Receptions of Antiquity, Constructions of Gender in European Art, 13001600

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 Gthenke (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, 13001600

Edited by

Marice Rose
Alison C. Poe

LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Detail, Amico Aspertini, Antiquities in Roman Collections, in the Codex Wolfegg,
c. 15003, 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
704.949938--dc23

2015004853

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Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii
List of Contributorsviii
List of FiguresXI

Introduction: Classical Reception, Gender Studies, and Art History1

Marice Rose and Alison C. Poe

1 Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel: Giottos Virtue Fortitude

Re-examined37
Mary D. Edwards

2 The Liminal Feminine: Illuminating Europa in the Ovide Moralis80

K. Sarah-Jane Murray with Ashley A. Simone

3 A Giant Corrupt Body: The Gendering of Renaissance Roma98

Genevieve S. Gessert

4 Luca Signorellis Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome and

Viewers in the Palazzo Petrucci, Siena131
Stephanie C. Leone

5 Queer Fragments: Sodoma, the Belvedere Torso, and Saint

Catherines Head169
Timothy B. Smith

6 The Trouble with Pasipha: Engendering a Myth at the Gonzaga

Court199
Maria F. Maurer

7 Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water in Lorenzo Lottos Venus

and Cupid230
April Oettinger

8 The Crone, the Witch, and the Library: The Intersection of Classical
Fantasy with Christian Vice during the Italian Renaissance264
Patricia Simons
vi Contents

9 Picturing Rape and Revenge in Ovids Myth of Philomela305

Hetty E. Joyce

10 Figuring Florence: Gendered Bodies in Sixteenth-Century

Personifications and Their Antique Models350
Claudia Lazzaro

11 Conjugal Piety: Creusa in Baroccis Aeneas Flight from Troy393

Ian Verstegen

12 Ancient Idols, Lascivious Statues, and Sixteenth-Century Viewers in

Roman Gardens418
Katherine M. Bentz

Index451
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 Jonquire
and Peter Buschman and the editors of the Metaforms series, Almut-Barbara
Renger, John Hamilton, and Jon Solomon. The anonymous outside readers
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 copy-
edit the text and notes; Ted Goodman masterfully handled the task of match-
ing 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 PhDs, 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 sculp-
ture 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 20142016 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 influ-
ence 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 collec-
tive, 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
List of Contributors ix

Miller-Brepols, 2008) considers the intersection between palaces and social rituals
and the roles of architects, patrons, and advisors in building. She is currently work-
ing 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 Chrtien de Troyes (Syracuse
University Press, 2008) explores the origins of vernacular storytelling in
twelfth-century France. Her research currently focuses on translating the Ovide
moralis 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 Michelangelos snowman. Her current
book project explores the art of Lorenzo Lotto and the rise of the contempla-
tive 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 childrens 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
x List of Contributors

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, particu-
larly 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. 13056.42
1.2 Giotto di Bondone, Personification of Fortitude, c. 13056.43
1.3 Bearded Hercules, Roman copy of a Greek original, c. 68-98 ce.44
1.4 Giotto di Bondone, Personification of Inconstancy, c. 13056.46
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, 1stlate 2nd century ce.56
1.9 Puteal with Omphale and Hercules, 1st2nd 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. 13056.68
2.1 Europa carried off by the bull, in the Ovide moralis, c. 132550.83
2.2 Christ carrying the cross, in the Ovide moralis, c. 132550.84
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, 1st2nd century ce, converted into a Venus in the
17th century.110
3.5 Anonymous, Roma as crone, in Fazio degli Ubertis 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, 15327.120
3.8 Adventus, Great Trajanic Frieze, 11720 ce.121
3.9 Amico Aspertini, drawing after Trajanic Adventus relief, in the Codex Wolfegg,
c. 15003.122
3.10 Giovanni Battista Palumba, Roma, 150010.123
3.11 Giulio Bonasone, Roma, in Achille Bocchis Book of Emblems, 1555.124
4.1 Luca Signorelli, Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome, c. 150911.133
4.2 Luca Signorelli, Castigation of Cupid, c. 150911.135
4.3 Andrea del Verrocchio, Putto with Dolphin, early 1480s.146
4.4 Jacopo della Quercia, Rhea Silvia, 14149.152
5.1 Sodoma, Execution of Niccol di Tuldo, 1526.170
xii List of Figures

5.2 Detail, Sodoma, Execution of Niccol di Tuldo, 1526.171

5.3 Detail, Sodoma, Execution of Niccol 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. 15326.178
5.8 Amico Aspertini, Antiquities in Roman Collections, in the Codex Wolfegg,
c. 15003.179
5.9 Sodoma, Saint Sebastian Pierced with Arrows, c. 15256.184
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 Niccol di Tuldo and tabernacle with relic head of Saint
Catherine of Siena.194
6.1 Giulio Romano, Pasipha and the Bull, 15268.200
6.2 Nicola da Urbino, plate with Pasipha and Daedalus, c. 15303.200
6.3 Workshop of Nicola da Urbino, plate with Pasipha and Daedalus, c. 1530.201
6.4 Roman sarcophagus with Pasipha and Daedalus, c. 150 ce.209
6.5 Follower of Baldassare Peruzzi (possibly Cristoforo Roncalli), study for exter-
nal 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 Pasipha and the Bull), 15268.212
6.7 Mithras Slaying a Bull, 3rd century ce.216
6.8 Giulio Romano, Hercules and the Cretan Bull, 15267.217
6.9 Master of the Campagna Cassone, The Loves of Pasipha, 15105.221
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, 15389.247
7.7 Giovanni Bellini, Feast of the Gods, 1514.248
7.8 Titian, Bacchanal of the Andrians, 15236.249
7.9 Lucas Cranach the Elder, Nymph of the Spring, after 1537.251
7.10 Lorenzo Lotto, Allegory of Chastity (The Maidens Dream), 15056.252
7.11 Jan Van Scorel, Cleopatra, c. 152024.254
7.12 Lorenzo Lotto, The Triumph of Chastity, c. 1530.256
7.13 Titian, Sacred and Profane Love, c. 1514.257
List of Figures xiii

8.1 Circle of Maso Finiguerra or Baccio Baldini, Hostanes, from the Florentine
Picture Chronicle, c. 14705.268
8.2 Dosso Dossi, Circe, c. 151125.271
8.3  Agostino Veneziano (after Marcantonio Raimondi?), Lo Stregozzo,
151525.279
8.4 Rosso Fiorentino, Incantation Scene, first half of the 16th century.281
8.5 Albrecht Drer, Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat, 15001.283
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 Pandions palace, in the Ovide moralis, c.
141525.311
9.2 Tereus asks Pandions permission to take Philomela to Thrace, in the Ovide
moralis, c. 141525.312
9.3 Tereus sails with Philomela to Thrace, in the Ovide moralis, c. 141525. 313
9.4 Tereus cuts out Philomelas tongue, in the Ovide moralis, c. 141525.314
9.5 Tereus falsely reports to Procne that Philomela is dead, in the Ovide moralis,
c. 141525.315
9.6  Philomela shows Itys head to Tereus, in the Ovide moralis, c.
141525.316
9.7 Philomela, Procne, and Tereus transformed into birds, in the Ovide moralis, c.
141525.317
9.8 Tereus cuts out Philomelas tongue, in the Ovide moralis, c. 132550.318
9.9 Philomela gives the tapestry to the messenger, in the Ovide moralis, c.
132550.319
9.10 The messenger gives Philomelas tapestry to Procne, in the Ovide moralis, c.
132550.320
9.11 The Myth of Philomela, in John Gower, Confessio Amantis, 1470s.321
9.12 Bernard Salomon, Tereus, Procne, and the Furies, in La Mtamorphose dOvide
figure, Lyon, 1557.323
9.13 Bernard Salomon, Pandion, Tereus, and Philomela, in La Mtamorphose
dOvide figure, Lyon, 1557.324
9.14 Bernard Salomon, Pandion forces Philomela, in La Mtamorphose dOvide
figure, Lyon, 1557.325
9.15 Bernard Salomon, Procne and her sister; Procne avenges her sister, in La
Mtamorphose dOvide figure, 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
xiv List of Figures

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 Philomelas 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, 160337.336
9.28 Luca Bertelli, Lucretia and Her Companions, c. 1575.337
9.29 Philomela (detail of 9.20).339
9.30 Philomelas embroidery (detail of 9.21).341
10.1 Niccol Tribolo, Fiesole, c. 1540.351
10.2 Michelangelo, Night, 152134.352
10.3 Baccio Bandinelli, Relief with scene of triumph on monument to Giovanni
dalle Bande Nere, 15403.353
10.4 Gemma Augustea, 912 ce.355
10.5 Sarcophagus with the Abduction of Persephone by Hades, detail, 2205 ce.356
10.6 Maenad, detail, 27 bce68 ce.357
10.7 Pierino da Vinci, Pisa Restored, c. 1552.358
10.8 Coin of Hadrian, Hadrian restoring Achaea, reverse, 1345 ce.359
10.9 Adventus of Marcus Aurelius, 176180 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 bce1st 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-1520searly 1530s.378
10.18 Anonymous after Michelangelo, River God, c. 15301600.380
10.19 Giorgio Vasari, San Gimignano and Colle Val dElsa with River Elsa,
15635.382
List of Figures xv

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 else-
where 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 sculp-
ture; 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 con-
struct, normalize, complicate, and/or challenge late medieval and early mod-
ern 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 scholar-
ship 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 accessiblebut they seek to avoid the positiv-
ismthat 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 audi-
encesand that later viewers and readers either grasped correctly or failed to

1 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

2 Rose and Poe

apprehend.2 This book instead considers all received meanings in all periods
as constructs that are shaped by the receivers 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 Rezeptionssthetik 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 audiences 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], 114, 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, 1231, 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), 46981, 4713. 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), 216, on the Belvedere
Laocon.
Introduction 3

later receptions are affected by earlier ones, is somewhat akin to Martindales

notion of transhistoricism.6 Martindale, however, envisions a linearand, in
effect, patrilinearrelationship 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 con-
fronted 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 patriar-
chy at least sometimes deployed ancient art and texts to advance its agenda.9

6 Charles Martindale, ReceptionA New Humanism? Receptivity, Pedagogy, the

Transhistorical, Classical Receptions Journal 5 (2013): 16983 (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), 5670 (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), 125, esp. 115; and Edith Hall, Putting the Class into
Classical Reception, in Companion to Classical Receptions, eds. L. Hardwick and C. Stray, 2011,
38697; 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), 126;
Ibid., Reclaiming Female Agency, 125. Specifically addressing the centuries under con-
sideration 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. 116;
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
4 Rose and Poe

The immense body of ancient visual and literary remains available in the four-
teenth 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 upper-
class educated men in these centuriesrulers, prelates, other male members
of powerful families, scholars, artists, and authors, alongside women who
embraced the prevailing agendarepresents for feminists an effort manage
this process, to midwife the delivery of a reborn culture in line with the gen-
der 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 Vasaris
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 readers 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.

classical culture in fourteenth- to sixteenth-century European art, see below, Review of

Recent Scholarship.
10 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), 24464.
11 Joan Kelly, Did Women Have a Renaissance? in Women, History and Theory: The Essays
of Joan Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1951. Reprinted (writing as Joan
Kelly-Gradol) from Becoming Visible: Women in European History, eds. Renate Bridenthal
and Claudia Koonz (Boston, ma: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 13764.
12 Giorgio Vasari, Proemio delle Vite, in Le Vite de pi eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori
da Cimabue insino a tempi nostri (Florence: Giunti, 1568). For the scholarship on Vasaris
use of the term rinascita, see below, Review of Recent Scholarship.
Introduction 5

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 contem-
porary 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 medi-
eval and Renaissance mores regarding gender roles and sexuality that underlie
depictions of female figures from antiquity: goddesses, female personifica-
tions, 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 pro-
posepossible gendered receptions of ancient and classically informed works
of art by individual viewers or groups of viewers. The visual culture of the four-
teenth 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 situ-
ated 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
themesresponses 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.
6 Rose and Poe

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 Greenhalghs 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 Pennys volume catalogued ninety-five canonical ancient sculp-
tures and discussed their discovery, display, and changing reputations from
1500 to 1900. Bober and Rubinsteins 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 ref-
erences to the objects, and about visual records made by artists working from
the year 1400 until the 1527 sack of Rome. In Christians 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), 20420.
14 Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture
15001900 (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. 13501527 (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:
LErma di Bretschneider, 2002); in Venice and France, see Pomian Krzysztof, Collectors
and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 15001800, 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.
Introduction 7

holdings of thirty-seven Roman collections, accompanied by deeply researched

contextual chapters that include investigations of the growth of antiquarian-
ism 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 Boccaccios Decameron (134851),
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
errorsfor 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 todays art
history as Heinrich Wlfflin, Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, and Ernst Gombrich
influenced generations by drawing strong distinctions between medieval atti-
tudes toward antiquities and Renaissance responses to these objects.19 Leonard

16 See Bentz, Chapter 12 in this volume, no. 1 for further sources on collections.
17 Avendo egli quella arte ritornata in luce, che molti secoli sotto gli error dalcuni, che pi
a dilettar gli occhi deglignoranti 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 Ghibertis
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, 8105.
18 For a problematization of the term rinascita, see Matteo Burioni, Vasaris Rinascita:
History, Anthropology, or Art Criticism? in Renaissance? Perceptions of Continuity and
Discontinuity in Europe, c. 13001550, ed. Alexander Lee and Pit Pport (Leiden: Brill,
2008), 11528. Ian Verstegen offers an analysis of Vasaris developmental but ahistorical
concept of art in Vasaris Progressive (But Non-Historicist) Renaissance, Journal of Art
Historiography 5 (2011): 119. 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), 2755.
19 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, 113; and Christopher S. Wood, Art Historys Normative Renaissance, in The
8 Rose and Poe

Barkans recent study, Unearthing the Past (1999), upholds this notion of differ-
ence 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 intermediariessome
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
Randolphs Engaging Symbols (2002), which looks at small ancient bronzes and
cameos as sources of inspiration for Donatellos David.23 Ancient texts pro-
vided 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 sub-
jects, styles, and techniques of ancient art that no longer survived. Sarah
McHam analyzes the relationship of Plinys Natural History to early modern

Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, eds. Allen J. Grieco, Michael Rocke, and
Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi (Florence: Olschki), 6592.
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, 1646, 23348.
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), 736, and Ilaria Ramelli, Ancient Allegory
and Its Reception through the Ages, International Journal of Classical Reception 18, no. 4
(2011): 56978.
23 Adrian W.B. Randolph, Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-
Century Florence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 1602.
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).
Introduction 9

culture in a definitive volume published while this collection was coming

together.25 Of the many lines of inquiry in McHams 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 com-
mentaries 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 Plinys characterization of the painter Apelles as a standard), and the
relationships between artists and patrons, not to mention the humanist world-
view as a whole.
McHam demonstrates that artistic receptions of Pliny went far beyond art-
ists simply replicating his descriptions, and art historians today accept that
knowledge of actual antiquities was no more important to many Renaissance
artists than other sourcesperhaps sometimes even less so. Malcolm Bull
argues in The Mirror of the Gods (2005) that medieval manuscripts such as the
Ovide moralis 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 demon-
strate that in addition to classical artworks, texts by Ovid, Virgil, Homer, Plato,
Plutarch, Horace, Lucan, Livy, Philostratus the Elder, and many other ancient
authorsknown 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 moralis, 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, Titians Women (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1997), 10726 discusses how Venetian painters tended to be more inter-
ested 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 Venices 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.
10 Rose and Poe

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
Woods paradigm of substitution, Renaissance artists and viewers often con-
sidered 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
Woods 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 art-
work was. In The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (1989),
Michael Camille discusses the contrast between the Gothic conceptualization

29 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 sub-
ject 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 dellantico nellarte italiana, 3 vols. (Turin: Einaudi,
19846); Nikolaus Himmelmann, Antike Gtter 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,
13001990s, 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 Universitys Survival of the Gods:
Classical Mythology in the Middle Ages in 1987; the Metropolitan Museum of Arts Man,
Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossarts Renaissance in 20102011; and the 2012 exhibi-
tion at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt, Zurck zur Klassik: Ein neuer
Blick auf das alte Griechenland.
30 Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone
Books, 2010).
31 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.
Introduction 11

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 antiq-
uity 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 Seznecs 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 astrologi-
cal books and tarot cards. Bull considers the same types of materials in domes-
tic 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 confer-
ences, journals, and edited volumes devoted to classical reception, even as
scholarship regarding other artistic media, such as film, dance, poetry, and the-
ater, 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 classi-
cal reception studies, but the editors use Barkans 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
12 Rose and Poe

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 disci-
pline, 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 par-
ticular 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 twentieth-
century 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 Hamburgers publications on previously ignored manuscripts
and drawings made by religious women for their own contemplation are essen-
tial contributions.40 Important recent scholarship on less-studied media
within the early modern period include Christiane Klapisch-Zubers work on
holy dolls, Jacqueline Marie Musacchios book on deschi da parto, and Cristelle
Baskinss milestone study of cassoni (painted wedding chests).41

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.
38 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.
39 Two groundbreaking, now classic, texts bringing attention to women artists were Linda
Nochlin, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists, ARTnews 69 (1971): 2239,
6771, and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1981).
40 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).
41 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).
Introduction 13

Feminist art historians have also adopted Laura Mulveys 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 Garrards 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 womens agency and recep-
tion 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 Ashgates 2013

42 Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 618; 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).
43 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.
44 See Rachel Dressler, Continuing the Discourse: Feminist Scholarship and the Study of
Medieval Visual Culture, Medieval Feminist Forum 43, no. 1 (2007): 1534, and Marian
Bleeke, Feminist Approaches to Medieval Visual Culture: An Introduction, Medieval
Feminist Forum 22, no. 2 (2008), 4952.
45 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 Eycks Arnolfini Portrait: Stories of an Icon (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995).
14 Rose and Poe

compilation is telling.46 James Saslows Ganymede in the Renaissance, a pio-

neering 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 Randolphs aforementioned study of Donatellos David,
where he considers a homosocial reading.49
Other scholarship in medieval and early modern studies has also consid-
ered viewer reception in ways that are relevant here. In his Gothic Idol, Camille
rejects Panofskys 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 num-
ber of collected volumes on medieval and early modern art and literature
include essays on gender and viewership (but not on classical reception), nota-
bly Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickerss Rewriting the
Renaissance (1986); Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesaris Refiguring Woman
(1991); Geraldine Johnson and Sara Matthews Griecos Picturing Women in
Renaissance and Baroque Italy (1997), many chapters of which consider domes-
tic religious or secular art within the context of power relations in the house-
hold; and Sherry Lindquists The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art (2012).51

46 There is also now Ashgates Women and Gender in the Early Modern World book series, and
the University of Chicago Presss series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. See Merry
E. Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender, for an overview of gender-based approaches.
47 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), 22345.
48 Patricia Simons, Hercules in Italian Renaissance Art: Masculine Labour and Homoerotic
Libido, Art History 31 (2008), 63264, and Lesbian (In)Visibility in Italian Renaissance
Culture: Diana and Other Cases of Donna con Donna, Journal of Homosexuality 27, no. 12
(1994): 81122.
49 Engaging Symbols, 18390. Chapters in this volume on the Renaissance use of antiquities
to destabilize gender include Edwards, Smith, and Maurer, Chapters 1, 5, and 6.
50 Gothic Idol, 1017.
51 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
Introduction 15

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 adopt-
ing the framework of classical reception). Saslows work on Ganymede and
Simonss 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 takenavenues 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 Kampens article The Muted Other in The Expanding Discourse.
Kampens essay articulates the theoretical principle, The classical rhetoric of
gender in works of art is, like the choice of the period deemed classic, the stak-
ing 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 Donatellos Judith and Holofernes by
Benvenuto Cellinis Perseus Slaying Medusa (154554) in the Piazza della
Signoria in Florence, and the addition of Giambolognas Rape of the Sabine
Women in 1582, as symbolizing the masculine power of the citys 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,
16170 (quote 161).
54 Yael Even, The Loggia dei Lanzi: A Showcase of Female Subjugation, in Expanding
Discourse, eds. N. Broude and M.D. Garrard, 12737. See also Elena Ciletti, Patriarchal
Ideology in the Renaissance Iconography of Judith, in Refiguring Women, eds. M. Migiel
and J. Schiesari, 3570.
16 Rose and Poe

concerning male violence against women, including these statue groups, par-
alleled the increasing limitation of womens 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 them-
selves, and of their rule, and considers how differently gendered viewers may
have received them.56 Randolph posits the theoretical standpoint that repre-
sentations 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 dia-
logic 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 concep-
tualization of the natural realm. Mary Garrard, in her far-reaching Brunelleschis
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 inter-
pretation by the patriarchy in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian art, sci-
ence, 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 scholar-
ship. 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 gar-
dens, adducing the passivity of female garden statues to show an increasing
debasement of images relating to Natura.59 In Garrards 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, 23944.
56 Randolph, Engaging Symbols.
57 Ibid. (quote 246). Lazzaro, in this volumes Chapter 10, examines the gendering of personi-
fications of Florence in sixteenth-century sculpture and painting as both male and
female.
58 Mary D. Garrard, Brunelleschis Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2010), 73.
59 Ibid., 275.
Introduction 17

artists imitated monumental ancient art with idealized styles because these
works of art were seen to be examples of mans perfection ofand therefore
displacement ofnature.60 Claudia Lazzaro, another contributor to the pres-
ent volume, has addressed the interaction of mythological subjects and per-
sonifications 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
Aristotles 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 mans 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 Gossarts use of nude mytho-
logical subjects to communicate the sexual and political power of his patron,
Philip of Burgundy.63 Titians 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, art-
ist, and/or audience.65 Luba Freedman treats sixteenth-century images of sin-
gle pagan deities in statuary and other media within the context of Italian

60 Ibid., 241.
61 Claudia Lazzaro, The Visual Language of Gender in Sixteenth-Century Garden Sculpture,
in Refiguring Women, eds. M. Migiel and J. Schiesari, 71113; 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), 24673.
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, Gossarts Mythological Nudes and the Shaping of Philip of
Burgundys Erotic Identity, in Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossarts Renaissance,
ed. Maryan W. Ainsworth (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010), 5767.
64 See the collection edited by Goffen, Titians Venus of Urbino (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997); Garrard, Brunelleschis Egg, 199204.
65 Goffen, Titians Women, 14657. Garrard, Brunelleschis Egg, 199204, however, sees in this
Venus not only the goddess of the marital bed but also the patron of courtesans.
18 Rose and Poe

male elite patrons displaying their status through art in their homes.66 Cristelle
Baskins employs a wide variety of methodologies, including gender and recep-
tion theory, in examining non-canonical cassone paintings and their depic-
tions 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 contra-
dictory messages of the imagerywhich 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 Campbells 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 dEste, marchesa of
Mantua.69 In his examination of Isabellas studiolo and its program of mytho-
logical 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 explic-
itly 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 Barkans 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 con-
temporary 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 discus-
sion of Baskinss methodology.
68 A potentially conflicting view of a wifes role with regard to the patriline through depic-
tion of a non-heroic classical subject is also discussed by Verstegen in this volume,
Chapter 11. Simons, Chapter 8, discusses contradictions in views of womens sexuality and
their presentations as anti-heroines: witches.
69 Stephen Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the
Studiolo of Isabella dEste (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004).
70 See Maurers 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.
Introduction 19

engaging with this set of questions. It also allows a number of profound the-
matic 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 litera-
ture 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
researchperhaps also collaborative in natureat the convergence of classi-
cal 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 archi-
tectural contexts.
In Chapter 1, Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel: Giottos Virtue Fortitude
Re-examined, Mary D. Edwards argues that the famous fresco cycle by Giotto
in the Arena Chapel in Padua (c. 13056) 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, Giottos Fortitude may have
evoked Hercules and Omphale simultaneously. The hero Hercules, com-
pared by some medieval authors to Christ, but tainted by having killed his

72 Lorna Hardwick, Editorial, Classical Receptions Journal 2, no. 13 (2010): 1. Natalie Boymel
Kampen, On Writing Histories of Roman Art, Art Bulletin 85 (2003): 37383, emphasizes
the value of interdisciplinarity and collaboration in art history.
20 Rose and Poe

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 Enricos 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 moralis in Chapter 2, The Liminal
Feminine: Illuminating Europa in the Ovide Moralis. A massive text compris-
ing the Metamorphoses and an early fourteenth-century Christian allegorical
commentary, the Ovide moralis provided one of the principal means by
which Ovids text was received by late medieval and Renaissance thinkers and
artists (see, for example, Maurer, Chapter 6, on Renaissance depictions of
Pasipha, and Joyce, Chapter 9, on late medieval and early modern Philomela
imagery). Murray and Simone focus on two early illustrated Ovide Moralis
manuscripts, Rouen Bibliothque Municipale ms 0.4 and Paris Bibliothque
de lArsenal ms 5069, each of which includes a miniature of Europa, the prin-
cess of Tyre taken by Jupiter in the guise of a bull. Ultimately derived from
ancient images of Europa riding on the bulls back, the illustration is juxta-
posed 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 lan-
guage, 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 Bracciolinis De varietate for-
tunae (second quarter of the fifteenth century), and receptions by contempo-
rary 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
understandto excavatethe 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 Poggios
words) left the gender of the city open to intersexual readings. Like hermaph-
roditic statues, this mixed-gender body demanded exploration.
Introduction 21

Stephanie C. Leone considers the potential meanings for elite viewers

Vittoria Piccolomini, Borghese Petrucci, and Aurelia Petrucci of Luca
Signorellis fresco Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome (c. 150911) in
their family palace in Siena. In Chapter 4, Luca Signorellis 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 Signorellis rendering of this possibly legendary event in early Roman his-
tory. 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 womens submissiveness in early modern Italy. For the newly married
Vittoria, Leone argues, the figure of Veturia may have offered a nuanced pic-
ture of womens 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 Sodomas fresco The Execution of
Niccol di Tuldo (completed 1526). Smith proposes in Chapter 5, Queer
Fragments: Sodoma, the Belvedere Torso, and Saint Catherines 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 heros deviation from conventional male roles
in his submission to Omphale (a subject also invoked, according to Edwards in
Chapter 1, by Giottos Fortitude). Sodoma exploited this gender fluidity of the
Torso, Smith argues, to downplay the masculinity of his headless Niccol.
The decapitation scene, which decorates the chapel of Saint Catherine of
Siena in her hometown, invites viewers to associate Niccols body with the
female saints head relic, displayed in the same space. In this context, Smith
contends, Sodomas 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 Pasipha, 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 Pasipha: Engendering a Myth at the Gonzaga
Court, Maurer discusses the multiple possible responses to this imagery
22 Rose and Poe

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 Pasipha myth; more
recent translations of and commentaries on these works, including the Ovide
moralis; an antique Pasipha sarcophagus relief in Rome; a fresco by
Baldassare Peruzzi on the faade 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 contempo-
raries 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 Pasiphas 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 onperhaps even
engagement ina range of behaviors, including the exploration of various
sexual roles by both men and women.
April Oettinger links Lorenzo Lottos 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 Lottos 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 Lottos 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: Lottos Venus embodies the pleasure,
the voluptas, of a beholders encounter with art. In engaging with and reinforc-
ing the early modern understanding of fountains and springs as feminine, the
Venus and Cupid joined an array of Renaissance classical receptions that con-
tributed 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
Introduction 23

around 1500. The pagan world, Simons notes, was not always a font of inspira-
tion 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. 151525, finding in these figures a mingling of attributes that in antiquity had
been associated with the crone (the grotesque old woman without supernatu-
ral powers), personified Envy, the Fates, the Furies, and Medusa. Such visual
and literary portrayals, Simons reminds the reader, appeared against a back-
drop of actual trials and executions of accused witches, and the classical
allusions helped to create a distancing effect for the viewer from these danger-
ous 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 Dossis Circe of c. 151125.
Hetty E. Joyce, in Chapter 9, Picturing Rape and Revenge in Ovids 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 moralis 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 Ovids 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 Ovids 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 scholar-
ship focuses on Philomelas 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 Philomelas
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 tradition-
ally heroic roles: Pasipha at Mantua (Maurer) and Creusa in Baroccis Aeneas
Flight from Troy (Verstegen).
Claudia Lazzaro explores the gendering of sixteenth-century personifica-
tions of Florence in art in relation to gendered Renaissance conceptions of
24 Rose and Poe

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 con-
vention of representing cities in bodily form, bore Roman origins. Sixteenth-
century 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 nur-
turer 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 Giambolognas fountain statue
Fiorenza (possibly c. 1560 or c. 1570).
In Chapter 11, Conjugal Piety: Creusa in Baroccis Aeneas Flight from Troy,
Ian Verstegen addresses the role played by Creusa in Federico Baroccis 1586
painting of Aeneas and his family leaving their home city, a lost work of which
a copy by the artist survives. In Verstegens interpretation, Baroccis 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 Virgils Aeneid 2.77689) and thereby enabling Aeneas to fulfill his des-
tiny 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 impor-
tant 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 stat-
uary 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 viewersall elite
men, most Church prelates and/or reformersthat 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 sensual-
ity 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
Introduction 25

threat of titillation. Like many of the contributors, moreover, Bentz demon-

strates that receptions of ancient art in the early modern era were markedly
heterogeneousand that contemporaries recognized this diversity.

Thematic Threads

Weaving these chapters together are not only their chronological and theoreti-
cal 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 recep-
tion, 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 theo-
retical work.74 The lush, well-groomed tresses of a beautiful young woman can
serve as a badge of fertility: Giambolognas hair-wringing Fiorenza, her pose
derived from the ancient Venus Anadyomene image type, embodies the fecun-
dity of Florence (Lazzaro). The long hair of witches, on the other hand, is
streaming and wild, as in the Stregozzo and in Drers 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
Bandinellis relief for the monument to Giovanni dalle Bande Nerea detail
mentioned by Vasarigives visual form to the poetic topos of conquest as

73 Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan
(Harmondsworth, uk: Penguin Books, 1977).
74 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): 125.
A fundamental early study is C.R. Hallpike, Social Hair, Man 4 (1969): 25664. Some of
these themes will be presented in the forthcoming OctoberDecember 2015 exhibition
Hair in the Classical World, Bellarmine Museum of Art, Fairfield University.
26 Rose and Poe

sexual domination (Lazzaro). Other hairstyling conventions convey the moral

rectitude of potentially problematic female figures. Signorellis Veturia makes
the adlocutio gesture of ancient male orators and possesses a level of persua-
sive 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 compan-
ions 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 wor-
thy 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. Giottos Fortitude at the Arena Chapel is a
woman with breastplate, lion skin, mace, and battleworn full-body shield who
nonetheless embodies a Virtue. In Edwardss 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 individuals 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 contempo-
rary 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 Lottos Venus and Cupid likely plays both parts (Oettinger).
On the other hand, the nude Pasipha copulating with the bull on one of
the maiolica dishes from Mantua is not classically idealized: She has the pro-

75 Michael Squire, The Art of the Body: Antiquity and Its Legacy (London: Tauris, 2011), esp.
69153.
76 Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Pantheon, 1956).
Introduction 27

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 Pasiphas expense, but female guests
may have appreciated Pasiphas 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 Dossis 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 feminizedsometimes 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 sculp-
tural fragment. In the pen-and-ink sketch by Amico Aspertini that appears on
this volumes cover, for example, the angled view of the Torso conceals its geni-
talia and lends a feminine curve to the breast. Sodomas adaptation of this
model for the figure of Niccol 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 Niccol in her letter about his exe-
cution. This combination of male and female physical qualities also permits
the viewer to reconstruct the figure in the minds eye with Catherines own
head, a relic housed in the same space, and thus to recast Niccols death as the
saints 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 Ghibertis 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 Barkans 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, 16484.

28 Rose and Poe

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 perfor-
mances by, the body. In Baroccis Aeneas Flight from Troy, Creusas lowered
head, deep bow, and outstretched hand convey the same resignation as the
downcast gaze and open hand of Baroccis 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 Pasipha entering the cow costume
in Giulio Romanos fresco assumes the ancient bent-knee pose of the male
hero wrangling a beast. The appropriation of this iconography characterizes
Pasipha 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 Signorellis fresco is the force that controls
the encounter of the Roman matrons with Coriolanus and his armed compan-
ions. Because Veturias 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 Signorellis speaking figure positively (Leone). Other
poses identified as masculine could be acceptable and even desirable in female
personifications, as Michelangelos Night in the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo
assured later Florentine sculptors. The Florence of Giambolognas 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 part-
ner 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), 378.
Introduction 29

gods or heroes committing sexual violence often employ formal and narrative
means to lionize the perpetrators as heroic, or at least to downplay the nega-
tive impact of their acts. Some modern art historians, Wolfthal observes, per-
petuate 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 mens meta-
phorical 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 captives 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 antiquityin this case, among other things, the dependence
on Roman mythological rape scenes, such as Hades sweeping Persephone onto
his chariothelp 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 moralis 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 Europas rape by Jupiter as a bull in Ovids
Metamorphoses, the first looking ahead toward Europas triumphs (Book 2),
the second expressing more sympathy for the fearful girl (Book 6); in both ver-
sions, they argue, Europa occupies a space partway between the mortal and
the divine. The Ovide moralis 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 bulls 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 behinda sign that she is not complicitand 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), 735.
30 Rose and Poe

crime. Unlike the allegorizing commentary in the text, the pictorial cycles
present Philomelas 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 uncer-
tain. This very ambiguity, however, excites a desire to investigate, to discover
more, to complete the picturethe 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 frag-
ments: Like the gigantei cadaveris corrupti of Rome, these sculpted bodies
despoiled by time held the intriguing potential for reanimation through resto-
ration, copying, adaptation, and viewing.80 Even when their sexual character-
istics survive, fragmentary statues seem to have been particularly ripe for
re-gendering, as Smiths analysis of the Belvedere Torso and Sodomas figure of
Niccol 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 gen-
der. 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, persua-
sive mothers, grotesque witches, beautiful witches, inspiring muses, sexual
aggressors, rape victims, saints, savers of mens souls, brides of Christ; men as
heads of state, heads of families, good husbands, bad husbands, victors in bat-
tle, 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, inter-
acted in a myriad of ways with the understandings and lived experiences of
gender in these periods.

80 Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 1999, 119207, but without connecting the reception of frag-
ments 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.
Introduction 31

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 chapter 1

Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel: Giottos 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 charac-
terized as a project intended to expiate the Scrovegni family sin of usury. This
chapter will explore Enricos remorse for his self-described male ablata (ill-
gotten gains) from a new perspective. More specifically, it will focus on Giottos
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, Enricos fathers crime was so infamous that in the Divine

I would like to thank the following librarians at Columbia University for assisting me in con-
ducting 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 Enricos
probable desire for expiation through the commission of the chapel, see Anne Derbes and
Mark Sandona, The Usurers Heart: Giotto, Enrico Scrovegni, and the Arena Chapel in Padua
(University Park, pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 236 and 316. For a recent
argument against Enrico having commissioned the chapel out of a desire for expiation for his
and his familys crimes of usury, see Laura Jacobus, Giotto and the Arena Chapel: Art,
Architecture and Experience (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2008), especially 1927.

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

38 Edwards

Comedy Dante consigns Reginaldo to one of the warmer parts of hell: the inner
ring of the Seventh Circle, the province of usurers (Inferno 17.6470).2 Giovanni
da Nono (c. 12751346) 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 foeno-
ribus 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, contro-
versy, 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), 2169, for both the Italian and the English.
3 On this passage, see Jacobus, Arena Chapel, Appendix13, 3778. 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, Usurers 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, 37981, who refers to the chronicle as the Pseudo-
Favasochi, 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
Enricos Will, Apollo 142 (1995): 45. See also Derbes and Sandona, Usurers Heart, 356.
6 For a laude by Jacopone da Todi urging the renunciation of the maltolletto one may inherit,
see Derbes and Sandona, Usurers 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,
5961 (citing Gratians 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), 213 and 43.
Biblical verses on usury: Lev 25:357; Ps 15:5; Lk 6:35.
7 See Jacobus, Arena Chapel, Appendix14, 381, and Derbes and Sandona, Usurers Heart, 325.
Sources refer to other negative aspects of Enricos personality as well: Da Nono writes in his
Liber de generatione that Enrico was a hypocrite because he joined the confraternity at the
Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel 39

The endowment document for the Arena Chapel of January 1, 1317 may sug-
gest that Enrico likewise commissioned the chapel as expiation for financial
misdeeds. Referring to the chapel as S.M. della Carit, 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 Enricos tomb, recorded in the
mid-sixteenth century by Bernardino Scardeone, also indicated that Enricos
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 ven-
erable 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 groundbreak-
ing 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

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, Appendix13, 378.
8 Text and translation in Jacobus, Arena Chapel, Appendix10, 368.
9 Bernardino Scardeone, De antiquitate urbis Patavii, et claris civibus Patavinis (Basel:
Episcopius, 1560), 3323. See Jacobus, Arena Chapel, Appendix 16, 3845. No doubt
Scardeones uppercase transcription imitates the lettering on the lost plaque.
10 See Jacobus, Arena Chapel, Appendix4, 3503 for the copy of the February 6, 1300 docu-
ment of the sale (from one Manfredo Dalesman), which was made on September 4, 1320.
11 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.
40 Edwards

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 priests jurisdiction, and
by which time the interior painted decoration was probably complete
indeed, the frescoes are traditionally dated 13056. As for the authorship of the
paintings, two early documents not only attribute them to Giotto but also indi-
cate that the chapels name was already associated with the amphitheater:
Francesco da Barberino wrote in his Documenti dAmore (c. 130812) 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 chap-
lain 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, Appendix8, 359, where she ren-
ders pannis as textiles. See Stubblebine, Giotto, 1078 for the suggestion that pannis
refers to wall hangings or tapestries. Jacobus suggests that the term might refer to hang-
ings, cloths, or vestments in her earlier article, Giottos Annunciation in the Arena
Chapel, Padua, Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 106, n. 5.
13 See Jacobus, Giottos 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, Usurers Heart, 245, and 164, n. 63, who build their arguments
on Claudio Bellinatis work, in particular Iconografia, iconologia e iconica nellarte nuova
di Giotto alla Cappella Scrovegni dellArena di Padova, Padova e il suo territorio
4 (1989): 1621. 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): 61101; for the suggestion that he might have been the Dominican Giovannino
da Mantova, see Emma Simi Varanelli, Giotto e Tommaso: I fondamenti dellestetica tomista
e la renovatio delle arti nel Duecento italiano (Rome: Atena, 1988), as cited by Derbes and
Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel 41

Giottos 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 loeil dado featuring seven personi-
fied 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 loeil 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 under-
stood. 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 familys profession; in par-
ticular, 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 familys
usury but also his own, and sought to refer openly to the source of the Scrovegni

Sandona, Usurers 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): 27794.
17 See Jacobus, Arena Chapel, Appendix9, 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, 20910; Derbes
and Sandona, Usurers Heart, 52.
19 In his lectures at Columbia University in the 1970s, the late Howard McP. Davis com-
mented 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, 182202. Tintori and Meiss, Observations on the Arena Chapel, 20910, discuss
the same references to usury. Derbes and Sandona, Usurers Heart, 524, 106, and 1113
write at length on the Expulsion and its association with the Scrovegni sin of usury.
42 Edwards

Figure1.1 Giotto di Bondone, Christ Driving the Moneylenders out of the Temple, c. 13056.
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 Scrovegnis hopes for expiation.

Giottos Fortitude

Giottos 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 icon-
ographic type of Hercules: The former face of the flayed lion fits snugly on the
figures head, and the paws are tied at the neck and waist, as seen on an
Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel 43

Figure1.2 Giotto di Bondone, Personification of Fortitude, c. 13056.

Scrovegni Chapel (Scala/Art Resource, ny)

imperial Roman statue (Fig.1.3).20 But as the painted figures small hand, the
soft flesh of the face, and the absence of an Adams apple make clear, Giottos

20 See Carlos A. Picn 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.
44 Edwards

Figure1.3 Bearded Hercules, Roman copy of a Greek original, c. 6898 ce.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York ( The Metropolitan
Museum of Art)
Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel 45

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 interpreta-
tion of the virtue Fortitude in Italian art. The caption beneath Giottos figure
even mentions some of her attributes:

Cuncta sternit fortitudosuperando

Et armata clavam gerens, prava quoque deprimit. En occidit vi leonem
eius pelle tegitur. Omnem superat agonem et in nullo frangitur.

Fortitude casts down everythingovercomingAnd 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 Giottos 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 fig-
ure from classical culture, one that eliminates some of the problems inherent
in the other two interpretations.
In her 1966 dissertation on Giottos Virtues and Vices, Selma Pfeiffenberger
links Giottos Fortitude to two Italian carvings: Nicola Pisanos 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 Pisanos 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 Giottos Fortitudethe 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 See Jacobus, Arena Chapel, Appendix9, 361 for the caption and the translation by Joseph
Spooner.
22 See Selma Pfeiffenberger, The Iconology of Giottos Virtues and Vices at Padua (PhD
diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1966), Ch. V:11.
46 Edwards

Figure1.4 Giotto di Bondone. Personification of Inconstancy, c. 13056.

Scrovegni Chapel (Alfredo Dagli Orti/Art Resource, ny)
Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel 47

traditional pendant to Fortitude is Cowardice.23 Pfeiffenberger contends that

Giottos Fortitude and Inconstancy oppose one another not merely as the sub-
jects 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 Giottos fig-
ure 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 inspira-
tion from an illustration of this type.25
Pfeiffenbergers interpretation is not completely satisfying for several rea-
sons. Nicola Pisanos Hercules/Fortitude is male and nude, not female and
clothed in a dress, while Giovanni Pisanos 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 Giottos personifica-
tion is therefore tenuous at best. In the Ex Ponto, Ovid indicates that the speak-
ers bodynot a shieldreceives 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 Giottos 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 According to James Paxson, Personifications Gender, Rhetorica: A Journal of the History

of Rhetoric 16, no. 2 (1998): 14979, Virtues are typically female in medieval art. However,
the figure of Fortitude, sometime called Courage, on the faade 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.
24 Sic ego Fortunae telis confixus iniquis. Pfeiffenberger, Iconology, Ch. V:13.
25 Ibid., 13; Richard Stettiner, Die illustrierten Prudentiushandschriften (Berlin: Druck von J.S.
Preuss, 1895), 70102, and Stettiner, Die illustrierten PrudentiushandschriftenTafelband
(Berlin: Grote, 1905), Plate143. For a color image, see http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/
bbb/0264/77/medium.
26 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.
48 Edwards

Figure1.5 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],
Plate143)

Sospita was a source for Giottos Fortitude.27 All three scholars cite a statue cur-
rently in the Vatican (Fig.1.6) that depicts Juno Sospita with a goat-skin cape
worn belted over a short-sleeved chiton, with the goats head worn over the
goddesss 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 chapels fertility-
related motifs, Derbes and Sandona argue that the goat skin links Juno Sospita
to Juno Februata (from februum, or goatskin), the protector of women in child-
birth, and that the similarity of Giottos Fortitude to this figure would have
been pertinent to the chapel, given its emphasis both on fertility and on
penitence.28 Fortitudes pelt is not a goats, however, but a lions; 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
Fortitudeor another figurewith a goat skin.

27 Derbes and Sandona, Usurers Heart, 1001, and the following note.
28 Ibid., 1945, 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.
Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel 49

Figure1.6 Juno Sospita, 2nd century ce.

Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican Museums, Vatican State ( Vanni
Archive/Art Resource, ny)
50 Edwards

The differences in iconography between Giottos figure and ancient images

of both Hercules and Juno Sospita demand another consideration of the clas-
sical 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
timea 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 Appendix2). 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 Omphales
slave, leading to Hercules and Omphales 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 enormouslyin 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 9871013).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 (12168).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 For the Latin and English, see Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Senecas Tragedies, trans. Frank
Justus Miller, vol. 2 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1968), 8691.
30 Ibid., 1067.
Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel 51

land (132241).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 mad-
ness. 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 gods tri-
pod, 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 (2.6.12). 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 (4.11.12). 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
(4.31.35).
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 (9.47136) 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 heros club and arrows and cov-
ers herself with his lion skin, while Hercules himself holds a wool basket
among girls and wears jewelry, a Sidonian gown, and a womans 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 Ibid., 1169.
32 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), 467.
52 Edwards

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
givenhis 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 Omphales role in the relationship. He omits
the cross-dressing but does describe Hercules spinning wool. Then he plays on
the queens 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 com-
parison 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 Plutarchs 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 (2.30358) portrays Hercules and Omphale as a lusty couple attending a
Bacchic festival in a grove. Hercules is so smitten with the queen that he solici-
tously 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 Omphales bracelets and splits her
shoes. And though the queen appropriates her lovers lion skin, club, and

33 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), 1129.
34 See Seneca, Tragedies, trans. Frank Justus Miller, vol. 1, p. 45 (lines 46571). In two other
plays Seneca has characters refer to Hercules in drag: In Hercules Oetaeus (lines 3717),
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 31729),
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.
35 For the English, see Leslie George Whitbread, trans., Fulgentius the Mythographer
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971), 678. For the Latin, see http://www.hs
-augsburg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost06/Fulgentius/ful_myt2.html.
36 For the pertinent sections in Greek and English, see Plutarch, Plutarchs Lives, vol. 3,
trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1920), 3369 (Life of
Antony).
Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel 53

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 (10.6469).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 Virtues disguising herself. She does so in
order to descend unnoticed from her position by Jupiters throne to inspire
Menoeceus to fulfill the oracles request and save the city of Thebes by throw-
ing 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 queens realm enjoyed peace and security.39
The Second Vatican Mythographer echoes Fulgentius criticism somewhat,
mentioning Hercules spinning, and he repeats the Omphale-navel pun, blam-
ing 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 (4.31.18)
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), 7883.
38 For the Latin and English text, see Statius, Thebaid, Books 812; Achilleid, trans. and ed.
D.R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2003), 172-81. For the
full account of the episode, from Virtues descent to the suicide of Menoeceus, see lines
632754.
39 Plutarch, Parallel Lives, vol. 1, 146 (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).
54 Edwards

[While] serving Omphale as her slave [Hercules meted] out punish-

ment 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 third-
century Roman floor mosaic from Llria 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), 4435. 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.
Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel 55

Figure1.7 Mosaic with Omphale and Hercules, 3rd century ce.

Museo Arqueolgico 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 herohis humiliation, evenand 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
heros 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 trsor dargenterie de Berthouville,
prs Bernay (Eure), conserv au Departement des mdailles et antiques de la Bibliothque
nationale (Paris: Lvy, 1916), 1023 and Plate XV. My thanks to Desiree Zenowich of the
Getty Institute for providing me with a scan of this text.
56 Edwards

Figure1.8 Detail, phiale with Omphale asleep, 1stlate 2nd century ce.
Cabinet des Medailles, Bibliothque 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
Omphales 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 womans dress, the hero is clearly enjoying a

43 It is now in the British Museum. For its reported discovery on Capri, see the museums web-
site, http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details
.aspx?objectId=460028&partId=1.
Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel 57

Figure1.9 Puteal with Omphale and Hercules, 1st2nd 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 others eyes. Omphale gently places one hand on her lovers 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
58 Edwards

on his shoulders, and the womans drapery reveals her backside as the two fig-
ures 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 Omphales legs and part of one
shoulder, leaving her breastsand perhaps even part of her groinbare,
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 queens side,
a basket of wool and a spindle on that of Herculesreferences 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 lead-
ing proponents were still alive when the chapel was being erected and deco-
rated: Lovato Lovati (12411309), Geremia da Montagnone (c. 12501321), and
Albertino Mussato (12611329), 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 pas-
sages from the texts of numerous ancient authors. Most essential to this essay

44 This second woman lacks the head band worn by Omphale, however, and may represent
the deceased in her guise. Paul Zanker, Eine rmische Matrone als Omphale, Rmische
Mitteilungen 106 (1999): 123, fig.6.
45 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.
46 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), 23940.
47 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), 81116. Witt defines
Geremia as a pre-humanist.
Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel 59

are Lovatos references to Ovids 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 Senecas plays.48 In his Compendium, Geremia da Montagnone refers to the
texts of Catullus, Martial, Horace, and many others. He was also familiar with
Platos 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 (refer-
ring to the emperor as Caesar), andat the request of Marsiglio of Paduahe
created a dialogue on Senecas 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 thir-
teenth 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 Now in the Vatican (Ms. Vat. Lat. 1769). See William P. Sisler, An Edition and Translation
of Lovato Lovatos Metrical Epistles, with Parallel Passages from Ancient Authors (PhD
diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1977), 7 for Lovatos analysis of Senecas meter. For Lovatos
paraphrasing the Latin texts, see 31, 48, 104 (Fasti); 32, 71, 76, 79, 100, 103, two times
(Heroides); and 29, 47, 48 (Thebaid).
49 This despite the fact that Statius was very popular in the medieval period, according to
Roberto Weiss. See Weiss, Il primo secolo dellumanesimo: Studi e testi (Rome: Storia e
letteratura, 1949), 3342. 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): 1820. This long article provides an
overview of the knowledge of Greek in the West during the Middle Ages. According to
Weiss, 189, 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.
50 See Nancy G. Siraisi, Arts and Sciences at Padua: The Studium of Padua before 1350 (Toronto:
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1973), 458. For Mussato in the context of his
generation, see Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients, 11873.
60 Edwards

and the Second Vatican Mythographer were well known across Europe
in the Middle Ages, and the Tragedies of Seneca attracted interest in the mid-
thirteenth 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 missinghis own
copy of Senecas 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 Appendix1). 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 Lovatos 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 argu-
ment 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
Appendix1), so too might a curious person in Padua have found such assis-
tance in deciphering Diodorus or the Pseudo-Apollodorus, if texts by these
authors were available.

51 For Lovatos now lost manuscript, see Sisler, Lovatis Metrical Epistles, 7 (Senecas
tragedies) and 15 (Tibullus).
52 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 Boccaccios 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: LErma di Bretschneider, 1997), 14982.
Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel 61

In fact, such an individual might well have been the scholar Pietro dAbano
(c. 12501316). 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. Lovatos 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 dAbano. 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 dAbano 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 chapela 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 Giottos 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 artists paintings, for in his written commentary on portraiture, he refers to

53 For Lovatos role in adding Pietro to the University faculty, see Sisler, Lovatis 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, Niccol, Giovanni, and Marsilio were affiliated with the uni-
versity when grown. See Franco Alessio, Filosofia e Scienza. Pietro dAbano, in Storia
della cultura veneta, vol. 2 (Vicenza: N. Pozza, 1976), 175, n. 12.
54 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 Pietros possible input on the iconography of Justice as
Venus, see Eleonora M. Beck, Giottos Harmony: Music and Art in Padua at the Crossroads
of the Renaissance (Florence: European Press Academic Publishing, 2005), 1137. For the
suggestion that Pietro advised Giotto in person on physiognomy, see Hubert Steinke,
Giotto und die Physiognomik, Zeitschrift fr Kunstgeschichte, 59, no. 4 (1996): 52347,
esp. 545.
62 Edwards

Giottos art, using the Venetian version of his nameZoto.55 Since the com-
mentary 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 Enricos programmer might well have been in
the audience as his guest, as the guest of another professor, or, if the program-
mer 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 per-
tains 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 chapels 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 Herculesand 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 characteriza-
tion 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 textssuch as those by Diodorus

55 For Pietro dAbanos commentary on portraiture, see J. Thomann, Pietro dAbano on

Giotto, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54 (1991): 23844.
56 For professorial readings in Padua, see Lynn Thorndike, Public Readings of New Works in
Mediaeval Universities, Speculum 1, no. 1 (1926): 1013.
57 For the public readings, see Ruth Crosby, Oral Delivery in the Middle Ages, Speculum 11,
no. 1 (1936): 88110. For the epistle in which Lovato identifies with Hercules, see Sisler,
Lovatis Metrical Epistles, 926 (the Latin) and 10610 (the translation). Lovato wrote this
epistle to a friend before his wedding in 1268. Perhaps prenuptial anxiety is behind the
tenor of the communication.
Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel 63

or Pseudo-Apollodoruswere 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 possi-
bly 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 Giottos interpreta-
tion of Fortitude.

Giottos 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 tes-
tify 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 Omphales
identifying attribute.58 Given the widespread occurrence of Greco-Roman rep-
resentations 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 Herculesin the same configuration as Giottos 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, 1294October 11, 1303). Whether His Holiness him-
self 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 pos-

58 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 200600, ed. Chris Entwistle and Nol Adams
(London: British Museum Press, 2011), 22938, 2314.
59 See The Vatican Collections: The Papacy and Art: Official Publication Authorized by the
Vatican Museums (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1983), 214.
64 Edwards

Figure1.10 Omphale draped in the lion skin of Hercules, c. 200 ce.

Museo Gregoriano Profano, Vatican Museums, Vatican City
(Scala/Art Resource, ny)
Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel 65

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 queens 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
Giottos 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 The precise dating of Giottos 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 cen-
tury. 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 obvi-
ously sensual than the statue in the Vatican, however, and often in contorted poses not
seen in Giottos figure. But the notion of inspiration through a gem is still worth consider-
ing. For such images of Omphale, see Sena Chiesa, Myth Revisited, 22938, esp. 2314.
61 See Kampen, Omphale and the Instability of Gender, 2334. 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), 16181.
66 Edwards

things would have resonated with him meaningfullyespecially 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 mur-
der. Once. Or twice. Or many times. Murderthe most grievous of sinswas
even worse than Enricos 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 stationa queen, no less.
Given Omphales 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 under-
world 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 heros ascent from a mountain-
top to heaven after death and his subsequent apotheosis thanks to his divine
father, Jupiter, which was seen as the equivalent of Christs 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 132030),
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, 2878; and with respect to his apo-
theosis, see Justin Martyr (c. 10065), Apologies, 1.202. See Alexander Ross (15901654),
Mystagogus Poeticus, 1712, 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 (194951): 40510. 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
Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel 67

would wish to identify with such a heroand 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 sug-
gested 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 illus-
trates purposelessness and lack of direction in the absence of Prudencethe
very Virtue that he opposes in the chapelbut also suggests the vice of
gluttony.63 To Osvald Sirn, Folly is a clown setting forth to fight imaginary
fools.64 Jacobus sees him as alluding to an accumulation of vices associated

on Via Dino Compagni, Journal of Early Christian Studies 13, no. 3 (2005): 34986. 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), 812,
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), 3759. Also of interest is Clarence H.
Miller, Hercules and His Labors as Allegories of Christ and His Victory over Sin in Dantes
Inferno, Quaderni ditalianistica 5 (1984): 117. 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), 63264.
63 Milton L. Gendel, Giottos Representation of the Seven Virtues and Vices in the Arena
Chapel at Padua (ma Thesis, Columbia University, 1940), 1: 4, nn. 2 and 5.
64 Osvald Sirn, Giotto and Some of His Followers, trans. Frederic Schenck (Cambridge, ma:
Harvard University Press, 1917), 53.
68 Edwards

Figure1.11 Giotto di Bondone, Personification of Folly,

c. 13056.
Scrovegni Chapel, padua, italy (Alfredo
Dagli Orti/Art Resource, ny)
Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel 69

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 Slincourt describes him as expressing an idiots 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 con-
nects him with the comment made by Jacopone da Todi (c. 12301306) upon
arriving at a nephews 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 Giottos 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 feath-
ers 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 sump-
tuous 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 chapels
Fortitude, Giotto provided his patron with the image of a powerful queen to
gaze upon each time Enrico stepped into the navenot 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: 69.
67 Basil De Slincourt, Giotto (London; New York: Duckworth; C. Scribners Sons, 1905), 153.
68 Maria Luisa Bonifazi, Giotto e le figurazioni allegoriche delle virt e dei vizi: nel centena-
rio giottesco, Lillustrazione vaticana, 8 (1937), 627; I.B. Supino, Giotto (Florence: Istituto di
edizioni artistiche, 1920), 145.
70 Edwards

Appendix1

Classical Texts and Learning in Europe and Italy in the

Late Middle Ages
The acquisition of specific classical texts by contemporary Paduan humanists was criti-
cal 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 manu-
script 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 dis-
mantled 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. nintheleventh
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, Chrtien de Troyes was inspired by the Fabulae when writ-
ing his Philomne, and Arnulfus of Orlans 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
xlixli. 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 universits de France, Srie latine (Paris: Les
Belles Lettres, 1995), vol. 12. For Hyginus and Chrtien de Troyes, see Edith Joyce Benkov,
Hyginus Contribution to Chrtiens Philomne, Romance Philology 36, no. 3 (1983): 4036,
and Gregory Hays, Did Chrtien de Troyes know Hyginus Fabulae? Romance Philology 62, no.
1 (2008): 7582. 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): 12631. For the hypothetical impact of the Fabulae on an English
chronicler whose life dates were 13781465, see Lisa M. Ruch, A Possible Identity for
Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel 71

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 Orlans
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 Ovids 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 Orlans, 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

Hugh of Genesis in John Hardyngs Chronicle, Notes and Queries 53, no. 2 (2006): 150. For the
chapters of Boccaccios 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), 2534, and for the period that Boccaccio worked on the manuscript, xxxi.
70 Dorothy M. Robathan, Ovid in the Middle Ages, in Ovid, ed. J.W. Binns (London: Boston,
Routledge and K. Paul, [1973]), 2017.
71 Robathan, 193 (Arnolfus and Baudry), 194 (Conrad), and 200 (Rabanus.)
72 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.
73 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, 43871.
74 Robathan, 203.
75 R.H. Rouse and A.C. de la Mare, New Light on the Circulation of the A-Text of Senecas
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.
76 R.H. Philp, The Manuscript Tradition of Senecas 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 spiritualit nei suoi
opuscoli apocrifi dal II al XI secolo, Italia medioevale e umanistica 16 (1973): 43135, and
Ezio Franceschini, Glosse e commenti medievali a Seneca tragico, in Studi e note di
72 Edwards

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 13156, not
ten years after the completion of the frescoes in Padua, the English Dominican Nicholas
Trevet wrote a commentary on Senecas tragedies for Cardinal Niccol 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 authors 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. 10901150s) in his exposition of
Hymen in the Philosophia Mundi. In addition, Bernard Silvestris drew from him in writ-
ing 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. 12401305) benefitted
from the Second Mythographers text as he composed the Roman de la Rose.81

filologica latina medievale, Pubblicazioni dellUniversit Cattolica del Sacro Cuore,

4th Series, Scienze filologiche, vol. 30 (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 193846): 1105.
77 Rouse and de la Mare, 2879. Petrarch made cross-references between Hercules Furens
and Senecas Agamemnon. De la Mare notes, 288, that the copy of Senecas tragedies that
Lovato found in Pomposa was used by the Paduan Humanists for readings.
78 Philp, 164.
79 Brian Stock, A Note on Thebaid Commentaries: Paris, B.N., lat. 3012, Traditio 27 (1971):
46871. 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 (19201): 20137.
80 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), 1412,
who devotes most of his article to the impact of Fulgentius on Bernardus Silvestris.
81 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.
Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel 73

As for the Third Vatican Mythographer, Alexander Neckam (11571217) drew heavily
on his text in composing his commentary on Martianus Capella, as did Bersuire (c.
12901362) in writing the Ovidius Moralizatus and Petrarch in composing Africa. Extant
today are over forty copies of this mythographers compilation ranging in date from
the twelfth to the fifteenth century, indicating, in Ronald Pepins view, the popularity
of this text.82 Thus most of the Latin works cited in this chapter as possibly contribut-
ing 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 Giottos 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-twenti-
eth century, Greek was still spoken in parts of Calabria.83

82 For the influence of the Third Mythographer on Neckham, see Chance, Medieval
Mythology, vol. 2, 188 and 1901, 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.
83 See Roberto Weiss, Medieval and Humanist Greek: Collected Essays (Padua: Antenore,
1977), 138 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), 411; 157; 202; and 968 for discussion of early manuscripts from Grottaferrata,
and vol. 2, Plates2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, and 75. The texts range in date from 1214 to 1299/1300 and
are religious in nature.
74 Edwards

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 emperors 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 Emperors 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 Hesiods 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 Homers
works.85

84 For Fredericks knowledge of not only Greek but Italian, Latin, French, German, and
Arabic, see Rose E. Selfe, trans., Philip H. Wicksteed, ed., Villanis Chronicle; Being
Selections from the First Nine Books of the Croniche Fiorentine by Giovanni Villani (London:
Archibald Constable 1906), 1289. For the passage in Villani, see Book VI e.1. For the manu-
script with plays by Sophocles, see Turyn, Dated Greek Manuscripts, vol. 1, 427 and vol. 2,
Plates 267. For the scholia on Diodorus in Paris bnf ms gr. 1665, see Aubrey Diller,
Diodorus in Terra DOtranto, Classical Philology 49, no. 4 (1954): 2578. 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.
85 For the Hesiod manuscripts in Florence, see Turyn, Greek Manuscripts, vol. 1, 2839 and
vol. 2, Plate23. For the twelfth-century copy in Greek of the Iliad in Milan, see ibid., vol. 1,
235 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, viiiix and xiii.
Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel 75

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
Plutarchs 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 pos-
session 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 Livesa 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

Appendix2

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

Greek

Aeschylus, Agamemnon 10245

Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica 4.31.18 (madness of H., 4.11.12)
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 22330
Palaephatus, On Unbelievable Tales 44
Pausanias, Description of Greece 2.21.3
, Moralia 785 EF
Plutarch, Parallel Lives: Demetrius and Antony 3.3; Theseus 6.5
Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 2.6.13 (madness of H., 2.4.12 and 2.6.12)

86 For the Moralia and Pace, see Philip A. Stadter, Planudes, Plutarch, and Pace of Ferrara,
Italia medioevale e umanistica 16 (1973): 13741. 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, 1589, Planudes trans-
lated 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.
76 Edwards

Sophocles, Women of Trachis (Trachiniae) 24791; 35174

Strabo, Geography 5.2.2
Tzetzes, Johannes, Book of Histories (Chiliades) 2.42442

Latin

Fulgentius, Mythologies 2.2

Hyginus, Fabulae 32
Ovid, Fasti 2.30356
, Heroides 9.50118
Propertius, Elegies 3.11.172
Pseudo-Seneca, Hercules Oetaeus 3717
Second Vatican Mythographer 178
Seneca, Hercules Furens 46571; 9871013 (madness of H.)
, Hippolytus (also called Phaedra) 31729
Statius, Thebaid 10.63249
Terence, The Eunuch 10278
Tertullian, The Mantle (De pallio) 4
Third Vatican Mythographer, On the Gods of the Pagan Nations and Their Allegories 13.1

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 chapter 2

The Liminal Feminine: Illuminating Europa

in the Ovide Moralis

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 transla-
tio, occurs in the prologue to the romance of Cligs (c. 1170) by Chrtien de
Troyes.1 While Chrtien 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: Chrtien 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 Chrtiens 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,
intheDe nuptiis and Isidore of Seville, flourished 560636, in his Etymologies)
recordedandpreserved 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 tradi-
tion 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 Chrtien
de Troyes (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008), esp. 347. This romance has been discussed
at length by numerous scholars. For the most thorough overview, see Michelle A. Freemans The
Poetics of Translatio Studii and Conjointure (Lexington, ky: French Forum, 1979) and Douglas
Kellys Honor, Debate, and Translatio imperii in Cligs, Arthuriana 1, no. 3 (2008): 3347. 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.

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015|doi 10.1163/9789004289697_004

The Liminal Feminine 81

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 Meuns late twelfth- and early
thirteenth-century Romance of the Rose,4 and, at the beginning of the four-
teenth century, the anonymous Ovide moralis (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 inart.7 The collection
of myths preserved in the Metamorphoses, coupled with the myths in the
widely circulated Fasti, Amores, Ars Amatoria, Tristia, andHeroides, provided
endless fodder for artists of all media, and permeated the artistic landscape of
Europe well into the Renaissance and beyond.8 Given Ovids 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 mythog-
raphers in Medieval Mythography: From Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres,
AD 4331177 (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. Haskinss work, first published in 1927, is still considered seminal, as is Richard
W. Southerns 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 embrac-
ing 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 Virgils impact upon written literature surpassed Ovids: The
books of the Metamorphoses yielded to the hexameter verses of Virgils Aeneid alone (versibus
autem hexametris soli Vergilii Aeneidi cesserunt Metamorphoseon libri, praefatio). All quota-
tions 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). Seznecs influential work, originally published in French in
82 Murray with Simone

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 theInferno).
We have chosen to focus our discussion on a series of images preserved in
the manuscripts of the early fourteenth-century Ovide moralis. Due to its
breadth, the Ovide moralis presents numerous obstacles to scholars. It consti-
tutes a hybrid of translation and commentary, transmitting in Old French the
entire fifteen books of Ovids Metamorphoses, with an additional 60,000 lines
of philosophical and theological commentary. Moreover, over nine hundred
illuminationsmany depicting scenes of classical mythology and pagan gods
and goddessescodified 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 illumina-
tions of Christ on his way to Calvary (Rouen Bibliothque 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 moralis
codices. Art historians and Old French scholars alike are apt to conclude sim-
ply that the earliest copies of the Ovide moralis (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

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.
9 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).
10 All medieval readers and illuminators were not as enthusiastic about the Christian inter-
pretations 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 com-
pletely (Paris Bibliothque Nationale mss fr. 870 and fr. 19121) the allegorical commentary,
reducing the text to a narrative rendition of Ovids Metamorphoses in the vernacular,
probably for the entertainment of court audiences.
11 Lord, Three Manuscripts of the Ovide Moralis, Art Bulletin 57, no. 2 (1975): 16175. 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 avail-
able online via the base dimages at http://bibliotheque.rouen.fr.
The Liminal Feminine 83

Figure2.1 Europa carried off by the bull, in the Ovide moralis, c. 132550.
Paris, Bibliothque de lArsenal, 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 juxtaposi-
tion to Biblical narrative, as embodied in the Ovide moralis, 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 Ovids Myth of Philomela, Chapter 9 in this
volume.
84 Murray with Simone

Figure2.2 Christ carrying the cross, in the Ovide moralis, c. 132550.

Paris, Bibliothque de lArsenal, 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 moralis can only be truly under-
stood within a dynamic text-image relationship: They both invoke the classical
myth they represent and, simultaneously, visually embody the moralization to
which Ovids 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
The Liminal Feminine 85

metaphor for the reception and transmission of classical culture in the Ovide
moralis.13
Following Chrtiens process, let us turn to the Greek origins of Europas
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 Europas 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 This discussion will be taken up again in a subsequent, and lengthier, study on the rela-
tionship of Christian and pagan imagery in the entire corpus of illuminations of the Ovide
moralis.
14 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 dis-
cussing Phoenician influence upon the Europa myth (How Phoenician was Europa?,
University of Otago, New Zealand, 2008).
15 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), 7692, 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), 2101.
16 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).
17 limc, vol. 4, part 1, nos. 1.4 and 1.8.
86 Murray with Simone

Figure2.3 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 Europas story. Indeed, Europas rape by Jupiter is one
of Ovids most beloved tales.19 We encounter the subject twice in the

18 See limc, vol. 4, part 1, nos. 21213 for Europa on the bulls back. There are only twenty
examples of Europa with the bull but not mounted upon it (nos. 120).
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
Ovidsflippant works and tales of sex? Ovids 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
The Liminal Feminine 87

Metamorphoses: once in Book Two as a sort of aeitiology for Thebes (83375),

and once in Book Six as a part of Arachnes tapestry (1037).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. (2.84753)

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, 2.8512), his long-hanging dewlaps (armis palearia pendent,
2.854), and his perfectly formed horns (cornua parva quidem, sed quae conten-
dere possis/ facta manu, puraque magis perlucida gemma, 2.8556), signaling
the sexually charged undertones of the whole passage.
The maiden was powerless to resist Jupiters 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, 2.85960). 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

Corinna in the Ars Amatoria seems little more than a figure for Ovids narrator to
objectify.
20 Europa also figures in Book Five of the Fasti, where the violence of her rape is down-
played, 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 (5.6178).
88 Murray with Simone

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, 2.8645). The sexual innuendo could
not be more obvious.
Finally, the princess dares to sit upon the bulls 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. (2.8705)

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, Ovids 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 beauti-
ful maiden chosen by Jupiter for a mate who bears his child and triumphantly
becomes the eponymous heroine of one third of the world, Arachnes vision in
Book Six is deeply pessimistic:

Maeonis elusam designat imagine tauri

Europam: verum taurum, freta vera putares.
Ipsa videbatur terras spectare relictas

21 Ovids 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-Hesiods 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.
The Liminal Feminine 89

et comites clamare suas tactumque vereri

adsilientis aquae timidasque reducere plantas. (6.1037)

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 scenes pitiable themes: Arachnes tapestry
emphasizes Europas 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
Jupiters 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 Europas 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 Jacoff, The Rape/Rapture of Europa: Paradiso 27, in The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid
in Dantes Divine Comedy, ed. Jacoff and Jeffrey Thompson Schnapp (Palo Alto, ca: Stanford
University Press, 1991), 2367. This dark portrayal of Europa reflects Arachnes own dire
position in the face of Minerva.
23 Within the Ovidian framework, while Arachnes 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 mor-
alis, by the sin of pride to which she succumbs. But that is the subject of another
discussion.
24 Jacoff, 234. Jacoffs interpretation goes hand in hand with M. Catherine Boultons argu-
ment in Gendered Spaces in Ovids Heroides, Classical World 102, no. 3 (2009): 27390.
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 adven-
ture, but are turned into transgressive figures, both morally and sexually, and become
subjected to extreme penalties.
25 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 con-
cerning 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, 4437.
90 Murray with Simone

prior to contemplating the Beatific Vision in the Paradiso (canto 27, lines
6796). 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 Ovids narrative,
Europa serves to connect the old and the new.26 The author of the Old French
Ovide moralis, with a sensitivity to Ovids aims, glosses the tale of Europa by
taking it one step further and using Ovids 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 moralis 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 moralis 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) orin
the case of Copenhagen Royal Library ms Thott. 399in both Latin and
French. Moreover, since most (perhaps all) of the manuscripts of the Ovide
moralis 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 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
Phaethons chariot) to the Theban cycle of Ovids opus, which serves simultaneously as a
commentary upon and a proleptic version of the founding of Rome. See also Micaela
Janan, Reflections in a Serpents Eye: Thebes in Ovids Metamorphoses (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009).
27 For a solid introduction to recent scholarship on the Ovide moralis, see the collection of
essays edited by Laurence Harf-Lancner, Laurence Mathey-Maille, and Michelle Szkilnik,
Ovide Metamorphose: Les lecteurs medievaux dOvide (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle,
2009).
28 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 moralis was composed at Jeannes 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 moralis was executed, and that the poem was begun before the
coronation.
29 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.
The Liminal Feminine 91

as the single illumination of New York Pierpont Morgan ms 443 (c. 140010)
attests: On the opening folio, the scribe presents his manuscript of the Ovide
moralis to King Charles V of France, with the Duc de Berry and Jean sans Peur
looking on. Given the Ovide moraliss 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 131520, 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 132550, originally contained 340 minia-
tures, 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 pro-
vided by the text, which reveals the importance of Europas feminine and lim-
inal role in the Old French translation.31
The author of the Ovide moralis makes an interesting move at the begin-
ning 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 gods sexual potency and his lustful hunting of Europa.
But, for the author of the Ovide moralis, Jupiters 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 Educated in theological controversies of his day, the author of the Moralized Ovid proba-
bly 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.
31 In other words, the careful placement of the images within the two manuscripts serves to
convey meaning.
92 Murray with Simone

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 beauti-
ful hands and kisses them (2.50347 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, Europas 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 allu-
sion 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 (2.506973).35 The translator notes at this point the birth of
Minosthe union bears fruitand introduces, as he does so often through-
out 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 (2.507480).36 The Old French version of the Europa tale
concludes more explicitly than Ovids. Whereas Ovid leaves up to the reader to
make the connection between the maidens name and the continent to which

32 Dou toriel sest aproucie./ A ses mains quieult lerbe deugie,/ Quel donne au toriel a mengier.
/ Les beles mains li leche et baise. All translations from the Ovide moralis are by K.Sarah-
Jane Murray, based on the French text (emended as necessary) established by Cornelius
De Boer, Ovide moralis: Pome du commencement du quatorzime sicle (Amsterdam: J.
Mller, 191538). At the time we are writing, the edition is out of print and not easily avail-
able to readers.
33 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 lemporte pas pour pas, 2.50514).
34 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 Ovids
Metamorphoses Books 15 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 333.
35 En Crete vient/ En sa droite forme revient/ Descouvert li a son corage/ Sa de lui pris le
pucelage/ Dont molt fu liez et esjos.
36 Lors fu Mynos engenos/ 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/ Denfer, et li felon jugi/ Lonc ce que
chascuns a pechi.
The Liminal Feminine 93

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
(2.50814).
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
alwaysappear together, as in the Aberdeen codex: The bullock is called juv-
encus 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,
Yehave 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 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/.
38 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.
39 This association between the bull and pride is especially interesting given the moraliza-
tion of Arachne in Book Six of the Ovide moralis as the prideful soul.
94 Murray with Simone

lower himself, without leaving behind his divinity (2.510316).40 This very
process of incarnation is (albeit imperfectly) mirrored in the poetic

rendering of Jupiters 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 (2.49678
and 2.50057).41
Read on an allegorical level, then, Europa represents the human soul rav-
ished by God, swept away to become the bride of Christ. The image of the soul-
qua-bride is reflected not only within the scope of the Ovide moralis 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 Bernards sixty-seventh ser-
mon 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 marvel-
ous condescension of the other. For it is not an attachment and union
between two persons who are of equal condition. Now, who could ven-
ture 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 holi-
ness 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 lov-
ers touch that the author of the Moralized Ovid renders Jupiter as the highly

40 Por lamour dumaine nature/ Se vault descendre et abessier/ Sans sa divinit lessier.
41 La divine forme lessa/ Pour la bele, et tant sabessa/ Quil en deigna bues devenir.
42 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.
The Liminal Feminine 95

sexualized toriel (bull). And it is entirely fitting that Europas 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 manu-
scriptsthat is, of Europa swept away on the back of the bull with either the
Ascension or Christ carrying the cross to the Calvaryis 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 carry-
ing of the cross on Christs 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 Arsenals 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 moralis into Western Christendom on a literal level and, on a more alle-
gorical 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 sacri-
fice of the Crucifixion. The master illuminator(s) responsible for illustrating
the Rouen and Arsenal manuscripts reinforced this notion, we argue, by juxta-
posing the image of Europas 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 Dantes 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
spacethe threshold between this world and the next. Many of her counter-
parts throughout the text (e.g., Io, as another study will show) perform a simi-
lar 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 Charlemagnes 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.
96 Murray with Simone

In this sense, although the image of Europa sitting on the back of the bull in
the Ovide moralis incorporates, visually, the same components and elements
present in ancient Greek and Roman art, its iconographic significance under-
went 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 Ovids world. Throughout the Ovide mor-
alis, 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, Ovids heroines, thus transformed, invited its
elite medieval patrons into a liminal feminine space in the manuscripts, engag-
ing them in the very process of metamorphosis, or conversion, to which the
Old French translation beckoned them.

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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: deflen-
dum quippe est hanc urbem tot quondam illustrium virorum atque imperato-
rum 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 appear-
ance 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 (141731), Poggio Bracciolini and his papal col-
league 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 friends 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 phys-
ical 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) 1.67, translation by
the author.
2 Mary D. Garrard, Brunelleschis Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2010), 334.

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015|doi 10.1163/9789004289697_005

A Giant Corrupt Body 99

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 nurse-
maid (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 citys fragmentary appearance,
inspires the viewer (and reader) toward a desire for comprehension and recon-
struction. 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 Poggios account as a touchstone, this chapter focuses on the interpreta-
tion in Renaissance Italy of ancient sculptures with intersexual status, namely those
depicting hermaphrodites. The first section explores the theme of the hermaphro-
dite in Italian humanistic thought and artistic output of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. Drawing from antiquitys 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 poten-
tial 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 render-
ings of Roma, which significantly are subject to the same heterogeneous methodol-
ogies 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 Longs characterization of the image of the hermaphro-
dite 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 genera-
tion, 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.
100 Gessert

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? Wouldnt you admire
and praise their art and the skill of the artist?6

Beccadelli included both Guarinos and Poggios 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, 34, in Beccadelli, Hermaphrodite, 569: 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, 23:
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?
A Giant Corrupt Body 101

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 theyre 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 exercis-
ing his poetic art to its greatest expression. The poets 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 gen-
der attitude: cross-dressers, homosexuals, or bisexuals.8 The inclusion of these
varied reactions in Beccadellis volume lastly acknowledges both the Lacanian
desire and the Kristevan abjection that such aberrant concepts could engen-
der.9 Guarinos statement essentially equates the revelation of the genitalia
with the representation of animals associated with transgression and corrup-
tion; in turn both objects of disgust have the potential of transcending their
abject status by aesthetic means.10 Yet a later moment in The Hermaphrodites
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 Beccadellis career.

7 Antonio Beccadelli, Reply to Poggio 2, in Parker, Hermaphrodite, 1145: 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.
8 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), 15070 for an overview of the legal situation in Italy.
9 See for example Kelly Oliver, Subjectivity without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring
Mothers (Lanham, md: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 55.
10 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982).
11 Antonio Beccadelli, Recantation, lines 34, in Parker, Hermaphrodite, 1245: Hic faeces
varias Veneris moresque profanos/quos natura fugit, me docuisse piget.
102 Gessert

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 Platos Symposium and Ovids Metamorphoses.13 In the
famous allegory by Aristophanes in Platos 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 bothmale and female, had a double identity overtly displayed in one unified
body. In contrast, the Ovidian account in Metamorphoses 4.285415 of
Hermaphroditus, the male offspring of Aphrodite and Hermes rendered inter-
sexual 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 her-
maphrodite; contemporary mythographers interpreted Ovids 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 indi-
viduals like the so-called Monster of Ravenna were seen as harbingers of spe-
cific 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 Platos 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 (Zrich and Munich: Artemis Verlag, 1990),
26885.
14 Long, Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe, 11.
15 Lauren Silberman, Mythographic Transformations of Ovids Hermaphrodite, The
Sixteenth Century Journal 19, no. 4 (1988): 64352.
16 Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1990), 3551; Long, Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe, 328. 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
A Giant Corrupt Body 103

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 thirteen-

year-old girl, which had been made with admirable skill. It is impossi-
ble 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 with-
out 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

observer interpreted each element of the childs anatomy as representative of the politi-
cal and social situation in contemporary Italy (Niccoli, Prophecy and People, 519).
17 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.
18 Lorenzo Ghiberti, Commentari 3.1: Vidi in Roma una statua duno Ermofrodito di gran-
deza duna fanciulla danni tredici, la quale statua era stata fatta con mirabile ingegno
La quale statua, doctrina et arte et magisterio non possibile con la lingua potere dire la
perfectione dessaessa statua era in su detto pannolino et era svolta in modo mostrava
la natura virile et la natura feminiledistesa tiene luna delle gambe col ditto grosso del
pi. 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), 1634.
104 Gessert

when viewed from the front; the male genitalia are apparent only when the
work is viewed from the other side. Ghibertis 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 Ligorios later description of
the Aracoeli sarcophagus depicting a cross-dressing Achilles among maidens
at Skyros. Ligorio also marveled at the ancient artists 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 androgynyinspired
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 muscula-
ture, 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 Translation in Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 163. For the original Italian, see Hermann
Dessau, Rmische 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.
20 Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance, Berlin-
Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and Humboldt-Universitt zu Berlin,
accessed August 11, 2014, CensusID 153877. http://census.bbaw.de.
21 On this type, the Apollo Citharoedos, see Bober and Rubenstein, Renaissance Artists and
Antique Sculpture, no. 35.
A Giant Corrupt Body 105

Figure3.1 Apollo Citharoedos, identified in the Renaissance as

Hermaphroditus, 2nd century ce.
Farnese Collection, Museo Archeologico
Nazionale di Napoli (The Warburg Institute
Photographic Collection)
106 Gessert

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 Ulisse Aldrovandi, Delle statue antiche che per tutta Roma in diversi luoghisi veggono, in
Lucio Mauro, Le antichit della citt 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.
23 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 Aldrovandis interpretation (CensusID 159467).
24 The epigraph of the statue as recorded in 1554 in the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae
seriesdescribes 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).
25 Bober and Rubenstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, no. 97.
26 Prospectivo Milanese, Antiquarie prospettiche romane 18, in Bober and Rubenstein,
Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, no. 97.
A Giant Corrupt Body 107

Figure3.2 Engraving of the Farnese Hermaphroditus, from the Speculum Magnificentiae

Romanae, 1554.
British Museum, London ( The Trustees of the British Museum)
108 Gessert

offspring of the superni dei. This hermaphrodite is famous not for its a rtistry,
but for its barely concealed monstrosity. This darker interpretation is delin-
eated by the Renaissance drawings of the sculpture, several of which combine
the hermaphrodite with another figure gazing with surprise, interest, or horror
at the figures 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 cover-
ing 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 con-
tains great potentiality, whether for perfection or corruption, and that its
definition and categorization is a worthwhile if dangerous pursuit. For her-
maphroditic images are like the objects of sacred initiation, designed to focus
attention on the fleeting moment of revelation and transition. But the revela-
tion was not fully illuminatingas the viewing of the external hybridity con-
tinued, 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 dichot-
omy is borne out in the nomenclature assigned to ancient feminine statues
(Venus Pudica, for example), with no such modesty associated with the her-
maphrodite.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, 2746) but that could be seen as the latent
influence for these interpretations.
A Giant Corrupt Body 109

Figure3.3 Drawing after the Farnese Hermaphroditus and Crouching Venus, c. 1503.
British Museum, London ( The Trustees of the British Museum)
110 Gessert

Figure3.4 Standing Hermaphrodite, 1st2nd century ce, converted into a Venus in the
17th century.
Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome (The Warburg Institute
Photographic Collection)
A Giant Corrupt Body 111

Lossa 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 Ovids 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 por-
trayed in Lucans Pharsalia (1.185203) or in Claudians late antique consular
panegyric Panegyricus dictus Probino et Olybrio (lines 8797).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 depar-
ture 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 faade 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 pray-
ing 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 Catharine Edwards, Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 11425. On receptions of Ovids 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),
30119.
32 Cornelius Vermeule, The Goddess Roma in the Art of the Roman Empire (London: Spink
and Son, 1959), 2962; Clive Foss, Roman Historical Coins (London: Seaby, 1990), 9 for the
earliest type depicting Roma as an entire figure (70 bce).
33 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), 1989; 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 personi-
fications 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.
34 Natalia Costa-Zalessow, The Personification of Italy from Dante through the Trecento,
Italica 68, no. 3 (1991), 31631; Baskins, Trecento Rome, 197210.
35 Baskins, Trecento Rome, 201.
112 Gessert

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 Schisms 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 Ubertis 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 Vs 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 rot-
ting 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, particu-
larly 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 ghost-
written by Baldassare Castiglione, Raphael makes heavy use of the Roma-
as-corpse metaphor, and he further elaborates the gendered potential of citys
prostrate body.

36 Baskins, Trecento Rome, 207.

37 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,
Chapter8 in this volume.
38 Loren W. Partridge, The Art of Renaissance Rome, 14001600 (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1996), 19.
39 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), 323, and Conradus Celtis, Degenerate Rome
and Roman Vultures, in Perosa and Sparrow, Renaissance Latin Verse, 4178.
A Giant Corrupt Body 113

Figure3.5 Anonymous Roma as crone, in Fazio degli Ubertis Dittamondo, 1447.

Bibliothque nationale, Paris
114 Gessert

In un punto mi d grandissimo satisfatione, per la cognitione di cosa tanto

excellente, e grandissimo dolore, vedendo quasi un cadavero di quella
nobil patria, che stata regina del mondo, cos miseramente lacerato.
Onde quelle famose opere, che hoggid pi che mai serebbono in fiore e
belle, forno dalla scellerata rabbia e crudele impeto di malvaggi homini,
arse e distrutte, ma non per tanto, che non vi restasse quasi la machina
del tutto, ma senza ornamenti e, per dir cos, lossa 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
ornamentthe 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 identifi-
able 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
shadowun poco della immagine, e quasi lombraof 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 artists death. Castiglione draws a mythological parallel:

Quod lacerum corpus medica sanaverit arte,

Hippolytum, stygiis et revocarit aquis,

40 Raphael (with Baldassare Castiglione), Letter to Leo x (first version, MS Mantua, Archivio
Privato Castiglione), in Raphael in Early Modern Sources 14831602, vol. 1, ed. John
Shearman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 5012; trans. in Holt, Documentary
History of Art, vol. 1, 2901 (italics mine). See also Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 389.
41 Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 233.
A Giant Corrupt Body 115

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, muti-
lated throughout her body, and recall to life and to its ancient beauty the
citys 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 Neptunes bull from the sea
following a false accusation of rape by his lustful stepmotherthe ultimate
mythological example of unfair and untimely death. In Molzas poem, the disi-
ecta 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 deaprile, 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, 6503, 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, 13001550, ed. Stephen J. Campbell
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 139, and Garrard, Brunelleschis Egg, 240.
116 Gessert

Dogni 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 Romes
past glory reminds the living of their own mortality, as Castiglione himself
declares at the end of his poem.44 The citys ravaged state, however, notably
described with both masculine and feminine attributes, contains many poten-
tialities 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 Romas 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 exca-
vation 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 inter-
pretation 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, were 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
A Giant Corrupt Body 117

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 cul-
tural 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 ico-
nography 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, per-
haps making its first appearance on the Ara Pacis Augustae. Over the course of
the imperial period, Romas 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

relationship between ancient images of Roma and sixteenth-century personifications of

cities in Tuscany, see Lazzaro, Figuring Florence.
47 Ronald Mellor, The Goddess Roma, Aufstieg und Niedergang der Rmischen Welt 17, no. 2
(1981) 10126; see also Vermeule, The Goddess Roma.
48 Mellor, The Goddess Roma, 958.
49 Ibid., 1014.
50 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
118 Gessert

Figure3.6 Porphyry Apollo, once identified as Roma/Vesta, 2nd century ce with 18th-century res-
torations in white marble.
Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Farnese Collection
A Giant Corrupt Body 119

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 stan-
dard 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 Aspertinis
version of this same relief in the Codex Wolfegg of c. 15003, 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 mis-
reading 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

until the late eighteenth century, with Albacinis 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.
51 Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, 5056 and nos.
35, 36.
52 See for example Marcantonio Raimondis 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).
53 Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, no. 178c.
54 Ibid., no. 158b.
55 Gunter Schweikart, Der Codex Wolfegg: Zeichnungen nach der Antike von Amico Aspertini
(London: Warburg Institute, 1986), 94, folios 40v41r in the sketchbook.
120 Gessert

Figure3.7 Maarten van Heemskerck, Sculpture Court of the Casa Sassi, Rome, 15327.
Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (The Warburg Institute Photographic
Collection)

Renaissance knowledge of antiquity, gave the interpretations of the personifi-

cation of Roma increased importance.
Significantly, Romas 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, Ligorios 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), 179.
A Giant Corrupt Body 121

Figure3.8 Adventus, Great Trajanic Frieze, 11720 ce.

Arch of Constantine, Rome (dair 37.329A)

included frontispieces and accompanying illustrations with positive allegor-

ical 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 figures gen-
der 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 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.
58 Arthur M. Hind, Early Italian Engraving: A Critical Catalogue, vol. 5 (London: Bernard
Quaritch, 1948), 2556; Cunnally, Images of the Illustrious, 7986. A comparison with
122 Gessert

Figure3.9 Amico Aspertini, drawing of Trajanic Adventus relief, in the Codex Wolfegg, c. 15003.
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 Bocchis book of emblems, published in 1555 in
Bologna, shows a labeled, seated Roma as an androgyne, with gender some-
where between the bearded Epimetheus on the left and the buxom Pandora
above (Fig.3.11).59 This influential representation may have been the inspira-
tion for tienne Delaunes 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 smooth-
faced youth, dressed in male armor but surrounded by the billowing drapery of
a female goddess.60

other engravings and woodcuts by Palumba (also known as Master I.B. with a Bird) aligns
Romas sinewy musculature and flat breast much more closely with the artists male
figures. The copy of Palumbas Roma by the German printer Hieronymus Hopfer (153663)
is identified in the British Museum catalogue as male (1845,0809.1456).
59 Achilles Bocchius (Achille Bocchi), Symbolicarum quaestionum de universo genere quas
serio ludebat, pl. 124. British Museum Collection Online H,5.86.
60 A later print by Delaune (1580) shows the same four monarchies surrounded by a globe
(British Museum 1834,0804.116); here Romas heavily shadowed face appears to have a
A Giant Corrupt Body 123

Figure3.10 Giovanni Battista Palumba, Roma, 150010.

British Museum, London ( The Trustees of the British Museum)

mustache. On Delaune see Christophe Pollet, Les Gravures dEtienne Delaune (15181583),
2 vols. (Villeneuve dAscq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2001). For an interesting
contemporary comparandum, see also the Roma in the title page engraving of Palma
Giovanes Camei trumphi ornamenta animalia of 15501628 (British Museum 1969,0719.5).
124 Gessert

Figure3.11 Giulio Bonasone, Roma, in Achille Bocchis Book of Emblems, 1555.

British Museum, London ( The Trustees of the British Museum)
A Giant Corrupt Body 125

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 gen-
erally formed by the process of thought, the idea of personification (figura)
was itself grammatically feminine and therefore actually female for pre-
Renaissance thinkers.62 But for Renaissance writers and artists, the ancient
conventions were not convincingly straightforward,63 nor perhaps correspon-
dent 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 stat-
ues possible contradictory interpretations, In Mieke Bals terms, such inver-
sions 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 didnt 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 war-
ranted by the figuration itself. To envision ancient Roma as a singularly catego-
rized 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 James J. Paxson, Personifications Gender, Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric

16, no. 2 (1998): 14979.
62 Paxson, Personifications Gender, 168, 175 (individual personifications are women
because personification is a woman).
63 See for example Mary Edwards, Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel: Giottos Virtue
Fortitude Re-examined, Chapter 1 in this volume, which identifies the figure of Fortitude
in the series of Virtues and Vices in Giottos early fourteenth-century frescoes in the Arena
Chapel in Padua as a cross-dressing Omphale. The series incorporates male personifica-
tions as well.
64 On the personifications of Florence and Pisa in this statue, see also Lazzaro, Figuring
Florence; for an image, see Fig. 10.15.
65 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.
126 Gessert

Conclusions

The duality inherent in an intersexual interpretation of Roma also encapsu-

lates 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 Raphaels letter to Pope Leo x, which vacillates
between the creative plans of an artist/builder and the pleas for preserva-
tion of an antiquarian, and it reverberates and is refracted even in later
poetic descriptions of the ancient city, such as Joachim Du Bellays Antiquitez
de Rome (1558):

Celle qui de son chef les toiles passait,

Et dun pied sur Thtis, lautre dessous lAurore,
Dune main sur le Scythe, et lautre sur le More,
De la terre et du ciel la rondeur compassait:

Jupiter ayant peur, si plus elle croissait,

Que lorgueil des Gants se relevt encore,
Laccabla sous ces monts, ces sept monts qui sont ore
Tombeaux de la grandeur qui le ciel menaait.

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 Bellays 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 upona mirror image to the
Renaissance process. Though intensely personal and idiosyncratic in its
details, Du Bellays poem reflects the opposition between archaeology and

66 Joachim Du Bellay, Les Antiquits 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 Spensers 1591 translation, The Ruines of
Rome, http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/RuinsOfRome.htm.
A Giant Corrupt Body 127

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 resurrec-
tion of Rome as a European capital, and it still has a profound effect on archae-
ological 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 beacons68 signaling the citys renewal. Cristina Mazzoni
has compared the curvilinear domes and hills of Rome to the she-wolfs 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 oppo-
sitions 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 perfec-
tion, but wayward attempts to use the dialectic can also be dangerous. The
Fascist regimes use of romanit to classify numerous cultural oppositions,
including gender roles, is a particularly vivid example.70

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 chapter 4

Luca Signorellis 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.150911), 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 wood-
work cornice above and benches below; an allantica 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 (14901526) and Vittoria
Todeschini Piccolomini (14941570).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), 2245.
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, pub-
lished as Historiae senenses [Rome: Istituto storico italiano per let moderna e contemporanea,
1992], vii, 152) and repeated by such early historians as G.A. Pecci, Memorie storico-critiche della
citt di Siena che servono alla vita civile di Pandolfo Petrucci (Siena: 1755), 2412. The marriage
contract, however, is dated 1511; see Agnese Farnese, Dizionario biograficodegli italiani, 1995,
http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/agnese-farnese_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/;

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015|doi 10.1163/9789004289697_006

132 Leone

has been discerned for the complex iconography of the paintings, a problem
exacerbated by the dismantling of the room. Rather than pursuing the positiv-
ist 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 interpreta-
tion by privileging the responses of original viewers as conditioned by indi-
vidual predispositions and preconceptions. In this essay I analyze one scene
from the camera bellathe Roman matron Veturias intercession to save Rome
from the attack of her son, Coriolanus (Fig.4.1)to test the value of investigat-
ing 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 Rezeptionssthetik 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 Sixteenth-
Century 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, 10440, offers an instructive example in his essay on Boschs 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 demon-
strate 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), 113; William
W. Batstone, Provocation: The Point of Reception Theory, in Martindale and Thomas,
Classics and the Uses of Reception, 1420.
Luca Signorellis Veturia Persuading Coriolanus 133

Figure4.1 Luca Signorelli, Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome, c. 150911.

National Gallery, London ( National Gallery, London/Art Resource, ny)

the potential for multiple responses. He defines groups of like-minded indi-

viduals as interpretive communities who interpret a text according to simi-
lar interpretive conventions due to shared socio-cultural characteristics.5
Acontested issue in reader-response theoryand one that is germane to my
use of itis 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): 46585; Fish, Yet Once
More, Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies (2001): 2938.
134 Leone

experience which the historically first addressee may have had in his read-
ing?6 For the art historian, Jausss search for the viewpoint of the first reader
calls to mind Ernst Gombrichs notions of schemata and beholders 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-really-
was.8 Although I agree with Martindale that reconstructing the past as a sin-
gular and absolute entity is unattainable, there is value in searching forthe
original attitude implied by works of art (to paraphrase Jauss) as long aswe
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 inanalyzing works of art in their original context.10 Baskinss work on
early modern Italian domestic art merits further discussion in the context of
thisessay.
In Cassone Painting, Humanism, and Gender in Early Modern Italy (1998),
Cristelle Baskins offers an alternative to the prevailing method of human-
ist iconography that interprets narrative paintings on cassoni (wedding

6 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), 5963.
7 For discussion of Gombrichs 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 Jausss theory to
Gombrichs ideas in Art and Illusion (1960).
8 Martindale, Introduction, in Martindale and Thomas, Classics and the Uses of Reception,
2, 913.
9 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, 49.
10 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.
Luca Signorellis Veturia Persuading Coriolanus 135

chests) according to stoic themes, republican sentiments, and, above all,

self-abnegating virtue and results in fixed, stable readings, regardless of indi-
vidual 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
Signorellis Castigation of Cupid from the Petrucci camera bella (Fig.4.2). The
subject derives from Francesco Petrarcas Triumph of Chastity, which is part
of his poem cycle of the Trionfi (1340s). As the most discussed concept

Figure4.2 Luca Signorelli, Castigation of Cupid, c. 150911.

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), 178.
136 Leone

inRenaissance writings on women, which proclaimed it the greatest feminine

virtue, chastity was a popular theme for domestic paintings, but the monu-
mental 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 Chastitys 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 Baskinss interpretation.13 In
considering female spectatorship, she places the theme in the liminal space
between a brides 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
husbands role of guarding his wifes 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 societyas a promiscuous
woman.14 I employ Baskinss nuanced hermeneutical approach in interpreting
another scene from the same room, Signorellis 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 domes-
tic space, marriage, gender roles, and elite viewers. In positing how such viewers

12 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), 1525. For further discussion of chastity, see also Kelly and Leslie, Intro
duction, to Menacing Virgins, esp. 201, who maintain its preeminence as a feminine vir-
tue while discussing ambivalent attitudes toward it, and Tinagli, Women in Italian
Renaissance Art, 234. See April Oettinger, Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water in
Lorenzo Lottos Venus and Cupid, Chapter 7 in this volume, for a discussion of Lorenzo
Lottos painting The Triumph of Chastity and her interpretation of the imagery as poten-
tially glorifying Venus as well as Chastity.
13 For a historiography of woman as a social construct (and the opposing view of essential-
ism) and womans 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), 125.
14 Baskins, Il trionfo della pudicizia, 1257 (quotation 131).
Luca Signorellis Veturia Persuading Coriolanus 137

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 categorylearned womento which the couples daughter
Aurelia (151142) belonged.

The Petrucci, the Camera Bella, and Existing Interpretations

The decoration of the camera bella coincided with the height of the Petrucci
familys 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 citys long-stand-
ing Republican systemalbeit one that was riddled with discordwas trans-
formed into an oligarchic government that maintained, however, the same
republican structures and required constant vigilance on Petruccis part.15
Pandolfos 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

15 See Maurizio Gattoni da Camogli, Pandolfo Petrucci e la politica estera della Repubblica di
Siena (14871512) (Siena: Edizioni Cantagalli, 1997); A. Lawrence Jenkens, ed., Renaissance
Siena: Art in Context (Kirksville, mo: Truman State University Press, 2005), 512, for a
historiography of Renaissance Siena that outlines the various interpretations of histori-
ans; Fabrizio Nevola, Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2008), 1578, 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),
6173.
16 Giovanni Agosti and Vincenzo Farinella, Interni senesi allantica, 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),
138 Leone

renovation of his palace, which was located in his familys traditional neigh-
borhood. 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 fin-
ished 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 residencewith the most innovative and
sophisticated allantica faade 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 Petruccis
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 respec-
tively 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 representa-
tional value.21 Before turning to the narrative wall frescoes, some ambiguous
details about the rooms patronage, function, and date must be addressed.

38397; Susan E. Wegner, The Rise of St. Catherine of Siena as an Intercessor for the
Sienese, in Jenkens, Renaissance Siena: Art in Context, 17393; Jackson, The Patronage
of Pandolfo the Magnificent, 6173.
17 Nevola, Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City, 198. Prior to Nevolas 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): 10753.
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, 2001. The architect was probably
Giacomo Cozzarelli, Francesco di Giorgios 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 Patrizis life and writings, Felice Battaglia, Enea Silvio
Piccolomini e Francesco Patrizi. Due politici senese del quattrocento (Siena: Instituto comu-
nale darte e di storia, 1936), 73154.
21 Ferrari, Valentini, and Vivi, Il palazzo del Magnifico a Siena, 135; Agosti and Farinella,
Interni senesi allantica, 5902; 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
Luca Signorellis Veturia Persuading Coriolanus 139

Thescholarship on the palace typically identifies the patron of the decoration

as Pandolfo Petrucci but links the room symbolically to Borghese Petruccis
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 rooms 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 mans 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
placedon 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 Pandolfos 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 fam-
ily, 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 palaces
ownership, Ferrari, Valentini, and Vivi, Il Palazzo del Magnifico a Siena, 1137, and for the
location of the parts of the camera bella, ibid., 13553. For the location of the floor tiles,
Elizabeth Miller and Alun Graves, Rethinking the Petrucci Pavement, Renaissance
Studies 24 (2010): 967.
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, 1268, cite the acts of a notary that took place there in 1510.
Laurence Kanter, The Late Works of Luca Signorelli and His Followers, 14981559 (PhD
diss., New York University, 1989), 181, calls the room Pandolfos study. Clough, Pandolfo
Petrucci e il concetto di magnificenza, 392, suggests that it was Pandolfos audience
room. Jackson, The Patronage of Pandolfo the Magnificent, 645, 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.
140 Leone

appear in rooms used by them.24 It is possible that Pandolfo originally occu-

pied 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
thatmen 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 cam-
paign could have extended beyond 1509: the marriage contract demon-
strates 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 womens 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), 467.
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 Signorellis documented presence in Siena coincides with the 1509 date. For the
floor tile dates, Miller and Graves, Rethinking the Petrucci Pavement, 96. Further evi-
dence 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 fin-
ished; see Kanter, The Late Works of Luca Signorelli, 183, n. 71.
Luca Signorellis Veturia Persuading Coriolanus 141

nineteenth-century description of Antonio Barilis 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 1509February 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 allantica decoration of the
room proclaimed the Petrucci familys preeminence and classical anteced-
ents, 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 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 dated1511.
27 Miller and Graves, Rethinking the Petrucci Pavement, 96.
28 Ferrari, Valentini, and Vivi, Il palazzo del Magnifico a Siena, 111, n. 20.
29 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 isdisputed, and The Castigation of Cupid is also called The Triumph of Chastity. The
primary interpretations of the frescoes are Vilmos Ttrai, Gli affreschi del Palazzo
Petrucci aSiena: Una precisazione iconografica e un ipotesi sul programma, Acta histo-
riae artium24 (1978): 17783; Holmquist, The Iconography of a Ceiling by Pinturicchio,
5163;Kanter,The Late Works of Luca Signorelli, 184200; Clough, Pandolfo Petrucci
e il concetto di magnificenza, 3924; and Jackson, The Patronage of Pandolfo the
Magnificent, 657.
30 Jackson, The Patronage of Pandolfo the Magnificent, 62, 67 (quotation). Kanter, The
Late Works of Luca Signorelli, 197, makes a similar point.
142 Leone

proven unsatisfactory, but the iconographic interpretations can be grouped

into three overlapping categories: political, marital/dynastic, and civic. Vilmos
Ttrai (1978) devised the most intricate interpretation by reading the narra-
tives as reflecting specific moments in Pandolfo Petruccis 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 ones family and country.
Julie Holmquist (1984) expands upon Ttrais discussion of the narratives as
representing Pandolfos virtues. Following the approach of humanist iconog-
raphy, 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 ones 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 homog-
enous audience. Furthermore, when applied to the story of Veturia and

31 Ttrai, Gli affreschi del Palazzo Petrucci a Siena. I agree with Kanter, The Late Works of
Luca Signorelli, 199, who has argued that Ttrais insistence on reading an allusion in
every scene to a particular moment in the life of the Petrucci is ultimately unconvincing.
32 Holmquist, The Iconography of a Ceiling by Pinturicchio, Ch. 2, esp. 556 on Coriolanus.
In Chs. 3 and 4, Holmquist links the walls to the ceilings twenty-one frescoed panels
depicting deities, which she interprets as the masculine and feminine forces of the uni-
verse that are united by virtue and love.
33 Kanter, The Late Works of Luca Signorelli, 1979, rejects the specificity of Ttrais histori-
cal interpretation but concludes that the narratives could function broadly as models of
political, dynastic, and marital virtues. Clough, Pandolfo Petrucci e il concetto di mag-
nificenza, 3934.
34 Marilena Caciorgna and Roberto Guerrini, La virt figurata. Eroi ed eroine dallantichit
nellarte senese tra Medioevo e Rinascimento (Siena: Protagon Editori Toscani, 2003),
13943.
Luca Signorellis Veturia Persuading Coriolanus 143

Coriolanus, they place primacy on the male protagonist while diminishing the
womans part.35 On the contrary, Livy, who was well known in the Italian
Renaissance, gives Veturia the leading role in the culminating events of
Coriolanuss life (History of Rome, 2.3340). 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 Coriolanuss 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 Coriolanuss 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 mothers 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 ven-

erim, 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 miser-
rima, diu futura sum: de his videris, quos, si pergis, aut immatura mors
aut longa servitus manet. (Liv. 2:40)

35 In noting the iconography of the camera bella, Henry and Kanter, Luca Signorelli, 224, sug-
gest 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.
36 Petrarch first revived Livys 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 Scribners Sons, 2004), 154. Caciorgna and Guerrini, La virt figurata, 13943,
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 mem-
orabilium libri novem) and their Renaissance editions (all were available by the late fif-
teenth century). Of the four authors, Livy is most relevant to Signorellis depiction of
Veturia because he gives her a pivotal role with extensive speech.
144 Leone

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 suf-
fer 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 Coriolanuss 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 support-
ing 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 ambas-
sadors on horseback engage in discussion, perhaps over their failure to per-
suade 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,
191959, t.p.196476), 34951.
38 Catherine La Courreye Blecki, An Intertextual Study of Volumnia: From Legend to
Character in Shakespeares Coriolanus, in Privileging Gender in Early Modern England, ed.
Jean R. Brink (Kirksville, mo: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, Inc., 1993), 813,
makes the point that both Livy and Plutarch treated her in this way.
39 Caciorgna and Guerrini, La virt figurata, 141, identify the setting and figures in the
middle ground.
Luca Signorellis Veturia Persuading Coriolanus 145

sharply at his companion who raises his hand in a seeming gesture of disagree-
ment. 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 com-
position before the fresco was cut on the right side.40 The viewers eye is drawn
to the boy by the figures encircling him, the soldiers 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
Coriolanuss 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 under-
stood Coriolanus son as embodying the chronological moment of the narra-
tive and demonstrating the painters 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 express-
ing the tension between them. His figura serpentinata conveys movement for-
ward 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 sons
advance and raises her right hand. Her emphatic gesture stops Coriolanuss
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 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): 1824.
41 Andrew Butterfield, The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1997), 12635, 222.
42 This idea is indebted to Leonard Barkans 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.
146 Leone

Figure4.3 Andrea del Verrocchio, Putto with Dolphin, early 1480s.

Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (Scala/Art Resource, ny)
Luca Signorellis Veturia Persuading Coriolanus 147

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-laws erect body, as she takes a
potentially unifying step toward her spouse. All figures contribute to the narra-
tive, but Veturias critical role, and specifically her political agency, has led me
to probe beyond attempts to find a single interpretation of the painting relat-
ing 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 consid-
ered exemplary for the virtues they embodiedand were presented as models
to emulate in writings on female moral educationbut were ambiguous
models because their actions often contradicted early modern societal mores.43
In Veturias case, her act of self-expression contradicts the norms set forth in
treatises like Francesco Barbaros 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 Veturias actions as recounted in ancient texts lose their
moral clarity in Boccaccios retelling of her story. In De mulieribus claris
(c. 1380), Boccaccio presents Veturia as an angry mother who casts aside

43 On exemplary women as ambiguous models of behavior, Constance Jordan, Boccaccios

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), 2547; Constance Jordan,
Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University
Press, 1990), 3440; Blecki, An Intertextual Study of Volumnia, 8091; 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),
24464.
44 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, 457.
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), 177228. On Barbaros treatise and education
within the context of marriage, Maria Ludovica Lenzi, Donne e madonne: Leducazione
femminile nel primo Rinascimento italiano (Turin: Loescher, 1982), 709.
148 Leone

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 Veturias
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 Romes
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 sons 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 itis reasonable
to think that learned spectators were aware of Veturias 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 Blecki, An Intertextual Study of Volumnia, 878; Giovanni Boccaccio, On Famous

Women, trans. Virginia Brown (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2001), 22331.
On the normative roles of women, Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 4054.
46 Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant (London:
Penguin, 1999), 1378.
47 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.
48 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.
49 For the historiography of Renaissance Siena, Jenkens, Introduction, in Renaissance City,
120. Jenkens argues that the problem for Siena is that its history and art have tradition-
ally been viewed through the lens of Renaissance Florence. More recently, Jenkens con-
cludes, scholars have analyzed the citys 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.
Luca Signorellis Veturia Persuading Coriolanus 149

Davids 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 (14941570), the scant details of her biography offer a few addi-
tional insights. Vittoria hailed from one of the most powerful and learned fami-
lies in Siena. She was the grandniece of the famous humanist Pope Pius ii
(Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, r. 145864) 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
Vittorias father, Andrea Todeschini Piccolomini (14451505), had benefited
from the nepotism of his uncle, Pius ii, to gain positions and titles commensu-
rate with a leading citizen of Siena. He was the family member who commis-
sioned Pinturicchio to fresco the Piccolomini Library, which was done at the
initiative of Pius iii.52 Vittorias mother, Agnese Farnese (c. 14601509), 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 husbands death, arranging
marriages for two of her sons and paying Pinturicchio for the altarpiece for
her familys funerary chapel.53 Agnese Farnese offered a model for her daugh-
ter 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

50 Benjamin David, Narrative in Context. The Cassoni of Francesco di Giorgio, in Jenkens,

Renaissance Siena: Art in Context, 10937.
51 Clough, Pandolfo Petrucci e il concetto di magnificenza, 390; Jenkens, Renaissance City,
167.
52 Fabrizio Nevola, Lieto e trionphante per la citt: Experiencing a Mid-Fifteenth-Century
Imperial Triumph Along Sienas Strada Romana, Renaissance Studies 17 (2003): 5834;
Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen, 5960. Andrea Piccolominis positions included capi-
tano 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, 613.
150 Leone

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 womens 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 womenwhether texts that praise
women for fulfilling conventional female virtues, such as Vespasiano da
Bisticcis Il Libro delle lode e commendazione delle donne, or those that praise
women for attaining masculine qualities like intelligence, such as Agostino
Strozzis Defensio mulierumdo not argue for systemic societal change.56
Major conditions of womens 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 womens 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,
93116. 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), 2667.
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), 3364.
57 Lenzi, Donne e madonne, esp. Introduction and Ch. 3. On the authority of women in the
household, see also Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Womens 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), 358.
Luca Signorellis Veturia Persuading Coriolanus 151

beauty, one that Vittorias 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
Signorellis 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 Quercias statue of a female figure with
two children (141419), 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 Quercias 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 Volumnias 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.
Volumnias 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 (trous-
seau).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 David, Cassoni of Francesco di Giorgio, 133.

59 On the foundation myth of Siena, and on Jacopo della Quercias 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, 2489, 272.
60 On the counter-donora, Joanna Woods-Marsden, Portrait of A Lady, 14301520, in
Virtue and Beauty: Leonardos Ginevra de Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women,
ed. David Alan Brown (Washington and Princeton: National Gallery of Art, Princeton
UniversityPress, 2001), 65; Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, Art, Marriage, and Family in the
Florentine Renaissance Palace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 45. On gold
brocade fabric, Jacqueline Herald, Renaissance Dress in Italy 14001500 (London: Bell &
Hyman, 1981), 789.
61 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,
6387, and Roberta Orsi Landini and Mary Westerman Bulgarella, Costume in
Fifteenth-Century Florentine Portraits of Women, in Brown, Virtue and Beauty,
152 Leone

Figure4.4 Jacopo della Quercia, Rhea Silvia, 14149.

Palazzo Pubblico, Siena (Scala/Art Resource, ny)
Luca Signorellis Veturia Persuading Coriolanus 153

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 hairstylevisible blond locks, but bound, neat,
and ornamentedis the respectable style of married women in the Italian
Renaissance.63 While the adornment of the ancient Volumnia visually con-
nects 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

8997. 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 Pandolfos nephew, Francesco di Camillo Petrucci: Syson, Renaissance Siena,
3236.
62 Caroline Campbell, Revaluing Dress in History Paintings for Quattrocento Florence, in
Revaluing Renaissance Art, ed. Gabriele Neher and Rupert Shepherd (Brookfield, vt:
Ashgate, 2000), 13745.
63 Long, flowing hair signified innocence for virgins but eroticism for married women. Mary
Rogers, The Decorum of Womens Beauty: Trissino, Firenzuola, Luigini and the
Representation of Women in Sixteenth-Century Painting, Renaissance Studies 2 (1988):
623; Woods-Marsden, Portrait of a Lady, 657; Musacchio, Art, Marriage, and Family,
1624; Alison C. Fleming, Maiden or Matron: The Unusual Iconography of the Virgin
Mary with the Long Flowing Hair, Nierika 2 (2012): 3241.
64 The marriage is commonly described as such; for instance, Eisenbichler, The Sword and
the Pen, 60.
65 On the transitional stages in a womans life, Baskins, Cassone Painting, Humanism, and
Gender, Ch. 2, esp. 28, 489; Anne Jacobson-Shutte, Trionfo delle donne: Tematiche di
rovesciamento dei ruoli nella Firenze rinascimentale, Quaderni Storici 44 (1980): 47496.
66 Kanter, The Late Works of Luca Signorelli, 198.
67 On Pierfrancesco Piccolominis role in Vittorias marriage, Dizionario biografico degli
italiani, Agnese Farnese. On humanists writings of marriage as a political entity, Jordan,
Renaissance Feminism, 545.
154 Leone

Whereas painted series of donne illustri, a popular type of domestic decora-

tion, depicted isolated figures of historic women as representations of stereo-
typical 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 con-
trolled. 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 Veturias 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, matronlydecidedly not
nubilewoman 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 reluc-
tance. This Veturia is not the angry mother of Boccaccios tale but rather Livys
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, 346, makes the point in discussing
the sequential narratives on cassoni. For an example of a Sienese Virtuous Men and
Women series, Syson, Renaissance Siena, 23444.
69 Ferguson, A Room Not Their Own, esp. 99100, 1045.
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, 513; Kathleen Wren Christian, Empire without End: Antiquities
Collections in Renaissance Rome, c. 13501527 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010),
989, 105.
71 Wiesner-Hanks, Womens Authority in the State and Household, 34.
Luca Signorellis Veturia Persuading Coriolanus 155

helped to structure the social expectations about the permeable, and some-
times 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 occasionsincluding in Sienawhen women acted as orators and
earned praise for their speech. Chroniclers record that for the wedding festivi-
ties of Frederick iii and Leonora of Portugal, celebrated in Siena in 1452, edu-
cated 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 intellectbut 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 Ippolitas 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 Piuss respective remarks allow us to envision cases
in which female utterance was acceptable to Sienese recipients. The represen-
tation of Veturias speech may have conjured such real occasions in the view-
ers 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 Nevola, Lieto e trionphante per la citt, 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.
73 Anthony F. DElia, Marriage, Sexual Pleasure, and Learned Brides in the Wedding Orations
of Fifteenth-Century Italy, Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002): 4189 (DElias translation).
74 DElia, Marriage, Sexual Pleasure, and Learned Brides, 416.
75 Julia L. Hairston, Skirting the Issue: Machiavellis Caterina Sforza, Renaissance Quarterly
53 (2000): 69294. On the early modern debate about the authority of ruling women, Wiesner-
Hanks, Womens Authority in the State and Household, 2760.
76 Tinagli, Womanly Virtues in Quattrocento Florentine Marriage Furnishings, 26584. For
another case study of the likely interactions of female and male viewers with an Italian
156 Leone

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, domi-
nated by passion over reason, prone to lustin 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 irrespon-
sible 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, cher-
ishing 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 deferen-
tially 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, Signorellis 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 Veturias 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 Signorellis painting, both women

Renaissance domestic painting featuring a female protagonist, see Maurer, The Trouble
with Pasipha, Chapter 6 in this volume.
77 My description of the transformation from unmarried to married man, and Albertis dis-
cussion of it, relies on Tinagli, Womanly Virtues in Quattrocento Florentine Marriage
Furnishings, 2678.
78 Caciorgna and Guerrini, La virt 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 tipografico-
editrice torinese, 1971), v,4,1.
79 Boccaccio, On Famous Women, 22931. Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman,
202, does not interpret Boccaccios addition to the story as diminishing the praise for
Luca Signorellis Veturia Persuading Coriolanus 157

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 storys aftereffects with the climactic
moment represented and, thereby, served as a warning against gender inver-
sion. 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 Petruccis
epithet of Il Magnifico. But whether the representation of such display rein-
forces 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 Bala. 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

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 Veturias victory, emphasizing the damage she caused over her achievement.
80 To explore this issue further, one might study contemporary sumptuary laws. Interestingly,
in 1509, the Bala revoked sumptuary laws for Petrucci women; Clough, Pandolfo Petrucci
e il concetto di magnificenza, 383.
81 Maurizio Gattoni da Camogli, La Titanomachia: Let dei Nove e dei Petrucci a Siena e le
guerre dItalia (14771524) (Siena: Cantagalli, 2010), 12341; and Eisenbichler, The Sword
and the Pen, 60.
82 Giugurta Tommasi, Dellhistorie di Siena: Deca seconda, ed. Mario De Gregorio, vol. 3
(Siena: Accademia Senese degli Intronati, 2006), 20: Cos ristrettosi con alcuni suoi i pi
cari e con altri suo fratello, fanciulletto, e prese quante gio[i]e quanti pi denari li fu pos-
sibile, abbandonando lo stato, la patria, la casa propria, [e] la moglie con quattro piccolo
sue fanciulline.
158 Leone

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 (146571) 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 populaces 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. 15147). 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 wis-
dom.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 medi-
ate 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 Petruccis
story is the negation of Machiavellis 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 occur-
ring at the very time that the definition of a republic, or respublica, was being
redefined to refer to popular or oligarchic governmentgovernments by a

83 History of Rome 2.3435.

84 Battaglia, Enea Silvia Piccolomini e Francesco Patrizi, 1012.
85 Francesco Patrizi, Il sacro regno del gran Patritio: del uero reggimento, e de la uera felicit
del principe, e beatitudine humana (Vinegia, 1547), ix, 203.
86 Niccol 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 Niccol 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 Machiavellis Discourses on Livy,
in Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, Cambridge Companions Online, ed. Najemy (2010),
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521861250.007, 97.
Luca Signorellis Veturia Persuading Coriolanus 159

plurality of personsand 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 partys 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 Borgheses exile, they might have thought the representation of a
famous ancient exemplar of exile in the Palazzo Petrucci was justifiably pre-
scient. 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 (151142) 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 relax-
ation of sumptuary laws.90 In The Birth of Feminism (2009), Sarah Ross contrib-
utes substantially to overturning the notion that intellectual capabilities
necessarily compromised the reputation of early modern women.91 She con-
vincingly 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): 45382, doi: 10.1177/0090591710366369.
89 Tommasi, Dellhistorie di Siena, Deca seconda, vol. 3, 45.
90 G. Gigli, Diario senese, vol. 1 (Siena, 1854), 71.
91 For an earlier assessment of women intellectuals that characterizes them as compro-
mised 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),6690.
160 Leone

modern Italian women like Isotta Nogarola (141866), Laura Cereta (146999),
and Cassandra Fedele (1465?1558) avoided condemnation and even gained
their contemporaries respect, burnishing the reputation of their families and
cities. Refuting Boccaccios characterization of donne illustri, Rosss revisionist
study argues that learned women were not exceptionala point also made by
Laura Ceretaand embodied both traditional feminine virtues and intellec-
tual faculties.92 Rosss 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 Vittorias eldest daughter, was a participant in this liter-
ary culture.
Only four years old when she left Siena with her mother and sisters after her
fathers exile, Aurelia returned to the city in 1524 for her first marriage, which
occurred during the brief period (15234) of restored Petrucci authority under
Borgheses 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 familys 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 Betussis translation of Boccaccios On Famous Women (first pub-
lished 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 96111.
93 Diana Maury Robin, Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation
in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 12730.
94 Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen, 62.
95 Tommasi, Dellhistorie di Siena, Deca seconda, vol. 3, 42.
Luca Signorellis Veturia Persuading Coriolanus 161

A decade later, the fresco intersected with Aurelias horizon of expecta-

tions 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 Ebreos
Dialoghi damore, 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 Vignalis Dulpisto in 1540 and Bartolomeo Carli
Piccolominis 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 Virgils work. One of
the other translations was dedicated to Aurelias 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 Vignalis dedication tells
us that Aurelia was engaged in more demanding studies, but Piccolominis
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 inter-
ests, 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 everyones law,/For only then will I call you worthy of valor.100 Her words
describe the factionalism that plagued Sienese politics after her fathers 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 Petruccis [hispanophile] natal or marital clans.
97 On the dedications to Aurelia, Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen, 6671. On Giulia
Gonzaga, Robin, Publishing Women, 1526.
98 Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen, 689.
99 Ibid., 716.
100 Ibid., 73: Fa delle membra sparse un corpo solo/Ed un giusto voler sia legge a tutti,/Ch
allora io ti dir di valor degna.
162 Leone

The focus on discord in Aurelias poem brings to mind Machiavellis 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 paint-
ing and Machiavellis political theory in the Discourses. It is not unrealistic to
think that Aurelia knew Machiavellis writings, since he wrote about her grand-
father. 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 rela-
tion 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
Aurelias poem, one that Sienas 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 Livys 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 paintings active engagement in the social, political, and cultural dis-
courses 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., 745, argues that Machiavelli would have been proud of Aurelias 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.
Luca Signorellis Veturia Persuading Coriolanus 163

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. Signorellis 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.

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 chapter 5

Queer Fragments: Sodoma, the Belvedere Torso,

and Saint Catherines 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 saints life,
including, in an image covering the entire left wall, the beheading of
Niccol di Tuldo, a political prisoner who came under Catherines minis-
try during his final days (Figs.5.15.3).2 In this fresco, framed illusionisti-
cally 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. Niccols
painted body and head share the chapels space with the actual relic head of

I am very grateful to this volumes editors, David Areford, Joanna Gardner-Huggett, Katherine
McIver, and Kathleen Spies for their feedback on earlier versions of this essay; I also appreci-
ate 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, 56288, especially 57980 for the fresco
depicting Niccol di Tuldo, and Susan E. Wegner, Heroizing Saint Catherine: Francesco
Vannis Saint Catherine of Siena Liberating a Possessed Woman, Womans Art Journal 19
(1998): 317.
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: Citt 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), 17393; 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), 41139. The scene of Niccol di Tuldos execution was only
rarely depicted, and the chapels fresco appears to be the first instance. For Niccol di Tuldo,
see F. Thomas Luongo, The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2006), 916.

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

170 Smith

Figure5.1 Sodoma, Execution of Niccol 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, Catherines 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
Queer Fragments 171

Figure5.2 Sodoma, Detail of Execution of Niccol di Tuldo, 1526.

Chapel of Saint Catherine of Siena (Foto Lensini, Siena)

Figure5.3 Sodoma, Detail of Execution of Niccol di Tuldo, 1526.

Chapel of Saint Catherine of Siena (Foto Lensini, Siena)
172 Smith

Figure5.4 Giovanni di Stefano, Marble tabernacle with relic head of Saint Catherine of
Siena, 1470s.
Chapel of Saint Catherine of Siena (Foto Lensini, Siena)
Queer Fragments 173

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 viewers ability to conceptually reconstitute the fragmented body.
Sodomas well-known predilection for the use of allantica details in his
works is evident throughout the chapel, as seen, for example, in the Roman-
inspired 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 Niccols 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 particu-
lar model? While the obvious answer may lie in the convenience of a headless
bodycomplete with jagged edges along the severed neckthat 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 Sodomas recasting
of the fragmentary Torso as a freshly decapitated body capable of communicat-
ing the gender ambiguity required by its devotional setting while also reflecting
the artists own personal reception of gender in ancient art. The chapels painted
and actual bodily fragments will be viewed through a lens that queers, or desta-
bilizes our confidence in, the relationship of representation to identity.

The Belvedere Torso and the Reception of Gender

Consideration of the Belvedere Torsos 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 Catherines head, see Caterina Gazzi, Le reliquie di S. Caterina da Siena
(Rome: Edizioni cateriniane, 1935), 4567; 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, 5714; and Wolfgang Loseries, Un theatrum sacrum del Sodoma: La cappella di Santa
Caterina, in Lultimo secolo della Repubblica di Siena: Arti, cultura e societ, ed. Mario Ascheri,
Gianni Mazzoni, and Fabrizio Nevola (Siena: Accademia senese degli Intronati, 2008), 329.
4 Andre Hayum, Giovanni Antonio BazziIl Sodoma (New York: Garland, 1976), 4950;
Wolfgang Loseries, Sodoma e la scultura antica, in Umanesimo a Siena: Letteratura, arti figu-
rative, musica, ed. Elisabetta Cioni and Daniela Fausti (Siena: Scandicci, 1994), 3589.
174 Smith

Figure5.5 Apollonios of Athens, Belvedere Torso, 1st century bce.

Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican Museums, Vatican City
(Scala/Art Resource, ny)
Queer Fragments 175

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 works impact on a rtists is extensive, but here I will focus
on the fragments 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 well-
preserved or slightly fragmented sculptures, altering these stone bodies per-
haps for narrative reasons, though the exact rationale is not always clear.8 Most
famously, the Pasquinoa 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 eventswas dressed on the feast day of
Saint Mark usually as a male figure, such as Janus, Hercules, or Mars, but occa-
sionally 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 fr Theorie und Praxis der Bildenden Kunst vom 16.
Jahrhundert bis Winckelmann (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1973); Raimund Wnsche, 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),
287314; and Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making
of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 191201.
6 For the question of restoration of the Belvedere Torso, see Wnsche, 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 Wnsche, Torso
vom Belvedere, 28990.
8 See, for example, Amico Aspertinis gender inversion of the reclining figure in the so-called Icarus
Relief in his Codex Wolfegg, fols. 46v47r. Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 1701 and 3767, n. 116.
9 Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 217; Denise la Monica, Ex aere, ex marmore: Una sola statua, in
Ex marmore: Pasquini, Pasquinisti, Pasquinate, nellEuropa moderna, ed. Chrysa Damianaki,
Paolo Procaccioli, and Angelo Romano (Manziana: Vecchiarelli, 2006), 30520; Kathleen
176 Smith

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 work-
shops.10 It is in this rather fluid artistic environment that the Belvedere Torsos
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 Brescias 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 Heemskercks 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 Sodomas painted body of Niccol 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 sculptures potential for gender slippage, or
at least gender neutrality. Thus, while most early sixteenth-century represen-
tations of the Belvedere Torso support a masculine identity for the original
figure, this does not mean that the statues 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 Michelangelos 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.13501527 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 1857.
10 Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 1817. 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, Rmische Antikensammlungen im Spiegel
eines Musterbuchs der Renaissance, Mnchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 21 (1970):
100, and Christian, Empire Without End, 279. For Giovanni Antonio da Brescias engraving,
see Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 1934.
12 Maarten van Heemskerck, Sketchbook 1.63, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. For the drawing,
see Wnsche, Torso vom Belvedere, 292, and Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 1923.
Queer Fragments 177

Figure5.6 Giovanni Antonio da Brescia, Belvedere Torso, c. 1515.

British Museum, London ( Trustees of the British Museum)
178 Smith

Figure5.7 Maarten van Heemskerck, Belvedere Torso with Fragment of an Obelisk, c. 15326.
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 Aspertinis drawing of
ancient sculptures from various Roman collections, a folio of the Codex
Wolfegg datable to 15003 (Fig.5.8).14 As one of the first known depictions of
the Belvedere Torso, this page has accompanied nearly every major examina-
tion 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 juxta-
position, 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), 22345; Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 1978.
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), 117, 34; and Gunter Schweikhart, Der Codex Wolfegg. Zeichnungen nach der Antike
von Amico Aspertini (London: The Warburg Institute, 1986), 278, 96100.
Queer Fragments 179

Figure5.8 Amico Aspertini, Antiquities in Roman Collections, in the Codex Wolfegg, c. 15003.
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
180 Smith

confirm a reference to the Belvedere Torso as Hercules, this aspect is

downplayed, and thus Amico Aspertinis 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 artists 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 identifica-
tion.15 The gender of the standing figure next to the pedestal is likewise uncer-
tain, 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 womens garb and performing womens work in
submission while she wore his lion skin, a story well known in the Renaissance
from Boccaccios De mulieribus claris (24.27, where Omphale is identified as
Iole) as well as Ovids Fasti (2.30558).17 Equally complex was the late medieval

15 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, 967; Christian, Empire Without End, 315.
16 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),
2152, and Patricia Simons, Hercules in Italian Renaissance Art: Masculine Labour and
Homoerotic Libido, Art History 31 (2008): 63264.
17 Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women, ed. and trans. Virginia Brown (Cambridge, ma: Harvard
University Press, 2001), 945; Ovid, Fasti, 2nd ed., trans. James George Frazer (Cambridge,
ma: Harvard University Press, 1987), 7983. Hercules dressed as a woman was illustrated
on a number of occasions in Roman art, including on Arretine bowls that may have been
Queer Fragments 181

and Renaissance artistic reception of Hercules as a sexually ambivalent char-

acter who loved men as well as women, with responses ranging from a reaffir-
mation of his status as a masculine ideal to his feminization as allegory.18 An
artists 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 power-
ful 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 depic-
tions, wearing it as a trophy. Thus, the viewer is invited to not only admire his
idealized body but also to clothe it mentally, with Omphales feminizing garb
as a possible alternative to the lion skin.

Sodoma and Antiquity

The impact of the art of antiquity, particularly relief and freestanding sculp-
ture, on the paintings of Sodoma has been well established in studies by
Andre Hayum and Wolfgang Loseries.19 Yet the artists use of the Belvedere
Torso in the context of the Sienese chapel frescoes demands a fuller investiga-
tion. 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), 23346. For a more extensive review of the ancient literary references to and ico-
nography of Omphale, and for an interpretation of Giottos figure of Fortitude as Omphale
in the frescoes of the Arena Chapel in Padua, see Mary D. Edwards, Cross-Dressing in the
Arena Chapel: Giottos Virtue Fortitude Re-examined, Chapter 1 in this volume.
18 See Simons, Hercules in Italian Renaissance Art, 63264. For Nicolo Pisanos 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, 234, 28, 356; Loseries, Sodoma e la scultura antica,
34581.
20 Hayum, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, 167, 29, 50. It is possible that Sodoma made at least three
trips to Rome between these dates: in 15078, when he worked on the ceiling of the Stanza
della Segnatura at the Vatican; in 15167, when decorating the Villa Farnesina for
182 Smith

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 antiqui-
ties owned by Sodoma and displayed in his studio and house.22 Among the
objects mentioned in inventories are a number of sculptural fragments, includ-
ing 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 Sodomas general access to antiquities is well established, less often
examined has been the influence of ancient sculpture on the artists famous
androgynous figural style, reflecting perhaps a very personal reaction to the
legacy of antiquity. The artists 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 Sodomas assumed bisexuality
may have shaped his aesthetics and response to ancient art are still nascent.24

Agostino Chigi; and at some point between 1519 and 1525, perhaps to attend Chigis wed-
ding 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.
21 Wnsche, Torso vom Belvedere, 2901. 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 (15234)
or Paul iii (153449), is uncertain.
22 Inventories of antique objects in the artists studio and home were drawn up on the occa-
sion of theft by his pupil Girolamo Magagni in 1529, included in Sodomas will of 1549, and
referred to in a letter written to Alessandro Corvini in 1551. For Sodomas collection, see
G.F. Hill, Sodomas Collection of Antiquities, Journal of Hellenic Studies 26 (1906): 2889;
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 antichit
a Roma tra 400 e 500, ed. Anna Cavallaro (Rome: De Lucca, 2007), 2339.
23 De Romanis, Tra Siena e Roma, 2356: Una tegola di terra antiqua drentovi uno Hercole
con uno toro et una donna con polli in uno bastone.
24 For Sodomas 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), 97101; and
Christopher Reed, Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2011), 457.
Queer Fragments 183

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 Leonardos sfumato. The result was a
series of sensual, androgynous figures, as exemplified by a painted banner of
Saint Sebastian, commissioned by the saints Sienese confraternity in May of
1525 (Fig.5.9).25 As explained by Elizabeth Bartman, ancient Roman homo-
erotic attraction to androgynous or Ephebic bodies stemmed from of a dis-
tinct 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 Laocon and his Sons,
which he evoked in the figure of Vulcan painted below the Tent of Darius at the
Villa Farnesina.28 Sodomas Christ at the Column (c. 15114), 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 artists use of ideal musculature, a twisted torso, and a vulnerable posi-
tion 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 artists choice of
this work as a model for the body of Niccol 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, Sodomas selective appropriation and synthesis of ancient frag-
ments 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, 1915.
26 Elizabeth Bartman, Eross Flame: Images of Sexy Boys in Roman Ideal Sculpture,
Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. Supplementary Volumes 1 (2002): 24971.
27 Saslow, 989.
28 Hayum, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, 35.
29 Ibid., 27; Piero Torriti, La Pinacoteca nazionale di Siena: I dipinti (Genoa: Sagep, 1990), 362.
184 Smith

Figure5.9 Sodoma, Saint Sebastian Pierced with Arrows, c. 15256.

Palazzo Pitti, Florence (Alfredo Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at
Art Resource, ny)
Queer Fragments 185

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 geni-
talia of the saint calls attention to the pubic area while occluding definitive iden-
tification of the figures 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 Sodomas consideration of ancient sculp-
ture 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 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.
31 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), 1346.
32 It is possible that Sodoma, or other Renaissance artists, were aware of Plutarchs descrip-
tion 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 essen-
tial excellence. For others, in their eagerness to imitate the turn of the neck and the expres-
sive, 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., Plutarchs
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): 7489. I
am grateful to Alison Poe and Marice Rose for pointing out this passage to me.
33 James Byram Shaw, Drawings By Old Masters at Christ Church Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1976), vol. 1, 107.
186 Smith

Figure5.10 Gaddi Torso, c. 2nd century bce.

Uffizi, Florence (Scala/Art Resource, ny)
Queer Fragments 187

Figure5.11 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 figures 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), 1412, no. 97. The work is also depicted in a Northern
188 Smith

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 hermaphro-
ditesurrounded in part by a thin veil.35 Sodomas 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 figures
sex is decidedly female, a choice by the artist paralleled by the fate of the sculp-
tural 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

Sodomas apparent consideration of ancient sculpture in terms of gender and

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

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.
35 Antiquarie Prospettiche romane composte per Prospectivo Melanese Depictore, stanza 18:
Hermaphroditae 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, 1656.
36 Loseries, Sodoma e la scultura antica, 361. For the fresco, see Torriti, La Pinacoteca nazio-
nale di Siena, 3624.
37 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 Hrtel, 1881), no. 845; Raissa Calza, Antichit di
Villa Doria Pamphili (Rome: E Luca, 1977), no. 75; and Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 376,
n. 103.
Queer Fragments 189

the saint in a space where the main focus is her relic head (Figures5.1, 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 chapels 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
Catherines followers, the earliest datable before 1406; abbreviated versions
also feature in depositions offered in 1414 in support of Catherines canoniza-
tion and in Tommaso Caffarinis biography of the saint, completed by 1417.
Thus, despite the omission of Niccol di Tuldos story from Raymonds official
account of the saints life, the text of Catherines letter was obviously accessible
and known at the time of the frescos execution.38
As literary and religious scholars have long noted, the famous letter essen-
tially describes a criminal execution but transforms the event into a saintly
martyrdom accompanied by a vision of the dead mans apotheosis.39 The letter
recounts how Catherine visited Niccol 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 Niccol arrived, he knelt submissively beside
Catherine, and his severed, bloody head fell into her hands after the execution-
ers blow. In the text, the repentant Niccol is recast as a martyr and his execution
compared to Christs sacrifice, a link made physically manifest through the

38 The first printed edition of Catherines letters appeared in 1500, allowing even broader
access to her writings in advance of Sodomas painting of the fresco some 26 years later.
For a history of the specific letter regarding Niccol di Tuldo, see Luongo, Saintly Politics,
914; for the early reception of Catherines 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): 129.
39 For the text of the letter, identified as T273/G97/DT31, see Catherine of Siena, Epistolario,
ed. Umberto Meattino (Rome: Edizioni Paolini, 1979), 12981302; for the English transla-
tions 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, 8290.
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), 3355; Daniel
Bornstein, Spiritual Kinship and Domestic Devotions, in Gender and Society in
Renaissance Italy, ed. Judith Brown and Robert Davis (New York: Longman, 1998), 1779;
Joan P. Del Pozzo, The Apotheosis of Niccol di Tuldo: An Execution Love Story, Modern
Language Notes 110 (1995): 16477; and Luongo, Saintly Politics, 90122.
190 Smith

recurrent invocation of the Saviors blood. Catherine describes Niccol 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 Niccols blood into his own blood, taking
Niccols soul into his side wound.41 Furthermore, at the beginning and end of
the letter, Catherine specifically recalls Christs crucifixion through additional,
broader references to his blood and side wound. She thus characterizes
Niccols execution as an imitation of the Passion of Christ.
The text also underscores Catherines unfulfilled desire to be martyred herself,
often expressed through her interest in the mingling of bodies and blood. While
consoling Niccol 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 reveal-
ing is Catherines admission that, having arrived early at the place of execution,
she knelt down and stretched out her neck on the block; when nothing hap-
pened, she lamented that she did not succeed in getting what I longed for.43
Indeed, it was Niccol 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 Niccol and Catherine are
joined, and that the martyrdom of one is therefore shared by both. In this regard,

40 Poi egli gionse, come uno agnello mansueto . Posesi gi con grande mansuetudine, e io
gli distesi el collo, e chinmi gi ramentli el sangue de lAgnello: Catherine of Siena,
Letters, vol. 1, 88.
41 Allora si vedeva Dio e Uomo, come si vedesse la chiarit del sole, e stave aperto e riceveva
sangue nel sangue suo . Poi che ebbe ricevuto el sangue e l desiderio suo, ed egli ricevette
lanima sua e la misse nella bottiga aperta del costato suo: Catherine of Siena, Letters, vol. 1, 88.
42 E teneva el capo suo in sul petto mio. Io sentivo uno giubilo, uno odore del sangue suo,
e non era senza lodore mio, el quale io aspetto di spandere per lo dolce sposo Ges:
Catherine of Siena, Letters, vol. 1, 87.
43 Aspettlo 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 gi, e distesi el
collo in sul ceppo; ma non mi venne fatto che io avessi leffetto pieno di me ine su:
Catherine of Siena, Letters, vol. 1, 87.
44 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): 89102.
Queer Fragments 191

Catherine employs a matrimonial metaphor to comfort her charge and to glo-

rify his apotheosis. To console Niccol, 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 Catherines receipt
of the bloody, severed head into her arms and her response with a vow, I will.46
The execution narratives 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 Niccol becomes Christ both as sacrificial
lamb and as mystical spouse to Catherine. Furthermore, at the moment of
Niccols entry into the side wound of Christ, Catherine writes, he turned as
does a bride when, having reached her husbands 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 Niccol 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 Christs side, Niccol
becomes the bridehis gender invertedand 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, Catherines mystical marriage to Christ was
among the most often represented moments of her vita.49 For her part,
Catherines gender is inverted in the letter, too, as she becomes Christ through
the imitatio Christi, the shared martyrdom that was effected by Niccols
execution, which she had longed to experience and had theatrically rehearsed

45 Confortati, fratello mio dolce, ch tosto giognaremo alle nozze; e, ricevuto el segno,
dissi: Giuso alle nozze, fratello mio dolce, ch test sarai all vita durabile: Catherine of
Siena, Letters, vol. 1, 87, 88.
46 E cos dicendo recevetti el capo ne le mani mie, fermando locchio nella divina bont,
dicendo: Io voglio: Catherine of Siena, Letters, vol. 1, 88.
47 For a more comprehensive discussion of this conflation, see Luongo, Saintly Politics, espe-
cially 113.
48 Volsesi come fa la sposa quando gionta alluscio dello sposo, che volle locchio e l capo
adietro, inchinando chi l acompagnata, e con latto dimostra segni di ringratiamento:
Catherine of Siena, Letters, vol. 1, 89.
49 Luongo, Saintly Politics, 10711; George Kaftal, Saint Catherine in Tuscan Painting (Oxford:
Blackfriars Press, 1949), 4651. 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).
192 Smith

upon her early arrival at the chopping block. Catherine, Niccol, and Christ are
thus perceived to be one and interchangeable, united through marriage and
martyrdom; fittingly, Niccols last words before the fall of the axe were Jesus
and Catherine.50
The fragmented body of Niccol painted in Catherines chapel at San
Domenico may have provided a site where viewers familiar with the letters
complicated play of gender could project the merging of both male and
female, Niccol and Catherine, into a single figure (Fig.5.3). Ultimately, it is
Sodomas very subtle transformation of the Belvedere Torso that allows such a
projection onto Niccols 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 ambigu-
ity. The rippling and defined musculature of the statue has been relatively
deemphasized, although the articulation of the reconstructed arms, shoul-
ders, and upper back still provides a sense of masculine power. By contrast, the
lower bodywhere the artist has also reconstructed the extremities missing
from the modeltakes on a softer, more pliant fleshiness at odds with the
hardness of dense muscle. This malleable quality is made clear in the render-
ing of Niccols left thigh, where the fingers of the executioners 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 gap-
ing 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,
Niccols mutilated body also may have recalled visual and hagiographic tradi-
tions 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 Ges e Caterina: Catherine of Siena, Letters, vol. 1, 88.
Queer Fragments 193

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 vagi-
nal, 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 Sodomas headless body
and to understand it as appropriate.
Other bodily fragments in the chapel, namely the painted head of Niccol
and the relic head of Catherine, also have a part to play in the meaning of the
bloody corpse. Niccols head is held aloft in the fresco, confirming the frag-
mentary nature of his body below; it also visually parallels Catherines actual
disembodied head over the nearby altar (Fig.5.4). The fact that the gaze of
the confraternity member holding Niccols head is turned towards the relic
further underscores the connection between the two heads (Figs. 5.2,
and5.12).52 It is worth recalling that one of the miracles mentioned in the
saints vita involved the gender inversion of the saints face before the eyes of
her confessor, Raymond of Capua.53 While visiting a sick Catherine in a con-
vent, Raymond began to doubt the authenticity of her visionary experiences.
As he was thinking such thoughts, he glanced at her face and saw not
Catherines 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 Catherines 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
chapels formal and spatial configuration. Indeed, the frescos illusionistic

51 Robert Mills, Whatever You Do is a Delight to Me! Masculinity, Masochism, and Queer
Play in Representations of Male Martyrdom, Exemplaria 13 (2001): 158; 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), 4965.
52 Loseries, Un theatrum sacrum del Sodoma, 329.
53 Raimondo da Capua, S. Caterina da Siena: Legenda maior, trans. P. Giuseppe Tinagli
(Siena: Edizioni Cantagalli, 1994), 95; Martha Easton, Why Cant 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), 3389; 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),
25788.
194 Smith

Figure5.12 View of Execution of Niccol 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 chapels real and fictive spaces to merge. Further, on
the saints feast day, the handling of the head relic as it was removed from
the altar and processed may have replicated the raising of Niccols head
in the painting.54 Ultimately, the viewer had an opportunity here to restore
the fragment conceptually, substituting Catherines head for Niccols on the
decapitated body. The resultant composite figure, much in line with Sodomas
interests in ancient sculpture and androgyny, may have been the artists goal
as he sought to visualize the complicated meaning of Catherines letter about
Niccols execution.

54 For ritual activities on Catherines feast day, the first Sunday of May, see Girolamo Gigli,
Diario senese (1854; reprint, Bologna: Arnaldo Forni editore, 1974), vol. 1, 16970; and
Parsons, The Cult of Saint Catherine of Siena, 278.
Queer Fragments 195

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, Sodomas choice of this famous sculpture as model
for Niccols 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 innumera-
ble times from various viewpoints, utilized as a figural model for countless
works, and prominently displayed in the Belvedere Courtyard; by the mid-
Cinquecento, its aesthetic value was deemed substantial enough to dissuade
any interest in restoration. With the commission for the frescoes of Catherines
chapel, Sodoma no doubt saw in the Torso the perfect, pliable vehicle for map-
ping a text that played with gender onto the fragmented body in a spatial and
iconographic dialogue between the fictive and real. Finally, the artists use of
the Torso should be tied to the possibilities inherent in his own personal recep-
tion 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.

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 chapter 6

The Trouble with Pasipha: Engendering a Myth

at the Gonzaga Court

Maria F. Maurer

The story of Pasipha and her insatiable lust for a bull occurs widely in classi-
cal 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 new-
found 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 Pasipha, 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 fres-
coes, 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
Pasipha 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 Pasipha, see Karl Scherling, Pasipha, Real-Encyclopdie der
classischen Altertumswissenschaft, ed. A. Pauly, G. Wissowa, and W. Kroll, vol. 18 (1949), cols.
207782; Euripides, I cretesi, trans. Raffaele Cantarella (Milan: Istituto Editoriale Italiano,
1964), 3741 and plates IX. For Pasipha in Greek and Latin literature, see Rebecca
Armstrong, Cretan Women: Pasipha, Ariadne, and Phaedra in Latin Poetry (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 758, 1257, and 16987.
2 At least two other plates from Nicola da Urbinos workshop depict Pasipha 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 doro della maiol-
ica: Ceramica italiana dei secoli XVXVI dalla raccolta del Museo Statale dellErmitage (Milan:
Mondadori Electa, 2003), no. 32.
3 For the concept of transhistoricism within the discipline of reception studies, see Charles
Martindale, Receptiona New Humanism? Receptivity, Pedagogy, the Transhistorical,
Classical Receptions Journal 5, no. 2 (2013): 16983.

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015|doi 10.1163/9789004289697_008

200 Maurer

Figure6.1 Giulio Romano, Pasipha and the Bull, 15268.

Camera di Psiche, Palazzo del Te, Mantua (Permission
of the Museo Civico di Palazzo Te)

Figure6.2 Nicola da Urbino, plate with Pasipha and Daedalus,

c. 15303.
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
( The State Hermitage Museum, photo by
Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri
Molodkovets)
The Trouble with Pasipha 201

Figure6.3 Workshop of Nicola da Urbino, plate with Pasipha 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 Pasipha 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 femi-
nine gender roles, I want to suggest, these images challenged such binaries
and reveal a measure of instability within Renaissance gender identities.4
Pasipha signified the consequences of uncontrolled female sexuality, yet
because heroutrageous 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 Butlers argument that gender is not a static
essence, but a contingent, performative construction that can be challenged and
manipulated.
202 Maurer

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 archi-
tectural 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 Giulios fresco at
the Palazzo del Te, included amongst the numerous classicizing scenes in the
Camera di Psiche, depicts Pasipha 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 Federicos wife,
Margherita Paleologa (Fig.6.2). The second dish, which is attributed to Nicolas
workshop and currently located at the Louvre, also shows Pasipha and
Daedalus in a field, with the addition of a scene in which Pasipha copulates
with the bull (Fig.6.3).7
The depictions of Pasipha and the bull created by Giulio Romano and
Nicola da Urbino for the Gonzaga court have never been examined as a group,

5 Federicos mother, Isabella dEste, formed a collection of mythological paintings, which date
from the years 1497 to after 1506. The imperial busts in Andrea Mantegnas Camera Picta
(146574), his Triumphs of Caesar (c. 14861506), and Leon Battista Albertis use of classical
architectural elements at the Basilica of SantAndrea (designed 1470) show a long-lived taste
for the antique in Mantua. A useful overview of the dynastys art and architectural projects
can be found in Molly Bourne, The Art of Diplomacy: Mantua and the Gonzaga, 13281630,
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),
13895.
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 dEste. Boutin, Displaying
Identity in the Mantua Court: The Maiolica of Isabella dEste, Federico II Gonzaga, and
Margherita Paleologa (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2011), 15066.
7 For the dating and attribution of Nicolas dishes, see the appendix in J.V.G. Mallet, Nicola da
Urbino and Francesco Xanto Avelli, Faenza 93 (2007): 199250.
The Trouble with Pasipha 203

and previous scholarly interpretations have been more concerned with narra-
tive 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. Giulios fresco has generally been interpreted as a
Neoplatonic excursus on animal passions intended for the buildings lusty
patron, Federico II.8 Nicola da Urbinos 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 Pasipha 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 Pasipha

While classical accounts of Pasiphas 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, Pasipha 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 Pasipha after
Minos failed to sacrifice the bull, though in some versions Venus is the cause of
Pasiphas woes.11 Her story is recounted in several classical and medieval
textsthat would have been available to members of the Gonzaga court, among
them Virgils Eclogues, Ovids Metamorphoses and Ars amatoria, Apuleius
Golden Ass, Philostratus the Elders Imagines, and the fourteenth-century
Ovide moralis.12

8 Frederick Hartt, Giulio Romano (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), vol. 1, 1368;
Konrad Oberhuber, Palazzo Te: Lapparato decorativo, in Giulio Romano, ed. Manfredo
Tafuri (Milan: Electa, 1989), 3436.
9 Boutin, Displaying Identity, 1945.
10 Catherine Hess, Getting Lucky: Renaissance Maiolica, in Sex Pots: Eroticism in Ceramics,
ed. Paul Mathieu (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 667. 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 dEste Gonzaga. La coltura, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana
204 Maurer

Virgils treatment of the Cretan queen appears designed to elicit the readers
sympathy. He refers to Pasipha 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 Pasiphas desire to insanity (6.4160). At one point he calls out to
her, Ah, unhappy girl, what a madness has gripped you! (6.47).14 Virgil por-
trays Pasiphae not as a woman indulging her basest desires, but as an unfortu-
nate soul whose actions are caused by a loss of reason. In contrast to Virgils
more sympathetic approach, classical and medieval authors generally repre-
sented Pasipha as a negative example of unbridled female sexuality; Ovid and
Apuleius in particular used her story to shock and titillate their audiences.15 In
Ovids Ars amatoria, Pasiphas passion for the bull is inflamed by its physical
beauty (1.28996). Moreover, when the bull continues to prefer the company
of cows despite her attempts to woo the animal, Pasipha 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 (8.1313; 9.73641),
and at greater length in the Ars amatoria (1.289327), Ovid characterizes
Pasipha 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, Pasiphas story serves as a moralistic warning
against female lust, yet the author also emphasizes the bawdiness of female
desire. Ovid also characterizes Pasipha 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 Pasiphas inability to transform
herself:

33 (1899): 7; Daniela Ferrari, Le collezioni Gonzaga: linventario dei beni del 15401542
(Milan: Silvana, 2003), 31624. Pasiphas story is also recounted in several other texts
which do not appear to have been known to the court: Euripides, Cretans fr. 472e; Pseudo-
Apollodorus, 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
Pizans Epistre Otha, 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 IIV, trans.
H.Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library 63 (1916; reprint, Cambridge, ma: Harvard
University Press, 1999).
15 Armstrong, Cretan Women, 16777. The author of the Ovide moralis appears to have been
more ambivalent in his recounting of Pasiphas 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.
The Trouble with Pasipha 205

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. 1.3058)

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 thingthere
Youre no heifer. But goodness, how
You wish you could be a plump, horned cow!

Pasiphas 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 Pasiphas perverse desire
and her ineffective attempts to attract the bull.
The bawdy aspect of Pasiphas tale also appealed to Apuleius, whose
description of a similar bestial act in his Metamorphoses draws on her tale
(10.1835).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 perfor-
mances of Lucius the ass. Among the viewers is a wealthy matron who, Lucius
reports, like some asinine Pasipha, 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 matrons 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), 20437. 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 Pasipha 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), 17196.
19 Ad instar asinariae Pasiphaae complexus meos ardenter exspectabat. Apuleius,
Metamorphoses, trans. Hanson, 2089.
20 Sed angebar plane non exili metu reputans quem ad modum tantis tamque magnis cru-
ribus possem delicatam matronam inscendere, vel tam lucida tamque tenera et lacte
ac melle confecta membra duris ungulis complecti, labiasque modicas ambroseo rore
206 Maurer

titillating potential of the matrons performance with Lucius, Thiasus accepts

his freedmans suggestion to include a live sex show in Lucius act, yet, like
Pasiphas bull, the ass is not eager to copulate with the woman selected for
him (10.3435).
In contrast to these earlier narrative descriptions of Pasipha, 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 Pasipha 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 sixteenth-
century 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 hand-
book 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., 2103.
21 Arthur Fairbanks, trans., Elder Philostratus, Imagines, Younger Philostratus, Imagines,
Callistratus, Descriptions, Loeb Classical Library 256 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University
Press, 1931), 649.
22 Ibid., 65. Federicos mother, Isabella dEste, commissioned an Italian translation from the
original Greek of Philostratus Imagines sometime between 1508 and 1515. Latin transla-
tions appear in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, but Philostratus text was
not widely available in Latin until Stefano Negris 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 dEstes manuscript nor Negris publication have
been transcribed in their entirety. See Michael Koortbojian and Ruth Webb, Isabella
dEstes Philostratus, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 56 (1993): 2607.
23 Fairbanks, Elder Philostratus, Imagines, 67.
24 For the Imagines as a source of inspiration and competition with antiquity see Rona
Goffen, Titians Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 10726, 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):
61105; Norman E. Land, The Viewer as Poet: The Renaissance Response to Art (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 10177.
The Trouble with Pasipha 207

vernacular translations, most notably the Ovide moralis, an early fourteenth-

century French text that relates the stories of the Metamorphoses and inter-
prets them within a Christian allegorical framework.25 In Ovids Metamorphoses
the story of Pasipha occupies only a few lines, yet the author of the Ovide
moralis expanded the narrative by incorporating elements from the Ars ama-
toria as well as from the tradition of courtly romance.26 Yet, according to
Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, because Pasiphas act ruptured the boundaries
between human and animal natures, the author of the text shortened and sim-
plified the interpretive section of her myth.27 In contrast to the narrative por-
tion of the text, the interpretive section does not mention Pasipha 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, Pasiphas trans-
gressive sexuality appears to have fascinated the author of the Ovide moralis,
who lingers over her beauty and the symptoms of her love, while at another
Pasiphas bestiality made Christian allegorical interpretation difficult.29
The story of Pasipha represents female behavior at the limits of society.
Unlike many mythological women, such as Europa and Leda, neither Pasipha
nor her lover undergoes a metamorphosis; instead, her transformation is tem-
porary, 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 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 Moralis, Chapter 2 in this volume,
and Hetty E. Joyce, Picturing Rape and Revenge in Ovids 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 Pasipha
and the bull: Giovanni di Bonsignori, Ovidio Metamorphoseos vulgare, with accompany-
ing woodcuts (Venice, 1497), and Niccol di Agostini, Ovidio Metamorphoseos in verso vul-
gar (1522).
26 Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, The Scandal of Pasipha: Narration and Interpretation in
the Ovide moralis, Modern Philology 93 (1996): 30910.
27 Ibid., 31921.
28 Ibid., 3167.
29 Ibid., 3225. Blumenfeld-Kosinski does not discuss the authors apparent fascination with
Pasiphas lustful gaze, which is briefly analyzed by Marilynn Desmond and Pamela
Sheingorn, Queering Ovidian Myth: Bestiality and Desire in Christine de Pizans Epistre
Othea, in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 112.
208 Maurer

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, Pasipha could be allegorized as the soul, thereby allowing
Christian and even Neoplatonic interpretations that focused on the differ-
ences between animal and human natures.31 Yet the myth of Pasipha was also
an apt vehicle for crude humor, and therefore in art the queen could be eroti-
cized in ways that encouraged viewers to indulge their passions. Pasiphas
story thus offered multiple interpretations to Renaissance artists and viewers.

Initial Receptions: Pasipha in Rome

By depicting a sexual relationship so far outside acceptable boundaries,

Renaissance artists and patrons attempted to cast female sexuality as danger-
ous 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 moralis influenced sixteenth-century depictions of Pasipha 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 Pasipha 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 faade.33 The front of the Roman

30 Joyce E. Salisbury, Bestiality in the Middle Ages, in Sex in the Middle Ages, ed. Salisbury
(New York: Garland Publishing, 1991), 17882.
31 This is precisely the interpretation that Hartt, using the Ovide moralis, proposed for
Giulios fresco at the Palazzo del Te. Hartt, Giulio Romano, vol. 1, 136.
32 Compare Ovid, Metamorphoses 9.73940 to Ars amatoria 1.324, and Virgil, Eclogues
6.4160.
33 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.
The Trouble with Pasipha 209

Figure6.4 Roman sarcophagus with Pasipha and Daedalus, c. 150 ce.

Louvre, Paris ( rmn-Grand Palais/Art Resource, ny)

sarcophagus depicts three scenes from the myth of Pasipha bracketed by a

pair of putti holding garlands: in the first Daedalus, accompanied by a putto,
stands before a seated Pasipha, 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 Pasipha 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 Pasipha by Baldassare
Peruzzi that shows a familiarity with both the ancient sarcophagus and
Philostratus text (Fig. 6.5).35 Peruzzis fresco was located on exterior of the

34 The portion of the sarcophagus where the putto bursts out of the cow has been damaged,
but the original appearance is preserved in Falconettos fresco and a drawing by
Giovanni Antonio Dosio dated c. 155965. See Carl Robert, Der Pasipha-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, Pasipha, col. 2079.
35 Giulio certainly saw Peruzzis work in Rome, where he worked at the Farnesina with
Raphael. Hartt, Giulio Romano, vol. 1, 323. Nicola da Urbino must have obtained draw-
ings 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, how-
ever, 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
210 Maurer

Figure6.5 Follower of Baldassare Peruzzi (possibly Cristoforo Roncalli), study for external deco-
ration of the Villa Farnesina, first quarter of the 16th century.
Louvre, Paris ( rmn-Grand Palais/Art Resource, ny)
The Trouble with Pasipha 211

Villa Farnesina, and today survives only in a drawing.36 In the Farnesina com-
position, Pasipha 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 Pasipha
in a field longing for the bull as in Philostratus ekphrasis, and Pasiphas
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 Pasipha sarcophagus, and that he drew his images
exclusively from Philostratus description, the depiction of Pasipha giving
orders to Daedalus in the Farnesina drawing suggests a familiarity with the
relief. In the Peruzzi drawing, Pasipha is more forceful than in either the sar-
cophagus or Philostratus Imagines, and thus her culpability in planning and
directing her bestial act is more clearly articulated. Peruzzis inclusion of the
figure of Daedalus and his emphasis on Pasiphas agency created a double
lens through which the Gonzaga court viewed classical texts and images of
theCretan queen.

Gendered Receptions: Pasipha in Mantua

Although Peruzzi was influential in the depiction of Pasipha at the Gonzaga

court, Giulio Romano and Nicola da Urbino combined Peruzzis 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 Pasipha the cow he has constructed. Rather than drawing
upon the Pasipha sarcophagus as a visual source, Giulio exploited its narra-
tive 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 Pasipha

locations of the frescoes, see Christoph L. Frommel, Baldassare Peruzzi als Maler und
Zeichner (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1967), 645, 1014.
36 The drawing has recently been attributed to Cristoforo Roncalli, called Pomarancio
(15531626). Eric Pagliano, Dessins italiens. Collection du Muse 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 (NewYork:
Abaris, 1979), 36.
37 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 dellantichit 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.
212 Maurer

entering the apparatus with an eagerness that betrays the influence of Peruzzis
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

Figure6.6 Giulio Romano, east wall of the Camera di Psiche (left to right, Jupiter and Olympia,
Polyphemus, and Pasipha and the Bull), 15268
Palazzo del Te, Mantua (With permission of the Museo Civico di Palazzo Te)

38 Jupiter and Olympia was an unusual choice, and Giulios fresco may, in fact, be the first
Renaissance depiction of the myth. The story of Olympias union with Jupiter and the
blinding of her husband, Philip of Macedon, who dared to gaze upon the couple, is told in
Plutarchs Life of Alexander. Plutarchs Lives were rediscovered in Western Europe in the
late fourteenth century. Marianne Pade, The Reception of Plutarchs Lives in Fifteenth-
Century Italy (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2007), vol. 1, 7694, 1727.
The Trouble with Pasipha 213

dei Venti and Sala dei Cavalli, nymphs, satyrs, gods, and goddesses enjoy a lav-
ish 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 Federicos 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 contempla-
tive 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 deco-
ration 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 Federicos relationship with his mistress.41 Yet the rooms complex,
disjointed, and often erotic images call for a more nuanced approach.
The scenes of Bacchus and Ariadne, Jupiter and Olympia, and Pasipha 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 paint-
ing to invade the viewers space: Ariadnes dress drapes over the frame, while
Olympia grips it in the throes of her passionate encounter with Jupiter, and the
tail of Pasiphas cow curves outward across it. The painted frames remind
the viewer that the images are works of art, while the illusionism of the wom-
ens bodies gives them a claim to physicality. Their white skin strikingly differ-
entiates 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 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.
40 Maria Maurer, The Palazzo del Te and the Spaces of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy
(PhD diss., Indiana University, 2012), 389.
41 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, 1348. Verheyen reads the images biographically, and
sees Federico as Cupid, who is torn between his mother, Isabella dEste/Venus, and his
lover, Isabella Boschetti/Psyche: The Palazzo del Te in Mantua: Images of Love and Politics
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 1921. Despite the fact that Verheyens
arguments have been refuted numerous times, his remains the dominant interpretation
of the room. See Maurer, Spaces of Masculinity, 415.
42 For an implausible narrative connection based on a fresco of Apollo that was never exe-
cuted, see Verheyen, The Palazzo del Te in Mantua, 26. For an allegorical interpretation,
see Hartt, Giulio Romano, 1348.
214 Maurer

to any allegorical message, though, the figures were surely meant to seduce the
male viewer. The sinuous forms of Ariadne and Pasipha 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 viewers erotic desire.
Giulio Romanos depiction of Pasipha 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 oblig-
ing opens her legs, hooks her left leg around Jupiters 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
Pasipha, on the other hand, is shown in an unmistakably superior and
active position. The bull lies passively in the background, while in the fore-
ground Pasipha agilely climbs into her new guise with the aid of its inventor,
Daedalus. Pasipha 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 James A. Brundage, Let Me Count the Ways: Canonists and Theologians Contemplate
Coital Positions, Journal of Medieval History 10, no. 2 (1984): 86.
44 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 Modis history, see Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions:
On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 2147.
45 Ibid., 645. Note particularly figs.11 and 12, which show women guiding their male part-
ners, 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 pur-
posefully 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 pro-
hibited. See Brundage, Let Me Count the Ways, 8193.
The Trouble with Pasipha 215

the viewers space, thus displaying a decidedly transgressive sexual position.

The viewer is, in effect, invited to mount and penetrate the cow, just as Pasipha
does as she ascends into the apparatus Daedalus has designed.46 The cows 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-cum-
voyeur in the violation of sexual norms that Pasipha performs.
Pasiphas pose is not derived from the Pasipha sarcophagus, where the
queen appears demure and veiled as befits a proper Roman wife. Instead,
Giulio modeled Pasipha 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 depict-
ing Theseus battling the Minotaur, and in reliefs and paintings of Mithras
slaying a bull.47 The pose was well known in Raphaels 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 identi-
fied the Aracoeli relief as a depiction of Hercules is attested to by his use of the
figures 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 heros exploits in

46 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), 1546.
47 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), 1069. 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), 1721.
48 Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, nos. 134 and 46 respec-
tively. The Hercules sarcophagus appears in a drawing in the Fossombrone Sketchbook by
a member of Raphaels 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 Raphaels workshop in the Vatican Logge.
49 Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm: Almquist and
Wiksell, 1960), 96100; Saxl, Lectures, 18.
216 Maurer

Figure6.7 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 bulls
horns backwards. The position of the bulls head and its open, bellowing mouth
recall the Aracoeli relief, though Giulio has altered the placement of the heros
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 For the other Herculean images See Hartt, Giulio Romano, vol. 1, 1134.
51 The Sala dei Cavalli Hercules and the Cretan Bull could also be based upon the third-
century Roman sarcophagus mentioned above, which unequivocally depicts Hercules
subduing the hind with his knee, but the formal similarities to the Mithras relief are
greater.
52 Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renais
sance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 1713. While Barkans text refers to
the Aracoeli relief, he illustrates a slightly different sculpture, which attests to the popu-
larity of the type and further demonstrates the likelihood that Giulio was familiar with it.
The Trouble with Pasipha 217

Figure6.8 Giulio Romano, Hercules and the Cretan Bull, 15267.

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 Giulios image of Hercules, highlighting the heros straining

53 Ibid., 1734.
54 For the sixteenth-century condition of the relief, see Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance
Artists, no. 46.
55 Patricia Simons, Hercules in Italian Renaissance Art: Masculine Labour and Homoerotic
Libido, Art History 31 (2008): 6324. On other challenges to the masculinity of Hercules in
218 Maurer

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 Pasipha located in the neighboring Camera di Psiche. Like her male ante-
cedents, Giulios Pasipha 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. Pasipha 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
Giulios Hercules, is full of swift movement and violence: Mithras streaming
cloak indicates the speed with which he has pounced upon the bull, and the
animals death throes are forcefully rendered. By contrast, in the figure of
Pasipha, Giulio created an elegant balance through the queens 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.
Giulios ability to modernize classical forms appears to have been a skill
that he consciously cultivated, and one that was prized by patrons and view-
ers. Pietro Aretino wrote that even Apelles and Vitruvius would recognize
Giulios 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 Pasipha 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 rela-
tionship between the scenes. In some versions of Hercules Labors, the Cretan

late medieval and early modern Italian art, see Mary D. Edwards, Cross-Dressing in the
Arena Chapel: Giottos Virtue Fortitude Re-examined, Chapter 1 in this volume, and
Timothy B. Smith, Queer Fragments: Sodoma, the Belvedere Torso, and Saint Catherines
Head, Chapter 5 in this volume.
56 This phrase can be loosely translated as classically modern and modernly classical.
Ettore Camesasca, ed., Lettere sullarte di Pietro Aretino (Milan: Milione, 1957), vol. 1, 215.
57 For Giulios relationship to the antique see also Ernst H. Gombrich, The Style allantica:
Imitation and Assimilation, in Norm and Form (London and New York: Phaidon, 1970),
1228; 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): 26372; Howard Burns, Quelle cose antique et moderne belle di Roma: Giulio
Romano, il teatro, lantico, in Giulio Romano, ed. Manfredo Tafuri (Milan: Electa, 1989),
22743.
The Trouble with Pasipha 219

Bull that the hero subdues is the same bull that enchanted Pasipha.58 Giulios
use of a similar pose for both figures makes visible the possible textual rela-
tionship between them. Giulio may also have intended to make Pasiphas
offense clear to his viewers. By using a male visual trope to depict her, Giulio
represents Pasipha as a woman who has contravened nature by taking on a male
role. In addition, Pasiphas gender inversion, the transgressive sexual position
of the cow, and even the docility of the male bull share a sense of humor remi-
niscent of sixteenth-century burlesque poetry and theatre.59 Although her
actions violate established gender roles, the humorous visual presentation of
the queen in Giulios fresco also makes her less threatening.
In contrast to the humorously suggestive content of Giulios fresco, the
Paleologo dish painted by Nicola da Urbino offers an interpretation that imag-
ines the story of Pasipha as a caution against female sexuality (Fig.6.2). Like
Peruzzis fresco, the dish depicts Pasipha 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 commis-
sioned sometime between 1530 and 1533, likely in connection with their 1531
wedding.60 To the left a putto points toward Pasipha, and a volcano in the

58 See Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica 4.13.4, and Hyginus, Fabulae 30. Pseudo-
Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 2.5.7 does not explicitly mention Pasipha 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 Pasipha. 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).
59 The play of gender, sexuality, and humor is evocative of the antics in Bernardo Dovizzi da
Bibbienas 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), 189223. 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), 4953.
60 Thornton and Wilson, Italian Renaissance Ceramics, vol. 1, 2403. Thornton and Wilson
argue that the dish was part of a service possibly commissioned to celebrate the birth of
the couples 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
220 Maurer

background spews smoke, a comment on Pasiphas fiery passions. While in

Peruzzis composition the bull appears oblivious to his fate, in Nicolas dish the
animal casts its eye out of the plate, thereby engaging the viewers sympathy.
Nicola has slightly altered Peruzzis composition so that Pasiphas 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,
womens bodies and movements were expected to be restrained, with limbs kept
close to the body.61 On Nicolas dish Pasiphas 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 awoman
who abandoned restraint should no longer be called a woman, but a new a mon-
strous creation.62 Pasipha also wears toeless boots, normally an article of male
attire in Nicolas 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 masculin-
ized Pasipha in order to communicate her status as an unnatural woman. In the
context of the Gonzaga-Paleologo nuptials, Pasiphas monstrous masculinity
also emphatically reminds viewers of the importance of female chastity.
The myth of Pasipha had previously been envisioned as a message for the
bride on a Franco-Italian cassone panel dated to c. 15105 (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

Monferrato and Margheritas uncle. Christies, 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 cele-
brate the forthcoming marriage. While the specific circumstances of the dishs commis-
sion remain speculative, its connection to Federicos 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.
61 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.
62 Imperocch, essendo la venust e la continenza quelle che sopra laltre cose il muliebre
sesso adornano, ogni volta che la donna da quelle si aliena, contraf la sua natura, n pi
donna ma nuovo mostro si doveria appellare. Prose e lettere edite e inedite, ed. Cecil
Grayson (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1959), 401. Translated by Fermor,
Movement and Gender, 134.
63 A.P. de Mirmonde, Cinq cassoni mythologiques de la collection Campana, La Revue du
Louvre et des muses de France 28 (1978): 8497.
The Trouble with Pasipha 221

Figure6.9 Master of the Campana Cassone, The Loves of Pasipha, 15105.

Muse du Petit Palais, Avignon ( rmn-Grand Palais/Art Resource, ny)

the presence of Neptune also references a version of the myth that attributes
Pasiphas lust for the bull to divine retribution for her husbands failure to
sacrifice the bull to the sea god.64 The Campana cassone foregrounds Pasiphas
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 grooms mari-
tal 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 Pasiphas actions. Pasipha 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 Pasipha and marriage in Renaissance society.66

64 See for example, Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica 4.77.2 and Pseudo-Apollodorus,
Bibliotheca 3.1.34. 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 Pasipha. 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 5074 and 12859.
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
222 Maurer

A second dish from Nicolas 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 Pasipha shows Daedalus the bull. In the
Paleologo dish, Pasiphas gesture draws the viewers gaze to the bull and then
across to the putto; in the Louvre dish, her arm sweeps across her body in an
echo of Peruzzis 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 Pasipha wraps her body around that of the
bull and pulls it toward her as the couple lock eyes.
Little is known of this works 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 bulls lolling
and somewhat phallic tongue, suggests a viewer familiar with the licentious tone
of Giulio Romanos mythological paintings in the Camera di Psiche. Moreover,
the body type and facial features of the copulating Pasipha on the Louvre dish
are masculine, or at the very least ambiguous, suggesting a further link to the
Gonzaga court. Pasipha has prominent sculpted muscles and a chiseled profile,
visual features more commonly associated with masculine imagery.68 As in the

appropriation of classical forms for the depiction of Pasipha should be traced to the
Roman ethos of Peruzzi and Giulio Romano.
67 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),
1324; 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), 14169.
68 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
The Trouble with Pasipha 223

gender-bending fresco at the Palazzo del Te and Nicolas Paleologo dish, the
metamorphosis of Pasipha 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: Pasipha 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 Pasipha created at Federicos behest were not for the marcheses enjoy-
ment 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 Nicolas 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 Pasipha would have
been used and experienced by both sexes within the context of Renaissance
dining practices. The Camera di Psiche, where Giulios fresco is located, served
as the palaces banquet chamber.70 The degree to which maiolica was actively
employed in dining is still a matter of debate, but Nicolas dishes would cer-
tainly have been viewed and perhaps even used during important banquets.71
In imagining Pasiphas 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

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.
69 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 12 and 6899.
70 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 biblio-
teca universitaria di Pavia (Milan: U. Hoepli, 1892), 2656.
71 Boutin, Displaying Identity, 605.
224 Maurer

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 Federicos mother, Isabella dEste,
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 imag-
ery 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 medi-
eval 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 legiti-
mized 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 phys-
ical delectations of the banquet. Depictions of Pasipha and the bull also cel-
ebrated 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 encour-
aging a denial of appetites, within the context of dining, Nicolas dishes and
Giulios fresco could have incited a loosening of sexual and social mores. Like
Pasipha, 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), 838.
75 Ibid., 4755, 14061.
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.
The Trouble with Pasipha 225

Far from constructing and reinforcing normative gender roles, images of

Pasipha at the Gonzaga court in fact trouble binary conceptions of masculin-
ity and femininity. At first glance, Giulio Romanos fresco at the Palazzo del
Te visualizes female desire as transgressive and even lewd, yet it also shows
Pasipha 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 Pasiphas aberrant sexuality and more with her agency. While
Pasipha 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 Pasiphas 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 Pasipha as a
submissive sexual partner, envisions her more as an object of desire. In classical
art and literature, Pasipha must disguise herself as a cow to attract the bull,
but on the Louvre dish, the bulls ardor appears to have been excited by her
human form.
While artists and patrons at the Gonzaga court may have ostensibly wanted
images of Pasipha to remind women of the importance of chastity and men
of the delights of indulgence, the works actually encouraged multiple interpre-
tations. Pasipha symbolized the consequences of female desire, yet her
actions could be entertaining and even arousing. Although she clearly com-
municated a moral message about the importance of female chastity, the
Cretan queen also opened up possibilities for womens sexual agency. Far from
reifying normative sexual roles, images of Pasipha and the bull visualized the
limits of human sexuality, and encouraged an exploration of alternative roles
for men and women.

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 chapter 7

Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water in

Lorenzo Lottos 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 minia-
ture 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: Societ
Tipografica de Classici Italiani, 1806), 901: Ne ponemmo ambeduo a sedere alla margine
dun fresco e limpidissimo fonte, che in quella sorgea: il quale n da ucello, n da fiera tur-
bato, s 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 ricominci 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: Societ Tipografica de
Classici Italiani, 1808), vol. 1, 135: ... 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
dellacque, che cinvitano a ragionare. For the English translation, see Bembo, Gli Asolani,
trans. Rudolf Gottfried (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1954), 145.

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

Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water 231

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.

Figure7.1 Lorenzo Lotto, Venus and Cupid, late 1520s.

Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
(Art Resource, ny)
232 Oettinger

Directly opposite the sheath of arrows strung over Cupids 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 Lottos landscapes.
Of the few mythological allegories that Lorenzo Lotto (c. 14801557) pro-
duced in the course of his fifty-year career, the Venus and Cupid is widely
regarded as the most alluringand 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 Lottos 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 dArmano, 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 paintings origins, scholarship has focused
on its iconography. Francesca Cortesi Boscos work treated Lottos painting in
light of hermetic symbolism and alchemy, while Keith Christiansens sugges-
tive article was the first to locate the canvas within the emergent genre of epi-
thalamic 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 othersincluding 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), 2524.
4 Berenson, who first attributed the Venus and Cupid to Lorenzo Lotto in his 1932 and 1936 lists
of the artists 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, 1778 (Appendix B).
Humfreys 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 inconclu-
sive. For the 1526 dating of the painting and a summary of discussions regarding the prove-
nance of the painting, see Keith Christiansen, Lorenzo Lotto and the Tradition of Epithalamic
Paintings, Apollo 124 (1986): 16673.
5 Francesca Cortesi Bosco, Gli affreschi delloratorio Suardi a Trescore: Lorenzo Lotto nella crisi
della Riforma (Bergamo: Bolis, 1980); Christiansen, Lorenzo Lotto.
Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water 233

Christiansen also addressed Lottos micturating Cupid, connecting the puer

mingens (urinating child) motif with the generative power of semen, a meta-
phor that took a variety of forms in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century epitha-
lamic 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 Giorgiones Dresden Venus.6
Lottos urinating putto may well celebrate the virility of Lottos Venetian
patron, yet the visionary dimensions of the puer mingens and its watery inter-
play with the reclining Venusanother polyvalent image in Lottos agehave
not been fully appreciated. Lottos Venus recalls the vast tradition of reclining
nudes who populated the sixteenth-century mythological paintings of his
contemporaries, yet the artists 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 Lottos 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 epi-
gram. These fountain motifs, distantly derived from antique statuary, were
grafted onto medieval allegories of water, reemerging in the antiquarian imagi-
nations of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanists in the form of speaking
fountains of desire, inspiration, and art. The following explores the role of
Lottos 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 Giorgiones 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 Giorgiones 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), 33742.
234 Oettinger

The Puer Mingens and the Nymph of the Spring

As Patricia Simons has shown, the puer mingens, a motif derived from classi-
cal reliefs, could embody a complex array of meanings in early modern art,
from the celebration of marriage to masculinity, sexual desire, metamorpho-
ses, 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, Lottos
audienceeither 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 Bergamocould 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 Lottos 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
theputto.9
A puer mingens similarly invigorates Lottos 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 Simonss analysis of the puer mingens in Lottos Venus and Cupid, see Manliness and the
Visual Semiotics, 35961. In addition to Simonss evocative discussion of the potential mean-
ings of the puer mingens motif, see Paul Barolsky, Infinite Jest: Wit and Humor in Italian
Renaissance Art (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978), 1615; 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): 198202.
8 Cortesi Boscos study, Gli affreschi, focuses on Lottos 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 Lottos frescoes in light of the culture of the villeggia-
tura 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), ixxxiii.
Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water 235

Figure7.2 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 Odonis 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.
236 Oettinger

Figure7.3 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 paintings 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 Odonis left arm.12 As in the Oratorio Suardi, where
the beholder plays a role in making sense of the interlaced hagiographies
onthe walls, the narrative of Odonis fragments relies on the creative imagina-
tion of the viewer, personified by the Hercules mingens, whose generative

11 Humfrey, Lorenzo Lotto, 107. For Odonis inventory, see D. Battilotti and M.T. Franco,
Regesti di committenti e dei primi collezionisti di Giorgione, Antichit Viva 17, no. 45
(1978): 5886.
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).
Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water 237

powers bring the collection of classical fragments to life. The green cloth that
sets the stage for Odonis collection, a color that foments the sight, as human-
ist 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 Odinis sophisticated con-
temporaries.13 The green cloth also functions to unveil more fragments
another Venus and a sculpted head of Hadrianthat seem to take on a life of
their own as they emerge from beneath it.
The metamorphic function of Lottos micturating Cupid can be understood
in relation to the urinating figures who activate the hagiographies in the
Oratorio Suardi and Andrea Odonis 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 popu-
lated 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 Lottos invention.14 Lottos
inspiration most likely derived from an antiquarian romance that the artist
knew well: the 1499 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Poliphilos Struggle for Love in a
Dream), a masterpiece of early printing produced at the Venetian press of

13 Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, trans. Carol Kaske and John Clarke (Binghamton, ny:
Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998), 2134 (2.14, lines 1921): 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 Ficinos discourse on green in relation to the visionary dimen-
sions of gardens, see Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto, The Medici Gardens: From Making to
Design (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
14 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 entre into
the vast tradition is Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in
the Making of Renaissance Culture (London: Yale University Press, 1999), 23347. 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): 34882. There is also a vast scholarship on the motif of the reclin-
ing nude in Venetian painting that is centered around Titians Venus of Urbino. See
Anderson, Giorgione, Titian, and the Sleeping Venus, 33742, and David Rosand,
Venereal Hermeneutics: Reading Titians 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), 26380.
238 Oettinger

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 relicsarchitectural orna-
ments, monumental sculpture, and enigmatic inscriptionsfrom an imagined
classical past. The heros 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 imagina-
tion, 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 Lottos 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 (The Mother of All), according to
an inscription above her, Poliphilo lavishes praise on the artful sculptor who pro-
duced the relief (in Poliphilos 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 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).
16 For recent bibliography and discussion of Poliphilos 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): 1530.
Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water 239

Figure7.4 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
alsuo acutissimo ingegno il lithoglypho habilissimamente et al libito havesse lopificio
240 Oettinger

Figure7.5 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 larboro Arbuto per gli rami cum la
sinistra mano violente rapto, et, al suo valore sopra la soporata Nympha flectendolo, indi-
cava di farli gratiosa umbra. Et cum laltro brachio traheva lo extremo di una cortinetta,
che era negli rami al tronco proximi innodata.
Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water 241

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 Poliphilos 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 (trickster) that spurts liquid
upon Poliphilos 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 Poliphilos 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 stimu-
lates and nurtures the protagonists 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

Poliphilos interplay with the two fountains recalls early modern statue poetry,
a genre that ascended to popularity in the circle of Pomponeo Letos 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 On the goddess Natura as an inspirational force, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European
Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 10627.
In his account of the primeval Earth, Lucretius wrote that the flow of nourishment is
directed toward the breasts. See De rerum natura 5.80136.
19 In the redesigned and expanded woodcuts for the 1546 French edition, the artist added
streams of water issuing from the ladys breasts, as well as Poliphilos 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.
20 Kathleen Wren Christian, Empire without End (London and New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2010), 13442; Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011), 10328.
242 Oettinger

most famous examples was the Huius Nympha Loci, a pseudo-classical epigram
once believed to be ancient but now attributed to a fifteenth-century human-
ist.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 anti-
quarians 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
Lovers initial progression from a waking to a dreaming state. His journey

21 For an excellent summary of the origins and fortunes of the Huius Nympha Loci epigram,
see Christian, Empire, 13442 and 2316. Building on Zita Patakis 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 com-
posed the epigram in response to the statue in Cardinal Piccolominis sculpture garden or
perhaps collaborated with Piccolomini when he penned it. See Christian, Empire, 135,
2389, 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 Drer, Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 16 (1953): 1717; Phyllis Pray Bober, The Coryciana and the Nymph
Corycia, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977): 2 2339; and Elisabeth
B. MacDougall, The Sleeping Nymph: Origins of a Humanist Fountain Type, Art Bulletin
57 (1975): 35765.
22 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 Christians translation and transcription. See Empire, 134, 238, n. 55.
23 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): 113.
Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water 243

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 hard-
woods, 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 Quant joi ung poi avant al,/Si vi ung vergi grant et l,/Tot clos dung haut mur batail-
li,/Portrait defors et entailli/A maintes riches escritures,/Les ymages et les paintures/Ai
moult volentiers remir. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed.
Daniel Poiron (Paris: Flammarion, 1999), 1.12931; de Lorris and de Meun, Romance of the
Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 32.
25 ... Une noise douce et plesant./Entor les ruissiaus et les rives/Des fontainnes sainnes et
vives/Poignoit lerbe espesse et drue;/Aussi y pest len sa drue/Couchier comme so rune
coite,/Car la terre estoit douce et moite/Por la fontainne, et y venoit/Tant derbe cum il
convenoit. De Lorris and de Meun, Roman, 1.13908, and Romance, 49.
26 Ou fons de la fontainne aval/Avoit dues pierres de cristal/Qua grant entente remirai.
Aussi cum li miroirs montre/Les choses qui li sont encontre/Et y voit len sans couverture/Et
244 Oettinger

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 Lovers sight.27
Medieval fountains of desire, as in the Narcissus fountain from the Roman
de la Rose, shaped fleeting visions out of watera space of desire and longing
inhabited by an elusive and often unattainable belovedin fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century literature and art.28 For instance, Book 1 of Angelo

Polizianos Stanze cominciate per la giostra del Magnifico Giuliano de Medici

lor color et lor faiture,/Tretout aussi vous di por voir/Que li cristal, sans decevoir,/Tout
lestre du vergier accusent/A cues qui dedens liaue musent; Si ni a si petite chose,/Tant
soit repote ne enclose,/Dont demonstrance ni soi faite/Com sel ert es cristaus portraite.
De Lorris and de Meun, Roman 1.153771, and Romance, 51.
27 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 20,36920,695 and Romance, 3348. On medieval fountains as metaphors, see
Erich Khler, Narcisse, la fontaine dAmour, et Guillaume de Lorris, Journal des Savants 2
(1963): 86103; Naomi Miller, Paradise Regained: Medieval Garden Fountains, in Medieval
Gardens, ed. Elisabeth MacDougall (Washington, dc: Dumbarton Oaks, 1986), 13753.
28 Watery visions descended from the tradition of the Roman de la Rose are poignantly woven
throughout Petrarchs verse, as in Standomi un giorno solo alla finestra (Anthony Mortimer,
ed., Petrarchs Canzoniere in the English Renaissance [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005], Canzoniere
323: lines 3648), when the poet envisions a crystal fountain that has enveloped the mem-
ory of his unattainable beloved, Laura: Chiara fontana in quel medesmo bosco/sorgea
dun sasso, et acque fresche et dolci/spargea, soavemente mormorando;/al bel seggio,
riposto, ombroso et fosco,/n pastori appressavan n bifolci,/ma nimphe et muse a quel
tenor cantando:/ivi massisi; et quando/pi dolcezza prendea di tal concento/et di tal vista,
aprir vidi uno speco,/et portarsene secola fonte e l loco: ondanchor 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 Petrarchs water metaphors, see Marjorie ORourke Boyle,
Petrarchs 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): 1758.
www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Italian/Petrarchhome.htm., Section 6.
Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water 245

(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 Polizianos sophis-
ticated 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 litera-
ture: Polizianos description of the richly carved doors of Venus palace, which
depict the Loves of the Gods. Desire, triggered by Giulios vision of the beauti-
ful Simonetta by the stream, has inspired art.30 Inspirational fountains in clas-
sicizing garb appeared elsewhere in the verse of sixteenth-century poets.
In Book 8 of Jacopo Sannazaros 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 Bembos 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 satu-
rated 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

29 Qui lieta mi dimoro Simonetta,/allombre, a qualche chiara e fresca linfa,/e spesso in

compagnia dalcuna ninfa. David Quint, ed. and trans., The Stanze of Angelo Poliziano
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 267.
30 On the ekphrasis of the palace doors in Polizianos Stanze, inspiration, and art, see
Stephen Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the
Studiolo of Isabella dEste (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 117.
31 See nn. 1, 2.
32 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: Harper Collins, 1995), 26881, (quote
275). Claudia Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden (London and New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1990), 13166; and Lazzaro, The Visual Language of Gender in Sixteenth-
Century Garden Sculpture, in Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian
Renaissance, ed. Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University
Press, 1991), 71113.
246 Oettinger

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
Holandas drawing of the fountain (15389) alludes to the reclining nymphs
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 specta-
tor 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
Bellinis Feast of the Gods (1514), which once adorned the Camerino of Alfonso
dEste, 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, 3612.
34 Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 23347; 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), 193215.
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, Sodomas 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 Raphaels more famous roun-
dels 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.
Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water 247

Figure7.6 Francisco de Holanda, Belvedere Cleopatra, 15389.

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 figurepossibly the garden god himselfreaches out to
248 Oettinger

Figure7.7 Giovanni Bellini, Feast of the Gods, 1514.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc (Courtesy National
Gallery of Art, Washington)

lift the nymphs 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, 1.391440). The sleeping nymph in Bellinis painting, a rein-
terpretation of the program given to him by humanist Mario Equicola and his
princely patron, Alfonso dEste, 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).
Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water 249

imaginatively fulfills the act of Lotis priapine lover, bringing to life the
sequence of events that follows. Similarly, in Titians Bacchanal of the Andrians
(15236), a painting that originally decorated the same room, a sleeping
nymph akin to the figure in Bellinis painting reclines beside a river trans-
formed into wine through the powers of a puer mingens who urinates into the
flowing waters (Fig.7.8).38 Behind the micturating child, the nudes marmo-
real form seems to metamorphose into flesh, while on the opposite bank, two
reclining beauties in modern garb lie beside the stream.39 Titians Nymph of
the Spring, her urinating companion, and her clothed counterpartscourt

Figure7.8 Titian, Bacchanal of the Andrians, 15236.

Prado, Madrid (Art Resource, ny)

38 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, 4745.
39 Phillip Fehl first discussed Titians poetics of sight and revelation. See Decorum and Wit
(Vienna: irsa Verlag, 1992), 4687.
250 Oettinger

ladies possibly cast as early modern Nymphs of the Springactivate the

viewers 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 Drer, 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 Drer owned), and the reclining nymph fountains that by then graced
many Renaissance sculpture gardens.41 In Cranachs 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 Cranachs
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 beholders active imagination that has now been awakened by
the vision of the nymph, who, in concert with the beholder, wakes.

Lorenzo Lottos Nymph of the Spring

Lorenzo Lotto first experimented with water and inspiration in the so-called
Maidens Dream (15056), a mythological allegory closely associated with the
traditions that shaped the Huius Nympha Loci and the visionary fountains of
Poliphilos antiquarian romance (Fig.7.10). In a forest grove bathed in twilights
warm glow, a drowsy figure reminiscent of the Nymph of the Spring reclines

40 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 Titians Andrians, Burlington
Magazine, 115, no. 845 (1973): 51825. As Murutes observed, the nymph and puer mingens
are not mentioned in Philostratus ekphrasis.
41 I thank Jeffrey Chipps Smith for kindly confirming that Drer owned a copy of the
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. For an early study on the topic of Drer and this text, see
Georg Leidinger, Albrecht Drer und die Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Munich: Verlag der
Bayer, 1929). On Drer and the nymph, see Otto Kurz, Huius Nympha Loci, 1717. 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): 1823.
Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water 251

Figure7.9 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 handa 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 inspi-
ration 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 Ursula Hoff, Meditation in Solitude, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 1
(1938): 2924.
43 In Lottos Cingoli Altarpiece (Madonna del Rosario), the beholder more directly gains
inspiration from the illusionistic flowers. In this case, the flowers inspire meditation, liter-
ally 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), 17685.
252 Oettinger

Figure7.10 Lorenzo Lotto, Allegory of Chastity (The Maidens 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 fea-
ture that heightens the dynamic moment of vision. Though Lottos precise
sources for Maidens Dream are still debated, the painting is widely understood
as an allegory of Chastity in which the lady, clad in white, contrasts with the
Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water 253

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, gov-
erning 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,
Lottos 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
maidens 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
theconch 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 Lottos unidentified patronpresumably a
sophisticated cittadino and romantic antiquarian much like Andrea Odoni
would have understood Lottos 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, Lottos reclining Venus inhab-
its an erotic landscape where inspirational waters, suggested by the blue cloth
beneath the lady, flow through the verdure of her pleasant grove, a locus amoe-
nus. Those familiar with the Belvedere sculpture garden may have also recog-
nized the snake emerging from under Venus blue cloth as a clever reference to
the (so-called) Cleopatra fountain in the Belvedere. Indeed, Lottos 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 antiqui-
ties, assimilated the Giorgionesque Dresden Venus type and the Belvedere
Cleopatra fountain. In his Death of Cleopatra (c. 1524), the nude queen, ven-
omous 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 Given that the panel likely functioned as a cover of a portrait, Lottos 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), 4665.
45 Bernard Aikema and Beverly Louise Brown, eds., Il Rinascimento a Venezia e la pittura del
Nord ai tempi di Bellini, Drer, Tiziano (Milan: Bompiani, 1999), no. 141.
254 Oettinger

Figure7.11 Jan van Scorel, Cleopatra, c. 15204.

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)

Lottos 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 inter-
est 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 Lottos voluptuous Venus is consonant with the praise lav-
ished 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, Lottos sensual
Venus was in keeping with shifting attitudes toward marriage as a civic
and ethical duty , the force that binds nations, guarantees personal

46 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).
47 Anthony dElia 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),
1057. See also dElia, Marriage, Sexual Pleasure, and Learned Brides in the Wedding
Orations of Fifteenth-Century Italy, Renaissance Quarterly 55, no. 2 (2002): 379433.
Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water 255

and civic welfare, reforms the corrupt, and provides the greatest plea-
sures in life, as Anthony dElia has argued in his work on early modern
ephithalamia.48
Lottos Venus and Cupid not only praises bridal voluptas but also cele-
brates the pleasurable consummation of the union between viewer and
image, between sensuality and the poetic imagination. The red curtain sus-
pended behind Venus suggests as much. Derived from the woodcut of the
fountain nymph from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Lottos curtain at once
functions to reveal the beholders visiona beautiful womanand 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 Poliphilos 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 consum-
mating 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, Poliphilos watery Sanctissima
genitrice, Lottos 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 DElia, Renaissance of Marriage, 1357.

49 For a discussion of the god Hymen in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and in relation to
Titians painting, see Paul Hills, Titians Veils, Art History 29 (2006): 77195.
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), 1067, on the goddess Natura.
256 Oettinger

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. 15278), a mythological paint-
ing 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 Cupids 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

Figure7.12 Lorenzo Lotto, The Triumph of Chastity, c. 1530.

Rospigliosi Pallavicini Collection, Rome (Alinari/Art Resource ny)

52 For instance, Mario Equicolas treatise on the subject, Libro de natura de amore, first pub-
lished in Venice in 1525 and dedicated to Isabella dEste. See Laura Ricci, ed., La redazione
manoscritta del Libro de natura de amore di Mario Equicola (Rome: Bulzoni, 1999).
53 Bernard Berenson, Lorenzo Lotto (London: George Bell & Sons, 1901), 261; Giovanni Carlo
Federico Villa, ed., Lorenzo Lotto, 2747, no. 53.
Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water 257

from a birds-eye view, landscape language with which Lotto experimented

elsewheremost 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 (Chastitythe woman in green) over voluptas (personified by Venus), but
Lottos 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 Lottos sensuous Creatrix Natura in the Venus
and Cupid and her ethereal counterpart in the Triumph of Chastity as medita-
tions on the multifaceted nature of love, a theme that informed Titians more
famousand enigmaticpainting, the so-called Sacred and Profane Love
(c. 1524) (Fig.7.13).56 In Titians epithalamium, another reflection on love and

Figure7.13 Titian, Sacred and Profane Love, c. 1514.

Galleria Borghese, Rome (Art Resource, ny)

54 For the most recent anaylsis and bibliography on Lottos San Nicola altarpiece (15279)
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): 7081.
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
Dianas chariot. See Calvesi, Venere effimera e Venere perenne. I. Botticelli, Bronzino,
Rubens, Piero di Cosimo, Lotto, Storia dellArte 108 (2004): 544, in particular 223.
56 Rona Goffen, Titians 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 Titians women, Lotto has reduced
this brides individuality to her reproductive function []. Titians 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 Titians painting, see Brian D. Steele, Water and Fire: Titians Sacred and
Profane Love and Ancient Marriage Customs, Source 15, no. 4 (1996): 229.
258 Oettinger

poetry mediated by a fountain of desire, two beautiesinterpreted as a ter-

restrial Venus in white garb and a nude celestial Venusengage the beholder.
A fountain with a phallic spout, an image related to the puer
mingens, sprinkles water onto a rose bushVenus flowerthat illusionisti-
cally takes root in the realm of the viewer, while a putto reaches into the foun-
tain to stir the inspirational waters in a gesture reminiscent of the young man
in Francisco De Holandas drawing of the Belvedere Cleopatra. Titians foun-
tain, a cistern allantica carved with scenes that recount the tale of Venus,
Adonis, and the Tinting of the Rose, also derived its inspiration from the wood-
cuts and text of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, as Max Friedlnder long ago
pointed out.57 As in Titians 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 sacra-
ment of marriage and to the sacred moment when Nature inspires Art.
The fleeting nature of this diaphanous vapor echoes that other change-
able, 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 elab-
orate Biblical narratives and the imaginative experience of beholding the
stories.59 Just as Bellini invoked fountains as a metaphor of the beholders

57 Walter Friedlander, La Tintura delle Rose, Art Bulletin 20, no. 3 (1938): 3204. On the
Sacred and Profane Love, poetry, and the romance tradition, see Paul Barolsky, Sacred and
Profane Love, Source 17, no. 3 (1998): 258. 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 sprin-
kling the white roses at the same bath with her blood.
58 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 dArmano, it is suggestive that the Venus that Lotto produced
for his nephew included an inscription on black Lyons cloth with the lettering he (Mario
dArmano) requested. See Humfrey, Lorenzo Lotto, 178 (Appendix B).
59 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 Reprsentation: Zwei Bildsphren der Frhen Neuzeit, ed.
Horst Bredekamp, Christiane Kruse, and Pablo Schneider (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag,
2010), 14960.
Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water 259

creativity and as a vehicle for demonstrating his own creative abilities, as

Marisa Bass has suggested, so Lotto also may have employed fountain imag-
ery to demonstrate his own virtuosity. By transforming a well-known foun-
tain sculpture into a painted image, Lotto was celebrating the triumph of
painting over sculpture, a well-worn paragone in sixteenth-century discus-
sions 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 artists role in propagating images) and associated
himself, through his abbreviated name, Laurent, with Apollos most sacred
and beloved tree.61

Conclusion

A painting likely made to commemorate an early modern marriage, Lottos

Venus and Cupid also celebrates the creative imagination. Lottos Nymph of
the Spring-turned-Goddess of Lovea medieval fountain of vision and desire
in classicizing guisebelongs 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 Lottos water nymph, to
conjure her sensuous form from the limpid stream suggested by the blue

60 For treatments of the paragone between sculpture versus painting in fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century art theory, see Leatrice Mendelsohn, Benedetto Varchis 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).
61 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. 15459), 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 Maidens Dream. See Fern Rusk Shapley, Catalogue of the
Italian Paintings, (London: National Gallery, 1968), vol. 1, 1589, and David Alan Brown et al.,
Lorenzo Lotto: Rediscovered Master of the Renaissance (London and New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1997), 857, no. 5. On the Parnassas genre, and more specifically on the
connection between fountains and the authority of the ancients, see Campbell, Renaissance
Faces, 12931. 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),
37240.
260 Oettinger

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 Lottos 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.

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 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 mili-
tary 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 resem-
bles aspects of Mikhail Bakhtins 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 bring-
ing 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. Hlne 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
Drer and Hans Baldung Grien, Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 332401; Linda C. Hults,
The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 2756; Charles Zika, The Appearance of Witchcraft: Print and
Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Routledge, 2007), 12555. 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.

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015|doi 10.1163/9789004289697_010

The Crone, the Witch, and the Library 265

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 Dauphin of southeastern France, and
German-speaking Switzerland. Gene Brucker concluded from his study of tri-
als 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 ban-
quets 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 inter-
course 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): 4201,
431 argues that authorities were concerned that illiterate people were seeking access to knowl-
edge by demonic means and thus were a threat to the restricted privilege of learned magic.
6 Bailey, Medieval Concept, 41939; Richard Kieckhefer, Mythologies of Witchcraft in the
Fifteenth Century, Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 1 (2006): 79108.
7 Norman Cohn, Europes Inner Demons (St. Albans: Paladin, 1976), 115 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), 5749. I try to take
chronology into account and avoid applying later texts back to earlier images.
266 Simons

Studies of classical reception during the Renaissance have to be balanced

with an investigation of cultural continuities alongside reinvigoration and dis-
covery, 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 uphold-
ing 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 Satans 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 Horaces 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 con-
demned by numerous Christian authors, chiefly once witches were a topic in

9 Cohn, Europes Inner Demons, 64, 667, 1557.

10 Joseph Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der
Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter (Bonn: Carl Georgi, 1901), 389 (the Latin); Alan Charles
Kors and Edward Peters, eds., Witchcraft in Europe 4001700: A Documentary History, 2nd
ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 603; Cohn, Europes Inner
Demons, 2103, noting that in Burchard of Wormss 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, Europes 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. 12
(1994): 81122. 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 5.512: Nox et Diana, quae silentium regis,/arcana cum fiunt sacra. Canidia
working at night also features in Horace, Satire 1.2150. All translations of ancient sources
are either mine or taken from the Loeb Classical Library series.
The Crone, the Witch, and the Library 267

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 confes-
sions, 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 excep-
tion 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.8.38.5, 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 18.178), the Malleus and most other texts on witchcraft considered the

14 Lucan, Bellum civile 6.507830 (Erictho); Apuleius, Metamorphoses 1.713 (Meroe) and 2.5,
3.1521 (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), 713, 7884; 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, 534. 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, 10.21057; Ovid, Metamorphoses 14.247307; Virgil, Aeneid 7.1020;
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, 14801580, Zeitenblicke 1, no. 1 (2002), http://www.zeitenblicke
.historicum.net/2002/01/zika/zika.html; Zika, Appearance, 13341. Guy Tal, Witches on
Top: Magic, Power, and Imagination in the Art of Early Modern Italy (PhD diss.,
268 Simons

Figure8.1 Circle of Maso Finiguerra or Baccio Baldini, Hostanes, from the Florentine
Picture Chronicle, c. 14705.
British Museum, London ( Trustees of the British Museum)
The Crone, the Witch, and the Library 269

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 Mirandolas dialogue Strix
(1523).18 The most common move was to follow Augustines lead, strength-
ened by training in the process of interpreting allegorically. Notably, Ovids
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 Picos leading character Phronimus notes that contem-
porary 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), 21458, discusses the theme of melancholy in relation to works
by Alessandro Allori (15756) and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (16505).
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 4001700, 23945; Peter Elmer, Nick Webb, and Roberta Wood, eds., The Renaissance
in Europe: An Anthology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 36694.
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 Lodis 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), 1523: 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
270 Simons

witches in Italy were called prostitutes, whose work easily overlapped with the
practice of supposed love magic (binding anothers 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 illus-
trations 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 Circes 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 Dossis oil painting
of c. 151125 (Fig.8.2), situated in Homers forest glade, surrounded by trans-
formed 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 isola-
tion.24 Her long blond hair bedecked with colorful flowers recalls Homers
emphasis on Circes glorious tresses (Odyssey 10.220, 10.310, 11.6), a detail that
indicates the painters contact with humanists learned in Greek. Renaissance
scholars, however, allegorized Circe in terms of Virgils dea saeva, cruel god-
dess (Aeneid 7.19), to be avoided as the embodiment of voluptuous pleasure

Press, 1904), 225, 2278, 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).
21 Matteo Duni, Under the Devils Spell: Witches, Sorcerers, and the Inquisition in Renaissance
Italy (Florence: Syracuse University in Florence, 2007), 715, with further references,
and 48, 83 for a woman denounced as a procuress in 1499. Horace, Epode 17.20 charac-
terizes Canidia as much beloved of sailors and of traders (amata nautis multum et
institoribus).
22 Andrea Alciato, Emblematum libellus (Venice, 1546), 10 verso, Cavendum meretricibus.
23 Circe occupies a glade (Homer, Odyssey 10.210) or grove (Virgil, Aeneid 7.11). On the paint-
ing in Washington, and on Dossis painting in the Galleria Borghese that probably depicts
Ariostos 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), 756, 8992, no. 3, 1148,
n. 12; Zika, Appearance, 13841, 255, n. 41; Giancarlo Fiorenza, Dosso Dossi: Paintings of
Myth, Magic, and the Antique (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2008), 10126. The change from the lions, wolves, and swine of the Odyssey to Dossos
dogs, birds, and stag has not been explained (it may, on one level, refer to the allure of
hunting).
24 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, 1501.
The Crone, the Witch, and the Library 271

Figure8.2 Dosso Dossi, Circe, c. 151125.

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 usinto 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 Circes 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 direc-
tion, 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 Cited from the translation of 1510 by Thomas More, in Merritt Y. Hughes, Spensers
Acrasia and the Circe of the Renaissance, Journal of the History of Ideas 4 (1943): 388.
26 Circe was not always fearsome. Taking their lead from Plutarchs humorous Bruta anima-
lia ratione uti, Moralia 985D92E, Niccol Machiavelli wrote a satire (1517) and
Giambattista Gelli a dialogue (1548) in which most of the animals refuse to revert to
human form: Machiavelli, LAsino 7.1158.151; Gelli, Circe; Tal, Witches on Top, 2489
(which does not discuss the humorous aspect).
272 Simons

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 ful-
filled, for she is a solitary figure.28 The torsion of her upper body is inspired by
Leonardos Standing Leda, and the arrangement of her legs and the suggestion
of a pastoral dream is reminiscent of Giulio Campagnolas 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 real-
ity. 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, 26.912), did not work forever. But
Dossis viewers, female and male, can be safely beguiled again and again, cap-
tivated 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, Circes magical allure threatened bestial conversion for all

27 Emphasized in Pseudo-Apollodorus, Biblioteca 7.17, the story was well enough known dur-
ing 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 26.912). Ulysses reluctance, due to loyalty to his wife Penelope,
is emphasized in Plutarch, Moralia 988F.
28 Homer, Odyssey 9.303, 10.295300, 335; for her desire see also, for instance, Hesiod,
Theogony, lines 10112.
29 The first two are cited in Peter Humfrey, Two Moments in Dossos Career as a Landscape
Painter, in Dossos 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), 667, 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),
13646; Patricia Simons, Homosociality and Erotics in Italian Renaissance Portraiture, in
Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1997), 312.
The Crone, the Witch, and the Library 273

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 Dossos
North Italian courtly circles, Matteo Maria Boiardos Orlando Innamorato.31
They are under the spell of the painters 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 Dossis audience understood that Circes 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 witchcrafts fantasy, and come to no
clear, single conclusion. The paintings 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, witch-
craft, and delusion.
A few modern scholars of witchcraft mention Dossos 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 Clarks assumption also
continue to affect our inability to recognize certain classicizing nudes as ref-
erences to witchcraft. The underlying premise remains that images of witches
are predominantly ugly and from Northern Europe. As with Dossos 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 peninsulas classical heritage. Ancient literature and art pro-
vided 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 1.6.503; Humfrey and Lucco, Dossi, 90;
Fiorenza, Dossi, 1056.
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), 1567 (written by the Lombard inquisitor in
c. 150513); Spina, Strigibus, 2, 75.
33 The phrase is from a chapter heading: Fritz Saxl, A Heritage of Images (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1970), 89.
274 Simons

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
Vecchios 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 mem-
bers of Dianas band.35 Twelve women at waters edge are about to be joined by
two more emerging from the bushes in the central middle ground (disturb-
ingly 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 Dianas 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 mis-
trusted 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 famil-
iar 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 Dianas devotees.38 Once Palmas
satyrs intrude on the sylvan gathering, viewers could pleasurably anticipate

34 Erwin Panofsky, Albrecht Drer 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 essays 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), 1847, no. 35. It is associated in passing with the night
rides of Diana by Eugenio Battisti, Lantirinascimento (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, 6201, 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), 18.
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), 502.
Diana is dea silvarum: Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.163.
The Crone, the Witch, and the Library 275

that Dianas 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 Picos 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 Aretinos 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 Picos 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 humanists library, particularly works by Homer, Horace, Lucan, Ovid,
Seneca, and Virgil.44 His book, first published in 1523 in Latin, translated into

39 Cohn, Europes Inner Demons, 115, 2146; 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; Aretinos
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 Picos wife
Giovanna Caraffa: Biondi, Libro detto Strega, 512.
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, 21824.
44 Picos 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, Hesiods Theogony, Homers Iliad and Odyssey, a Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite,
276 Simons

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 Picos 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. Picos 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 Picos chronological distinction calls to mind only slightly earlier
statements by two Italian Dominican inquisitors: Bernardo Rategno da Comos
claim that he had found inquisitorial records going back 150 years, that is, to
the mid-fourteenth century, and Silvestro Mazzolini da Prierios 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, Lucans Bellum civile, Ovids Fasti and Metamorphoses, Lucius
Flavius Philostratus Life of Apollonius, Pindars poetry, Plinys Natural History, essays by
Plutarch, various plays by Seneca, and Virgils various works. A few examples are referred
to in my footnotes. For more detail, see the notes in Biondi, Libro detto Strega, 20216.
45 See esp. Ovid, Fasti 6.13168; Samuel Grant Oliphant, The Story of the Strix: Ancient,
Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 44 (1913): 13349;
Cohn, Europes Inner Demons, 20610. Pamphiles 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
6.13148; Lucan, Bellum civile 6.689; Seneca, Hercules furens 688 and Medea 733; and
Quintus Serenus, Liber Medicinalis 58.10356, and reference is made to Pliny, Natural
History 11.95.
47 Pico, Strix, B i rectoB ii recto; Elmer, Webb, and Wood, Renaissance in Europe, 36770.
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,
The Crone, the Witch, and the Library 277

in diabolical history and an emerging resurgence built on that pagan past, a

conception partly informed by his personal experience examining the testi-
mony of local witches at recent trials (15223).50
In the words of Dicastes, the inquisitor in Picos dialogue, all the pagan gods
are demons.51 Picos 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 pro-
vided only false knowledge. Describing his visit to the Belvederes grove of
renowned ancient statuary in a letter of August 1512, he hinted at the displays
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 poems
printed marginalia go hand in hand with the demonization of pagan deities
and dismissal of the innumerable monsters filling ancient poetry.56 Picos

Renaissance Inquisitors: Dominican Inquisitors and Inquisitorial Districts in Northern

Italy, 14741527 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 33, 151 n. 5, 156, 2201. Mazzolini several times dates
the papal bull to 1404, which brings his chronology more in line with Bernardos.
50 For the trials, see Biondi, Libro detto Strega, 1327, 21722.
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, 401.
53 Giovanfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, letter to Lilius Gyraldus, in his De Venere et
Cupidine expellendis (Rome, 1513), B iv rectoC 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), 1058; Maggi, Company of
Demons, 645.
54 It was displayed in the Belvedere by 1509: Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and
Antique Sculpture, 667, no. 16. See Fig. 12.1 in the present volume.
55 Pico, De Venere et Cupidine expellendis (Rome, 1513), A i rectoB 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 Picos classical references.
278 Simons

reference to amorini as demented deities that insane antiquity shaped as

winged brothers and to the way in which Daphne was harmed due to Cupids
attack on Apollo recall commentary by the early ninth-century bishop and
mythographer Theodulf of Orlans.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 lit-
erature as compelling evidence to convert classicists amongst his learned cir-
cles 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 rid-
ing off with Diana were sometimes imagined to be instead joining Venus, god-
dess 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 sculptors artistic skill (artificis ingenium) in proper Renaissance
fashion, yet held that the statues fragmentary state proved that the darkness
of the false superstition had been vanquished by the light of his own true
religion.60
Picos 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 antiquityimparted to the

57 Pico, De Venere et Cupidine expellendis, lines 67 (quos male, fana vetustas/Aligeros

finxis dementia numina fratres), 278; Jane Chance, Medieval Mythography from
Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres, a.d. 4331177, vol. 1 (Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 1994), 1339, quoting Theodulfs poem De libris quos legere solebam,
3362.
58 Pico, Strix, H i recto; expanded a little in Albertis 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, 1036, 11013), but Italian exam-
ples 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, 1089, 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.
The Crone, the Witch, and the Library 279

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 Clarks 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. 151525
(Fig. 8.3), but evident also in paintings by Salvator Rosa or prints after
Parmigianinos designs, amongst others.63 In most cases, the ugly witch is at
the center of wild, forbidding, and exaggerated acts. Images of hags, demons,

Figure8.3 Agostino Veneziano (after Marcantonio Raimondi?), Lo Stregozzo, 151525.

British Museum, London ( Trustees of the British Museum)

61 Burckhardt, Civilization, 356 (hereafter quoted from 370). Tals 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 under-
standing of the surprisingly interconnected worlds of humanism and witchcraft (Tal,
Witches on Top, v, my emphases).
62 Bailey, Medieval Concept, 41939; Kieckhefer, Mythologies of Witchcraft, 79108.
63 Battisti, Lantirinascimento, esp. Nascita dela strega, 13857. For various possible, indirect
allusions to witches in sixteenth-century Italian art, see Mary D. Garrard, Brunelleschis
Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2010), 868, 25961, 282, 286.
280 Simons

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
Horaces Canidia offered incantations.66 Rossos designs for engravings include
winged skeletons and emaciated, screeching figures in dark woods and ceme-
teries, 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 consid-
erable 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 sau-
sages. 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 Griens recent woodcut Witches Sabbath (1510) that the Italian print
must partly be a response to it. Baldungs female coterie has become in the

64 Stephen J. Campbell, Michelangelo, Rosso, and the (Un)Divinity of Art, Art Bulletin 84
(2002): 596620; Michael Cole, The Demonic Arts and the Origin of the Medium, Art
Bulletin 84 (2002): 62140; Hults, Witch as Muse, 2756; 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),
402, 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), 548, no. 2 (Allegory of Death and Fame), 724, no. 8 (Fury),
3446, cat. no. 108 (the drawing and engraving by Ren Boyvin of The Dream of Hercules).
68 Patricia A. Emison, Truth and Bizzarria in an Engraving of Lo Stregozzo, Art Bulletin 81
(1999): 62333; Campbell, (Un)Divinity of Art; Hults, Witch as Muse, 3946; Zika,
Appearance, 1257, 231; Tal, Witches on Top, 160214.
The Crone, the Witch, and the Library 281

Figure8.4 Rosso Fiorentino, Incantation Scene, first half of the 16th century.
Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris (Art Resource, ny)
282 Simons

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 artist-
turned-writer Gian Paolo Lomazzo when he published his Trattato in 1585. He
was thinking in particular of the muscular men from Michelangelos 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 Picos argument about the dan-
ger of witchcraft, it concentrates far more on invention, horror, and effect than
on documentation, and none of its details derive from Picos 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
113); 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 cita-
tions, 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 Drers engraved
Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat of 15001 (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
youthriding a goat (wearing Bacchus leopard skin?) and frenetic acolytes, all

69 Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato (Milan, 1585), 678 (732); Emison, Truth and Bizzarria,
6267.
70 Emison, Truth and Bizzarria, 6303 draws a direct connection with Picos Strix.
71 Tal, Witches on Top, 173200.
72 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 Mirandolas Strix, Sixteenth Century Journal 34 (2003): 5372.
73 Gioconda Albricci, Lo Stregozzo di Agostino Veneziano, Arte Veneta 36 (1982): 5561; Tal,
Witches on Top, 200.
The Crone, the Witch, and the Library 283

Figure8.5 Albrecht Drer, Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat, 15001.

London, British Museum ( Trustees of the British Museum)
284 Simons

idealized in classical terms, recall familiar Bacchic processions or Triumphs.74

For instance, trumpeting, heads-thrown-back bodies exuberantly moving for-
ward 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 litera-
ture about witches, as is the swamp.76 On the far left, the birds rising up in a
cluster represent Ovids version of striges, old women transformed into fowl
by a Marsian spell.77 Other elements recall the authors vivid, lengthy treat-
ment 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 Drers 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, 1235, nos. 768 for
Indian Triumphs, 12731, nos. 813 for Bacchic processions.
75 Ibid., 1245, no. 78.
76 For the swamp, see Seneca, Hercules furens 6868. 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, 7.176403, esp. 7.181, 183, 2578 (passis Medea capillis/bacchan-
tum ritu flagrantis circuit aras), 7.2623 (Interea validum posito medicamen aeno/fervet
et exsultat spumisque tumentibus albet), 7.282. Medeas car drawn by dragons that have
sloughed off their skins (7.2347) may have inspired the skeletal structure in the print.
Bacchus admired Medeas magic (7.2946). 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, 6556. 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, 99124, 127.
80 Parmigianino similarly designed a hybrid monster that has to be supported on its way:
Zika, Appearance, 1234, 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 riders head associates the
horde with followers of Diana/Hecate.
The Crone, the Witch, and the Library 285

grounded view rather than Drers 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 ugli-
ness 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 Drers 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 devel-
oped from Andrea Mantegnas figure of Envy in his ambitious engraving of
the Battle of the Sea Gods (c. 147588) (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, prais-
ing images of infernal furies, Satanic spirits, chimeras, and hybrids by
Drer, Mantegna, and others, such as the Stregozzo, various monsters
described by the ancients as well as by modern romance writers such as

Figure8.6 Andrea Mantegna, Battle of the Sea Gods (left half ), 1470s.
London, British Museum ( Trustees of the British Museum)

81 Charmain Mesenzeva, Zum Problem: Drer und die Antike. Albrecht Drers Kupferstich
Die Hexe, Zeitschrift fr Kunstgeschichte 46 (1983): 187202 (one of the cameos was
owned by Lorenzo de Medici); Zika, Appearance, 279.
286 Simons

Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto, all of which have outdone whatever was
thinkable to imagine concerning such monsters and serpents.82
In Clarks 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 Clarks clear-cut
boundaries, located as it is at the intersection of Italian and German imagery
and amalgamating classical and contemporary visual language with contem-
porary notions of witchcraft and its believed horrors. That type of interchange
is witnessed around 1507 by Benedetto Montagnas copy in reverse of Drers
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 Romanos 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 Drer,
taken up in Italian art too, was so powerful an image that it remains the stereo-
type 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, 6778 (7.32), singling out Drers Knight, Death and the Devil and
Mantegnas 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 second-
century marble relief in Rome showing a Bacchanal, see Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions:
On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 315.
The engraving, which omits the landscape and a winged putto milking the goat, is attrib-
uted 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
The Crone, the Witch, and the Library 287

Figure8.7 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)
288 Simons

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 knowledge-
able, yet they had a higher probability than young women of being widows,
who were less tied to patriarchal and domestic constraints. They could be bar-
ren 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 pros-
titute 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 Apuleiuss Metamorphoses, Aretinos 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
Clarks 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, Aretinos
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 Lucans 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), 1620, with further references.
86 Anger against guardians controlling access to the speakers object of desire could result in
accusations of witchcraft: Amy Richlin, Invective Against Women in Roman Satire,
Arethusa 17 (1984): 712; Patrizia Bettella, The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models
in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2005), 5961.
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 6.5413.
The Crone, the Witch, and the Library 289

Figure8.8 Agostino Veneziano (after Marcantonio Raimondi), Old Woman Approaching

the Grave, 1528.
London, British Museum ( Trustees of the British Museum)
290 Simons

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 Agostinos 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 habi-
tus of the cemetery are represented as ugly, old, stolid, and masculine-
looking. 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 mens. Men were innately heated and
dry, in contrast to the natural state of women as cold and wet, but old age dis-
rupted that balance. Unease about non-idealized female bodies is evident in
Horaces 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. 4567. Enea Vico produced
the 1542 version (an example of which is in the Ashmolean Museum). Agostino
Venezianos signed engraving of two men in a graveyard may represent necromancy:
Emison, Truth and Bizzarria, 627, fig.7.
91 Horace, Satires 1.8.1450 (two barefooted witches, Canidia and the Elder Sagana, search
for bones and set a fire in the Esquiline graveyard); Epodes 5.100, 17.58. Lucans Erictho is
one of many other ancient witches who frequent graves and tombs (Bellum civile 6.5112
and 5.6413).
92 Paolo Grillandi, Tractatus de sortilegiis (Frankfurt, 1592), 534 (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, 7983. 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, 689. On humoral theory see Patricia
Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 12557, 184.
The Crone, the Witch, and the Library 291

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 representa-
tion 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
Ovids 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 womans sagging breasts are relatively rare, even
in satire, appearing in one of Horaces misogynist diatribes as festering,
flabby breasts, like a mares teats, and in two epigrams by Martial, one of
which compares a womans breasts to spiders webs, but neither of which
specifies that a witch is the target.99 Usually, the witch of antiquity was with-
ered, leathery, old, and sometimes pallidrhetoric 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 Ovids 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, 87116, especially Penczs 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 1470s80s, see below.
97 See n. 3 for the distinction between crone and hag as used in this essay.
98 Richlin, Invective, 6780.
99 Horace, Epode 8.78: mammae putres/equina quales ubera; Martial, Epigrams, 3.72.3,
3.93.5 (araneorum cassibus pares mammas).
292 Simons

was by Pico and in engravings by Raimondi, Agostino Veneziano, and others

(Figs.8.38.5, 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, Varros 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 Dantes Divine
Comedy.102 Snakes in their hair, the Furies ululate and obstruct Orpheus in the
underworld in Angelo Polizianos Favola dOrfeo (c. 1480), epitomized in the
woodcut of the c. 1500 publication by a naked, snake-entwined hag, emaci-
ated, 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 Virgils
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 6.5158; Ovid, Amores 1.8.2, 14
(quaedam nomine Dipsas anus, corpus anile); Propertius, Elegies 4.5.67; Pico, Strix,
Dvi 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): 11955. 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 dOnofrio, ed., Romei e Giubilei (Milan: Electa,
1999), 410, no. 215.
103 Angelo Poliziano, Poesie italiane, ed. Saverio Orlando (Milan: Rizzoli, 1976), 11920, 124.
Orpheus encountered Furies with snakes entwined in their hair: Virgil, Georgics 4.4823.
The Crone, the Witch, and the Library 293

flight.104 The Florentine demon, Horaces satirized victim Folia, Varros

Infamy, and Ovids 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 8.8056), 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 shepherds bag.105 Around 1355, Boccaccios misogynist satire
Corbaccio similarly denigrated a wifes 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 crea-
ture 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
Boccaccios phrasing and Martials 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 Abb
Moses the Indian in a Tuscan Thebaid of the 1440s: J. Byam Shaw, Paintings by Old Masters
at Christ Church Oxford (London: Phaidon, 1967), 405, cat. no. 23.
105 For the Latin, and a French translation of c. 13712, see Jehan Le Fvre, Les lamentations de
Matheolus, ed. A.-G. Van Hamel (Paris: Bouillon, 1892), 4 (line 169, Trop est femme
demonieuse), 20 (lines 6601, malice femenin), 21 (lines 6814, Le pis a dur et les mam-
elles,/Qui tant souloient ester belles,/Sont froncies, noires, souillies/Com bourses de ber-
gier 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 immod-
est proposal concerning the Corbaccio, Studi sul Boccaccio 16 (1987): 31528 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, 745, cat. no. 9.
108 For the frescoes, dated in the 1410s, see Steffi Roettgen, Italian Frescoes: The Early
Renaissance (New York: Abbeville, 1996), 4259, esp. pl. 13.
294 Simons

of a crone included wrinkled and empty breasts that look like a spiders
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 describ-
ing a nun who was casting incantations of love magic: Her breasts dangled like
a mans 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 medi-
eval misogyny with ancient invective and allegorical iconography. Figures rep-
resenting 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 devils 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 Dantes
Inferno (1.111), always implicated with Eves 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 womans very large, pendent, and
putrid breasts, in Polizianos Latin poem In Anum: Prose Volgari inedite, Poesie Latine e Greche
edite e inedite, ed. Isidoro del Lungo (Florence: Barbra, 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; Aretinos Dialogues, 45. For the multiple senses of purses and
money bags as testicles or wombs, see Simons, Sex of Men, 16986.
112 The quotations are from Petherbridge, Witches and Wicked Bodies, 15; Roper, Witch in the
Western Imagination, 1819. 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, 2145;
Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven: Yale University
The Crone, the Witch, and the Library 295

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, self-
consuming, 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 Ovids casting of Invidia not as a male figure but as a
hag who infects Aglauros with jealousy over beautiful Mercurys attraction to
her sister Herse (Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.760832).117 Ovids Envy is pallid and
shriveled, her eyesight is warped, venom drips from her tongue, and pectora
felle virent (green, poisonous gall oerflows 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
anyones success, Envy gnaws and is gnawed, herself her own punishment
(carpitque et carpitur una / suppliciumque suum est, 2.7812).
Such is the inspiration for Giottos allegory of the vice frescoed in the Arena
Chapel of Padua around 1305.119 Raging flames at her feet devour the p ersonified

Press, 2004), 613, 80, 125, 135, 168; Roper, Witch in the Western Imagination, 1524, 87116.
It is not clear that envy appeared much in trial documents. Ovid, Virgil, and the Wisdom
of Solomon are amongst the sources cited in Sachss poem on Envy (Roper, Witch in the
Western Imagination, fig.4.4).
115 Shoaf, Eyeing Envy, 12632.
116 Katherine M.D. Dunbabin and M.W. Dickie, Invidia rumpantur pectora: The Iconography
of Phthonos/Invidia in Graeco-Roman Art, Jahrbuch fr Antike und Christentum 26
(1983): 737.
117 Ovids 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).
118 Compare Roper, Witch in the Western Imagination, 100: The idea that envy is fundamen-
tally about fertility lies at the heart of the myth of Aglauros in Ovids Metamorphoses, for
it is Herses sexual union with Mercury that Aglauros envies.
119 Shoaf, Eyeing Envy, fig.2.
296 Simons

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 Ovids vivid details recur in Alciatos
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 Alciatos 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 Penczs woodcut of 1534 illustrating Hans Sachss
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 crones sagging
breasts and, as in Ovid, a long stream of bile suppurates from the other.121 That
the later edition of Sachss poem in 1553 instead features a male figure suggests
that Invidia is not being typed at either time as a witch. Peter Fltners 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
Dantes 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), 1734, 1767 (3.24, 27); Lorenzo de Medici, Tutte le opere, ed. Paolo Orvieto
(Rome: Salerno, 1992), vol. 1, 5538 (the Selve of 148692). Invidia remains the opponent
of desire and thus is exiled in Bronzinos painting of Venus dated c. 1550 and now in
Budapest: Janet Cox-Rearicks entry in Bronzino: Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici,
ed. Carlo Falciani and Antonio Natali (Florence: Mandragora, 2010), 21011, 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 DAscia (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 Rossos drawing of Pandora
releasing numerous ills (c. 15368), 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, 548, 298301, nos. 2, 95). Rosso also depicted several old women,
including St. Anne and Judiths servant, as wrinkled crones.
The Crone, the Witch, and the Library 297

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
Mantegnas Battle of the Sea Gods from the 1470s or early 1480s (Fig.8.6). Here,
the clothed allegorical figure evident in Giottos fresco, and depicted as a stolid,
attribute-laden, and heavily garbed woman in a North Italian engraving of
Invidia dated c. 146080, was transformed from a visual notation to an inte-
grated 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 Ovids account of Invidia
and drops elements like snake-eating that would isolate the figure as an alle-
gorical outsider in the midst of an animated brawl. He keeps the ugly crone
and her crucial emaciation, however, which here sufficiently conveys the oblit-
eration 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 9.3742; Sebastiano Gentile, ed., Sandro Botticelli: Pittore della Divina
Commedia (Milan: Skira, 2000), vol. 2, 569; Lomazzo, Trattato, 6745 (7.32, le poppe
guisa di due bozzacchie crespe, cadenti dal petto), added after a quotation from Ovids
passage on Invidia. Ariostos 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), 28590, nos.
7981. For Leonardos 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),
11620, nos. 104, 1068, 109 B; Alessandro Nova, The Kite, Envy and a Memory of
Leonardo da Vincis Childhood, in Coming About A Festschrift for John Shearman, ed.
Lars R. Jones and Louisa C. Matthew (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Art Museums,
2001), 3816 (which reproduces the anonymous engraving, a copy of which is in the
Rijksmuseum).
125 Lomazzo, Trattato, 3056 (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.
298 Simons

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 Robettas later engraving
(c. 150010) identified by scholars as an Allegory of Envy, the sagging breasts
signify age, ugliness, barrenness, and corrosion both corporeal and psychologi-
cal.127 On the basis of the Biblical text about devilish envy, Drer adapted
Mantegnas 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 Drers 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
Mantegnas engraving, but the figure crucially has more substantial, firmer
breasts than the pendulous ones of the Italian Invidia and thus does not invoke
the vices 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 ref-
erence instead clusters around post-menopausal age, ugliness, excess, and mar-
ginalization. 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 vari-
ous 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 psy-
choanalytic 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 13.646 (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 genera-
tion 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 Robettas engraving is a virtual signa-
ture 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),
2989.
The Crone, the Witch, and the Library 299

it as a physical reality.128 All the more, then, might we need to treat early mod-
ern 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 Dossis 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 ren-
dering Invidia in male form was also revived during the Renaissance. Lucians
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 Botticellis c. 1494 panel
of the subject and in Michelangelos 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 Drer recalled when placing his Invidia-derived witch on an ani-
mal (Fig. 8.5).130 In fact, Mantegnas Invidia is also a rider (Fig. 8.6), though
standing rather than seated on a marine monster directed by a somewhat dis-
mayed youth who is overridden and overtaken. Mantegnas iconographic inno-
vation 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, 12.

129 Lucian, Slander 5; Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, ed. and trans. Cecil
Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972), 967 (3.53); Gentile, Sandro Botticelli, vol. 1, 1567,
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 Michelangelos representation, see
Patricia Simons, Envy and the Other Vices in Michelangelos Last Judgment, Source 33,
no. 2 (2014): 1320.
130 Popham, Drawings of Leonardo, 1179, nos. 1078. For an overview of the riding type, see
Simona Cohen, Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art (Leiden: Brill, 2008),
1922.
300 Simons

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 institu-
tional and personal power. Yet at other times, as we have seen with Dossos 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, sup-
plying 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 incu-
bus, 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
areimagined 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), 1921 (first published around 1471 in Milan or Venice, and issued 66
times by 1500); Popham, Drawings of Leonardo, 1178, no. 107. The idea is not novel in
seventeenth-century emblems, which are discussed in Roper, Witch in the Western
Imagination, 17.
The Crone, the Witch, and the Library 301

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 chapter 9

Picturing Rape and Revenge in Ovids Myth

of Philomela

Hetty E. Joyce

Only a fraction of the stories in Ovids Metamorphoses became popular

subjects in the visual arts. That the tale of Philomela, Procne, and Tereus
(6.424674) 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 Procnes 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 Philomelas 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 (pur-
pureasque notas filis intexuit albis/indicium sceleris; 6.5778). 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 Procnes young son Itys, dismembering, boil-
ing, 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 tetral-
ogy (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

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015|doi 10.1163/9789004289697_011

306 Joyce

sources.1 Aristotle comments in the Poetics (54b) on the construction of the

Tereus, citing Philomelas revelatory fabricthe voice of the shuttle (
), in Sophocles phraseas an example of a poetic device that
aids in anagnorisis, the change from ignorance to knowledge. But Aristotle dis-
approves of Sophocles use of the cloth as the vehicle of revelation, considering
it contrived and inartistic.
The surviving manuscript tradition of Ovids 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 picture-
books with little text. The best-known of the later versions are two early four-
teenth-century works: the Ovide moralis, whose imbedded Old French tale of
Philomena has been attributed to Chrtien de Troyes (written about 1170);3 and
Chaucers Legend of Good Women, which omits the sisters revenge entirely,
however, ending the story with their reunion in the woods.4 John Gowers late
fourteenth-century Confessio Amantis (The Lovers Confession) also includes
the story of Philomela.5

I am very grateful to Alison Poe and Marice Rose for their thoughtful comments and sugges-
tions 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), 17791.
2 Ralph Hexter, Ovid in the Middle Ages: Exile, Mythographer, and Lover, in Brills Companion
to Ovid, ed. Barbara Weiden Boyd (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002), 41342; John Richmond,
Manuscript Traditions and the Transmission of Ovids Works, in Boyd, Ovid, 44359, 46974;
Frank T. Coulson, Procne and Philomela in the Latin Commentary Tradition of the Middle
Ages and Renaissance, Euphrosyne 36 (2008): 18196.
3 Cornelis de Boer, Philomena, conte racont daprs Ovide par Chretien de Troyes; pub. daprs
tous les manuscrits de lOvide moralis 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),
1839, 20065; Ana Poiret, Recasting the Metamorphoses in Fourteenth-Century France: The
Challenges of the Ovide moralis, in James G. Clark, Frank T. Coulson, and Kathryn L.
McKinley, ed., Ovid in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 83107.
4 Sheila Delany, The Naked Text: Chaucers Legend of Good Women (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994): 21321; Paul Beekman Taylor, Chaucers Chain of Love (Madison, nj:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 5770.
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), 13042; Bruce Herbert, The Myth of Tereus in Ovid and Gower, Medium
Picturing Rape And Revenge 307

In the Metamorphoses, the production of Philomelas 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 Philomelas weaving (6.576578), feminist crit-
ics 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 undervalu-
ing of women artists, particularly those working in the traditionally feminine
craft of textile.6 For Katherine Kruger, Philomelas 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
Ovids work with Philomela; Behind Philomelas weaving is Ovids own web of
words (textus) that recreates events which are spectacular for their suppression
of speech. Philomelas 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): 20814; Amanda M. Leff, Writing, Gender, and Power in Gowers Confessio
Amantis, Exemplaria 20, no. 1 (2008): 2847; Kathryn McKinley, Lessons for a King from
Gowers 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), 10728.
6 Patricia Kleindienst Joplin, The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours, Stanford Literature Review 1, no.
1 (1984): 2553, reprinted in Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World: Readings and Sources,
ed. Laura K. McClure (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2002), 25986; Elissa Marder,
Disarticulated Voices: Feminism and Philomela, Hypatia 7, no. 2 (1992): 15662; James M.
Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashberry (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), 4653; E. Jane Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old
French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 11550; Charles Segal,
Philomelas 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), 25880; Jane O. Newman, And Let Mild Women to Him Lose Their
Mildness: Philomela, Female Violence, and Shakespeares 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), 5965; Patricia B. Salzman-Mitchell, A Web of Fantasies: Gaze, Image, and Gender in
Ovids Metamorphoses (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2005), 13949; 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, Philomelas Web, 2656.
308 Joyce

Philomelas power to speakthat is, the power of wordsas woven into and
bound up with the power of pictures to speakto 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 asser-
tion of the will to survive despite everything that threatens to silence us.10
Modern literary critics have thus attributed profound significance to Philomelas
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 Ovids 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 moralis 6.33053349).
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 7.235065). 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 Philomelas 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 indic-
ative 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): 623.
11 Heffernan, Museum of Words, 47; Marder, Disarticulated Voices, 60; Salzman-Mitchell, A
Web of Fantasies, 1446; Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 45.
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 5.576973).
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 repre-
senting the rape (Heffernan, Museum of Words, 61).
Picturing Rape And Revenge 309

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 fathersand Athenshonor, which had out-
weighed 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 Bibliothque Municipal ms 0.4, with 453 illumi-
nations, as the ancestor of all surviving illustrated manuscripts of the Ovide

14 Ludi Chazalon, Le mythe de Tre, Procn et Philomle dans les images attiques, Mtis,
N.S. 1 (2003): 11948; Aurlie Damet, Linfamille. Les violences familiales sur la cramique
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 hor-
rifying. Tereus feast reappears (certainly coincidentally) on maiolica dishes in the 1530s:
Baldassare Manara: Gteborg, Rhsska Konstljdmuseet, inv. no. Ker 114 (Carmen
Ravanelli Guidotti, Baldassare Manara Faetino: Pittore di maioliche nel Cinquecento
[Ferrara: Belriguardo, 1996], 10811); 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],
1245, 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): 101.
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, 524, 645, 6970, 726, 84, 1201, 12830, 13840,
1447).
310 Joyce

moralis.17 It was made for Clmence 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 Pandions palace (Fig. 9.1). Next Tereus asks
Pandions 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 princesss 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 tales dnouement: Procne
turns sharply away from her husband as he falsely reports her sisters 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 hoopoes 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 decep-
tive love, impermanent and unstable, but the series of miniatures devoted to
the preceding recounting of the story does not reflect this moralizing interpre-
tation 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
Lords assessment, the speedy, slapdash designer had a certain respect for
the original [i.e. Rouen] Ovide moralis but not to the point of slavish copying
(compare Figs. 9.4 and 9.8).18 Indeed, the artist demonstrates his indepen-
dence 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 Carla Lord, Three Manuscripts of the Ovide moralis, Art Bulletin 57, no. 2 (1972): 1613;
Lord, A Survey of Imagery in Medieval Manuscripts of Ovids Metamorphoses and Related
Commentaries, in Clark et al., Ovid in the Middle Ages, 26170.
18 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, 1639;
Appendix, 173).
Picturing Rape And Revenge 311

Figure9.1 Tereus and Philomela in Pandions palace, in the Ovide moralis, c. 141525.
collections de la bibliothque municipale de rouen, ms 0.4, fol. 169v
312 Joyce

Figure9.2 Tereus asks Pandions permission to take Philomela to Thrace, in the Ovide moralis,
c. 141525.
collections de la bibliothque municipale de rouen, ms 0.4, fol. 170v

John Gowers 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. Gowers 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. Philomelas tale comes in Book 5,
55516047, 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 womans 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 Lee A. Ritscher, The Semiotics of Rape in Renaissance English Literature (New York: Peter
Lang Publishing, 2009), 2.
20 Peter Nicholson, Love and Ethics in Gowers Confessio Amantis (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2005), 28891.
Picturing Rape And Revenge 313

Figure9.3 Tereus sails with Philomela to Thrace, in the Ovide moralis, c. 141525.
collections de la bibliothque municipale de rouen, ms 0.4, fol. 173R

horses than ever do anything against his ladys 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 Librarys 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 book-
collecting wife of Edward iv.23 Its Flemish artists produced vivid miniatures,

21 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, 5.605267).
22 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):
14386.
23 Martha Driver, Women Readers and Pierpont Morgan ms M. 126, in John Gower:
Manuscripts, Readers and Contexts, ed. Malte Urban (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 6783.
314 Joyce

Figure9.4 Tereus cuts out Philomelas tongue, in the Ovide moralis, c. 141525.
collections de la bibliothque 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, con-
centrates on his grisly work; a trickle of blood falls onto Philomelas
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
illuminations frame, observing that the transgression against the princess
is re-emphasized by the aggressive breaking of the frame by the foot of
Picturing Rape And Revenge 315

Figure9.5 Tereus falsely reports to Procne that Philomela is dead, in the Ovide moralis, c. 141525.
collections de la bibliothque municipale de rouen, ms 0.4, fol. 177R

Tereus, which holds down her gown.24 Philomelas suffering is nevertheless

restrainedshe faces Tereus and clasps her hands in prayer, like a virgin
martyrand the retribution of the fashionably dressed sisters is deliberate
and dignified.25 Though the large knife on the table points suggestively from
the kings groin to Philomelas hips, as in the Rouen and Arsenal Ovide moralis
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 Driver, Women Readers, 89.

25 The costume elements in the Philomela miniatureparticularly the headdresses worn
by the womenare found also in portraits of Elizabeth Woodville and help to date the
manuscript and locate its origin in Flanders (Driver, Women Readers, 8992).
316 Joyce

Figure9.6 Philomela shows Itys head to Tereus, in the Ovide moralis, c. 141525.
collections de la bibliothque municipale de rouen, ms 0.4, fol. 177r

For the Rouen and Arsenal manuscripts of the Ovide moralis and the
Morgan Librarys Confessio Amantis, Anton Boschloos 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.
Picturing Rape And Revenge 317

Figure9.7 Philomela, Procne and Tereus transformed into birds, in the Ovide moralis, c. 141525.
collections de la bibliothque municipale de rouen, ms 0.4, fol. 177r

thereafter continue to be issued unabatedly throughout the sixteenth cen-

tury 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, Vortrge der Bibliothek Warburg (19267): 58144; Boschloo, Images of the
Gods, 41221; Gerlinde Huber-Rebenich, Liconografia della mitologia antica tra Quattro-
e Cinquecento: Edizioni illustrate delle Metamorfosi di Ovidio, Studi umanistici piceni 12
(1992): 12333; Anna Rosa Gentilini, Circulation of Books and Artistic Commissions dur-
ing the 16th century: Research on Livius and Ovids Book Tradition and Ceramics
Tradition, in LIstoriato: Libri a stampa e maioliche italiane del Cinquecento (Faenza:
Gruppo Editoriale Faenza Editrice, 1993), 17082. Ovid Illustrated: The Reception of Ovids
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 Ovids poem.
318 Joyce

Figure9.8 Tereus cuts out Philomelas tongue, in the Ovide moralis, c. 132550.
Paris, Bibliothque de lArsenal, 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 Jrg)
Wickram, Metamorphoses (Mainz, 1545, 1551) (Henkel, Illustrierte Ausgaben, 1056;
Evamarie Blattner, Holzschnittfolgen zu den Metamorphosen des Ovid: Venedig 1497 und
Mainz 1545, Beitrge zur Kunstwissenschaft [Munich: Scange, 1998], 358, 1029, fig. M18);
and Lodovico Dolces very popular Le trasformationi di M. Lodovico Dolce tratte da Ovidio
(Venice: Gabriel Giolito, 1553) (Henkel, Illustrierte Ausgaben, 824; Bodo Guthmller,
Mito, poesia, arte: Saggi sulla tradizione Ovidiana nel Rinascimento [Rome: Bulzoni
Editore, 1997], 25174; Guthmller, Ovidio metamorphoseos vulgare: Forme e funzioni della
trasposizione in volgare [Florence: Cadmo, 2008],, 26977; Boschloo, Images of the Gods,
Picturing Rape And Revenge 319

Figure9.9 Philomela gives the tapestry to the messenger, in the Ovide moralis, c. 132550.
Paris, Bibliothque de lArsenal, ms 5069, fol. 89v

The richly illustrated, frequently reprinted 1557 Lyon edition of the

Metamorphoses, with woodcuts by Bernard Salomon (le Petit Bernard),

4167). 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
Farnesinas 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],
346, pl. 34; Claudia Cieri Via, LArte delle Metamorfosi: Decorazioni mitologiche del
Cinquecento [Rome: Lithos, 2003]: 298301; Claudio M. Strinati et al., eds., Sebastiano del
Piombo, 14851547 [Milan: F. Motta, 2008], 1302 [Tullia Carrat]).
320 Joyce

Figure9.10 The messenger gives Philomelas tapestry to Procne, in the Ovide moralis, c. 132550.
Paris, Bibliothque de lArsenal, 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 moralis.29 The text is an abridged
retelling, with each page displaying a woodcut at the top and eight lines of

29 La Mtamorphose dOvide figure (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, 7282; Ghislaine Amielle, Recherches sur
des traductions franaises des Metamorphoses dOvide illustres et publies en France la
fin du XVe sicle et au XVIe sicle (Paris: J. Touzot, 1989), 198240; Peter Sharratt, Bernard
Salomon, illustrateur lyonnais (Geneva: Droz, 2005), 15065, 25863, 3056. An edition of
the poem by Johannes Spreng, with copies of many of Salomons woodcuts by Virgil Solis,
itself underwent many reprintings after its original 1563 publication (Henkel, Illustrierte
Picturing Rape And Revenge 321

Figure9.11 The Myth of Philomela, in John Gower, Confessio Amantis, 1470s.

The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, ms m.126, fol. 122r

poetry (attributed to Barthlemy Aneau) below, within an elaborate frame of

arabesque or grotesque ornament.30 Most of the stories are given one or some-
times 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, 8795; Karl Stahlberg, Virgil Solis und die Holzschnitte zu den Metamorphosen
des Ovid, Marginalien: Zeitschrift fr Buchkunst und Bibliophilie 95 [1984]: 2935).
30 Amielle, Recherches sur les traductions franaises, 21.
322 Joyce

woodcut illustrates for the first time the beginning of the story, with Tereus
and Procne in bed (Fig. 9.12): As Ovid relates (6.42932), Furies with flam-
ing 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
beds tester.
On the next page, Philomela is conducted onto Tereus ship, having been
commended to the Thracian kings 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
(6.556557). 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 womens 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 boys 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 bed-
room setting belongs rather to the similarly brutal tale of mortal lust, Tarquins
rape of the virtuous Roman matron Lucretiaa popular exemplum of female
virtue in the early modern periodwhich served as a ready pictorial model for
the rape of Philomela.31 Compare, for example, Giorgio Ghisis engraving of
Tarquin and Lucretia (c. 1540; Fig.9.17) after Giulio Romanos fresco of the sub-
ject in the Camerino dei Falconi, Palazzo Ducale, Mantua.32

31 The story is told in Livy, History of Rome 1.579 and Ovid, Fasti 11.722852 (Patricia Emison,
The Singularity of Raphaels Lucretia, Art History 14, no. 3 (1991): 3769; Ritscher,
Semiotics of Rape, 623).
32 Suzanne Boorsch, Michal Lewis, and R.E. Lewis, The Engravings of Giorgio Ghisi
(New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985), 378, no. 2.
Picturing Rape And Revenge 323

Figure9.12 Bernard Salomon, Tereus, Procne, and the Furies, in La Mtamorphose

dOvide figure, Lyon, 1557.
324 Joyce

Figure9.13 Bernard Salomon, Pandion, Tereus, and Philomela, in La Mtamorphose dOvide

figure, Lyon, 1557.

The popularity of Antonio Tempestas 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 Philomelas story into its two most dramatic epi-
sodes. He stages the assault in a well-furnished bedroom, following the iconog-
raphy of Tarquins rape of Lucretia, but unlike previous illustrators of the
Philomela myth, he represents the rape itself, not the mutilation. In Tempestas
Plate59, Tereus, his sword still hanging at his side, pushes the half-undressed

33 Antonio Tempesta, Metamorphoseon sive Transformationum Ovidianarum libri quinde-

cim, 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.
Picturing Rape And Revenge 325

Figure9.14 Bernard Salomon, Pandion forces Philomela, in La Mtamorphose dOvide figu-

re, Lyon, 1557.

Philomela back on the bed as helike Tarquinforces his legs between his
victims knees; his billowing cloak betrays the violence of the attack (Fig.9.18).
Salomons woodcut is an intermediate step in the development of the iconog-
raphy of Philomelas rape: He adapts the rape of Lucretia to depict the cutting
of Philomelas 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
Tempestas Plate 60, which follows Salomons 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 Philomelas rape in
Lucretias bedroom, Tempestas sequence distinguishes Philomelas story from
Lucretias 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), 1436.
326 Joyce

Figure9.15 Bernard Salomon, Procne and her sister; Procne avenges her sister, in La
Mtamorphose dOvide figure, Lyon, 1557.

Let us now consider why the tongue-cutting is so often substituted for the
rape; Tempestas etching is the rare exception. In her discussion of illuminated
manuscripts of Christine de Pizans Epistre Othea (c. 1400)an anthology of clas-
sical myths, several based on Ovidian narratives of rapeDiane 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 womans beauty was considered an incitement to male desire (as Ovid makes
clear in 6.4518), 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 moralis (Figs.9.4, 9.8), Tereus seizes Philomela from behind, emphasiz-
ing the violent nature of his crime and his victims unwillingness. Certainly an
image of the mutilation, could not be misinterpreted: Tereus act was

35 Wolfthal, Images of Rape, 13040.

36 Jocelyn Catty, Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England: Unbridled Speech
(New York: St. Martins Press, 1999), 14.
Picturing Rape And Revenge 327

Figure9.16 Bernard Salomon, Procne avenges her sister, in La Mtamorphose dOvide figu-
re, Lyon, 1557 (detail of 9.15).

an unambiguously brutal, shocking, and reprehensible violation of Philomelas

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 ori-
gin, made around 1600 (Figs.9.20, 9.21).37 The valances are remarkableprobably
uniquefor 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], xviiixix, 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], 1589; Mihoko Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and
Literary Form in England, 15881688 [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003], 1668). 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.
328 Joyce

Figure9.17 Giorgio Ghisi, Tarquin and Lucretia, c. 1540.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Ovids 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, pin-
ning Philomela down with his knee just as Tarquin overpowers Lucretia in
Titians 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, 15801700: Twixt Art and Nature (New York: Bard
Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, 2008), 198202, 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), 2235: 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.
Picturing Rape And Revenge 329

Figure9.18 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 Salomons 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 dEurope brodaient: Broderie au petit point, 15701610 (Paris: Reunion des Muses
Nationaux, 2003): 702, 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, 7997, 2802, 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.
330 Joyce

Figure9.19 Antonio Tempesta, Procne kills Itys and shows his head to Tereus, from the
Metamorphoseon Ovidianarum, c. 1606.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California

Figure9.20 First of two embroidered bed valances with the story of Philomela, c. 1600.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Figure9.21 Second of two embroidered bed valances with the story of Philomela, c. 1600.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Picturing Rape And Revenge 331

Figure9.22 Tereus cuts out Philomelas tongue (detail of 9.20).

Salomons figure) show that she is to be responsible for the captive princesss
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 Philomelas 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 Philomelas 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. Ovids text (6.57180) is ambiguous about the number and even the
gender of Philomelas guard(s), while the Old French Philomena (lines 86773) 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 figures 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 icono-
graphic consistency.
332 Joyce

Figure9.23 Cornelis Cort after Titian, The Rape of Lucretia, c. 1571.

London, British Museum ( Trustees of the British Museum)
Picturing Rape And Revenge 333

Figure9.24 Tereus introduces Philomela to the old woman (detail of 9.20).

and release. The urgency of the womens 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 Philomelas 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 Pandions 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, 64.101.137173).
334 Joyce

Figure9.25 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 patternsindependently drawn or copied from prints and pattern
booksto canvas for ladies to work.45 A womans skill at needlework was a
source of pride but at the same time a reflection of societys restricting expec-
tations 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 Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, 13471; Privat-Savigny, Quand les princesses
dEurope brodaient, 204; Parker, The Subversive Stitch, 739.
45 Anthony Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The
Influence of Continental Prints, 15581625 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1997): 23545; Wells-Cole repeats (240) Hackenbrochs misidentification of the figure of
the old woman.
46 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), 23742; Jones and Stallybrass,
Renaissance Clothing, 13444.
Picturing Rape And Revenge 335

Figure9.26 Procne and her companions (detail of 9.21).

households position and economic standing.47 A watercolor in the early

seventeenth-century Album Amicorum of Gervasius Fabricius (Fig.9.27) illus-
trates 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 homewell-furnished with a large
bed, fireplace, and a walker for her toddlerworking at her embroidery (not
spinning, as in Livy 1.57.9), assisted by an older woman with distaff and spin-
dle (and keys hanging from her waist). Humanist writers held contradictory
views of spinning and weaving, which were classical symbols of ideal femi-
ninity 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, 160337; 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): 299302; Patricia Fortini Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art,
Architecture, and the Family (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 901.
50 Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, 10433.
336 Joyce

Figure9.27 Ladies in a garden embroidering, from the Album Amicorum of Gervasius

Fabricius, 160337.
( 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 Stradanos ceiling painting
Penelope at Her Loom in the Sala di Penelope, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence
(155562), Penelopes 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 It should be noted, however, that Wickram, Dolce, Salomon, and Tempesta had no reluc-
tance 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.
52 Penelope is equated in Stradanos painting with Eleonora de Toledo, Duchess of Florence.
Georgianna Ziegler, Penelope and the Politics of Womens Place in the Renaissance, in
Glorianas Face: Women, Public and Private in the English Renaissance, ed. S.P. Cerasano
and Marion Wynne-Davies (New York, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 2633,
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, 1127). See also Crispin de Passes 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).
Picturing Rape And Revenge 337

Figure9.28 Luca Bertelli, Lucretia and Her Companions, c. 1575.

milan, civica raccolta delle stampe achille bertarelli
338 Joyce

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 dis-
tinction. 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 fash-
ions 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 pos-
sibility supported by the hair ornament worn by Philomela in the tongue-cut-
ting scene (Fig.9.29), which resembles the jewel-and-feather ornament worn
by Elizabeth i in George Gowers much-copied Armada Portrait (c. 1588).
Tereus clothes also support a late sixteenth-century English origin for the pan-
els: 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 dEurope brodaient, 54. Compare the dress worn by
ladies of the court in embroideries in the Chateau dcouen (Privat-Savigny, Quand les
princesses dEurope brodaient, 702, no. 2, and 939, no. 8; English or French, late sixteenth
century) and New York (Morrall and Watt, English Embroidery in the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 1124, no. 2; probably English, 15801600).
55 E.g., an engraving after an unknown artist, Sir Francis Drake (late sixteenth or early seven-
teenth 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 hats 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).
Picturing Rape And Revenge 339

Figure9.29 Philomela (detail of 9.20).

340 Joyce

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 Ovids poem, the wilderness where the Athenian princess is raped and
imprisoned symbolizes the barbarian kings disregard for the moral constraints
of civilization, but the rural setting in the valances has quite different associa-
tions. Gardens and rural scenes were popular subjects for needlework pro-
duced for aristocratic patrons, who delighted equally in elaborate gardens
and textiles.57 But the Philomela of the valances is not sitting in a garden sur-
rounded 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 Philomelas sewing is not the quiet production of domestic fur-
nishings 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 reso-
lute 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 ladywhether patron, designer, or bothknew her Ovid very
well, for the pattern on Philomelas embroidery frame (Fig.9.30) is neither
words nor images but the very notaesigns or marksdescribed 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, 1667).
57 Beck, Elizabethan Gardens, 623; Privat-Savigny, Quand les princesses dEurope brodaient,
8699.
58 Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, 158.
Picturing Rape And Revenge 341

Figure9.30 Philomelas embroidery (detail of 9.21).

the guardianwho had not been represented in any earlier illustrationnot

once but twice. Jane Burns cites the passage in the Old French Philomena
(lines 86773) that comments on the tyrant Tereus foolishness in selecting as
a guard for his prisoner a woman who knows how to weavefeminine
knowledge, quite outside the mans experience, that will have fatal conse-
quences for him.59 But while offering essential assistance, the guardian can-
not read the needleworks message: Philomelas mysterious embroidery
reinforces the ladys claim to patronage of the design and perhaps its author-
ship 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 Salomons Metamorphoses for the old
woman; didactic prints for Philomela sewing; contemporary courtly dress and
attitudes for the figures. But what of Philomelas revenge? The consequences of
Tereus crimethe infanticide and cannibal feast, so often depicted in earlier
illustrations of the mythare not shown in the valances, which end, as in

59 Burns, Bodytalk, 132.

342 Joyce

Chaucers version of the story, with Philomelas rescue by her sister. Chaucer
dismisses Ovids 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 mans 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 cen-
turies. Both male and female poets identified particularly with the com-
playnte of the transformed Philomela, whose silencing and recovered voice in
the nightingales 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 societys 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 Shakespeares
works are steeped in the poem, which he would have known in Latin as well as
in Goldings translation; indeed, the Metamorphoses are the source of about
ninety percent of Shakespeares references to classical mythology.63 The story
of Philomela is alluded to in three of Shakespeares works: Titus Andronicus
(written or revised in 1594), the narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece (1594), and
Cymbeline (16089). In Titus Andronicus, Lavinias rapists have cut off her
hands as well as her tongue, to prevent her from exposing their crime by

60 Legend of Good Women, 7.2383, 2393: Delaney, The Naked Text, 2201.
61 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, 623;
Ann Rosalind Jones, New Songs for the Swallow: Ovids Philomela in Tullia dAragona 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), 26377; Catty, Writing Rape, 2, 12133.
62 John Frederick Nims, ed., Ovids 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), 2525.
63 Jonathan Bate, Shakespeares Ovid, in Ovids Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding
Translation, xlii.
Picturing Rape And Revenge 343

sewing a tedious sampler like Philomela.64 Lavinia is able to communi-

cate nonetheless, by showing the Philomela passage in a copy of the
Metamorphoses from her fathers library (4.1.4650). 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
Ovids book for what was Philomelas tapestry. The Metamorphoses, especially
in its illustrated Renaissance form, is a tapestry [Barkans 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 Procnes 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 hardend hearts, harder than stones;
And let mild women to him lose their mildness,
Wilder to him than tigers in their wildness. (lines 974980)

Lucrece immediately rejects the notion of exacting vengeance herself, how-

ever, and chooses to leave revenge in the hands of men. The resulting invisibil-
ity of the Philomela option leaves no alternative response to female
victimization than the self-victimization of noble suicide. Jane Newman

64 Lavinias uncle Marcus thus describes her terrible injuries:

Fair Philomela, she but lost her tongue,
And in a tedious sampler sewd 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 sewd than Philomel (2.4.3843).
65 Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 2467.
66 Lucreces identification with the abused princess is made explicit later in the poem (lines
112834) when she imagines herself singing a sad duet with the transformed Philomela
(Enterline, Rhetoric of the Body, 1925).
344 Joyce

argues that Lucreces rejection of the sisters course of action is the result of
the ideological pressure of a postclassical gender code organized around pre-
serving political agency for the male.67 I propose that the proliferation of rape
narratives, the popularity of Goldings translation of Ovids poem, and
Shakespeares 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 interpreta-
tion undermine the textiles subversive power or its assertion of female agency
and creative independence? Not at all. I suggest that the designers intention
was just the resolution that Patricia Joplin has advocated: that viewers of the
valances, female and male, resist defining womens 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

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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 clas-
sical 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 met-
aphorical 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 subordi-
nate status.1 The gendered associations of personifications of Florence are
instead complicated by their evocation of various legends of the citys ancient
Roman foundingwhich encompass both masculine and feminine
aspectsin 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 Rmischen Welt 17, no. 2
(1981): 10116, 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): 4462; and Ren 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), 8192.

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

Figuring Florence 351

Cities Personified

The first known nude personification of a city in Florentine art is Niccol

Tribolos sculpture of Fiesole (Fig.10.1), the hill town overlooking Florence, cre-
ated 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 Fiesoles robust body, nudity,
and torsion, with her head facing left and her leg sharply right, reveal the pro-
found influence of Michelangelos 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 masters departure from Florence in 1534. He also produced
small-scale copies of the Times of Day and in 1545 assembled the tombs in

Figure10.1 Niccol Tribolo, Fiesole, c. 1540.

Bargello Museum, Florence (Ralph
Lieberman)

2 Bertha H. Wiles, Tribolo in His Michelangelesque Vein, Art Bulletin 14, no. 1 (1932): 6470. It
was executed sometime after the commission for the garden in 1537 and before a description
in a letter by Niccol Martelli in 1543.
3 Michael Hirst, Michelangelo: The Achievement of Fame 14751534 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2011), 1956, dates the ten models for the statues in the Medici Chapel to 15246, and
the transport of a slightly used block so that he could begin work on the Night to late the
same year.
352 Lazzaro

Figure10.2 Michelangelo, Night, 152134.

Medici Chapel, Florence (Ralph Lieberman)

the chapel.4 The statues relationship extends beyond the formal, since
Michelangelos 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 Bandinellis abducted female captive
(Fig.10.3) and Pierino da Vincis 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 Wabiski, LAccademia medicea del disegno a Firenze nel
Cinquecento: Idea e istituzione (Florence: Olschki, 1987), 802.
Figuring Florence 353

Figure10.3 Baccio Bandinelli, Relief with scene of triumph on monument to Giovanni dalle
Bande Nere, 15403.
Piazza San Lorenzo, Florence (Ralph Lieberman)

could explain personificationabstract ideas or non-human entities given

human body and voicethrough 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 indi-
rectly visualized in Baccio Bandinellis relief on the base of the monument he
designed to the celebrated condottiere Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, father of

5 James J. Paxson, Personifications Gender, Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 16,
no. 2 (1998): 1523; Manuel Aguirre, The Grieving City: Lucans Aged Rome and the
Morphology of Sovereignty, Neohelicon 35, no. 1 (2008): 402.
6 Paxson, Personifications Gender, 153. Aguirre, The Grieving City, 402, 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),
5560, discusses the roles of the female city in Italian Renaissance poetry and their relation-
ship with sexuality.
354 Lazzaro

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 sol-
diers 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 Bandinellis captive, ultimately inspired by Michelangelo, results in
the display of her breasts and contradictory directions of her body, both cling-
ing to, and leaning away from, her captor.
Prisoners and captives, women as well as men, feature significantly in impe-
rial Roman narrative scenes, as either an aspect of warfare or a symbolic repre-
sentation 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 gar-
ment 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 aestheti-
cizes 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

7 Louis A. Waldman, Baccio Bandinelli and Art at the Medici Court: A Corpus of Early Modern
Sources (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2004), 1923 and 2624, with pay-
ments through 1543.
8 Keith Bradley, On Captives under the Principate, Phoenix: A Journal of the Classical
Association of Canada 58, no. 34 (2004): 298318; Philip De Souza, War, Slavery, and
Empire in Roman Imperial Iconography, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 54,
no. 1 (2011): 4057.
9 Diana E.E. Kleiner, Roman Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 6971;
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), 2469 and figs.79,
80, 82, and 84.
10 Felix Pirson, Style and Message on the Column of Marcus Aurelius, Papers of the British
School at Rome 64 (1996): 142 and 157.
Figuring Florence 355

Figure10.4 Gemma Augustea, 912 ce.

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Erich Lessing/Art Resource,
ny)

Bandinellis 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, Bandinellis couple does not pretend to represent a seemingly docu-
mentary 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 relation-
ship 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 faade of the Casa Milesi in Rome.
356 Lazzaro

Figure10.5 Sarcophagus with the Abduction of Persephone by Hades, detail, 2205 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 Persephones are also among the prin-
cipal signifiers of ancient maenadsfollowers of Dionysos and images of
female abandon (Fig.10.6). In his brief discussion of Bandinellis relief, Giorgio
Vasari singled out the nudes and disheveled hair.12 The abducted females hair
is indeed strikingdeeply 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 femalespoised, restrained, and upright13would
also resonate as signifying the loss of female decorum, her civil persona
undone. Bandinellis 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 sym-
bolic of one as in Bandinellis 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 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de pi eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanesi,
vol. 6 (Firenze: G. C. Sansoni, 1906), 169, e femmine scapigliate, ed ignudi.
13 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), 1378 and
1445.
Figuring Florence 357

Figure10.6 Maenad, detail, 27 bce68 ce.

Metropolitan Museum, New York (The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, Rogers Fund, 1912, www.metmuseum.org)
358 Lazzaro

Figure10.7 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 Pisas 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), 2324, 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.
Figuring Florence 359

images, a standing male ruler shares the dextrarum iunctio (ceremonial right-
hand 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

Figure10.8 Coin of Hadrian, Hadrian restoring Achaea, reverse, 1345 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 deriva-
tion from the ancient coin type and its Michelangelesque transformation.
360 Lazzaro

to Tribolos 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 Pisas 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
Pierinos 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 under-
stood as referring metaphorically to the city as a beautiful woman. In the
earliest known visual image of Florence personified as a woman from a mid-
thirteenth-century manuscript, she appears like the Virgin Mary with long gar-
ments 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 fea-
tured 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 Martines, Poetry as Politics, 534 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.
17 See Marco Cianchi, Alcune considerazioni sui bassorilevi di Pierino da Vinci, in Pierino
da Vinci, 53 and figs.838, for both Chatsworth and Uffizi preparatory drawings.
18 Baskins, Shaping Civic Personification, 1003, who also notes the erotically charged
Pisa in both Pierinos relief and Vasaris painting in the Palazzo Vecchio.
19 Adrian W.B. Randolph, Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-
Century 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.
20 Bergstein, Marian Politics, 6879; Randolph, Engaging Symbols, 6971.
Figuring Florence 361

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 lit-
erature 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 Romeher appearance together with the living emperor in both narra-
tive 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 inti-
matephysical 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 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 26783, 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), 11425, dis-
cusses 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 personi-
fication 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): 53541, discusses personifications of Rome in late fourth- and
fifth-century Latin poetry, particularly Claudians 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.
22 Mellor, Goddess Roma, 956, 984, 1005, 1013, and 100510, for the goddess Roma in
Augustan and later poetry.
23 Ibid., 10135; Kleiner, Roman Sculpture, 1912, 2546, 291, and figs.159, 223, and 258.
362 Lazzaro

Figure10.9 Adventus of Marcus Aurelius, 176380 ce.

Arch of Constantine, Rome (Vanni Archive/Art Resource, ny)
Figuring Florence 363

government.24 Those who were considered the citys 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), patri-
cian 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 configura-
tion, 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 citys rightful lovers, its citizens, had been displaced by
her new lord. He figured Cosimos Florence as a woman created for many lov-
ers, 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, char-
acterized 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, 6971; Bergstein, Marian Politics, 688.

25 Randolph, Engaging Symbols, 701; 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
dangelica forma; or par chen ciel si dorma, sun sol sappropia quell ch 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 12001575 (Malden, ma: Blackwell Publishing, 2006),
429.
30 Giovanni Gaetano Bottari and Stefano Ticozzi, Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura ed
architettura scritte da pi celebri personaggi dei secoli xv, xvi, e xvii, vol. 4 (Milan:
G. Silvestri, 1822), 2534, CLI.
364 Lazzaro

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 Cosimos face evoke the city as metaphorically
the milkthe sustenanceof ruler and citizens, and also the city as seduc-
tress, lover, and mistress.31 In a preparatory drawing in Copenhagen, Vasari

Figure10.10 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.
Figuring Florence 365

imagined her fully nude, rushing toward her prince-lover in her eagerness to
place the crown on his head.32 Vasaris painting alludes to the Roman sen-
ates 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 Romecity or statewho 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 invin-
cibility 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 Romes military
might. In antiquity as in the Renaissance, breasts could denote female fearless-
ness 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), 5960, no. 13.
33 Malcolm Campbell, Observations on the Salone de Cinquecento in the Time of Duke
Cosimo i de Medici, 15401574, in Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nellEuropa del 500,
vol. 3 (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1983), 8267; 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, 2203, fig.185, for the Great Trajanic Frieze; 2924, fig.261, for
the Triumph of Marcus Aurelius; and another example is the Arch of Titus, 1878, fig.156.
35 Mellor, Goddess Roma, 10123, 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, 701, 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, Personifications Gender, 1523, for the urbs invictissima of the Rhetorica ad
Herennium (4.53.66).
366 Lazzaro

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 prow-
ess is also deeply embedded in notions of Florence through stories, from at
least the thirteenth century, of the citys 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 fea-
tures 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 Albertis 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 represent-
ing Florence in Bartolommeo Ammannatis multi-figured Juno Fountain, com-
missioned soon after, in 1555, wears fluttering drapery reminiscent of a peplos
with a mantle around her shoulders, suggestive of ancient womens garments,

37 Mellor, Goddess Roma, 963 and 10113.

38 Charles Davis, Topographical and Historical Propaganda in Early Florentine Chronicles
and in Villani, Medioevo e Rinascimento 2 (1988): 35.
39 Philip Attwood, Italian Medals c. 15301600 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 meda-
glie italiane del xvi secolo (Florence: Polistampa, 2000), vol. 2, 473, no. 1400 (Domenico di
Polo, c. 1543), and vol. 3, pl. 291.
40 Charles Davis, Frescos by Vasari for Sforza Almeni, Coppiere to Duke Cosimo i,
Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 24, no. 2 (1980): 14951; Annamaria
Petrioli Tofani, ed., Michelangelo, Vasari, and Their Contemporaries: Drawings from the
Uffizi (New York: Morgan Library and Museum, 2008), 667, no. 30.
41 Detlef Heikamp, Bartolomeo Ammannatis 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
Bartolis text.
Figuring Florence 367

Figure10.11 Giorgio Vasari, study for a frontispiece, c. 1550.

Uffizi, Florence, n. 394 (Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attivit
culturali/Art Resource, ny)
368 Lazzaro

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 san-
daled 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 incor-
porate 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 emperors restoration of
the city after the civil war of 689 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 well-
coiffed 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 CityFlorence as Flora

While Florences 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 thir-
teenth 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 The other figures are Immortality, Fortune, and Virtue at the top, Minerva at the right, and
the Arno River below. Heikamp, Ammannatis Marble Fountain, 12930 and 11573 for
the fountain generally.
43 The British Museum possesses two coins of Vespasian of this type, and others with a simi-
lar 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. 723) and pl. 30, no. 382; and for Vespasian raising the goddess Roma, 157, no.
1360, pl. 74, dated c. 6970.
44 Bergstein, Marian Politics, 67980.
Figuring Florence 369

Figure10.12 Bartolomeo Ammannati, Flora/Florence, from

Juno Fountain, 1550.
Bargello Museum, Florence (Scala/
Art Resource, ny)
370 Lazzaro

Figure10.13 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
Botticellis Primavera also represents Fiorenza, the city personified.46 An
antique statue type likely provided the visual model for Botticellis 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), 189; Randolph, Engaging Symbols, 105.
46 Cox-Rearick, Dynasty and Destiny, 79.
47 Ibid., 82; Charles Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love: Botticellis Primavera and Humanist Culture
at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 30.
Figuring Florence 371

The probable model, a statue that was in the Medici collection in the sixteenth
century (Fig.10.14), was also a source for Ammannatis 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 antiq-
uity as the Hora of Autumn. Over her long, flowing chiton, the figures 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 Cosimos 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 Vasaris frontispiece and Ammannatis
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 Giambolognas Florence

Triumphant over Pisa, which represents the city as conqueror, while also allud-
ing to Flora through the flowers in her hair (Fig.10.15). The work was commis-
sioned in 1565 as a pendant to Michelangelos Victory of thirty or forty years
earlier, and the plaster model and Michelangelos 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 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 res-
torations, perhaps sixteenth century, of head, forearms, feet and base. Vasari termed the
drapery fine cloth certi panni sottili.
49 In the 1539 wedding, Florence was conflated with the beautiful Flora, whose costume
includes a gorget, lions-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),
1435, 166 (for the military costume), and 16970.
50 In a letter of 1579 to Grand Duke Francesco, Tanai de Medici described Ammannatis
statue as la Flora ch i fiori in grembo el braccio armato e dinota Fiorenza. Cosimo
Bartoli identified the frontispiece figure as Flora come voi sapete si intede qui per la citt
di Firenze, quoted in Heikamp, Ammannatis Marble Fountain, 121 and 129.
372 Lazzaro

Figure10.14 Hora of Autumn (Pomona), Roman copy of 1st century bce1st century ce.
Uffizi, Florence (Scala/Art Resource, ny)
Figuring Florence 373

Figure10.15 Giambologna, Florence Triumphant over Pisa, c. 1575.

Bargello Museum, Florence (Ralph Lieberman)
374 Lazzaro

assistance of Pietro Francavilla.51 Giambolognas composition derives from

Michelangelos 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 Vincis relief (Fig.10.7) Duke Cosimo raises up, or meta-
phorically restores, a fallen Pisa in the form of a sexually available female, in
Giambolognas statue group gender roles are reversed: An imposing, over life-
size, 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
Bandinellis 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 Cosimos
eldest son Francesco with Joanna of Austria, which linked love and politics, as
had earlier poetic metaphors of Florence as bride and lover. Giambolognas
Florence Triumphant could resonate on multiple levels, from the city as con-
queror, through its overt theme and placement in the Sala Grande below
Vasaris 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 Forl and pater-
nal grandmother of Cosimo de Medici, took possession of the main fortress
at Forl after the murder of her husband. When her enemies threatened to kill
her children, instead of reacting with a womans maternal instinct, as they had

51 Charles Avery, Giambologna: The Complete Sculpture (London: Phaidon Press, 1993), 25,
779, 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), 2378; Christina Strunck, Eine radikale
Programmnderung im Palazzo Vecchio: Wie Michelangelos Sieger auf Giambologna und
Vasari wirkte, in Michelangelo: Neue Beitrge, ed. Michael Rohlmann and Andreas
Thielemann (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2000), 26597; Baskins, Shaping Civic
Personification, 91108.
52 Avery, Giambologna, 67, fig.76, notes the touseled hair and beard on the model reminis-
cent of a barbarian in ancient Roman sculpture, and also on the marble, figs. 80
and 91.
53 See Strunck, Radikale Programmnderung, 2715, for multiple readings, including a
matrimonial allegory.
Figuring Florence 375

anticipated, she responded in a virile manner, like a virago.54 In Niccol

Machiavellis 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 Plutarchs Moralia).55 Other contemporary
chroniclers portrayed Caterina as tricking her captors by claiming to be preg-
nant, 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
Giambolognas 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

Giambolognas inspiration for Florence Triumphant over Pisa (Fig.10.15) came

not only from Michelangelos Victory, but more fundamentally from his prede-
cessors 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.
Michelangelos inventions also enabled later Florentine artists to rework
ancient models into images that introduced current concerns with gender

54 Julia L. Hairston, Skirting the Issue: Machiavellis Caterina Sforza, Renaissance Quarterly
53, no. 3 (2000): 691 and 696, virilmente rispose and propria virago, and generally 687
712. Hairston adds, 6923, that later writers noted the different expectations for noble and
ruling women, among them Torquato Tasso in Della virt 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 prin-
cesses of noble blood, in the face of serious incidents, were obliged to display virility.
55 Ibid., 68990, for the version in the Discourses and Florentine Histories, and 7056, for
anasyrmos in Plutarchs Moralia (Lacaenarum Apophthegmata 6.4 and De mulierum virtu-
tibus 5), likely known to Machiavelli and other historians, who described women per-
forming this gesture to assert their childbearing role in society and thereby to shame their
husbands into returning to battle.
56 Ibid., 6949.
57 Ibid., 707.
376 Lazzaro

distinctions and with the relationship of sex and power. Contemporaries dis-
cussing Michelangelos female nudes were particularly attentive to gender char-
acteristics, some complaining about their muscularity.58 Others, including the
prominent Florentine authors Anton Francesco Doni in 1543 and Francesco
Bocchi in 1591, found leggiadraa term for a graceful movement that was
understood as explicitly femininein the Night.59 The influential poet and sati-
rist Pietro Aretino noted approvingly the muscles of the male in the body of the
female in Michelangelos Venus in his cartoon for the Venus and Cupid.60 Despite
Michelangelos overturning of gender expectations by reversal and combina-
tion, 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
Michelangelos 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 ani-
mated 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 fore-
shadow 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 Jonathan Katz Nelson, La Venere e Cupido Fiorentina: un nudo eroico feminile e la

potenza dellamore, 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), 312 and 378.
59 Ibid., 389. For the gendered term leggiadra, see Fermor, Movement and Gender, 137
and generally 12945.
60 Venere e Amore, 230, letter of 1542. The cartoon is lost; the final painting, by Pontormo, is
in the Accademia Gallery in Florence.
61 Francesco Bocchi, The Beauties of the City of Florence: A Guidebook of 1591, trans. Thomas
Frangenberg and Robert Williams (London: Harvey Miller, 2006), 245.
62 Paul Joannides in Venere e Amore, 1501, no. 4, dates the drawing c. 1520.
63 Joachim Poeschke, Michelangelo and His World: Sculpture of the Italian Renaissance (New
York: Abrams, 1996), 201.
64 Jeannine OGrody, Michelangelo: The Master Modeler, in I bozzetti michelangioleschi della
Casa Buonarroti, ed. Pina Ragionieri (Florence: Mandragora, 2000), 4853; Nelson in
Venere e Amore, 1545, 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, 1523, dates it to the mid-
1520s in a convincing argument.
Figuring Florence 377

Figure10.16 Michelangelo, study of a torso of Aphrodite c. 1520.

British Museum, London ( The Trustees of the British
Museum)
378 Lazzaro

Figure10.17 Michelangelo, Nude Female, mid-1520searly 1530s.

Casa Buonarroti, Florence (Alinari/Art Resource ny)
Figuring Florence 379

of Aphrodite in Michelangelos 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 tor-
sions give contrary directions to the figure, formally and potentially icono-
graphically, 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 rework-
ing 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 Michelangelos reclining male Dusk and Day
in type, but not in composition or affect. In comparison with the relaxed, static,
and planar Roman river gods, Michelangelos 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 Vasaris frontispiece drawing (Fig.10.11),
or Ammannatis 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 proba-
bly 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 sug-
gests 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 cen-
tury understood gendered body language. The term gagliardo described move-
ments that are sforzati, difficult or forced, vigorous and visually complex, and
indicative of males.67

65 Claudia Lazzaro, River Gods: Personifying Nature in Sixteenth-Century Italy, Renaissance

Studies 25, no. 1 (2011): 705.
66 OGrody, Master Modeler, 378.
67 Fermor, Movement and Gender, 13243, who notes Castigliones use of the term
gagliardo in the immensely popular Book of the Courtier for movements that are at the
380 Lazzaro

Figure10.18 Anonymous after Michelangelo, River God, c. 15301600.

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, cop-
ied various times in the Renaissance; and numerous depictions on coins.68

same time gagliardi and sforzati; Ludovico Dolces description in 1554 or 1555 of the move-
ment of Adonis in Titians Venus and Adonis as gagliardo; and Vasaris 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 Rossos
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): 52051.
68 For the Louvre statue and the sarcophagus, both known in the Renaissance, see Bober
and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, 1134, nos. 66, and 72, 25.
Coins include those of Nero, Vespasian, Domitian, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and
Figuring Florence 381

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 Michelangelos re-working of ancient proto-
types, 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 flourishingof 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 sur-
rounding territory, in addition to other metaphorical gifts.72 On the ceiling of
the Palazzo Vecchios 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 Vasaris 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
Michelangelos 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):
5512; for early sixteenth-century examples of the Tiber as synecdoche for Rome, see
Lazzaro, River Gods, 7780.
70 Victoria Kirkham, Laura Battiferra and her Literary Circle: An Anthology (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006), 50, 83, 1245, 1445, and 1723.
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 Lottos Venus and Cupid, Chapter 7 in this volume.
72 Vasari, Ragionamenti in Le vite 8.145 explains that the River Arnos 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), 8898.
382 Lazzaro

spread legs, exposed genitals, and water pouring from their vases unambigu-
ously convey the analogy between human procreation and natures flourish-
ing. In the scene of the nearby cities of San Gimignano and Colle Val dElsa, the
thickset River Elsa bears an overflowing urn and between his legs rests a cornu-
copia with undulating base and a small grotesque head at its end that obscures
his genitals while unabashedly alluding to them (Fig.10.19). Vasaris 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

Figure10.19 Giorgio Vasari, San Gimignano and Colle Val dElsa with River Elsa, 15635.
Sala Grande, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (Alinari/Art Resource, ny)
Figuring Florence 383

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 Ovids Metamorphoses in personi-
fying 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, Tribolos
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 Vasaris frontispiece (Fig.10.11).77 The execu-
tion of the statuary in Tribolos 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, Giambolognas bronze statue person-
ifying Florence atop the shaft of Tribolos 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 33173.
75 For example, Tanai de Medici identified Ammannatis river god in the Juno Fountain as
the Arno che fa fertile la cit, cited in Heikamp, Ammannatis Marble Fountain, 121.
76 Boccaccios Il ninfale fiesolano and Lorenzos 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 DElia, Giambolognas Giant and the
Cinquecento Villa Garden as a Landscape of Suffering, Studies in the History of Gardens and
Designed Landscapes 31, no. 1 (2011): 167.
77 Lazzaro, River Gods, 8790, for the Castello river gods and their reflections in Bartolis
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.
384 Lazzaro

Figure10.20 Giambologna, Fiorenza, c. 1560 or 1570.

Villa La Petraia, Florence (Scala/ Ministero per i Beni e le Attivit
culturali/Art Resource ny)
Figuring Florence 385

before mid-century, Tribolo had originated the radically new idea of personify-
ing Florence as nude, following the precedent of Michelangelos 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 Tribolos invention.
Twenty or thirty years later, Giambologna gave compelling form to Tribolos
conception.79 Her body pose is conspicuously similar to Giambolognas
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 compo-
sitions 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 Tribolos 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 repre-
sent 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 reinterpreta-
tion of the type became the canonical image. Marcantonio Raimondis engrav-
ing of 1506 of Venus Anadyomene (since Aphrodite was known as Venus in the
Renaissance) widely disseminated the new type. In Marcantonios 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, Giambolognas statue adopts the sixteenth-century variation, as
undoubtedly Tribolos 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, 15860, for an excel-
lent summary of the evidence.
80 Avery, review of Giambologna gli dei, gli eroi in Sculpture Journal 15, no. 2 (2006): 300; and
on Giambolognas 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), 1735 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),
8693 and figs.2832, for a review of scholarship on both the half-draped and nude ver-
sions, which share similar hand gestures.
83 Avery, Giambologna, 54; Keutner, Statue del Giambologna, 44.
386 Lazzaro

they would have read Giambolognas Castello Fiorenza as both Florence per-
sonified and as Venus.84 Figuring the city in the guise of the iconic classical
Anadyomene alludes to Florences 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 associa-
tion with the goddesss 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 metaphoricallyfrom the aqueducts
that Cosimo constructed starting from this very site to the flourishing of
the arts.85
In Giambolognas 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 for-
ward and leg raised.86 Fiorenzas serpentine pose evokes Michelangelos 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 composi-
tion 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 Michelangelos nude
females, as well as the martial references of Vasari and Ammannati, emphasiz-
ing instead Fiorenzas 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, leggiadra, and sensuality.

84 Lapi Ballerini, Fiorenza, in Giambologna, 160; and Michael W. Cole, Venus (Fiorenza),
in Luchinat, The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence, 2112, no.
74, who calls it Venus because it does not display any attributes of Florence.
85 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), 16789 on the garden and aqueducts at Castello.
86 Anthea Brook, A Graphic Source for Giambolognas Fata Morgana, in Giambologna tra
Firenze e lEuropa, ed. Sabine Eiche (Florence: Centro Di, 2000), 508, discusses this type
of Giambolognas standing female figures and a potential model in Raphael.
Figuring Florence 387

Conclusion

In imperial Roman visual art, the goddess Roma, as we have seen, is repre-
sented 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 bounti-
ful, 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
femaleand feminine are multifaceted including the power of sexuality, mas-
culine and feminine signifiers together in female images, and fertility and viril-
ity 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.

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 chapter 11

Conjugal Piety: Creusa in Baroccis Aeneas Flight

from Troy

Ian Verstegen

It is often noted that Federico Barocci (c. 15331612), 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 Rudolfs 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. Baroccis
painting was serious, deep, and thought-provoking, with many levels of reso-
nance 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, 23037;
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), 27281. For Rudolf IIs
patronage, see R.J.W. Evans, Rudolf ii and His World: A Study in Intellectual History, 15761612
(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), 1634.
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, ber knstlerische Beziehungen des bayer-
ischen Hofes zum Hof von Urbino, Mnchener Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 9 (1932): 37780;
Timothy Wilson, Committenza roveresca e committenza delle botteghe maiolicarie del
ducato di Urbino nellepoca roveresca, in I Della Rovere: Piero della Francesca, Raffaello,
Tiziano, ed. Paolo Dal Poggetto (Milan: Electa, 2004), 2039.

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

394 Verstegen

Figure11.1 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 paintings

deeper significance.4
The subject of the painting comes from Book 2 of Virgils 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 2.73541

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.
Conjugal Piety 395

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
Fatewhether 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 fathers leg; Creusa lags
slightly behind. Barocci artfully combines the family as they have just set out to
save their lineage and fulfill their destinythe main point of the imagewith
Creusas 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, maes-
tusque 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 2.76889

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.
396 Verstegen

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

Creusas shade assures Aeneas that he should not fear her disapproval as he
selects a new bride. Then she disappears. In Baroccis painting, Creusas 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 renovatioboth dynastic and religiousplays out
in the picture as Trojan and Roman blur with pagan and Christian in a new
beginning. Above all, though, it is Baroccis sympathetic treatment of Creusa
that gives a Renaissance spin on the tale, by bringing to the viewers 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, 467.

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
Conjugal Piety 397

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 num-
bers 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 Baroccis 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 Christs birth in his fourth Eclogue.9
I would like to isolate an area of transformed reading relating to Virgil, atti-
tudes 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 Christmay 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. Creusas 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 vic-
tims who are sacrificed on the altar of Rome.10 Indeed, Aeneas account of his

I outline in A Realist Theory of Art History (London: Routledge, 2013), sometimes the soci-
etal configuration itself already contains ideological elements.
8 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).
9 See Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance, for a sensitive discussion of the recent
tendency to see critique of Aeneas in Virgils text.
10 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
398 Verstegen

escape suggests that Creusa was left to trail in the first place.11 The heros
energyis 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 rela-
tively 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 fami-
lies and, as mother, in continuing the blood line.13

The Story

In my discussion of Baroccis 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 Virgils 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 Virgils Aeneid, Womens Studies 8 (1981): 217.
12 For the rise of patrilineality in the late medieval period, which displaced bilateral (matri-
lineal/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), 7988.
13 For a discussion of persisting recognition of bilateral relations, see Carolina Blutrach-
Jelin, The Visibility of Early Modern Castilian Noblewomen in Genealogical Narratives,
Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6 (2011): 1739.
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 distinc-
tion 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).
Conjugal Piety 399

may be impossible to separate, analytically their distinction is essential for

clarifying how a painting communicates its contents. According to this formu-
lation, 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
paintings commission around 1586 was a matter of personal significance.
Although the emperor made first contact, and the commission did not origi-
nate 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 frater-
nity 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 dukes military command (con-
dotta) and admission into the Order of the Golden Fleece.17 The mutual dedi-
cation 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 signifi-
cance, 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 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 individuals 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 meaningpace
Derridacan direct in part the form of reception of significance.
16 Since 1582, Francesco Maria ii had been a client of Philip ii, Rudolf IIs cousin. Rudolf ii
received the Golden Fleece in Innsbruck in 1585 and Francesco Maria ii later in the year
(September 15) in Bologna.
17 For the Calling of St. Andrew, sent to Madrid in 1588, see Emiliani, Federico Barocci, vol. 1,
18897. Bellori noted in 1672 that Andrew was a just choice because he was protettore de
Cavalieri dellOrdine del Tosone: Gian Paolo Bellori, Le vite de pittori, scultori et architetti
moderni (originally published 1672), ed. E. Borea (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), 181.
18 For the diplomatic alliances between Urbino and the Habsburg house, see my Francesco
Paciotti, Military Architecture, and European Geopolitics, Renaissance Studies 24 (2010):
122.
400 Verstegen

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 (142282). Manuscripts
of the Aeneid naturally existed in the ducal palace library at Urbino.19 The
intarsia decoration of the studiolo in Federicos palace at Gubbio, now in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, includes Virgils portrait and a readable copy
of the Aeneid on a lectern, turned to the section about the death of Pallas
(10.45790).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 Landinos 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 Baroccis circle may have regarded the Aeneid as a his-
torical 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 Baroccis direction by

19 E.g., Urb. lat. 350, now in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Florence, c. 14501475, 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), 16270.
20 See on this decorative program Olga Raggio, The Gubbio Studiolo and its Conservation, vol. 1,
Federico da Montefeltros 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 Landinos com-
mentary was not influential. This Neoplatonic notion of Aeneas moral progress had deep
roots in the reception of Virgils 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): 121. 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).
Conjugal Piety 401

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, Baroccis 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, duti-
fully locating the dates of Aeneas adventure along his universal timeline.25

The Iconography

Following Emperor Rudolf iis request for a non-religious work, when Duke
Francesco Maria iiperhaps in consultation with the artistchose the subject
and paid for it, and when Barocci painted it, the men had in mind an appropri-
ately 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 dukes palace, but the story was also represented many times in the maiolica
industry native to Urbino and its environs. Of most immediate interest, how-
ever, is a version of the story painted by Baroccis great-uncle, Girolamo Genga.
Genga painted his Flight of Aeneas from Troy in association with the wed-
ding of Borghese Petrucci and Vittoria Piccolomini in Siena in the early
sixteenth century (Fig.11.2).26 Gengas version anticipates Baroccis but is more
matter-of-fact, reflecting a fifteenth-century aesthetic. The figural group of

24 Torquato Tasso, Discorsi del poema eroico, in Discorsi dellarte poetica e del poema eroico,
ed. L. Poma (Bari, Laterza, 1964), 59: Laonde potr di lei avvenire quel chaviene de le pic-
ciole 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.
25 Polydore Vergil, On Discovery, ed. and trans., Brian P. Copenhaver (Cambridge ma: Harvard
University Press, 2002), 498.
26 See V. Ttrai, Gli affreschi del Palazzo Petrucci a Siena. Una precisazione iconografica e
unipotesi sul programma, Acta historiae Artium Academiae scientiarum hungaricae
(1978): 17783; Laurence Kanter, Luca Signorelli and Girolamo Genga in Princeton,
Record of the Princeton University Art Museum 62 (2003), 6883. On another work of art
produced for this couple, and for the dating of this marriage to 1511, see Stephanie Leone,
Luca Signorellis Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome and Viewers in the Palazzo
Petrucci, Siena, Chapter 4 in this volume.
402 Verstegen

Figure11.2 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
Gengas and Baroccis paintings but also in other Renaissance renderings of
this scene, reflecting an ancient iconographic tradition of representing the trio
in this way.27 In Gengas version, as in Baroccis later one, Creusa follows
this group yet seems to fall behind. Her visible agitation in Gengas 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 numisma-
tum Romanorum miscellanea explicationes (Lyon: Sebastianum de Honoratis, 1560):
Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance, Berlin-
Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and Humboldt-Universitt zu Berlin,
200714, 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.
Conjugal Piety 403

transformed by Barocci into a more metaphorical sense of resignation.

Baroccis treatment of the trailing Creusa as a shade-like figure is suggested
further in Francesco Xantos 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 Raphaels 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, Raphaels fresco was
probably painted without knowledge of Gengas contemporary work. Still,
Raphaels group intentionally evoked the flight of Aeneas, Anchises, and
Ascanius from Troy.30 Drawings of Raphaels 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 touch-
stone for successive artists. Aeneas bends slightly forward to bear the weight of
Anchises on his back, with his fathers arm slung over his shoulder and across

28 Francesco Xanto Avelli, plaque painted with the Flight of Aeneas and the Death of Creusa,
c. 1535, 30.2 by 27.6cm. (Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Brunswick).
29 For bibliography, see Marcia B. Hall, The High Renaissance: 15031534, in Cambridge
Companion to Rome, ed. Hall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1345.
30 Ingrid Rowland, The Vatican Stanze, in Cambridge Companion to Raphael, ed. Marcia B.
Hall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1157.
31 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).
32 Paul Joannides, The Drawings of Raphael, with a Complete Catalogue (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 104.
404 Verstegen

Figure11.3 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 maiol-
ica 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, Queste
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).
Conjugal Piety 405

Figure11.4 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
Raphaels fresco.
Regarding Baroccis particular handling of the group, the early sources, typi-
cally 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
406 Verstegen

(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 Gengas overall conception, changed Raphaels 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 colon-
naded building in the painting is modeled on Jacopo Sansovinos Biblioteca
Marciana in Venice, while adaptations of Trajans Column and Bramantes
Tempietto in Rome appear as well. The mix of ancient and modern classicizing
monuments effects the conflation of Troy and Rome.
Baroccis first-hand knowledge of these monuments, like his familiarity with
Raphaels fresco, would not have prevented him from using prints. For exam-
ple, as Stuart Lingo has shown, Baroccis conceptions of the Column of Trajan
rely on Serlios Le antiquit di Roma of 1540, the third book of his Sette libri
dellarchitettura.35 It is useful pointing out that while these prints were authori-
tative sources for all Renaissance artists, Bramante and Raphael were real peo-
ple to Barocci, individuals with ties to his own familys history in Urbino. The
antiquarianism that they embodied gave considerable tangibility to the con-
ception 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 Gengas blunt expression of her agita-
tion is exchanged for a more subtle rendering of her resigned exit, it is interest-
ing to think of Baroccis 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 coun-
terpart to the service Creusa renders Aeneas. Creusas status in Baroccis 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 desc-
rivono le antiquit di Roma e le altre che sono in Italia, e fuori dItalia (Venice: Francesco
Marcolini, 1540); Lingo, Federico Barocci: Allure and Devotion in Late Renaissance Painting,
17980.
36 For the Perdono, see Emiliani, Federico Barocci, vol. 1, 10415; for the Popolo, ibid., vol. 1,
12849.
37 Emiliani, Federico Barocci, vol. 1, 199207.
Conjugal Piety 407

Figure11.5 Federico Barocci, Creusa

(detail of Fig.11.1).

Figure11.6 Federico Barocci, Annunciation

(detail), 1584.
Pinacoteca Vaticana
(Vatican Museums)

thought as a secondary but absolutely necessary component of Christs

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 Baroccis 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 down-
cast gazes and acquiescent gestures. The Annunciation, completed in 1584,
must have been relatively fresh in the artists mind as he began the Aeneas in
408 Verstegen

1585. For Creusas 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 Marys face, Barocci could combine her head with Creusas 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 fig-
ure 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 continu-
ity with the Trojan past as part of an unbroken strain that ranin some ver-
sionsthrough 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 tradi-
tion, 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 patrons 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
completedand 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 paint-
ing in a non-Habsburg context, as was the print created by Agostino Carracci.39

38 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.
39 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.
Conjugal Piety 409

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 dukes grandmother) was
ancient and enjoyed its right of rule to old alliances with the Guelph
Hohensteindynasty, 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 Jasonwho had captured the
golden fleecewas 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
emperors 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. Jasons 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 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 156371 at the court in Spain. Francesco Maria was there from 15668.
41 See Tanner, Last Descendant of Aeneas, passim, on the Gonzaga and Este.
42 On the Guelph ties of the early Montefeltri, see June Osborne, Urbino: The Story of a
Renaissance City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 301. For the relation of the
Hohenstaufen and Habsburgs, see Michael Toch, Welfs, Hohenstaufen and Habsburgs,
in The New Cambridge Medieval History Volume 5, c.1198c.1300, ed. David Abulafia
(Cambridge, 1999), 375404.
43 For the donation of Pippin, see Thomas Noble, The Republic of St. Peter: The Birth of the
Papal State, 680825 (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.
44 On this linkage in the Holy Roman Empire of the Habsburgs, see Tanner, Last Descendents
of Aeneas.
410 Verstegen

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 dukes 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 rela-
tive 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 numer-

ous levels. In the Aeneid, Aeneas escape from Troy is the first step in his foun-
dation of Rome. Baroccis great forebear, Raphael, painted the Fire in the Borgo
as a Christian type, set in Rome, of this original Trojan diaspora. Baroccis inter-
pretation of the city of Troy itself suggests Rome, collapsing ancient and con-
temporary temporalities, but in another sense casting Aeneas flight as a
departure from Rome for another dynastic foundation: Carolingian Aachen?
Ottonian Magdeburg? Rudolf IIs 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: Trajans Column and
the classicizing Tempietto. These function foremost as symbols of antiq-
uity, but the allusion to Rome is unmistakable. Bramantes Tempietto, like
Raphaels Aeneas group, is by an Urbino artist and therefore serves as a per-
sonal possession of the classical past on behalf of Urbino and its duke. Like
the Column, the Tempietto is not rendered directly from Baroccis recollec-
tions of Rome (or from drawings remaining in Urbino) but rather from
Sebastiano Serlios rendering ofand changes tothe structure in his Le

45 Ridolfi, Cronachetta Pesarese, ed. A. Camilli, Atti e Memorie di Storia Patria per le Marche
34 (1923), 1707: Part di qua la compagnia di 400 soldati del cap. Silla Barignani.
46 For a brief account, see Evans, Rudolf ii and His World, 75.
Conjugal Piety 411

antiquit di Roma, printed in Venice in 1540. Serlio classicized Bramantes

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 Baroccis care in replicating these features. The resul-
tant 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 cen-
tury, 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, Orvietos Duomo, and
the Ges and Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome.48 Raphaels scene takes place in
the Latinized Christian ambit of the papal borgo, but Baroccis 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 Baroccis greatest achievement
in triggering associational significances in the viewers mind. And it is most
significant for our analysis because Barocci places particular weight on the
moral gravitas of Aeneasand indeed of his whole family, as Creusa takes on
an analogous quality. This layer of significance would have been rounded out

47 This is Pietro Aretinos phrase, Lettere sullarte 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 Giulios approach
to antiquity, see Maria Maurer, The Trouble with Pasipha: Engendering a Myth at the
Gonzaga Court, Chapter 6 in this volume.
48 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 dellIstituto di Storia dellArchitettura 15/16 (1990): 61722; at the Ges, see J.D.C.
Masheck, The Original High Altar Tabernacle of the Ges Rediscovered, Burlington
Magazine 112 (1970), 1103; and at the Aracoeli (now in the Museo di Roma), begun in 1552,
see Carlo Pietrangeli, Il tabernacolo cinquecentesco dellAracoeli al Museo di Roma,
Bollettino dei Musei Comunali di Roma 8 (1961): 2633.
412 Verstegen

to encompass the centerpiece of the Catholic faith, the Sacrament, at a time

when this faith was under attack in Rudolf IIs 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 struc-
ture, the interweaving of patrinlineal and conjugal family lines. The reality of
conjugal cooperation played out in a variety of ways. In Urbino, Baroccis 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 dEste, with no hope for offspring, while
Rudolf ii was not even married. Since the reign of Pius v (156572), 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 genea-
logical succession represented by the family of Aeneas in Baroccis 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 iis 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 iis
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
atFossombrone; 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 IIs 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.
Conjugal Piety 413

visible or invisible reminders of the conjugal system needed to make patrilin-

eality 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 IIs
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 aforemen-
tioned Vittoria Farnese. Giulias early death ended one alliance and forced
the creation of another. The Habsburgs on Rudolf IIs 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 IIs marriage to
Mary Tudor ended with her death in 1558 and concluded the Spanish kings
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 dEste, 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 Baroccis 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 high-
profile engagements (first to Philip IIs 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 Baroccis 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 worlds active moral gravity. Of the many elements of meaning
and significance in the painting, I have chosen to focus on one particular ele-
ment of significance, the early modern understanding of elite conjugality as

50 Evans, Rudolf ii and His World, 557.

414 Verstegen

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 paintings highborn viewers in Urbino and
Prague a cultural logic that was current in Italy and the Holy Roman Empire.
Baroccis reception of Virgils 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.

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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 prel-
ates, 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 culti-
vate 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 15001900 (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1982); Claudio Franzoni, Rimembranze dinfinite cose: Le collezioni rinascimentali di
antichit, in Memoria dellantico nellarte italiana, ed. Salvatore Settis (Turin: Giulio Einaudi,
19846), 30060; Patricia Giudicelli-Falguires, La cit fictive. Les collections de cardinaux,
Rome, au XVIme sicle, in Les Carrache et les dcors profanes: Actes du Colloque organis par
lEcole franaise de Rome, Rome, 24 octobre 1986, ed. Andr Chastel (Rome: cole Franaise de
Rome, 1988), 215333; Isa Belli Barsali, I giardini di statue antiche nella Roma del500, in Gli
Orti Farnesiani sul Palatino (Rome: cole Franaise de Rome, Soprintendenza Archeologica di
Roma, 1990), 34172; 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):
397434; and Kathleen Wren Christian, Empire without End: Antiquities Collections in
Renaissance Rome, c. 13501527 (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 liter-
ary 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

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015|doi 10.1163/9789004289697_014

Ancient Idols 419

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 display-
ing 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 Trents
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 unre-
stricted leisure and pleasure.
In order to better understand the varied and sometimes complex percep-
tion of ancient sculpture displayed in gardens, this essay examines the small
but strident negative reception history for antiquities in sixteenthcentury
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 12. 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), 139.
420 Bentz

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
sixteenthcentury 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 pub-
lished 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 super-
stition, 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), 1057, 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), 1239; Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 3234; Phyllis Pray
Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources,
2nd ed. (London: Harvey Miller, 2010), 667.
5 Argumentum praebuit carmine, antiquum Veneris et Cupidinis simulacrum: uti in epis-
tolaad 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
Ancient Idols 421

Figure12.1 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)
422 Bentz

Although he might appreciate the artistic qualities of the Venus Felix,

Gianfrancesco emphasizes Christianitys 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 hagi-
ographies 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 Greats 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 contem-
porary 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 sculp-
tures and Cupid-idols, in the name of Christian morality.8
As the passion for collecting and displaying antiquities spread in sixteenth-
century Rome, complaints of idolatry occurred more frequently. Touring the
Villa Belvedere in 1523, Pope Adrian VI (r. 15223) was shown the famous
Laocon and other statues, upon which he sardonically remarked, they are
just idols of the ancients.9 The Dutch popes attitude alarmed Italian collec-
tors 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): 5575. Recently, Anthony Kaldellis has argued that Mangos 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 17890.
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): 4465.
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 d non faccia quell che dice
haver fatto 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), 1123.
Ancient Idols 423

building of Saint Peters.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 popes private rooms. When visit-
ing 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 admira-
tion of ancient statues as idolatrous behavior became more severe. In 1566,
imperial agent Niccol Cusano wrote that Pope Pius V (r. 156672) 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 Belvederes open-air theater (which had
been built and decorated with ancient sculpture by Pirro Ligorio in 1565) as
well as the Colosseum and the citys 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 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., 18911930), 73.
11 Eugenio Albri, ed. Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al senato, vol. 3, series 2 (Florence:
Societ Editrice Fiorentina, 1846), 114; von Pastor, History of the Popes, vol. 9, 734.
12 ... 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.
13 N sto in dubbio che, sel papa vota, che le statue avanzeranno a Roma, et che ci saria da
comprar molte cose. 13 March 1567, in Carteggio inedito dartisti dei secoli XIV, XV, XVI, eds.
Johann Wilhelm Gaye and Alfred von Reumont, vol. 3 (Florence: G. Molini, 18391840),
238.
14 Intendo ha in oltre gran caprizzo, di far guastar LAnfiteatro, chiamato volgarmente il
Colisseo et alcuni archi trionfali, che sono le pi belle et rare antichita di Roma sotto
pretesto che sono cose gintili et per levarne a fatto la memoria et loccasione siano viste
424 Bentz

for lime following Gregory the Greats 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 (154563). 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

da quelli che vengono a Roma pi 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
Archologischen Instituts: Rmische Abteilung 6 (1890): 366; Christina Riebesell, Die
Sammlung des Kardinal Alessandro Farnese: Ein Studio fr Knstler und Gelehrte
(Weinheim: vch, Acta humaniora, 1994), 6970.
15 The pope did give a number of works to Francesco deMedici: Andrea Gldy, Cosimo I as
Collector: Antiquities and Archaeology in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Cambridge:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 1545.
16 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 15381573 (Leipzig: Alphons Drr, 1866), 374. Several scholars
have concluded that Pius Vs actions ultimately preserved many antiquities in Rome or
enabled their preservation in other collections. See Christian Hlsen, Le Statue di Roma,
Gttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen 176 (1914): 257311; 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, Rmisches
Jahrbuch fr Kunstgeschichte 13 (1971): 10178; Alessandro Nova, The Artistic Patronage of
Pope Julius III (15501555): 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): 183214.
17 See especially Book 2, Chapter 10 of Paleottis Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane
in Paola Barocchi, ed., Trattati darte del cinquecento: fra manierismo e controriforma, vol.
2 (Bari: Gius. Laterza, 1962), 117503. 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).
Ancient Idols 425

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 pro-
duced 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 argu-
ments were popular in later treatises on art, such as Jesuit theologian Antonio
Possevinos 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 contem-
porary viewing public, or worse, adversely affect the Churchs reform efforts.

Decorum, Nudity, and Ancient Statues

Paleotti and other theorists of the later sixteenth century wrote to elaborate
upon the Council of Trents decrees about saintly relics and sacred images.
During its final session in December 1563, the Council affirmed and codified the

18 E questo quello d campo maggiore agli eretici di nominarci idoloatri: ch, se noi aves-
simo le sole imagini desanti, non resterebbe forsi luogo al loro inganno, ma sendo fra noi
tante statue defalsi di e facendosene tante ogni giorno, non meraviglia se con questo
pretesto ci dimandando tutti idolatri e prendono occasione dingannare i popoli. Quando
ci battezziamo facciamo giuramento di rinonziare alle invenzioni del Diavolo; ma quale
invenzione pi diabolica di quella dfalsi di? Barocchi, Trattati, vol. 2, 2912; Paleotti,
Discourse, 1734.
19 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, 14501600,
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.
426 Bentz

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 specifi-
cally 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 profanein subject content, style of depiction, or
usebe 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 admoni-
tions 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 sen-
sual 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 For the decrees see Norman F. Tanner, ed. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2
(Washington, dc: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 7746. For additional background, see
John OMalley, Art, Trent, and Michelangelos Last Judgment, Religions 3, no. 2 (2012): 34456.
21 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 rel-
iquiarum 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, 7756.
22 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): 22945.
23 Molanus quotes Horace, De arte poetica liber 1802, 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.
Ancient Idols 427

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 genera-
tions 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 Counter-
Reformation critics as Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano, sacred images such as
Michelangelos 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 con-
fused its moral lesson.28 Critics citing decorum thus objected to sacred images

24 Erasmuss original statement reads: Quemadmodum inquit, non decet in familia audiri
sermonem lascivum, ita nec tabulas haberi convenit impudicas. Loquax enim res est pic-
tura 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 liber-
orum? Desiderius Erasmus, Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami Opera Omnia, vol. 5 (Leiden:
P. Van der Aa, 17036), col. 696E. For the translation see Freedberg, Johannes Molanus, 241.
25 Freedberg, Johannes Molanus, 239.
26 Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabrianos Dialogo nel quale si ragiona degli errori e degli abusi
de pittori circa listorie (Camerino, 1564) discusses the problem of nudity and lack of deco-
rum few years earlier, but his dialogue is centered on criticizing Michelangelos Last
Judgment and rarely refers to secular works of art.
27 Robert Williams, Art, Theory and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 73122.
28 For the text of Fabrianos dialogue, see Barocchi, Trattati, vol. 2, 1115. See also Marcia B.
Hall, After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 18994. As a result of the controversy over the lack of
428 Bentz

that lacked appropriateness for their setting and function, and nudity and sen-
sual imagery in a sacred context was especially problematic in post-Tridentine
Rome. Because critics of sacred art in this periodeducated men, almost always
affiliated with the Church and the reform movementwere also viewers of the
ubiquitous ancient statuary displayed in public streets and the palaces and gar-
dens 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 Crescenzis 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
bishops consternation is not unexpected, given his active involvement in the
Council of Trent during the 1540s. Indeed, Paleottis treatise, written after the
Councils 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 exclu-
sively for reasons of literary study, he ought to have the Christian pru-
dence 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

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 Michelangelos Last Judgment in the Age of the
CounterReformation, in Michelangelos Last Judgment, ed. Marcia B. Hall (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
29 mentre egli viveva io vidi nel suo palazzo a Roma fauni, satiri e nudit 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.
30 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
Ancient Idols 429

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 influ-
ence of Jesuit reformers in the 1570s, felt ashamed by the nude allantica 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, respect-
able 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 per-
sone cristiane et onorate. Il che principalmente dovria esser osservato dale persone eccle-
siastiche, massimamente avendosi lessempio si S. Gregorio papa e di molti altri santi,
che tutte queste imagini defalsi di come monstri si levarono dattorno. Barocchi,
Trattati, vol. 2, 293; translation in Paleotti, Discourse, 175.
31 Barocchi, Trattati, vol. 3, 11723.
32 Hendrick van Cleve III visited Rome in 15501, 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 artists
sketches and memories of the Vatican gardens some thirty years earlier. For more on Van
Cleve, see Marion Van der Meulen, Cardinal Cesis Antique Sculpture Garden: Notes on a
Painting by Hendrick van Cleef III, The Burlington Magazine 116 (1974): 1424.
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 rela-
tives 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 deMedici, his wife Eleonora de Toldeo, and their
430 Bentz

Figure12.2 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

children Isabella, Garzia, and Giovanni were also hosted at the Villa Giulia and toured pri-
vate antiquities collections and gardens, such as Cardinal Ippolito dEstes villa on the
Quirinal Hill. See David Coffin, The Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome (Princeton:
Princeton Unversity Press, 1979), 1723; Andrea Gldy, Lost in Antiquities: Cardinal
Giovanni deMedici (15431562), 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 deMedici to describe his visit to the Villa Medici
during the cardinals absence. He received an extensive tour of the grounds from the gar-
dener, Luca, as well as the gardeners wife, Margherita, who was making mustards and jams
(Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Archivio Mediceo del Principato, vol. 5101, fols. 753r754v).
35 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 IXXXVIII (Rome: Ioanem Besicker
Alemanum, 1506), fol. 326v, cited in Christian, Empire without End, 199.
Ancient Idols 431

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 glimps-
ing indecent sculpture that he had women banned entirely from the villa.37
Surely women could find nude sculpture as fascinating as their male coun-
terparts, but the displays of ancient works seem to have been designed to
appeal specifically to the male gaze. At Fontainebleau in 1543, King Franois I,
accompanied by Cardinal Ippolito dEste and Marechal Claude dAnnebault,
invited the Duchesse dtampes Anna Jeanne de Pisseleu dHeilly 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 audi-
ence for ancient nudes. In the male-dominated courts of later sixteenth-
century Rome, the chief owners of collections and wealthy patrons of villa
gardens were men with political or professional connections to the Church.39

36 Women who were avid collectors of ancient art in sixteenth-century Italy, such as
Marchesa Isabella dEste of Mantua, were rather rare exceptions to the rule. Ulisse
Aldrovandis 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 deMedici 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 deMedici, 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, 3323.
37 Avviso of 12 June 1568, cited in von Pastor, History of the Popes, vol. 17, 95.
38 Adolfo Venturi, Una visita artistica di Francesco I re di Francia, Archivio storico dellarte
2 (1890): 3778.
39 Owing to the papal bureaucracy, the large numbers of male staff in Roman courts, and the
nature of Romes economy, the citys population throughout the sixteenth century was
432 Bentz

It is thus predictable, as we have seen, that the loudest critics of ancient statu-
ary were their male ecclesiastical peers, and especially those invested in
Church reform. We should also keep in mind that the artists, architects, antiq-
uities 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 char-
acters and the danger these might pose to viewers they perceived to be inexpe-
rienced or nave about the display of antiquities in private collections. Bishop
Antonio Agustn, 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 benefi-
cial to young scholars and artists, the Northerners are bestially scandal-
ized 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, Agustn was not against ancient art or the study of ancient
culture. Instead, what seems to have bothered him was the overtly provocative

predominately male. The most complete census data is for the year 1592, when the citys
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): 20720.
40 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 dun 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 scandaliz-
zano bestialmente, & fama malum vires acquirit eundo. Cos va perdendo provincie la
vostra Urbs Alma Regina Provinciarum. Letter of 12 November 1566, in Antonio Agustn,
Opera Omnia, vol. 7 (Lucca: Rocchius, 1772), 2478. My translation is based on Coffin, Villa
in the Life, 174.
Ancient Idols 433

nature of particular works and their accessibility in villa gardens and palaces
to conservative northern European pilgrims or visitors who might misunder-
stand 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, 30914; Paleotti, Discourse, 1869.

42 See above, and n. 18.
43 ... un Agrippina bellissima, cha i pi 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 Beitrge zum Nachleben der Antike
2 (2000): 4160. On the statue, see Barbara Vierneisel-Schlrb and Klaus Vierneisel,
Katalog der Skulpturen, II: Klassische Skulpturen des 5. und 4. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. (Mnich:
C.H. Beck, 1979), 16377, 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 antichit della citt di Roma brevissimamente raccolte da chiunque h
scritto, antico, moderno, ed. Lucio Mauro (Venice: Giordano Ziletti, 1562), 12930.
434 Bentz

Figure12.3 So-called Agrippina (draped female torso), Roman copy after a 5th-
century bce original.
Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek Mnchen,
GL 208 (Christa Koppermann)
Ancient Idols 435

Figure12.4 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)
436 Bentz

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: fea-
tured 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 inter-
act with this sculpture, turning the base to view the nude figures from all
angles. Yet the eroticism of the sculpture was underscored by the satyrs phal-
lus 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. Aldrovandis description thus emphasizes the salacious nature
of the subject represented as if to warn readers against too much enjoyment.
As Aldrovandis description shows, the novel display settings and the lush
and sensuous garden surroundings for nude and erotic statuary only height-
ened their sensual and suggestive qualities. The planted vegetation, water fea-
tures, 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

For the statue, see A. Giuliano, ed., La Collezione BoncompagniLudovisi: Algardi, Bernini,
e la fortuna dellantico (Venice: Mattilio, 1992), 1527, no. 16.
45 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.
46 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), 24673 . 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 Brunelleschis
Ancient Idols 437

abilities of females. The Diana of Ephesus made for the Villa dEste 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 Goddesss 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 gro-
tesque.48 Female sexuality and fertility were further accentuated in other sculp-
tural vignettes at the Villa dEste, 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 activi-
ties. 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 entertain-
ing.50 Villa gardens were commonly the venues for luxurious banquets and
elaborate amusements for important visitors and diplomatic guests; often car-
dinals 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, dEste and Medici, as well as the Farnese
estate at Caprarola and the Villa dEste at Tivoli.51 These large parties would
traditionally include members of Romes sizeable courtesan population, and
courtesans or prostitutes would also accompany smaller group outings or pic-
nic rendezvous as well. In 1501, Agostino Vespucci wrote to Niccol Machiavelli
reporting on the behavior of poets in gardens:

Egg: Nature, Art and Gender in Renaissance Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2010), 275313.
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 dEste at Tivoli (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 189.
48 Lazzaro, Gendered Nature and its Representation, 2503; The Italian Renaissance
Garden, 144; and Park, Nature in Person, especially 5764.
49 The Venus statue was of the Capitoline type. Coffin, The Villa dEste at Tivoli, 34; Gardens
and Gardening, 8990.
50 Coffin, Villa in the Life, 232.
51 Avviso of 29 September 1582. See ibid., 209.
438 Bentz

Figure12.5 Gillis van den Vliete, Diana of Ephesus, 1568.

Villa dEste, Tivoli, Italy (Author)
Ancient Idols 439

[They] are continuously in the garden with women, and others similar to
them, where they awaken the silent muse with their lyre, giving them-
selves 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 instru-
ments 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 worri-
some 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 popula-
tions, one of flesh and blood and one of marble.55 Not only were contemporary

52 in dovere stare continue per li giardini fra donne, et altri simili ad s, 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 Niccol
Machiavelli in Florence, 16 July 1501, in Pasquale Villari, Niccol 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.
53 Michele Maylender and Luigi Rava, Storia delle accademie dItalia, vol. 5 (Bologna:
A. Forni, repr., 1976), 4667.
54 Havendo il Papa inteso che il card. Alessandrino andava troppo speso alle vigne et paren-
doli vita troppo licentiosa, gli ha commesso che non parta pi 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.
55 Erma Mandowsky and Charles Mitchell, Pirro Ligorios 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.
440 Bentz

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 Alighieris 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 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), 17745.
57 For the Pasquino and other talking statues in Rome, see Valerio Marucci, ed. Pasquinate
del Cinque e Seicento, Omikron (Roma: Salerno editrice, 1988); Cesare DOnofrio, Un
popolo di statue racconta: Storie fatti leggende delle citt di Roma antica, medievale, mod-
erna (Rome: Romana Soc. Ed., 1990) and Claudio Rendina, Pasquino, statua parlante:
Quattro secoli di pasquinate (Roma: Newton Compton, 1991).
58 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, 15501700 (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2001), 74.
59 Mio padre spirituale, al quale io do assai credito per la sua bont e mi ha consigliato che
io non armi la mia casa di simili cose, parendogli che non convegnono a cardinali della mia
et 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, 15401621, ed. Paola
Barocchi and Giovanna Gaeta Bertel, vol. 1, pt. 1 (Florence: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 2002),
237. The translation here is based on Stenhouse, Visitors, Display and Reception, 4123.
Ancient Idols 441

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 dis-
solute 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 sculp-
ture 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 essay-
ist Michel de Montaigne seems to confirm this idea when describing the gar-
dens he visited in Rome in 15801: 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 audi-
ence for gardens, then, was most likely members of the educated classes.62 On
the other hand, the popularity of garden parties featuring courtesans, the prev-
alence 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 Michel de Montaigne, Montaignes Travel Journal, trans. Donald Murdoch Frame (San
Francisco: North Point Press, 1983), 96.
61 David Coffin, The Lex Hortorum and Access to Gardens of Latium During the
Renaissance, Journal of Garden History 2 (1982): 20132. See also Katherine M. Bentz, The
Rhetoric of the Garden Gate in Early Modern Rome, in Early Modern Rome, 13411667, ed.
Portia Prebys (Rome: sate, 2010), 24663.
62 Stenhouse, Visitors, Display and Reception, 412.
442 Bentz

did visit gardens, causing alarm for such reformers as Agustn and Paleotti.63
Not only would such visitors see the ancient idols, observe the lascivious-
ness 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 Churchs 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 Farneses Caprarola, Cardinal Riccis 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 See notes 18 and 40.

64 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), 667, 119.
65 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): 24776.
66 Luba Freedman, The Revival of the Olympian Gods in Renaissance Art, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2434.
67 Clare Robertson, Il Gran Cardinale: Alessandro Farnese, Patron of the Arts (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 2012.
Ancient Idols 443

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 sub-
jects.68 Even the model Church reformer, Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, had diffi-
culty 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 secu-
lar 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 stat-
ues, 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 benefi-
cial 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, 24369.

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): 1504.
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 Armeninis text was published.
72 Fabio Albergati, Del Cardinale (Rome: Giovanni Angelo Ruffinelli, 1598), 191.
73 quando per nel resto siano senza lascivia alcuna e col suo decoro saggiamente
espresse. Barocchi, Trattati, vol. 2, 317; Paleotti, Discourse, 191.
444 Bentz

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 nave and thus easily corrupted. This is per-
haps why accusations of idolatry and fears about influencing the youth,
women, the unlettered, or northern European visitors were repeated by differ-
ent 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, aus-
terity, 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 owner-
ship of such works were markers of wealth and noble Roman status. Thus
ancient statues, and the contemporary works of sculpture they inspired, con-
tinued 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 mas-
terpieces of ancient art.
Although Renaissance culture was profoundly influenced by the fascination
with and appreciation for antiquity, this study has shown that in sixteenth-
century Rome, as in any society, taste was not uniform. Often, as in the case of
ardent Counter-Reformation reformer Cardinal Carlo Borromeo and his inabil-
ity 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 seek-
ing ancient sculpture for models and inspiration for their own works were
also, invariably, men. In this way, the reception of ancient sculpture in
Ancient Idols 445

sixteenth-century Roman gardens was fundamentally determined by notions

of decorum, gender, and identity.

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Index*
abduction, see rape/abduction
adlocutio26, 154
Adonis212, 258, 259n57, 309n16, 380n67
Adrian VI, Pope422, 423
Adventus of Hadrian, relief (Conservatori
Palace, Rome)361
Adventus of Marcus Aurelius, relief, Arch of
Constantine, Rome361, 362
Adventus of Trajan, relief, Arch of
Constantine, Rome121
Aeneas393, 394, 394n1, 395401, 402, 403,
404, 405, 406, 407417
Aglauros295, 295n118
Agosti, Giovanni137n15
Agostino Veneziano150
Bacchante Seated Backwards on a Goat,
With Herm of Satyr287, 292
Stregozzo (engraver)23, 279, 280, 282n73
reissue of Marcantonio Raimondi,
cemetery scene, engraving280, 287,
288, 289, 290n90
Agrippa, Henricus Cornelius148
Declamation of the Nobility and
Preeminence of the Female Sex148n48
Agrippina, statue, Cesi Garden433,
433n43, 434
Agustn, Bishop Antonio432, 432n40, 441
Alberti, Leon Battista
Intercenales296n120
On Painting299, 299n129
Alcamenes
Procne and Itys305, 309, 310, 316, 322, 330
Alciato, Andrea
Emblemata270, 270n22
Illustrations296
Aldrovandi, Ulisse
Delle statue antiche105, 106n22, 431n36,
433, 433n44
Alessandrino, Cardinal (Michele
Bonelli)439, 439n54
Alexander the Great183, 185, 186, 187, 212n38
Alexander the Great, bust (Uffizi)185,
185n31, 187
Alighieri, Dante71
* Numbers in bold indicate pages with images.
Inferno38, 67n62, 82, 272, 272n27, 294,
297n123, 298n126
Alighieri, Francesco
Antiquitates Valentinae440, 440n58
Amazons18, 117, 119, 122, 150n57, 350, 350n1,
365, 366, 387; goddess Roma as
Amazonian 119, 122, 366, 368
Ammannati, Bartolomeo368
Juno Fountain, Florence366, 366n41,
368n42, 369, 371, 371n50, 370, 383n75,
385, 386
Florence369, 371
anasyrmos (lifting of the skirts)375, 375n55
Anchises394, 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, 443445; as instruments of
Satan, 425; negative reception of, 429,
422, 423, 424, 439442; sensuality of, 426,
431; visual power of, 418, 419, 436, 439,
441. See also under individual statues
Aneau, Barthlemy
La Mtamorphose dOvide figure
(attributed to?)321
Antaeus66, 66n62
Apelles100, 141, 218, 299, 299n129
Calumny141, 299, 299n129
Aphrodite, see Venus
Aphrodite of Knidos, statue376, 385n82, 421
Apollo51, 118, 18n50, 183, 214n42,
259,259n61, 278, 309n16, 424; ancient
statues of, 27, 104, 105, 117, 118; Apollo
Citharoedos, 105, 176n10; Apollo
Medicus, 267
Apuleius204, 205, 209, 222
Metamorphoses (Golden Ass)205,
205n18, 205n19, 267, 267n15, 275n44,
276n45, 284n78, 2888, 292n100
Arachne87, 88, 89, 89n22, 93n39
Arcadia230, 230n1, 245, 253 264
Arcimboldo401
Ares, see Mars
452
Aretino, Pietro218, 218n56, 275, 288, 294,
376, 412n47
Cortigiano288n88, 290, 294n111
Sei Giornate275n41, 288n87
Ariadne200n1, 203, 212, 213, 214
Ariadne/Cleopatra, Belvedere Courtyard,
Vatican238n14, 246. See also
Francisco de Holanda, drawing of
fountain with Ariadne/Cleopatra
Aristotle59, 73, 426
Poetics306, 426, 426n23
Ariosto, Ludovico270n23, 286, 297
Armenini, Giovanni Battista
On the True Precepts of the Art of
Painting443, 443n71
Arno River, statue, Belvedere, Vatican)379,
381
Arnulfus of Orlans
Commentary on the Fasti71
Arrivabene, Giovan Francesco433, 433n43
Artemis, see Diana
Ascanius394, 395, 402, 402n27, 403, 404, 406
Asclepius115, 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, Mariano106, 188
Athena350, 350n1, 365, 365n35, 387; Athena
Nikophoros iconography, 117
Athens305, 308, 309, 309n15, 422n6
Centauromachy metopes, Parthenon215
Augustine294
City of God267, 269, 274n37
Augustus, Roman emperor365, 397, 408
Avignon papacy111
Bacchantes/maenads26, 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/Dionysos143n36, 212, 213, 214,
268n15, 282, 284, 285n78, 356
Bagnaia
Villa Lante443
Bal, Mieke28n78, 125, 125n65
Index
Bandinelli, Baccio
Triumphal scene, base, monument to
Giovanni delle Bande Nere25, 29,
352, 353, 354, 354n7, 355, 355n11, 356,
359, 374
Banqueting223, 223n70, 224, 224n74, 225;
witches banquets, 266, 275, 278
barbarians, iconography of340, 354, 374n52
Barbaro, Francesco147n44, 157
De re uxoria147
Barkan, Leonard2n5, 8, 8n20, 18, 18n71, 27,
27n77, 30n80, 145n42, 154n70, 175n5,
176n8, 176n10, 176n12, 178n13, 188n35,
188,87, 216, 216n52, 237n14, 246n34, 343,
343n65
Barocci, Federico393, 393n1
Aeneas Flight from Troy393, 394, 394n1,
395401, 402, 403, 404, 405, 406, 407,
408417; See also Carracci, Agostino,
print after Federico Barocci, Aeneas
Flight from Troy
Aeneas Flight from Troy (copy, Villa
Borghese)393, 394, 395, 408, 413
Annunciation406, 407, 408
Deposition408
Madonna del Popolo406
Perdono di Assisi406, 406n36
Bartoli, Cosimo366, 366n41, 371n50, 383
Bartman, Elizabeth, 183
Baskins, Cristelle12, 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 Hermaphrodite100, 100n4, 101, 101n7,
101n11
bed, marital17n65, 255; as setting for rape
scenes, see Philomela; Lucretia. See also
valances, bed
Bellay, Joachim Du
Antiquitez de Rome126, 125n66, 127
Bellini, Giovanni
Feast of the Gods237, 246, 248, 249
Bellini, Jacopo
drawings of fountain sculptures258,
258n59
Bellori, Gian Pietro399n17, 405, 406n34
Index
Belvedere Courtyard, see Vatican, Belvedere
Villa
Belvedere Torso, statue fragment169, 173,
174, 175n5, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182,
183n21, 183, 188, 192, 195, 218n55
Bembo, Pietro
Gli Asolani230, 230n1, 246
Benedict XI, Pope38, 40
Benson, Pamela Joseph150
Berchorius, Petrus, see Bersuire, Pierre
Bergamo
Oratorio Suardi232n5, 234, 235, 236,
237
Bernardus Silvestris72, 72n80
Bersuire, Pierre (Petrus Berchorius)
Ovidius Moralizatus73
Bertelli, Luca
Lucretia and Her Companions335, 337
Bestiaries93, 93n37, 93n38, 94
Bestiality205, 207, 207n29, 208, 208n30, 211,
222, 223n68
bisexuality101, 182, 215n46
Bisticci, Vespasiano da
Il Libro delle lode e commendazione delle
donne150
Black, Robert71n72
blood, see wounds
Bober, Phyllis and Ruth Rubinstein6, 6n15
Boccaccio, Giovanni60, 60n52, 180n17
De mulieribus claris (Good
Women)71n69, 147, 147n43, 180
Corbaccio192, 293n106, 293n107
Decamerone7, 7n17
Genealogia deorum gentilium libri
(Geneology of the Pagan Gods)74
Filocolo296n120
Bocchi, Achille
Symbolicarum122, 122n59, 124, 376,
376n61
illustration of Roma124
Boiardo, Matteo Maria
Orlando Innamorato273n31
Boniface VIII, Pope40, 63
Bonofazi, Maria Luisa69, 69n68
Borghese, Scipione408, 409
Borromeo, Carlo, Cardinal443, 444
Botticelli, Sandro
Calumny of Apelles141, 299, 299n129
Primavera370, 370n47
453
Bracciolini, Poggio
De varietate fortunae98, 98n1, 99, 100, 100n5
Bramante, Donato188n35, 406, 410, 411
breasts, female, bile spraying from296;
compared to spiders webs, 291, 294;
sagging, 27, 291, 291n95, 292, 292n100,
296, 296n122, 297n124, 298; as water-
spouts in fountain sculpture, 241, 241n18,
241n19; of witches, 285, 286, 291, 291n95,
292, 292n100, 293, 294, 294n109, 295,
296, 206n122, 297, 297n124, 298, 298n127
brides136, 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 Garrard3n8, 3n9,
13, 13n42
bucolic imagery258n57
Bull, Malcolm9, 9n26
Buonarroti, Michelangelo24, 282, 299n129,
351, 354, 356, 358n14, 363n27, 366n40,
374n51, 375, 376, 379
Battle of Cascina282
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
frescoes176, 282, 427
Ignudi176
Last Judgment41, 41n19, 299,
299n129, 427, 428n28
Times of Day, New Sacristy (Medici
Chapel), San Lorenzo, Florence375
Dawn178, 375
Day375
Dusk375
Night178, 351, 352, 375
Victory, Sala Grande, Palazzo Vecchio,
Florence375
Burckhardt, Jacob278, 278n59, 279, 279n61
Butler, Judith201n4
Caciorgna, Marilena142
Caffarini, Tommaso
Biography of St. Catherine of Siena189
454 Index

Calmeta, Vincenzo Chastity135, 136, 136n12, 142, 150, 154, 203,

De ostentazione220
Campagnola, Giulio
Young Shepherd272
Camille, Michael10, 11, 11n32, 14
Campogli, Maurizio Gatttoni da137n15, 157
Campbell, Caroline153
Campbell, Stephen18, 18n69
Canidia266, 266n13, 267n14, 270n21, 280,
290n91
Canon Episcopi, see Capitulum Episcopi
Capitulum Episcopi (Canon Episcopi)266
Caprarola
Palazzo Farnese437, 442
captives, images of25, 29, 331, 352, 354,
354n8, 355, 356, 374, 387
Caraglio, Gian Giacomo286n84, 404, 405
Carracci, Agostino
print after Federico Barocci, Aeneas Flight
from Troy393, 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
Carmen115n42
Letter to Pope Leo X (with
Raphael)114n40, 126
Catherine of Siena169, 170, 171, 172, 173,
188193, 194, 195
Letter to Raymond of Capua1375189,
193, 193n53
Catullus, G. Valerius59, 232
Carmina275n44
Caviness, Madeline13, 13n45
ceramics. See also maiolica
Attic red-figure vases86, 309
Cerberus66
Ceres/Demeter
ancient statues of424
Cereta, Laura160
Poems148, 148n47
Chalchidius
Timaeus59
Chance, Jane70, 70n69
Charles II (the Lame), King of Naples73
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor161,
223n70
Charles V, King of France91
208, 220, 220n60, 221, 222, 223, 225, 252,
256, 257, 312, 420
Chastity, personification of252
Chaucer, Geoffrey
Legend of Good Women306, 306n4, 308
Chrtien de Troyea
Cligs80, 80n1
Ovide moralis (author?)70, 70n69, 306n3
Philomena70, 306
Christ6667; Ascension of, 29, 82, 91, 95;
carrying the cross on the way to
Calvary, 29, 82, 84; driving the
merchants from the Temple41, 42;
Incarnation, 95, 102; Passion, 190; and
salvation, 93, 95
Christian, Kathleen Wren6, 6n14, 154n70,
241n20, 418n1
Chronica Patavina38
Cicero (M. Tullius Cicero)47n24, 275n44
Circe23, 27, 267, 267n14, 267n17, 269,
269n19, 270, 270n20, 270n23, 270n24,
271, 271n25, 271n26, 272, 277, 300
Clark, Kenneth26, 26n76, 264, 264n1, 273,
279, 286, 288, 300
Clarke, John134
Claudian (Claudius Claudianus)
Panegyricus dictus Probino et Olybrio111,
361n21
Clmence of Hungary, Queen of France310
Clement VIII, Pope410
Cleopatra52, 237n14, 246, 246n36, 247, 253,
254, 258
Cleve, Hendrick van III430
coins and medals, ancient
Hadrian restoring Achaea359
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 Rienzo111
Colonna, Franceso
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili9, 22, 233,
237, 238, 238n15, 239, 239n17, 240,
242n23, 247, 248, 259, 259n41, 253, 255,
255n39, 255n50, 257n55, 258, 258n57,
420n3, 422n4
Index
Coriolanus131168
Corpses20, 30, 30n80, 112, 114, 116, 170, 192, 193
Cort, Cornelius
Tarquin and Lucretia328, 332
Couchman, Jane see Poska, Allyson and Jane
Couchman
Council of Trent424, 427, 428
courtesans/prostitutes269n19, 294, 429,
437, 441
cowardice47
Cranach, Lucas
Nymph of the Spring250, 251
Crescenzi, Cardinal Marcello428
Creusa23, 24, 28, 393397, 397n10, 398,
398n10, 401403, 403n28, 404, 405, 406,
407, 408, 409, 413, 414
cross-dressing26, 50, 51, 104, 125n63, 180,
122, 122n60
Cupid/Eros57, 135, 136n12, 136, 136n14, 141,
141n29, 143n35, 278, 422; and Venus, 230,
231, 232234, 237, 238, 245, 253, 255259,
272, 277278, 376, 376n58, 381n71, 420n5,
421, 443; and Psyche, 205n18, 213
Cybele/Magna Mater17
Daedalus, and Pasipha200, 202, 204, 206,
208, 209, 211, 214, 215, 218, 221n64, 222,
225, 308n16
Dante, see Alighieri, Dante
David, Benjamin149n50
Decapitation169, 173, 188, 190, 192, 194
Deianira51
Delaune, tienne
Four Ancient Monarchies122, 122n60
Demeter, see Ceres
Demons169, 265n7, 255n9, 266n12, 274n38,
275n39, 276, 276n45, 277, 277n52, 277n63,
278, 279, 282n72, 286, 292, 294, 288, 422
Derbes, Anne and Mark Sandona37n1,
38n6, 40n16, 47, 48, 48n27,
deschi da parto (birth trays)12, 233, 233n6
dextrarum iunctio (ancient hand-clasp
gesture)359, 361
Diana/Artemis14, 14n48, 15, 160, 258n55,
264, 266, 266n10, 266n12, 266n13, 267,
274, 275, 278, 284n76
Diana of Ephesus236, 236n12, 246n36, 437,
437n47, 438. See also Vliete, Gillis van
den, Diana of Ephesus
455
Dido18, 394, 397, 498n11
dining, and viewing art223, 223n70, 224,
224n74, 225
Diodorus Siculus
Bibliotheca historica51, 54, 54n41, 58, 60,
61, 62, 73, 74, 75
Dionysos, see Bacchus
Dismemberment24, 30, 30n80, 305
donora (trousseau)151, 151n60
Dodwin, Joscelyn11, 11n34
Dosio, Giovanni Antonio
sketchbook (Berlin)119
Dossi, Battista
Stregozzo (attributed)280
Dossi, Dosso273, 299
Bacchanal (attributed)275
Circe23, 27, 270, 270n23, 271, 272, 273
Dowry136, 141. See also donora
dream poetry238, 238n16, 241, 242, 250, 252,
255, 259n61, 266, 272, 273, 279
Drer, Albrecht242n21, 250, 250n41, 253n45,
264, 274n34, 286n82
Witch riding backwards on a goat25,
282, 283, 284286, 298, 299 . See also
Montagna, Benedetto, copy in reverse
of Albrecht Drer, Witch riding
backwards on a goat
Eleonora de Toledo, Duchess of
Florence336n52, 363n27, 429n34
Elia, Anthony F.D155
Elizabeth of Valois, Queen of Spain413
embroidery, see textiles
Epicureanism254n46
epithalamia
epithalamic poetry233, 254, 254n47
epithalamic painting233, 233n6, 234 257
Equicola, Mario248
Libro de Natura de Amore256n52
Erasmus, Desiderius426, 427, 427n24
Erictho267, 267n14, 288, 290n91
Eros, see Cupid
Este, Ippolito d, Cardinal430n34, 431
Este, Isabella d18, 202n5, 202n6, 203n12,
206n22, 214n41, 224, 246n36, 256n52, 431n36
Este, Lucrezia d412, 413
Eucharist411
Europa20, 8082, 83, 8485, 86, 8797,
175n9, 203, 205, 207, 207n25, 217, 386n86
456
Even, Yael15, 15n54, 16
Execution169, 170, 171, 173, 188192, 194,
275, 290
Fabricius, Gervasius
Album Amicorum335, 335n48, 336
Farnese, Agnese131n2, 142n26, 149n53, 149,
150, 153n67
Farnese, Alessandro, see Paul III, Pope
Farnese, Alessandro, Cardinal424n10, 437,
442, 442n67, 443n69
Farnese, Alessandro, governor of the
Netherlands410
Farnese, Vittoria, Duchess of Urbino
412, 413
fauns, see satyrs
Faunus52, 53
Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of
Urbino400, 400n19, 409
Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua199,
202, 292n5, 202n6, 203, 204n12, 206n22,
213, 213n41, 219, 219n59, 219n60, 221,
223, 224
Ferguson, M.T., and M. Quilligan14, 14n51
Ferguson, Margaret W.147
Ferrara
Camerino of Alfonso dEste246
Ferrarese, Riccobaldo40
Ferrari, Valentini, Vivi138n21, 141n26
Fertility17, 25, 48, 99, 233n6, 265, 291, 295,
295n118, 298n127, 381383, 386, 387,
437. See also nature
Fiesole
personifications of351, 352, 360, 383,
383n76, 385
Figura serpentinata (serpentine figure)145,
272
Fior di virt, florilegium300, 300n131
First Vatican Mythographer70, 70n69
Fish, Stanley132, 133n5
Fltner, Peter
Invidia, plaquette296
Flora368, 369, 370, 371, 371n49, 371n50, 381,
385, 386
Florence, as object of love =16, 2324,
360365; foundation legends, 351;
personifications of, 350382
Baptistery10
Gardens, Villa Medici, Castello441
Index
New Sacristy (Medici Chapel), San
Lorenzo179, 376n64, 379
Palazzo Vecchio364n31, 366n41, 381n73
Floris, Frans
drawing of standing hermaphrodite
statue187188
Fontainebleau
Palace431
Folly, personification of67, 68
Fortitude, personification of42, 43, 45,
4748, 50, 66, 67, 69
Fortuna, goddess47
Foucault, Michel25, 25n73
fountains, symbolism of2223, 233, 240,
241250, 253, 386, 433; in early modern
gardens, 444; and nymph sculpture,
238, 239, 241, 245246, 246n36, 249,
250, 250n41, 253, 255, 258; and river god
sculpture, 351, 366, 366n41, 368n42,
369, 371n59, 379, 383, 383n75, 383n78
fragments, of statues16, 2324, 30, 108, 175,
176, 185, 188, 195; of bodies, 112, 114, 170,
173, 192, 193, 195
Francesco da Barberino
Documenti dAmore40
Francisco de Holanda (Francesco dOlanda)
drawing of fountain with Ariadne/
Cleopatra246, 247, 258
Francesco Maria II delle Rovere, Duke of
Urbino393, 399, 399n16, 408, 409,
409n40, 410, 412, 412n49, 413
Franois I, King of France431
Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor60, 73,
74, 74n84
Freedman, Luba8, 8n24, 17, 18n66
Fulgentius, F. Planciades
Mythologies53, 59, 72, 76
Furies23, 285, 292, 292n103, 296, 300, 322, 323
Gaddie Torso. see Alexander the Great
gagliardo (with forced movements)379n67,
380n67, 381
Gaia. see Tellus
Galatea212
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, 242246,
418420, 422433, 436437, 439445.
See also under individual gardens by city;
nature; fountains
Garimberto, Bishop Girolamo442, 442n64,
443n69
Garrard, Mary15, 16n58 See also Broude,
Norma and Mary Garrard
Gemma Augustea354, 355, 365, 365n35
Gendel, Milton L.67, 67n63
gender fluidity5, 21, 27, 176
gender inversion175n8, 193, 219. See also
cross-dressing
Genga, Girolamo131, 403, 412
Aeneas Fleeing Troy141, 401, 401n26, 402,
403, 406
Fabius Maximus Ransoming Roman
Prisoners from Hannibal141
Penelope and Telemachus141, 143n35
Gentile da Fabriano16
Geremia di Montagnone63
Compendium59
Ghiberti, Lorenzo
Commentari7n17, 27, 103n18, 104
Ghisi, Giorgio
Tarquin and Lucretia322, 322n32, 328
Giambologna
Fiorenza24, 25, 374, 384, 385, 385n79,
385n80, 385n83, 386, 386n84
Florence Triumphant over Pisa373, 375, 385
Rape of the Sabine Women15
Giotto di Bondone1920, 3779
frescoes, Arena Chapel, Padua3741, 42,
43, 44, 46, 79, 218, 294n14, 295
Giorgione
Dresden Venus233, 233n6, 253
Giovanni Antonio da Brescia
engraving of Belvedere Torso176, 177
Giovanni da Nono59n49
Liber de generatione aliquorum civium
urbis Padue38, 38n7
Giulio Romano206n22, 208, 209n35, 217,
218n57, 220n59, 224n72, 287, 292,
411n47
frescoes, Palazzo del Te, Mantua21, 28,
199, 200, 201203, 203n8, 205n18,
209n31, 211, 212, 212n38, 213n41, 213n42,
214, 214n45, 215, 216, 216n52, 218221,
223225, 286
457
Hercules and the Cretan Bull217, 218
I Modi214
Tarquin and Lucretia, Palazzo Ducale,
Mantua322
Goffen, Rona17, 17n65
Goldhill, Simon3, 3n7
Golding, Arthur
Metamorphoses342, 342n62, 342n63,
344
Gombrich, Ernst7, 7n19, 134, 134n7, 218n57,
277n53, 278n60, 398n14, 420n3, 422n5
Gonzaga, Eleonora, Duchess of Urbino412
Gonzaga, Giulia181
Gonzaga, Federico II, see Federico II
Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua
Gossart, Jan17
Gower, John
Confessio Amantis, illustrations306,
306n5, 307n5, 308, 308n13, 312, 312n20,
313n22, 313n23, 321
Granvelle, Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de
442, 442n65
Gregory the Great, Pope295, 422, 422n7,
424, 428
Greenhalgh, Michael2n5, 6, 6n13
Grieco, Sarah Matthews, see Johnson,
Geraldine and Sarah Matthews Grieco
Grien, Hans Baldung
Witches Sabbath264n3, 280
Grillandi, Paolo
Tractatus de sortilegiis290n92
Guarino da Verona
Letter to Antonio Beccadelli100
Gubbio
Palace, Studiolo of Federico da
Montefeltro400, 400n20
Guillaume de Lorris, see Jean de Meun and
Guillaume de Lorris, Roman de la Rose
Habsburg, Maria, of Austria413
Hairston, Julia L.155
hairstyles, female2526,111, 153, 153n63, 205,
232, 270, 280, 284, 284n78, 285, 286, 292,
292n103, 297, 322, 338, 349, 354, 356,
368, 371, 374, 385, 386
Hamburger, Jeffrey12, 12n40, 13
Hans von Aachen393
Hardwick, Lorna1n1, 2n5, 3n8, 11n37, 19,
19n72
458
Haskell, Francis, and Nicholas Penny
6, 6n14
Hayum, Andre173n4, 181n19, 183n18
Hecate266, 266n12, 267, 284n80
Heliodoros of Rhodes435
Helios203, 398n10
Hera, see Juno/Hera
Hercules/Herakles14, 42, 44, 47, 5054, 55,
56, 57, 5867, 72, 175, 180, 180n16, 181,
181n18, 182, 215, 215n48, 217, 217n55, 218,
219n58, 276n46, 280, 280n67, 282, 284,
285n76, 328; and masculinity, 180,
217218
Hercules mingens type234, 234n7, 235,
235n10, 236, 237
Hermaphrodites20, 28, 30, 57, 99104, 106,
108, 112, 117, 127, 432; ancient statues of,
8n21, 187
Hermaphroditus99, 102, 102n13, 108, 108n30,
109; ancient statues of, 105, 107, 108, 110
Herodotus
Histories75, 275n44
Hesiod
Theogony74, 74n85, 270n24, 272n28,
275n44
Works and Days74
Hippolytus, son of Theseus115, 116, 136
Homer60, 275, 275n44, 277, 307n6, 353n6, 400
Iliad74, 74n85, 275n44
Odyssey267n17, 270, 270n23, 270n24, 272,
272n28, 275n44
Homosexuality101
Hora of Autumn/Pomona, statue
(Uffizi)371, 372
Horace59, 82, 249, 275, 276, 280, 290, 291,
293, 426
Ars poetica116n44, 282, 428n23
Epodes266, 266n13, 269n19, 270n21,
280n66, 284n78, 290n94, 291n99,
292n100
Satires266n13, 290n91
Hostanes267, 267n16, 268, 292
Huius Nympha Loci, epigram22, 233, 241,
242, 242n21, 245, 249, 250, 250n41, 253
humor, and female sexuality208, 219n59,
223, 234n7, 238; and images of
Pasipha, 201, 203, 208, 219, 220, 223
hybridity108, 117, 279, 280, 282, 284, 284n80,
285
Index
Hyginus, G. Julius59, 60
Fabulae51, 70, 76
Hymenaeus254
Hypnerotomachia
PoliphiliHypnerotomachia Poliphili9,
22, 233, 237, 238, 238n15, 239, 239n17, 240,
242n23, 247, 248, 259, 259n41, 253, 255,
255n39, 255n50, 257n55, 258, 258n57,
420n3, 422n4
idolatry, concerns over439, 420, 420n5, 422,
422n6, 423, 424, 425
Inconstancy, personification of45, 46, 47
Inquisition265, 270n21, 273n32, 276,
276n49, 277, 277n49, 288, 290
Iphitus51, 53
Isidore of Seville72
Etymologies80
Itys305, 309, 310, 316, 322, 330
Jacobus, Laura37n1, 38n3, 38n7, 40n12,
40n13, 41n17, 45n21, 69n65
Jacopone da Todi38n6, 69
Jan van Scorel259, 253, 254
Death of Cleopatra253, 254
Jauss, Hans Robert2, 2n3, 132, 134, 134n6,
134n7, 134n9, 162
Jean de Meun and Guillaume de Lorris
Roman de la Rose72, 81, 243n24, 244,
244n27
Jeanne de Bourgogne90
Jewelry51, 156, 231, 338, 338n55
Johnson, Geraldine, and Sarah Matthews
Grieco14, 14n51, 15, 16, 16n55
Juno/Hera50, 51, 62; Juno Februata48;
Juno Sospita45, 48
Juno Sospita, statue (Vatican)48, 49
Jupiter/Jove/Zeus51, 62, 85, 86, 87,
87n20, 88, 88n21, 89, 9195,
203, 212, 212n38, 213, 214; ancient
statues of, 424
Kampen, Natalie Boymel15, 15n53, 58n46,
65, 65n61
Kelly, Joan4, 4n11
Knidian Aphrodite, see Aphrodite of Knidos,
statue
Kristeva, Julia101, 102n10
Lacan, Jacques101
Index
Laocon and His Sons, statue group (Vatican
Belvedere)183, 422
landscape painting248249, 250259
laurel, symbolism of251, 260
Lazzaro, Claudia17, 17n61, 2326, 28, 29,
111n33, 117n46, 125n64, 245n33, 379n65,
381n69, 383n77, 386n85, 418n1, 436n46,
437n48, 443n68
Leda207, 272, 309n16, 436
leges hortorum (laws of gardens)441
leggiadra (graceful movement)376,
376n59, 386
Leo X, Pope112, 114n40, 126, 160, 363,
370n45, 381n72, 403, 423
Leonardo da Vinci183, 188n35, 297n124,
299, 299n130, 300, 300n131, 358n14,
427
Standing Leda272
Lendinara, Altegrado Cattaneo di, Bishop of
Vicenza40, 62
Ligorio, Pirro104, 104n19, 120n56, 423, 439,
439n55
Antiquae Urbis Imago, map120
Lindquist, Sherry14, 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, Kathleen99
Loschi, Antonio98, 99, 112
Lotto, Lorenzo230263
Andrea Odoni234, 235, 236, 237
Apollo Asleep on Parnassus259n61
Cingoli Altarpiece251, 251n43
frescoes, Oratorio Suardi,
Bergamo232n5, 234, 236, 237
Maidens Dream250, 252, 253
San Nicola Altarpiece257, 257n54
Triumph of Chastity256
Venus and Cupid231, 253, 254, 255, 258,
258n58
Lovati, Lovato5863, 65
Epistles58
Lucan (M. Annaeus Lucanus)59
Bellum civile267n14, 276n44, 276n46,
284n78, 288n89, 290n91, 292n109
Pharsalia111
459
Lucian of Samosata
Slander299n129
Lucretia, Tarquin and322325, 328, 328n39,
332, 329, 343
Lucretius (T. Lucretius Carus)254
De rerum natura241n18, 254n46
Maarten van Heemskerck
drawing of Belvedere Torso176, 176n12, 178
drawing of Sassi palace courtyard119, 120
Machiavelli, Niccol158n86, 159, 162, 271n26,
375, 375n54, 375n55, 438, 439n52
Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus
Livy158, 158n87, 162
The History of Florence158, 158n87
The Prince158
maenads, see Bacchantes
magic205, 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 Olaus428
Maiolica12, 21, 22, 26, 28, 199, 202, 292n6,
203n10, 222n67, 224, 309n14, 393n3, 402,
403, 406
Malleus Maleficarum267, 267n17
Mantegna, Andrea202n5, 286n82, 291n96,
297, 298, 299
Battle of the Sea Gods285, 297
Mantua
Palazzo Ducale322
Palazzo del Te21, 28, 199, 202, 202n6,
205n18, 208n31, 211, 213n40, 213n41,
213n42, 214, 215, 223, 223n69, 224, 225, 286
manuscripts
Aberdeen Bestiary93, 93n27
Cambridge LXV.12 (Ovide moralis)92
Copenhagen Royal Library ms Thott. 399
(Ovide moralis)90
Morgan ms M.126 (Confessio
Amantis)313, 316, 321
Morgan ms 443 (Ovide moralis)91
Oxford Bestiary93
Paris Arsenal ms 5069 (Ovide
moralis)29, 82, 310
Paris bnf ms fr. 24306 (Ovide
moralis)90
Rouen Bibliothque Municipal ms 0.4
(Ovide moralis)20, 82, 309
460
Marforio, statue, Rome440
Marriage15, 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, 149150,
157161, 401n26, 409, 412, 413. See also
brides; cassoni (marriage chests)
Mars/Ares176, 212, 366, 381
Martial (M. Valerius Martialis)59
Epigrams 291, 291n99, 293
Martianus Capella (Martianus Minneus Felix
Capella)72, 73
De nuptiis80
Martin V, Pope
Etsi in cunctarum, papal bull112
Martindale, Charles2, 2n4, 3, 3n6, 81n7,
132n4, 134, 134n8, 134n9, 199n3
Maso Finiquerra, circle of268
Maurus, Rabanus71
Mary360, 406408, 413
Martyrdom188190, 190n44, 191192, 193n51
Masaccio (Tommaso di ser Giovanni)16
matron, woman as132, 143,150, 154, 162, 335
McHam, Sarah9, 9n25
Medea95, 267, 267n14, 269, 276n46, 284,
284n78, 321
Medici, Cosimo I de, Duke of Florence161,
354, 356, 359, 360, 363, 364, 365, 366,
371, 374, 381, 386
Medici, Fernando de, Cardinal430n34, 437
Medici, Lorenzo de285n81, 296, 296n120,
363, 368, 370n47, 375
Medici, Maria de413
Medusa292, 300
Megara50, 51
Mercury51, 56
Mtamorphose dOvide figure320n29, 323,
324, 325, 326, 327
Michelangelo, see Buonarroti, Michelangelo
Migiel, Marilyn, and Juliana Schiesari14,
14n51, 17n61
Milliken, Roberta25n74
Mills, Robert193n51
Minerva, see Athena
Minos, King of Crete92, 203, 219n58
Minotaur203, 215
Index
Mithras22, 215, 328n39
slaying bull, relief from Aracoeli215,
215n48, 216, 217, 218
Molanus, Johannes
On Pictures and Sacred Images426n23,
427, 427n24, 427n25
Molza, Francesco Maria
In mortem Raphaelis Urbini116n43
Montagna, Benedetto
copy in reverse of Albrecht Drer, Witch
riding backwards on a goat286
mothers58, 136, 142, 144, 145,147, 148, 150,
151, 153, 156, 158, 162, 241, 253, 255, 369,
373, 396, 398
Mulvey, Laura13, 13n42
Musacchio, Jacqueline Marie12, 12n41
Muses30, 100, 233n28, 259n61
Mussato, Albertino58, 59, 63
Ecerinide59
Nagel, Alexander, and Christopher Wood10,
10n30
Narcissus243, 244, 244n27
Natura16, 101n11, 103n18, 241, 241n18,
254n46, 255n51, 257
nature, natural world as gendered
female436, 436n46, 437. See also bucolic
imagery; landscapes; Natura, goddess
Neckam, Alexander73, 73n82
Neoplatonism161, 203, 208, 213, 213n41, 277,
400, 400n22
Neptune/Poseidon17, 115, 203, 221, 221n64,
297n125
Niccol di Tuldo169, 169n1, 169n2, 170, 171,
176, 183, 188, 189, 189n39, 194
Nicola da Urbino
maiolica dish, Pasipha and Daedalus
(Paleologo dish)200, 202, 202n6, 203,
219, 219n60, 221225
maiolica dish, Pasipha and Daedalus
(workshop, attributed to)201, 202,
203, 222, 223
nudity, significance of26, 192, 351, 375, 383, 419,
425427, 427n26, 428, 429, 432, 441, 444
nymphs14, 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
obelisks127, 178
Omphale5054, 55, 56, 57, 5863, 6567,
7075, 180, 181, 181n17; sculpture,
Vatican, 64
Ovid (P. Ovidius Naso)
Amores81
Ars amatoria81, 203, 204, 204n17, 207,
208, 208n32
Ex Ponto47
Fasti52, 53n37, 59, 71, 76, 81, 87n20, 180,
180n17, 248, 276n44, 276n45, 276n46,
284n77, 322n31
Heroides51, 59, 71, 76, 81
Metamorphoses71, 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, 305307, 307n6, 309,
309n16, 310n17, 316, 317, 317n27, 318n28,
319, 320n20, 329, 342, 342n62, 342n63,
343, 383
Tristia81
Ovide moralis9, 9n26, 20, 23, 29, 8097,
203, 204n15, 207, 207n25, 207n26, 208,
208n31, 306, 306n3, 308, 310, 310n17, 326
Illustrations83, 84, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315,
316, 317, 318, 319, 320
Pace di Ferrara75
Padua19, 2-, 37, 40, 41, 5863, 65, 7073, 75,
295; study of ancient texts in, 5863
Arena Chapel3741, 42, 43, 44, 79, 218,
294n14, 295
Paleologa, Margherita202, 202n6, 219,
219n60, 220, 224, 225
Paleotti, Gabriele, Bishop
Discourse on Sacred and Profane
Images295n117, 424, 424n17, 425,
425n18, 428, 429n30, 433, 433n41, 442444
Palma il Vecchio
Bathing Nymphs or Diana and Callisto
Palumba, Giovanni Battista
Roma, print121, 122n58, 123
Pan and Daphnis (Cesi Garden)433, 435,
436n45
Panofsky, Erwin7, 14, 132n3, 181n18, 215n49,
273, 274n34
paragone, of painting and sculpture259,
259n60
461
Pasipha199, 200, 201, 202208, 209, 211,
212, 213215, 218220, 221, 222229
Pasquino, statue, Rome175, 440, 440n57
patience, personification of47, 48
Patrizi, Francesco
De regno et regis institutione158
De institutione reipublicae158
Paul III, Pope (Alessandro Farnese)149
Paxon, James47n23
Pencz, Georg
Envy, woodcut291n96, 296
Penelope141, 143n35, 272n27, 336, 336n52
Penny, Nicholas, see Haskell, Francis and
Nicholas Penny
Persephone29, 354, 355n11, 356
Personifications1617, 2326; of cities,
111112, 114117, 119122, 125126,
350392; 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, 4748, 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, Baldassare22, 119, 206n22
drawing of Trajanic relief on Arch of
Constantine120
Pasipha, fresco (lost), Villa Farnesina,
Rome209, 210, 211, 211n35, 212,
215,n48, 219, 220, 222, 222n66. See also
Pomarancio (Cristoforo Roncalli),
drawing after Baldassare Peruzzi,
Pasipha, fresco (lost), Villa Farnesina,
Rome (attributed to)
Petrarca, Francesco135
Trionfi135
Petrucci, Achille159
Petrucci, Alfonso160
Petrucci, Aurelia138, 159162
Petrucci, Borghese131, 137139, 149, 147, 158,
160, 301
Petrucci, Giulia138, 161
Petrucci, Iacopo di Giovfrancesco di
Iacopo160
Petrucci, Pandolfo131n2, 137, 137n15,
138141, 157
Petrucci, Raffaele157
462
Pfeiffenberger, Selma45, 45n22, 47, 47n23,
47n24, 69, 69n66
Phaedra199n1, 203
Philip II, King of Spain399, 399n16, 410, 413
Philomela305310, 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, 342349
Philostratus the Elder
Imagines203, 206, 206n21, 206n22, 206n23,
208, 209, 209n34, 211, 250n40, 276n44
Philostratus, L. Flavius
Life of Apollonius276n44
Philp, R.H.71n76
Piccolomini, Andrea Todeschini159
Piccolomini, Bartolomeo Carli
translation, Aeneid 4161
Piccolomini, Aeneas Sylvius. See also Pope
Pius II
Storie delle due amanti151
Piccolomini, Francesco Todeschini. See
Pius III, Pope
Piccolomini, Pierfrancesco153
Piccolomini, Vittoria Todeschini138140,
149151, 153, 157, 160, 401
Pico della Mirandola,
Giovanfrancesco269n18, 275
De expellendis Venere et Cupidine277n53,
420, 420n3
Strix269
pietas (filial piety)142, 156, 396
Pierino da Vinci
Pisa Restored358, 374
preparatory drawing for Pisa
Restored360, 360n17
Pietro dAbano61, 62, 62n55
Pilatus, Leontius60
Pindar276n44, 277
Pinturicchio (Bernardino di Betto)131,
139n23, 140, 140n25, 141n29, 142n32, 149
Pippin, King of the Franks306n1, 409,
409n43
Pisa, personifications of28, 356, 358, 360,
374, 374n51, 375, 385
Pisano, Giovanni
Fortitude45, 47
Pisano, Nicola
Hercules/Fortitude, pulpit, baptistery,
Pisa45, 47
Index
Pisseleu d'Heilly, Anna Jeanne de, Duchess
dtampes431
Pius II, Pope149. See also Aeneas Sylvius
Piccolomini
Pius III, Pope149
Pius V, Pope412, 412n49, 423, 424, 424n16,
431, 439
Pizan, Christine de148n46, 154, 204n12
Le livre de la cite des dames148
Epistre Othea207n29, 326
Planudes, Max75
Platina (Bartolommeo Sacchi)
De honesta voluptate et valetudine224,
224n76
Plato9, 80n1, 82, 277, 400, 401
Meno59
Phaedo59
Symposium102, 102n12
Timaeus59
Pliny the Elder8, 9n25, 276, 436
Natural History9, 267n16, 276n44,
276n46, 284n77
Plutarch (L. Mestrius Plutarchus)185n32,
271n26, 276, 277
Parallel Lives52, 52n36, 53, 61, 73, 75, 212,
212n38
Moralia75, 75n86, 375, 375n55
Lacaenarum Apophthegmata375n55
De mulierum virtutibus375n55
Poliziano, Angelo
Favola dOrfeo292
Stanze cominiciate per la giostra del
Magnifico Giuliano deMedici244,
245, 245n29, 245n30
Pomarancio (Cristoforo Roncalli)
drawing after Baldassare Peruzzi,
Pasipha, fresco (lost), Villa Farnesina,
Rome (attributed to), 211n36
Pomona, see Hora of Autumn/Pomona, statue
(Uffizi)
Poseidon, see Neptune
Poska, Allyson, and Jane Couchman13n43
Possevino, Antonio
Treatise on Poetry and Painting425,
425n19
Praxiteles, style of104, 421, 423
Priapus241
prisoners, see captives
Procne, see Philomela
Index
Profectio of Domitian relief, Palazzo della
Cancelleria (now Vatican), Rome361
Promiscuity135m 275, 288, 293
Propertius, Sextus
Elegies76, 292n100
Prospectivo Milanese
Antiquarie prospettiche romane107n26,
188n35
prostitutes, see courtesans
Protestants, and persecution of witches, 265;
as viewers of antiquities, 423, 425, 433
Prudentius (Aurelius Prudentius Clemens)
Psychomachia, illustrations47, 48
Pseudo-Apollodorus
Bibliotheca51, 54, 54n41, 60, 63, 73, 75
public speaking, by women143144,
154155
puer mingens (urinating child)22, 233, 234,
234n7, 235, 235n10, 249, 250n40
Quercia, Jacopo della
Rhea Silvia152
Raimondi, Marcantonio119n52, 286n84, 290
engraving of cemetery scene288, 289, 292
engravings for I Modi214
Stregozzo (attributed)279, 280
Venus Anadyomene385
Randolf, Adrian8, 8n23, 14, 16, 16n57
rape/abduction29, 85, 86, 8796, 305;
feminist approaches to, 2830; 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 Stanze403,
405, 406, 410
Letter to Pope Leo X (with Baldassare
Castiglione)112, 114n40, 126
Raymond of Capua189, 193
Legenda maior of St. Catherine of
Siena189
Reiss, Sheryl, and David Wilkins13n43
relics, head of St. Catherine of Siena170,
172, 193, 194
Rhea Silvia151
Rhetorica ad Herennium352, 365n36
463
Ricci, Giovanni, Cardinal440442
rivers and streams, and inspiration245,
246, 249; personifications, 379, 379n65,
380, 381, 381n69, 383, 386, 386n85, 387.
See also fountains; nature
river gods24, 237n14, 351, 379, 379n65, 380,
381, 381n69, 382, 383, 383nn75, 383n77,
387; ancient statues of, 351, 379381
Robathan, Dorothy M.71n70
Robetta, Cristofano
Allegory of Envy, engraving298
Rolandinus of Padua62
Roma, ancient images of361, 365, 365n36,
366, 366n37, 368
Romance of Eneas81
romanitas (Romanness)418, 418n2, 419n2
Romano, Giulio, see Giulio Romano
Rome, personifications111126, 350, 365,
365n35, 366, 368; Roma
Triumphans111, 121n57
Ara Pacis Augustae117
Arch of Titus119
Arch of Constantine119, 119n52, 121, 361,
362, 365
Bramante, Tempietto406, 410, 411
Casino of Pius IV424, 424n16, 442
Cesi Garden429n32, 432, 432n40, 433,
433n43, 441
Colosseum423
Column of Marcus Aurelius354, 354n9,
354n10, 355
Palazzo delle Valle443
Sassi Palace119, 120
Vigna of Pope Julius III432n40, 440
Villa dEste, Quirinal Hill437, 437n47,
437n49
Villa Farnesina181n20, 211, 215n48
Villa Giulia424, 424n16, 429n34, 430n34
Villa Medici430, 441
Villa of Cardinal Ricci, Pincian Hill440,
441, 442
See also Vatican
Roncalli, Cristoforo, see Pomarancio
Rosa, Salvator279
Ross, Sarah159, 160n92, 162n102
Rosso Fiorentino289n64, 280n67, 296n122,
380n67
Witches, drawing280, 281
Rouse, R.H. and A.C. de la Mare71n75, 72n77
464
Rubinstein, Ruth, see Bober, Phyllis and Ruth
Rubinstein
Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor393, 394,
399n16, 401, 408, 409, 409n40, 410,
510n46, 412, 413
ruins, ancient98, 112, 127, 264
rural imagery, see bucolic imagery
Sacchi, Bartolommeo, see Platina
sacred art, and decorum425, 426, 426n22,
427, 428, 429
Salomon, Bernard
illustrations, La Mtamorphose dOvide
figure319, 320n29, 323, 324, 325, 326,
327, 336, 341
Philomela scenes325, 326
Vertumnus and Pomona329, 331
Saluzzo
Castello della Manta293
Sannazaro, Jacopo
Arcadia230, 230n41, 245
sarcophagi, ancient Roman
sarcophagus with Abduction of
Persephone (Walters Gallery,
Baltimore)354, 355n11, 356
sarcophagus with Achilles on Skyros, from
the Aracoeli104
sarcophagus with Labors of
Hercules215, 282
sarcophagus with Indian Triumph of
Dionysus, possibly from the
Aracoeli284
sarcophagus with Mars and Rhea Silvia
(Palazzo Mattei, Rome)380
sarcophagus with Pasipha and
Daedalus208, 209, 209n34, 211
Saslow, James14, 14n47, 15, 15n52, 178n13, 183n25
Sassi Apollo, statue121n50, 176n10
Sassi collection of antiquities27, 104, 117.
See also Sassi Apollo, statue
satyrs/fauns57, 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, Girolamo60, 60n51, 275, 422
Saxl, Fritz6n15, 215n47, 215n49, 250n41, 273,
273n33
Schiesari, Juliana, see Migiel, Marilyn and
Juliana Schiesari
Index
Schraeder, Stephanie17, 17n63
Scherling, Ksrl199n1
Scrovegni, Enrico37, 37n1, 38, 38n4, 39, 39n8,
39n10, 39n11, 4041, 58, 61, 62, 65, 66
Scrovegni, Reginaldo3738
Sebastiano del Piombo
frescoes, Sala di Galatea, Villa Farnesina,
Rome319n28
Second Vatican Mythographer53, 53n40,
60, 72, 72n81, 76
Seidel, Linda13, 13n45
Slincourt, Basil de69, 69n67
Semen233, 294, 383
Seneca the Younger (L. Annaeus Seneca)59,
76, 275, 276, 276n44, 276n46, 284n76
Tragedies50, 52, 52n34, 59, 60, 71
Serlio, Sebastiano
Le antiquit di Roma406, 406n35, 410, 411
Sexuality136, 179, 181n17, 182, 183, 201, 204,
208, 219, 219n59, 221, 225, 278, 28, 353n6,
360, 387, 436, 437; sexual positions,
attitudes towards, 214215, 223
Seven Deadly Sins295
Seznec, Jean11, 11n34, 81n8
Sforza, Caterina155n75, 374, 375n54
Shakespeare, William144n38, 308n11,
342n63, 343
The Rape of Lucretia307n6, 342, 344
Titus Andronicus342
shepherd, see bucolic imagery
Siena131168, 169198
Chapel of Saint Catherine of Siena,
church of San Domenico169, 170, 171,
172, 173, 194, 195
Church of Santa Croce188, 411, 411n48
Palazzo Ducale21
Palazzo Petrucci131168
Signorelli, Luca131168
Castigation of Cupid135
Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare
Rome131132, 133, 134168
silence, silencing of women147, 154, 242,
305, 307, 308, 340, 342
Simons, Patricia14, 14n48, 15, 67n62, 112n37,
180n16, 181n18, 217n55, 233n6, 234
234n7, 266n12, 272n30, 274n37, 290n94,
294n111, 299n129, 382, 383n74, 420n3
Sirn, Osvald67, 67n64
Sisler, William P.59n48, 60n51
Index
Skinner, Marilyn397n10
Smart, Alastair47, 47n26
Sodoma, Il169173, 181198; antiquities
collection, 182; and bisexuality, 182,
182n24, 183
Christ at the Column183
drawing of antiquities (Christ Church,
Oxford)185
Execution of Niccol di Tuldo169, 170, 171,
173, 188192, 194
frescoes, church of Santa Croce, Siena169,
170, 171, 173, 188192, 194, 275, 290
frescoes, Villa Farnesina, Rome181n20,
211, 215n48
Saint Sebastian183, 184
Sophocles74, 74n84, 76, 308
Tereus305
Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, encyclo-
pedia106n24, 107, 120
spinning, see textiles
Spranger, Bartholomaeus393
statue poetry241. See also Huius Nympha
Loci epigram
Stradano, Giovanni
Penelope at Her Loom, Palazzo Vecchio,
Florence336, 336n52
Straet, Jan Van der, see Stradano, Giovanni
Statius, P. Papinius
Thebaid53, 53n38, 59, 59n49, 59,
72, 76
Stregozzo engraving279, 280, 280n68, 282,
282n73, 285, 286, 288, 298, 300
Strozzi, Agostino
Defensio mulierum150
Stubblebine, James39, 39n11, 40n12, 40n14
Supino, I.N.69
tapestry, see textiles
Tarquin, see Lucretia
Tasso, Torquato376, 400, 400n23, 401n24
Ttrai, V.142
Tempesta, Antonio
Metamorphoseon sive Transformationum
Ovidianarum libri quindecim, aeneis
formis324, 324n33, 325, 326, 329, 330,
336
Tellus/Terra Mater/Gaia17
Tereus, see Philomela
Terra Mater, see Tellus
465
Textiles307, 308, 331, 343, 344; embroidery/
spinning, 331, 334, 334n46, 335, 336,
337, 340; weaving, 307, 307n7, 308, 335,
336, 338. See also valances, bed
Theodontius60, 61
Theodulf of Orleans
De libris quos legere solebam278, 278n57
Theseus50, 115, 215
Third Vatican Mythographer72, 73, 73n82, 76
Tiber River, statue (Louvre)380
Tibullus, Albius60
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio)
Bacchanal of the Andrians249
Sacred and Profane Love242n23, 257,
257n56, 258n57
Tarquin and Lucretia328, 328n39
Venus of Urbino17
Tizio, Sigismondo
Historiarum Senesium131n2, 140, 140n25
Tivoli
Villa dEste437, 437n47, 437n49
Tommasi, Giugurta
Dell'historie di Siena157, 157n82, 159n89,
159, 160, 160n95
Trevi
Garden of Benedetto Valenti440
Tribolo, Niccol352n4, 385
design for Fiorenza385, 385n79.
See also Giambologna, Fiorenza
Fiesole351, 351n2, 360, 385
Fountain, Villa Medici, Castello,
Florence383
triumphal arches116, 119, 121, 354, 365, 423
trousseau, see donora. See also dowry
Troy23, 24, 28, 141, 306, 393, 394, 396, 397,
401403, 406, 407, 410, 414
Tudor, Mary, Queen of England and Ireland,
Queen of Spain413
Uberti, Fabrizio degli
illustration, Dittamondo112, 113
Umbrian sketchbook, drawing of Belvedere
torso176
Urbino400, 401, 406, 409, 409n42, 410, 412
Palace400, 400n19
Urination231, 233, 233n6, 237, 238, 246, 249,
253, 258. See also puer mingens, Hercules
mingens
Usury3738
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
novem143n36, 156
Valla, Lorenzo254
Varano, Giulia, princess of Camerino413
Varro (M. Terentius Varro)292, 293
Eumenides292n101
Vasari, Giorgio4
frescoes, Sala Grande (Sala del
Cinquecento), Palazzo Vecchio,
Florence364, 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 of430
Stanze403, 403n30
Villa Belvedere21, 29, 182, 195, 246, 253,
277, 277n53, 278n60, 379, 420, 422,
422n9, 423, 424n14, 431
Vatican Mythographers53n40, 72n81,
73n82. See also under individual
mythographers
Veiling26, 57, 148, 154, 188, 192, 215, 231,
255n49
Venice, Lorenzo Lotto in232, 233, 253
Biblioteca Marciana406
Venus/Aphrodite17, 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 Discovery401, 401n25
Verrocchio, Andrea del
Putto with Dolphin145, 146
Vertumnus329
Veturia131, 131n1, 132, 133, 134168
Vices, personifications of41, 45, 243, 296,
299n129, 300
Victory, personifications251, 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
Aeneid24, 161, 204n14, 268n117, 270,
270n23, 270n24, 292, 394, 395, 395n5,
396n6, 397401, 403, 410, 414
Eclogues203, 204, 204n14, 208n32, 397
Virginity136, 136n12
Virgin Mary, see Mary
Virtues, personifications of41, 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
Vitruvius218
Vliete, Gillis van den
Diana of Ephesus (Villa dEste,
Tivoli)437n47, 438
Volumnia143, 144, 144n38, 145, 147, 147n43,
148n45, 150, 151, 151n59, 153, 154, 158n79
Warburg, Aby7
Warburg Institute6
water , symbolism of242, 243, 244, 245, 246,
250, 253. See also semen; fountains,
symbolism of
weaving, see textiles
widows50, 111, 111n33, 112, 288, 293, 360, 412
Wilkins, David, see Reiss, Sheryl and David
Wilkins
William of Conches72, 72n81
William of Moerbeke59
Witches264304
Witt, Ronald G.71n73
Wives17, 18n68, 28, 136, 143, 144, 147n44,
148, 150, 151, 153, 155157, 159, 215, 293,
336, 336n52, 360
Wlfflin, Heinrich7
Wolfthal, Diane28, 29n79, 325n34, 326, 326n35
Index 467

women artists12n39, 307 wreaths, wreathing231, 258, 331, 365, 374

Woodville, Elizabeth, Queen of
England313, 315n25
wounds, and execution of Niccol di
Tuldo169, 170, 171, 173, 188192, 194; side
wound of Christ, 190191
Xanto, Francesco202n7, 309n14, 403,
403n28
Aeneas Flight From Troy, maiolica404
Zeus, see Jupiter/Zeus