer, classicized rhetoric rather than focusing on aged witches. On the other hand, for at least some viewers, knowledge of what witches and demons supposedly did in their pleasurable rural gatherings could add extra titillation, and for others like Pico such clear delineations of sexual excess in ancient times affirmed their preconceptions about evil women and lust. The aged female witch imagined in ancient literature as well as by Dürer, taken up in Italian art too, was so powerful an image that it remains the stereotype of witches. A disproportionate number of those actually accused were indeed probably relatively old in age according to premodern standards, though many on trial were younger.85 Neither youthfully beautiful nor reproductive, 82 Lomazzo, Trattato, 677–8 (7.32), singling out Dürer’s Knight, Death and the Devil and Mantegna’s Descent into Limbo, as well as the Stregozzo; Emison, “Truth and Bizzarria,” 634, n. 9. 83 Mesenzeva, “Problem,” 195. 84 For the fresco in the north vault of the Sala delle Aquile, and on its roots in a secondcentury marble relief in Rome showing a Bacchanal, see Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 31–5. The engraving, which omits the landscape and a winged putto milking the goat, is attributed to the school of Marcantonio Raimondi. Suzanne Boorsch, ed., The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 28, School of Raimondi, Caraglio, Bonasone (New York: Albaris, 1978), 36:3. 85 Records show that there is some truth to the stereotype of the witch as an old woman, but for complications, including infrequent documentation of age, see Alison Rowlands, “Age

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Figure 8.7 Agostino Veneziano (after Giulio Romano), Bacchante Seated Backwards on a Goat with Herm of Satyr, c. 1520s. London, British Museum (© Trustees of the British Museum)

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the aged woman who was called a witch was potentially ­dangerous for being wise and experienced, though most often in actual terms she was vulnerable and marginalized. Aged women could be expected to be sexually knowledgeable, yet they had a higher probability than young women of being widows, who were less tied to patriarchal and domestic constraints. They could be barren but with access to children, or renowned for healing that equally meant they were knowledgeable in how to harm. Or, when credited with skills in love magic, the woman called a witch was sometimes condemned not only as a prostitute but also as a bawd, guardian, or old nurse who could disrupt or control courtship, encourage promiscuity while envying it, and disturb crucial limits regarding age and class.86 In Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, Aretino’s fiction, the Stregozzo, and inquisitorial accusations, witches engendered such passion that sometimes young noble men fervently desired decrepit, poor women, a passion that was considered disruptive and unnatural.87 The stereotype of the witch tends to be of a “naked” and wild woman in Clark’s language, yet some were represented clothed (Fig.  8.4) and leaden (Fig.  8.8). Aged witches in both ancient and Renaissance literature haunt tombs and burial places, able at times to resurrect the dead but more often using bones and decaying flesh for other nefarious purposes. In 1525, Aretino’s satirical comedy Cortigiana presented the witch and sawbones Lady Maggiorina plucking out the eyes of hanged men and collecting fingernails of the dead from Roman graveyards, though only to cure colic.88 Rather than report the work of a contemporary healer-witch, Aretino relies for the two abominable actions, if not their goal, on Lucan’s Erictho.89 In deadpan rather than satirical form, with an ostensibly allegorical slant about Time and Death, elderly denizens of the cemetery are the subject of an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi, the popularity of which is indicated by reissues in 1528 (by Agostino



of Accused Witches,” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, ed. Richard M. Golden (Santa Barbara: abc-clio, 2006), 16–20, with further references. 86 Anger against guardians controlling access to the speaker’s object of desire could result in accusations of witchcraft: Amy Richlin, “Invective Against Women in Roman Satire,” Arethusa 17 (1984): 71–2; Patrizia Bettella, The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 59–61. 87 Pietro Aretino, Sei Giornate, 38; Aldo Stella, Chiese e stato nelle relazioni ei nunzi pontifici a Venezia (Vatican City, 1964), 286. 88 Pietro Aretino, Cortigiana, ed. Angelo Romano (Milan: Rizzoli, 1989), 60 (Prologue), 96 (2.6, where she is also described as flying in animal form to Benevento). 89 Lucan, Bellum civile 6.541–3.

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Figure 8.8 Agostino Veneziano (after Marcantonio Raimondi), Old Woman Approaching the Grave, 1528. London, British Museum (© Trustees of the British Museum)

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Veneziano, in reverse: Fig. 8.8) and 1542.90 Two aged figures gather firewood for a sacrificial altar in the setting of the ancient cemetery on the Esquiline Hill (the Baths of Trajan are visible in the background), the very burial area Horace had singled out for witches’ horrible nocturnal deeds.91 Around the same time as Aretino wrote the Cortigiana and the print was made, the inquisitor Paulo Grillandi claimed to know of several cases in Rome of nocturnal exhumation and use of body parts such as nails, eyes, and ears for sorcery.92 In this way, classical heritage and local rumor together informed theatrical entertainment, printed images, and juridical treatise, all referring to acts in the city of Rome at a time when actual executions of accused witches remained rare there.93 While both characters in the engraving are hefty, lumbering creatures, one figure (on the right in Agostino’s copy in reverse) appears more masculine due to knotted brow and facial shading that approximates a slight beard. Its head cloth suggests, however, that the wearer is a woman. In either case, both habitués of the cemetery are represented as ugly, old, stolid, and masculinelooking. The fundamental medical principles of humoral theory, inherited from antiquity and still predominant, meant that the dried-up state of old women brought their bodies closer to men’s. Men were innately heated and dry, in contrast to the natural state of women as cold and wet, but old age disrupted that balance. Unease about non-idealized female bodies is evident in Horace’s description of the witch Folia as having a “masculine libido,” implying that she is a tribade and sexual predator.94 90

Konrad Oberhuber, ed., The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 27, The Works of Marcantonio Raimondi and of His School (New York: Abaris, 1978), 126, nos. 456–7. Enea Vico produced the 1542 version (an example of which is in the Ashmolean Museum). Agostino Veneziano’s signed engraving of two men in a graveyard may represent necromancy: Emison, “Truth and Bizzarria,” 627, fig. 7. 91 Horace, Satires 1.8.14–50 (two barefooted witches, Canidia and the Elder Sagana, search for bones and set a fire in the Esquiline graveyard); Epodes 5.100, 17.58. Lucan’s Erictho is one of many other ancient witches who frequent graves and tombs (Bellum civile 6.511–2 and 5.641–3). 92 Paolo Grillandi, Tractatus de sortilegiis (Frankfurt, 1592), 53–4 (written c. 1525). 93 Simplicio, “Italy,” 575 notes three executions between 1505 and 1524. 94 Horace, Epode 5.41 (“masculae libidinis”); Bernadette J. Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 35; Stratton, Naming the Witch, 79–83. Denigration of women, some of whom are witches, in Italian fourteenth- and fifteenth-century poetry includes the comment that they are bearded: Bettella, Ugly Woman, 58, 61, 63, 68–9. On humoral theory see Patricia Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 125–57, 184.

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It has been argued that in historical circumstances as well as in cultural i­ magery the typical witch was not only old but also fundamentally associated with Invidia (Envy), which was represented as a hag with sagging breasts, a form asserted to be Ovidian. Hence, a recent exhibition on the representation of witches from the fifteenth century to the present day claimed that the old hag “beyond the age of childbearing” was “understood to be overwhelmed by envy of fertility and youthful beauty.”95 But there are several problems with this conflation, as we shall see. Firstly, wizened breasts are not part of Ovid’s description of Invidia at all. Secondly, they rarely appear in classical or medieval culture, and when they do, they are not associated with witches; and only in the unusual case of a few obscure figurines, unknown during the Renaissance, is Envy perhaps shown thus. Rather, the exaggeratedly empty breasts signify ugliness, extreme old age, or the allegorical figure of Fury. The combination of witch with Envy and with drooping breasts takes place over the course of the sixteenth century, bringing together misogyny and allegory, blending ancient and medieval strands. By the late fifteenth century, and even more widely by the 1530s, the aged woman with shrunken breasts had become the stock figure of Envy, and by the 1580s this visual rhetoric was perhaps a sign of the witch.96 The thin, ugly old woman, in other words, is not always a witch.97 The promiscuous, ugly, and often old woman is a staple of ancient Roman invective, frequently accused of having a loose vagina (from overuse) and overlarge breasts.98 An old woman’s sagging breasts are relatively rare, even in satire, appearing in one of Horace’s misogynist diatribes as festering, “flabby breasts, like a mare’s teats,” and in two epigrams by Martial, one of which compares a woman’s breasts to spider’s webs, but neither of which specifies that a witch is the target.99 Usually, the witch of antiquity was withered, leathery, old, and sometimes pallid—rhetoric often repeated, as it later 95

Deanna Petherbridge, Witches and Wicked Bodies (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2013), 14, see also 21, 26. For the misreading of Ovid’s figure of Invidia as having sagging breasts see Lyndal Roper, The Witch in the Western Imagination (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 92, 100. 96 Roper, Witch in the Western Imagination, 87–116, especially Pencz’s woodcut of 1534 and the illustrated title page of a book published in the German vernacular in 1582 (fig. 4.11), though the latter is about the “Envy Devil” rather than witches per se (107). For Lomazzo (1584), and for Mantegna and Leonardo in the 1470s–80s, see below. 97 See n. 3 for the distinction between “crone” and “hag” as used in this essay. 98 Richlin, “Invective,” 67–80. 99 Horace, Epode 8.7–8: “mammae putres/equina quales ubera”; Martial, Epigrams, 3.72.3, 3.93.5 (“araneorum cassibus pares mammas”).

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was by Pico and in engravings by Raimondi, Agostino Veneziano, and others (Figs. 8.3–8.5, 8.8)—but her breasts occasion no comment.100 Pendulous breasts were thus a misogynist visual trope for the crone in antiquity, not an attribute of the witch, but they were sometimes attributed to demonic entities. In the first century bce, Varro’s third Fury, vindictive Infamy, was an unbounded, disorderly creature “with loose flowing breast [and] uncut hair.”101 Two unrestrained bodily elements, hair and breasts, succinctly capture the uncontrolled, excessive nature of fearsome female figures. The grotesque witch of the Renaissance was visually similar to ancient, terrifying creatures like the Fates, the Furies, and Medusa. These figures had already featured in illustrations to medieval texts, most notably Dante’s Divine Comedy.102 Snakes in their hair, the Furies ululate and obstruct Orpheus in the underworld in Angelo Poliziano’s Favola d’Orfeo (c. 1480), epitomized in the woodcut of the c. 1500 publication by a naked, snake-entwined hag, emaciated, old, with sagging breasts and long windblown hair.103 The hag with the attribute of tangled snakes occurred in the work of artists like Giulio Bonasone, Andrea Riccio, and Giulio Romano because she was the Medusa-like Fury or other native of the underworld drawn from such classical sources as Virgil’s Aeneid 6. All these evil Furies and related monsters in Renaissance art amalgamate the vivid, nasty presence of ancient creations with medieval traditions. For instance, demons portrayed in the Florentine Picture Chronicle of the 1470s are generated from medieval marginalia and scenes of Hell, but the demon on the far right rushing through the air to assist Hostanes (Fig. 8.1), above a snake-infested Fury-like creature, may have a more complex genealogy. Endowed with wings, bird feet, and beak, it also exhibits two dangling breasts and may be the earliest post-classical depiction of the ancient strix in full 100 Apuleius, Metamorphoses 1.8 (Meroe as a “scortum scorteum,” “leathery old whore”), 1.12; Horace, Epode 5.98 (“obscenas anus”); Lucan, Bellum civile 6.515–8; Ovid, Amores 1.8.2, 14 (“quaedam nomine Dipsas anus,” “corpus anile”); Propertius, Elegies 4.5.67; Pico, Strix, D vi recto (“vetulae rugosae”). For the Roman witch as old, usually drunk, see Elizabeth Ann Pollard, “Witch-Crafting in Roman Literature and Art: New Thoughts on an Old Image,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 3 (2008): 119–55. Pollard associates the type with several statues of old women displaying one or two sagging breasts, but cites no texts for the detail. 101 Sullivan, “Witches,” 386 (Varro, Eumenides, fragment 123). 102 For example, a Dante codex of c. 1330: Mario d’Onofrio, ed., Romei e Giubilei (Milan: Electa, 1999), 410, no. 215. 103 Angelo Poliziano, Poesie italiane, ed. Saverio Orlando (Milan: Rizzoli, 1976), 119–20, 124. Orpheus encountered Furies with snakes entwined in their hair: Virgil, Georgics 4.482–3.

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flight.104 The Florentine demon, Horace’s satirized victim Folia, Varro’s Infamy, and Ovid’s Famine, whose “breast seemed to be hanging free and just to be held by the framework of the spine” (“pendere putares / pectus et a ­spinae tantummodo crate teneri,” Metamorphoses 8.805–6), demonstrate that drooping breasts primarily signified ugly, aged, and female bodies that were demeaned by being pictured as beyond normative standards and controls. The misogynist trope of pendent breasts continued in medieval literature. Believing all women were “too demonic,” around 1295 a French cleric bemoaned his marriage to a widow, describing her snake-like “feminine malice” and ugly body, including breasts, once admired but now “empty, black, stretched, and wrinkled like a shepherd’s bag.”105 Around 1355, Boccaccio’s misogynist satire Corbaccio similarly denigrated a wife’s flaccid breasts, “empty and wrinkled like a deflated bladder.”106 Thus is she depicted in a manuscript of the satire illustrated in the 1370s or 1420s, personifying the sins of Luxuria and Pride as she gazes at herself in a mirror, rouged and pursing her reddened lips, a creature of artifice and deception.107 Rather than covering herself modestly with the pudica gesture at genitals or breasts, she points with her left hand to the explicit details of pubic hair and red vulva. As the epitome of ridiculed old age, the crone also appears in other visual imagery, crouched beside the Fountain of Youth in the Castello della Manta at Saluzzo, for instance, dugs hanging.108 Boccaccio’s phrasing and Martial’s arachnoid image jointly inspired poems by fifteenth-century humanist Angelo Poliziano in which lengthy descriptions 104 Less birdlike, but still with dangling teats, a demon standing on the ground assaults Abbâ Moses the Indian in a Tuscan Thebaid of the 1440s: J. Byam Shaw, Paintings by Old Masters at Christ Church Oxford (London: Phaidon, 1967), 40–5, cat. no. 23. 105 For the Latin, and a French translation of c. 1371–2, see Jehan Le Fèvre, Les lamentations de Matheolus, ed. A.-G. Van Hamel (Paris: Bouillon, 1892), 4 (line 169, “Trop est femme demonieuse”), 20 (lines 660–1, “malice femenin”), 21 (lines 681–4, “Le pis a dur et les mamelles,/Qui tant souloient ester belles,/Sont froncies, noires, souillies/Com bourses de bergier mouillies”). 106 Giovanni Boccaccio, Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, Corbaccio, ed. Francesco Erbani (Milan: Garzanti, 1988), 272 (“vote o vizze che sia una vescica sgonfiata”); Boccaccio, Corbaccio, trans. and ed. Anthony K. Cassell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 55. 107 Corbaccio, 128, n. 208, reproduced as the frontispiece. For a color reproduction see http:// opac.bml.firenze.sbn.it/Manuscript.htm?Segnatura=Plut.42.34. Paul Watson, “An immodest proposal concerning the Corbaccio,” Studi sul Boccaccio 16 (1987): 315–28 attributes it to Bartolomeo di Fruosino in the 1420s; others to the circle of Agnolo Gaddi in the 1370s: Boccaccio visualizzato, ed. Vittore Branca (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), vol. 2, 74–5, cat. no. 9. 108 For the frescoes, dated in the 1410s, see Steffi Roettgen, Italian Frescoes: The Early Renaissance (New York: Abbeville, 1996), 42–59, esp. pl. 13.

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of a crone included “wrinkled and empty breasts that look like a spider’s web.”109 In 1539 an anonymous author mocked Roman courtesans in terms echoing ancient rhetoric and Boccaccio, deriding their unnatural cosmetics and overused bodies, “wrinkled and dried out; their tits floppy, like deflated bladders hanging down.”110 Aretino in 1534 followed the lead of the French cleric, comparing “empty,” withered breasts to a male container when describing a nun who was casting incantations of love magic: “Her breasts dangled like a man’s bags, but without the seeds inside.”111 The male “bags” were scrota, partly masculinized yet infertile, lacking the essential semen that made a man. It is thus misleading to characterize such breasts as “phallic dugs” having a “virile hard teat,” because they are too small and shriveled, without the male fluid that most characterized the premodern phallus.112 Old, dried-out women became unnaturally masculine in certain respects according to medical t­ heory, but they did not become male or potent. The hag that emerged in Renaissance witch imagery thus combined medieval misogyny with ancient invective and allegorical iconography. Figures representing Infamia or satirizing Luxuria were joined by the personification of the vice of Invidia, which Pico regarded as the core motivation for demons.113 The conviction relies on the biblical adage, “Through the devil’s envy death entered the world” (Wisdom of Solomon 2.24). Theologians like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas reiterated the originary blame, which was cast also in Dante’s Inferno (1.111), always implicated with Eve’s succumbing to temptation and the consequent introduction of mortality.114 Furthermore, Envy had been one of 109 Poliziano, Poesie italiane, 158 (“Una vecchia mi vagheggia … le suo poppe vizze e vote paion propio ragnatelo”). The image is repeated, about an old woman’s very large, pendent, and putrid breasts, in Poliziano’s Latin poem “In Anum”: Prose Volgari inedite, Poesie Latine e Greche edite e inedite, ed. Isidoro del Lungo (Florence: Barbèra, 1867), 272, line 14 (“araneosis”). 110 Francisco Delicado (attrib.), Ragionamento del Zoppino, fatto frate, e Lodovico, puttaniere, dove contiensi la vita e genealogia di tutte le cortigiane di Roma, ed. Mario Cicognani (Milan: Longanesi, 1969), 27 (“Hanno il corpo, per il soverchio maneggiar, rugoso e crespo; le lor zinne fiappe, che paian vessiche sgonfie che gli cascano”) (first published in 1539). 111 Aretino, Sei Giornate, 37; Aretino’s Dialogues, 45. For the multiple senses of purses and money bags as testicles or wombs, see Simons, Sex of Men, 169–86. 112 The quotations are from Petherbridge, Witches and Wicked Bodies, 15; Roper, Witch in the Western Imagination, 18–19. On the importance of semen, see Simons, Sex of Men. 113 Pico, Strix, Bvi verso. 114 Various theologians are listed in Matthew G. Shoaf, “Eyeing Envy in the Arena Chapel,” Studies in Iconography 30 (2009): 165, n. 95. For an alternative, psychoanalytic reading of Envy, see Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil (London: Routledge, 1994), 203, 214–5; Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven: Yale University

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the Seven Deadly Sins since Pope Gregory had incorporated it into that ­classification system in the sixth century.115 There was a long theological and exegetical preparation for the association of envy with witches. In ancient literature and Greco-Roman art, Invidia is shown as a malicious, selfconsuming, choking, pallid, and emaciated entity, usually male, casting the evil eye and spells.116 Most surviving Hellenistic-Roman figurines of Invidia are male, with the genitals exaggerated for apotropaic effect. The rare surviving instances of Envy depicted in female form show her with breasts (in one case, drooping) and usually pulling apart a large gash in her chest, but these few terracotta and bronze objects from the eastern Mediterranean were not known during the Renaissance. The old witch was classical in inspiration but rarely if ever visualized, and the wizen-breasted, envious hag was a later merger of ancient and medieval tropes. Influential instead was Ovid’s casting of Invidia not as a male figure but as a hag who infects Aglauros with jealousy over beautiful Mercury’s attraction to her sister Herse (Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.760–832).117 Ovid’s Envy is pallid and shriveled, her eyesight is warped, venom drips from her tongue, and “pectora felle virent” (“green, poisonous gall o’erflows her breast,” 2.777), which is not, however, described as withered. She eats snakes, but they do not infest her hair or haunt her surroundings. Her body is decayed and sluggish, though she is not specifically old, and her target is a young, unmarried woman who rages with desire but who does not mention reproduction or fertility.118 At the sight of anyone’s success, Envy “gnaws and is gnawed, herself her own punishment” (“carpitque et carpitur una / suppliciumque suum est,” 2.781–2). Such is the inspiration for Giotto’s allegory of the vice frescoed in the Arena Chapel of Padua around 1305.119 Raging flames at her feet devour the p ­ ersonified

115 116

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Press, 2004), 61–3, 80, 125, 135, 168; Roper, Witch in the Western Imagination, 15–24, 87–116. It is not clear that “envy” appeared much in trial documents. Ovid, Virgil, and the Wisdom of Solomon are amongst the sources cited in Sachs’s poem on Envy (Roper, Witch in the Western Imagination, fig. 4.4). Shoaf, “Eyeing Envy,” 126–32. Katherine M.D. Dunbabin and M.W. Dickie, “Invidia rumpantur pectora: The Iconography of Phthonos/Invidia in Graeco-Roman Art,” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 26 (1983): 7–37. Ovid’s version is still cited as authoritative by Gabriele Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, trans. William McCuaig (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012), 286 (first published in 1582). Compare Roper, Witch in the Western Imagination, 100: “The idea that envy is fundamentally about fertility lies at the heart of the myth of Aglauros in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for it is Herse’s sexual union with Mercury that Aglauros envies.” Shoaf, “Eyeing Envy,” fig. 2.

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figure, while her tongue has become a snake that bites her own vicious, twisted eyes. She is aging, but heavily draped; her breasts are indicated by highlights on her clothing, but they are an attribute of her volumetric body rather than indicating poison or sterility. So too do Ovid’s vivid details recur in Alciato’s text in the Emblemata for the emblem of Invidia (1531), snake-eating, pallid, emaciated, and eating at herself. Only in the woodcut illustrations first issued in 1546 does Alciato’s book convey the notion that Invidia has hollowed-out breasts. That feature had not appeared in descriptions of malicious Envy by Boccaccio and Lorenzo de’ Medici either, each of whom focus on her as the mortal enemy of love.120 In German Renaissance art, the allegorical figure of Envy first appears with Georg Pencz’s woodcut of 1534 illustrating Hans Sachs’s poem on Invidia. While the horned, bat-winged creature devours herself and a snake slithers up her leg, a large spider crawls up one of the crone’s sagging breasts and, as in Ovid, a long stream of bile suppurates from the other.121 That the later edition of Sachs’s poem in 1553 instead features a male figure suggests that Invidia is not being typed at either time as a witch. Peter Flötner’s figure in his plaquette of Invidia (c. 1540), in a series on the Vices, adopts a similar stance and retains the sagging dugs but displays even fewer signs of being a witch, for elements like the snake, spider, and bat wings are gone. She gnaws at her dripping heart, watched by a snarling dog that chillingly embodies the envy of the hungry. Thus, over the course of the sixteenth century, Invidia appears as a crone with wilted breasts.122 The loose-breasted crone is, though, sometimes equally a snake-tressed, Hydra-girt Fury, as drawn in the 1480s or 1490s by Botticelli at Dante’s infernal city of Dis filled with heretics, or as described around one 120 Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Filocolo, trans. Donald Cheney with Thomas G. Bergin (New York: Garland, 1985), 173–4, 176–7 (3.24, 27); Lorenzo de’ Medici, Tutte le opere, ed. Paolo Orvieto (Rome: Salerno, 1992), vol. 1, 553–8 (the Selve of 1486–92). Invidia remains the opponent of desire and thus is exiled in Bronzino’s painting of Venus dated c. 1550 and now in Budapest: Janet Cox-Rearick’s entry in Bronzino: Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici, ed. Carlo Falciani and Antonio Natali (Florence: Mandragora, 2010), 210–11, no. 4.5. She is a pallid, hunched “mulier decrepita” and the controller of courtship in Leon Battista Alberti, Intercenales, ed. Franco Bacchelli and Luca D’Ascia (Bologna: Pendragon, 2003), 170, 244. 121 Roper, Witch in the Western Imagination, fig. 4.4. 122 Eating vipers, a shriveled Envy with sagging breasts appears in Rosso’s drawing of Pandora releasing numerous ills (c. 1536–8), and the creature craning her neck in his Allegory of Death and Fame (1517) may be Envy, although nothing marks her as such except the breasts (Carroll, Rosso, 54–8, 298–301, nos. 2, 95). Rosso also depicted several old women, including St. Anne and Judith’s servant, as wrinkled crones.

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hundred years later by Lomazzo in his chapter on the Furies, where Invidia is endowed with “breasts in the guise of two dried bladders, falling from the chest.”123 But the most impressive visualization of the envious crone occurs in Mantegna’s Battle of the Sea Gods from the 1470s or early 1480s (Fig. 8.6). Here, the clothed allegorical figure evident in Giotto’s fresco, and depicted as a stolid, attribute-laden, and heavily garbed woman in a North Italian engraving of Invidia dated c. 1460–80, was transformed from a visual notation to an integrated narrative character of dramatic urgency.124 Explicitly labeled Invidia by the ansate tablet she holds, the screaming figure with long windblown hair, emaciated body, and drooping breasts combines, for the first time, Invidia with the desiccated crone in a classicized narrative. Tritons, Nereids, and sea monsters engage in a noisy battle set against a marshy shore lit by strong moonlight. Lomazzo probably had this engraving in mind when discussing the difficult depiction of night lighting, praising the ingenuity of such diverse fantasies and capricci as “lunar places like rivers, swamps and other locations” with “aquatic animals, marine monsters, river nymphs, … and the like.”125 Mantegna ignores most of Ovid’s account of Invidia and drops elements like snake-eating that would isolate the figure as an allegorical outsider in the midst of an animated brawl. He keeps the ugly crone and her crucial emaciation, however, which here sufficiently conveys the obliteration of self-destructive envy. She has what Dante had called the “shameless eyes” of Envy, embodying the meretrice (harlot) that was “the common scourge 123 Dante, Inferno 9.37–42; Sebastiano Gentile, ed., Sandro Botticelli: Pittore della Divina Commedia (Milan: Skira, 2000), vol. 2, 56–9; Lomazzo, Trattato, 674–5 (7.32, “le poppe à guisa di due bozzacchie crespe, cadenti dal petto”), added after a quotation from Ovid’s passage on Invidia. Ariosto’s snake-ridden Fury is a fiendish monster derived from Ovid who gnaws on herself like Invidia (Orlando Furioso, 42.58). 124 Jane Martineau, ed., Mantegna (London: Royal Academy of the Arts, 1992), 285–90, nos. 79–81. For Leonardo’s five allegorical drawings of Invidia with sagging breasts (c. 1481– 94), see A.E. Popham, The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci (London: Jonathan Cape, 1946), 116–20, nos. 104, 106–8, 109 B; Alessandro Nova, “The Kite, Envy and a Memory of Leonardo da Vinci’s Childhood,” in Coming About … A Festschrift for John Shearman, ed. Lars R. Jones and Louisa C. Matthew (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Art Museums, 2001), 381–6 (which reproduces the anonymous engraving, a copy of which is in the Rijksmuseum). 125 Lomazzo, Trattato, 305–6 (6.27, “vari & diversi capricci de i pittori, tutte quelle historie, fantasie, inventioni, … altri luochi Lunari come fiumi, palludi, & altri, dove no si possono fare pitture, … fatti Lunari, come fatti di animali acquatici, mostri marini, ninfe di fiumi, caccie, girandole, scherzo simplici, giuochi ninfali, come di correre & simili”). I am not sure that anyone has noted the nocturnal setting, evident in the dark shading over the hill city between Invidia and Neptune.

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and vice of courts.”126 Craning forward and looking at the mirror like Luxuria, she screeches at herself, her Evil Eye and self-destructive force engendering the fury around her. Here and in other depictions, including Cristofano Robetta’s later engraving (c. 1500–10) identified by scholars as an Allegory of Envy, the sagging breasts signify age, ugliness, barrenness, and corrosion both corporeal and psychological.127 On the basis of the Biblical text about devilish envy, Dürer adapted Mantegna’s screaming crone amid monsters in a nocturnal marsh into the old figure flying on a goat (Fig. 8.5), imaginatively transferring her into the pictorial world of witchcraft, a conceit that was then followed in the Stregozzo (Fig. 8.3). Neither Dürer’s audience nor the artist himself necessarily associated his printed image of the flying crone with Invidia. Closer to a parodic rendition of Vulgar Venus, the pose of the wiry figure recalls much of the upper body in Mantegna’s engraving, but the figure crucially has more substantial, firmer breasts than the pendulous ones of the Italian Invidia and thus does not invoke the vice’s bodily degeneration. Even in later sixteenth-century imagery, Envy is not necessarily the primary connotation of naked old women depicted with wizened bodies; the chief reference instead clusters around post-menopausal age, ugliness, excess, and marginalization. The figure of the crone with sagging breasts, like the ultimately similar figure of the witch, arose from a variety of ancient and medieval strands, and one needs to distinguish among such genres as theology, allegory, poetry, invective, satire, and history when discussing this visual evidence and its various strategies and allusions. Envy seems to have been rarely mentioned in witch trials and confessions. When sermons and other religious writings broach the subject, the context is the theological tradition discussed above. The psychoanalytic reading of the witch as envious, an interpretation that has been applied to both trials and images, conflates different discourses, genres, and historical periods. Furthermore, images bear little relation to trial documents, as Lyndal Roper has pointed out, though in many ways it would also have been heretical to confer substantive presence on the diabolical by picturing 126 Dante, Inferno 13.64–6 (“gli occhi putti, morte commune, delle corti vizio”). 127 For an alternative reading, based on German material, that emphasizes the breasts of old witches as postmenopausal and defines envy as “at the root the desire to prevent generation and creation,” see Roper, Witch in the Western Imagination, 100 and passim; see n. 118 above. The single infant seated at the lower left of Robetta’s engraving is a virtual signature and does not primarily indicate the successful, widespread fertility of the embracing couples envied by the crone. For the engraving see Jay Levenson et al., Early Italian Engravings from the National Gallery of Art (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1973), 298–9.

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it as a physical reality.128 All the more, then, might we need to treat early modern images of witches as neither historical records nor statements of personal beliefs by the artists regarding perceived dangers and realities of witchcraft. Like the artists, viewers of images in illustrated books, single sheets, and other forms, such as Dossi’s painting, might have been more fascinated by exercises in pictorial imagination and phantasmagoric seduction than invested in beliefs concerning the diabolical nature of experienced reality. Although most witches were women and nearly all of the representations of witchcraft heavily focused on female participants, the ancient tradition of rendering Invidia in male form was also revived during the Renaissance. Lucian’s description of the famous Calumny painted by Apelles included a pale, thin male figure of Envy, a masculine gendering repeated by Leon Battista Alberti in his treatise on painting (c. 1435), which was followed in Botticelli’s c. 1494 panel of the subject and in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment fresco (1541).129 Despite the influence of Ovid, then, the iconography of Envy took time to stabilize, varying in gender and displaying a range of attributes and actions, and this process did not focus exclusively on witches. Following a late medieval tradition, Leonardo twice choose to show the vice as a rider, on skeletal Death or on a repugnant toad, and perhaps it was this pattern that Dürer recalled when placing his Invidia-derived witch on an animal (Fig.  8.5).130 In fact, Mantegna’s Invidia is also a rider (Fig.  8.6), though standing rather than seated on a marine monster directed by a somewhat dismayed youth who is overridden and overtaken. Mantegna’s iconographic innovation and thoughtful engagement with classical as well as medieval allegory is a case study in the complexity of classical reception during the Renaissance, pointing to assimilation alongside invention. Images of witches and demons were syncretistic and eclectic in inspiration, drawn from classical literature, ancient and medieval misogyny, centuries of theological rhetoric, and newer trends in scholarship. There was no straightforward relationship between, say, 128 Roper, Witch in the Western Imagination, 1–2. 129 Lucian, Slander 5; Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, ed. and trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972), 96–7 (3.53); Gentile, Sandro Botticelli, vol. 1, 156–7, no. 4.13. See Roper, Witch in the Western Imagination, 200, n. 16 for German prints of a male Envy. On the theme, see David Cast, The Calumny of Apelles. A Study in the Humanist Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). For Michelangelo’s representation, see Patricia Simons, “Envy and the Other Vices in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment,” Source 33, no. 2 (2014): 13–20. 130 Popham, Drawings of Leonardo, 117–9, nos. 107–8. For an overview of the riding type, see Simona Cohen, Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 19–22.

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representations of Invidia, crones, and witches, but there was a telling overlap, as there was with other Vices and with such ancient figures as the Furies and Medusa. A broad range of visual culture directed, demonstrated, and affirmed official discourse, creating and validating it in vivid, captivating, credible, fantastically horrible ways. Clear polarities outlined in the mid-twentieth century by w ­ riters like Bakhtin and Clark between grotesque and ideal, naked and nude, realism and classicism, are compelling no more. The force and authority of the classical heritage contributed a powerful cast of characters and settings as well as graphic language, much of it deployed in public contexts in order to consolidate institutional and personal power. Yet at other times, as we have seen with Dosso’s Circe, ancient literature furnished a vehicle for the exploration of ambiguity, empathy, and emotion. For some, antiquity provided validating proof; for others, it was an avenue for exercises in delusion and illusion, tying into key intellectual debates about the nature of evidence, the ways in which the past could be interpreted, and the precise status of classical culture as admirable or suspect. Dreamland and underworld were each derived from ancient culture, supplying the pleasing pastoral landscape behind Circe but also the thrilling lunar lighting and swamp of the Stregozzo. A key reason for the use of the hag as the stereotype of the witch, I suggest, was that the superficial charms of the incubus, succubus, and devil were by that means deliberately denied; those humans they successfully seduced were mockingly visualized as desperate, ugly, and impotent. Viewers were imaginatively and psychically distanced from an empathetic connection with people horrendously burned at the stake while simultaneously being offered widespread representations of the figure as a symbolic encapsulation of menacing evil. Similarly, Envy was considered the twin or interlocked opposite of Love, as the popular early fourteenth-century Fior di Virtu insisted through numerous paraphrases from church authorities, and as Leonardo restated.131 Compelling, intense images of emotions like fury, envy, and lust acknowledge their hold yet simultaneously control how they are imagined and help viewers to distance themselves, and thus to feel safe and superior, by such strategies as allegory, exaggeration, and disfigurement, all rendered more authoritative by reference to classical antiquity. 131 Nicholas Fersin, trans., The Florentine Fior di Virtu of 1491 (Washington, d.c.: Library of Congress, 1953), 19–21 (first published around 1471 in Milan or Venice, and issued 66 times by 1500); Popham, Drawings of Leonardo, 117–8, no. 107. The idea is not novel in seventeenth-century emblems, which are discussed in Roper, Witch in the Western Imagination, 17.

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chapter 9

Picturing Rape and Revenge in Ovid’s Myth of Philomela Hetty E. Joyce Only a fraction of the stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses became popular subjects in the visual arts. That the tale of Philomela, Procne, and Tereus (6.424–674) was not one of these is hardly surprising, for of the many Greek myths recounting betrayal, rape, torture, and murderous revenge, this one may be the worst. It is not the story of a “heroic rape,” in which the aggressor is a god or hero, but rather concerns the abuse of power by a cruel and deceitful king. Ovid tells of how Tereus, king of Thrace, married the Athenian princess Procne, daughter of King Pandion. Five years later, at Procne’s request, he sailed to Athens to fetch her sister Philomela for a visit. He was immediately seized by a passionate desire for the beautiful virgin, and after arriving with her in his own country, he dragged her off to a hut in the woods and raped her. In order to silence Philomela’s threats to expose the crime, he cut out her tongue. Then, after forcing himself on her again repeatedly, he returned to his wife, telling her that her sister had died on the journey. Guarded in the hut to prevent her escape, the girl made use of a “barbarian loom” on which, in the course of a year, she wove “purple marks on white threads in witness to the crime” (purpureasque notas filis intexuit albis/indicium sceleris; 6.577–8). With gestures, she persuaded a female servant to deliver the finished tapestry to her sister, who upon reading it became speechlessly enraged. Under cover of a Bacchic festival, Procne freed Philomela from the hut, and to avenge Tereus’ wrongs, the sisters murdered Tereus and Procne’s young son Itys, dismembering, boiling, and roasting the body into a meal for the unsuspecting father. As Tereus dined, blood-spattered Philomela rushed into the room and flung Itys’ head at him. The horrified and furious king pursued the women with drawn sword until all three were changed into birds: a nightingale and a swallow pursued eternally by a hoopoe. The tale was already an old one when Ovid told it: Earlier treatments had included a Tereus by Aeschylus’ nephew Philocles, part of his Pandionis tetralogy (set of four plays), now lost, as well as Sophocles’ tragedy of Tereus, which survives only in fragments; these works must also have depended on earlier

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sources.1 Aristotle comments in the Poetics (54b) on the construction of the Tereus, citing Philomela’s revelatory fabric—“the voice of the shuttle” (ἡ τῆϛ κερκίδοϛ φωνή), in Sophocles’ phrase—as an example of a poetic device that aids in anagnorisis, the change from ignorance to knowledge. But Aristotle disapproves of Sophocles’ use of the cloth as the vehicle of revelation, considering it contrived and inartistic. The surviving manuscript tradition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses begins in the ninth century in France and continues virtually uninterrupted into the Renaissance.2 In addition to editions of the Latin text, there were numerous translations into the vernacular in poetry and prose; retellings, condensations, and bowdlerizations; texts with added moralizing interpretations; and picturebooks with little text. The best-known of the later versions are two early fourteenth-century works: the Ovide moralisé, whose imbedded Old French tale of Philomena has been attributed to Chrétien de Troyes (written about 1170);3 and Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, which omits the sisters’ revenge entirely, however, ending the story with their reunion in the woods.4 John Gower’s late fourteenth-century Confessio Amantis (The Lover’s Confession) also includes the story of Philomela.5



I am very grateful to Alison Poe and Marice Rose for their thoughtful comments and suggestions regarding earlier versions of this study. Any errors that remain are my own. 1 Anne Pippin Burnett, Revenge in Attic and Later Tragedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 177–91. 2 Ralph Hexter, “Ovid in the Middle Ages: Exile, Mythographer, and Lover,” in Brill’s Companion to Ovid, ed. Barbara Weiden Boyd (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002), 413–42; John Richmond, “Manuscript Traditions and the Transmission of Ovid’s Works,” in Boyd, Ovid, 443–59, 469–74; Frank T. Coulson, “Procne and Philomela in the Latin Commentary Tradition of the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” Euphrosyne 36 (2008): 181–96. 3 Cornelis de Boer, Philomena, conte raconté d’après Ovide par Chretien de Troyes; pub. d’après tous les manuscrits de l’Ovide moralisé avec introduction, notes, index de toutes les formes et iii appendices (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1909); Roger Cormier, ed. and trans., Three Ovidian Tales of Love, Garland Library of Medieval Literature, ser. A, vol 26 (New York and London: Garland, 1986), 183–9, 200–65; Ana Poiret, “Recasting the Metamorphoses in Fourteenth-Century France: The Challenges of the Ovide moralisé,” in James G. Clark, Frank T. Coulson, and Kathryn L. McKinley, ed., Ovid in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 83–107. 4 Sheila Delany, The Naked Text: Chaucer’s “Legend of Good Women” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994): 213–21; Paul Beekman Taylor, Chaucer’s Chain of Love (Madison, nj: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 57–70. 5 Carolyn Dinshaw, “Rivalry, Rape and Manhood: Gower and Chaucer,” in Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange, els Monograph Series 51, ed. Robert F. Yeager (University of Victoria, bc, 1991), 130–42; Bruce Herbert, “The Myth of Tereus in Ovid and Gower,” Medium

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In the Metamorphoses, the production of Philomela’s tapestry is the only quiet interval in a story filled with vivid violence, physical and psychological. It is the pivot on which the tale turns, galvanizing the mourning Procne into action and transforming the victimized women into fierce avengers. Although Ovid devotes only three lines to Philomela’s weaving (6.576–578), feminist critics of the poem and its descendants consider this scene the most significant in the story, as it lies at the intersection of three of their major concerns: physical violence against women; the cultural silencing of women; and the undervaluing of women artists, particularly those working in the traditionally feminine “craft” of textile.6 For Katherine Kruger, “Philomela’s achievement consists in her ability to transform wool into an instrument of symbolic and semiotic power. … Both the decision to act and the action itself constitute the most important event in the story.”7 Charles Segal emphasizes the identification of Ovid’s work with Philomela; “Behind Philomela’s weaving is Ovid’s own web of words (textus) that recreates events which are spectacular for their suppression of speech. … Philomela’s weaving is both the art-work of the tale and the agency of a vengeance that changes the face of nature.”8 James Heffernan regards aevum 41 (1972): 208–14; Amanda M. Leff, “Writing, Gender, and Power in Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” Exemplaria 20, no. 1 (2008): 28–47; Kathryn McKinley, “Lessons for a King from Gower’s Confessio Amantis 5,” in Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Alison Keith and Stephen Rupp (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2007), 107–28. 6 Patricia Kleindienst Joplin, “The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours,” Stanford Literature Review 1, no. 1 (1984): 25–53, reprinted in Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World: Readings and Sources, ed. Laura K. McClure (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2002), 259–86; Elissa Marder, “Disarticulated Voices: Feminism and Philomela,” Hypatia 7, no. 2 (1992): 156–62; James M. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashberry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 46–53; E. Jane Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 115–50; Charles Segal, “Philomela’s Web and the Pleasures of the Text: Reader and Violence in the Metamorphoses of Ovid,” in Modern Critical Theory and Classical Literature, ed. Irene de Jong and J.P. Sullivan (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994), 258–80; Jane O. Newman, “‘And Let Mild Women to Him Lose Their Mildness’: Philomela, Female Violence, and Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 310; Katherine Sullivan Kruger, Weaving the Word: The Metaphorics of Weaving and Female Textual Production (Selinsgrove, pa: Susquehanna University Press, 2001), 59–65; Patricia B. Salzman-Mitchell, A Web of Fantasies: Gaze, Image, and Gender in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2005), 139–49; and more generally, Roszika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, 2nd ed. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010). 7 Kruger, Weaving the Word, 60. 8 Segal, “Philomela’s Web,” 265–6.

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Philomela’s power to speak—that is, the power of words—as “woven into and bound up with the power of pictures to speak—to break through the silence in which they, like women, are traditionally bound.”9 Patricia Joplin argues that “Philomela and her loom speak to us because together they represent an assertion of the will to survive despite everything that threatens to silence us.”10 Modern literary critics have thus attributed profound significance to Philomela’s weaving, but late medieval and Renaissance artists, patrons, and audiences seem to have had very different concerns: Even when the myth of Philomela is included in the repertory of illustrations of Ovid’s poem, her fabrication of the pivotal textile remains unrepresented until the very end of our period. There is little agreement among narrators of the story as to exactly what Philomela wove. Ovid describes the tapestry as “purple marks on white cloth,” but notae can be understood as either images or letters or even physical marks like bruises, and intexuit can be understood as either weaving or composition.11 The author of the Old French Philomena clearly imagines a figured tapestry when he praises the skill with which the princess wove varicolored threads into the complete story of her sufferings, from the ship that brought her from Athens to her imprisonment in the woods (Ovide moralisé 6.3305–3349). Chaucer, however, goes to some trouble to explain that while Philomela can read she cannot write with a pen, “but lettres can she weven to and fro” (Legend of Good Women 7.2350–65). Gower describes a cloth with “lettres and ymagerie.”12 Patricia Salzman-Mitchell suggests that it is precisely because Ovid seems to “suppress her capacity for visual representation” by failing to describe the contents of Philomela’s tapestry, women as viewers and creators construct the missing imagery to “find what is behind the appearances.”13 9 Heffernan, Museum of Words, 49. 10 Joplin, “The Voice of the Shuttle,” 54. Carla Mazzio characterizes the tendency “to read the prototypical severing of female hand and tongue, instruments of self-expression, as indicative of larger strategies of patriarchal self-inscription in early modern Europe,” but points out that the myth of Philomela has also been appropriated by male poets (Mazzio, “Sins of the Tongue,” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Mazzio (New York and London: Routledge, 1997): 62–3. 11 Heffernan, Museum of Words, 47; Marder, “Disarticulated Voices,” 60; Salzman-Mitchell, A Web of Fantasies, 144–6; Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 4–5. 12 “And tho withinne a whyle als tyt/Sche waf a cloth of Selk al whyt/With lettres and ymagerie,/ In which was al the felonie,/Which Tereus to hire hath do” (Confessio Amantis 5.5769–73). 13 Salzman-Mitchell, A Web of Fantasies, 148. Heffernan ruefully notes the inconvenience of Ovid, Chaucer, and Gower not having “much to say about the weaving of pictures representing the rape” (Heffernan, Museum of Words, 61).

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The myth of Philomela has a long history of visual representation, though there is a considerable gap between its appearance in fifth-century Athens and its reappearance in the early modern period. Several Attic red-figure vases depict events at the end of the story: Itys seized by Procne and Philomela on the interior of a cup in Paris (Louvre 147.1); Procne plunging a sword into Itys’ throat on the interior of a cup in Munich (Antikensammlungen 2638); and the sisters confronting Tereus, the gruesome remains of the feast in a box below the couch on which he reclines, on a krater in Rome (Villa Giulia 3579).14 Athenians of the Pandionis tribe, whose eponymous hero was King Pandion, especially honored Procne rather than her sister, admiring her determination to avenge the insult to her father’s—and Athens’—honor, which had outweighed her natural maternal instincts. A statue of Procne and Itys by Alcamenes, c. 430 bce, stood at the corner of the Acropolis, near the Nike bastion.15 But these works were unknown in the medieval and early modern periods, and there was nothing in the ancient pictorial tradition to guide the artists who illuminated the manuscripts and, later, those who illustrated the printed texts of the Metamorphoses.16 Carla Lord describes Rouen Bibliothèque Municipal ms 0.4, with 453 illuminations, as “the ancestor of all surviving illustrated manuscripts of the Ovide

14

Ludi Chazalon, “Le mythe de Térée, Procnè et Philomèle dans les images attiques,” Métis, N.S. 1 (2003): 119–48; Aurélie Damet, “‘L’infamille’. Les violences familiales sur la céramique classique entre monstration et occultation,” Images Re-vues 9 (2011), http://imagesrevues .revues.org/1606. The representation of the myth on tableware is particularly apt, if horrifying. Tereus’ feast reappears (certainly coincidentally) on maiolica dishes in the 1530s: Baldassare Manara: Göteborg, Röhsska Konstlöjdmuseet, inv. no. Ker 114 (Carmen Ravanelli Guidotti, Baldassare Manara Faetino: Pittore di maioliche nel Cinquecento [Ferrara: Belriguardo, 1996], 108–11); Francesco Xanto Avelli: Venice, Museo Correr, Cl. iv no. 0025 (Jacqueline Petruzzellis-Scherer, “Fonti iconografiche delle opera dell’ Avelli al Museo Correr di Venezia,” in Francesco Xanto Avelli da Rovigo, Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, ed. Giambattista Siviero [Rovigo: Accademia dei Concordi, 1988], 124–5, no. 5, fig. 5; J.V.G. Mallet, Xanto: Pottery-Painter, Poet, Man of the Italian Renaissance (London: The Wallace Collection, 2007) 197, no. 238. 15 Athens, Acropolis 1358; G.P. Stevens, “The Northeast Corner,” Hesperia 15 (1946): 10–1. 16 Representations of tales from the Metamorphoses known to Renaissance artists include Leda and the Swan, Venus and Adonis, Ganymede and the Eagle, Phaeton, Apollo and Marsyas, Daedalus and Icarus, Pentheus (interpreted as the death of Orpheus), Hermaphrodite, the Niobids, and Meleager, but not Philomela (Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth O. Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture [London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1986], 47, 52–4, 64–5, 69–70, 72–6, 84, 120–1, 128–30, 138–40, 144–7).

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moralisé.”17 It was made for Clémence of Hungary, wife of King Louis x of France, between 1314 and her death in 1328. Typical of the manuscript are two- or three-figured images of great elegance, designed to appeal to its royal readers. The illustrations of the story of Philomela begin with Tereus’ first encounter with Philomela in Pandion’s palace (Fig.  9.1). Next Tereus asks Pandion’s permission to take Philomela back to Thrace (Fig. 9.2): Father and daughter lean away from Tereus and raise a hand, as if resisting Tereus’ suit, but he is persuasive, and we next see Philomela and Tereus in his ship (Fig. 9.3). The steersman beside Tereus and a female attendant beside Philomela look askance as Tereus reaches out to touch the frowning princess’s breast. Turn the page, and the rape has been done (Fig. 9.4): Now Tereus approaches Philomela from behind and with a smirk reaches around to cut out her tongue. Folio 177 is enriched with three miniatures picturing the tale’s dénouement: Procne turns sharply away from her husband as he falsely reports her sister’s death (Fig. 9.5); Procne sits cold and composed beside Tereus at the banquet table as Philomela displays Itys’ bloody head (Fig. 9.6); and last, the three have been transformed into birds from the waist down, with Tereus, holding a great sword, standing between the two bird-women (Fig. 9.7). The hoopoe’s striped feathers are suggested by white splotches on Tereus’ tail. The allegory that follows the tale identifies Tereus as the body, Procne as the soul, and Philomela as deceptive love, impermanent and unstable, but the series of miniatures devoted to the preceding recounting of the story does not reflect this moralizing interpretation but rather responds to the taste of the period for vivid tales and romances. Largely dependent on the Rouen manuscript is Paris Arsenal MS 5069, whose illuminator devoted nine miniatures to the myth of Philomena. In Lord’s assessment, the “speedy, slapdash designer … had a certain respect for the original [i.e. Rouen] Ovide moralisé but not to the point of slavish copying” (compare Figs. 9.4 and 9.8).18 Indeed, the artist demonstrates his independence here by interpolating two scenes which illustrate the transfer of the completed tapestry from Philomela to the messenger and from the messenger to Procne. In the first image (Fig. 9.9), the cloth is violet with a red lining; in the second (Fig. 9.10), the cloth has been turned with the blood-red side out, but in neither scene is any woven pattern discernable. 17

18

Carla Lord, “Three Manuscripts of the Ovide moralisé,” Art Bulletin 57, no. 2 (1972): 161–3; Lord, “A Survey of Imagery in Medieval Manuscripts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Related Commentaries,” in Clark et al., Ovid in the Middle Ages, 261–70. The cycles in which the Arsenal manuscript diverges most from the Rouen are the ones, like that of Philomela, that appear in other literature (Lord, “Three Manuscripts,” 163–9; Appendix, 173).

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Figure 9.1 Tereus and Philomela in Pandion’s palace, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1415–25. collections de la bibliothÈque municipale de rouen, ms 0.4, fol. 169v

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Figure 9.2 Tereus asks Pandion’s permission to take Philomela to Thrace, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1415–25. collections de la bibliothÈque municipale de rouen, ms 0.4, fol. 170v

John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, composed around 1390 for Richard ii, was intended to provide moral guidance to the king, who, however, was charged with tyranny soon after and deposed. Gower’s poem employs the confessions made by an aging Lover (Amans) to Genius, the priest of Venus, as a frame for a collection of shorter narrative poems, mainly taken from Ovid, arranged under the heads of the seven mortal sins. Philomela’s tale comes in Book 5, 5551–6047, under the sin of Avarice, and specifically the crime of Ravine or robbery, reflecting pre- and early modern laws that conceived of rape as the theft of a woman’s chastity, a valuable commodity.19 Gower characterizes Tereus’ crime as above all a violation of truth and marriage, and the sisters’ revenge as ensuring remembrance of its consequences.20 After hearing the story, Amans swears that he would rather be trampled or torn apart by wild 19 20

Lee A. Ritscher, The Semiotics of Rape in Renaissance English Literature (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009), 2. Peter Nicholson, Love and Ethics in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 288–91.

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Figure 9.3 Tereus sails with Philomela to Thrace, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1415–25. collections de la bibliothÈque municipale de rouen, ms 0.4, fol. 173R

horses than ever do anything against his lady’s will, and that he will always seek to please her.21 That the Middle English Confessio Amantis continued to be popular into the fifteenth century is evidenced by the Morgan Library’s richly illuminated copy of the poem (Morgan ms M.126).22 Martha Driver believes that the manuscript was made in the 1470s for Elizabeth Woodville, the bookcollecting wife of Edward iv.23 Its Flemish artists produced vivid miniatures, 21

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“Mi fader, goddess forebode!/Me were levere be fortrode/With wilde hors and be todrawe,/ Er I agein love and his lawe/Dede eny thing or loude or stille,/Which were noght mi ladi wille… Bot while I live, I wol obeie/Abidinge on hire courtesie/If eny merci wolde hir plie” (Confessio Amantis, 5.6052–67). Richard K. Emmerson, “Reading Gower in a Manuscript Culture: Latin and English in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 143–86. Martha Driver, “Women Readers and Pierpont Morgan ms M. 126,” in John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers and Contexts, ed. Malte Urban (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 67–83.

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Figure 9.4 Tereus cuts out Philomela’s tongue, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1415–25. collections de la bibliothÈque municipale de rouen, ms 0.4, fol. 173v

very faithful to the tales they illustrate. The illumination for the story of Philomela compresses almost the entire story into a single frame (Fig. 9.11). In the left foreground is the tongue-cutting: Tereus, wearing a conical hat, concentrates on his grisly work; a trickle of blood falls onto Philomela’s breast. In the center Tereus, now in crown and ermine-trimmed tunic, stands behind a teetering table; its golden vessels tumble to the floor, as evoked by Ovid (6.661). The king and a lady of the court throw up their hands as Philomela and Procne approach from the right. Philomela proffers a tray, the contents of which are unclear but can be readily surmised. Three birds fly above their heads while on the right, seen through an archway, are two statues on columns, images of the gods to whom Philomela had earlier (6.526) appealed in vain. Driver considers the miniature of Philomela the most shocking example of several instances in the manuscript in which figures extend beyond the illumination’s frame, observing that the transgression against the princess is “re-emphasized by the aggressive breaking of the frame by the foot of

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Figure 9.5 Tereus falsely reports to Procne that Philomela is dead, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1415–25. collections de la bibliothÈque municipale de rouen, ms 0.4, fol. 177R

Tereus,  which holds down her gown.”24 Philomela’s suffering is nevertheless restrained—she faces Tereus and clasps her hands in prayer, like a virgin martyr—and the retribution of the fashionably dressed sisters is deliberate and dignified.25 Though the large knife on the table points suggestively from the king’s groin to Philomela’s hips, as in the Rouen and Arsenal Ovide moralisé neither the rape nor the infanticide is shown, perhaps out of respect for the sensibilities of the elegant and cultivated queen who may have commissioned the manuscript. 24 25

Driver, “Women Readers,” 89. The costume elements in the Philomela miniature—particularly the headdresses worn by the women—are found also in portraits of Elizabeth Woodville and help to date the manuscript and locate its origin in Flanders (Driver, “Women Readers,” 89–92).

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Figure 9.6 Philomela shows Itys’ head to Tereus, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1415–25. collections de la bibliothÈque municipale de rouen, ms 0.4, fol. 177r

For the Rouen and Arsenal manuscripts of the Ovide moralisé and the Morgan Library’s Confessio Amantis, Anton Boschloo’s observations regarding the illustrations in the earliest printed Metamorphoses could equally apply: “The whole apparatus of moralizing exegesis might just as well not have existed as far as the illustrator is concerned; it has not had any influence at all on his representations, … but in considering the illustrations [the reader] could amuse himself freely… without considering the meaning of the happenings described by Ovid for the salvation of his soul.”26 The Rouen, Arsenal, and Morgan manuscripts were luxury products, intended for a limited audience. Printed editions of the Metamorphoses, aimed at a wider readership, first appear at the end of the fifteenth century and 26

Anton Boschloo, “Images of the Gods in the Vernacular,” Word and Image 4 (1988): 415.

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Figure 9.7  Philomela, Procne and Tereus transformed into birds, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1415–25. collections de la bibliothÈque municipale de rouen, ms 0.4, fol. 177r

thereafter continue to be issued unabatedly throughout the sixteenth century  and beyond.27 It has been estimated that there were over 100 editions of the Metamorphoses printed between 1500 and 1599, and though only a small percentage was illustrated, this number still represents thousands of 27

M.D. Henkel, “Illustrierte Ausgaben von Ovides Metamorphosen im xv., xvi. und xvii. Jahrhundert,” Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg (1926–7): 58–144; Boschloo, “Images of the Gods,” 412–21; Gerlinde Huber-Rebenich, “L’iconografia della mitologia antica tra Quattroe Cinquecento: Edizioni illustrate delle Metamorfosi di Ovidio,” Studi umanistici piceni 12 (1992): 123–33; Anna Rosa Gentilini, “Circulation of Books and Artistic Commissions during the 16th century: Research on Livius’ and Ovid’s Book Tradition and Ceramics Tradition,” in L’Istoriato: Libri a stampa e maioliche italiane del Cinquecento (Faenza: Gruppo Editoriale Faenza Editrice, 1993), 170–82. Ovid Illustrated: The Reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Image and Text (ovid.lib.virginia.edu), constructed by Daniel Kinney with Elizabeth Styron, is a vast archive of textual and pictorial responses to Ovid’s poem.

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Figure 9.8 Tereus cuts out Philomela’s tongue, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1325–50. Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, ms 5069, fol. 88v

illustrated books in circulation. The surviving early books, however, either do not illustrate the Philomela story at all or illustrate only its conclusion, the metamorphosis.28 28

Among the earliest printed illustrations of the Philomela myth are Georg (or Jörg) Wickram, Metamorphoses (Mainz, 1545, 1551) (Henkel, “Illustrierte Ausgaben,” 105–6; Evamarie Blattner, Holzschnittfolgen zu den Metamorphosen des Ovid: Venedig 1497 und Mainz 1545, Beiträge zur Kunstwissenschaft [Munich: Scange, 1998], 35–8, 102–9, fig. M18); and Lodovico Dolce’s very popular Le trasformationi di M. Lodovico Dolce tratte da Ovidio (Venice: Gabriel Giolito, 1553) (Henkel, “Illustrierte Ausgaben,” 82–4; Bodo Guthmüller, Mito, poesia, arte: Saggi sulla tradizione Ovidiana nel Rinascimento [Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1997], 251–74; Guthmüller, Ovidio metamorphoseos vulgare: Forme e funzioni della trasposizione in volgare [Florence: Cadmo, 2008],, 269–77; Boschloo, “Images of the Gods,”

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Figure 9.9 Philomela gives the tapestry to the messenger, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1325–50. Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, ms 5069, fol. 89v

The richly illustrated, frequently reprinted 1557 Lyon edition of the Metamorphoses, with woodcuts by Bernard Salomon (“le Petit Bernard”), 416–7). The initial printing of 1,800 copies of the Dolce volume was sold out in a few months. The 1568 edition is available as an ebook at http://books.google.com/books?id =BE4FdLY1LfMC&dq=dolce+trasformationi+facsimile&source=gbs_navlinks.    The rarity of illustrations of the myth in books before 1550 is equaled by its almost complete absence from the major media during the first half of the sixteenth century. The sole example is one of the eight lunettes frescoed by Sebastiano del Piombo in the Villa Farnesina’s Sala di Galatea (1511), all from Ovid and chosen on the basis of their relation to the element of air (Michael Hirst, Sebastiano del Piombo [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980], 34–6, pl. 34; Claudia Cieri Via, L’Arte delle Metamorfosi: Decorazioni mitologiche del Cinquecento [Rome: Lithos, 2003]: 298–301; Claudio M. Strinati et al., eds., Sebastiano del Piombo, 1485–1547 [Milan: F. Motta, 2008], 130–2 [Tullia Carratù]).

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Figure 9.10

The messenger gives Philomela’s tapestry to Procne, in the Ovide moralisé, c. 1325–50. Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, ms 5069, fol. 90r

contains a wealth of imagery for the myth of Philomela not seen since the Rouen and Arsenal manuscripts of the Ovide moralisé.29 The text is an abridged retelling, with each page displaying a woodcut at the top and eight lines of 29

La Métamorphose d’Ovide figurée (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1557). I am grateful to the staff of the Prints Collection, New York Public Library, for allowing me to study and photograph their volume. Henkel, “Illustrierte Ausgaben,” 72–82; Ghislaine Amielle, Recherches sur des traductions françaises des Metamorphoses d’Ovide illustrées et publiées en France à la fin du XVe siècle et au XVIe siècle (Paris: J. Touzot, 1989), 198–240; Peter Sharratt, Bernard Salomon, illustrateur lyonnais (Geneva: Droz, 2005), 150–65, 258–63, 305–6. An edition of the poem by Johannes Spreng, with copies of many of Salomon’s woodcuts by Virgil Solis, itself underwent many reprintings after its original 1563 publication (Henkel, “Illustrierte

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Figure 9.11

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The Myth of Philomela, in John Gower, Confessio Amantis, 1470s. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, ms m.126, fol. 122r

poetry (attributed to Barthélemy Aneau) below, within an elaborate frame of arabesque or grotesque ornament.30 Most of the stories are given one or sometimes two or three pages; the tale of Philomela is one of only three stories (along with those of Phaethon and Medea) to receive five pages. The first Ausgaben,” 87–95; Karl Stahlberg, “Virgil Solis und die Holzschnitte zu den Metamorphosen des Ovid,” Marginalien: Zeitschrift für Buchkunst und Bibliophilie 95 [1984]: 29–35). 30 Amielle, Recherches sur les traductions françaises, 21.

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woodcut illustrates for the first time the beginning of the story, with Tereus and Procne in bed (Fig.  9.12): As Ovid relates (6.429–32), Furies with flaming  torches attend their ill-fated nuptials instead of Juno or Hymen, and an owl laid et sauvage, in the words of the abridgment, has come to rest on the bed’s tester. On the next page, Philomela is conducted onto Tereus’ ship, having been commended to the Thracian king’s care by her father (Fig. 9.13). Next Tereus assaults the girl, not in the woods but in a well-appointed room, against a stately bed with disordered sheets (Fig. 9.14). The rape has been done: This act is the mutilation, for Tereus stands above the bound Philomela, pincers in his left hand and sword in his right, just as Ovid describes the brutal de-tonguing (6.556–557). Turn the page, and Procne arrives at the prison-hut with her Bacchic companions to rescue Philomela, who had “used her hands in place of her tongue” (“adonq pour langue use des mains”) to summon her sister (Fig. 9.15). On the facing page is the women’s revenge (Fig. 9.16): In the right background, Procne plunges a sword into Itys’ belly; she holds him up by the hair, his feet dangling above the ground. In the foreground, the sisters take center stage, showing the boy’s head to his father, who stands with sword drawn but in a decidedly defensive posture, behind the table on which the contents of the feast are all too clearly displayed. Their hair flies behind them, like the Furies in the first picture. Although the text describes the transformation (“Puis par moyens estrangement subtils, sont faits oiseaus, tous de divers plumage”), it is not illustrated. The narrative is represented as an entirely human story of transgressive passion and its consequences in which the gods play no part. Regarding the composition of the mutilation scene (Fig. 9.14), the bed may have been included to recall the marriage bed in the first scene (Tereus has betrayed not only his oath to Pandion but also his marriage vows), but the bedroom setting belongs rather to the similarly brutal tale of mortal lust, Tarquin’s rape of the virtuous Roman matron Lucretia—a popular exemplum of female virtue in the early modern period—which served as a ready pictorial model for the rape of Philomela.31 Compare, for example, Giorgio Ghisi’s engraving of Tarquin and Lucretia (c. 1540; Fig. 9.17) after Giulio Romano’s fresco of the subject in the Camerino dei Falconi, Palazzo Ducale, Mantua.32

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32

The story is told in Livy, History of Rome 1.57–9 and Ovid, Fasti 11.722–852 (Patricia Emison, “The Singularity of Raphael’s Lucretia,” Art History 14, no. 3 (1991): 376–9; Ritscher, Semiotics of Rape, 62–3). Suzanne Boorsch, Michal Lewis, and R.E. Lewis, The Engravings of Giorgio Ghisi (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985), 37–8, no. 2.

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Figure 9.12

Bernard Salomon, Tereus, Procne, and the Furies, in La Métamorphose d’Ovide figurée, Lyon, 1557.

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Figure 9.13

Bernard Salomon, Pandion, Tereus, and Philomela, in La Métamorphose d’Ovide figurée, Lyon, 1557.

The popularity of Antonio Tempesta’s 150-page picture book Metamorphoseon … Ovidianarum, published in Amsterdam in c. 1606 but based on designs made some years earlier, is attested by the large number of consecutive editions and copies.33 Tempesta distills Philomela’s story into its two most dramatic episodes. He stages the assault in a well-furnished bedroom, following the iconography of Tarquin’s rape of Lucretia, but unlike previous illustrators of the Philomela myth, he represents the rape itself, not the mutilation. In Tempesta’s Plate 59, Tereus, his sword still hanging at his side, pushes the half-undressed 33

Antonio Tempesta, Metamorphoseon sive Transformationum Ovidianarum libri quindecim, aeneis formis (Amsterdam: W. Ianssonius, [1606?]); Eckhardt Leuscher, The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 35, Antonio Tempesta, Commentary, pt. 1 (New York: Abaris Books, 1983), 3; Sebastian Buffa, The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 36, Antonio Tempesta (New York: Abaris Books, 1983), 39. Tempesta sold the plates for the Metamorphoseon and other series directly to publishers in the North who, because of their experience in the international art trade, guaranteed a wide diffusion of his prints.

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Figure 9.14

325

Bernard Salomon, Pandion forces Philomela, in La Métamorphose d’Ovide figurée, Lyon, 1557.

Philomela back on the bed as he—like Tarquin—forces his legs between his victim’s knees; his billowing cloak betrays the violence of the attack (Fig. 9.18). Salomon’s woodcut is an intermediate step in the development of the iconography of Philomela’s rape: He adapts the rape of Lucretia to depict the cutting of Philomela’s tongue. Tempesta adopts the iconography for Lucretia more directly, either consciously exploiting its thematic resonances with the rape of the Athenian princess or simply employing a familiar pictorial model. In Tempesta’s Plate  60, which follows Salomon’s representation of the murder and feast more closely (in reverse), the two women take center stage while Tereus is literally marginalized (Fig. 19). Despite re-staging Philomela’s rape in Lucretia’s bedroom, Tempesta’s sequence distinguishes Philomela’s story from Lucretia’s by emphasizing the rare circumstance in myth of an injured woman taking revenge into her own hands.34

34

Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The “Heroic” Tradition and Its Alternatives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 143–6.

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Bernard Salomon, Procne and her sister; Procne avenges her sister, in La Métamorphose d’Ovide figurée, Lyon, 1557.

Let us now consider why the tongue-cutting is so often substituted for the rape; Tempesta’s etching is the rare exception. In her discussion of illuminated manuscripts of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea (c. 1400)—an anthology of classical myths, several based on Ovidian narratives of rape—Diane Wolfthal notes that the artists avoided images of sexual violation, perhaps in order to thwart the appetite for images of sexual violence in the young man to whom the letter is ostensibly addressed, or to counter belief that “a woman wants to be conquered.”35 A woman’s beauty was considered an incitement to male desire (as Ovid makes clear in 6.451–8), and so women might be charged with complicity at least in the sexual violence against them.36 In the Rouen and Arsenal manuscripts of the Ovide moralisé (Figs. 9.4, 9.8), Tereus seizes Philomela from behind, emphasizing the violent nature of his crime and his victim’s unwillingness. Certainly an image of the mutilation, could not be misinterpreted: Tereus’ act was

35 Wolfthal, Images of Rape, 130–40. 36 Jocelyn Catty, Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England: Unbridled Speech (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 14.

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327

Bernard Salomon, Procne avenges her sister, in La Métamorphose d’Ovide figurée, Lyon, 1557 (detail of 9.15).

an unambiguously brutal, shocking, and reprehensible violation of Philomela’s body, one bleeding orifice substituting for the other. The earliest preserved work that shows Philomela actually creating the pivotal textile is a pair of embroidered bed valances in New York, of English or French origin, made around 1600 (Figs. 9.20, 9.21).37 The valances are remarkable—probably unique—for their confluence of subject and medium. Illustrated editions of 37

Metropolitan Museum of Art (64.101.1278, 1279), in silk and wool tent stitch on canvas; each panel is 16” × 65” (Yvonne Hackenbroch, English and Other Needlework, Tapestries and Textiles in the Untermeyer Collection [Cambridge, ma: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Harvard University Press, 1960], xviii–xix, figs.  27, 29; Thomasina Beck, Elizabethan Gardens [New York: Viking Press, 1979], fig. p. 15; Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory [Cambridge ma: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 158–9; Mihoko Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588–1688 [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003], 166–8). I am very grateful to Melinda Watt, Associate Curator, Sculpture and Decorative Arts, and the staff of the Antonio Ratti Textile Center for permitting me to examine and photograph the valances.

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Giorgio Ghisi, Tarquin and Lucretia, c. 1540. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Ovid’s poem were numerous by this time and in wide circulation. The narrative in the valances, however, does not follow any of the known literary versions or surviving illustrations of the myth very closely. At the beginning, we see a groom holding Tereus’ horse: This group has no place in the Philomela story but rather belongs, like the setting in general, to the rural and hunting scenes that were popular subjects for contemporary textiles.38 Next comes the de-tonguing (Fig. 9.22): Tereus leans forward, pinning Philomela down with his knee just as Tarquin overpowers Lucretia in Titian’s painting of the subject (engraved c. 1571 by Cornelis Cort; Fig. 9.23).39 38

See Beck, Elizabethan Gardens, figs. pp. 13, 22; Andrew Morrall and Melinda Watt, eds., English Embroidery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1580–1700: ’Twixt Art and Nature (New York: Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, 2008), 198–202, cat. no. 46. 39 Titian, Tarquin and Lucretia, c. 1571, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Walter L. Strauss and Tomoko Shimura, The Illustrated Bartsch, v. 52, Netherlandish Artists (New York: Abaris Books, 1986), 223–5: The Rape of Lucretia. The bent-knee, billowing-cape pose derives from ancient representations of a god or hero (e.g. Hercules or Mithras) subduing an animal: See Maria F. Maurer, “The Trouble with Pasiphae: Engendering a Myth at the Gonzaga Court,” in this volume, Chapter 6.

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Figure 9.18

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Antonio Tempesta, Tarquin Rapes Philomela, from the Metamorphoseon … Ovidianarum, c. 1606. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California

He grasps her tongue with one hand and raises his sword to strike. Tereus then introduces Philomela to an old woman seated on the ground, as if they were guests at a garden party (Fig. 9.24).40 The seated figure is modeled on Vertum­ nus disguised as an old woman in Bernard Salomon’s illustration for the story of Vertumnus and Pomona in Metamorphoses 14. Her posture and staff signal her inferior status, but the keys and purse hanging near her feet (not present in 40

See Beck, Embroidered Gardens, figs. pp. 7, 19, 23; Maria-Anne Privat-Savigny, Quand les princesses d’Europe brodaient: Broderie au petit point, 1570–1610 (Paris: Reunion des Musées Nationaux, 2003): 70–2, no. 3; 111, fig. 1. Landscapes and gardens were often the setting for amorous couples: See the mid-seventeenth-century embroideries in Morrall and Watt, English Embroidery, 79–97, 280–2, nos. 81, 82. On early modern villa gardens as settings for licentious activities, see Katherine M. Bentz, “Ancient Idols, Lascivious Statues, and Sixteenth-Century Viewers in Roman Gardens,” in this volume, Chapter 12.

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Antonio Tempesta, Procne kills Itys and shows his head to Tereus, from the Metamorphoseon …Ovidianarum, c. 1606. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California

Figure 9.20  First of two embroidered bed valances with the story of Philomela, c. 1600. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Figure 9.21

Second of two embroidered bed valances with the story of Philomela, c. 1600. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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331

Tereus cuts out Philomela’s tongue (detail of 9.20).

Salomon’s figure) show that she is to be responsible for the captive princess’s keeping.41 The second panel begins with a bagpipe-playing shepherd and his flock, then presents Philomela seated before the hut, working on an embroidery frame in her lap; the guard stands beside her holding a distaff and spindle (Fig.  9.25).42 Here, finally, is Philomela’s textile in progress, though it is not woven as in Ovid but embroidered like the valances themselves. Next come Procne and two companions, wreathed in ivy and holding thyrsi (Fig. 9.26). In the tongue-cutting scene, ivy wraps around Philomela’s torso as if to bind her, so the ivy wreaths of her Bacchic rescuers subtly reiterate the theme of capture 41 Hackenbroch, English and Other Needlework, xix, misidentifies the seated figure in the valance as a seer. Ovid’s text (6.571–80) is ambiguous about the number and even the gender of Philomela’s guard(s), while the Old French Philomena (lines 867–73) identifies them as a peasant woman and her daughter. 42 The guard figure seems younger and is dressed differently than in the previous scene, but her headdress is the same. The differences may be due to the first figure’s having been copied from a particular visual source, while the second was improvised. Note, too, that Tereus and Philomela have changed their clothes as well between the tongue-cutting and introduction scenes. It appears that the designer was not very concerned with iconographic consistency.

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Cornelis Cort after Titian, The Rape of Lucretia, c. 1571. London, British Museum (© Trustees of the British Museum)

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Figure 9.24

333

Tereus introduces Philomela to the old woman (detail of 9.20).

and release. The urgency of the women’s mission is conveyed by the sweep of their skirts behind them. Bed valances were usually made in sets of three, to accommodate the exposed sides of a four-poster bed. The panels at the sides were equal in length, while the central panel at the front was shorter. In the two panels preserved in New York, the narrative proceeds from left to right in both panels, whereas the composition converges toward the front of the bed, developing to the right in the first panel and ending with Philomela’s rescuers moving to the left in the second panel. Perhaps the missing middle (i.e. front) panel depicted a rural scene, or scenes leading up to the events pictured in the longer panels: the wedding of Tereus and Procne, or Tereus’ return to Pandion’s court, or Tereus and Philomela sailing to Thrace.43 It has not been possible to determine the identity of the designer, maker, or patron of the valances, or even their country of origin. The professional Company of Broderers was granted its first charter by Queen Elizabeth in 1561, 43

A contemporary set of three embroidered valances in New York with the theme of the infancy of Christ present an analogous treatment of chronology: The short front panel depicts the Annunciation and the Visitation, while the longer panels depict the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, and later events (French, c. 1600; Metropolitan Museum of Art, 64.101.1371–73).

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Figure 9.25

Philomela embroiders (detail of 9.21).

but objects for domestic use (e.g., cushions, pillows, and bed hangings) were often produced by amateurs, and many wealthy and well-born women in England and France were excellent embroiderers.44 Designers would transfer the patterns—independently drawn or copied from prints and pattern books—to canvas for ladies to work.45 A woman’s skill at needlework was a source of pride but at the same time a reflection of society’s restricting expectations of quiet industry.46 Embroidery “ensured that women spent long hours  at home, retired in private, yet it made a public statement about the 44 45

46

Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, 134–71; Privat-Savigny, Quand les princesses d’Europe brodaient, 20–4; Parker, The Subversive Stitch, 73–9. Anthony Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Influence of Continental Prints, 1558–1625 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997): 235–45; Wells-Cole repeats (240) Hackenbroch’s misidentification of the figure of the old woman. Tilde Sankovitch, “Inventing Authority of Origin: The Difficult Enterprise,” in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse ny: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 237–42; Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, 134–44.

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Figure 9.26

335

Procne and her companions (detail of 9.21).

household’s position and economic standing.”47 A watercolor in the early seventeenth-century Album Amicorum of Gervasius Fabricius (Fig. 9.27) illustrates just such a scene of elegant occupation, with several well-dressed ladies, attended by a woman in cap and apron, working like Philomela on embroidery and lace in a partially walled garden.48 Also similar to the group in the valance is the engraving of Lucretia and Her Companions by the Paduan Luca Bertelli (c. 1575) (Fig.  9.28).49 We find the industrious Roman matron in a modern home—well-furnished with a large bed, fireplace, and a walker for her toddler—working at her embroidery (not spinning, as in Livy 1.57.9), assisted by an older woman with distaff and spindle (and keys hanging from her waist). Humanist writers held contradictory views of spinning and weaving, which were classical symbols of ideal femininity but menial labor in wealthy households of the time.50 The omission of the weaving scene from all known earlier illustrations of the Philomela myth may thus reflect the expectations of their elite and middle-class audiences: Artists may have been reluctant to depict the princess engaged in a task 47 Parker, The Subversive Stitch, 63. 48 Album Amicorum of Gervasius Fabricius, of Saltzburg, 1603–37; British Library ms 17025, fol. 50r; Beck, Elizabethan Gardens, 37. 49 Sara F. Matthews Grieco, “Persuasive Pictures: Didactic Prints and the Construction of the Social Identity of Women in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. Letizia Panizza (Oxford: Legenda, European Humanities Research Centre, 2000): 299–302; Patricia Fortini Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture, and the Family (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 90–1. 50 Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, 104–33.

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Figure 9.27 Ladies in a garden embroidering, from the Album Amicorum of Gervasius Fabricius, 1603–37. (© The British Library Board, Add. 17025, FOL, 5or)

unworthy of her rank.51 On the other hand, weaving may have been too closely identified with virtuous domesticity. In Giovanni Stradano’s ceiling painting Penelope at Her Loom in the Sala di Penelope, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (1555–62), Penelope’s women spin and engage in other wool-making activities while she bends over her loom, the ideal of the chaste and faithful wife.52 Perhaps it was thought that Philomela, not married and yet not chaste, without 51

52

It should be noted, however, that Wickram, Dolce, Salomon, and Tempesta had no reluctance to show Minerva and Arachne at work at their looms, though that scene could hardly have been omitted if the story were to be illustrated at all. Penelope is equated in Stradano’s painting with Eleonora de Toledo, Duchess of Florence. Georgianna Ziegler, “Penelope and the Politics of Women’s Place in the Renaissance,” in Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private in the English Renaissance, ed. S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (New York, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 26–33, fig. 2.1. As Brown observes, what occupied the good wife when her household tasks were done was emulating Lucretia and her companions by doing needlework (Brown, Private Lives, 112–7). See also Crispin de Passe’s engraving after Maarten de Vos, Parable of the Wise Virgins, c. 1600, where the five virgins read, write, spin, weave, and sew (British Museum no. 1868,0612.2038).

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Figure 9.28

Luca Bertelli, Lucretia and Her Companions, c. 1575. milan, civica raccolta delle stampe achille bertarelli

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a home or suitable companionship, should not be represented as engaging in such activity. In the final analysis, though, in choosing not to represent Philomela weaving, earlier illustrators of her story demonstrated that they believed that this episode was less important, or simply less interesting, than her violation and revenge. Since, as far as can be determined, the sewing scene was unprecedented in the iconography of the myth of Philomela, the valances’ designer was free to translate her weaving into embroidery. As Roszika Parker observes, “Sewing may have suggested a pleasing modesty, but embroidery conferred noble distinction. It was, traditionally, a badge of status.”53 Its representation in the valance, which draws on the imagery of edifying prints, reflects the habits of a woman in the top rank of society and may even be a personal reference to the skill of the patron/fabricator herself. All the women in the valances (except the guardian) are dressed in the height of late-sixteenth-century fashion: pleated ruff, gown over a petticoat, tight bodice, and puffed and slashed sleeves embellished with jewels; their hair is parted in the center and rolled high over the temples. Although these fashions were worn by noblewomen on both sides of the Channel, the width of the ruffs, petticoats, and sleeves and the jewelry suggests an English origin,54 a possibility supported by the hair ornament worn by Philomela in the tongue-cutting scene (Fig. 9.29), which resembles the jewel-and-feather ornament worn by Elizabeth i in George Gower’s much-copied Armada Portrait (c. 1588). Tereus’ clothes also support a late sixteenth-century English origin for the panels: The Spade-shaped beard, turned-down collar, and sash worn diagonally across the chest are found in late portraits of Sir Francis Drake (d. 1596), and Tereus’ high, conical hat became popular in England in the 1590s.55 But the figures’ contemporary dress is not simply a convention of biblical and

53 Parker, The Subversive Stitch, 63. 54 Privat-Savigny, Quand les princesses d’Europe brodaient, 54. Compare the dress worn by ladies of the court in embroideries in the Chateau d’Écouen (Privat-Savigny, Quand les princesses d’Europe brodaient, 70–2, no. 2, and 93–9, no. 8; English or French, late sixteenth century) and New York (Morrall and Watt, English Embroidery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 112–4, no. 2; probably English, 1580–1600). 55 E.g., an engraving after an unknown artist, Sir Francis Drake (late sixteenth or early seventeenth century), National Portrait Gallery, London, NDG D2283. For Tereus’ hat, see Jane Ashelford, A Visual History of Costume: The Sixteenth Century (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1983), nos. 113, 115, 120, 125, 129, 140. The crown set on the hat’s brim may have been inspired by the elaborate jeweled hat ornament worn by James vi of Scotland in a 1595 portrait (Ashelford, Visual History of Costume, no. 138).

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Figure 9.29

Philomela (detail of 9.20).

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mythological illustration during this period: It strongly encourages the viewer to identify with the protagonists.56 The women in the valances move as if in a trance, not a hair out of place, their beautiful clothes faultlessly arranged. Their eyes stare like dolls’ eyes out of expressionless faces. Even the Bacchantes’ movements are dignified. Their remoteness of affect may be due in part to the limitations of the medium but also to the standards of decorum required of high-born females, as seen in the illuminations in the Rouen and Morgan manuscripts, made for elite women. Philomela alone, at the moment of her mutilation, turns her eyes toward us, beseeching pity and acknowledgment of her suffering (Fig. 9.29). In Ovid’s poem, the wilderness where the Athenian princess is raped and imprisoned symbolizes the barbarian king’s disregard for the moral constraints of civilization, but the rural setting in the valances has quite different associations. Gardens and rural scenes were popular subjects for needlework produced for aristocratic patrons, who delighted equally in elaborate gardens and textiles.57 But the Philomela of the valances is not sitting in a garden surrounded by genteel companions or enjoying the countryside with an attentive lover. There is an uncomfortable tension between the terrible events of the narrative and the peaceful landscape in which those events unfold. Further, the purpose of Philomela’s sewing is not the quiet production of domestic furnishings but the communication of a vital message, “encoding resistance to the invisible silence of women that the habit of sewing is supposed to ensure.”58 Procne also asserts herself: She has rejected her domestic role and has led her ladies out of Tereus’ palace to assume the independent movements and resolute purpose of Bacchantes. The subject matter and certain details of its treatment suggest that the patron of the valances, and perhaps the designer as well, was a woman. I think our lady—whether patron, designer, or both—knew her Ovid very well, for the pattern on Philomela’s embroidery frame (Fig. 9.30) is neither words nor images but the very notae—signs or marks—described by the poet, a secret language, perhaps, known only to the sisters and thus proof against discovery. The notion of female agency and solidarity is another theme of the valances: Philomela effects her deliverance entirely with the help of other women. Especially noteworthy in this regard is the inclusion of 56

As the English poet George Gascoigne does with Tereus in his poem The Complaynte of Philomene of 1576 (Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects, 166–7). 57 Beck, Elizabethan Gardens, 6–23; Privat-Savigny, Quand les princesses d’Europe brodaient, 86–99. 58 Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, 158.

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Figure 9.30

341

Philomela’s embroidery (detail of 9.21).

the guardian—who had not been represented in any earlier illustration—not once but twice. Jane Burns cites the passage in the Old French Philomena (lines 867–73) that comments on the tyrant Tereus’ foolishness in selecting as a guard for his prisoner a woman who knows how to weave—feminine knowledge, quite outside the man’s experience, that will have fatal consequences for him.59 But while offering essential assistance, the guardian cannot read the needlework’s message: Philomela’s mysterious embroidery reinforces the lady’s claim to patronage of the design and perhaps its authorship as well. The designer of the valances assembled images from a variety of sources to create its entirely original narrative: scenes of rural pleasures for the horse and groom, shepherd, and genial landscape; rape of Lucretia imagery for the tongue-cutting; an unrelated figure from Salomon’s Metamorphoses for the old woman; didactic prints for Philomela sewing; contemporary courtly dress and attitudes for the figures. But what of Philomela’s revenge? The consequences of Tereus’ crime—the infanticide and cannibal feast, so often depicted in earlier illustrations of the myth—are not shown in the valances, which end, as in 59 Burns, Bodytalk, 132.

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Chaucer’s version of the story, with Philomela’s rescue by her sister. Chaucer dismisses Ovid’s blood-soaked conclusion in a line, “The remenaunt is no charge for to telle” (The rest is no great matter now to tell), replacing it with a warning to women about man’s inevitable infidelity, “But hit so be that he may have non other” (Unless, so be it, that he may have no other).60 This cynical observation contrasts unpleasantly with the real crimes portrayed earlier and seems a weak justification for the omission of the sisters’ revenge from the valances. As contemporary sources provide models for the valances’ imagery, we must look to contemporary literature to interpret the valances’ iconography. Rapes and attempted rapes, often couched in the language of myth, were common subjects in the literature of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Both male and female poets identified particularly with the “complaynte” of the transformed Philomela, whose silencing and recovered voice in the nightingale’s song served as metaphors for the constraints endured by the court poet, for the failure of poetic inspiration, or for the conditions facing any woman who chose to write, defying society’s injunction to be “chaste, silent and obedient.”61 Arthur Golding published the first translation into English of the Metamorphoses in 1567; it was reprinted five times by 1603.62 Shakespeare’s works are steeped in the poem, which he would have known in Latin as well as in Golding’s translation; indeed, the Metamorphoses are the source of about ninety percent of Shakespeare’s references to classical mythology.63 The story of Philomela is alluded to in three of Shakespeare’s works: Titus Andronicus (written or revised in 1594), the narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece (1594), and Cymbeline (1608–9). In Titus Andronicus, Lavinia’s rapists have cut off her hands as well as her tongue, to prevent her from exposing their crime by

60 61

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Legend of Good Women, 7.2383, 2393: Delaney, The Naked Text, 220–1. E.g., works by Gascoigne (The Complaynte of Philomene, 1576) and fellow Tudor poet Sir Philip Sidney (The Nightingale, 1595) many others: Mazzio, “Sins of the Tongue,” 62–3; Ann Rosalind Jones, “New Songs for the Swallow: Ovid’s Philomela in Tullia d’Aragona and Gaspara Stampa,” in Refiguring Women: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, ed. Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 263–77; Catty, Writing Rape, 2, 121–33. John Frederick Nims, ed., Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation 1567 (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2000); Raphael Lyne, “Ovid in English Translation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 252–5. Jonathan Bate, “Shakespeare’s Ovid,” in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation, xlii.

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sewing a “tedious sampler” like Philomela.64 Lavinia is able to communicate nonetheless, by showing the Philomela passage in a copy of the Metamorphoses from her father’s library (4.1.46–50). In his discussion of the play, Leonard Barkan argues that Shakespeare saw the Metamorphoses as a compendium of word and image and could therefore “have Lavinia substitute Ovid’s book for what was Philomela’s tapestry. The Metamorphoses, especially in its illustrated Renaissance form, is a tapestry” [Barkan’s emphasis].65 The maker of the valances demonstrates this confluence by stitching both picture and text. After Lavinia reveals the crime against her and its perpetrators, her kinsmen take an oath to avenge her, emulating the oath that “Lord Junius Brutus sware for Lucrece’ rape” (4.1.93). In The Rape of Lucrece, written about the same time as Titus Andronicus, Lucrece addresses Time after the attack, imagining ways of punishing Tarquin with “extremes beyond extremity” (line 969) that recall Philomela and Procne’s revenge against the tyrant Tereus:66 Disturb his hours of rest with restless trances, Afflict him in his bed with bedrid groans; Let there bechance him pitiful mischances, To make him moan; but pity not his moans: Stone him with harden’d hearts, harder than stones; And let mild women to him lose their mildness,

Wilder to him than tigers in their wildness. (lines 974–980)

Lucrece immediately rejects the notion of exacting vengeance herself, however, and chooses to leave revenge in the hands of men. The resulting invisibility of the “Philomela option” leaves no alternative response to female victimization than the self-victimization of “noble” suicide. Jane Newman 64

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Lavinia’s uncle Marcus thus describes her terrible injuries: Fair Philomela, she but lost her tongue, And in a tedious sampler sew’d her mind: But, lovely niece, that mean is cut from thee: A craftier Tereus hast thou met withal, And he hath cut those pretty fingers off, That could have better sew’d than Philomel (2.4.38–43). Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 246–7. Lucrece’s identification with the abused princess is made explicit later in the poem (lines 1128–34) when she imagines herself singing a sad duet with the transformed Philomela (Enterline, Rhetoric of the Body, 192–5).

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argues that Lucrece’s rejection of the sisters’ course of action is “the result of the ideological pressure of a postclassical gender code organized around preserving political agency for the male.”67 I propose that the proliferation of rape narratives, the popularity of Golding’s translation of Ovid’s poem, and Shakespeare’s striking use of the myth of Philomela in two works of the 1590s provide a context for the unusual choice of this subject for the valances, and that the designer of the (perhaps self-referential) embroideries, in declining to represent the sisters’ revenge, similarly chose “mildness” over “wildness” under “the ideological pressure of a postclassical gender code.” Does this interpretation undermine the textile’s subversive power or its assertion of female agency and creative independence? Not at all. I suggest that the designer’s intention was just the resolution that Patricia Joplin has advocated: that viewers of the valances, female and male, resist defining women’s status as either innocent victim or cruel avenger, to interrupt the structure of reciprocal violence, and to celebrate “the woman artist who in recovering her own voice, uncovers not only its power but its potential to transform revenge (violence) into resistance (peace).”68 Bibliography Amielle, Ghislaine. Recherches sur des traductions françaises des Métamorphoses d’Ovide illustrées et publiées en France à la fin du XVe siècle et au XVIe siècle. Paris: J. Touzot, 1989. Ashelford, Jane. A Visual History of Costume: The Sixteenth Century. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1983. Barkan, Leonard. The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986. Bate, Jonathan. “Shakespeare’s Ovid.” In Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation 1567, edited by John Frederick Nims, xli–l. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2000. Beck, Thomasina. Elizabethan Gardens. New York: Viking Press, 1979.

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Newman, “‘And Let Mild Women to Him Lose their Mildness’,” 326. This issue was particularly fraught with a woman on the English throne, though Queen Elizabeth herself “condoned patriarchal ideologies and traditions that held that women were inferior and participated in the continuing subjection of English women” (Ritscher, Semiotics of Rape, 75). Joplin, “The Voice of the Shuttle,” 53.

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Blattner, Evamarie. Holzschnittfolgen zu den Metamorphosen des Ovid: Venedig 1497 und Mainz 1545. Beiträge zur Kunstwissenschaft 72. Munich: Scaneg, 1998. Bober, Phyllis Pray, and Ruth O. Rubinstein. Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture. London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1986. Boer, Cornelis de. Philomena, conte raconté d’après Ovide par Chretien de Troyes; pub. d’après tous les manuscrits de l’Ovide moralisé avec introduction, notes, index de toutes les formes et iii appendices. Paris: P. Geuthner, 1909. Boorsch, Suzanne, Michal Lewis, and R.E. Lewis. The Engravings of Giorgio Ghisi. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985. Boschloo, Anton. “Images of the Gods in the Vernacular.” Word and Image 4 (1988): 412–21. Brown, Patricia Fortini. Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture, and the Family. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004. Buffa, Sebastian. The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 36, Antonio Tempesta. New York: Abaris Books, 1983. Burnett, Anne Pippin. Revenge in Attic and Later Tragedy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Burns, E. Jane. Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Catty, Jocelyn. Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England: Unbridled Speech. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Chazalon, Ludi. “Le mythe de Térée, Procnè et Philomèle dans les images attiques.” Métis, N.S. 1 (2003): 119–48. Cieri Via, Claudia. L’Arte delle Metamorfosi: Decorazioni mitologiche del Cinquecento. Rome: Lithos, 2003. Cormier, Roger, ed. and trans. Three Ovidian Tales of Love. Garland Library of Medieval Literature, ser. A, vol. 26. New York: Garland, 1986. Coulson, Frank T. “Procne and Philomela in the Latin Commentary Tradition of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.” Euphrosyne 36 (2008): 181–96. Damet, Aurélie. “‘L’infamille’. Les violences familiales sur la céramique classique entre monstration et occultation.” Images Re-vues 9 (2011). http://imagesrevues.revues .org/1606. Delany, Sheila. The Naked Text: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Dinshaw, Carolyn. “Rivalry, Rape and Manhood: Gower and Chaucer.” In Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange, edited by Robert F. Yeager, 130–42. els Monograph Series 51, University of Victoria, bc, 1991. Driver, Martha. “Women Readers and Pierpont Morgan ms M. 126.” In John Gower: Manuscripts, Readers and Contexts, edited by Malte Urban, 67–83. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009.

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Emison, Patricia. “The Singularity of Raphael’s Lucretia.” Art History 14, no. 3 (1991): 373–97. Emmerson, Richard K. “Reading Gower in a Manuscript Culture: Latin and English in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 143–86. Enterline, Lynn. The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Frye, Susan. “Of Chastity and Rape: Edmund Spenser Confronts Elizabeth i in The Fairie Queen.” In Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose, 353–79. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Gentilini, Anna Rosa. “Circulation of Books and Artistic Commissions during the 16th century: Research on Livius’ and Ovid’s Book Tradition and Ceramics Tradition.” In L’Istoriato: Libri a Stampa e Maioliche Italiane del Cinquecento, 170–82. Faenza: Gruppo Editoriale Faenza Editrice, 1993. Guthmüller, Bodo. Mito, poesia, arte: Saggi sulla tradizione Ovidiana nel Rinascimento. Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1997. ———. Ovidio metamorphoseos vulgare: Forme e funzioni della traspozione in volgare. Florence: Cadmo, 2008. Hackenbroch, Yvonne. English and Other Needlework, Tapestries and Textiles in the Untermeyer Collection. Cambridge, ma: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Harvard University Press, 1960. Heffernan, James M. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashberry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Henkel, M.D. “Illustrierte Ausgaben von Ovides Metamorphosen im xv., xvi. und xvii. Jahrhundert.” Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg (1926–7): 58–144. Herbert, Bruce. “The Myth of Tereus in Ovid and Gower.” Medium aevum 41 (1972): 208–14. Hexter, Ralph. “Ovid in the Middle Ages: Exile, Mythographer, and Lover.” In Brill’s Companion to Ovid, edited by Barbara Weiden Boyd, 413–42. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002. Hirst, Michael. Sebastiano del Piombo. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Huber-Rebenich, Gerlinde. “L’iconografia della mitologia antica tra Quattro- e Cinquecento: Edizioni illustrate delle Metamorfosi di Ovidio.” Studi umanistici piceni 12 (1992): 123–33. Jones, Ann Rosalind. “New Songs for the Swallow: Ovid’s Philomela in Tullia d’Aragona and Gaspara Stampa.” In Refiguring Women: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, edited by Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari, 263–77. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991. ———, and Peter Stallybrass. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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Joplin, Patricia Kleindienst. “The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours.” Stanford Literature Review 1, no. 1 (1984): 25–53. Kruger, Kathryn Sullivan. Weaving the Word: The Metaphorics of Weaving and Female Textual Production. Selinsgrove, pa: Susquehanna University Press, 2001. Leff, Amanda M. “Writing, Gender, and Power in Gower’s Confessio Amantis.” Exemplaria 20, no. 1 (2008): 28–47. Leuscher, Eckhardt. The Illustrated Bartsch, v. 35, Antonio Tempesta, Commentary, Pt 1. New York: Abaris Books, 1983. Lord, Carla. “Three Manuscripts of the Ovide moralisé.” Art Bulletin 57, no. 2 (1972): 161–75. ———. “A Survey of Imagery in Medieval Manuscripts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Related Commentaries.” In Ovid in the Middle Ages, edited by James G. Clark, Frank T. Coulson, and Kathryn L. McKinley, 261–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Mallet, J.V.G. Xanto: Pottery-Painter, Poet, Man of the Italian Renaissance. London: The Wallace Collection, 2007. Marder, Elissa. “Disarticulated Voices: Feminism and Philomela.” Hypatia 7, no. 2 (1992): 148–66. Matthews-Grieco, Sara F. “Persuasive Pictures: Didactic Prints and the Construction of the Social Identity of Women in Sixteenth-Century Italy.” In Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, edited by Letizia Panizza, 285–314. Oxford: Legenda, European Humanities Research Centre, 2000. Mazzio, Carla. “Sins of the Tongue.” In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, 53–79. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. McClure, Laura K., ed. Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World: Readings and Sources. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. McKinley, Kathryn. “Lessons for a King from Gower’s Confessio Amantis 5.” In Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Alison Keith and Stephen Rupp, 107–28. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2007. Morrall, Andrew, and Melinda Watt, eds. English Embroidery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1580–1700: ’Twixt Art and Nature. New York: Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, 2008. Newman, Jane O. “‘And Let Mild Women to Him Lose Their Mildness’: Philomela, Female Violence, and Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece.” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 304–26. Nicholson, Peter. Love and Ethics in Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Nims, John Frederick, ed. Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The Arthur Golding Translation 1567. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2000.

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chapter 10

Figuring Florence: Gendered Bodies in Sixteenth-Century Personifications and Their Antique Models Claudia Lazzaro To personify the city of Florence in the sixteenth century, artists integrated iconographic models from classical antiquity with recent Florentine artistic developments, particularly those of Michelangelo. The images that resulted use human anatomy to create meaning in forms that were unprecedented in antiquity. These Florentine personifications visualize different ways that classical and Renaissance culture understood a city as analogous to the female body. They also figure Florence as male in images of the Arno River, which, like their female personification counterparts, draw upon ancient prototypes and also upon contemporary notions of maleness. The expressive and dynamic bodies in these sixteenth-century personifications actively perform their metaphorical actions and relationships. On ancient Roman coins and imperial reliefs, Roma is represented as manly, deriving from the goddess Athena or Amazon types, both with arms and helmet, in contrast to the personifications of conquered cities and regions, which are feminized to indicate their subordinate status.1 The gendered associations of personifications of Florence are instead complicated by their evocation of various legends of the city’s ancient Roman founding—which encompass both masculine and feminine aspects—in addition to long-standing Florentine verbal and poetic traditions that figure the city as female.

I am grateful to my colleagues and graduate students in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell, to whom I presented an early version of this essay, especially Verity Platt and Annetta Alexandridis, for their valuable suggestions. I also thank the editors of this volume, Marice Rose and Alison Poe, for their astute questions and comments on the final draft. 1 Ronald Mellor, “The Goddess Roma,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt 17, no. 2 (1981): 1011–6, for Roma as Athena, Amazon, and a composite; and for conquered territories,Teresa R. Ramsby and Beth Severy-Hoven, “Gender, Sex, and the Domestication of the Empire in Art of the Augustan Age,” Arethusa 40, no. 1 (2007): 44–62; and René Rodgers, “Female Representation in Roman Art: Feminising the Provincial ‘Other’,” in Roman Imperialism and Provincial Art, ed. Sarah Scott and Jane Webster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 81–92.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004289697_012

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Cities Personified

The first known nude personification of a city in Florentine art is Niccolò Tribolo’s sculpture of Fiesole (Fig. 10.1), the hill town overlooking Florence, created for the Medici garden at Castello and dating about 1540. The female form surrounded by stalactites accompanied a reclining river god representing the nearby Mugnone River in a wall fountain ensemble, which formed part of an allegorical representation of the Tuscan region.2 Fiesole’s robust body, nudity, and torsion, with her head facing left and her leg sharply right, reveal the profound influence of Michelangelo’s Night of the 1520s (Fig.  10.2).3 This statue Tribolo knew well, since he had worked with Michelangelo in the Medici Chapel before the master’s departure from Florence in 1534. He also produced small-scale copies of the Times of Day and in 1545 assembled the tombs in

Figure 10.1

Niccolò Tribolo, Fiesole, c. 1540. Bargello Museum, Florence (Ralph Lieberman)

2 Bertha H. Wiles, “Tribolo in His Michelangelesque Vein,” Art Bulletin 14, no. 1 (1932): 64–70. It was executed sometime after the commission for the garden in 1537 and before a description in a letter by Niccolò Martelli in 1543. 3 Michael Hirst, Michelangelo: The Achievement of Fame 1475–1534 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 195–6, dates the ten models for the statues in the Medici Chapel to 1524–6, and the transport of a slightly used block so that he could begin work on the Night to late the same year.

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Figure 10.2 Michelangelo, Night, 1521–34. Medici Chapel, Florence (Ralph Lieberman)

the chapel.4 The statues’ relationship extends beyond the formal, since Michelangelo’s Night was the first monumental nude female statue in Florence and not incidentally also a personification, if not of a city. Shortly after its creation, Fiesole inspired two figures that either personify or more generally represent a city in sculpted reliefs: Baccio Bandinelli’s abducted female captive (Fig. 10.3) and Pierino da Vinci’s Pisa (Fig. 10.7). All three Florentine sculptors working in the 1540s and early 1550s employ the Michelangelesque torsion of the body, with torso nearly frontal, leg raised, and thigh turned so far to the side to be parallel to the picture plane and nearly horizontal.

The Act of Conquering and the Conquered City

Cities have been personified as female from classical antiquity, an idea so familiar that a first-century Latin text on rhetoric, Rhetorica ad Herennium, 4 Wiles, “Tribolo,” 59; Zygmunt Waźbiński, L’Accademia medicea del disegno a Firenze nel Cinquecento: Idea e istituzione (Florence: Olschki, 1987), 80–2.

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Figure 10.3

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Baccio Bandinelli, Relief with scene of triumph on monument to Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, 1540–3. Piazza San Lorenzo, Florence (Ralph Lieberman)

could explain personification—abstract ideas or non-human entities given human body and voice—through the example of a female city.5 Fundamental to the analogy of the female body to the city is that it can be penetrated, as a city can be invaded or conquered.6 This traditional poetic metaphor is indirectly visualized in Baccio Bandinelli’s relief on the base of the monument he designed to the celebrated condottiere Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, father of 5 James J. Paxson, “Personification’s Gender,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 16, no. 2 (1998): 152–3; Manuel Aguirre, “The Grieving City: Lucan’s Aged Rome and the Morphology of Sovereignty,” Neohelicon 35, no. 1 (2008): 40–2. 6 Paxson, “Personification’s Gender,” 153. Aguirre, “The Grieving City,” 40–2, gives examples across time periods of the city as woman, including an association between rape and the violation of city walls in Homer. Lauro Martines, “Poetry as Politics and Memory in Renaissance Florence and Italy,” in Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence, ed. Giovanni Ciappelli and Patricia Lee Rubin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 55–60, discusses the roles of the female city in Italian Renaissance poetry and their relationship with sexuality.

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Duke Cosimo de’ Medici. Commissioned in 1540, it depicts a triumphal scene with semi-nude male and female prisoners brought to the seated captain at the right (Fig. 10.3).7 My focus is on the episode at the left, where a soldier holds up a female captive. In this image of abduction, or symbolic rape, the female is a representative of the fate of conquered cities, albeit not a personification of a specific one. The two figures are interlocked, almost in an embrace, the soldier’s bent left leg between and supporting hers, his arms encircling her waist, their poses emphasizing that sexual possession is a sign of conquering. The torsion in Bandinelli’s captive, ultimately inspired by Michelangelo, results in the display of her breasts and contradictory directions of her body, both clinging to, and leaning away from, her captor. Prisoners and captives, women as well as men, feature significantly in imperial Roman narrative scenes, as either an aspect of warfare or a symbolic representation of a conquered city.8 In ancient art, as on the lower register of the Gemma Augustea (Fig.  10.4), the sardonyx cameo well-known in the Renaissance, and on the Column of Marcus Aurelius, women are taken captive by being pulled or grabbed by the hair, or also dragged by the wrist or arm.9 Their captive state might also be conveyed through the fluttering or ripped garment typical of a maenad or the unruly hair of a barbarian.10 While some of the ancient Roman imagery may claim to represent the brutality of war and depict the plight of real women, Bandinelli instead sexualizes and aestheticizes the female captive by borrowing from ancient mythological scenes of rape, not narrative ones of war. His image closely resembles the type on some Roman sarcophagi of the popular story of the abduction of Persephone, in which Hades similarly grasps the waist of Persephone, who reacts like

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Louis A. Waldman, Baccio Bandinelli and Art at the Medici Court: A Corpus of Early Modern Sources (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2004), 192–3 and 262–4, with payments through 1543. Keith Bradley, “On Captives under the Principate,” Phoenix: A Journal of the Classical Association of Canada 58, no. 3–4 (2004): 298–318; Philip De Souza, “War, Slavery, and Empire in Roman Imperial Iconography,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 54, no. 1 (2011): 40–57. Diana E.E. Kleiner, Roman Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 69–71; Sheila Dillon, “Women on the Columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius and the Visual Language of Roman Victory,” in Representations of War in Ancient Rome, ed. Sheila Dillon and Katherine E. Welch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 246–9 and figs. 79, 80, 82, and 84. Felix Pirson, “Style and Message on the Column of Marcus Aurelius,” Papers of the British School at Rome 64 (1996): 142 and 157.

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Figure 10.4

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Gemma Augustea, 9–12 ce. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, ny)

Bandinelli’s captive with arm and head flung back (Fig. 10.5).11 Very different in their behavior than the soldiers and their captives on the Column of Marcus Aurelius, Bandinelli’s couple does not pretend to represent a seemingly documentary episode of war, but rather visualizes the analogy between a conquered 11

For the great popularity of Rape of Persephone sarcophagi, see Zahra Newby, “In the Guise of Gods and Heroes: Portrait Heads on Roman Mythological Sarcophagi,” in Life, Death and Representation: Some New Work on Roman Sarcophagi, ed. Jas Elsner and Janet Huskinson (New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 191 and 200. Francesco Vossilla, “Baccio Bandinelli e Benvenuto Cellini tra il 1540 ed il 1560: Disputa su Firenze e su Roma,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 41, no. 3 (1997): 280 and fig. 26, notes the relationship to the Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus sarcophagus in the Uffizi and to the 1520s fresco of the Rape of the Sabines by Polidoro da Caravaggio and Maturino of Florence on the façade of the Casa Milesi in Rome.

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Figure 10.5

Sarcophagus with the Abduction of Persephone by Hades, detail, 220–5 ce. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore (The Walters Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1965)

city and a female penetrated metaphorically, through the resemblance to mythological abductions. Flung-back heads and flying hair like Persephone’s are also among the principal signifiers of ancient maenads—followers of Dionysos and images of female abandon (Fig. 10.6). In his brief discussion of Bandinelli’s relief, Giorgio Vasari singled out the nudes and “disheveled hair.”12 The abducted female’s hair is indeed striking—deeply undercut, rope-like, and extending far down her back. For Renaissance viewers, the wild hair and flailing pose, the opposite of the ideal movements of females—poised, restrained, and upright13—would also resonate as signifying the loss of female decorum, her civil persona undone. Bandinelli’s image, derived from Roman mythological rape scenes, grafts the flung-back head and exaggerated wild hair of a maenad onto the new Michelangelesque language of robust bodies in torsion. A female personification of a conquered city, not a captive generally symbolic of one as in Bandinelli’s scene of triumph, is the focal point of a relief of about 1552 by Pierino da Vinci commemorating the efforts of Duke Cosimo in the subjugated city of Pisa (Fig. 10.7). Medici activities in the crucial seaport 12 13

Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, vol. 6 (Firenze: G. C. Sansoni, 1906), 169, “e femmine scapigliate, ed ignudi.” Sharon Fermor, “Movement and Gender in Sixteenth-Century Italian Painting,” in The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture Since the Renaissance, ed. Kathleen Adler and Marcia R. Pointon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 137–8 and 144–5.

Figuring Florence

Figure 10.6

Maenad, detail, 27 bce–68 ce. Metropolitan Museum, New York (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1912, www.metmuseum.org)

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Figure 10.7

Pierino da Vinci, Pisa Restored, c. 1552. Vatican Museums, Vatican City (Scala/Art Resource, ny)

included reopening the university and especially water regulation and land reclamation, such as establishing the office of canals, rebuilding Pisa’s fleet, and draining swamps in the notoriously malarial region. Luca Martini, the Florentine courtier, engineer, and humanist who directed these projects, undoubtedly also commissioned the relief.14 In the center of a procession of historical and allegorical figures, Cosimo, in the role of benign conqueror, grasps the arm of a sunken female personifying Pisa and appears to lift her up. With his identification of the relief as Pisa restored by the duke (figurava Pisa restaurata del duca), Vasari indicates that he understood its iconographic source in ancient Roman coins of the restitution type. In these numismatic 14

Louis A. Waldman in Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and the Renaissance in Florence, ed. David Franklin (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 292, no. 106; Jonathan Katz Nelson in The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence, ed. Cristina Acidini Luchinat (New Haven: Yale University Press in association with the Detroit Institute of Arts, 2002), 232–4, no. 95; Cristelle Baskins, “Shaping Civic Personification: Pisa Sforzata, Pisa Salvata,” in Early Modern Visual Allegory: Embodying Meaning, ed. Baskins and Lisa Rosenthal (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007), 96 and 100.

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images, a standing male ruler shares the dextrarum iunctio (ceremonial righthand clasp) with a female personified city or region in a kneeling pose of subordination, as in a gold coin of Emperor Hadrian with Achaea, an area of central and southern Greece (Fig. 10.8).15 Unlike the separate figures on Roman coins, however, who touch only with the hand grasp, Pierino emphasized the physical interaction of the two bodies, as Bandinelli had done shortly before. The two forms pressed together act out the metaphor of restoration through what seems a literal lifting of an unstable female. Her instability derives from her Michelangelesque twisted pose similar

Figure 10.8

Coin of Hadrian, Hadrian restoring Achaea, reverse, 134–5 ce. British Museum, London (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

15 Vasari, Le vite, 6.129; Marco Collareta, “Pierino da Vinci e Pisa,” in Pierino da Vinci: Atti della giornata di studio, ed. Marco Cianchi (Florence: Becocci, 1995), 36, indicates the derivation from the ancient coin type and its Michelangelesque transformation.

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to Tribolo’s Fiesole, with frontal torso and thigh in profile, and from her stance partway between standing and kneeling. In her precarious position, Pisa needs Duke Cosimo for support, and her robust body and antique-style clinging drapery, through which her breasts are clearly visible, present the city as a sexually ripe, available female, an image that would have been familiar from fifteenth-century Florentine poems that characterized Pisa as a whore and a slave.16 In a preparatory drawing for the relief now in Chatsworth, Pierino makes Pisa’s sexuality yet more explicit in his rendering of her with bare breast and legs emerging from a flimsy garment, awkwardly attempting to stand while an armored Cosimo clutches her arm.17 Cristelle Baskins has emphasized the heroic acts of women during the Florentine siege of Pisa in 1499,18 but in Pierino’s relief of Pisa Restored, the city is figured as a fallen woman, unable to stand on her own.

Florence as Lover and Nurturer

The traditional personification of a city as a woman led to the projection onto Florence of typically female roles within reciprocal relationships. The habitual epithet of the city for centuries, Fiorenza bella, beautiful Florence, was understood as referring metaphorically to the city as a beautiful woman. In the earliest known visual image of Florence personified as a woman from a midthirteenth-century manuscript, she appears like the Virgin Mary with long garments and arms crossed in prayer.19 That chaste portrayal had changed by the fourteenth century, when the idea of Florence as a female object of love featured in Tuscan poetry.20 In Greek and Latin literature, the gendering of cities as female resulted in personifications as mother, wife, and beloved, and also as grieving widow and sick or fallen woman, as Lucan and Claudian portray 16

17 18 19

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Martines, “Poetry as Politics,” 53–4 and 58, where he notes that three Florentine laments after the earlier conquest of Pisa in 1409 were repeatedly copied and reprinted, including three times in the early sixteenth century. See Marco Cianchi, “Alcune considerazioni sui bassorilevi di Pierino da Vinci,” in Pierino da Vinci, 53 and figs. 83–8, for both Chatsworth and Uffizi preparatory drawings. Baskins, “Shaping Civic Personification,” 100–3, who also notes the “erotically charged” Pisa in both Pierino’s relief and Vasari’s painting in the Palazzo Vecchio. Adrian W.B. Randolph, Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in FifteenthCentury Florence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 93 and fig. 2.4; Mary Bergstein, “Marian Politics in Quattrocento Florence: The Renewed Dedication of Santa Maria Del Fiore in 1412,” Renaissance Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 693 and fig. 10. Bergstein, “Marian Politics,” 687–9; Randolph, Engaging Symbols, 69–71.

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Rome.21 When the new conceptualization in texts of Florence as a beloved woman migrated into images, available visual models of city personifications in ancient Roman coins, reliefs, and cameos provided inspiration, even though they differed significantly from the metaphorical language in both ancient literature and Tuscan poetry. The Roma that was widely represented on these ancient objects was a goddess and at the same time the personified Roman state, or the collective Roman people. She was not exclusively the personified city of Rome—her appearance together with the living emperor in both narrative and allegorical scenes reflects her different status from the beloved city in poetry.22 In this visual tradition, Roma typically has no more of an active role than clasping hands in the dextrarum iunctio with the emperor, as on coins; putting a guiding hand on his elbow, as in the Cancelleria Profectio of Domitian relief now in the Vatican; handing him an orb, as in the Adventus of Hadrian relief in the Conservatori Palace; or gazing purposefully at him, as in the Adventus of Marcus Aurelius relief on the Arch of Constantine (Fig. 10.9).23 In Florentine literary and verbal traditions, and also in sixteenth-century visual images, the analogy between city and female body extended to intimate physical relationships, chief among them a loving and sexual one with ruler or citizens. A late fourteenth-century song imagined Florence as a bride sleeping in the arms of council members in what was then an oligarchical 21

22 23

Yorgis Yatromanolakis, “Poleos Erastes: The Greek City as the Beloved,” in Personification in the Greek World: From Antiquity to Byzantium, ed. Emma Stafford and Judith Herrin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 268 and passim 267–83, traces the metaphor of the city as beloved in variations in Greek poetry; Aguirre, “The Grieving City,” 49, enumerates the various roles of the city personified as female in a broad cultural pattern in literature and folklore, and notes in particular Lucan, De bello civili 1; Catharine Edwards, Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 114–25, discusses the female roles of Rome in Latin literature, especially 118, for the exile poems of Ovid in which the absent city and absent woman are elided “to imply a feminine personification of Rome”; and Michael Roberts, “Rome Personified, Rome Epitomized: Representations of Rome in the Poetry of the Early Fifth Century,” American Journal of Philology 122, no. 4 (2001): 535–41, discusses personifications of Rome in late fourth- and fifth-century Latin poetry, particularly Claudian’s goddess Roma (Panegyricus dictus Probino et Olybrio consulibis; De bello gildonico; In Eutropium 1; De consulatu Stilichonis 2; De Sexto consulatu Honorii 6). For the complicated portrayal of the city of Rome in the Renaissance, see Genevieve S. Gessert, “A Giant Corrupt Body: The Gendering of Renaissance Roma,” Chapter 3 in this volume. Mellor, “Goddess Roma,” 956, 984, 1005, 1013, and 1005–10, for the goddess Roma in Augustan and later poetry. Ibid., 1013–5; Kleiner, Roman Sculpture, 191–2, 254–6, 291, and figs. 159, 223, and 258.

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Figure 10.9  Adventus of Marcus Aurelius, 176–380 ce. Arch of Constantine, Rome (Vanni Archive/Art Resource, ny)

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government.24 Those who were considered the city’s worthy lovers changed over time, however. A poem of the early fifteenth century, before the Medici ascendancy, claimed that privilege for the “old lovers” (antichi amanti), patrician men from old families, and cautioned them about newcomers, gente nuova, the Ciompi heirs of a different social class, who wanted the lady for themselves.25 By the mid-fifteenth century, in a different political configuration, a well-known remark, “It is a pity so beautiful a woman [as Florence] has no husband,” received the response, “Yes, but she has a paramour,” an allusion to the Medici, then the most powerful citizens.26 Others, however, construed the relationship between the city and her Medici lover differently. Michelan­ gelo, in a madrigal written about 1545 after the Medici had become hereditary dukes, asserted that the city’s rightful lovers, its citizens, had been displaced by her new lord. He figured Cosimo’s Florence as a woman created for many lovers, even a thousand, but taken by one for himself, leaving the others weeping and in misery.27 For her citizens, lovers, and rulers, Florence also fulfilled the roles of mother and nurturer. In the gendered discourse of mid-fifteenth-century Florence, the court herald to the Signoria, the governing body, invoked his patria, Florence, as his dear mother.28 In 1515, Lorenzo de’ Medici, nephew of Pope Leo x, characterized the city as feeding or sustaining his political aspirations. He described Florence as his “support and estate and … la poppa mia,” as John Najemy explains, literally the breast, and thus the milk, nourishing his ambitions.29 In her role as nurturer, the city could foster not only political ambitions but also artistic production and much else. A letter of 1571 to Cosimo, then Grand Duke, noted that the city produced excellent artists, like a fecund mother.30

24 Randolph, Engaging Symbols, 69–71; Bergstein, “Marian Politics,” 688. 25 Randolph, Engaging Symbols, 70–1; Bergstein, “Marian Politics,” 287, n. 329. 26 Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 365. 27 James M. Saslow, The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 423: “Per molti, donna, anzi per mille amanti create fusti; e d’angelica forma; or par che’n ciel si dorma, s’un sol s’appropia quell ch’è dato a tanti.” See also Mary A. Watt, “Veni, Sponsa. Love and Politics at the Wedding of Eleonora di Toledo,” in The Cultural World of Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence and Siena, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2004), 30. 28 Bergstein, “Marian Politics,” 288, n. 31. 29 John M. Najemy, A History of Florence 1200–1575 (Malden, ma: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 429. 30 Giovanni Gaetano Bottari and Stefano Ticozzi, Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura ed architettura scritte da’ più celebri personaggi dei secoli xv, xvi, e xvii, vol. 4 (Milan: G. Silvestri, 1822), 253–4, CLI.

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In the sixteenth century, the long-familiar metaphorical language of the city as both lover and nurturer merged in visual images of bare breasts. In about 1565, in his cycle of paintings in the Sala Grande in the Palazzo Vecchio, Vasari represented the personified city crowning Duke Cosimo in the tondo at the center of the ceiling (Fig. 10.10). The firm, high breasts of the nubile, beautiful Florence close to Cosimo’s face evoke the city as metaphorically the milk—the sustenance—of ruler and citizens, and also the city as seductress, lover, and mistress.31 In a preparatory drawing in Copenhagen, Vasari

Figure 10.10  Giorgio Vasari, Apotheosis of Duke Cosimo, c. 1565. Sala Grande, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (Alinari/Art Resource, ny) 31

Ettore Allegri and Alessandro Cecchi, Palazzo Vecchio e i Medici: Guida storica (Florence: spes, 1980), 235 and 243, no. 23; Vasari, Ragionamenti in Le vite, 8.220, calls her “una Firenze.”

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imagined her fully nude, rushing toward her prince-lover in her eagerness to place the crown on his head.32 Vasari’s painting alludes to the Roman senate’s awarding of the oak wreath or corona civica to Augustus for saving the lives of fellow citizens by ending the civil wars of the Late Republic, one of many parallels to Augustus that Cosimo exploited.33 In Roman imagery, however, it is not the personified Rome—city or state—who crowns the emperor, but often a Victory, as on the Great Trajanic Frieze from the Arch of Constantine (Fig. 3.9) and the Triumph of Marcus Aurelius in the Conservatori, and not in such a sexually suggestive act.34 In the upper register of the Gemma Augustea, Oikoumene, personifying the inhabited earth, crowns Augustus, while the stately, Athena-like Roma shares a throne with the emperor (Fig. 10.4).35

The Impregnable City and Military Imagery

Cities are not always conquered; they can also defend themselves and be impregnable, like a female body that cannot be penetrated.36 The same invincibility is suggested of the Roman state in images of Roma in imperial imagery on coins, reliefs, and triumphal arches, where she appears most often as an Amazon type with crested helmet, boots, and short sleeveless and belted tunic, unfastened at one shoulder to bare her breast, all to signify Rome’s military might. In antiquity as in the Renaissance, breasts could denote female fearlessness and strength as well as nurturing and sexual availability. In the Adventus 32

Chris Fischer, Central Italian Drawings: Schools of Florence, Siena, the Marches and Umbria (Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst, 2001), 59–60, no. 13. 33 Malcolm Campbell, “Observations on the Salone de’ Cinquecento in the Time of Duke Cosimo i de’ Medici, 1540–1574,” in Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell’Europa del ’500, vol. 3 (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1983), 826–7; and Henk Th. van Veen, Cosimo de’ Medici and His Self-Representation in Florentine Art and Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 67, who explains the ancient context. 34 Kleiner, Roman Sculpture, 220–3, fig. 185, for the Great Trajanic Frieze; 292–4, fig. 261, for the Triumph of Marcus Aurelius; and another example is the Arch of Titus, 187–8, fig. 156. 35 Mellor, “Goddess Roma,” 1012–3, who notes that there are few certain examples of Roma as Athena (otherwise indistinguishable from the goddess Athena), with the Gemma Augustea as one of two sure representations on gems; for the Gemma Augustea itself, see Kleiner, Roman Sculpture, 70–1, and Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources (London: Harvey Miller, 2010), 216, no. 168, for Renaissance knowledge of it. 36 Paxson, “Personification’s Gender,” 152–3, for the urbs invictissima of the Rhetorica ad Herennium (4.53.66).

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of Marcus Aurelius relief, Amazonian Roma stands at the right, large and powerful, armed with shield, quiver, and spear; she is dignified and chaste, firm in her gaze at the emperor, but set apart from him (Fig. 10.9).37 Military prowess is also deeply embedded in notions of Florence through stories, from at least the thirteenth century, of the city’s founding by the Roman soldier Florino under the sign of Mars.38 The invincible goddess Roma provided a direct model for visualizing Florence in at least one context. The Fiorenza on the reverse of a medal issued by Duke Cosimo early in his reign and used over a period of years emulates the Amazon Roma type on imperial Roman coins in her pose seated on piled-up shields and arms, wearing a helmet and boots, and holding a Victory and a spear.39 Other public and collective personifications of Florence incorporate features of the martial apparatus of Roma along with additional attributes. In one such image of Florence, she appears at the left in a drawing by Vasari with helmet, pauldrons, boots, and scepter, but also a long and flowing garment (Fig. 10.11).40 The invention was that of Cosimo Bartoli, Florentine historian, mathematician, and academician, who used it as the frontispiece to his 1550 Italian translation of Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise on architecture. In his account of the imagery, Bartoli explained that the arms of the personified Florence served to demonstrate the strength of the city.41 The statue representing Florence in Bartolommeo Ammannati’s multi-figured Juno Fountain, commissioned soon after, in 1555, wears fluttering drapery reminiscent of a peplos with a mantle around her shoulders, suggestive of ancient women’s garments, 37 38 39

40

41

Mellor, “Goddess Roma,” 963 and 1011–3. Charles Davis, “Topographical and Historical Propaganda in Early Florentine Chronicles and in Villani,” Medioevo e Rinascimento 2 (1988): 35. Philip Attwood, Italian Medals c. 1530–1600 in British Public Collections (London: British Museum Press, 2003), vol. 1, 325, n. 778, and vol. 2, pl. 164, n. 778a, explains that the image on the reverse was originally created as an oval plaquette, and one example may also have been used as a hat-badge. See also Giuseppe Toderi and Fiorenza Vannel Toderi, Le medaglie italiane del xvi secolo (Florence: Polistampa, 2000), vol. 2, 473, no. 1400 (Domenico di Polo, c. 1543), and vol. 3, pl. 291. Charles Davis, “Frescos by Vasari for Sforza Almeni, ‘Coppiere’ to Duke Cosimo i,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 24, no. 2 (1980): 149–51; Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, ed., Michelangelo, Vasari, and Their Contemporaries: Drawings from the Uffizi (New York: Morgan Library and Museum, 2008), 66–7, no. 30. Detlef Heikamp, “Bartolomeo Ammannati’s Marble Fountain for the Sala Grande of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence,” in Fons Sapientiae: Renaissance Garden Fountains, ed. Elizabeth B. MacDougall (Washington, dc: Dumbarton Oaks, 1978), 129, quotes Cosimo Bartoli’s text.

Figuring Florence

Figure 10.11

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Giorgio Vasari, study for a frontispiece, c. 1550. Uffizi, Florence, n. 394 (Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, ny)

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if not based on any particular sculptural type (Fig. 10.12). She also wears armor beneath her gown, visible on her raised arm, while a helmet rests by her sandaled feet, and she carries a bundle of arrows in her right hand.42 These images of martial Florence, although inspired by Amazonian Roma, differ from the treatment of masculine and feminine in ancient personifications. They incorporate imagery found in ancient representations of the city of Rome, instead of the goddess Roma, as on the reverse of a coin type of Vespasian of 71 ce. The coin, inscribed Roma Resurge[n]s, commemorates the emperor’s restoration of the city after the civil war of 68–9 ce (Fig. 10.13). Here it is not a conquered province for whose hand the standing emperor reaches, as Hadrian and others later used the motif (Fig. 10.8), but rather the city of Rome in a similar kneeling pose.43 In this rare ancient instance of the city personified, the kneeling female figure in her long, loose, and feminine tunic with wind-swept mantle and wellcoiffed hair is accompanied by the goddess Roma standing behind her wearing Amazonian attire and holding a shield. The sixteenth-century personifications of Florence by Vasari and Ammannati fuse in a single figure the masculine armor of Roma, the goddess and state, with the feminine hair and dress of the personified city of Rome.

The Nature of the City—Florence as Flora

While Florence’s military character derived from stories of its Roman origins, other long-standing notions of the city emerged from its legendary founding in a field of flowers. Alluding to this tradition, prose and poetry from the thirteenth century characterized Florence as a “city of flowers,” which flourished, flowered, and bore fruit.44 In a sonnet for Lorenzo the Magnificent shortly after 42

43

44

The other figures are Immortality, Fortune, and Virtue at the top, Minerva at the right, and the Arno River below. Heikamp, “Ammannati’s Marble Fountain,” 129–30 and 115–73 for the fountain generally. The British Museum possesses two coins of Vespasian of this type, and others with a similar figure of Libertas in place of the city of Rome (with the inscription Libertas Restituta rather than Roma Resurges). Another gold coin shows the goddess Roma in her military attire in the same kneeling position. Harold Mattingly, Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum, vol. 2 (London: British Museum, 1966), xlvi, 121, no. 566, pl. 21.9 and 22.1, and 118, pl. 21.1, for the Libertas image; and Mattingly, Coins of the Roman Empire in the British Museum, vol. 2, 2nd rev. ed. (London: British Museum Publications, 1976), 85, no. 372 (dated c. 72–3) and pl. 30, no. 382; and for Vespasian raising the goddess Roma, 157, no. 1360, pl. 74, dated c. 69–70. Bergstein, “Marian Politics,” 679–80.

Figuring Florence

Figure 10.12  Bartolomeo Ammannati, Flora/Florence, from Juno Fountain, 1550. Bargello Museum, Florence (Scala/ Art Resource, ny)

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Figure 10.13  Coin of Vespasian, Roma Resurge[n]s, reverse, 71 ce. British Museum, London (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

his death in 1492, Bernardo Bellincioni conceived of the city as a beautiful woman with flowers in her lap.45 Janet Cox-Rearick cited the association to argue that the figure of Flora, goddess of flowers and of springtime, in Botticelli’s Primavera also represents Fiorenza, the city personified.46 An antique statue type likely provided the visual model for Botticelli’s Flora, as ancient poetry inspired the poetic image of the goddess strewing flowers.47 45

Janet Cox-Rearick, Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art: Pontormo, Leo x, and the Two Cosimos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 18–9; Randolph, Engaging Symbols, 105. 46 Cox-Rearick, Dynasty and Destiny, 79. 47 Ibid., 82; Charles Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 30.

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The probable model, a statue that was in the Medici collection in the sixteenth century (Fig. 10.14), was also a source for Ammannati’s Florence more than a half-century later (Fig. 10.12). Vasari referred to the ancient statue, of a young woman bearing fruit in a fold of her cloak, as Pomona, goddess of abundance, which is similar in seasonal association to the identity of the statue in antiquity as the Hora of Autumn. Over her long, flowing chiton, the figure’s mantle clings to her breasts and legs and flutters at each side from her dancing pose.48 The association of Florence with Flora was common in the sixteenth century, from at least the time of Duke Cosimo’s wedding in 1539, although joined with military attributes, combining masculine Roma with feminine Flora.49 Despite the inclusion of a helmet and arms, contemporaries recognized the figure type with flowers and flowing garments in Vasari’s frontispiece and Ammannati’s statue as Flora, and they readily interpreted these images as representing both Florence and Flora.50

The Body Bared and Female Virility

Another image of the personified city emerges in Giambologna’s Florence Triumphant over Pisa, which represents the city as conqueror, while also alluding to Flora through the flowers in her hair (Fig. 10.15). The work was commissioned in 1565 as a pendant to Michelangelo’s Victory of thirty or forty years earlier, and the plaster model and Michelangelo’s statue group were both set up in the same year on opposite sides of the Sala Grande of the Palazzo Vecchio, but the final marble sculpture was only completed in about 1575 with the

48

49

50

See Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, 104, no. 58, for Vasari and knowledge of the statue and related examples in the Renaissance, as well as the restorations, perhaps sixteenth century, of head, forearms, feet and base. Vasari termed the drapery fine cloth “certi panni sottili.” In the 1539 wedding, Florence was conflated with the beautiful Flora, whose costume includes a gorget, lion’s-head shoulder pauldrons, and armored arms, transcribed in A Renaissance Entertainment: Festivities for the Marriage of Cosimo i, Duke of Florence, in 1539: An Edition of the Music, Poetry, Comedy, and Descriptive Account, with Commentary, ed. Andrew C. Minor and Bonner Mitchell (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1968), 143–5, 166 (for the military costume), and 169–70. In a letter of 1579 to Grand Duke Francesco, Tanai de’ Medici described Ammannati’s statue as “la Flora ch’à i fiori in grembo e’l braccio armato e dinota Fiorenza.” Cosimo Bartoli identified the frontispiece figure as “Flora come voi sapete si intede qui per la città di Firenze,” quoted in Heikamp, “Ammannati’s Marble Fountain,” 121 and 129.

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Figure 10.14  Hora of Autumn (“Pomona”), Roman copy of 1st century bce–1st century ce. Uffizi, Florence (Scala/Art Resource, ny)

Figuring Florence

Figure 10.15  Giambologna, Florence Triumphant over Pisa, c. 1575. Bargello Museum, Florence (Ralph Lieberman)

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assistance of Pietro Francavilla.51 Giambologna’s composition derives from Michelangelo’s invention of a victorious figure standing over a prisoner, but also evokes various other sixteenth-century Florentine versions of the type. While in Pierino da Vinci’s relief (Fig. 10.7) Duke Cosimo raises up, or metaphorically restores, a fallen Pisa in the form of a sexually available female, in Giambologna’s statue group gender roles are reversed: An imposing, over lifesize, and graceful female, nude but for one leg sheathed in drapery, vanquishes a crouching and now male Pisa. The iconographic inversion is also one of the concept of a city, from conquered to unconquerable. The emasculated captive is subdued and bound with chains, manacles around his wrists, and a Michelangelesque strap across his chest, with bent head, unkempt beard, and the disheveled hair that for Vasari signified the female as possessed in Bandinelli’s relief.52 On the other hand, the hair of Fiorenza, as Giambologna called her, is artfully arranged in an elegant coiffure and adorned with a wreath of flowers. The occasion for the commission was the wedding of Cosimo’s eldest son Francesco with Joanna of Austria, which linked love and politics, as had earlier poetic metaphors of Florence as bride and lover. Giambologna’s Florence Triumphant could resonate on multiple levels, from the city as conqueror, through its overt theme and placement in the Sala Grande below Vasari’s scene of the battle with Pisa, to the familiar trope of a male as prisoner of love in a metaphorical relationship with his beloved Florence.53 But what about analogies to actual women? In a legendary episode in 1488, Caterina Sforza, countess of Forlì and paternal grandmother of Cosimo de’ Medici, took possession of the main fortress at Forlì after the murder of her husband. When her enemies threatened to kill her children, instead of reacting with a woman’s maternal instinct, as they had

51

Charles Avery, Giambologna: The Complete Sculpture (London: Phaidon Press, 1993), 25, 77–9, and 254, no. 10; Tommaso Mozzati, “Firenze trionfa su Pisa,” in Giambologna, gli dei, gli eroi: Genesi e fortuna di uno stile europeo nella sculptura, eds. Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi and Dimitrios Zikos (Florence: Giunti, 2006), 237–8; Christina Strunck, “Eine radikale Programmänderung im Palazzo Vecchio: Wie Michelangelos Sieger auf Giambologna und Vasari wirkte,” in Michelangelo: Neue Beiträge, ed. Michael Rohlmann and Andreas Thielemann (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2000), 265–97; Baskins, “Shaping Civic Personification,” 91–108. 52 Avery, Giambologna, 67, fig. 76, notes the “touseled” hair and beard on the model “reminiscent of a ‘barbarian’ … in ancient Roman sculpture,” and also on the marble, figs.  80 and 91. 53 See Strunck, “Radikale Programmänderung,” 271–5, for multiple readings, including a matrimonial allegory.

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anticipated, she responded “in a virile manner,” “like a virago.”54 In Niccolò Machiavelli’s famous iteration of the event that inspired later historiographers, Caterina stated that she had the means to make more children, while raising her skirts to reveal her genitals (a gesture called anasyrmos in antiquity and recounted in analogous contexts in Plutarch’s Moralia).55 Other contemporary chroniclers portrayed Caterina as tricking her captors by claiming to be pregnant, some also claiming an obscene gesture or comment.56 All agreed that with her astuteness and audaciousness, Caterina had acted like a man, although paradoxically it was by pointing either literally or figuratively to her anatomy, her penetrability and reproductive capacity. Julia Hairston explains that she assumed both roles of warrior and child-bearer, male and female.57 From this familiar story we can imagine how contemporaries could see in the nudity of Giambologna’s Florence Triumphant a sign of female power and strength and an apt representation of the conquering city.

Michelangelo and the Nude: Re-imagining Gender and Antiquity

Giambologna’s inspiration for Florence Triumphant over Pisa (Fig. 10.15) came not only from Michelangelo’s Victory, but more fundamentally from his predecessor’s extension of the expressive potential of the human body through the new aesthetic of the serpentine line, particularly in his Times of Day— Dawn and Dusk, Day and Night (Fig. 10.2)—reclining on the tombs of Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici in the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo in Florence. Michelangelo’s inventions also enabled later Florentine artists to rework ancient models into images that introduced current concerns with gender 54

55

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Julia L. Hairston, “Skirting the Issue: Machiavelli’s Caterina Sforza,” Renaissance Quarterly 53, no. 3 (2000): 691 and 696, “virilmente rispose” and “propria virago,” and generally 687– 712. Hairston adds, 692–3, that later writers noted the different expectations for noble and ruling women, among them Torquato Tasso in Della virtù feminile e donnesca of 1582, who distinguished between the accepted behavior of women at service to the family and the standards for the female ruler. An early seventeenth-century account explained that “princesses of noble blood, in the face of serious incidents, were obliged to display virility.” Ibid., 689–90, for the version in the Discourses and Florentine Histories, and 705–6, for anasyrmos in Plutarch’s Moralia (Lacaenarum Apophthegmata 6.4 and De mulierum virtutibus 5), likely known to Machiavelli and other historians, who described women performing this gesture to assert their childbearing role in society and thereby to shame their husbands into returning to battle. Ibid., 694–9. Ibid., 707.

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distinctions and with the relationship of sex and power. Contemporaries discussing Michelangelo’s female nudes were particularly attentive to gender characteristics, some complaining about their muscularity.58 Others, including the prominent Florentine authors Anton Francesco Doni in 1543 and Francesco Bocchi in 1591, found leggiadrìa—a term for a graceful movement that was understood as explicitly feminine—in the Night.59 The influential poet and satirist Pietro Aretino noted approvingly “the muscles of the male in the body of the female” in Michelangelo’s Venus in his cartoon for the Venus and Cupid.60 Despite Michelangelo’s overturning of gender expectations by reversal and combination, the Night acquired such status that Bocchi in his guidebook to Florence proclaimed it equal in beauty to the iconic ancient Aphrodite of Knidos.61 Michelangelo’s innovations arise in part from his creative engagement with ancient sculpture, including the Knidos itself. In a drawing of about 1520 in the British Museum (Fig. 10.16), one of four after an ancient torso of the Knidia type, the artist adds some bulk and definition, reduces the breasts, elongates the torso, juts out the hip, and raises the left leg, all of which accentuates the tilt of the body to the side.62 Joachim Poeschke has observed that even when ostensibly copying an antique model, Michelangelo transformed and animated it, in some cases making it seem to be rather after a living form.63 The subtle differences between these four drawings and their prototype foreshadow a more radical rethinking of the female nude in a clay model of five or more years later (Fig. 10.17).64 In contrast to the type of standing ancient statue 58

59 60 61 62 63 64

Jonathan Katz Nelson, “La Venere e Cupido Fiorentina: un nudo eroico feminile e la potenza dell’amore,” in Venere e Amore: Michelangelo e la nuova bellezza ideale = Venus and Love: Michelangelo and the New Ideal of Beauty, ed. Franca Falletti and Jonathan Katz Nelson (Florence: Giunti, 2002), 31–2 and 37–8. Ibid., 38–9. For the gendered term leggiadrìa, see Fermor, “Movement and Gender,” 137 and generally 129–45. Venere e Amore, 230, letter of 1542. The cartoon is lost; the final painting, by Pontormo, is in the Accademia Gallery in Florence. Francesco Bocchi, The Beauties of the City of Florence: A Guidebook of 1591, trans. Thomas Frangenberg and Robert Williams (London: Harvey Miller, 2006), 245. Paul Joannides in Venere e Amore, 150–1, no. 4, dates the drawing c. 1520. Joachim Poeschke, Michelangelo and His World: Sculpture of the Italian Renaissance (New York: Abrams, 1996), 20–1. Jeannine O’Grody, “Michelangelo: The Master Modeler,” in I bozzetti michelangioleschi della Casa Buonarroti, ed. Pina Ragionieri (Florence: Mandragora, 2000), 48–53; Nelson in Venere e Amore, 154–5, no. 7, relates it to the figures of Earth and Air for the Medici Chapel tombs, and dates it c. 1533; and Joannides in Venere e Amore, 152–3, dates it to the mid1520s in a convincing argument.

Figuring Florence

Figure 10.16  Michelangelo, study of a torso of Aphrodite c. 1520. British Museum, London (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

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Figure 10.17 Michelangelo, Nude Female, mid-1520s–early 1530s. Casa Buonarroti, Florence (Alinari/Art Resource ny)

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of Aphrodite in Michelangelo’s drawing, which remains essentially planar, his model presents the upper torso turning dramatically to the side, bringing one shoulder forward and the other back, a movement counterbalanced by the nearly frontal lower body, with sharply bent raised right leg. These torsions  give contrary directions to the figure, formally and potentially iconographically, and render it active and complex. The artistic innovations that Michelangelo developed in his standing clay model he also adapted to the marble reclining statues of Night and Dawn in the Medici Chapel. The male reclining nudes of Michelangelo likewise result from his reworking of ancient statue types, in this case river gods, some striking examples of which had just been unearthed in Rome in the early sixteenth century and transported to the Belvedere statue court in the Vatican. One of these figures was restored as the Arno River with a Michelangelesque head, and Michelangelo himself designed for it a rustic setting with dripping water, which ultimately inspired the display of river gods in garden fountains.65 The ancient statues of river gods in the Vatican inspired Michelangelo’s reclining male Dusk and Day in type, but not in composition or affect. In comparison with the relaxed, static, and planar Roman river gods, Michelangelo’s personifications slouch back or rotate the upper body, and cross a back leg over a front one. The river gods of other Florentine artists, such as that in Vasari’s frontispiece drawing (Fig. 10.11), or Ammannati’s Arno River in his Juno Fountain, follow the male Times of Day in the Medici Chapel in their more dynamic and intricate poses. Michelangelo also planned to rest reclining river gods on the floor below the tombs, which, although never completed, survive in drawings and in the models that probably remained in the chapel until after 1555.66 Later artists copied these in both drawings and statuettes, inventing variations, adding missing parts, and emphasizing Michelangelesque torsions. In an anonymous sixteenth-century drawing, for example, the artist bends the legs, raises the back leg high, creates shifts in the torso from soft belly facing the viewer to breast in profile, and suggests a head twisted sharply back (Fig. 10.18). These male bodies assume poses that are not only more active, but also more masculine, as the sixteenth century understood gendered body language. The term gagliardo described movements that are sforzati, difficult or forced, vigorous and visually complex, and indicative of males.67

65 66 67

Claudia Lazzaro, “River Gods: Personifying Nature in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” Renaissance Studies 25, no. 1 (2011): 70–5. O’Grody, “Master Modeler,” 37–8. Fermor, “Movement and Gender,” 132–43, who notes Castiglione’s use of the term gagliardo in the immensely popular Book of the Courtier for movements that are at the

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Figure 10.18  Anonymous after Michelangelo, River God, c. 1530–1600. British Museum, London (© The Trustees of the British Museum)



Male Virility, the River, and the City

The Tiber river god appeared in various forms and with multiple meanings in Roman art. Ancient images include colossal cult river god statues, such as the Tiber in the Louvre, discovered in Rome in 1512; representations on sarcophagi, such as the Mars and Rhea Silvia sarcophagus in the Palazzo Mattei, copied  various times in the Renaissance; and numerous depictions on coins.68

68

same time gagliardi and sforzati; Ludovico Dolce’s description in 1554 or 1555 of the movement of Adonis in Titian’s Venus and Adonis as gagliardo; and Vasari’s characterization in his Lives, of both Castagno and Rosso Fiorentino as artists who are gagliardi, evident in particular in the vigorous movements, contorted poses, and extended limbs of Rosso’s Moses and the Daughters of Jethro. See also Michael Cole, “The Figura Sforzata: Modelling, Power and the Mannerist Body,” Art History 24, no. 4 (2001): 520–51. For the Louvre statue and the sarcophagus, both known in the Renaissance, see Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, 113–4, nos. 66, and 72, 25. Coins include those of Nero, Vespasian, Domitian, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and

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In Latin literature, particularly in late authors such as Claudian, the Tiber river god could function as a synecdoche for Rome, and it did so again commonly in the sixteenth century.69 So too in sixteenth-century Florence the Arno River, embodied in forms inspired by Michelangelo’s re-working of ancient prototypes, came to represent the city along with the female personifications. Legends of the ancient Roman founding of the city set it both in a field of flowers and by a flowing river. In the figurative language of sixteenth-century Florentine poetry, Flora, the goddess of flowers, and the Arno river god equally personify the city.70 Both suggest fertility and flourishing—of the earth, of poetry and the arts, and of the state.71 Vasari understood that the cornucopia that frequently accompanies ancient river god statues, as well as his own painted examples, signified the abundance that the river brought to the surrounding territory, in addition to other metaphorical gifts.72 On the ceiling of the Palazzo Vecchio’s Sala Grande, the central scenes of the Apotheosis of Duke Cosimo (Fig. 10.10) and of Florentine history are framed at either end by eight square compartments with representations of the subject cities of the Florentine state, each illustrated through personifications of river and city, symbols and cityscapes.73 Vasari’s nude river gods, foreshortened and pressed to the picture plane, lounge in a variety of seated, reclining, and twisted poses. Although craggy old men, they have the muscular and beefy physique of Michelangelo’s later figures. They not only designate geographical place, but through their body language they also demonstrate the fruitfulness that the rivers brought to the land. They assume gagliardo masculine poses, and their Marcus Aurelius, examples of which are cited and illustrated on the ocre (Online Coins of the Roman Empire) website, http://numismatics.org/ocre/results?q=deity _facetTiber (accessed 11 February 2015). 69 Michael Roberts, “Rome Personified, Rome Epitomized: Representations of Rome in the Poetry of the Early Fifth Century,” American Journal of Philology 122, no. 4 (2001): 551–2; for early sixteenth-century examples of the Tiber as synecdoche for Rome, see Lazzaro, “River Gods,” 77–80. 70 Victoria Kirkham, Laura Battiferra and her Literary Circle: An Anthology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 50, 83, 124–5, 144–5, and 172–3. 71 On the association between flowing water and the flourishing of vision and inspiration in early modern Italy, see April Oettinger, “Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water in Lorenzo Lotto’s Venus and Cupid,” Chapter 7 in this volume. 72 Vasari, Ragionamenti in Le vite 8.145 explains that the River Arno’s cornucopia in the room of Leo x signified the abundance of “frutti terrestri” as well as of the “ingegni dei suoi populi.” 73 Illustrated in Ugo Muccini, Il Salone dei Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio (Florence: Le Lettere, 1990), 88–98.

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spread legs, exposed genitals, and water pouring from their vases unambiguously convey the analogy between human procreation and nature’s flourishing. In the scene of the nearby cities of San Gimignano and Colle Val d’Elsa, the thickset River Elsa bears an overflowing urn and between his legs rests a cornucopia with undulating base and a small grotesque head at its end that obscures his genitals while unabashedly alluding to them (Fig. 10.19). Vasari’s river gods represent the abundance of water in the Tuscan state and its vaunted fertility through a substantial and aggressively male presence in the ceiling. Patricia Simons has demonstrated that in the sixteenth century fluids, particularly

Figure 10.19 Giorgio Vasari, San Gimignano and Colle Val d’Elsa with River Elsa, 1563–5. Sala Grande, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (Alinari/Art Resource, ny)

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bodily fluids such as urine and semen, were understood as interchangeable.74 In the Sala Grande ceiling, water seemingly stands for semen as well as urine. Whereas female personifications of Florence suggest the fecundity of the Tuscan state through their bare breasts, nudity, and flowers, river gods convey its bountifulness through male virility and male reproductive capacity.75 These figures must have seemed familiar to their contemporaries, recalling a Tuscan literary tradition that followed the model of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in personifying the local landscape and tracing the origins of its geography to the exploits, love affairs, and abductions among nymphs and river gods that led to their metamorphosis.76

Florence as Nude Venus

In the Medici garden at Castello, designed by Tribolo from about 1538, fountain statues reproduced the passage of water through Tuscan territory, from local mountains to the Arno and Mugnone Rivers, bringing abundant water and ensuing fertility to the city of Florence. In this geographical allegory, Tribolo’s innovative Fiesole (Fig.  10.1), the first nude city personification in Florence, occupied a niche together with the River Mugnone, which has not survived but may be reflected in the river god in Vasari’s frontispiece (Fig. 10.11).77 The execution of the statuary in Tribolo’s design for the garden took place over some time and underwent alterations after his death in 1550, but the essential scheme remained. Although added later, Giambologna’s bronze statue personifying Florence atop the shaft of Tribolo’s tall marble candelabra fountain at the center of the garden completes the pre-existing plan (Fig.  10.20).78 Well 74

Patricia Simons, “Manliness and the Visual Semiotics of Bodily Fluids in Early Modern Cul­ ture,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 39, no. 2 (2009): 331 and generally 331–73. 75 For example, Tanai de’ Medici identified Ammannati’s river god in the Juno Fountain as the “Arno che fa fertile la cità,” cited in Heikamp, “Ammannati’s Marble Fountain,” 121. 76 Boccaccio’s Il ninfale fiesolano and Lorenzo’s Ambra are in this genre, in addition to local anonymous works about Fiesole and Pratolino. For this Tuscan literary tradition and its relationship to garden sculpture, see Una Roman D’Elia, “Giambologna’s Giant and the Cinquecento Villa Garden as a Landscape of Suffering,” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 31, no. 1 (2011): 16–7. 77 Lazzaro, “River Gods,” 87–90, for the Castello river gods and their reflections in Bartoli’s frontispieces. 78 The fountain was later moved to the adjacent Villa Petraia and now bears a copy of the bronze statue made after the restoration of the original in 1980, which is displayed inside the villa.

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Figure 10.20  Giambologna, Fiorenza, c. 1560 or 1570. Villa La Petraia, Florence (Scala/ Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource ny)

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before mid-century, Tribolo had originated the radically new idea of personifying Florence as nude, following the precedent of Michelangelo’s Night and Dawn, as well as his own Fiesole. The equally novel representation of the city as Aphrodite Anadyomene, rising from the sea, was also Tribolo’s invention. Twenty or thirty years later, Giambologna gave compelling form to Tribolo’s conception.79 Her body pose is conspicuously similar to Giambologna’s Fiorenza in Florence Triumphant over Pisa (Fig.  10.15), despite their different actions, size, and materials, as it is also to many of his other female nudes. Charles Avery has noted that Giambologna invented a large number of compositions early in his career, from which he drew at various points in later years.80 Scholars have dated the Castello bronze both before and after the 1565 plaster model for Florence Triumphant, but its relationship with the earlier planned statue and the new manner of visualizing the city signaled by Tribolo’s model support arguments for an early dating, preceding the two-figure group.81 In antiquity, statues of the Anadyomene, such as those in the Vatican and Palazzo Colonna in Rome along with many statuettes, most commonly represent the goddess with both arms raised on either side of her head to grasp her locks.82 In the Renaissance, however, an early sixteenth-century reinterpretation of the type became the canonical image. Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving of 1506 of Venus Anadyomene (since Aphrodite was known as Venus in the Renaissance) widely disseminated the new type. In Marcantonio’s engraving as in later Renaissance versions, one arm crosses her body and both hands together grip her long hair.83 While unambiguously alluding to the ancient prototype, Giambologna’s statue adopts the sixteenth-century variation, as undoubtedly Tribolo’s model had as well. As contemporaries could identify earlier images by Vasari and Ammannati as both Florence and Flora, so too 79

See Isabella Lapi Ballerini, “Fiorenza,” in Giambologna, gli dei, gli eroi, 158–60, for an excellent summary of the evidence. 80 Avery, review of Giambologna gli dei, gli eroi in Sculpture Journal 15, no. 2 (2006): 300; and on Giambologna’s repetition of types and their later naming, including the Castello Fiorenza, see Michael W. Cole, Ambitious Form: Giambologna, Ammanati, and Danti in Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 173–5 and 330, no. 45. 81 Avery, Giambologna, 130, dates it to about 1560; Herbert Keutner, “Le statue del Giambologna,” in Fiorenza in Villa, ed. Cristina Acidini Luchinat (Florence: Alinari, 1987), 44, to about 1570. 82 Christine Mitchell Havelock, The Aphrodite of Knidos and Her Successors: A Historical Review of the Female Nude in Greek Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 86–93 and figs. 28–32, for a review of scholarship on both the half-draped and nude versions, which share similar hand gestures. 83 Avery, Giambologna, 54; Keutner, “Statue del Giambologna,” 44.

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they would have read Giambologna’s Castello Fiorenza as both Florence personified and as Venus.84 Figuring the city in the guise of the iconic classical Anadyomene alludes to Florence’s ancient Roman origins and to stories of its founding at the confluence of two rivers, the Arno and Mugnone, represented in garden statues from which water flowed to the central fountain. Florence in the guise of Venus, rather than as Flora or Roma, also emphasizes the association with the goddess’s generative nature and her narrative links to water. She represents the fertility of the city from its abundant water, as well as all that water and fertility can convey metaphorically—from the aqueducts that Cosimo constructed starting from this very site to the flourishing of the arts.85 In Giambologna’s fountain statue, Fiorenza acts out the abundance of water by wringing her long tresses, from which water originally flowed. Her body is also dynamic with turns and oppositions: head to her right, arms and hair to her left; straight right leg and bent left resting on an urn; and torso bent forward and leg raised.86 Fiorenza’s serpentine pose evokes Michelangelo’s clay model of a standing female (Fig. 10.17) and his reclining Night (Fig. 10.2) and Dawn as much as the hair-wringing refers to the antique. The spiral composition invites us to walk around and admire her curvaceous form and smooth surface from every point of view. Yet Giambologna undoes all the masculine muscles and conjoined masculine and feminine of Michelangelo’s nude females, as well as the martial references of Vasari and Ammannati, emphasizing instead Fiorenza’s femaleness and aligning her with the ancient tradition of statues of Aphrodite in her desirability and sensuousness. While the figure is emphatically gendered, her pose is not one easily assumed by a living body, and from different points of view the abstract design of contrasting angular and curved forms is apparent. Giambologna combines a naturalistic action with an artistic reformulation of the human body that is reminiscent of both antiquity and Michelangelo but that is ultimately his own distinctive, later sixteenth-century image of grace, leggiadrìa, and sensuality. 84

85

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Lapi Ballerini, “Fiorenza,” in Giambologna, 160; and Michael W. Cole, “Venus (Fiorenza),” in Luchinat, The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence, 211–2, no. 74, who calls it Venus because it does not display any attributes of Florence. Claudia Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden: From the Conventions of Planting, Design, and Ornament to the Grand Gardens of Sixteenth-Century Central Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 167–89 on the garden and aqueducts at Castello. Anthea Brook, “A Graphic Source for Giambologna’s Fata Morgana,” in Giambologna tra Firenze e l’Europa, ed. Sabine Eiche (Florence: Centro Di, 2000), 50–8, discusses this type of Giambologna’s standing female figures and a potential model in Raphael.

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Conclusion In imperial Roman visual art, the goddess Roma, as we have seen, is represented as a manly Amazon or Athena type, while feminized images are reserved for both male and female captives. In sixteenth-century Florence, to represent the female personified city as lover and nurturer and as flourishing and bountiful, Florentines instead drew on ancient iconographic traditions of feminine imagery associated with nature, from the Seasons (understood as Pomona) to Aphrodite, as well as on images of river gods for her male counterpart. While emphatically gendered images are essential in both ancient Rome and early modern Florence, the parameters of gender differ in Florentine imagery: The female and feminine are multifaceted including the power of sexuality, masculine and feminine signifiers together in female images, and fertility and virility together in male figures. The fertility of Florence and its surrounding territory is a leitmotif of the sixteenth century, and under Medici rule, it was not only a natural result of the local geography but also achieved through the harnessing of nature: building aqueducts, taming rivers, draining marshes, and other agricultural and water management projects.87 Long called the “second Rome” or “daughter of Rome,” Florence as the “New Rome” ushered in by the Medici dukes in the sixteenth century was figured not primarily through the military associations of ancient Roma, but rather through sensuality, nudity, and metaphors of procreation. Bibliography Acidini Luchinat, Cristina, ed. The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence. New Haven: Yale University Press in association with the Detroit Institute of Arts, 2002. Aguirre, Manuel. “The Grieving City: Lucan’s Aged Rome and the Morphology of Sovereignty.” Neohelicon 35, no. 1 (2008): 31–60.

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For medals celebrating Cosimo’s construction of aqueducts, draining the Pisan marshes, and channeling the Arno River, see Phillip Attwood in The Medici, Michelangelo, 235–41, no. 98. On water management under the Medici dukes, see Felicia M. Else, “Controlling the Waters of Granducal Florence: A New Look at Stefano Bonsignori’s View of the City (1584),” Imago Mundi 61, no. 2 (June 2009): 174–81; and Suzanne B. Butters, “Princely Waters: An Elemental Look at the Medici Dukes,” in La civiltà delle acque tra Medioevo e Rinascimento, ed. Daniela Lamberini, vol. 1 (Florence: Olschki, 2010), 289–410.

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Allegri, Ettore, and Alessandro Cecchi. Palazzo Vecchio e i Medici: Guida storica. Florence: S.P.E.S., 1980. Attwood, Philip. Italian Medals c. 1530–1600 in British Public Collections. 2 vols. London: British Museum Press, 2003. Avery, Charles. Giambologna: The Complete Sculpture. London: Phaidon Press, 1993. ———. “Reviews.” Sculpture Journal 15, no. 2 (2006): 299–309. Baskins, Cristelle. “Shaping Civic Personification: Pisa Sforzata, Pisa Salvata.” In Early Modern Visual Allegory: Embodying Meaning, edited by Cristelle Louise Baskins and Lisa Rosenthal, 91–108. Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2007. Bergstein, Mary. “Marian Politics in Quattrocento Florence: The Renewed Dedi­ cation  of Santa Maria Del Fiore in 1412.” Renaissance Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 673–719. Bober, Phyllis Pray, and Ruth Rubinstein. Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources. London: Harvey Miller, 2010. Bocchi, Francesco. The Beauties of the City of Florence: A Guidebook of 1591. Translated by Thomas Frangenberg and Robert Williams. London: Harvey Miller, 2006. Bradley, Keith. “On Captives under the Principate.” Phoenix: A Journal of the Classical Association of Canada 58, no. 3–4 (2004): 298–318. Brook, Anthea. “A Graphic Source for Giambologna’s Fata Morgana.” In Giambologna tra Firenze e l’Europa, edited by Sabine Eiche, 47–63. Florence: Centro Di, 2000. Butters, Suzanne B. “Princely Waters: An Elemental Look at the Medici Dukes.” In La civiltà delle acque tra Medioevo e Rinascimento, edited by Daniela Lamberini, vol. 1, 289–410. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2010. Campbell, Malcolm. “Observations on the Salone de’ Cinquecento in the Time of Duke Cosimo i de’ Medici, 1540–1574.” In Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell’Europa del’ 500, vol. 3, 814–30. Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1983. Cianchi, Marco. “Alcune considerazioni sui bassorilevi di Pierino da Vinci.” In Pierino da Vinci: Atti della giornata di studio, edited by Marco Cianchi, 47–55. Florence: Becocci, 1995. Cole, Michael. “The Figura Sforzata: Modelling, Power and the Mannerist Body.” Art History 24, no. 4 (2001): 520–51. Cole, Michael W. Ambitious Form: Giambologna, Ammanati, and Danti in Florence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Collareta, Marco. “Pierino da Vinci e Pisa.” In Pierino da Vinci: Atti della giornata di studio, edited by Marco Cianchi, 35–7. Florence: Becocci, 1995. Cox-Rearick, Janet. Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art: Pontormo, Leo X, and the Two Cosimos. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Davis, Charles. “Frescos by Vasari for Sforza Almeni, ‘Coppiere’ to Duke Cosimo i.” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 24, no. 2 (1980): 127–202.

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Waźbiński, Zygmunt. L’Accademia medicea del disegno a Firenze nel Cinquecento: Idea e istituzione. Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1987. Wiles, Bertha H. “Tribolo in His Michelangelesque Vein.” Art Bulletin 14, no. 1 (1932): 59–70. Yatromanolakis, Yorgis. “Poleos Erastes: The Greek City as the Beloved.” In Personification in the Greek World: From Antiquity to Byzantium, edited by Emma Stafford and Judith Herrin, 267–83. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2005.

chapter 11

Conjugal Piety: Creusa in Barocci’s Aeneas’ Flight from Troy Ian Verstegen It is often noted that Federico Barocci (c. 1533–1612), known for his devout life, painted only one significant non-religious picture in his long career: Aeneas’ Flight from Troy (c. 1589), executed for Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf ii.1 The emperor had approached agents of the Duke Francesco Maria ii della Rovere of Urbino looking for a non-devotional picture, one of a “different taste” (altro gusto).2 The result, a lost painting that we now know through a copy in the Villa Borghese, Rome (Fig. 11.1), probably somewhat disappointed the emperor, as it lacked the titillating quality of the mythological works produced by artists at Rudolf’s court in Prague, such as Hans von Aachen and Bartholomaeus Spranger.3 Indeed, the Duke of Urbino marveled that he never got a word of thanks from the emperor, or even an acknowledgment of receipt. Barocci’s painting was serious, deep, and thought-provoking, with many levels of resonance for the sixteenth-century viewer. It treated ancient subjects in the

1 For literature on this painting, see Harald Olsen, Federico Barocci, 2nd ed. (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1962); Andrea Emiliani, Federico Barocci (Bologna: Alfa, 1985), vol. 2, 230–37; Federico Barocci, rev. ed. (Ancona: Il Lavoro Editoriale/Ars Books, 2008); Stuart Lingo, Federico Barocci: Allure and Devotion in Late Renaissance Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Peter Gillgren, Siting Federico Barocci and the Renaissance Aesthetic (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011); Judith W. Mann and Babette Bohn, eds., Federico Barocci: Renaissance Master of Colour and Line, exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 272–81. For Rudolf II’s patronage, see R.J.W. Evans, Rudolf ii and His World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576–1612 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985); Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, The School of Prague: Painting at the Court of Rudolf ii (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 2 Georg Gronau, Documenti artistici urbinati (Florence: G.C. Sansoni, 1936), 163–4. 3 It is interesting that at precisely the same time, the Duke of Bavaria, Wilhelm V, accepted a gift of Urbino maiolica, asking for more with the proviso to the painters “a non porvi cosa alcuna che tenga del dishonesto”: Georg Gronau, “Über künstlerische Beziehungen des bayerischen Hofes zum Hof von Urbino,” Münchener Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 9 (1932): 377–80; Timothy Wilson, “Committenza roveresca e committenza delle botteghe maiolicarie del ducato di Urbino nell’epoca roveresca,” in I Della Rovere: Piero della Francesca, Raffaello, Tiziano, ed. Paolo Dal Poggetto (Milan: Electa, 2004), 203–9.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004289697_013

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Figure 11.1

Federico Barocci, The Flight of Aeneas from Troy, c. 1589. Galleria Borghese, Rome (Art Resource, ny)

manner of a religious istoria, an approach that forms a key to the painting’s deeper significance.4 The subject of the painting comes from Book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid, in which the Trojan hero relates the story of his escape from Troy to Queen Dido of Carthage. Bent on war after the breach of the city through the trickery of the great wooden horse, Aeneas was counseled by his mother Venus, he recounts, to tend to his family instead. He and his wife Creusa, his father Anchises, and his son Ascanius together prepared their escape. At first, Aeneas says, Creusa “walked behind us” (pone subit coniunx). But as the hero wove through the burning city, he discovered hic mihi nescio quod trepido male numen amicum confusam eripuit mentem. namque auia cursu dum sequor et nota excedo regione uiarum, heu misero coniunx fatone erepta Creusa substitit, errauitne uia seu lapsa resedit, incertum; nec post oculis est reddita nostris. Aeneid 2.735–41

4 The idea that the painting is treated little differently from one of his altarpieces is put forward by Marcia B. Hall in After Raphael (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 274.

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At that moment some hostile power confused me and robbed me of my wits. I ran where there was no road, leaving the familiar area of the streets. Then it was that my wife Creusa was torn from me by the cruelty of Fate—whether she stopped or lost her way or sat down exhausted, no one can tell. I never saw her again.5 In the painting, as represented by the Villa Borghese copy, Aeneas hoists up Anchises as the young Ascanius puts a hand on his father’s leg; Creusa lags slightly behind. Barocci artfully combines the family as they have just set out to save their lineage and fulfill their destiny—the main point of the image—with Creusa’s impending estrangement. Creusa seems both to acknowledge her fate and to anticipate the next episode of the story, when Aeneas returns to the city alone to search for his wife and instead encounters her shade. Ausus quin etiam voces iactare per umbram implevi clamore vias, maestusque Creusam nequiquam ingeminans iterumque iterumque vocavi. Quaerenti et tectis urbis sine fine ruenti infelix simulacrum atque ipsius umbra Creusae visa mihi ante oculos et nota maior imago. Obstipui, steteruntque comae et vox faucibus haesit. Tum sic adfari et curas his demere dictis: “Quid tantum insano iuvat indulgere dolori, o dulcis coniunx? Non haec sine numine divum eveniunt; nec te comitem hinc portare Creusam fas, aut ille sinit superi regnator Olympi. Longa tibi exsilia et vastum maris aequor arandum, et terram Hesperiam venies, ubi Lydius arva inter opima virum leni fluit agmine Thybris. Illic res laetae regnumque et regia coniunx parta tibi; lacrimas dilectae pelle Creusae. Non ego Myrmidonum sedes Dolopumue superbas aspiciam aut Grais servitum matribus ibo, Dardanis et divae Veneris nurus; sed me magna deum genetrix his detinet oris. Iamque vale et nati serva communis amorem.” Aeneid 2.768–89

I even dared to call her name into the darkness, filling the streets with my shouts. Grief-stricken, I called her name “Creusa! Creusa!” again and again, but there was no answer. I would not give up the search but was still rushing around the houses of the city when her likeness appeared in sorrow before my eyes, her very ghost, but larger than she was in life. I was paralysed. My hair stood on end. My voice stuck in my throat. Then she spoke to me and comforted my sorrow with these words: “O husband that I love, why do you choose to give yourself to such wild grief? These 5 Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. David West (New York: Penguin, 1991), 46.

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things do not happen without the approval of the gods. It is not their will that Creusa should go with you when you leave this place. The King of High Olympus does not allow it. Before you lies a long exile and a vast expanse of sea to plough before you come to the land of Hesperia where the Lydian river Thybris flows with smooth advance through a rich land of brave warriors. There prosperity is waiting for you, and a kingdom and a royal bride. Wipe away the tears you are shedding for Creusa whom you loved. I shall not have to see the proud palaces of the Myrmidons and Dolopians. I am a daughter of Dardanus and my husband was the son of Venus, and I shall never go to be a slave to any matron of Greece. The Great Mother of the Gods keeps me here in this land of Troy. Now fare you well. Do not fail in your love for our son.”6 Creusa’s shade assures Aeneas that he should not fear her disapproval as he selects a new bride. Then she disappears. In Barocci’s painting, Creusa’s lack of engagement seems to evoke her second state, that of umbra. For contemporary Italians, then, the image rounded out the significance of the passage: It was through the loss of his wife that Aeneas actually learned of his fate; he could only fulfill his destiny without her. Much is said of Aeneas’ piety (pietas) by Virgil and his exegetes, but in this instance, Creusa demonstrates her own piety. In this chapter, I tease out both the intended meaning of this painting and the significance it would have had for its contemporary aristocratic audiences. Principally, I am concerned with elements of family structure and gender, and in this vein it is extremely telling how Barocci represents the scene with Creusa graciously bowing out, retiring from an elite family line that will go on to become even more illustrious. The painting also underscores the resonances of Aeneas’ journey for the various dynasties of Europe, not least that of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf ii, who claimed descent from Aeneas. In addition, the theme of renovatio—both dynastic and religious—plays out in the picture as Trojan and Roman blur with pagan and Christian in a new beginning. Above all, though, it is Barocci’s sympathetic treatment of Creusa that gives a Renaissance spin on the tale, by bringing to the viewer’s mind the functioning of his or her contemporary society, where marital alliances made politics work. It is my hope that by stressing the difference between meaning and significance I can make my gendered reading amenable to coordination with general iconographic analysis.7 6 Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. West, 46–7. 7 I believe that in some instances gendered readings might appear forced because they reflect significance rather than meaning (on this distinction, see no. 14). On the other hand, as

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The Aeneid in the Renaissance Studies of the reception of the Aeneid in the Renaissance demonstrate that all twelve books of the poem were read together, as indicated by increasing numbers of editions containing not only the well-known wanderings of the hero but also the (then) less familiar foundation stories.8 A text that began in part as propaganda for Augustus, demonstrating the descent of the Julian line from Aeneas, composed by an author who in the medieval tradition was sometimes faulted for his lust, became in Renaissance receptions the typological life of a pre-Christian ideal prince, composed by a man who was himself an exemplar of virtue. The latter understanding was largely consistent through the early modern period. Most of the major commentaries of the Aeneid were published already in the fifteenth century; by Barocci’s day, the notion of Virgil as pious man, perfect poet, and moral teacher was well-entrenched. Aeneas had long been embraced by Christianity because he was believed to have unwittingly prophesized Christ’s birth in his fourth Eclogue.9 I would like to isolate an area of transformed reading relating to Virgil, attitudes toward women, and the logic of kingly unions. Virgil took for granted a model of strict patrilineal (if sometimes adoptive) descent, a schema that— like so many other aspects of the dispensation before Christ—may have been reinterpreted in the Renaissance. Analyses of gender in the original Virgilian poem see female consorts in general as providing mere modes of passage for Aeneas. In the Aeneid, after recounting to Dido the story of his flight from burning Troy, the hero leaves the Carthaginian queen to continue onward to Latium. She commits suicide. Creusa’s fate is thus repeated with Dido, and even if Creusa credits the will of the gods, it is ruthless logic that ultimately leads to the foundation of Rome. Aeneas’ loves follow one another: Creusa, Dido, Lavinia. One critic has even stated that Creusa and Dido are “female victims who are sacrificed on the altar of Rome.”10 Indeed, Aeneas’ account of his 8

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I outline in A Realist Theory of Art History (London: Routledge, 2013), sometimes the societal configuration itself already contains ideological elements. On the early modern reception of the Aeneid, see David Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Craig Kallendorf, In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Renaissance (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1989). See Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance, for a sensitive discussion of the recent tendency to see critique of Aeneas in Virgil’s text. Mihoko Suzuki, Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 11. This point of view reflects the pioneering notion of “rescuing Creusa”; see Marilyn Skinner, ed. “Rescuing Creusa: New Methodological

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escape suggests that Creusa was left to trail in the first place.11 The hero’s energy is devoted strictly to carrying his elderly father and safeguarding his son to preserve the family line; Creusa must fend for herself. There is much of this patrilineal logic that remained in the Renaissance, or arose again after the medieval period.12 Against the normative model of female subjugation to the patriline in the Aeneid, however, one must contrast the more subtle reality of the Renaissance that Barocci and his patrons would have known. For while it is true that women in both merchant and aristocratic classes had few powers, and therefore that the conjugal couple itself was relatively unimportant, the bond between two patrilines was all-important. Creusa seen in this light would suggest to a sixteenth-century viewer not so much the inevitable passing of consorts, but the evolving alliances between patrilines. The woman is certainly subordinate, but she has a role to play in allying families and, as mother, in continuing the blood line.13

The Story

In my discussion of Barocci’s painting, I shall observe a hermeneutic distinction between meaning and significance.14 Although in practice the two concepts Approaches to Women in Antiquity,” special issue, Helios 13, no. 2 (1987). To “rescue” Creusa is either to save her from Virgil’s logic itself or else to give voice to alternative ancient renderings of the myth in which Creusa survives. 11 Marilynn Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). Softening this view, Christine Perkell notes that Aeneas’ behavior is rhetorical and serves to show his “astonishing brutality in Books 10 and 12 to be not entirely anomalous”: “On Creusa, Dido, and the Quality of Victory in Virgil’s Aeneid,” Women’s Studies 8 (1981): 217. 12 For the rise of patrilineality in the late medieval period, which displaced bilateral (matrilineal/patrilineal) arrangements, see Georges Duby, Medieval Marriage. Two Models from Twelfth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 1985), 79–88. 13 For a discussion of persisting recognition of bilateral relations, see Carolina BlutrachJelin, “The Visibility of Early Modern Castilian Noblewomen in Genealogical Narratives,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6 (2011): 173–9. 14 This distinction was first proposed by E.D. Hirsch, Jr. in Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). In art history, the strongest defender of this distinction is E.H. Gombrich (e.g. Reflections on the History of Art: Views and Reviews, ed. Richard Woodfield [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987], 86, 110.) For a discussion, see Richard Woodfield, “Ernst Gombrich: Iconology and the ‘Linguistics of the Image,’” Journal of Art Historiography 5 (2011).

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may be impossible to separate, analytically their distinction is essential for clarifying how a painting communicates its contents. According to this formulation, meaning is the original, intended message of the work of art for its maker and standard reception audience. While making the piece, the artist can make choices that will have special significance for different individuals, but these decisions do not affect the overall meaning. In addition, a work of art can take on new significance in new environments and contexts, but it does not thereby take on a different meaning.15 I make this clarification because it seems clear that the occasion for the painting’s commission around 1586 was a matter of personal significance. Although the emperor made first contact, and the commission did not originate as a gift from the Duke of Urbino, Rudolf ii may have felt entitled to a favor from Francesco Maria ii, as the imperial family had recently honored the duke with membership in the Order of the Golden Fleece, the coveted fraternity of knights overseen by the first sovereign of the Habsburg family, King Philip ii of Spain. Both Rudolf ii and the duke had been inducted shortly before, in 1585.16 At precisely the time of the commission, Barocci was working on a painting for Philip ii in gratitude for his duke’s military command (condotta) and admission into the Order of the Golden Fleece.17 The mutual dedication of Duke Francesco Maria ii and King Philip ii to the defense of European Christianity at both the Hungarian and Netherlandish fronts drew upon their common status as warriors.18 In the distinction between meaning and significance, this diplomatic activity prompted the choice of subject matter, creating its special significance; once the theme was selected, though, the development of the iconography was in many ways conventional. 15

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Needless to say, there is a great deal of debate on this distinction. I will only say that I do not mean intention in narrow terms of an individual’s private intention. Intentionality can have an external sense, according to the norms of the society and the traditions in which a work is created. Furthermore, the structure of the original meaning—pace Derrida—can direct in part the form of reception of significance. Since 1582, Francesco Maria ii had been a client of Philip ii, Rudolf II’s cousin. Rudolf ii received the Golden Fleece in Innsbruck in 1585 and Francesco Maria ii later in the year (September 15) in Bologna. For the Calling of St. Andrew, sent to Madrid in 1588, see Emiliani, Federico Barocci, vol. 1, 188–97. Bellori noted in 1672 that Andrew was a just choice because he was “protettore de’ Cavalieri dell’Ordine del Tosone”: Gian Paolo Bellori, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti moderni (originally published 1672), ed. E. Borea (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), 181. For the diplomatic alliances between Urbino and the Habsburg house, see my “Francesco Paciotti, Military Architecture, and European Geopolitics,” Renaissance Studies 24 (2010): 1–22.

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The Aeneid was well known in Urbino, one of the most erudite courts in Renaissance Italy. The prominence of the Aeneid in Urbino was already well established in the fifteenth century during the lifetime of its illustrious duke and famous military captain Federico da Montefeltro (1422–82). Manuscripts of the Aeneid naturally existed in the ducal palace library at Urbino.19 The intarsia decoration of the studiolo in Federico’s palace at Gubbio, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, includes Virgil’s portrait and a readable copy of the Aeneid on a lectern, turned to the section about the death of Pallas (10.457–90).20 One of the most important synthetic commentaries of the Aeneid, the Disputationes Camaldulenses by Cristoforo Landino (c. 1474), was partly dedicated to Federico.21 Readers of Landino’s text at Urbino may have been inclined to view Aeneas as a Christ-like figure. To the standard Renaissance conception of Aeneas as a prototype of the wise and virtuous king, Landino added that Aeneas had resolved the conflicts between the active and contemplative lives, and he sketched the path of the poem as the maturation of a furious warrior into an ideal moderate prince.22 Evidence from the later sixteenth century suggests that the humanists in Barocci’s circle may have regarded the Aeneid as a historical source with deep moral significance. Indeed, humanist Torquato Tasso, raised like Barocci in the circle of the ducal court at Urbino, sought to create his own epic poems on the models of Homer and Virgil, eschewing more recent Romance precedents. Echoing Plato and the Neoplatonists, Tasso argues in his Discorsi del poema eroica (1594) that perfect poetry ought to deal in the real (vero) and not the fantastical.23 Tasso even hints in Barocci’s direction by 19

E.g., Urb. lat. 350, now in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Florence, c. 1450–1475, with illustration added in the late 1470s by Guglielmo Giraldi in Urbino). See Cecilia Martelli, “Virgil, Works (Urb. lat. 350),” in Federico da Montefeltro and His Library, exh. cat., ed. Marcello Simonetta (Milan: Y. Press, 2007), 162–70. 20 See on this decorative program Olga Raggio, The Gubbio Studiolo and its Conservation, vol. 1, Federico da Montefeltro’s Palace at Urbino and its Studiolo (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000). 21 Cristoforo Landino, Disputationes Camaldulenses, ed. Peter Lohe (Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1980). 22 Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance, 37, argues that this element of Landino’s commentary was not influential. This Neoplatonic notion of Aeneas’ moral progress had deep roots in the reception of Virgil’s text, though: See Kallendorf, In Praise of Aeneas, 159. 23 For Tasso see Guido Giglioni, “The Matter of the Imagination: The Renaissance Debate over Icastic and Fantastic Imitation,” Camenae 8 (2010): 1–21. On Tasso and visual poetics in general, see Jonahan Unglaub, Poussin and the Poetics of Painting: Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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comparing sophistry to the optical corrections that sculptors make, an analogy drawn from Plato.24 Unlike the fanciful works of artists like Giuseppe Arcimboldo, whose whimsies Rudolf ii enjoyed immensely, Barocci’s painting provided a sober report on Aeneas in the manner of a religious istoria. The Urbino polymath Polydore Vergil likewise treated the Aeneid as history, dutifully locating the dates of Aeneas’ adventure along his universal timeline.25

The Iconography

Following Emperor Rudolf ii’s request for a non-religious work, when Duke Francesco Maria ii—perhaps in consultation with the artist—chose the subject and paid for it, and when Barocci painted it, the men had in mind an appropriately valorous event: the sacrifice of relocating for the endurance of the family line, with the necessary collateral losses (Creusa). Barocci would have been aware of a particularly rich tradition of representations of the episode of the Flight from Troy in Urbino. Not only were illustrated manuscripts available in the duke’s palace, but the story was also represented many times in the maiolica industry native to Urbino and its environs. Of most immediate interest, however, is a version of the story painted by Barocci’s great-uncle, Girolamo Genga. Genga painted his Flight of Aeneas from Troy in association with the wedding of Borghese Petrucci and Vittoria Piccolomini in Siena in the early sixteenth century (Fig. 11.2).26 Genga’s version anticipates Barocci’s but is more matter-of-fact, reflecting a fifteenth-century aesthetic. The figural group of 24

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Torquato Tasso, Discorsi del poema eroico, in Discorsi dell’arte poetica e del poema eroico, ed. L. Poma (Bari, Laterza, 1964), 59: “Laonde potrà di lei avvenire quel ch’aviene de le picciole statue, le quali, collocate in altissima parte, non sono occulte, paiono assai minori nondimeno a’ riguardanti.” Discourses on the Heroic Poem, trans. M. Cavalchini and I. Samuel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 3: “Perchance then what befalls small statues will befall it: when they are high up, they are not hidden but seem much smaller to beholders.” Polydore Vergil, On Discovery, ed. and trans., Brian P. Copenhaver (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 2002), 498. See V. Tàtrai, “Gli affreschi del Palazzo Petrucci a Siena. Una precisazione iconografica e un’ipotesi sul programma,” Acta historiae Artium Academiae scientiarum hungaricae (1978): 177–83; Laurence Kanter, “Luca Signorelli and Girolamo Genga in Princeton,” Record of the Princeton University Art Museum 62 (2003), 68–83. On another work of art produced for this couple, and for the dating of this marriage to 1511, see Stephanie Leone, “Luca Signorelli’s Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome and Viewers in the Palazzo Petrucci, Siena,” Chapter 4 in this volume.

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Figure 11.2

Girolamo Genga, The Flight of Aeneas from Troy, c. 1510. Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena (public domain)

Aeneas with Anchises on his back and Ascanius next to him occurs not only in Genga’s and Barocci’s paintings but also in other Renaissance renderings of this scene, reflecting an ancient iconographic tradition of representing the trio in this way.27 In Genga’s version, as in Barocci’s later one, Creusa follows this group yet seems to fall behind. Her visible agitation in Genga’s scene is 27

See, for example, an ancient Roman funerary altar now in the Archaeological Museum, Turin, whose inscription was transcribed by Petrus Apianus in 1534, and the reverse of a denarius of Caesar (without Ascanius) recorded in Costanzo Landi, In veterum numismatum Romanorum miscellanea explicationes (Lyon: Sebastianum de Honoratis, 1560): Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance, BerlinBrandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2007–14, CensusIDs 159779, 10053402. http://census.bbaw.de. Online Coins of the Roman Empire database, ric ii Trajan 801 (without Anchises), ric iii Antoninus Pius 91, 615, 227. http://numismatics.org/ocre.

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transformed by Barocci into a more metaphorical sense of resignation. Barocci’s treatment of the trailing Creusa as a shade-like figure is suggested further in Francesco Xanto’s 1535 maiolica plate, where she is behind the main action both spatially and in time: She is already an umbra, as indicated by her appearance in a flame (Fig. 11.3).28 Viewers were therefore accustomed to seeing Creusa conflated in her roles as spouse failing to keep up with her family and as shade. If Barocci was indebted to Genga for basic scheme of the scene, his painting also acknowledges the fleeing group in the left foreground of Raphael’s famous Fire in the Borgo fresco in the Vatican Stanze (c. 1514; Fig. 11.4).29 A male figure carries an elderly man on his back away from the conflagration with a child at his side. Although Raphael and Genga were associates, Raphael’s fresco was probably painted without knowledge of Genga’s contemporary work. Still, Raphael’s group intentionally evoked the flight of Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius from Troy.30 Drawings of Raphael’s group would have been available to Barocci through his uncle, Bartolomeo Genga, the son of Girolamo, and Barocci himself would have had access to the frescoes when visiting Rome as a young man.31 The “Aeneas” group for Raphael lends deep gravitas to the “modern” event depicted. Paul Joannides notes that this reference to the Aeneid in the Fire in the Borgo conflates the fire in Rome in 847 during the reign of Leo iv with the Fall of Troy. In a manner that will be useful to us later, Joannides observes how Raphael made references to the reigning Medici dynasty, which had regained power by their move to Rome.32 The aged Anchises bears the features of Leo x himself. Joannides calls the connection to the Medici “allusive and elusive,” however, arguing that it was not immediately evident to the average viewer. In any case, Raphael employed a figural solution that became the familiar touchstone for successive artists. Aeneas bends slightly forward to bear the weight of Anchises on his back, with his father’s arm slung over his shoulder and across 28 29 30 31

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Francesco Xanto Avelli, plaque painted with the Flight of Aeneas and the Death of Creusa, c. 1535, 30.2 by 27.6 cm. (Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Brunswick). For bibliography, see Marcia B. Hall, “The High Renaissance: 1503–1534,” in Cambridge Companion to Rome, ed. Hall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 134–5. Ingrid Rowland, “The Vatican Stanze,” in Cambridge Companion to Raphael, ed. Marcia B. Hall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 115–7. For a discussion of what Barocci saw and copied in Rome on his two youthful trips, see Jeffrey Fontana, “Federico Barocci: Imitation and the Formation of Artistic Identity,” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1998). Paul Joannides, The Drawings of Raphael, with a Complete Catalogue (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 104.

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Figure 11.3  Francesco Xanto Avelli, plaque painted with the Flight of Aeneas and the Death of Creusa, c. 1535. Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Brunswick

his chest. Ascanius keeps pace at one side. This figure group was made popular in engravings by Gian Giacomo Caraglio and others, who influenced the maiolica painters and Barocci himself.33 The plate made in Urbino by Xanto (Fig. 11.3) 33

See Suzanne Boorsch and John Spike, eds., The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 28, Italian Masters of the Sixteenth Century (New York: Abaris Books, 1985). The inscription reads, “Quest’e colui che a Troia il padre Anchise trasse del fuoco, et doppo longo errore sotto la ripa Antandra aposar mise” (This is the one that drew his father Anchises from the fire, and after long wandering placed himself under the cliffs of Antandrus).

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Figure 11.4  Raphael, “Aeneas” group, from The Fire in the Borgo, 1514. Vatican Stanze, Vatican City (Vatican Museums)

is most certainly mediated by the print of Caraglio and not based directly on Raphael’s fresco. Regarding Barocci’s particular handling of the group, the early sources, typically laconic, do not register much. For Bellori, for example, Aeneas “carries his elderly father on his shoulder, followed by his son Ascanio, and by Creusa”

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(porta Enea in collo il vecchio padre Anchise, seguitato dal fanciullo Ascanio, e da Creusa).34 On close inspection, it can be seen that Barocci has, by and large, adopted Genga’s overall conception, changed Raphael’s poses of Aeneas and Anchises, increased Ascanius’ anxiety, and given a graceful countenance to Creusa. In addition, Barocci has added a number of details. The Trojan colonnaded building in the painting is modeled on Jacopo Sansovino’s Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, while adaptations of Trajan’s Column and Bramante’s Tempietto in Rome appear as well. The mix of ancient and modern classicizing monuments effects the conflation of Troy and Rome. Barocci’s first-hand knowledge of these monuments, like his familiarity with Raphael’s fresco, would not have prevented him from using prints. For example, as Stuart Lingo has shown, Barocci’s conceptions of the Column of Trajan rely on Serlio’s Le antiquità di Roma of 1540, the third book of his Sette libri dell’architettura.35 It is useful pointing out that while these prints were authoritative sources for all Renaissance artists, Bramante and Raphael were real people to Barocci, individuals with ties to his own family’s history in Urbino. The antiquarianism that they embodied gave considerable tangibility to the conception of the ancient world that Barocci enacted in his painting. As we shall see, these choices also have deeper implications. If the treatment of Creusa in manuscript illumination and maiolica plates before Barocci is fairly summary, and if Genga’s blunt expression of her agitation is exchanged for a more subtle rendering of her resigned exit, it is interesting to think of Barocci’s similar approaches to the Virgin Mary. Barocci often represents a gracefully interceding Virgin, as in the Perdono di Assisi (1576, San Francesco, Urbino) and the Madonna del Popolo (1579, Uffizi, Florence).36 Closest in facial expression to Creusa (Fig. 11.5) is the Mary in his Annunciation (Fig. 11.6; 1584, Vatican), an altarpiece for the basilica at Loreto.37 Here, Mary accepts the divine will of the angel Gabriel, her submission a Christian counterpart to the service Creusa renders Aeneas. Creusa’s status in Barocci’s Flight from Troy is analogous to the role of Mary in sixteenth-century Catholic

34 Bellori, Le vite, 192. 35 Sebastiano Serlio, Il terzo libro di Sabastiano Serlio, bolognese, nel quale si figurano e descrivono le antiquità di Roma e le altre che sono in Italia, e fuori d’Italia (Venice: Francesco Marcolini, 1540); Lingo, Federico Barocci: Allure and Devotion in Late Renaissance Painting, 179–80. 36 For the Perdono, see Emiliani, Federico Barocci, vol. 1, 104–15; for the Popolo, ibid., vol. 1, 128–49. 37 Emiliani, Federico Barocci, vol. 1, 199–207.

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Figure 11.5

Federico Barocci, Creusa (detail of Fig. 11.1).

Figure 11.6

Federico Barocci, Annunciation (detail), 1584. Pinacoteca Vaticana (Vatican Museums)

thought as a secondary but absolutely necessary component of Christ’s revelation. In the Flight from Troy, Creusa looks down, her right hand held close to her, her left hand enacting a gesture of futility. In Barocci’s Annunciation, Mary also looks down, and she puts aside her prayer book with one hand as she signals pious acceptance with the other. The two figures are not completely alike, but they resemble each other in expressing profound submission through downcast gazes and acquiescent gestures. The Annunciation, completed in 1584, must have been relatively fresh in the artist’s mind as he began the Aeneas in

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1585. For Creusa’s head, Barocci turned to a figure who supports the fainting Mary in his Deposition of 1569 (Duomo, Perugia). Since this figure looks down, gazing at Mary’s face, Barocci could combine her head with Creusa’s body and pose to change the meaning. In both cases, however, it was appropriate for a female figure accepting a preordained order.

A Trojan Dynasty

I propose that the most straightforward significance of the picture relates to the proclaimed Trojan ancestry of Emperor Rudolf ii, a lineage embodied in the figure of Aeneas. Like Virgil, whose foundation story traced a line from Aeneas to Romulus and on to Augustus himself, the Habsburgs claimed to live in continuity with the Trojan past as part of an unbroken strain that ran—in some versions—through the Carolingian and Ottonian dynasties. While the early modern mind certainly tolerated a great deal of far-fetched dynastic creation, in this case Rudolf ii sat on the throne of the Holy Roman Empire and so was believed to be a descendent of Roman emperors at least by office, if not by blood.38 Some of the connections between Aeneas and the contemporary world would therefore have been more direct and timeless in German thought than in the Italian tradition, where the link was more typological, based on a notion of rinascita that took for granted a break between the modern and ancient traditions. In being given (or possibly helping to choose) the subject of Aeneas, Barocci had at his disposal a multivalent hero not only useful for his patron’s peer, Emperor Rudolf ii, but also for his patron, Duke Francesco Maria ii della Rovere. I emphasize that the Trojan dynasty is an element of significance because there is no doubt that the painting was able to function in a number of contexts. The copy that Barocci painted shortly after the original had been completed—and the only one still surviving, the painting given by the Monsignore Giuliano della Rovere, later Pope Julius ii, to Scipione Borghese and still in the Borghese Gallery (Fig. 11.1)—was entirely successful as a painting in a non-Habsburg context, as was the print created by Agostino Carracci.39 38

39

For this “mythic genealogy,” see Marie Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), Chapter 5. For the office of Holy Roman Emperor, see Christopher Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 64. On the print, and on the modello in the Windsor Castle collection, recently reattributed to Barocci himself, see David Scrase, “A Touch of the Divine”: Drawings by Federico Barocci in British Collections, exh. cat. (Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum, 2006), cat. no. 59.

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Francesco Maria ii was also privileged with a distinguished genealogy, though on a more modest scale.40 While the della Rovere could not match the dynastic antiquity of the Este and Gonzaga, they were related to these families by marriage and therefore enjoyed the same mythic genealogy.41 More importantly, the Montefeltro line (through the duke’s grandmother) was ancient and enjoyed its right of rule to old alliances with the Guelph Hohenstein dynasty, the predecessor of the Habsburg dynasty.42 Furthermore, the land grants that had created the Papal States, including the fief of Urbino, had come directly from the Frankish king Pippin, father of Charlemagne.43 This allowed the Montefeltro and succeeding della Rovere to believe in an antiquity preceding even the papal investiture of Urbino. The city of Urbino itself had ancient Roman foundations. Thus it is important to consider how the painting functioned also for Barocci as a citizen of the duchy of Urbino, especially once he painted the second version that was given to Scipione Borghese. The linkage of Aeneas with the mythic hero Jason—who had captured the golden fleece—was a welcome association.44 As already noted, both Duke Francesco Maria ii and Emperor Rudolf ii had been received into the Order of the Golden Fleece in 1585. Francesco Maria ii most likely eagerly accepted the emperor’s request to facilitate a Barocci commission, the specific subject of which he determined. The secondary level of significance of this choice is based on the connection between Aeneas and Rome, with another layer of resonance (or typology) afforded by the mythical story of Jason. Jason’s tireless exploits served the Knights of the Golden Fleece as a model for the relentless defense of Christianity. Francesco Maria ii, who had served at the great sea 40

41 42

43

44

It is probable that Francesco Maria II and Rudolf ii knew each other from their youths in Spain. Rudolf ii (born in 1552) was only slightly younger than Francesco Maria II (born in 1549) and spent 1563–71 at the court in Spain. Francesco Maria was there from 1566–8. See Tanner, Last Descendant of Aeneas, passim, on the Gonzaga and Este. On the Guelph ties of the early Montefeltri, see June Osborne, Urbino: The Story of a Renaissance City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 30–1. For the relation of the Hohenstaufen and Habsburgs, see Michael Toch, “Welfs, Hohenstaufen and Habsburgs,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History Volume 5, c.1198–c.1300, ed. David Abulafia (Cambridge, 1999), 375–404. For the donation of Pippin, see Thomas Noble, The Republic of St. Peter: The Birth of the Papal State, 680–825 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 93. Noble clarifies that this “donation” was actually the forcing of the Lombard king, Aistulf, to donate these lands to the church. On this linkage in the Holy Roman Empire of the Habsburgs, see Tanner, Last Descendents of Aeneas.

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battle of Lepanto (1571), had signed an accord with Spain in 1582 after several years of jockeying for a suitable condotta. The receipt of the Golden Fleece was symbolic of Spanish-imperial allegiance, and it was just while Barocci was working on his painting that the first requests for troops from Urbino began to arrive. Indeed, in 1587 the duke’s cousin Alessandro Farnese in Flanders asked, on behalf of Philip ii, for 400 soldiers to be sent to the front.45 Francesco Maria ii would not send troops to Hungary until 1595, after almost thirty years of relative peace on the eastern front. After raids on Hungary, Pope Clement viii and Rudolf ii would form the basis of a larger alliance, leading to fifteen years of war.46 But the Duke of Urbino did contribute to the defense of two key Habsburg war zones, and a chain of associations through Jason and the Golden Fleece links Aeneas’ Flight from Troy to this perceived fight to preserve Christianity.

Renovatio

The painting also invites reading as a replaying of a foundation myth on numerous levels. In the Aeneid, Aeneas’ escape from Troy is the first step in his foundation of Rome. Barocci’s great forebear, Raphael, painted the Fire in the Borgo as a Christian type, set in Rome, of this original Trojan diaspora. Barocci’s interpretation of the city of Troy itself suggests Rome, collapsing ancient and contemporary temporalities, but in another sense casting Aeneas’ flight as a departure from Rome for another dynastic foundation: Carolingian Aachen? Ottonian Magdeburg? Rudolf II’s Prague? Indeed, the city and the genealogical line cannot be separated, so that any return from exile, or any re-founding in the largest sense, can be implied. The scene reads most emphatically as Rome through two monuments known to the well-traveled and well-read individual: Trajan’s Column and the classicizing Tempietto. These function foremost as symbols of antiquity,  but the allusion to Rome is unmistakable. Bramante’s Tempietto, like Raphael’s “Aeneas” group, is by an Urbino artist and therefore serves as a personal “possession” of the classical past on behalf of Urbino and its duke. Like the Column, the Tempietto is not rendered directly from Barocci’s recollections of Rome (or from drawings remaining in Urbino) but rather from Sebastiano Serlio’s rendering of—and changes to—the structure in his Le 45 Ridolfi, Cronachetta Pesarese, ed. A. Camilli, Atti e Memorie di Storia Patria per le Marche 3–4 (1923), 170–7: “Partì di qua la compagnia di 400 soldati del cap. Silla Barignani.” 46 For a brief account, see Evans, Rudolf ii and His World, 75.

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antiquità di Roma, printed in Venice in 1540. Serlio classicized Bramante’s structure further, correcting the Doric features to make it look less like the actual structure and more like an ancient building in a pure Greek order. Stuart Lingo has emphasized Barocci’s care in replicating these features. The resultant “antiquely modern” monument contributes to the collapsing of past and present in the image.47 Yet a third layer of meaning may be found. By the time the painting was made, the Tempietto-like structure would have inspired in viewers’ minds a post-Tridentine sacramental tabernacle. Since the middle of the sixteenth century, archbishops had requested the clearing of high altars for reservation of the Holy Sacrament. In response, large temple-like structures were built on the high altars of such churches as Santa Croce in Florence, Orvieto’s Duomo, and the Gesù and Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome.48 Raphael’s scene takes place in the Latinized Christian ambit of the papal borgo, but Barocci’s tabernacle-like structure serves effectively as well to signify that paganism, represented by the household idols carried by Anchises, has been succeeded by Christianity. Indeed, the ever-forward movement of renovatio suggests the renewal of the Church in the Counter-Reformation, and the cult of the Eucharist, overcoming all infidels. The Tempietto structure, by appearing so modern in this tabernacle guise, links Aeneas to the true religion. This Christianization of Aeneas is perhaps Barocci’s greatest achievement in triggering associational significances in the viewer’s mind. And it is most significant for our analysis because Barocci places particular weight on the moral gravitas of Aeneas—and indeed of his whole family, as Creusa takes on an analogous quality. This layer of significance would have been rounded out 47

48

This is Pietro Aretino’s phrase, Lettere sull’arte di Pietro Aretino, ed. Ettore Camesasca (Milan: Edizioni del Milione, 1957), vol. 1, 215, referring to Giulio Romano: “anticamente moderno e modernamente antico.” On the pertinence of this phrase to Giulio’s approach to antiquity, see Maria Maurer, “The Trouble with Pasiphaë: Engendering a Myth at the Gonzaga Court,” Chapter 6 in this volume. For the sacramental tabernacle at Santa Croce, see Marcia B. Hall, Renovation and Counter-Reformation: Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Sta Maria Novella and Sta Croce, 1565– 1577 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); at Orvieto Cathedral, commissioned in 1554 and in place by 1564, see Marietta Cambareri, “A Study in the Sixteenth-Century Renovation of Orvieto Cathedral: The Sacramental Tabernacle for the High Altar,” Quaderni dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Architettura 15/16 (1990): 617–22; at the Gesù, see J.D.C. Masheck, “The Original High Altar Tabernacle of the Gesù Rediscovered,” Burlington Magazine 112 (1970), 110–3; and at the Aracoeli (now in the Museo di Roma), begun in 1552, see Carlo Pietrangeli, “Il tabernacolo cinquecentesco dell’Aracoeli al Museo di Roma,” Bollettino dei Musei Comunali di Roma 8 (1961): 26–33.

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to encompass the centerpiece of the Catholic faith, the Sacrament, at a time when this faith was under attack in Rudolf II’s empire from the infidels outside the borders as well as by the rise of Protestantism, challenges that called the faithful to chivalric duty. Conjugality The wave of renovatio undergone by the Trojan foundation myth in the late sixteenth century was spurred as well by a contemporary aspect of social structure, the interweaving of patrinlineal and conjugal family lines. The reality of conjugal cooperation played out in a variety of ways. In Urbino, Barocci’s own family and others like it were connected through a number of crisscrossing marital alliances among the leading merchant families, primarily the Genga and Oddi. At the international level, the Spanish-imperial alliance with Urbino required a series of marriages to reinforce political ties. In this way, the logic of the conjugal couple strengthened that of the patriline. In 1586, Duke Francesco Maria ii and Emperor Rudolf ii were both without heirs. Francesco Maria ii was separated from his wife, Lucrezia d’Este, with no hope for offspring, while Rudolf ii was not even married. Since the reign of Pius v (1565–72), the rules of royal succession (at least in the Papal States) had been strictly enforced: Only legitimate male heirs could succeed the rule of a state.49 The clear-cut genealogical succession represented by the family of Aeneas in Barocci’s painting would be a reminder of the importance of the male line. Without a legitimate heir, a dynasty ends. For ruling families, there were many vestiges of past conjugal alliances. In Urbino, as Barocci painted, there was the dowager duchess Vittoria Farnese, mother of the duke and widow of his father, Duke Guidobaldo ii della Rovere; she would live until 1602. Earlier in the century, Francisco Maria ii’s paternal grandmother, Eleonora Gonzaga, had outlived her husband for more than a decade, dying when her grandson had been a baby in 1550. Emperor Rudolf ii’s mother, Maria (Habsburg) of Austria, lived in the Convent of Las Descalzas Reales in Madrid, surviving until 1603. These royal widows either remained at court, like Vittoria; occupied alternative courts, like Eleonora, who lived at Fossombrone; or retired to cloistered life, like Maria of Habsburg. They were 49

On May 23, 1567 in the bull Admonet Nos, Pius V forbade the alienation of any papal lands, including the inheritance of titles, to illegitimate family lines. Duke Francesco Maria II’s son, Federico Ubaldo, predeceased the duke in 1622. At that time, the duke made arrangements for the duchy to devolve to the Holy See at his death, which occurred in 1631.

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visible or invisible reminders of the conjugal system needed to make patrilineality function. Some women were more directly like Creusa in their temporary service to the sovereign. For example, an almost perfect parallel to Creusa would be Giulia Varano, princess of Camerino, who had married Francesco Maria II’s father, Guidobaldo ii, between papal elections in 1534. This marriage was an attempt to create a super-state in the middle of Italy, and it was fought bitterly by the new pontiff, Paul iii Farnese. Giulia died in 1547, however, and Guidobaldo ii had to seek a new wife, leading to his betrothal to the aforementioned Vittoria Farnese. Giulia’s early death ended one alliance and forced the creation of another. The Habsburgs on Rudolf II’s side enjoyed longer unions, but of course other branches of the family were not immune to the need for updated dynastic arrangements. Most famously, Philip II’s marriage to Mary Tudor ended with her death in 1558 and concluded the Spanish king’s ambitions in Great Britain, leading to his next marriage, to Elizabeth of Valois (1559). Perhaps Francesco Maria ii hoped with full Catholic piety that his own estranged wife Lucrezia d’Este, childless and living in Ferrara away from the della Rovere court at Pesaro, might become her own kind of Creusa, so that his line might carry on. In fact, not long after Barocci’s painting arrived in Prague, she did: Lucrezia died on February 12, 1598. The next year, weary of dynastic machinations and with approval of the king, the duke married Livia della Rovere, the daughter of his first cousin Ippolito, who was a natural son of his uncle, Cardinal Giulio Feltrio della Rovere. The duke and his new wife bore a son in 1605. For his part, Rudolf ii continued to discuss potential mates up until the end of his life. Still, despite having many mistresses and a series of highprofile engagements (first to Philip II’s daughter the Infanta Isabella, then to Maria de’ Medici), he left office childless. His dynasty did not pass directly through him but to his brother, who took control in 1612.50 Conclusion In Barocci’s one mythological painting that has survived (through a copy), Aeneas’ Flight from Troy, the artist did not depict a world of alterity but rather stressed its world’s active moral gravity. Of the many elements of meaning and significance in the painting, I have chosen to focus on one particular element of significance, the early modern understanding of elite conjugality as 50 Evans, Rudolf ii and His World, 55–7.

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embodied by the figure of Creusa. In this context, while Aeneas represents the pious future founder of a glorious dynasty, the bowing Creusa stands for the crucial yet literally fleeting role played in powerful families by wives of approved political alignment and high status. Shown yielding to the force of destiny, Creusa evoked for the painting’s highborn viewers in Urbino and Prague a cultural logic that was current in Italy and the Holy Roman Empire. Barocci’s reception of Virgil’s Aeneid involved modifying the original meaning of the story to characterize Creusa as an important but temporary pawn in the game of aristocratic succession within the contemporary system of patrilineal dynamics. Bibliography Aretino, Pietro. Lettere sull’arte di Pietro Aretino, edited by Ettore Camesasca. Milan: Edizioni del Milione, 1957. Bellori, Gian Paolo. Le vite de’ Pittori, Scultori et Architetti Moderni, edited by E. Borea. Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Blutrach-Jelin, Carolina. “The Visibility of Early Modern Castilian Noblewomen in Genealogical Narratives.” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6 (2011): 173–9. Boorsch, Suzanne, and John Spike, eds. The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 28, Italian Masters of the Sixteenth Century. New York: Abaris Books, 1985. Cambareri, Marietta. “A Study in the Sixteenth-Century Renovation of Orvieto Cathedral: The Sacramental Tabernacle for the High Altar.” Quaderni dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Architettura 15/16 (1990): 617–22. Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance. BerlinBrandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. 2007–14. http://census.bbaw.de/. Desmond, Marilynn. Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Duby, Georges. Medieval Marriage. Two Models from Twelfth-Century France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Emiliani, Andrea. Federico Barocci: Urbino, 1535–1612. Bologna: Alfa, 1985. ———. Federico Barocci: Urbino, 1535–1612, rev. ed. Ancona: Il Lavoro Editoriale/Ars Books, 2008. Evans, R.J.W. Rudolf ii and His World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576–1612. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. Fontana, Jeffrey. “Federico Barocci: Imitation and the Formation of Artistic Identity.” PhD diss., Boston University, 1998.

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Giglioni, Guido. “The Matter of the Imagination: The Renaissance Debate over Icastic and Fantastic Imitation.” Camenae 8 (2010): 1–21. Gillgren, Peter. Siting Federico Barocci and the Renaissance Aesthetic. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011. Gombrich, E.H. Reflections on the History of Art: Views and Reviews, edited by Richard Woodfield. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Gronau, Georg. “Über künstlerische Beziehungen des bayerischen Hofes zum Hof von Urbino.” Münchener Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 9 (1932): 377–80. ———. Documenti artistici urbinati. Florence: G.C. Sansoni, 1936. Hall, Marcia B. After Raphael. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ———. “The High Renaissance: 1503–1534.” In Cambridge Companion to Rome, edited by Marcia B. Hall, 107–83. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ———. Renovation and Counter-Reformation: Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Sta Maria Novella and Sta Croce, 1565–1577. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Herlihy, David. Medieval Households. Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 1985. Hirsch, E.D. Jr. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967. Joannides, Paul. The Drawings of Raphael, with a Complete Catalogue. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983. Kallendorf, Craig. In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Renaissance. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1989. Kanter, Laurence. “Luca Signorelli and Girolamo Genga in Princeton.” Record of the Princeton University Art Museum 62 (2003), 68–83. Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta. The School of Prague: Painting at the Court of Rudolf ii. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Landino, Cristoforo. Disputationes Camaldulenses, edited by Peter Lohe. Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1980. Lingo, Stuart. Federico Barocci: Allure and Devotion in Late Renaissance Painting. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Mann, Judith, and Babette Bohn, eds. Federico Barocci: Renaissance Master of Colour and Line, exh. cat. With Carol Plazzotta. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Martelli, Cecilia. “Virgil, Works (Urb. lat. 350).” In Federico da Montefeltro and His Library, exhibition catalogue, edited by Marcello Simonetta, 162–70. Milan: Y. Press, 2007. Masheck, J.D.C. “The Original High Altar Tabernacle of the Gesù Rediscovered.” Burlington Magazine 112 (1970), 110–13. Noble, Thomas. The Republic of St. Peter: The Birth of the Papal State, 680–825. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984. Olsen, Harald. Federico Barocci, 2nd ed. Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1962. Osborne, June. Urbino: The Story of a Renaissance City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

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Perkell, Christine. “On Creusa, Dido, and the Quality of Victory in Virgil’s Aeneid.” Women’s Studies 8 (1981): 201–23. Pietrangeli, Carlo. “Il tabernacolo cinquecentesco dell’Aracoeli al Museo di Roma.” Bollettino dei Musei Comunali di Roma 8 (1961): 26–33. Raggio, Olga. The Gubbio Studiolo and Its Conservation, vol. 1, Federico da Montefel­ tro’s  Palace at Urbino and Its Studiolo. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000. Ridolfi, Antonio. Cronachetta Pesarese, ed. A. Camilli, Atti e Memorie di Storia Patria per le Marche 3–4 (1923): 170–7. Rowland, Ingrid. “The Vatican Stanze.” In The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, ed. Marcia B. Hall, 95–119. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Scrase, David. “A Touch of the Divine”: Drawings by Federico Barocci in British Collections, exh. cat. Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum, 2006. Serlio, Sebastiano. Il terzo libro di Sabastiano Serlio, bolognese, nel quale si figurano e descrivono le antiquità di Roma e le altre che sono in Italia, e fuori d’Italia. Venice: Francesco Marcolini, 1540. Skinner, Marilyn, ed. “Rescuing Creusa: New Methodological Approaches to Women in Antiquity.” Special issue, Helios 13, no. 2 (1987). Suzuki, Mihoko. Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic. Ithaca: Cornell, 1989. Tanner, Marie. The Last Descendant of Aeneas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Tasso, Torquato. Discorsi del poema eroico. In Discorsi dell’arte poetica e del poema eroico, edited by L. Poma. Bari: Laterza, 1964. ———. Discourses on the Heroic Poem, edited and translated by M. Cavalchini and I. Samuel. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. Tàtrai, V. “Gli affreschi del Palazzo Petrucci a Siena. Una precisazione iconografica e un’ipotesi sul programma.” Acta historiae Artium Academiae scientiarum hungaricae (1978): 177–83. Toch, Michael. “Welfs, Hohenstaufen and Habsburgs.” In The New Cambridge Medieval History Volume 5, c.1198–c.1300, edited by David Abulafia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Unglaub, Jonathan. Poussin and the Poetics of Painting: Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Verstegen, Ian. “Francesco Paciotti, Military Architecture, and European Geopolitics.” Renaissance Studies 24 (2010): 1–22. ———. A Realist Theory of Art History. London: Routledge, 2013. Vergil, Polydore. On Discovery, edited and translated by Brian P. Copenhaver. Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 2002. Virgil. The Aeneid, edited and translated by David West. New York: Penguin, 1991.

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Wilson, Timothy. “Committenza roveresca e committenza delle botteghe maiolicarie del ducato di Urbino nell’epoca roveresca.” In I Della Rovere: Piero della Francesca, Raffaello, Tiziano, edited by Paolo Dal Poggetto, 203–9. Milan: Electa, 2004. Wilson-Okamura, David. Virgil in the Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Wood, Christopher. Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008. Woodfield, Richard. “Ernst Gombrich: Iconology and the ‘Linguistics of the Image.’” Journal of Art Historiography 5 (2011), https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress .com/2011/12/woodfield.pdf.

chapter 12

Ancient Idols, Lascivious Statues, and Sixteenth-Century Viewers in Roman Gardens Katherine M. Bentz In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, noble families, wealthy prelates, and antiquarian scholars in Rome began amassing collections of ancient sculpture and inscriptions for display in palace courtyards and villa gardens.1 By the 1550s, ancient sculptures had become prominent visual attractions in most of the large garden and villa estates surrounding the city as collectors attempted to emulate the design of ancient villas. Through displaying ancient statues in gardens and opening these gardens to visitors, collectors could cultivate and promote a magnificent and noble identity, sustained by the trappings of wealth, the virtue of liberality, and venerable Romanitas (Roman-ness).2 1 The literature on the history of the collecting and display of antiquities in Renaissance Rome is extensive, but useful overviews include Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982); Claudio Franzoni, “‘Rimembranze d’infinite cose’: Le collezioni rinascimentali di antichità,” in Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, ed. Salvatore Settis (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1984–6), 300–60; Patricia Giudicelli-Falguières, “La cité fictive. Les collections de cardinaux, à Rome, au XVIème siècle,” in Les Carrache et les décors profanes: Actes du Colloque organisé par l’Ecole française de Rome, Rome, 2–4 octobre 1986, ed. André Chastel (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1988), 215–333; Isa Belli Barsali, “I giardini di statue antiche nella Roma del’500,” in Gli Orti Farnesiani sul Palatino (Rome: École Française de Rome, Soprintendenza Archeologica di Roma, 1990), 341–72; David Coffin, Gardens and Gardening in Papal Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Claudia Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); William Stenhouse, “Visitors, Display, and Reception in the Antiquity Collections of Late-Renaissance Rome,” Renaissance Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2005): 397–434; and Kathleen Wren Christian, Empire without End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome, c. 1350–1527 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010). 2 A term rarely used in antiquity, Romanitas was first coined by Tertullian (De pallio 4.1) to mock the Carthaginian imitation of Roman social habits in attempts to claim a Roman identity. Its negative association faded during the Middle Ages as the Church absorbed the practices of Roman law, thus combining the ideas of Roman identity and culture with the idea of Christianitas. With the growth of humanism and the interest in the material and literary remains of ancient Rome during the fifteenth century, the idea of Romanitas became a means of asserting authoritative Roman imperium and cultural superiority as inherited from the ancients. By displaying ancient statues and inscriptions, a collector sent a social and

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Throughout the sixteenth century, foreign and local visitors to Roman gardens regularly lavished praise upon ancient statues and recorded their admiration in both written and visual form. The fascination with antiquities and the passion for collecting and displaying ancient works was widespread in Renaissance Rome, but not everyone was so enamored with ancient art. In the first decades of the sixteenth century, a few conservative critics decried the pagan and idolatrous nature of ancient sculpture, and as church reform gained momentum and the Council of Trent’s influence became more pronounced, ancient statues were increasingly the object of derision and negative reception by certain viewers, owners, and art theorists. Complaints often centered on concerns similar to those expressed about sacred images in post-Tridentine Italy: the immorality of nudity and overtly sexual themes and the importance of proper decorum. Yet there were other issues that influenced or conditioned the negative reception of ancient sculpture. The great majority of garden owners, collectors, and viewers in Rome were well-educated men with connections to the Church, indicating that the gender and social identity of viewers played a role in how ancient statues were perceived and discussed. Further, sixteenth-century ideas about the persuasive power of images, both sacred and profane, also played a crucial role in the arguments made by critics of ancient works. Finally, the sensual, verdant settings of Roman gardens and their relatively open accessibility made them extremely popular (and to critics, dangerous) enticements for unrestricted leisure and pleasure. In order to better understand the varied and sometimes complex perception of ancient sculpture displayed in gardens, this essay examines the small but strident negative reception history for antiquities in sixteenth–century Rome. Previous scholarship has considered the negative reception of ancient sculpture only in scattered or individual cases, perhaps for understandable reasons. Fueled by an enthusiasm for history, beauty, artistry, and the symbolic and social power conveyed by its ownership and display, ancient art was widely appreciated and revered in the Renaissance. Detractors were thus few and far between. But negative reactions to ancient statues show that the taste for and

political message that connected him to the glory of ancient Rome. In the sixteenth century, the concept of Romanitas was a way to substantiate claims to an authentic noble Roman lineage. For developments in the use of Romanitas in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, see Christian, Empire without End, especially Chapters 1–2. Recent scholarship in classical archaeology and ancient history has questioned the validity of the concept of Romanitas to define social identity within an ancient context. See Louise Revell, Roman Imperialism and Local Identities (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–39.

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interest in antiquities was by no means monolithic in this period. Thus a broad study of negative reception not only reveals a distaste for antiquities, but also helps us to understand their allure, and illuminates the ways in which ideas of decorum, gender, and identity helped to define taste and roles for images in sixteenth–century society.

“Idols of the Ancients”

One of the most frequently repeated themes in the condemnation of ancient sculpture throughout the sixteenth century was the charge of idolatry. As early as 1513, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola published a poetic diatribe against ancient pagan culture as represented by the antiquities he observed in the Belvedere villa and garden at the Vatican. The poem, De Venere et Cupidine expellendis (Rome, 1513), and an accompanying letter decry the manner in which the statues, or “false deities,” were honored and displayed as if each on its own altar, and imagine the expulsion of such brutish idols to enable chastity and honorable pleasure to return once again to the Belvedere.3 Particularly offended by the sinister and “vain” Venus Felix group in the papal collection (Fig.  12.1),4 he explained the impetus for his condemnation in a letter published with a second edition of the poem: The poem was occasioned by the ancient statue of Venus and Cupid . . . . Truly in this statue it was possible to perceive at the same time the gifts of the maker and to reflect about the way in which the darkness of false superstition, put to flight by the true religion that not even the images of these gods could be seen except in broken fragments and almost withered away.5 3 Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, De Venere et Cupidine expellendis carmen (Rome: Mazzochi, 1513). For more on Pico and his writings, see Simons, “The Crone, the Witch, and the Library,” Chapter 8 in this volume; for excerpts and translations of the poem and letters see E.H. Gombrich, “Hypnerotomachiana,” in Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1972), 105–7, 223. 4 Documented in the Belvedere collection by 1509. See Hans Henrik Brummer, The Statue Court in the Vatican Belvedere, vol. 20, Stockholm Studies in the History of Art (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1970), 123–9; Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 323–4; Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources, 2nd ed. (London: Harvey Miller, 2010), 66–7. 5 “Argumentum praebuit carmine, antiquum Veneris et Cupidinis simulacrum: uti in epistola ad Lilium non paucis retuli. Sed sane eo in simulacro simul et artificis ingenium licebat suspicere: et simul admirari vanae superstitionis tenebras verae luce religionis ita fugatas, ut

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Figure 12.1  The Toilet of Venus (Venus Felix and Cupid), 2nd-century ce Roman copy after the 4th-century bce Aphrodite of Knidos by Praxiteles. Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican Museums, Vatican State (Scala/ Art Resource, ny)

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Although he might appreciate the artistic qualities of the Venus Felix, Gianfrancesco emphasizes Christianity’s victory over pagan idols, exemplified by the broken limbs of the Venus Felix and other statuary. Ideas about the dangers of idolatry and the sinister threat that ancient sculpture posed to Christianity derived from a centuries-old suspicion of paganism, one rooted in early Christian and medieval tradition. Early Christians widely believed that demons animated pagan sculpture, and Byzantine hagiographies repeatedly tell tales of evil spirits cast out of ancient statues through their destruction.6 By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, heroic legends about Pope Gregory the Great’s smashing of ancient sculpture in order to stamp out heresy and pagan culture were well established and promoted throughout western Europe.7 Similar fears of idolatry, both pagan and contemporary idol worship, inspired later reformers such as late fifteenth-century Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola. His famous bonfires in Florence were aimed at destroying a range of material and luxury goods, including “sculptures and Cupid-idols,” in the name of Christian morality.8 As the passion for collecting and displaying antiquities spread in sixteenthcentury Rome, complaints of idolatry occurred more frequently. Touring the Villa Belvedere in 1523, Pope Adrian VI (r. 1522–3) was shown the famous Laocoön and other statues, upon which he sardonically remarked, “they are just idols of the ancients.”9 The Dutch pope’s attitude alarmed Italian collectors and antiquarians. “In this way,” wrote humanist Girolamo Negro, “without a doubt he will do what it is said that Saint Gregory did, and that all the statues, the living memory of the glory of Rome, will be burned into lime for the

nec ipsorum Deorum imagines nisi truncate, fractae, et pene prorsus evanidae spectarentur.” The English translation appears in Gombrich, “Hypnerotomachiana,” 223. 6 Cyril Mango, “Antique Statuary and the Byzantine Beholder,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 17 (1963): 55–75. Recently, Anthony Kaldellis has argued that Mango’s assessment of the Early Christian and Byzantine suspicion of pagan statues is oversimplified: Anthony Kaldellis, The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), especially 178–90. 7 Tillman Buddensieg, “Gregory the Great, the Destroyer of Pagan Idols: A History of a Medieval Legend,” Journal of the Warburg and Cortauld Institutes 28 (1965): 44–65. 8 Christian, Empire without End, 195. 9 “Et essendoli ancora mostrato in Belvedere il Laocoonte per una cosa eccellente e mirabile, disse; sunt idola antiquarorum. Di modo, che dubito molto, un dì non faccia quell che dice haver fatto à San Gregorio, et che di tutte queste statue, viva memoria della gloria Romana, non faccia calce per la fabrica di San Pietro.” Letter of Girolamo Negro to Marcantonio Micheli, 17 March 1523, in Girolamo Ruscelli, Delle lettere di principi, le quali o si scrivono da principi, vol. 1 (Venice: Francesco Ziletti, 1581), 112–3.

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building of Saint Peter’s.”10 Perhaps the austere Adrian did not burn the papal antiquities, but he did sell off some works from the collection and had the entrances to the Belvedere walled up in order to hide the statues and control access to them. Venetian ambassadors reported that under Pope Leo X (r. 1513– 21), one could come and go in the villa as one pleased, but under Adrian there was only one entrance, which led from the pope’s private rooms. When visiting  in 1523, they had to request special permission to see the Belvedere and its famous statues, and waited over an hour for an escort with the keys to the door.11 Given the heightened concerns about heresy and Protestant defection from the Church during the period of the Council of Trent, objections to the admiration of ancient statues as idolatrous behavior became more severe. In 1566, imperial agent Niccolò Cusano wrote that Pope Pius V (r. 1566–72) felt “it was unfitting for a successor to Peter to have pagan idols in his palace,” and thus he gave away numerous works to the Roman people for display on the Capitoline and sold or gifted others to noble or royal collectors outside Rome.12 Under pressure from several cardinals, Pius agreed to retain the heart of the Belvedere collection, but with the condition that it be closed to the public. Writing in 1567, Giorgio Vasari observed in a letter to Prince Francesco de’ Medici (in search of works for his own collection), “If this pope lives long, there can be no doubt that all the statues will be pushed out in Rome, and that there will be many things available to purchase.”13 In 1569, diplomatic bulletins stated that Pius planned to demolish the Villa Belvedere’s open-air theater (which had been built and decorated with ancient sculpture by Pirro Ligorio in 1565) as well as the Colosseum and the city’s ancient triumphal arches, “in order to remove the temptation from visitors to Rome to pay more attention to pagan than to Christian things.”14 The old fear that the pope would burn the statues 10 11 12 13

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Ibid. See also Ludwig von Pastor, A History of the Popes, from the Close of the Middle Ages, ed. Ralph Francis Kerr, vol. 9 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1891–1930), 73. Eugenio Albèri, ed. Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al senato, vol. 3, series 2 (Florence: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 1846), 114; von Pastor, History of the Popes, vol. 9, 73–4. “... che non conveniva a chi era successore di Pietro tenere simili idoli in casa.” von Pastor, History of the Popes, vol. 17, 112, n. 1. “Nè sto in dubbio che, sel papa à vota, che le statue avanzeranno a Roma, et che ci saria da comprar molte cose.” 13 March 1567, in Carteggio inedito d’artisti dei secoli XIV, XV, XVI, eds. Johann Wilhelm Gaye and Alfred von Reumont, vol. 3 (Florence: G. Molini, 1839–1840), 238. “Intendo ha in oltre gran’ caprizzo, di far guastar L’Anfiteatro, chiamato volgarmente il Colisseo et alcuni archi trionfali, che sono le più belle et rare antichita di Roma sotto pretesto che sono cose gintili et per levarne a fatto la memoria et l’occasione siano viste

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for lime following Gregory the Great’s example surfaced again in such reports. Pressured by cardinals once more, Pius did not execute his demolition plans.15 He did empty his predecessors’ personal villas (the Villa Giulia and the Casino of Pius IV) of antiquities, but complaints that Pius V was keen to “make all of Rome into a convent or a monastery of Saint Dominic” suggest that his primary concerns were focused less on simply destroying ancient sculpture than on general religious reform and spiritual decorum.16 Worries about the display and viewing of ancient sculpture as acts of idolatry were strong ones, however, and admonitions continued with greater urgency following the Council of Trent (1545–63). In his Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images (Bologna, 1582), reformer and Bolognese Bishop Gabriele Paleotti repeatedly criticized the ownership and exhibition of ancient statues and images of “Jove, Apollo, Mercury, Juno, Ceres and Other False Gods.”17 Keeping such works, or commissioning contemporary paintings and sculptures

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da quelli che vengono a Roma più per vedere le dette cose che per visitar limina Petri et andar alle sette chiese et a vedere le reliquie de’ martiri et santi di Dio…” Avviso of 26 March 1569, von Pastor, History of the Popes, vol. 17, 113, 407. See also Adolf Michaelis, “Geschichte des Statuenhofes im Vaticanischen Belvedere,” Jahrbuch des Kaiserlich Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts: Römische Abteilung 6 (1890): 3–66; Christina Riebesell, Die Sammlung des Kardinal Alessandro Farnese: Ein “Studio” für Künstler und Gelehrte (Weinheim: vch, Acta humaniora, 1994), 69–70. The pope did give a number of works to Francesco de’Medici: Andrea Gáldy, Cosimo I as Collector: Antiquities and Archaeology in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 154–5. “S.S.ta vorebbe che Roma tutta fosse un monasterio di San Domenico.” Letter of Giovanni Antonio de Taxis to Andreas Masius, 13 July 1566, in Andreas Masius, Briefe von Andreas Masius un Seinen Freunden 1538–1573 (Leipzig: Alphons Dürr, 1866), 374. Several scholars have concluded that Pius V’s actions ultimately preserved many antiquities in Rome or enabled their preservation in other collections. See Christian Hülsen, “Le Statue di Roma,” Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen 176 (1914): 257–311; von Pastor, History of the Popes, vol. 17, 114. For the history and decoration of the Villa Giulia and the Casino of Pius IV, see Tilman Falk, “Studien zur Topographie und Geschichte der Villa Giulia in Rom,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 13 (1971): 101–78; Alessandro Nova, The Artistic Patronage of Pope Julius III (1550–1555): Profane Imagery and Buildings for the De Monte Family in Rome (New York: Garland, 1988); Louis Cellauro, “The Casino of Pius IV in the Vatican,” Papers of the British School at Rome 63 (1995): 183–214. See especially Book 2, Chapter 10 of Paleotti’s Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane in Paola Barocchi, ed., Trattati d’arte del cinquecento: fra manierismo e controriforma, vol. 2 (Bari: Gius. Laterza, 1962), 117–503. All excerpts quoted from this text derive from the recently published English translation, Gabrielle Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, trans. William McCuaig (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012).

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of these subjects, he states, angers Christ who conquered pagan gods with the cross, and the saints and apostles martyred for refusing to worship such false idols. Further, digging underground for ancient works leaves us wide open to being called idolaters by the heretics [Protestants], a false charge that might not stick if all our images were ones of the saints, but with so many statues of the false gods among us and more being produced all the time, it is no wonder that with this pretext they call the lot of us idolaters and seize the occasion to deceive the peoples. When we are baptized, we take an oath to renounce the inventions of the Devil, but what invention is more diabolical than that of false gods?18 Paleotti here recalls the early Christian and medieval belief that ancient statues were instruments of Satan, abhorrent to Christ and Christian saints and martyrs, and suggests that collecting or displaying such works was sinful. Similar arguments were popular in later treatises on art, such as Jesuit theologian Antonio Possevino’s Treatise on Poetry and Painting of 1595.19 But Paleotti also alludes to broader post-Tridentine concerns about the influence and effect of images, and how a lack of propriety in the exhibition of ancient art might harm the contemporary viewing public, or worse, adversely affect the Church’s reform efforts.

Decorum, Nudity, and Ancient Statues

Paleotti and other theorists of the later sixteenth century wrote to elaborate upon the Council of Trent’s decrees about saintly relics and sacred images. During its final session in December 1563, the Council affirmed and codified the 18

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“E questo è quello dà campo maggiore agli eretici di nominarci idoloatri: ché, se noi avessimo le sole imagini de’santi, non resterebbe forsi luogo al loro inganno, ma sendo fra noi tante statue de’falsi dèi e facendosene tante ogni giorno, non è meraviglia se con questo pretesto ci dimandando tutti idolatri e prendono occasione d’ingannare i popoli. Quando ci battezziamo facciamo giuramento di rinonziare alle invenzioni del Diavolo; ma quale invenzione è più diabolica di quella d’falsi dèi?” Barocchi, Trattati, vol. 2, 291–2; Paleotti, Discourse, 173–4. Possevino writes that the very sight of pagan statues is hateful to the saints in heaven: Tractatio de poesi & pictura ethnica, humana, & fabulosa collate cum vera, honesta, & sacra (Lyon: Pillehotte, 1595), Chapter 27. See also Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450–1600, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 114, and David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 371.

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longstanding tradition in the Catholic Church of the importance of Christian images for teaching and preaching, as well as for directing the faithful in pious devotion and veneration of saints in the true faith.20 Their directives specifically cautioned against the abuse of sacred images, warning of the appearance of “sensual appeal,” “seductive charm,” and “sensual luxury” in the images that might be venerated.21 Ultimately, bishops were to serve as regulators to ensure that nothing hinting of the profane—in subject content, style of depiction, or use—be associated with sacred images. These somewhat vague guidelines induced Cinquecento theorists to clarify and prescribe the requisite decorous appearance and proper use of sacred images. In some cases, authors’ admonitions extended beyond the sacred to include discussions of profane works. Flemish theologian Johannes Molanus’ On Pictures and Sacred Images was one of the earliest and most influential treatises to discuss the problem of “sensual appeal” in secular as well as sacred art.22 In addition to citing the decrees of the Council of Trent, Molanus cites Horace, Aristotle, and other ancient authors on the power of images and the need for art to be carefully scrutinized and controlled.23 He also quotes Erasmus of Rotterdam about the dangers of nudity and indecency in art: 20

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For the decrees see Norman F. Tanner, ed. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2 (Washington, dc: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 774–6. For additional background, see John O’Malley, “Art, Trent, and Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’,” Religions 3, no. 2 (2012): 344–56. “Omnis porro superstitio in sanctorum invocation, reliquiarum veneration et imaginum sacro usu tollatur, omnis turpis quaestus eliminetur, omnis denique lascivia vitetur, it a ut procaci venustate imagines non pingantur nec ornentur; et sanctorum celebration ac reliquiarum visitation homines ad commessationes atque ebrietates non abutantur, quasi festi dies in honorem sanctorum per luxum ac lasciviam agantur.” “All superstition must be removed from invocation of the saints, veneration of relics and use of sacred images; all aiming at base profit must be eliminated; all sensual appeal must be avoided, so that images are not painted or adorned with seductive charm; and people are not to abuse the celebration of the saints and visits to their relics for the purpose of drunken feasting, as if feast days in honor of the saints were to be celebrated with sensual luxury.” Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2, 775–6. Johannes Molanus, De picturis et Imaginibus Sacris, liber unus, tractans de vitandis circa eas abusibus ac de earundem significationibus (Louvain: Hieronymum VVellaeum, 1570). For the text and translation see David Freedberg, “Johannes Molanus on Provocative Paintings. De Historia Sanctarum Imaginum et Picturarum, Book II, Chapter 42,” Journal of the Warburg and Cortauld Institutes 34 (1971): 229–45. Molanus quotes Horace, De arte poetica liber 180–2, on the powerful effect of images on the viewer, and cites Aristotle, Politics 7. 17, on how indecent paintings and sculpture lead to corrupt morals. For Molanus’ use of other ancient, medieval, and contemporary sources, see Freedberg, “Johannes Molanus.”

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‘Just as’, he [Erasmus] says, ‘it is not becoming for indecent speech to be heard in the family, so it is not fitting to possess immodest pictures. A picture, silent though it is, can speak, and its influence gradually creeps over the mind. Some adorn their own rooms with obscene works of art, as if the youth were lacking in incitements to wickedness’.24 Because they are so persuasive, argues Molanus, obscene or indecent images corrupt the morals of viewers and should be forbidden, “not only in the case of sacred images, but also of profane.”25 Molanus was not the first author to write about the problem of nudity in art, but his treatise was the first to explicitly mention the decrees of the Council of Trent in relation to the broader idea of decorum for art and its display.26 The concept of decorum was central to Renaissance art theory.27 For generations of writers, such as Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgio Vasari, and others, decorum was a principle that governed the suitability of content, composition, and style; the aptness of setting or function for the work of art; and the social mores that controlled taste and the reception of art. For such CounterReformation critics as Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano, sacred images such as Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel lacked decorum because the narrative composition and depictions of figures strayed from biblical scripture and established iconographical convention; its sophisticated maniera style was inaccessible to a general audience; and the nude figures distracted from and confused its moral lesson.28 Critics citing decorum thus objected to sacred images 24

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Erasmus’s original statement reads: “Quemadmodum inquit, non decet in familia audiri sermonem lascivum, ita nec tabulas haberi convenit impudicas. Loquax enim res est pictura tacita, & sensim irrepit in animos hominum. Turpitudinis deliciis quidam ornant sua conclavia, quasi iuventuti desint irritamenta nequitiae. Membra quae verecundiae gratia celas ne videantur, cur in tabula nudas, & nunquam ea pateris abesse a conspectu liberorum?” Desiderius Erasmus, Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami Opera Omnia, vol. 5 (Leiden: P. Van der Aa, 1703–6), col. 696E. For the translation see Freedberg, “Johannes Molanus,” 241. Freedberg, “Johannes Molanus,” 239. Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano’s Dialogo nel quale si ragiona degli errori e degli abusi de’ pittori circa l’istorie (Camerino, 1564) discusses the problem of nudity and lack of decorum few years earlier, but his dialogue is centered on criticizing Michelangelo’s Last Judgment and rarely refers to secular works of art. Robert Williams, Art, Theory and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 73–122. For the text of Fabriano’s dialogue, see Barocchi, Trattati, vol. 2, 1–115. See also Marcia B. Hall, After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 189–94. As a result of the controversy over the lack of

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that lacked appropriateness for their setting and function, and nudity and sensual imagery in a sacred context was especially problematic in post-Tridentine Rome. Because critics of sacred art in this period—educated men, almost always affiliated with the Church and the reform movement—were also viewers of the ubiquitous ancient statuary displayed in public streets and the palaces and gardens of wealthy collectors in Rome, they developed similar concerns about decorum and nudity in the reception of antiquities. Viewers who objected to ancient sculpture were often simply scandalized by the nudity of figures and the sexually explicit themes they represented. Olaus Magnus, Archbishop of Uppsala, was especially appalled by the nude female statues owned by Cardinal Marcello Crescenzi. Writing to Cardinal Stanislaus Hosius in 1552 to report Crescenzi’s death, Magnus complained “while he [Crescenzi] was living, I saw in his palace in Rome fauns, satyrs, and female nudes, as if the flesh did not have enough rebellious force to induce weak human nature in a thousand evil images and dangers.”29 The Swedish bishop’s consternation is not unexpected, given his active involvement in the Council of Trent during the 1540s. Indeed, Paleotti’s treatise, written after the Council’s decrees had circulated for a few years, includes several exhortations to prelates to hide their antiquities and images of pagan gods, for using them as ornament attributes to them undeserved honor and dignity: Hence, if someone does enjoy having these images in his home exclusively for reasons of literary study, he ought to have the Christian prudence to keep them someplace so secluded that it will be evident that he draws a strong distinction between such images and images of Christian, honorable persons. This ought to apply with special force to ecclesiastics, especially since they have the example of Saint Gregory the pope … and many other saints who rid their surroundings of such images of false gods, regarding them as monstrous.30

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decorum perceived in the Last Judgment, Daniele da Volterra was famously ordered to cover the offending figures with painted loincloths. For an overview of the criticism, see Melinda Schlitt, “Painting, Criticism, and Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Age of the Counter–Reformation,” in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, ed. Marcia B. Hall (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). “mentre egli viveva io vidi nel suo palazzo a Roma fauni, satiri e nudità femminili, come se la carne ribelle non avesse forza sufficiente a indurre la debole natura umana in mille immagini e pericoli malvagi.” Letter of 8 June 1552, in von Pastor, History of the Popes, vol. 17, 114, n. 4. “Onde che, se alcuno per causa di studio delle lettere solamente si dilettasse di avere presso di se queste imagini, doveria almeno secondo la prudenzia Cristiana tenerle in

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What had been a small, yet consistent, negative reaction to ancient works in the earlier sixteenth century grew much more pronounced after the Council of Trent. Even the sculptor Bartolomeo Ammannati, who came under the influence of Jesuit reformers in the 1570s, felt ashamed by the nude all’antica “satyrs and fauns” that he had executed in his earlier career. In a public letter written to the Accademia del Disegno in Florence in 1582, he warned young artists not to follow his example in creating “dishonest or lascivious” nude figures and risk offending God.31 Such paternalistic and conservative attitudes about censoring nudity in ancient statues also reflected attitudes toward women and what was considered proper for them in sixteenth-century society. Perhaps unsurprisingly, records of reception for ancient sculpture contain few traces from women viewers, although we know they visited gardens and saw ancient sculpture. Prints and painted images depicting garden spaces, such as the View of the Vatican Gardens by Hendrick van Cleve III, often include women (Fig. 12.2).32 Indeed, respectable women of various social classes, as well as courtesans and prostitutes, were very much a visible and active presence in the daily life of the Roman cityscape.33 Accounts of diplomatic visits or reports in archival documents also note the presence of women in gardens as guests or visitors.34 For the most part, however,

luoghi tanto remote, che si conoscesse che fa gran differenza tra queste e quelle di persone cristiane et onorate. Il che principalmente dovria esser osservato dale persone ecclesiastiche, massimamente avendosi l’essempio si S. Gregorio papa … e di molti altri santi, che tutte queste imagini de’falsi dèi come monstri si levarono d’attorno.” Barocchi, Trattati, vol. 2, 293; translation in Paleotti, Discourse, 175. 31 Barocchi, Trattati, vol. 3, 117–23. 32 Hendrick van Cleve III visited Rome in 1550–1, returning to his native Antwerp shortly thereafter. During the 1580s, he was commissioned by an unknown patron or patrons to paint a series of panoramic views of Rome. These paintings thus reflect the artist’s sketches and memories of the Vatican gardens some thirty years earlier. For more on Van Cleve, see Marion Van der Meulen, “Cardinal Cesi’s Antique Sculpture Garden: Notes on a Painting by Hendrick van Cleef III,” The Burlington Magazine 116 (1974): 14–24. 33 Contrary to conventional thought, Roman women in the early modern period were not cloistered at home, but went about the city in the company of servants, friends, or relatives to attend religious celebrations, civic events, to visit monuments and gardens, and to run errands for daily life. See Elizabeth S. Cohen, “To Pray, to Work, to Hear, to Speak: Women in Roman Streets c. 1600,” in Cultural History of Early Modern European Streets, ed. Riitta Laitinen and Thomas V. Cohen (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009). 34 For example, like other important visitors to Rome during the reign of Pius IV, Virginia delle Rovere, Daughter of the Duke of Urbino and wife of Federico Borromeo, stayed in the Villa Giulia in 1560 to rest and recuperate from travelling prior to her official entry into the city; that same year Cosimo I de’Medici, his wife Eleonora de Toldeo, and their

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Figure 12.2  Hendrick van Cleve III, View of the Vatican Gardens, 1580s. Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris

women were excluded from the culture of antiquities collecting in Rome. As early as 1506 Raffaele Maffei declared that “women and their daughters” should be barred from viewing nude Greek statues, for they could “easily be corrupted by the sight.”35 Only a small handful of women in Rome were known to have

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children Isabella, Garzia, and Giovanni were also hosted at the Villa Giulia and toured private antiquities collections and gardens, such as Cardinal Ippolito d’Este’s villa on the Quirinal Hill. See David Coffin, The Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome (Princeton: Princeton Unversity Press, 1979), 172–3; Andrea Gáldy, “Lost in Antiquities: Cardinal Giovanni de’Medici (1543–1562),” in The Possessions of a Cardinal: Politics, Piety and Art, ed. Mary Hollingsworth and Carol M. Richardson (University Park, pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 154. In addition, women might also work in villa gardens: in October 1577, a friend wrote to Cardinal Ferdinando de’Medici to describe his visit to the Villa Medici during the cardinal’s absence. He received an extensive tour of the grounds from the gardener, Luca, as well as the gardener’s wife, Margherita, who was making mustards and jams (Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Archivio Mediceo del Principato, vol. 5101, fols. 753r–754v). “Nudare hominem graeca omnino res, tam ob artis ostentationem, quam ob libidinem reperta: nec iam Christianos pudet eas passim consectari, ac in atrijs domorum ponere, ut hoc plane spectaculo matronas filiasque suas ad impudicitiam invitent.” Raffaele Maffei, R. Volaterrani Commentariorum urbanorum Liber I–XXXVIII (Rome: Ioanem Besicker Alemanum, 1506), fol. 326v, cited in Christian, Empire without End, 199.

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owned antiquities collections; those who did have collections had acquired them via inheritance from husbands or other family members.36 Pius V was so concerned by the impropriety of women wandering the Belvedere and glimpsing indecent sculpture that he had women banned entirely from the villa.37 Surely women could find nude sculpture as fascinating as their male counterparts, but the displays of ancient works seem to have been designed to appeal specifically to the male gaze. At Fontainebleau in 1543, King François I, accompanied by Cardinal Ippolito d’Este and Marechal Claude d’Annebault, invited the Duchesse d’Étampes Anna Jeanne de Pisseleu d’Heilly and her maids to view his newly acquired casts and copies after famous ancient statues in Roman collections. When the king stopped to show the Duchesse (who was also his mistress) the sensual curves and bodily perfection of a nude Venus, she excused herself with a coy smile and joined her maids in another room to “warm themselves” while the king remained behind with the men to continue admiring the figure.38 Observing and discussing antiquities was a stimulating pastime for members of the elite classes of sixteenth-century society, but this anecdote implies that while women could perhaps find ancient statues quite interesting, or possibly even arousing, male viewers were the intended audience for ancient nudes. In the male-dominated courts of later sixteenthcentury Rome, the chief owners of collections and wealthy patrons of villa gardens were men with political or professional connections to the Church.39 36

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Women who were avid collectors of ancient art in sixteenth-century Italy, such as Marchesa Isabella d’Este of Mantua, were rather rare exceptions to the rule. Ulisse Aldrovandi’s guidebook to the private antiquities collections of mid-sixteenth-century Rome, Di tutte le statue antiche (Rome, 1556 and 1562, see note 44 below), mentions only one woman: Livia Colonna. She inherited the collection from her husband Marzio Colonna upon his death in 1538; when she herself was killed in 1554, the collection reverted to back to the Colonna family. Sheryl E. Reiss suggests that Alfonsina Orsini, widow of Piero de’Medici and living in Rome in 1514, was an antiquities collector owing to a letter written by her son-in-law (Filippo Strozzi) that comments on her possession of five beautiful ancient statues. Sheryl E. Reiss, “Widow, Mother, Patron of Art: Alfonsina Orsini de’Medici,” in Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy, ed. Sheryl E. Reiss and David G. Wilkins (Kirksville, mo: Truman State University Press, 2001). Kathleen Christian has pointed out, however, that it is unclear whether Alfonsina actively purchased the statues or if they were simply found near the property she leased or owned. Christian, Empire without End, 332–3. Avviso of 12 June 1568, cited in von Pastor, History of the Popes, vol. 17, 95. Adolfo Venturi, “Una visita artistica di Francesco I re di Francia,” Archivio storico dell’arte 2 (1890): 377–8. Owing to the papal bureaucracy, the large numbers of male staff in Roman courts, and the nature of Rome’s economy, the city’s population throughout the sixteenth century was

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It is thus predictable, as we have seen, that the loudest critics of ancient statuary were their male ecclesiastical peers, and especially those invested in Church reform. We should also keep in mind that the artists, architects, antiquities dealers, fountaineers, and other figures responsible for designing and decorating Roman villa gardens were, by and large, men. Thus while women certainly visited and enjoyed gardens and their contents, the spectatorship for displays of ancient statues was dominated by men. Nudity was not the only problem troubling critics of ancient works; they also worried about sexually explicit nature of mythological narratives or characters and the danger these might pose to viewers they perceived to be inexperienced or naïve about the display of antiquities in private collections. Bishop Antonio Agustín, a noted classical scholar and expert in canon law, expresses this anxiety in a letter to the antiquarian Fulvio Orsini in Rome in 1566: I doubt that it is necessary to bury all the nude statues, since no new information has come out about them, but certainly those masculine herms from the Villa Cesi and Villa Carpi look bad, and that Hermaphrodite with the Satyr in the chapel, and other paintings in the house of another senatorial patron of the famous Mario, and the garden of Pope Julius III with so many Venuses and other lascivities that, although they are beneficial to young scholars and artists, the Northerners are bestially scandalized and the evil rumors gain strength. So, our City, the Gracious Queen of the Provinces, goes on losing territories.40 As a student of ancient law and Latin, and as a friend to many antiquarians and collectors in Rome, Agustín was not against ancient art or the study of ancient culture. Instead, what seems to have bothered him was the overtly provocative

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predominately male. The most complete census data is for the year 1592, when the city’s population of roughly 100,000 had a ratio of thirty-seven women to every 100 men. See Thomas James Dandelet, “Rome, 1592: An Introduction to a Newly Discovered Parish Census,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 50 (2005): 207–20. “Io dubito che bisogni sotterrare tutte le statue ignude, perche non venga fuori qualche informazione di esse: & certo parevano male quelli termini maschii della vigna di Cesis & di Carpi, & quel Hermafrodito col Satiro nella Capella, & altra pitture in Casa d’un altro Senatore patrone del famoso Mario. Et la vigna di papa Giulio Terzo con tante Veneri & alter lascivie. Che se bene alli studiosi giovano, e alli artefici, li Oltramontani si scandalizzano bestialmente, & fama malum vires acquirit eundo. Così va perdendo provincie la vostra Urbs Alma Regina Provinciarum.” Letter of 12 November 1566, in Antonio Agustín, Opera Omnia, vol. 7 (Lucca: Rocchius, 1772), 247–8. My translation is based on Coffin, Villa in the Life, 174.

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nature of particular works and their accessibility in villa gardens and palaces to conservative northern European pilgrims or visitors who might misunderstand the true priorities of the Church. Paleotti had argued in his treatise that clerics in particular should know better than to display pagan works openly in their homes and villas for the wrong types of viewers, such as the unlettered, the young, or laypersons.41 That the open display of scandalous antiquities might lead Protestants to exploit the charge of idolatry or the sin of luxury against the Catholic Church was a serious concern for reformers.42

Villa Gardens and Statues on Display

An even greater problem for detractors, however, was the fact that villa gardens in Rome and the surrounding countryside, with their fountains, architectonic features, planted specimens, beautiful views, and famous ancient statuary, including images with potentially titillating themes, were designed to attract viewers. The erotic nature of some of the ancient statues displayed in these gardens was, in fact, exactly what viewers often commented upon. Giovan Francesco Arrivabene, the Mantuan envoy reporting on the 1550 election of Paul III, used his free time during the papal conclave to visit the sites of Rome. In one letter, he describes the Cesi Garden near the Vatican and its ancient statuary in great detail, and remarks upon the “very beautiful Agrippina, who has the most lascivious drapery that one can see (Fig. 12.3).”43 In a similar manner, Ulisse Aldrovandi discusses the Pan and Daphnis group displayed in the Cesi Garden in his guidebook to private antiquities collections in Rome (Fig.  12.4).44 Describing the nude satyr lecherously embracing the 41 Barocchi, Trattati, vol. 2, 309–14; Paleotti, Discourse, 186–9. 42 See above, and n. 18. 43 “... un Agrippina bellissima, c’ha i più lascivi vestimenti che si possano vedere.” Guido Rebecchini, “Giovan Francesco Arrivabene a Roma nel 1550. Una nuova descrizione del giardino del Cardinale Federico Cesi,” Pegasus, Berliner Beiträge zum Nachleben der Antike 2 (2000): 41–60. On the statue, see Barbara Vierneisel-Schlörb and Klaus Vierneisel, Katalog der Skulpturen, II: Klassische Skulpturen des 5. und 4. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. (Münich: C.H. Beck, 1979), 163–77, no. 15. For a description of the Cesi Garden and antiquities collection, see Katherine M. Bentz, “Cardinal Cesi and his Garden: Antiquities, Landscape, and Social Identity in Early Modern Rome” (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2003). 44 Ulisse Aldrovandi, Di Tutte le statue antiche che in Roma in diversi luoghi, e case particolari si veggono …, in Le antichità della città di Roma brevissimamente raccolte da chiunque hà scritto, ò antico, ò moderno, ed. Lucio Mauro (Venice: Giordano Ziletti, 1562), 129–30.

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Figure 12.3  So-called “Agrippina” (draped female torso), Roman copy after a 5thcentury bce original. Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek München, GL 208 (Christa Koppermann)

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Figure 12.4  P  an and Daphnis, 1st-century ce Roman copy after a c. 100 bce original by Heliodoros of Rhodes. Museo Nazionale Romano (Palazzo Altemps), Rome, Italy (© Vanni Archive/Art Resource, ny)

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youth as “one of the works of beauty found in Rome,” and one of the three satyrs mentioned by Pliny, he relates with admiration its novel display: featured within the Antiquario (a pavilion displaying antiquities in the garden), in a niche encrusted with colored marble intarsia and standing upon an ancient base with a turning mechanism. Yet, he writes, “the poets say that these satyrs, half men and half goats, are found in the forests and they are very lascivious: One also reads in some histories of our Christian Saints that they have seen some of them.”45 Aldrovandi clearly admires the beauty and the installation of the work, and is intrigued by the tactile means by which the viewer may interact with this sculpture, turning the base to view the nude figures from all angles. Yet the eroticism of the sculpture was underscored by the satyr’s phallus along with the proximity of the sexually suggestive Leda and Swan statue group, also presented on a turning base and displayed in the opposite niche of the Antiquario. Aldrovandi’s description thus emphasizes the salacious nature of the subject represented as if to warn readers against too much enjoyment. As Aldrovandi’s description shows, the novel display settings and the lush and sensuous garden surroundings for nude and erotic statuary only heightened their sensual and suggestive qualities. The planted vegetation, water features, topographic variation, and walking paths and other design elements of gardens were calculated to engage and stimulate the senses. In addition to the palpable sensate experience viewers had in gardens, Renaissance minds believed that nature was gendered female, and they conceived of nature as a locus of procreative energy, fertile abundance, and potent fecundity. In visual imagery as well as in literary texts, analogies for female sexuality and female reproductive faculties were used frequently to express the generative power and bounty of nature.46 Such analogies were plentiful in sixteenth-century garden sculpture, which regularly alluded to the sexuality or the procreative 45

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For the statue, see A. Giuliano, ed., La Collezione Boncompagni–Ludovisi: Algardi, Bernini, e la fortuna dell’antico (Venice: Mattilio, 1992), 152–7, no. 16. “Hanno i poeti detto, che questi satiri mezi huomini e mezi capre si ritrovino pe’ boschi, e siano molto lascivi: si legge anco in alcuna historia de’ nostri Santi Christiani, che ne sia state alcuno da loro veduto nel mondo.” Ibid., 130. Likewise, his description of another Pan and Daphnis group in the Farnese collection praises its beauty, but underscores the “lascivious embrace” of the satyr: Aldrovandi, Di tutte le statue antiche, 155. Claudia Lazzaro, “Gendered Nature and its Representation in Sixteenth-Century Garden Sculpture,” in Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture, ed. Sarah Blake McHam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 246–73 . See also Katharine Park, “Nature in Person: Medieval and Renaissance Allegories and Emblems,” in The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Mary D. Garrard, “Natura Bound: the Later Tuscan Mannerists,” in Brunelleschi’s

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abilities of females. The Diana of Ephesus made for the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, for example, demonstrates this concept well (Fig. 12.5).47 Here the nourishing and fertile characteristics of nature are represented by water flowing through the Earth Goddess’s many breasts and dripping down her body, and are further underscored by the rows of wild animals appearing around her waist and legs. Although the statue is based upon an ancient classical figure, in this Renaissance Diana ideas of excess, infinite abundance, and uninhibited female sexuality are conflated and made literal and emphatic, almost to the point of the grotesque.48 Female sexuality and fertility were further accentuated in other sculptural vignettes at the Villa d’Este, such as the Grotto of Venus, which featured an ancient nude Venus figure emerging from her bath. A sixteenth-century description of the garden called it the “Grotto of Voluptuous Pleasure.”49 The themes of sensual pleasure in the display of garden sculpture reflected the use of villa gardens as sites for leisure, pleasure, and even licentious activities. In 1576, Ammannati wrote that Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici wanted to fashion his new villa on the Pincio expressly as a site for dining and entertaining.50 Villa gardens were commonly the venues for luxurious banquets and elaborate amusements for important visitors and diplomatic guests; often cardinals used their villas to compete with their peers for entertaining. A report of 1582, for example, notes that many cardinals vied for the chance to entertain the ambassador from Moscow in their gardens, and that he particularly enjoyed those belonging to Cardinals Farnese, d’Este and Medici, as well as the Farnese estate at Caprarola and the Villa d’Este at Tivoli.51 These large parties would traditionally include members of Rome’s sizeable courtesan population, and courtesans or prostitutes would also accompany smaller group outings or picnic rendezvous as well. In 1501, Agostino Vespucci wrote to Niccolò Machiavelli reporting on the behavior of poets in gardens:



Egg: Nature, Art and Gender in Renaissance Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 275–313. 47 Sculpted by Gillis van den Vliete in 1568, the Diana of Ephesus was modeled after an ancient version in the Farnese collection. It originally stood in the central Water Organ fountain, but was moved to the lower garden terrace in the seventeenth century. See David Coffin, The Villa d’Este at Tivoli (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 18–9. 48 Lazzaro, “Gendered Nature and its Representation,” 250–3; The Italian Renaissance Garden, 144; and Park, “Nature in Person,” especially 57–64. 49 The Venus statue was of the “Capitoline type.” Coffin, The Villa d’Este at Tivoli, 34; Gardens and Gardening, 89–90. 50 Coffin, Villa in the Life, 232. 51 Avviso of 29 September 1582. See ibid., 209.

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Figure 12.5  Gillis van den Vliete, Diana of Ephesus, 1568. Villa d’Este, Tivoli, Italy (Author)

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[They] are continuously in the garden with women, and others similar to them, where they awaken the silent muse with their lyre, giving themselves pleasure and amusement. But, good God, what means they have, to my mind, and how much wine they guzzle after they have poetized! The Roman Vitellius and Sardanapalus of olden times have come to life again, nor would they be anything here. They have players of various instruments and they dance and leap with these girls in the manner of the Salii or rather the Bacchantes.52 Such garden parties continued throughout the period: the Accademia dei Vignaioli, a poets’ sodality, composed notoriously burlesque verses during their raucous al fresco soirees.53 Diplomatic reports and letters in 1566 noted that Cardinal Alessandrino (Michele Bonelli) was reprimanded and forbidden to leave the Vatican Palace by his uncle, Pope Pius V, because he “went too often to the vineyards and his life there appeared too licentious.”54 Pius urged his young nephew to follow his own ascetic example. Given the atmosphere of sensory delights and profane pleasures in villa gardens, the display of nude or sexually suggestive ancient sculptures in these places was undoubtedly worrisome to critics and Church reformers. Critics of ancient statues were also aware of the persuasive visual power that sculpture had over Renaissance viewers. Public sculpture was a part of everyday experience in sixteenth-century Rome, as it had been in antiquity: Pirro Ligorio and others reminded readers that ancient Rome had two populations, one of flesh and blood and one of marble.55 Not only were contemporary 52

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“…in dovere stare continue per li giardini fra donne, et altri simili ad sè, dove con la lyra loro suscitent musam tacentem, diensi piacere, et si trastullino. Ma, bone Deus, che pasti fanno loro, secondo intendo, et quantum vini ingurgitant poy che li hanno poetizato! Vitellio romano, et apud hesternos Sardanapalo, si reviviscerent, non ci sariano per nulla. Hanno li sonatori di varri instrumenti, et con quelle damigelle dansono et saltono in morem Salium, vel potius Bacchantium.” Letter of Agostino Vespucci in Rome to Niccolò Machiavelli in Florence, 16 July 1501, in Pasquale Villari, Niccolò Machiavelli e suoi tempi, illustrati con nuovi documenti, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Milan: Ulricho Hoepli, 1895), 574. For the English translation, see Coffin, Gardens and Gardening, 230. Michele Maylender and Luigi Rava, Storia delle accademie d’Italia, vol. 5 (Bologna: A. Forni, repr., 1976), 466–7. “Havendo il Papa inteso che il card. Alessandrino andava troppo speso alle vigne et parendoli vita troppo licentiosa, gli ha commesso che non parta più di Palazzo et che piglia esempio della vita de S.Sta quando anco era giovane.” Avviso of 22 June 1566, cited in von Pastor, History of the Popes, vol. 17, 83, n. 1. Erma Mandowsky and Charles Mitchell, Pirro Ligorio’s Roman Antiquities: The Drawings in ms XIII. B. 7 in the National Library in Naples, vol. 28, Studies of the Warburg Institute (London: Warburg Institute, 1963), 49, n. 5. Ligorio adapted Cassiodorus, Variae Epistolae 7.13.1.

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and ancient sculptures highly praised for their lifelike realism, but qualities that evoked living flesh, or portraits that presented a “speaking likeness” of the model, were especially valued.56 On the streets of Renaissance Rome, ancient statues like the Pasquino or the Marforio “spoke” to passersby through affixed written verses, functioning as the mouthpieces for political and social satire.57 Viewers could become entirely engrossed in admiring ancient works, as described in Francesco Alighieri’s Antiquitates Valentinae, a tract written in the 1530s to praise the collection in the garden of Benedetto Valenti in Trevi. While waiting for the patron of the house, two characters in the dialogue peruse the ancient statues displayed in the garden. When one of them complains that they have been silently gazing at the works for too long, his friend replies, “I seemed to see these men whose effigies are preserved in marble here as if they were alive and to talk with them.”58 Perhaps this powerful presence was what Cardinal Giovanni Ricci wanted to expunge from the antiquities he had acquired from the vigna (vineyard) of Pope Julius III, having received advice from one of his spiritual confessors in 1569: My spiritual father, to whom I give much credit for his goodness, has advised me that I should not decorate my house with things like those, because it seemed to him that they did not benefit cardinals of my age, all the more so since the pope had rid himself of them. I listened to him, and had them put in the cellar, where they stayed in the dark for a few days.59 56

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Lex Hermans, “Consorting with Stone: The Figure of the Speaking and Moving Statue in Early Modern Italian Writing,” in Push Me Pull You: Imaginative, Emotional, Physical, and Spatial Interaction in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art, ed. Sarah Blick and Laura G. Gelfand (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 177–45. For the Pasquino and other “talking” statues in Rome, see Valerio Marucci, ed. Pasquinate del Cinque e Seicento, Omikron (Roma: Salerno editrice, 1988); Cesare D’Onofrio, Un popolo di statue racconta: Storie fatti leggende delle città di Roma antica, medievale, moderna (Rome: Romana Soc. Ed., 1990) and Claudio Rendina, Pasquino, statua parlante: Quattro secoli di pasquinate (Roma: Newton Compton, 1991). “Qui aver videbar videre vivos mortals, quorum referent vultum Marmora simulque loquebar cum iis,” in Francesco Alighieri: Antiquitates Valentinae, ed. Claudio Franzoni (Ferrara: Franco Cosimo Panini, 1991), 68. For the English translation, see Louis Marchesano, “A Social History of Represented Antiquities: Civility and Antiquarianism in Rome, 1550–1700” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2001), 74. “Mio padre spirituale, al quale io do assai credito per la sua bontà e mi ha consigliato che io non armi la mia casa di simili cose, parendogli che non convegnono a cardinali della mia età le ho fatte portar tutte in una cantina, dove non vedranno lume per parecchi giorni,” in Collezionismo Mediceo e storia artistica. Da Cosimo I a Cosimo II, 1540–1621, ed. Paola Barocchi and Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà, vol. 1, pt. 1 (Florence: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 2002), 237. The translation here is based on Stenhouse, “Visitors, Display and Reception,” 412–3.

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Here Ricci appears to have felt pressure from more reform-minded clerics about the impropriety of the open display of ancient statues at his home. As a consequence, he hid the statues in an attempt to dispel some of their allure and to appease those peers who might criticize his behavior. Critics of antiquities thus had numerous reasons to decry their presence in the villa gardens of Rome: The overt nudity and erotic sensuality of ancient statues were enhanced by the suggestiveness of the garden sites in which they appeared. Such garden settings could function as venues for decadent or dissolute behavior. Finally, the visual and symbolic power of sculpture, combined with the authority and venerable patina of the ancient past, ensured that antiquities were irresistible attractions for viewers in Roman gardens. Exacerbating these issues for critics was the fact that gardens, and the sculpture displayed within them, could be accessible to a visiting public. Unlike public sacred spaces, where bishops had authority to monitor the images on display, villa gardens could not be similarly controlled. Not only were gardens private properties owned by the most powerful nobles or prelates in the city, but there also existed a long-standing custom that ensured gardens would be open to guests, or at least guests of particular social classes. The French essayist Michel de Montaigne seems to confirm this idea when describing the gardens he visited in Rome in 1580–1: “These beauties are open to anyone who wants to enjoy them, and for whatever purpose, even to sleep there, even in company if the masters are not there, and they do not like to go there much.”60 The custom of accessibility was expressed in the so-called leges hortorum, or “laws of gardens,” inscriptions welcoming visitors to entertain themselves in the garden.61 Most often, these inscriptions were posted on garden gates, as at the Villa Medici and in the Cesi Garden. But leges hortorum inscriptions were always in Latin, and they were sometimes situated deep within the villa itself, as in the case of the nymphaeum at the Villa Giulia. The intended visiting audience for gardens, then, was most likely members of the educated classes.62 On the other hand, the popularity of garden parties featuring courtesans, the prevalence of villas mentioned in travel guidebooks to Rome, the accounts of visits in private correspondence, and the numbers of artists who sketched scenes and sculpture in these gardens, attest that foreigners and the “less-educated” 60 61

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Michel de Montaigne, Montaigne’s Travel Journal, trans. Donald Murdoch Frame (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983), 96. David Coffin, “The ‘Lex Hortorum’ and Access to Gardens of Latium During the Renaissance,” Journal of Garden History 2 (1982): 201–32. See also Katherine M. Bentz, “The Rhetoric of the Garden Gate in Early Modern Rome,” in Early Modern Rome, 1341–1667, ed. Portia Prebys (Rome: sate, 2010), 246–63. Stenhouse, “Visitors, Display and Reception,” 412.

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did visit gardens, causing alarm for such reformers as Agustín and Paleotti.63 Not only would such visitors see the ancient idols, observe the lasciviousness  of the statues on display, and witness the sinful decadence of garden settings, but they might also misconstrue the priorities of the elite members of the Church’s hierarchy and conclude that the entire Church was indeed corrupt.

The “Reverendi Riformatori” and the Display of Antiquities

While the numbers of critics of ancient sculpture were relatively few, their negative views of ancient statues remained steady throughout the sixteenth century and had at least some impact on the appreciation for antiquities and the influence of ancient art on contemporary commissions. Collecting in Rome seems to have been slightly curtailed during the later sixteenth century. On several occasions, Bishop Girolamo Garimberto sarcastically complained to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese that the “Reverendi Riformatori di Santa Riforma di Roma,” or the self-righteous ecclesiastical peers who disapproved of his collecting, had discouraged him from buying new pieces.64 Cardinal de Granvelle wrote to Fulvio Orsini in 1581 to lament that all the best ancient works were going to markets and collectors outside of Rome, “in places where they do not intend to take proper account of them.”65 There was also a decline in commissions for contemporary Renaissance paintings and sculpture that featured the Olympian gods.66 Decorative programs in several villas, such as Cardinal Alessandro Farnese’s Caprarola, Cardinal Ricci’s villa on the Pincian Hill, or the Casino of Pius IV also shifted from a focus on classical mythology to religious subjects and iconography in keeping with Counter-Reformation principles.67 63 64

65 66 67

See notes 18 and 40. Clifford M. Brown and Anna Maria Lorenzoni, Our Accustomed Discourse on the Antique: Cesare Gonzaga and Gerolamo Garimberto, Two Renaissance Collectors of Greco-Roman Art (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993), 66–7, 119. Pierre de Nolhac, “Lettere inedite del Cardinal de Granvelle a Fulvio Orsini e al Cardinale Sirleto,” Studi e documenti di storia e diritto 5 (1844): 247–76. Luba Freedman, The Revival of the Olympian Gods in Renaissance Art, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 243–4. Clare Robertson, “Il Gran Cardinale”: Alessandro Farnese, Patron of the Arts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 201–2.

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Despite the strong criticism of ancient sculpture, however, the appeal of antiquities was found much too compelling. To whatever degree it slowed in the final decades of the sixteenth century, collecting and displaying ancient statuary did continue, even into later periods. Some villas, such as the Villa Lante in Bagnaia, continued to be decorated with ancient mythological subjects.68 Even the model Church reformer, Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, had difficulty parting with his antiquities. In 1569 he sold all of his worldly goods and art collections in order to donate the proceeds to charity.69 Yet a letter Borromeo wrote that year also reveals that he could not give up his favorite Venus and Cupid statue: He refused to donate it to Cardinal Crivelli, and did not want it to be sold.70 Ultimately, authors of art treatises and comportment books, even those detractors of ancient art, found ways of palliating the display of antiquities in palaces and villa gardens. In his treatise On the True Precepts of the Art of Painting, Giovanni Battista Armenini discussed the proper decorum for secular works, and made it clear that ancient statues and mythological images were appropriate for loggias and gardens, but not for other more formal or public palace locations. He cites the hanging garden located inside the Palazzo delle Valle in Rome along with other noble gardens as models for display of ancient sculpture.71 Writing about the proper behavior for a cardinal, in 1589 Fabio Albergati encouraged cardinals to collect and display paintings, ancient statues, and coins as a means of “honest leisure,” so far as the images were uplifting and not lascivious in subject.72 Paleotti even conceded that displaying some pagan statues, such as portraits of virtuous historical persons, could be beneficial for learning. So long as the more dangerous statues are hidden from the views of uneducated persons, images of pagans may be permitted, “provided, of course, that they are entirely free of lasciviousness and sagely expressed with decorum.”73 68 Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden, 243–69. 69 Avviso of 23 July 1569. See Riebesell, Die Sammlung des Kardinal Alessandro Farnese, 170; Brown and Lorenzoni, Our Accustomed Discourse on the Antique, 191. 70 12 May 1569, excerpt in Carlo Marcora, “Il museo di S. Carlo,” Diocesi di Milano: rassegna di vita e di storia ambrosiana 3 (1964): 150–4. 71 Giovanni Battista Armenini, De veri precetti della pittura (Ravenna: Francesco Teabaldini, 1587), 62, 181, 93, 97. The delle Valle collection had been purchased by the Medici just three years before Armenini’s text was published. 72 Fabio Albergati, Del Cardinale (Rome: Giovanni Angelo Ruffinelli, 1598), 191. 73 “…quando però nel resto siano senza lascivia alcuna e col suo decoro saggiamente espresse.” Barocchi, Trattati, vol. 2, 317; Paleotti, Discourse, 191.

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Conclusion Counter-Reformation critics of ancient sculpture were concerned above all with the appearance and function of sacred images and with ensuring that the sacred remain clearly separate and defined in opposition to the profane. Ancient sculpture represented the profane in every way, and so it was essential that its pagan origins, nudity, sensuality, and affective power be secured from tainting those viewers who were naïve and thus easily corrupted. This is perhaps why accusations of idolatry and fears about influencing the youth, women, the unlettered, or northern European visitors were repeated by different critics throughout the period. But it is also clear that critics of ancient sculpture were anxious about clerical reform. Luxurious villas with sumptuous gardens open to visitors were incongruous with calls for greater humility, austerity, and spiritualism among ecclesiastics. Writers like Paleotti worried that upon observing such decadence, viewers might allege idolatry or worse, leave the Church over its apparent corruption. In the end, however, the culture of antiquities collecting and the building and enjoying of gardens was too deeply engrained in Renaissance culture in Rome to suffer any long-term effects of censorship and calls for change in the later sixteenth century. Antiquities were attractive to collectors not only because of their beauty or the history they represented, but because ownership of such works were markers of wealth and noble Roman status. Thus ancient statues, and the contemporary works of sculpture they inspired, continued to serve as featured attractions in villa gardens in Rome throughout the early modern period. As gardens grew in size, patrons devised increasingly elaborate display spaces within their garden villas to show off their prized masterpieces of ancient art. Although Renaissance culture was profoundly influenced by the fascination with and appreciation for antiquity, this study has shown that in sixteenthcentury Rome, as in any society, taste was not uniform. Often, as in the case of ardent Counter-Reformation reformer Cardinal Carlo Borromeo and his inability to part with a precious Venus statue, the role of images and works of art in daily life operated within competing notions of decorum and identity. The negative reception history of ancient statues also reveals that gender divisions were key in the reception of ancient sculpture in sixteenth-century Rome, as the collectors, art writers, and most garden visitors and viewers of antiquities were educated men, primarily deriving from the ecclesiastical ranks of society. The sixteenth-century painters and sculptors who frequented gardens seeking  ancient sculpture for models and inspiration for their own works were also, invariably, men. In this way, the reception of ancient sculpture in

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Index* abduction, see rape/abduction adlocutio 26, 154 Adonis 212, 258, 259n57, 309n16, 380n67 Adrian VI, Pope 422, 423 Adventus of Hadrian, relief (Conservatori Palace, Rome) 361 Adventus of Marcus Aurelius, relief, Arch of Constantine, Rome 361, 362 Adventus of Trajan, relief, Arch of Constantine, Rome 121 Aeneas 393, 394, 394n1, 395–401, 402, 403, 404, 405, 406, 407–417 Aglauros 295, 295n118 Agosti, Giovanni 137n15 Agostino Veneziano 150 Bacchante Seated Backwards on a Goat, With Herm of Satyr 287, 292 Stregozzo (engraver) 23, 279, 280, 282n73 reissue of Marcantonio Raimondi, cemetery scene, engraving 280, 287, 288, 289, 290n90 Agrippa, Henricus Cornelius 148 Declamation of the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex 148n48 Agrippina, statue, Cesi Garden 433, 433n43, 434 Agustín, Bishop Antonio 432, 432n40, 441 Alberti, Leon Battista Intercenales 296n120 On Painting 299, 299n129 Alcamenes Procne and Itys 305, 309, 310, 316, 322, 330 Alciato, Andrea Emblemata 270, 270n22 Illustrations 296 Aldrovandi, Ulisse Delle statue antiche 105, 106n22, 431n36, 433, 433n44 Alessandrino, Cardinal (Michele Bonelli) 439, 439n54 Alexander the Great 183, 185, 186, 187, 212n38 Alexander the Great, bust (Uffizi) 185, 185n31, 187 Alighieri, Dante 71 * Numbers in bold indicate pages with images.

Inferno 38, 67n62, 82, 272, 272n27, 294, 297n123, 298n126 Alighieri, Francesco Antiquitates Valentinae 440, 440n58 Amazons 18, 117, 119, 122, 150n57, 350, 350n1, 365, 366, 387; goddess Roma as Amazonian 119, 122, 366, 368 Ammannati, Bartolomeo 368 Juno Fountain, Florence 366, 366n41, 368n42, 369, 371, 371n50, 370, 383n75, 385, 386 Florence 369, 371 anasyrmos (lifting of the skirts) 375, 375n55 Anchises 394, 402, 402n27, 403, 404n33, 406, 411 ancient statues, admiration of artistic skill 103, 104, 106, 278; as containing evil spirits, 422; and decorum, 422, 425, 427, 428, 428n28, 443–445; as instruments of Satan, 425; negative reception of, 429, 422, 423, 424, 439–442; sensuality of, 426, 431; visual power of, 418, 419, 436, 439, 441. See also under individual statues Aneau, Barthélemy La Métamorphose d’Ovide figurée (attributed to?) 321 Antaeus 66, 66n62 Apelles 100, 141, 218, 299, 299n129 Calumny 141, 299, 299n129 Aphrodite, see Venus Aphrodite of Knidos, statue 376, 385n82, 421 Apollo 51, 118, 18n50, 183, 214n42, 259,259n61, 278, 309n16, 424; ancient statues of, 27, 104, 105, 117, 118; Apollo Citharoedos, 105, 176n10; Apollo Medicus, 267 Apuleius 204, 205, 209, 222 Metamorphoses (Golden Ass) 205, 205n18, 205n19, 267, 267n15, 275n44, 276n45, 284n78, 2888, 292n100 Arachne 87, 88, 89, 89n22, 93n39 Arcadia 230, 230n1, 245, 253 264 Arcimboldo 401 Ares, see Mars

452 Aretino, Pietro 218, 218n56, 275, 288, 294, 376, 412n47 Cortigiano 288n88, 290, 294n111 Sei Giornate 275n41, 288n87 Ariadne 200n1, 203, 212, 213, 214 Ariadne/Cleopatra, Belvedere Courtyard, Vatican 238n14, 246. See also Francisco de Holanda, drawing of fountain with Ariadne/Cleopatra Aristotle 59, 73, 426 Poetics 306, 426, 426n23 Ariosto, Ludovico 270n23, 286, 297 Armenini, Giovanni Battista On the True Precepts of the Art of Painting 443, 443n71 Arno River, statue, Belvedere, Vatican) 379, 381 Arnulfus of Orléans Commentary on the Fasti 71 Arrivabene, Giovan Francesco 433, 433n43 Artemis, see Diana Ascanius 394, 395, 402, 402n27, 403, 404, 406 Asclepius 115, 267 Aspertini, Amico drawings in the Codex Wolfegg: ancient sculptures in collections in Rome, 122, 178, 179; Trajanic relief on Arch of Constantine, 119, 119n55, 122 Astalli, Mariano 106, 188 Athena 350, 350n1, 365, 365n35, 387; Athena Nikophoros iconography, 117 Athens 305, 308, 309, 309n15, 422n6 Centauromachy metopes, Parthenon 215 Augustine 294 City of God 267, 269, 274n37 Augustus, Roman emperor 365, 397, 408 Avignon papacy 111 Bacchantes/maenads 26, 284, 284n78, 286, 287, 340, 341, 357, 439, 439n52; captives likened to 136, 356; dancers likened to, 439; Procne and companions as, 26, 340; witches likened to, 284, 284n78, 286, 286n84, 287 Bacchus/Dionysos 143n36, 212, 213, 214, 268n15, 282, 284, 285n78, 356 Bagnaia Villa Lante 443 Bal, Mieke 28n78, 125, 125n65

Index Bandinelli, Baccio Triumphal scene, base, monument to Giovanni delle Bande Nere 25, 29, 352, 353, 354, 354n7, 355, 355n11, 356, 359, 374 Banqueting 223, 223n70, 224, 224n74, 225; witches’ banquets, 266, 275, 278 barbarians, iconography of 340, 354, 374n52 Barbaro, Francesco 147n44, 157 De re uxoria 147 Barkan, Leonard 2n5, 8, 8n20, 18, 18n71, 27, 27n77, 30n80, 145n42, 154n70, 175n5, 176n8, 176n10, 176n12, 178n13, 188n35, 188,87, 216, 216n52, 237n14, 246n34, 343, 343n65 Barocci, Federico 393, 393n1 Aeneas’ Flight from Troy 393, 394, 394n1, 395–401, 402, 403, 404, 405, 406, 407, 408–417; See also Carracci, Agostino, print after Federico Barocci, Aeneas’ Flight from Troy Aeneas’ Flight from Troy (copy, Villa Borghese) 393, 394, 395, 408, 413 Annunciation 406, 407, 408 Deposition 408 Madonna del Popolo 406 Perdono di Assisi 406, 406n36 Bartoli, Cosimo 366, 366n41, 371n50, 383 Bartman, Elizabeth, 183 Baskins, Cristelle 12, 18, 18n67, 111, 111n33, 111n34, 111n35, 112n36, 125, 125n65, 134, 135n11, 135, 136, 136n12, 136n14, 153n65, 154n68, 155n72, 221n65, 358n14, 360, 360n18, 374n51 Bazzi, Giovanni Antonio, see Sodoma, Il Beccadelli, Antonio The Hermaphrodite 100, 100n4, 101, 101n7, 101n11 bed, marital 17n65, 255; as setting for rape scenes, see Philomela; Lucretia. See also valances, bed Bellay, Joachim Du Antiquitez de Rome 126, 125n66, 127 Bellini, Giovanni Feast of the Gods 237, 246, 248, 249 Bellini, Jacopo drawings of fountain sculptures 258, 258n59 Bellori, Gian Pietro 399n17, 405, 406n34

Index Belvedere Courtyard, see Vatican, Belvedere Villa Belvedere Torso, statue fragment 169, 173, 174, 175n5, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 183n21, 183, 188, 192, 195, 218n55 Bembo, Pietro Gli Asolani 230, 230n1, 246 Benedict XI, Pope 38, 40 Benson, Pamela Joseph 150 Berchorius, Petrus, see Bersuire, Pierre Bergamo Oratorio Suardi 232n5, 234, 235, 236, 237 Bernardus Silvestris 72, 72n80 Bersuire, Pierre (Petrus Berchorius) Ovidius Moralizatus 73 Bertelli, Luca Lucretia and Her Companions 335, 337 Bestiaries 93, 93n37, 93n38, 94 Bestiality 205, 207, 207n29, 208, 208n30, 211, 222, 223n68 bisexuality 101, 182, 215n46 Bisticci, Vespasiano da Il Libro delle lode e commendazione delle donne 150 Black, Robert 71n72 blood, see wounds Bober, Phyllis and Ruth Rubinstein 6, 6n15 Boccaccio, Giovanni 60, 60n52, 180n17 De mulieribus claris (Good Women) 71n69, 147, 147n43, 180 Corbaccio 192, 293n106, 293n107 Decamerone 7, 7n17 Genealogia deorum gentilium libri (Geneology of the Pagan Gods) 74 Filocolo 296n120 Bocchi, Achille Symbolicarum 122, 122n59, 124, 376, 376n61 illustration of Roma 124 Boiardo, Matteo Maria Orlando Innamorato 273n31 Boniface VIII, Pope 40, 63 Bonofazi, Maria Luisa 69, 69n68 Borghese, Scipione 408, 409 Borromeo, Carlo, Cardinal 443, 444 Botticelli, Sandro Calumny of Apelles 141, 299, 299n129 Primavera 370, 370n47

453 Bracciolini, Poggio De varietate fortunae 98, 98n1, 99, 100, 100n5 Bramante, Donato 188n35, 406, 410, 411 breasts, female, bile spraying from 296; compared to spider’s webs, 291, 294; sagging, 27, 291, 291n95, 292, 292n100, 296, 296n122, 297n124, 298; as waterspouts in fountain sculpture, 241, 241n18, 241n19; of witches, 285, 286, 291, 291n95, 292, 292n100, 293, 294, 294n109, 295, 296, 206n122, 297, 297n124, 298, 298n127 brides 136, 139, 147, 151, 153, 191, 203, 220, 221, 254, 257n56, 361, 374, 396; bride of Christ, 94, 191, 191n49 See also epithalamia Broude, Norma and Mary Garrard 3n8, 3n9, 13, 13n42 bucolic imagery 258n57 Bull, Malcolm 9, 9n26 Buonarroti, Michelangelo 24, 282, 299n129, 351, 354, 356, 358n14, 363n27, 366n40, 374n51, 375, 376, 379 Battle of Cascina 282 cartoon for Venus and Cupid (lost) 376, 376n58, 376n60, 376n63 female nude, clay model (Casa Buonarroti) 378, 379, 386, 386n84 drawing after Aphrodite of Knidos (British Museum) 376, 377 Madrigal (c. 1545) 363 Sistine Chapel, Vatican, ceiling frescoes 176, 282, 427 Ignudi 176 Last Judgment 41, 41n19, 299, 299n129, 427, 428n28 Times of Day, New Sacristy (Medici Chapel), San Lorenzo, Florence 375 Dawn 178, 375 Day 375 Dusk 375 Night 178, 351, 352, 375 Victory, Sala Grande, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence 375 Burckhardt, Jacob 278, 278n59, 279, 279n61 Butler, Judith 201n4 Caciorgna, Marilena 142 Caffarini, Tommaso Biography of St. Catherine of Siena 189

454 Calmeta, Vincenzo De ostentazione 220 Campagnola, Giulio Young Shepherd 272 Camille, Michael 10, 11, 11n32, 14 Campogli, Maurizio Gatttoni da 137n15, 157 Campbell, Caroline 153 Campbell, Stephen 18, 18n69 Canidia 266, 266n13, 267n14, 270n21, 280, 290n91 Canon Episcopi, see Capitulum Episcopi Capitulum Episcopi (Canon Episcopi) 266 Caprarola Palazzo Farnese 437, 442 captives, images of 25, 29, 331, 352, 354, 354n8, 355, 356, 374, 387 Caraglio, Gian Giacomo 286n84, 404, 405 Carracci, Agostino print after Federico Barocci, Aeneas’ Flight from Troy 393, 394, 395, 408, 413 cassoni (marriage chests) 12, 134, 135, 135n11, 220, 221 cassone with myth of Pasiphae (Campana collection, Louvre) 220, 221 Castiglione, Baldassare Carmen 115n42 Letter to Pope Leo X (with Raphael) 114n40, 126 Catherine of Siena 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 188–193, 194, 195 Letter to Raymond of Capua 1375 189, 193, 193n53 Catullus, G. Valerius 59, 232 Carmina 275n44 Caviness, Madeline 13, 13n45 ceramics. See also maiolica Attic red-figure vases 86, 309 Cerberus 66 Ceres/Demeter ancient statues of 424 Cereta, Laura 160 Poems 148, 148n47 Chalchidius Timaeus 59 Chance, Jane 70, 70n69 Charles II (the Lame), King of Naples 73 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 161, 223n70 Charles V, King of France 91

Index Chastity 135, 136, 136n12, 142, 150, 154, 203, 208, 220, 220n60, 221, 222, 223, 225, 252, 256, 257, 312, 420 Chastity, personification of 252 Chaucer, Geoffrey Legend of Good Women 306, 306n4, 308 Chrétien de Troyea Cligés 80, 80n1 Ovide moralisé (author?) 70, 70n69, 306n3 Philomena 70, 306 Christ 66–67; Ascension of, 29, 82, 91, 95; carrying the cross on the way to Calvary, 29, 82, 84; driving the merchants from the Temple 41, 42; Incarnation, 95, 102; Passion, 190; and salvation, 93, 95 Christian, Kathleen Wren 6, 6n14, 154n70, 241n20, 418n1 Chronica Patavina 38 Cicero (M. Tullius Cicero) 47n24, 275n44 Circe 23, 27, 267, 267n14, 267n17, 269, 269n19, 270, 270n20, 270n23, 270n24, 271, 271n25, 271n26, 272, 277, 300 Clark, Kenneth 26, 26n76, 264, 264n1, 273, 279, 286, 288, 300 Clarke, John 134 Claudian (Claudius Claudianus) Panegyricus dictus Probino et Olybrio 111, 361n21 Clémence of Hungary, Queen of France 310 Clement VIII, Pope 410 Cleopatra 52, 237n14, 246, 246n36, 247, 253, 254, 258 Cleve, Hendrick van III 430 coins and medals, ancient Hadrian restoring Achaea 359 Roma Resurgens (Vespasian) 368, 368n43, 370, 380n68 river god (Marcus Aurelius) 361, 380, 381n68 coins and medals, post-antique Fiorenza (Cosimo I, Florence) 366 Cola di Rienzo 111 Colonna, Franceso Hypnerotomachia Poliphili 9, 22, 233, 237, 238, 238n15, 239, 239n17, 240, 242n23, 247, 248, 259, 259n41, 253, 255, 255n39, 255n50, 257n55, 258, 258n57, 420n3, 422n4

Index Coriolanus 131–168 Corpses 20, 30, 30n80, 112, 114, 116, 170, 192, 193 Cort, Cornelius Tarquin and Lucretia 328, 332 Couchman, Jane see Poska, Allyson and Jane Couchman Council of Trent 424, 427, 428 courtesans/prostitutes 269n19, 294, 429, 437, 441 cowardice 47 Cranach, Lucas Nymph of the Spring 250, 251 Crescenzi, Cardinal Marcello 428 Creusa 23, 24, 28, 393–397, 397n10, 398, 398n10, 401–403, 403n28, 404, 405, 406, 407, 408, 409, 413, 414 cross-dressing 26, 50, 51, 104, 125n63, 180, 122, 122n60 Cupid/Eros 57, 135, 136n12, 136, 136n14, 141, 141n29, 143n35, 278, 422; and Venus, 230, 231, 232–234, 237, 238, 245, 253, 255–259, 272, 277–278, 376, 376n58, 381n71, 420n5, 421, 443; and Psyche, 205n18, 213 Cybele/Magna Mater 17 Daedalus, and Pasiphaë 200, 202, 204, 206, 208, 209, 211, 214, 215, 218, 221n64, 222, 225, 308n16 Dante, see Alighieri, Dante David, Benjamin 149n50 Decapitation 169, 173, 188, 190, 192, 194 Deianira 51 Delaune, Étienne Four Ancient Monarchies 122, 122n60 Demeter, see Ceres Demons 169, 265n7, 255n9, 266n12, 274n38, 275n39, 276, 276n45, 277, 277n52, 277n63, 278, 279, 282n72, 286, 292, 294, 288, 422 Derbes, Anne and Mark Sandona 37n1, 38n6, 40n16, 47, 48, 48n27, deschi da parto (birth trays) 12, 233, 233n6 dextrarum iunctio (ancient hand-clasp gesture) 359, 361 Diana/Artemis 14, 14n48, 15, 160, 258n55, 264, 266, 266n10, 266n12, 266n13, 267, 274, 275, 278, 284n76 Diana of Ephesus 236, 236n12, 246n36, 437, 437n47, 438. See also Vliete, Gillis van den, Diana of Ephesus

455 Dido 18, 394, 397, 498n11 dining, and viewing art 223, 223n70, 224, 224n74, 225 Diodorus Siculus Bibliotheca historica 51, 54, 54n41, 58, 60, 61, 62, 73, 74, 75 Dionysos, see Bacchus Dismemberment 24, 30, 30n80, 305 donora (trousseau) 151, 151n60 Dodwin, Joscelyn 11, 11n34 Dosio, Giovanni Antonio sketchbook (Berlin) 119 Dossi, Battista Stregozzo (attributed) 280 Dossi, Dosso 273, 299 Bacchanal (attributed) 275 Circe 23, 27, 270, 270n23, 271, 272, 273 Dowry 136, 141. See also donora dream poetry 238, 238n16, 241, 242, 250, 252, 255, 259n61, 266, 272, 273, 279 Dürer, Albrecht 242n21, 250, 250n41, 253n45, 264, 274n34, 286n82 Witch riding backwards on a goat 25, 282, 283, 284–286, 298, 299 . See also Montagna, Benedetto, copy in reverse of Albrecht Dürer, Witch riding backwards on a goat Eleonora de Toledo, Duchess of Florence 336n52, 363n27, 429n34 Elia, Anthony F.D’ 155 Elizabeth of Valois, Queen of Spain 413 embroidery, see textiles Epicureanism 254n46 epithalamia epithalamic poetry 233, 254, 254n47 epithalamic painting 233, 233n6, 234 257 Equicola, Mario 248 Libro de Natura de Amore 256n52 Erasmus, Desiderius 426, 427, 427n24 Erictho 267, 267n14, 288, 290n91 Eros, see Cupid Este, Ippolito d’, Cardinal 430n34, 431 Este, Isabella d’ 18, 202n5, 202n6, 203n12, 206n22, 214n41, 224, 246n36, 256n52, 431n36 Este, Lucrezia d’ 412, 413 Eucharist 411 Europa 20, 80–82, 83, 84–85, 86, 87–97, 175n9, 203, 205, 207, 207n25, 217, 386n86

456 Even, Yael 15, 15n54, 16 Execution 169, 170, 171, 173, 188–192, 194, 275, 290 Fabricius, Gervasius – Album Amicorum 335, 335n48, 336 Farnese, Agnese 131n2, 142n26, 149n53, 149, 150, 153n67 Farnese, Alessandro, see Paul III, Pope Farnese, Alessandro, Cardinal 424n10, 437, 442, 442n67, 443n69 Farnese, Alessandro, governor of the Netherlands 410 Farnese, Vittoria, Duchess of Urbino  412, 413 fauns, see satyrs Faunus 52, 53 Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino 400, 400n19, 409 Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua 199, 202, 292n5, 202n6, 203, 204n12, 206n22, 213, 213n41, 219, 219n59, 219n60, 221, 223, 224 Ferguson, M.T., and M. Quilligan 14, 14n51 Ferguson, Margaret W. 147 Ferrara Camerino of Alfonso d’Este 246 Ferrarese, Riccobaldo 40 Ferrari, Valentini, Vivi 138n21, 141n26 Fertility 17, 25, 48, 99, 233n6, 265, 291, 295, 295n118, 298n127, 381–383, 386, 387, 437. See also nature Fiesole personifications of 351, 352, 360, 383, 383n76, 385 Figura serpentinata (serpentine figure) 145, 272 Fior di virtù, florilegium 300, 300n131 First Vatican Mythographer 70, 70n69 Fish, Stanley 132, 133n5 Flötner, Peter Invidia, plaquette 296 Flora 368, 369, 370, 371, 371n49, 371n50, 381, 385, 386 Florence, as object of love = 16, 23–24, 360–365; foundation legends, 351; personifications of, 350–382 Baptistery 10 Gardens, Villa Medici, Castello 441

Index New Sacristy (Medici Chapel), San Lorenzo 179, 376n64, 379 Palazzo Vecchio 364n31, 366n41, 381n73 Floris, Frans drawing of standing hermaphrodite statue 187–188 Fontainebleau Palace 431 Folly, personification of 67, 68 Fortitude, personification of 42, 43, 45, 47–48, 50, 66, 67, 69 Fortuna, goddess 47 Foucault, Michel 25, 25n73 fountains, symbolism of 22–23, 233, 240, 241–250, 253, 386, 433; in early modern gardens, 444; and nymph sculpture, 238, 239, 241, 245–246, 246n36, 249, 250, 250n41, 253, 255, 258; and river god sculpture, 351, 366, 366n41, 368n42, 369, 371n59, 379, 383, 383n75, 383n78 fragments, of statues 16, 23–24, 30, 108, 175, 176, 185, 188, 195; of bodies, 112, 114, 170, 173, 192, 193, 195 Francesco da Barberino Documenti d’Amore 40 Francisco de Holanda (Francesco d’Olanda) drawing of fountain with Ariadne/ Cleopatra 246, 247, 258 Francesco Maria II delle Rovere, Duke of Urbino 393, 399, 399n16, 408, 409, 409n40, 410, 412, 412n49, 413 François I, King of France 431 Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor 60, 73, 74, 74n84 Freedman, Luba 8, 8n24, 17, 18n66 Fulgentius, F. Planciades Mythologies 53, 59, 72, 76 Furies 23, 285, 292, 292n103, 296, 300, 322, 323 Gaddie Torso. see Alexander the Great gagliardo (with forced movements) 379n67, 380n67, 381 Gaia. see Tellus Galatea 212 gardens, access to, see Leges hortorum; as settings for entertainment, 418, 436, 437, 437n48, 439, 439n52; as settings for women working at embroidery, 307n6, 329n40, 331, 333n43, 334, 335, 336, 338;

Index sculpture, 233, 239, 240, 241, 242–246, 418–420, 422–433, 436–437, 439–445. See also under individual gardens by city; nature; fountains Garimberto, Bishop Girolamo 442, 442n64, 443n69 Garrard, Mary 15, 16n58 See also Broude, Norma and Mary Garrard Gemma Augustea 354, 355, 365, 365n35 Gendel, Milton L. 67, 67n63 gender fluidity 5, 21, 27, 176 gender inversion 175n8, 193, 219. See also cross-dressing Genga, Girolamo 131, 403, 412 Aeneas Fleeing Troy 141, 401, 401n26, 402, 403, 406 Fabius Maximus Ransoming Roman Prisoners from Hannibal 141 Penelope and Telemachus 141, 143n35 Gentile da Fabriano 16 Geremia di Montagnone 63 Compendium 59 Ghiberti, Lorenzo Commentari 7n17, 27, 103n18, 104 Ghisi, Giorgio Tarquin and Lucretia 322, 322n32, 328 Giambologna Fiorenza 24, 25, 374, 384, 385, 385n79, 385n80, 385n83, 386, 386n84 Florence Triumphant over Pisa 373, 375, 385 Rape of the Sabine Women 15 Giotto di Bondone 19–20, 37–79 frescoes, Arena Chapel, Padua 37–41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 79, 218, 294n14, 295 Giorgione Dresden Venus 233, 233n6, 253 Giovanni Antonio da Brescia engraving of Belvedere Torso 176, 177 Giovanni da Nono 59n49 Liber de generatione aliquorum civium urbis Padue 38, 38n7 Giulio Romano 206n22, 208, 209n35, 217, 218n57, 220n59, 224n72, 287, 292, 411n47 frescoes, Palazzo del Te, Mantua 21, 28, 199, 200, 201–203, 203n8, 205n18, 209n31, 211, 212, 212n38, 213n41, 213n42, 214, 214n45, 215, 216, 216n52, 218–221, 223–225, 286

457 Hercules and the Cretan Bull 217, 218 I Modi 214 Tarquin and Lucretia, Palazzo Ducale, Mantua 322 Goffen, Rona 17, 17n65 Goldhill, Simon 3, 3n7 Golding, Arthur Metamorphoses 342, 342n62, 342n63, 344 Gombrich, Ernst 7, 7n19, 134, 134n7, 218n57, 277n53, 278n60, 398n14, 420n3, 422n5 Gonzaga, Eleonora, Duchess of Urbino 412 Gonzaga, Giulia 181 Gonzaga, Federico II, see Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua Gossart, Jan 17 Gower, John Confessio Amantis, illustrations 306, 306n5, 307n5, 308, 308n13, 312, 312n20, 313n22, 313n23, 321 Granvelle, Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de  442, 442n65 Gregory the Great, Pope 295, 422, 422n7, 424, 428 Greenhalgh, Michael 2n5, 6, 6n13 Grieco, Sarah Matthews, see Johnson, Geraldine and Sarah Matthews Grieco Grien, Hans Baldung Witches’ Sabbath 264n3, 280 Grillandi, Paolo Tractatus de sortilegiis 290n92 Guarino da Verona Letter to Antonio Beccadelli 100 Gubbio Palace, Studiolo of Federico da Montefeltro 400, 400n20 Guillaume de Lorris, see Jean de Meun and Guillaume de Lorris, Roman de la Rose Habsburg, Maria, of Austria 413 Hairston, Julia L. 155 hairstyles, female 25–26,111, 153, 153n63, 205, 232, 270, 280, 284, 284n78, 285, 286, 292, 292n103, 297, 322, 338, 349, 354, 356, 368, 371, 374, 385, 386 Hamburger, Jeffrey 12, 12n40, 13 Hans von Aachen 393 Hardwick, Lorna 1n1, 2n5, 3n8, 11n37, 19, 19n72

458 Haskell, Francis, and Nicholas Penny  6, 6n14 Hayum, Andrée 173n4, 181n19, 183n18 Hecate 266, 266n12, 267, 284n80 Heliodoros of Rhodes 435 Helios 203, 398n10 Hera, see Juno/Hera Hercules/Herakles 14, 42, 44, 47, 50–54, 55, 56, 57, 58–67, 72, 175, 180, 180n16, 181, 181n18, 182, 215, 215n48, 217, 217n55, 218, 219n58, 276n46, 280, 280n67, 282, 284, 285n76, 328; and masculinity, 180, 217–218 Hercules mingens type 234, 234n7, 235, 235n10, 236, 237 Hermaphrodites 20, 28, 30, 57, 99–104, 106, 108, 112, 117, 127, 432; ancient statues of, 8n21, 187 Hermaphroditus 99, 102, 102n13, 108, 108n30, 109; ancient statues of, 105, 107, 108, 110 Herodotus Histories 75, 275n44 Hesiod Theogony 74, 74n85, 270n24, 272n28, 275n44 Works and Days 74 Hippolytus, son of Theseus 115, 116, 136 Homer 60, 275, 275n44, 277, 307n6, 353n6, 400 Iliad 74, 74n85, 275n44 Odyssey 267n17, 270, 270n23, 270n24, 272, 272n28, 275n44 Homosexuality 101 Hora of Autumn/Pomona, statue (Uffizi) 371, 372 Horace 59, 82, 249, 275, 276, 280, 290, 291, 293, 426 Ars poetica 116n44, 282, 428n23 Epodes 266, 266n13, 269n19, 270n21, 280n66, 284n78, 290n94, 291n99, 292n100 Satires 266n13, 290n91 Hostanes 267, 267n16, 268, 292 Huius Nympha Loci, epigram 22, 233, 241, 242, 242n21, 245, 249, 250, 250n41, 253 humor, and female sexuality 208, 219n59, 223, 234n7, 238; and images of Pasiphaë, 201, 203, 208, 219, 220, 223 hybridity 108, 117, 279, 280, 282, 284, 284n80, 285

Index Hyginus, G. Julius 59, 60 Fabulae 51, 70, 76 Hymenaeus 254 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili Hypnerotomachia Poliphili 9, 22, 233, 237, 238, 238n15, 239, 239n17, 240, 242n23, 247, 248, 259, 259n41, 253, 255, 255n39, 255n50, 257n55, 258, 258n57, 420n3, 422n4 idolatry, concerns over 439, 420, 420n5, 422, 422n6, 423, 424, 425 Inconstancy, personification of 45, 46, 47 Inquisition 265, 270n21, 273n32, 276, 276n49, 277, 277n49, 288, 290 Iphitus 51, 53 Isidore of Seville 72 Etymologies 80 Itys 305, 309, 310, 316, 322, 330 Jacobus, Laura 37n1, 38n3, 38n7, 40n12, 40n13, 41n17, 45n21, 69n65 Jacopone da Todi 38n6, 69 Jan van Scorel 259, 253, 254 Death of Cleopatra 253, 254 Jauss, Hans Robert 2, 2n3, 132, 134, 134n6, 134n7, 134n9, 162 Jean de Meun and Guillaume de Lorris Roman de la Rose 72, 81, 243n24, 244, 244n27 Jeanne de Bourgogne 90 Jewelry 51, 156, 231, 338, 338n55 Johnson, Geraldine, and Sarah Matthews Grieco 14, 14n51, 15, 16, 16n55 Juno/Hera 50, 51, 62; Juno Februata 48; Juno Sospita 45, 48 Juno Sospita, statue (Vatican) 48, 49 Jupiter/Jove/Zeus 51, 62, 85, 86, 87, 87n20, 88, 88n21, 89, 91–95, 203, 212, 212n38, 213, 214; ancient statues of, 424 Kampen, Natalie Boymel 15, 15n53, 58n46, 65, 65n61 Kelly, Joan 4, 4n11 Knidian Aphrodite, see Aphrodite of Knidos, statue Kristeva, Julia 101, 102n10 Lacan, Jacques 101

Index Laocoön and His Sons, statue group (Vatican Belvedere) 183, 422 landscape painting 248–249, 250–259 laurel, symbolism of 251, 260 Lazzaro, Claudia 17, 17n61, 23–26, 28, 29, 111n33, 117n46, 125n64, 245n33, 379n65, 381n69, 383n77, 386n85, 418n1, 436n46, 437n48, 443n68 Leda 207, 272, 309n16, 436 leges hortorum (laws of gardens) 441 leggiadrìa (graceful movement) 376, 376n59, 386 Leo X, Pope 112, 114n40, 126, 160, 363, 370n45, 381n72, 403, 423 Leonardo da Vinci 183, 188n35, 297n124, 299, 299n130, 300, 300n131, 358n14, 427 Standing Leda 272 Lendinara, Altegrado Cattaneo di, Bishop of Vicenza 40, 62 Ligorio, Pirro 104, 104n19, 120n56, 423, 439, 439n55 Antiquae Urbis Imago, map 120 Lindquist, Sherry 14, 15n51 Livy (Titus Livius Patavinus) 9, 59, 143, 143n36, 144, 144n37, 144n38, 154, 158, 158n87, 152, 322n31, 335 Lomazzo, Gian Paolo Trattato = 282, 282n69, 285, 286n82, 291, 296, 297, 297n123, 297n125 Long, Kathleen 99 Loschi, Antonio 98, 99, 112 Lotto, Lorenzo 230–263 Andrea Odoni 234, 235, 236, 237 Apollo Asleep on Parnassus 259n61 Cingoli Altarpiece 251, 251n43 frescoes, Oratorio Suardi, Bergamo 232n5, 234, 236, 237 Maiden’s Dream 250, 252, 253 San Nicola Altarpiece 257, 257n54 Triumph of Chastity 256 Venus and Cupid 231, 253, 254, 255, 258, 258n58 Lovati, Lovato 58–63, 65 Epistles 58 Lucan (M. Annaeus Lucanus) 59 Bellum civile 267n14, 276n44, 276n46, 284n78, 288n89, 290n91, 292n109 Pharsalia 111

459 Lucian of Samosata Slander 299n129 Lucretia, Tarquin and 322–325, 328, 328n39, 332, 329, 343 Lucretius (T. Lucretius Carus) 254 De rerum natura 241n18, 254n46 Maarten van Heemskerck drawing of Belvedere Torso 176, 176n12, 178 drawing of Sassi palace courtyard 119, 120 Machiavelli, Niccolò 158n86, 159, 162, 271n26, 375, 375n54, 375n55, 438, 439n52 Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy 158, 158n87, 162 The History of Florence 158, 158n87 The Prince 158 maenads, see Bacchantes magic 205, 265, 265n5, 265n6, 266, 267, 267n16, 267n17, 269n19, 270, 270n23, 271, 272, 273, 276n45, 279, 284, 285, 288, 292n100, 294. See also witches Magnus, Archbishop Olaus 428 Maiolica 12, 21, 22, 26, 28, 199, 202, 292n6, 203n10, 222n67, 224, 309n14, 393n3, 402, 403, 406 Malleus Maleficarum 267, 267n17 Mantegna, Andrea 202n5, 286n82, 291n96, 297, 298, 299 Battle of the Sea Gods 285, 297 Mantua Palazzo Ducale 322 Palazzo del Te 21, 28, 199, 202, 202n6, 205n18, 208n31, 211, 213n40, 213n41, 213n42, 214, 215, 223, 223n69, 224, 225, 286 manuscripts Aberdeen Bestiary 93, 93n27 Cambridge LXV.12 (Ovide moralisé) 92 Copenhagen Royal Library ms Thott. 399 (Ovide moralisé) 90 Morgan ms M.126 (Confessio Amantis) 313, 316, 321 Morgan ms 443 (Ovide moralisé) 91 Oxford Bestiary 93 Paris Arsenal ms 5069 (Ovide moralisé) 29, 82, 310 Paris bnf ms fr. 24306 (Ovide moralisé) 90 Rouen Bibliothèque Municipal ms 0.4 (Ovide moralisé) 20, 82, 309

460 Marforio, statue, Rome 440 Marriage 15, 28, 136, 139, 139n21, 149, 141n26, 142, 147n44, 147, 149, 153, 156, 159, 169, 181n49, 192, 220n60, 221, 233, 234, 238, 254, 258, 259, 260, 312, 322, 412, 413; attitudes towards, 254, 254n47, 255; mystic marriage to Christ, 191, 191n49, 238; as political alliance, 149–150, 157–161, 401n26, 409, 412, 413. See also brides; cassoni (marriage chests) Mars/Ares 176, 212, 366, 381 Martial (M. Valerius Martialis) 59 Epigrams 291, 291n99, 293 Martianus Capella (Martianus Minneus Felix Capella) 72, 73 De nuptiis 80 Martin V, Pope Etsi in cunctarum, papal bull 112 Martindale, Charles 2, 2n4, 3, 3n6, 81n7, 132n4, 134, 134n8, 134n9, 199n3 Maso Finiquerra, circle of 268 Maurus, Rabanus 71 Mary 360, 406–408, 413 Martyrdom 188–190, 190n44, 191–192, 193n51 Masaccio (Tommaso di ser Giovanni) 16 matron, woman as 132, 143,150, 154, 162, 335 McHam, Sarah 9, 9n25 Medea 95, 267, 267n14, 269, 276n46, 284, 284n78, 321 Medici, Cosimo I de’, Duke of Florence 161, 354, 356, 359, 360, 363, 364, 365, 366, 371, 374, 381, 386 Medici, Fernando de’, Cardinal 430n34, 437 Medici, Lorenzo de’ 285n81, 296, 296n120, 363, 368, 370n47, 375 Medici, Maria de’ 413 Medusa 292, 300 Megara 50, 51 Mercury 51, 56 Métamorphose d’Ovide figure 320n29, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327 Michelangelo, see Buonarroti, Michelangelo Migiel, Marilyn, and Juliana Schiesari 14, 14n51, 17n61 Milliken, Roberta 25n74 Mills, Robert 193n51 Minerva, see Athena Minos, King of Crete 92, 203, 219n58 Minotaur 203, 215

Index Mithras 22, 215, 328n39 slaying bull, relief from Aracoeli 215, 215n48, 216, 217, 218 Molanus, Johannes On Pictures and Sacred Images 426n23, 427, 427n24, 427n25 Molza, Francesco Maria In mortem Raphaelis Urbini 116n43 Montagna, Benedetto copy in reverse of Albrecht Dürer, Witch riding backwards on a goat 286 mothers 58, 136, 142, 144, 145,147, 148, 150, 151, 153, 156, 158, 162, 241, 253, 255, 369, 373, 396, 398 Mulvey, Laura 13, 13n42 Musacchio, Jacqueline Marie 12, 12n41 Muses 30, 100, 233n28, 259n61 Mussato, Albertino 58, 59, 63 Ecerinide 59 Nagel, Alexander, and Christopher Wood 10, 10n30 Narcissus 243, 244, 244n27 Natura 16, 101n11, 103n18, 241, 241n18, 254n46, 255n51, 257 nature, natural world as gendered female 436, 436n46, 437. See also bucolic imagery; landscapes; Natura, goddess Neckam, Alexander 73, 73n82 Neoplatonism 161, 203, 208, 213, 213n41, 277, 400, 400n22 Neptune/Poseidon 17, 115, 203, 221, 221n64, 297n125 Niccolò di Tuldo 169, 169n1, 169n2, 170, 171, 176, 183, 188, 189, 189n39, 194 Nicola da Urbino maiolica dish, Pasiphaë and Daedalus (Paleologo dish) 200, 202, 202n6, 203, 219, 219n60, 221–225 maiolica dish, Pasiphaë and Daedalus (workshop, attributed to) 201, 202, 203, 222, 223 nudity, significance of 26, 192, 351, 375, 383, 419, 425–427, 427n26, 428, 429, 432, 441, 444 nymphs 14, 22, 57, 102, 203, 213, 217, 233, 234, 238, 239, 240n17, 241, 241n19, 242, 242n21, 244,n28, 245, 246, 246n33, 246n36, 248, 249, 250, 250n40, 250n41, 251, 253, 255, 259, 264, 266, 274, 297, 383

Index obelisks 127, 178 Omphale 50–54, 55, 56, 57, 58–63, 65–67, 70–75, 180, 181, 181n17; sculpture, Vatican, 64 Ovid (P. Ovidius Naso) Amores 81 Ars amatoria 81, 203, 204, 204n17, 207, 208, 208n32 Ex Ponto 47 Fasti 52, 53n37, 59, 71, 76, 81, 87n20, 180, 180n17, 248, 276n44, 276n45, 276n46, 284n77, 322n31 Heroides 51, 59, 71, 76, 81 Metamorphoses 71, 81, 82, 82n10, 87, 89, 90n26, 91, 92n34, 102, 203, 204, 205, 207, 297n25, 208, 208n32, 267n17, 269, 274n38, 276n44, 276n46, 285n78, 293, 295, 295n118, 305–307, 307n6, 309, 309n16, 310n17, 316, 317, 317n27, 318n28, 319, 320n20, 329, 342, 342n62, 342n63, 343, 383 Tristia 81 Ovide moralisé 9, 9n26, 20, 23, 29, 80–97, 203, 204n15, 207, 207n25, 207n26, 208, 208n31, 306, 306n3, 308, 310, 310n17, 326 Illustrations 83, 84, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320 Pace di Ferrara 75 Padua 19, 2-, 37, 40, 41, 58–63, 65, 70–73, 75, 295; study of ancient texts in, 58–63 Arena Chapel 37–41, 42, 43, 44, 79, 218, 294n14, 295 Paleologa, Margherita 202, 202n6, 219, 219n60, 220, 224, 225 Paleotti, Gabriele, Bishop Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images 295n117, 424, 424n17, 425, 425n18, 428, 429n30, 433, 433n41, 442–444 Palma il Vecchio Bathing Nymphs or Diana and Callisto Palumba, Giovanni Battista Roma, print 121, 122n58, 123 Pan and Daphnis (Cesi Garden) 433, 435, 436n45 Panofsky, Erwin 7, 14, 132n3, 181n18, 215n49, 273, 274n34 paragone, of painting and sculpture 259, 259n60

461 Pasiphaë 199, 200, 201, 202–208, 209, 211, 212, 213–215, 218–220, 221, 222–229 Pasquino, statue, Rome 175, 440, 440n57 patience, personification of 47, 48 Patrizi, Francesco De regno et regis institutione 158 De institutione reipublicae 158 Paul III, Pope (Alessandro Farnese) 149 Paxon, James 47n23 Pencz, Georg Envy, woodcut 291n96, 296 Penelope 141, 143n35, 272n27, 336, 336n52 Penny, Nicholas, see Haskell, Francis and Nicholas Penny Persephone 29, 354, 355n11, 356 Personifications 16–17, 23–26; of cities, 111–112, 114–117, 119–122, 125–126, 350–392; of Death, 280n67, 282, 288, 284, 296n122; of Envy, 285, 291, 291n96, 204, 294n114, 295, 295n114, 295n117, 296, 296n122, 297, 297n124, 298, 298n127, 299, 299n129, 300; of Folly, 67, 68; of Fortitude, 42, 43, 45, 47–48, 50, 66, 67, 69; of Infamy, 292, 293; of Inconstancy, 45, 46, 47, 47n23; of Luxuria, 293, 294, 298; of Patience, 47, 48; of Pride, 293 Peruzzi, Baldassare 22, 119, 206n22 drawing of Trajanic relief on Arch of Constantine 120 Pasiphaë, fresco (lost), Villa Farnesina, Rome 209, 210, 211, 211n35, 212, 215,n48, 219, 220, 222, 222n66. See also Pomarancio (Cristoforo Roncalli), drawing after Baldassare Peruzzi, Pasiphaë, fresco (lost), Villa Farnesina, Rome (attributed to) Petrarca, Francesco 135 Trionfi 135 Petrucci, Achille 159 Petrucci, Alfonso 160 Petrucci, Aurelia 138, 159–162 Petrucci, Borghese 131, 137–139, 149, 147, 158, 160, 301 Petrucci, Giulia 138, 161 Petrucci, Iacopo di Giovfrancesco di Iacopo 160 Petrucci, Pandolfo 131n2, 137, 137n15, 138–141, 157 Petrucci, Raffaele 157

462 Pfeiffenberger, Selma 45, 45n22, 47, 47n23, 47n24, 69, 69n66 Phaedra 199n1, 203 Philip II, King of Spain 399, 399n16, 410, 413 Philomela 305–310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328, 329, 330, 331, 333, 334, 335, 338 339, 340, 341, 342–349 Philostratus the Elder Imagines 203, 206, 206n21, 206n22, 206n23, 208, 209, 209n34, 211, 250n40, 276n44 Philostratus, L. Flavius Life of Apollonius 276n44 Philp, R.H. 71n76 Piccolomini, Andrea Todeschini 159 Piccolomini, Bartolomeo Carli translation, Aeneid 4 161 Piccolomini, Aeneas Sylvius. See also Pope Pius II Storie delle due amanti 151 Piccolomini, Francesco Todeschini. See Pius III, Pope Piccolomini, Pierfrancesco 153 Piccolomini, Vittoria Todeschini 138–140, 149–151, 153, 157, 160, 401 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanfrancesco 269n18, 275 De expellendis Venere et Cupidine 277n53, 420, 420n3 Strix 269 pietas (filial piety) 142, 156, 396 Pierino da Vinci Pisa Restored 358, 374 preparatory drawing for Pisa Restored 360, 360n17 Pietro d’Abano 61, 62, 62n55 Pilatus, Leontius 60 Pindar 276n44, 277 Pinturicchio (Bernardino di Betto) 131, 139n23, 140, 140n25, 141n29, 142n32, 149 Pippin, King of the Franks 306n1, 409, 409n43 Pisa, personifications of 28, 356, 358, 360, 374, 374n51, 375, 385 Pisano, Giovanni Fortitude 45, 47 Pisano, Nicola Hercules/Fortitude, pulpit, baptistery, Pisa 45, 47

Index Pisseleu d'Heilly, Anna Jeanne de, Duchess d’Étampes 431 Pius II, Pope 149. See also Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini Pius III, Pope 149 Pius V, Pope 412, 412n49, 423, 424, 424n16, 431, 439 Pizan, Christine de 148n46, 154, 204n12 Le livre de la cite des dames 148 Epistre Othea 207n29, 326 Planudes, Max 75 Platina (Bartolommeo Sacchi) De honesta voluptate et valetudine 224, 224n76 Plato 9, 80n1, 82, 277, 400, 401 Meno 59 Phaedo 59 Symposium 102, 102n12 Timaeus 59 Pliny the Elder 8, 9n25, 276, 436 Natural History 9, 267n16, 276n44, 276n46, 284n77 Plutarch (L. Mestrius Plutarchus) 185n32, 271n26, 276, 277 Parallel Lives 52, 52n36, 53, 61, 73, 75, 212, 212n38 Moralia 75, 75n86, 375, 375n55 Lacaenarum Apophthegmata 375n55 De mulierum virtutibus 375n55 Poliziano, Angelo Favola d’Orfeo 292 Stanze cominiciate per la giostra del Magnifico Giuliano de’Medici 244, 245, 245n29, 245n30 Pomarancio (Cristoforo Roncalli) drawing after Baldassare Peruzzi, Pasiphaë, fresco (lost), Villa Farnesina, Rome (attributed to), 211n36 Pomona, see Hora of Autumn/Pomona, statue (Uffizi) Poseidon, see Neptune Poska, Allyson, and Jane Couchman 13n43 Possevino, Antonio Treatise on Poetry and Painting 425, 425n19 Praxiteles, style of 104, 421, 423 Priapus 241 prisoners, see captives Procne, see Philomela

Index Profectio of Domitian relief, Palazzo della Cancelleria (now Vatican), Rome 361 Promiscuity 135m 275, 288, 293 Propertius, Sextus Elegies 76, 292n100 Prospectivo Milanese Antiquarie prospettiche romane 107n26, 188n35 prostitutes, see courtesans Protestants, and persecution of witches, 265; as viewers of antiquities, 423, 425, 433 Prudentius (Aurelius Prudentius Clemens) Psychomachia, illustrations 47, 48 Pseudo-Apollodorus Bibliotheca 51, 54, 54n41, 60, 63, 73, 75 public speaking, by women 143–144, 154–155 puer mingens (urinating child) 22, 233, 234, 234n7, 235, 235n10, 249, 250n40 Quercia, Jacopo della Rhea Silvia 152 Raimondi, Marcantonio 119n52, 286n84, 290 engraving of cemetery scene 288, 289, 292 engravings for I Modi 214 Stregozzo (attributed) 279, 280 Venus Anadyomene 385 Randolf, Adrian 8, 8n23, 14, 16, 16n57 rape/abduction 29, 85, 86, 87–96, 305; feminist approaches to, 28–30; 308, images of, 86, 354, 356 Raphael (Raffaelo da Urbino) 112, 114, 114n40, 115, 116, 116n43, 182n21, 209n35, 215, 215n48, 246n36, 282, 322n31, 386n86, 394, 403n30, 403n32, 410, 411, 427n28 Fire in the Borgo, Vatican Stanze 403, 405, 406, 410 Letter to Pope Leo X (with Baldassare Castiglione) 112, 114n40, 126 Raymond of Capua 189, 193 Legenda maior of St. Catherine of Siena 189 Reiss, Sheryl, and David Wilkins 13n43 relics, head of St. Catherine of Siena 170, 172, 193, 194 Rhea Silvia 151 Rhetorica ad Herennium 352, 365n36

463 Ricci, Giovanni, Cardinal 440–442 rivers and streams, and inspiration 245, 246, 249; personifications, 379, 379n65, 380, 381, 381n69, 383, 386, 386n85, 387. See also fountains; nature river gods 24, 237n14, 351, 379, 379n65, 380, 381, 381n69, 382, 383, 383nn75, 383n77, 387; ancient statues of, 351, 379–381 Robathan, Dorothy M. 71n70 Robetta, Cristofano Allegory of Envy, engraving 298 Rolandinus of Padua 62 Roma, ancient images of 361, 365, 365n36, 366, 366n37, 368 Romance of Eneas 81 romanitas (Romanness) 418, 418n2, 419n2 Romano, Giulio, see Giulio Romano Rome, personifications 111–126, 350, 365, 365n35, 366, 368; Roma Triumphans 111, 121n57 Ara Pacis Augustae 117 Arch of Titus 119 Arch of Constantine 119, 119n52, 121, 361, 362, 365 Bramante, Tempietto 406, 410, 411 Casino of Pius IV 424, 424n16, 442 Cesi Garden 429n32, 432, 432n40, 433, 433n43, 441 Colosseum 423 Column of Marcus Aurelius 354, 354n9, 354n10, 355 Palazzo delle Valle 443 Sassi Palace 119, 120 Vigna of Pope Julius III 432n40, 440 Villa d’Este, Quirinal Hill 437, 437n47, 437n49 Villa Farnesina 181n20, 211, 215n48 Villa Giulia 424, 424n16, 429n34, 430n34 Villa Medici 430, 441 Villa of Cardinal Ricci, Pincian Hill 440, 441, 442 See also Vatican Roncalli, Cristoforo, see Pomarancio Rosa, Salvator 279 Ross, Sarah 159, 160n92, 162n102 Rosso Fiorentino 289n64, 280n67, 296n122, 380n67 Witches, drawing 280, 281 Rouse, R.H. and A.C. de la Mare 71n75, 72n77

464 Rubinstein, Ruth, see Bober, Phyllis and Ruth Rubinstein Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor 393, 394, 399n16, 401, 408, 409, 409n40, 410, 510n46, 412, 413 ruins, ancient 98, 112, 127, 264 rural imagery, see bucolic imagery Sacchi, Bartolommeo, see Platina sacred art, and decorum 425, 426, 426n22, 427, 428, 429 Salomon, Bernard illustrations, La Métamorphose d’Ovide figure 319, 320n29, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327, 336, 341 Philomela scenes 325, 326 Vertumnus and Pomona 329, 331 Saluzzo Castello della Manta 293 Sannazaro, Jacopo Arcadia 230, 230n41, 245 sarcophagi, ancient Roman sarcophagus with Abduction of Persephone (Walters Gallery, Baltimore) 354, 355n11, 356 sarcophagus with Achilles on Skyros, from the Aracoeli 104 sarcophagus with Labors of Hercules 215, 282 sarcophagus with Indian Triumph of Dionysus, possibly from the Aracoeli 284 sarcophagus with Mars and Rhea Silvia (Palazzo Mattei, Rome) 380 sarcophagus with Pasiphaë and Daedalus 208, 209, 209n34, 211 Saslow, James 14, 14n47, 15, 15n52, 178n13, 183n25 Sassi Apollo, statue 121n50, 176n10 Sassi collection of antiquities 27, 104, 117. See also Sassi Apollo, statue satyrs/fauns 57, 185, 213, 238, 241, 246, 246n36, 247, 251, 253, 274, 275, 275n43, 286, 287, 428, 429, 432, 433, 436, 436n45; ancient statues of, 185 Savonarola, Girolamo 60, 60n51, 275, 422 Saxl, Fritz 6n15, 215n47, 215n49, 250n41, 273, 273n33 Schiesari, Juliana, see Migiel, Marilyn and Juliana Schiesari

Index Schraeder, Stephanie 17, 17n63 Scherling, Ksrl 199n1 Scrovegni, Enrico 37, 37n1, 38, 38n4, 39, 39n8, 39n10, 39n11, 40–41, 58, 61, 62, 65, 66 Scrovegni, Reginaldo 37–38 Sebastiano del Piombo frescoes, Sala di Galatea, Villa Farnesina, Rome 319n28 Second Vatican Mythographer 53, 53n40, 60, 72, 72n81, 76 Seidel, Linda 13, 13n45 Sélincourt, Basil de 69, 69n67 Semen 233, 294, 383 Seneca the Younger (L. Annaeus Seneca) 59, 76, 275, 276, 276n44, 276n46, 284n76 Tragedies 50, 52, 52n34, 59, 60, 71 Serlio, Sebastiano Le antiquità di Roma 406, 406n35, 410, 411 Sexuality 136, 179, 181n17, 182, 183, 201, 204, 208, 219, 219n59, 221, 225, 278, 28, 353n6, 360, 387, 436, 437; sexual positions, attitudes towards, 214–215, 223 Seven Deadly Sins 295 Seznec, Jean 11, 11n34, 81n8 Sforza, Caterina 155n75, 374, 375n54 Shakespeare, William 144n38, 308n11, 342n63, 343 The Rape of Lucretia 307n6, 342, 344 Titus Andronicus 342 shepherd, see bucolic imagery Siena 131–168, 169–198 Chapel of Saint Catherine of Siena, church of San Domenico 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 194, 195 Church of Santa Croce 188, 411, 411n48 Palazzo Ducale 21 Palazzo Petrucci 131–168 Signorelli, Luca 131–168 Castigation of Cupid 135 Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome 131–132, 133, 134–168 silence, silencing of women 147, 154, 242, 305, 307, 308, 340, 342 Simons, Patricia 14, 14n48, 15, 67n62, 112n37, 180n16, 181n18, 217n55, 233n6, 234 234n7, 266n12, 272n30, 274n37, 290n94, 294n111, 299n129, 382, 383n74, 420n3 Sirén, Osvald 67, 67n64 Sisler, William P. 59n48, 60n51

Index Skinner, Marilyn 397n10 Smart, Alastair 47, 47n26 Sodoma, Il 169–173, 181–198; antiquities collec­tion, 182; and bisexuality, 182, 182n24, 183 Christ at the Column 183 drawing of antiquities (Christ Church, Oxford) 185 Execution of Niccolò di Tuldo 169, 170, 171, 173, 188–192, 194 frescoes, church of Santa Croce, Siena 169, 170, 171, 173, 188–192, 194, 275, 290 frescoes, Villa Farnesina, Rome 181n20, 211, 215n48 Saint Sebastian 183, 184 Sophocles 74, 74n84, 76, 308 Tereus 305 Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, encyclopedia 106n24, 107, 120 spinning, see textiles Spranger, Bartholomaeus 393 statue poetry 241. See also Huius Nympha Loci epigram Stradano, Giovanni Penelope at Her Loom, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence 336, 336n52 Straet, Jan Van der, see Stradano, Giovanni Statius, P. Papinius Thebaid 53, 53n38, 59, 59n49, 59, 72, 76 Stregozzo engraving 279, 280, 280n68, 282, 282n73, 285, 286, 288, 298, 300 Strozzi, Agostino Defensio mulierum 150 Stubblebine, James 39, 39n11, 40n12, 40n14 Supino, I.N. 69 tapestry, see textiles Tarquin, see Lucretia Tasso, Torquato 376, 400, 400n23, 401n24 Tátrai, V. 142 Tempesta, Antonio Metamorphoseon sive Transformationum Ovidian­arum libri quindecim, aeneis formis 324, 324n33, 325, 326, 329, 330, 336 Tellus/Terra Mater/Gaia 17 Tereus, see Philomela Terra Mater, see Tellus

465 Textiles 307, 308, 331, 343, 344; embroidery/ spinning, 331, 334, 334n46, 335, 336, 337, 340; weaving, 307, 307n7, 308, 335, 336, 338. See also valances, bed Theodontius 60, 61 Theodulf of Orleans De libris quos legere solebam 278, 278n57 Theseus 50, 115, 215 Third Vatican Mythographer 72, 73, 73n82, 76 Tiber River, statue (Louvre) 380 Tibullus, Albius 60 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) Bacchanal of the Andrians 249 Sacred and Profane Love 242n23, 257, 257n56, 258n57 Tarquin and Lucretia 328, 328n39 Venus of Urbino 17 Tizio, Sigismondo Historiarum Senesium 131n2, 140, 140n25 Tivoli Villa d’Este 437, 437n47, 437n49 Tommasi, Giugurta Dell'historie di Siena 157, 157n82, 159n89, 159, 160, 160n95 Trevi Garden of Benedetto Valenti 440 Tribolo, Niccolò 352n4, 385 design for Fiorenza 385, 385n79. See also Giambologna, Fiorenza Fiesole 351, 351n2, 360, 385 Fountain, Villa Medici, Castello, Florence 383 triumphal arches 116, 119, 121, 354, 365, 423 trousseau, see donora. See also dowry Troy 23, 24, 28, 141, 306, 393, 394, 396, 397, 401–403, 406, 407, 410, 414 Tudor, Mary, Queen of England and Ireland, Queen of Spain 413 Uberti, Fabrizio degli illustration, Dittamondo 112, 113 Umbrian sketchbook, drawing of Belvedere torso 176 Urbino 400, 401, 406, 409, 409n42, 410, 412 Palace 400, 400n19 Urination 231, 233, 233n6, 237, 238, 246, 249, 253, 258. See also puer mingens, Hercules mingens Usury 37–38

466 valances, bed, with Philomela scenes (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) 327, 327n27, 328n38, 330, 331, 331n41, 333, 334, 335, 338, 339, 340, 341 Valerius Maximus Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri novem 143n36, 156 Valla, Lorenzo 254 Varano, Giulia, princess of Camerino 413 Varro (M. Terentius Varro) 292, 293 Eumenides 292n101 Vasari, Giorgio 4 frescoes, Sala Grande (Sala del Cinquecento), Palazzo Vecchio, Florence 364, 382 Lives of the Artists (Vite) 4, 4n12, 356n12, 359n15, 364n31, 380n67, 281n72 preparatory drawing for Apotheosis of Duke Cosimo (Copenhagen)  364, 381 study for frontispiece (Uffizi) 366, 367, 368 Vatican Gardens, view of 430 Stanze 403, 403n30 Villa Belvedere 21, 29, 182, 195, 246, 253, 277, 277n53, 278n60, 379, 420, 422, 422n9, 423, 424n14, 431 Vatican Mythographers 53n40, 72n81, 73n82. See also under individual mythographers Veiling 26, 57, 148, 154, 188, 192, 215, 231, 255n49 Venice, Lorenzo Lotto in 232, 233, 253 Biblioteca Marciana 406 Venus/Aphrodite 17, 17n65, 22, 25, 26, 102, 108, 109, 110, 136n12, 175, 188, 203, 212, 213n41, 230, 231, 232, 232n4, 233, 23n6, 234n7, 235, 237, 237n14, 238, 245, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 258n58, 259, 260, 265, 267, 272, 277, 277n53, 278, 309n16, 312, 376, 381n71, 383, 386n84, 394; ancient statues of, 106, 108, 110, 420, 421, 422, 431, 432, 437, 437n49, 443, 444; Venus Anadyomene statue type, 385, 386; Venus Pudica statue type, 106, 108; Vulgar Venus (Aphrodite Pandemos), 285, 285, 298 Venus Felix, statue (Vatican, Belvedere) 272, 272n29, 277, 278, 420, 421, 422

Index Vergil, Polydore On Discovery 401, 401n25 Verrocchio, Andrea del Putto with Dolphin 145, 146 Vertumnus 329 Veturia 131, 131n1, 132, 133, 134–168 Vices, personifications of 41, 45, 243, 296, 299n129, 300 Victory, personifications 251, 354n9, 365, 366 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 9, 59, 81, 81n7, 82, 89n22, 161, 203, 204, 208, 208n32, 275, 276n44, 295n114, 397, 397n8, 400, 400n19, 400n22 Aeneid 24, 161, 204n14, 268n117, 270, 270n23, 270n24, 292, 394, 395, 395n5, 396n6, 397–401, 403, 410, 414 Eclogues 203, 204, 204n14, 208n32, 397 Virginity 136, 136n12 Virgin Mary, see Mary Virtues, personifications of 41, 43, 45, 53, 135, 142, 142n32, 143n35, 144, 147n43, 147, 150, 154, 155, 155n76, 160, 163, 180, 217, 246n36, 257, 286, 322, 368n42. See also under individual personificaitons Vitruvius 218 Vliete, Gillis van den Diana of Ephesus (Villa d’Este, Tivoli) 437n47, 438 Volumnia 143, 144, 144n38, 145, 147, 147n43, 148n45, 150, 151, 151n59, 153, 154, 158n79 Warburg, Aby 7 Warburg Institute 6 water , symbolism of 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 250, 253. See also semen; fountains, symbolism of weaving, see textiles widows 50, 111, 111n33, 112, 288, 293, 360, 412 Wilkins, David, see Reiss, Sheryl and David Wilkins William of Conches 72, 72n81 William of Moerbeke 59 Witches 264–304 Witt, Ronald G. 71n73 Wives 17, 18n68, 28, 136, 143, 144, 147n44, 148, 150, 151, 153, 155–157, 159, 215, 293, 336, 336n52, 360 Wölfflin, Heinrich 7 Wolfthal, Diane 28, 29n79, 325n34, 326, 326n35

467

Index women artists 12n39, 307 Woodville, Elizabeth, Queen of England 313, 315n25 wounds, and execution of Niccolò di Tuldo 169, 170, 171, 173, 188–192, 194; side wound of Christ, 190–191

wreaths, wreathing 231, 258, 331, 365, 374 Xanto, Francesco 202n7, 309n14, 403, 403n28 Aeneas’ Flight From Troy, maiolica 404 Zeus, see Jupiter/Zeus