Patricia Simons
University of Melbourne, Art History, School of Culture and Communication, Department Member
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University of Michigan, Women's and Gender Studies, Emeritus add
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History of Art, Italian Renaissance Art, Gender and Sexuality, Women and Gender Studies, Women Artists, Material Culture Studies, and 68 moreMaterial Culture, Material Culture & Materiality, Materiality of Art, Renaissance Italy, Female Patronage of Art and Architecture, Renaissance Italy, Historiography (in Art History), Baroque Art and Literature, Print Culture, 16th and 17th century Dutch and Flemish Art, Northern European Art, 1400-1700, Gender Studies, Artemisia Gentileschi, Italian Baroque art, 16th Century Italian Art, History of Costume, Arms and Armour, History of the Senses, Prints and Drawings, Sexuality and Gender, Italian Renaissance sculpture, Fashion History, Shoes, Stone carving and lapidary techniques, Early Modern Art and Visual Culture, Makeup and Cosmetics, History of Science and Medicine In Medieval and Renaissance Europe, Italian Studies, Classical Reception Studies, History of Medicine in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Early Modern Women´s and Gender History, 15th Century Italian Art, Feminist Theory, History of Anatomy, Pilgrim badges, History of Dress, History of Medicine and the Body, History and Theory of Dress, Black Masculinity, Masculinity, Masculinity Studies, Masculinity and Gender Studies, Manliness, The Body, Dress and the Body, Fireplaces, Gay And Lesbian Studies, Queer Studies, Queer Theory, Gender, History of Florence, Masculinities, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Studies On Men And Masculinity, Donatello, Critical studies on men and masculinities, Renaissance Florence, Leonardo Bruni, Sexuality Studies, Lesbian and Gay History, Feminism, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Citrizenship, Queer, Reproduction, Maternity, Abortion, Sexualtiy Gender and National Identity, and Twentieth-Century Australian History edit
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Patricia Simons is a specialist in the art of Renaissance Europe (primarily Italy, France and the Netherlands) with a... morePatricia Simons is a specialist in the art of Renaissance Europe (primarily Italy, France and the Netherlands) with a special focus on the representation of gender and sexuality and interdisciplinary research on materiality, visuality and material culture. Her books include The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and the co-edited Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy (Clarendon Press, 1987). Her work ranges from fourteenth-century Italian imagery to contemporary Australian art. Essays, published in anthologies and peer-review journals like Art History, Renaissance Quarterly, and Renaissance Studies, have investigated such issues as portraiture as a mode of fictive representation, medical discourse in relation to visual culture, the representation and reception of female and male homoeroticism, the visual dynamics of secrecy and of scandal, and the public and theatrical use of Christ Child figures. It is distinguished for its combination of rigor and innovation, as well as for analyzing the breadth of visual and material culture, from badges to maiolica, anatomical illustration to erotic prints, life size sculpture to canonical oil paintings and frescoes. Her latest project is a large, open access Google Doc, a global bibliography on premodern women artists and patrons (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qciG2ndN2dOfg4KDgL9LwCOl8HUZP5liSKtwRcJ_Ah4/edit). She is currently working on a book-length analysis of the visual and cultural history of beards as core markers of various masculinities in Early Modern Europe, including a consideration of racial and ethnic differences. She holds an honorary Professorial Fellow appointment at the University of Melbourne and is also Professor Emerita, Women’s and Gender Studies/History of Art, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. edit
Categories are chiefly ordered by medium or geography and, for individuals, by birthdate (before 1700), but standard terms like "Medieval" or "Renaissance and Early Modern" are sometimes used here for European culture. The former begins... more
Categories are chiefly ordered by medium or geography and, for individuals, by birthdate (before 1700), but standard terms like "Medieval" or "Renaissance and Early Modern" are sometimes used here for European culture. The former begins around 500 CE and ends around 1400 (for Italy) or 1500 (elsewhere in Europe). " Primary sources " encompass anything produced before 1800; they are ordered chronologically; and are separated out when there is a significant number. Please be aware that this document is ir regularly updated and new features added , so if you rely on a downloaded doc or pdf remember to check back with the online Google Doc version. Only sporadic updates have been added since June 2020. For individual entries, be sure also to look at the general categories of each woman's era. We have attempted to outline who is included in general sources as much as possible, rather than listing the source under multiple women. The usual rule for giving a woman an individual entry has been that she has two or more sources dedicated to her.
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"Introduction: What is True About Artemisia?" by Sheila Barker; "Identifying Artemisia: The Archive and the Eye" by Mary D. Garrard; "Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy and the Madonna of the Svezzamento: Two Masterpieces by Artemisia" by... more
"Introduction: What is True About Artemisia?" by Sheila Barker;
"Identifying Artemisia: The Archive and the Eye" by Mary D. Garrard;
"Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy and the Madonna of the Svezzamento: Two Masterpieces by Artemisia" by Gianni Papi
"Deciphering Artemisia: Three New Narratives and How They Expand our Understanding" by Judith W. Mann
"Unknown Paintings by Artemisia in Naples, and New Points Regarding Her Daily Life and Bottega" by Riccardo Lattuada
"Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders (1610) in the Context of Counter-Reformation Rome" by Patricia Simons
"Artemisia’s Money: A Woman Artist’s Financial Strategies in Seventeenth-Century Florence" by Sheila Barker
"Artemisia Gentileschi: The Literary Formation of an Unlearned Artist" by Jesse Locker
"Women Artists in Casa Barberini: Plautilla Bricci, Maddalena Corvini, Artemisia Gentileschi, Anna Maria Vaiani, and Virginia da Vezzo" by Consuelo Lollobrigida
"‘Il Pennello Virile’: Elisabetta Sirani and Artemisia Gentileschi as Masculinized Painters?" by Adelina Modesti
"Allegories of Inclination and Imitation at the Casa Buonarroti" by Laura Camille Agoston
"Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy by Artemisia Gentileschi. A Technical Study" by Christina Currie, Livia Depuydt, Valentine Henderiks, Steven Saverwyns, and Ina Vanden Berghe
"Identifying Artemisia: The Archive and the Eye" by Mary D. Garrard;
"Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy and the Madonna of the Svezzamento: Two Masterpieces by Artemisia" by Gianni Papi
"Deciphering Artemisia: Three New Narratives and How They Expand our Understanding" by Judith W. Mann
"Unknown Paintings by Artemisia in Naples, and New Points Regarding Her Daily Life and Bottega" by Riccardo Lattuada
"Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders (1610) in the Context of Counter-Reformation Rome" by Patricia Simons
"Artemisia’s Money: A Woman Artist’s Financial Strategies in Seventeenth-Century Florence" by Sheila Barker
"Artemisia Gentileschi: The Literary Formation of an Unlearned Artist" by Jesse Locker
"Women Artists in Casa Barberini: Plautilla Bricci, Maddalena Corvini, Artemisia Gentileschi, Anna Maria Vaiani, and Virginia da Vezzo" by Consuelo Lollobrigida
"‘Il Pennello Virile’: Elisabetta Sirani and Artemisia Gentileschi as Masculinized Painters?" by Adelina Modesti
"Allegories of Inclination and Imitation at the Casa Buonarroti" by Laura Camille Agoston
"Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy by Artemisia Gentileschi. A Technical Study" by Christina Currie, Livia Depuydt, Valentine Henderiks, Steven Saverwyns, and Ina Vanden Berghe
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Cultural History, Gender Studies, Women's Studies, Art Theory, Women's History, and 16 moreVisual Culture, Art Conservation, Italian Renaissance Art, Early Modern Italy, Women Artists, Baroque art and architecture, Italian Baroque art, Feminist Art History, Feminist Literary Theory and Gender Studies, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Connoisseurship, Letteratura italiana, pittura napoletana del Seicento, Barberini patronage, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Analysis of Pigments on Ancient Artifacts
Printed artworks were often ephemeral, but in the early modern period, exchanges between print and other media were common, setting off chain reactions of images and objects that endured. Paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, musical or... more
Printed artworks were often ephemeral, but in the early modern period, exchanges between print and other media were common, setting off chain reactions of images and objects that endured. Paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, musical or scientific instruments, and armor exerted their own influence on prints, while prints provided artists with paper veneers, templates, and sources of adaptable images. This interdisciplinary collection unites scholars from different fields of art history who elucidate the agency of prints on more traditionally valued media, and vice-versa. Contributors explore how, after translations across traditional geographic, temporal, and material boundaries, original 'meanings' may be lost, reconfigured, or subverted in surprising ways, whether a Netherlandish motif graces a cabinet in Italy or the print itself, colored or copied, is integrated into the calligraphic scheme of a Persian royal album. These intertwined relationships yield unexpected yet surprisingly prevalent modes of perception. Andrea Mantegna's 1470/1500 Battle of the Sea Gods, an engraving that emulates the properties of sculpted relief, was in fact reborn as relief sculpture, and fabrics based on print designs were reapplied to prints, returning color and tactility to the very objects from which the derived. Together, the essays in this volume witness a methodological shift in the study of print, from examining the printed image as an index of an absent invention in another medium - a painting, sculpture, or drawing - to considering its role as a generative, active agent driving modes of invention and perception far beyond the locus of its production.
Co-edited by
Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Art Institute of Chicago
Edward H. Wouk, Art History and Visual Studies, University of Manchester (UK)
Co-edited by
Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Art Institute of Chicago
Edward H. Wouk, Art History and Visual Studies, University of Manchester (UK)
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Print Culture, Translation Studies, Renaissance Studies, History of Science, Arms and Armor Studies, and 17 moreHistory of Costume, Mughal History, 16th Century Netherlandish Art, Materiality (Anthropology), Italian Renaissance Art, Printing History, Materiality of Art, History of scientific instruments, 17th Century Netherlandish Art, Spanish Colonial Peru, Mercure de France, Andrea Mantegna, Maarten De Vos, History of the Mughal Book, Dezallier D'Argenville, 16th Century Antwerp, and penschilderijen
How were male bodies viewed before the Enlightenment? And what does this reveal about attitudes towards sex and gender in premodern Europe? This richly textured cultural history investigates the characterization of the sex of adult male... more
How were male bodies viewed before the Enlightenment? And what does this reveal about attitudes towards sex and gender in premodern Europe? This richly textured cultural history investigates the characterization of the sex of adult male bodies from ancient Greece to the seventeenth century. Before the modern focus on the phallic, penetrative qualities of male anatomy, Patricia Simons finds that men's bodies were considered in terms of their active physiological characteristics, in relation to semen, testicles and what was considered innately masculine heat. Re-orienting attention from an anatomical to a physiological focus, and from fertility to pleasure, Simons argues that women's sexual agency was perceived in terms of active reception of the valuable male seed. This provocative, compelling study draws on visual, material and textual evidence to elucidate a broad range of material, from medical learning, high art and literary metaphors to obscene badges, codpieces and pictorial or oral jokes.
Please note that this book is still in print, available in paperback, and I cannot supply copies of it. Please encourage your institutional library to obtain a copy.
Please note that this book is still in print, available in paperback, and I cannot supply copies of it. Please encourage your institutional library to obtain a copy.
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Gender Studies, Sex and Gender, Early Modern History, History of Medicine, Material Culture Studies, and 17 moreMasculinity Studies, Visual Culture, Gender and Sexuality, Gender, Early Modern Europe, Masculinity, Masculinities, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Early Modern Italy, Studies On Men And Masculinity, History of Medicine and the Body, Jokes, History of Medicine in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Manliness, Nude Art, Pilgrim badges, and Sex In 1500s
special issue on Other Fantasies. Guest editor. Includes my “Introduction: Other Fantasies,” pp. 3-5, which frames and summarizes the articles (the pdf is available under Papers here). Download the TOC for details. Contains essays by... more
special issue on Other Fantasies. Guest editor. Includes my “Introduction: Other Fantasies,” pp. 3-5, which frames and summarizes the articles (the pdf is available under Papers here). Download the TOC for details. Contains essays by Diane Losche on Secrecy in the Abelam (Papua New Guinea), Charles Zika on witchcraft and sexuality in early 16th C Germany, Michael Carter on Cranach's women, Shan Short on Bernini's Ecstasy of St Teresa, Kylie Winkworth on 19th C images of women riding bicycles, and Paul Duro on 19th C readings of Marat and Charlotte Corday.
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Patronage, in its broadest sense, has been established as one of the dominant social processes of pre-industrial Europe. While it has been traditionally viewed simply as the context for extraordinary artistic creativity, patronage has... more
Patronage, in its broadest sense, has been established as one of the dominant social processes of pre-industrial Europe. While it has been traditionally viewed simply as the context for extraordinary artistic creativity, patronage has more recently been examined by historians and art historians alike as a comprehensive system of patron-client structures which permeated society and social relations. Focusing specifically on the city of Florence, these essays explore the new understanding of Renaissance Italy as a 'patronage society,' considering its implications for the study of art patronage and patron-client structures wherever they occur.
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This article is dedicated, by one non-chess playing woman, to the youngest ever 'Grandmaster' of chess, Judit Polgar. The historical background of conventions which made Judit unusual is my focus.
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A consideration of two large prints by Agostino Carracci that are sometimes, but not always, grouped with the Lascivie series that he produced in the 1580s. Unlike the other entries in the series, these prints—The Satyr Mason and Ogni... more
A consideration of two large prints by Agostino Carracci that are sometimes, but not always, grouped with the Lascivie series that he produced in the 1580s. Unlike the other entries in the series, these prints—The Satyr Mason and Ogni cosa vince l'oro—imply a contemporaneity with late 16th-century viewers, despite their inclusion of satyr and cupid figures. These larger prints are especially distinguished by their reliance on texts such as carnival songs and popular sayings, and it is through an examination of the history of these textual elements that the humor and allusions of the prints become clear. Working on the vernacular, obscene, and mildly “disguised” level, these large, lascivious prints present a wry comment on the issue of what can be rendered visible and what remains hidden in erotica.
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The period 1300–1600 ce was one of intense and far-reaching emotional realignments in European culture. New desires and developments in politics, religion, philosophy, the arts and literature fundamentally changed emotional attitudes to... more
The period 1300–1600 ce was one of intense and far-reaching emotional realignments in European culture. New desires and developments in politics, religion, philosophy, the arts and literature fundamentally changed emotional attitudes to history, creating the sense of a rupture from the immediate past. In this volatile context, cultural products of all kinds offered competing objects of love, hate, hope and fear. Art, music, dance and song provided new models of family affection, interpersonal intimacy, relationship with God, and gender and national identities. The public and private spaces of courts, cities and houses shaped the practices and rituals in which emotional lives were expressed and understood. Scientific and medical discoveries changed emotional relations to the cosmos, the natural world and the body. Both continuing traditions and new sources of cultural authority made emotions central to the concept of human nature, and involved them in every aspect of existence.
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Questo volume propone un discorso critico sulla sessualità e sulla cultura visiva dell'Italia rinascimentale. I saggi raccolti tentano di fare luce su una serie di zone d'ombra, dando spazio a tutte quelle pratiche o preferenze... more
Questo volume propone un discorso critico sulla sessualità e sulla cultura visiva dell'Italia rinascimentale. I saggi raccolti tentano di fare luce su una serie di zone d'ombra, dando spazio a tutte quelle pratiche o preferenze considerate in genere come alternative o anomalie, e a un'ampia varietà di scenari "scandalosi". Particolare attenzione è stata riservata all'aspetto materiale della cultura sessuale, dalle modalità di rappresentazione erotica del corpo agli oggetti e agli strumenti associati all'attività sessuale. Ne emerge un quadro completamente nuovo della sessualità rinascimentale, che spazza via secoli di manipolazioni ed equivoci socio-culturali, svelando scenari finora trascurati o volutamente nascosti. Diciassette saggi provocatori, con incursioni nel campo dell'arte, della letteratura, della storia, e persino della filosofia, organizzati intorno a quattro assi fondamentali: la pratica, la performance, la perversione e la punizione. ...
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Examining images of Lot and his daughters against the setting of the utter destruction of Sodom, this essay highlights the role of visual rhetoric in mediating as well as constructing responses to disaster. Horror is represented rather... more
Examining images of Lot and his daughters against the setting of the utter destruction of Sodom, this essay highlights the role of visual rhetoric in mediating as well as constructing responses to disaster. Horror is represented rather than recorded, as much invented and assuaged as heightened. The visual imagery of disaster is manipulated and redeployed, put to various, even dissonant purposes, depending on function, context and occasion. Numerous distinctions and paradoxes lie at the heart of Lot’s tale: punishment is the forerunner to selective salvation, destruction co-exists with visibility, doom is overcome by safety, incest couples with sodomy, control battles with indulgence, patriarchal continuity operates against abandonment, stoicism contrasts with disaster.
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Professor, History of Art, University of Michigan The rise of Italian maiolica is a quintessential phenomenon of the Renaissance, the result of technical innovation and artistic skill, and an increasingly varied addition to the market of... more
Professor, History of Art, University of Michigan The rise of Italian maiolica is a quintessential phenomenon of the Renaissance, the result of technical innovation and artistic skill, and an increasingly varied addition to the market of consumer items that served functions of display and conviviality.1 It was admired for its novelty, pleasurable visual effects, and ability to trump the ancients. In 1568, the painter Giorgio Vasari favorably contrasted maiolica with ancient pottery, which never had "the lustrous glazing nor the charm and variety of painting" evident in his own day.2 Spurred by local demand for Hispano-Moresque ceramics [see Wilson, "The Impact of Hispano-Moresque Imports in Fifteenth-century Florence," this volume], Italian potters transformed utilitarian objects into increasingly colorful, diverse products, which in turn became export items. Early Italian pottery was decorated with simple forms and marked by a limited palette, like a green and brown jug from Orvieto (cat. no. 5) or mid-fifteenth-century pitcher from Florence ornamented with dark blue monstrous birds, a lion, and an oak-leaf pattern against a cream ground
Agostino Carracci’s erotic prints of the 1580s are chiefly discussed in terms of their classical references, populated as they are with satyrs and nymphs or characters like Orpheus, Andromeda, the Three Graces, and Venus with Cupid. But... more
Agostino Carracci’s erotic prints of the 1580s are chiefly discussed in terms of their classical references, populated as they are with satyrs and nymphs or characters like Orpheus, Andromeda, the Three Graces, and Venus with Cupid. But vernacular wordplay and sexual double entendre that rely on popular sayings and verbal wit also inform his conception of erotic pleasure. This is very evident in his larger engravings of a satyr mason and of an old lecher with a rebus below, two prints that, due to their size, could not have initially belonged to what contemporaries came to call the Lascivie series.
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personification was sometimes represented as male. Lucian, in the famous Calumny of Apelles, describes Envy as a pale, thin man, a gendering repeated around 1435 by Al bert!1 So, too, the Vice is male in Botticelli's c. 1494 panel of... more
personification was sometimes represented as male. Lucian, in the famous Calumny of Apelles, describes Envy as a pale, thin man, a gendering repeated around 1435 by Al bert!1 So, too, the Vice is male in Botticelli's c. 1494 panel of the subject.2 His hooded, emaciated man in ragged garb standing be neath the dais shoots out a long arm with sharp fingers, ready to pierce the judge's eyes so that they will not discern the truth. To these examples I here add a prominent male figure in Michelangelo's Last Judg ment, unveiled at the Sistine Chapel in 1541 (Fig. 1). In the process, I suggest that the six other deadly sins, all male, also tumble into hell.
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Putative textual proof for Titian's central involvement in producing illustrations for Vesalius's anatomy book De fabrica (1543) requires reexamination. On the basis of orthographic, literary, and historical evidence, a phrase in... more
Putative textual proof for Titian's central involvement in producing illustrations for Vesalius's anatomy book De fabrica (1543) requires reexamination. On the basis of orthographic, literary, and historical evidence, a phrase in Annibal Caro's after-dinner speech, here dated to 1536, is shown instead to refer ironically to a surgeon's notorious execution in 1517. Anatomia was a word in the satirical as well as the medical lexicon. It is important to understand the satirical tone of Caro's speech about a priapic statuette. Delivered during Carnival to the Roman Academy of Virtue, the speech respects neither antiquities nor artists like Michelangelo in its obscene humor.
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Art, Humor, Italian Literature, Metaphor, History of Anatomy, and 15 moreMedicine, History of Medicine and the Body, Italy, Literary studies, Anatomy, Jokes, Carnival, Art Theory and Criticism, Andreas Vesalius, Jan Stephan van Calcar, Historical Studies, History of Italian Academies, Annibal Caro, Anatomists, and anniversaries and special events
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... things'.68 The very tensions or contradic-tions of desire and decorum may often have been played out over a chessboard amongst the aristo-cracy. ... places where he could better see his paternal house, where he knew that... more
... things'.68 The very tensions or contradic-tions of desire and decorum may often have been played out over a chessboard amongst the aristo-cracy. ... places where he could better see his paternal house, where he knew that Biancifiore dwelt' and at night he sat at 'the gates of his ...
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Current conceptualizations of sexual identity in the West are not necessarily useful to an historian investigating "lesbianism" in the social history and visual representations of different periods. After an overview of... more
Current conceptualizations of sexual identity in the West are not necessarily useful to an historian investigating "lesbianism" in the social history and visual representations of different periods. After an overview of Renaissance documents treating donna con donna relations which examines the potentially positive effects of condemnation and silence, the paper focuses on Diana, the goddess of chastity, who bathed with her nymphs as an exemplar of female bodies preserved for heterosexual, reproductive pleasures. Yet the self-sufficiency and bodily contact sometimes represented in images of this secluded all-female gathering might suggest "deviant" responses from their viewers.
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Art History, Art, Masculinity Studies, Masculinity, Masculinities, and 15 moreClassical Mythology, Reception of Antiquity, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Hercules, Art Theory and Criticism, Andrea Mantegna, Michelangelo, Homoerotismo, Antonio Del Pollaiolo, Manliness, Nude Art, Mantegna, Hércules, Baccio Baldini, and Homoeroticism
Bodylines. The Human Figure in Art by Felicity Woolf and Michael Cassin, London: The National Gallery, 1987, 48 pp., 34 ills, 9 in colour, £4.95
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"Introduction: What is True About Artemisia?" by Sheila Barker; "Identifying Artemisia: The Archive and the Eye" by Mary D. Garrard; "Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy and the Madonna of the... more
"Introduction: What is True About Artemisia?" by Sheila Barker; "Identifying Artemisia: The Archive and the Eye" by Mary D. Garrard; "Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy and the Madonna of the Svezzamento: Two Masterpieces by Artemisia" by Gianni Papi "Deciphering Artemisia: Three New Narratives and How They Expand our Understanding" by Judith W. Mann "Unknown Paintings by Artemisia in Naples, and New Points Regarding Her Daily Life and Bottega" by Riccardo Lattuada "Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders (1610) in the Context of Counter-Reformation Rome" by Patricia Simons "Artemisia’s Money: A Woman Artist’s Financial Strategies in Seventeenth-Century Florence" by Sheila Barker "Artemisia Gentileschi: The Literary Formation of an Unlearned Artist" by Jesse Locker "Women Artists in Casa Barberini: Plautilla Bricci, Maddalena Corvini, Artemisia Gentileschi, Anna Maria Vaiani, and Virginia da Vezzo" by Consuelo Lollobrigida "‘Il Pennello Virile’: Elisabetta Sirani and Artemisia Gentileschi as Masculinized Painters?" by Adelina Modesti "Allegories of Inclination and Imitation at the Casa Buonarroti" by Laura Camille Agoston "Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy by Artemisia Gentileschi. A Technical Study" by Christina Currie, Livia Depuydt, Valentine Henderiks, Steven Saverwyns, and Ina Vanden Berghe
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Cultural History, Gender Studies, Art, Art Theory, Visual Culture, and 15 moreArt Conservation, Italian Renaissance Art, Early Modern Italy, Women Artists, Baroque art and architecture, Italian Baroque art, Feminist Art History, Feminist Literary Theory and Gender Studies, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Connoisseurship, Letteratura italiana, pittura napoletana del Seicento, Barberini patronage, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Analysis of Pigments on Ancient Artifacts
Printed artworks were often ephemeral, but in the early modern period, exchanges between print and other media were common, setting off chain reactions of images and objects that endured. Paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, musical or... more
Printed artworks were often ephemeral, but in the early modern period, exchanges between print and other media were common, setting off chain reactions of images and objects that endured. Paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, musical or scientific instruments, and armor exerted their own influence on prints, while prints provided artists with paper veneers, templates, and sources of adaptable images. This interdisciplinary collection unites scholars from different fields of art history who elucidate the agency of prints on more traditionally valued media, and vice-versa. Contributors explore how, after translations across traditional geographic, temporal, and material boundaries, original 'meanings' may be lost, reconfigured, or subverted in surprising ways, whether a Netherlandish motif graces a cabinet in Italy or the print itself, colored or copied, is integrated into the calligraphic scheme of a Persian royal album. These intertwined relationships yield unexpected yet surprisingly prevalent modes of perception. Andrea Mantegna's 1470/1500 Battle of the Sea Gods, an engraving that emulates the properties of sculpted relief, was in fact reborn as relief sculpture, and fabrics based on print designs were reapplied to prints, returning color and tactility to the very objects from which the derived. Together, the essays in this volume witness a methodological shift in the study of print, from examining the printed image as an index of an absent invention in another medium - a painting, sculpture, or drawing - to considering its role as a generative, active agent driving modes of invention and perception far beyond the locus of its production. Co-edited by Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Art Institute of Chicago Edward H. Wouk, Art History and Visual Studies, University of Manchester (UK)
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Print Culture, Translation Studies, Art, Renaissance Studies, History of Science, and 15 moreArms and Armor Studies, History of Costume, Mughal History, Materiality (Anthropology), Italian Renaissance Art, Printing History, Materiality of Art, History of scientific instruments, Spanish Colonial Peru, Mercure de France, Andrea Mantegna, Maarten De Vos, Routledge, History of the Mughal Book, and penschilderijen
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According to biographer Carlo Cesare Mal vasia, the studio/academy of the Carracci in late sixteenth-century Bologna was filled with lively conversation and was eagerly vis ited by aristocrats and learned men because "there was... more
According to biographer Carlo Cesare Mal vasia, the studio/academy of the Carracci in late sixteenth-century Bologna was filled with lively conversation and was eagerly vis ited by aristocrats and learned men because "there was always so much joking, wit, gos sip, and lively exchange that the difficulties of the discipline seemed lightened by the constant merriment."1 The sons of a tailor, Agostino (1557-1602) and Annibale (156
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... For similar comments in the sixteenth century, see Janson, p. 24; and Macchioni, p. 135. ... in Laurence B. Kanter and others, Painting and Illumination in Early Renaissance Florence, 1300???1450 ... and Society, ed. by Benjamin G.... more
... For similar comments in the sixteenth century, see Janson, p. 24; and Macchioni, p. 135. ... in Laurence B. Kanter and others, Painting and Illumination in Early Renaissance Florence, 1300???1450 ... and Society, ed. by Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt with Elizabeth B. Welles ...
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Gender Studies, Masculinity Studies, Gender and Sexuality, Gender, Masculinity, and 9 moreHistory of Florence, Masculinities, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Studies On Men And Masculinity, Donatello, Critical studies on men and masculinities, Renaissance Florence, Leonardo Bruni, and Brepols Publishers
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The Triumph of Marriage: Painted Cassoni of the Renaissance (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, 16 October 2008-18 January 2009; The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, 14 February-17 May 2009) - By Cristelle Baskins, Adrian W. B. Randolph, Jacqueline Marie Musacchio and Alan C...more
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See separate abstract here
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While much work has been done to find African figures in Renaissance art, substantive analysis is less common. This paper contributes to a broader critical understanding of that presence by taking the case study of Titian’s canvas... more
While much work has been done to find African figures in Renaissance art, substantive analysis is less common. This paper contributes to a broader critical understanding of that presence by taking the case study of Titian’s canvas depicting five bathing nymphs and an African woman who helps Diana cover herself when Actaeon interrupts them (1556-59). The only clothed woman, the African attendant on the far right concentrates on preserving Diana’s chaste modesty as well as her own. Little attention has been paid to the figure, but here it is asked: what difference does her body language, gaze, unusual striped robe, jewelry and skin color make?
When considering the representation of race, a broad range of visual evidence, types of visibility, and cultural situations need to be acknowledged and analyzed. Above all, as with gender it is crucial to do more than repeatedly identify victimization and objectification, and work toward recognizing agency and subjectivity. Who sees what, and in which circumstances, is not an immutable or timeless process, and new ways of seeing old material demonstrate that history is about subtlety and change, offering hope for a different future.
A link to the YouTube video is supplied.
When considering the representation of race, a broad range of visual evidence, types of visibility, and cultural situations need to be acknowledged and analyzed. Above all, as with gender it is crucial to do more than repeatedly identify victimization and objectification, and work toward recognizing agency and subjectivity. Who sees what, and in which circumstances, is not an immutable or timeless process, and new ways of seeing old material demonstrate that history is about subtlety and change, offering hope for a different future.
A link to the YouTube video is supplied.
Research Interests:
Overly sentimentalized and naturalized in the past, regarded only as objects used by bourgeois newlyweds and frustrated nuns, this paper argues that so-called " holy dolls " representing the Christ Child in life-size form had much richer... more
Overly sentimentalized and naturalized in the past, regarded only as objects used by bourgeois newlyweds and frustrated nuns, this paper argues that so-called " holy dolls " representing the Christ Child in life-size form had much richer and widespread effects, emotive and devotional, in early Renaissance Italy. Engaging viewers in the passion, reality, and thus enduring truth of their faith was an essential function of Christian visual culture. Three-dimensional objects of the Child reinforced pious conviction not only about the particular narrative of birth but also about the fundamental theological tenet of Incarnation, of the divine word being miraculously enfleshed in human form. Both the details of the tale and its awe-inspiring, celebratory import are vividly encapsulated in crèche scenes, usually consisting of polychromed terracotta statues. These ensembles began with a Christmas Eve mass arranged by St Francis at Greccio in 1223, in which a knight experienced a vision of the Christ Child. My paper examines the role and emotional impact of actualized figures of the Child during the Christmas calendar, in relation to public practices such as liturgical drama, crèche scenes, and confraternal plays that urged members to kiss the newborn's feet. The paper also pays attention to a range of viewers, including men and children. For full programme and all abstracts see http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/media/259700/devotions-program-lowres.pdf
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Abstract of December 2017 conference paper that explores the dynamics and contradictions between "nature" and "artifice' in relation to men's wigs in eighteenth-century England and France.
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Eighteenth-Century British History and Culture, Everyday Aesthetics, Masculinity, Eighteenth-Century French Studies, Naturalism, and 9 moreSatire & Irony, Masculinity and Gender Studies, Eighteenth-Century British Art, English satire, Eighteenth Century Print Culture, Hair, Eighteenth Century Studies, WIGS, and History of Wigs
In a conference wisely wanting to question and extend the issue of " family portraits, " this paper examines the paternal yet non-biological image of Joseph in Renaissance art. In striking instances the patriarch is not at all generic but... more
In a conference wisely wanting to question and extend the issue of " family portraits, " this paper examines the paternal yet non-biological image of Joseph in Renaissance art. In striking instances the patriarch is not at all generic but is, rather, portrayed with the visage of a contemporary man. Pious devotion is one reason for taking on the guise of Joseph. In keeping with the model of the Imitatio Christi, devotees seek to follow and emulate rather than imitate or straightforwardly identify with a sainted character. However, the particular choice of the guise of Christ's human father also suggests careful consideration of how to align with parthenogenesis, that is, how a man might assert patriarchal authority, paternal care and social status in the very story that necessarily insists on divinely sanctioned but not biological fatherhood. Brief attention is paid to works by artists such as Michiel Sittow, Raphael and Cranach. But this paper focuses on a cluster of thirty or so paintings of the Holy Family produced in the first half of the sixteenth century by the Antwerp artist Joos van Cleve and his circle. If Joseph is an appropriate model for an elderly father, or grandfather, celebrating the arrival of a son, he is also exemplary for a patriarchal guardian such as stepfather, pastoral priest, tutor or choirmaster. Close examination of the paintings supports the possibility of a range of literate guardians taking on the pictorial role of Joseph.
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By focusing on the visual culture of early modern Italy, this paper reexamines the strict division drawn between sacred and profane love, which owes much to Durkheim's sociological study of religion (1912). Often too easily mapped onto... more
By focusing on the visual culture of early modern Italy, this paper reexamines the strict division drawn between sacred and profane love, which owes much to Durkheim's sociological study of religion (1912). Often too easily mapped onto Neoplatonism, or assimilated with Hercules' choice between virtue and vice, the dichotomy is interpreted as a straightforward set of alternatives. Rather, this paper argues, the point was to challenge its audience, to visualize emotional struggle, and to present intersection or hierarchy more than total opposition. Titian's famous painting of 1514, given the title Sacred and Profane Love due to an inventory of 1693, was in fact therein described as having three crucial personifications. Examining other such examples, including Petrarch's Triumphs of Love and of Chastity painted for fifteenth-century domestic objects, and various renditions of the theme of chastity battling amor, the paper then focuses on the quality, context and meaning of the overlooked Allegory by Guido Reni held in the National Gallery of Victoria (here dated to the 1630s).
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Following on from my investigation of the pious and social efficacy of prolific family portraiture within the Tornabuoni chapel of S. Maria Novella, this paper finds a similar mix of motives informing the portrayal of contemporary faces... more
Following on from my investigation of the pious and social efficacy of prolific family portraiture within the Tornabuoni chapel of S. Maria Novella, this paper finds a similar mix of motives informing the portrayal of contemporary faces in the guise of religious characters. These include devotion or allegiance but incentives for such masquerades further range from humility to audacity, penitence to celebration, homage to ridicule. Several previously unrecognized examples of portraits in disguise painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio (fig. 1) and Sebastiano del Piombo (fig. 2) are the starting point here for a study of their connection to art theory and devout customs of the time as well as their social and visual impact in a religious context. Particular attention will be given to the depiction of patricians, merchants and scholars as lowly characters like beggars or shepherds, and to reasons why they have been overlooked, which have implications for our modern assumptions about the parameters of portraiture.
Research Interests:
Portraits, Portraiture, Italian Renaissance Art, Religious History, Early modern religion and culture, and 9 moreEarly modern religious history, Piety, Sebastiano del Piombo, 15th Century Florence, Renaissance Florence, Sebastiano Luciani detto Sebastiano del Piombo, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Cappella Sassetti, and Portraiture and the Problematic of Representation
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Research Interests:
Broad generalizations have been made about the preponderance or fetishization of beards during the Renaissance, but in actuality the facial decoration came in and out of fashion, in part according to the practice of influential rulers or... more
Broad generalizations have been made about the preponderance or fetishization of beards during the Renaissance, but in actuality the facial decoration came in and out of fashion, in part according to the practice of influential rulers or popes as well as to cyclical custom over time. Even when not in full display, the capacity to grow a beard was considered a crucial sign of physiological health, adult status and masculine vigor. Portraits thus show a subtle range of facial hair on male sitters, from hairless boys to youths with incipient beards and men with morning shadow, carefully styled beards and groomed moustaches, or hoary stubble. Significance was also accorded the absence of body hair, or its overabundance. This paper will go beyond drawing a single, sharp distinction between men and women, or between boys and men, by attending to other central factors like religious status, geographical location, and historical change.
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Portraits, History of Costume, Fashion History, Masculinity, Portraiture, and 11 moreMasculinities, Costume (Art History), Constructions of masculinity, Masculinity and Gender Studies, Medical History, Hair, Hair Politics, Costume history, Human Hair, Beards, and Portraiture and the Problematic of Representation
Presented at the conference "Witchcraft and Emotions: Media and Cultural Meanings," Centre for the History of Emotions, University of Melbourne, 25-27 November 2015
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Research Interests:
Susanna beset by the Elders has long been cast as a straightforward case of male voyeurism. My paper instead focuses on the range of female agency exercised when viewing images of the heroine, who was an exemplary figure of chastity but... more
Susanna beset by the Elders has long been cast as a straightforward case of male voyeurism. My paper instead focuses on the range of female agency exercised when viewing images of the heroine, who was an exemplary figure of chastity but also beauty and bravery. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, women demonstrated widespread interest in Susanna, including Lucrezia Tornabuoni’s lengthy poem (c. 1480) and Artemisia Gentileschi’s selection of the subject for her first independent, signed work in 1610. In addition to virgins, daughters, young brides and married women as owners, dedicatees and viewers of Susanna images, there is also the possibility that courtesans and former prostitutes may have been encouraged to esteem and deploy her example. The case of Susanna is an outstanding instance of the way in which many premodern women were able to negotiate between the strictures of chastity and the pleasures of sensuality.
Research Interests:
Gender Studies, Women in Art, Women and Gender Studies, Renaissance Italian art, the representation of women in the Renaissance period, Susanna and the Elders, and 8 moreWomen in the Renaissance, Male and Female Gaze, Women in the Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, The Male Gaze, Nude Art, Male Gaze, and Women In Renaissance Italy
This paper examines the intersection of African race and over-heated masculinity in the case of medieval and early Renaissance fire blowers (aeolipiles). Upon being filled with water and heated in front of a fire, these hollow metal... more
This paper examines the intersection of African race and over-heated masculinity in the case of medieval and early Renaissance fire blowers (aeolipiles). Upon being filled with water and heated in front of a fire, these hollow metal figurines blew - from small holes usually at the mouth – a jet of air to fan the flames. One female figure (or eunuch) survives, but otherwise they were male, having exaggerated features that accentuated their masculinity (with enlarged genitals), their status (servile and amusingly chubby) or their African race. Medieval examples, like the Ashmolean’s ithyphallic “Jack of Hilton” from the fourteenth century, usually hold one hand to the head as though reacting to the actual heat, wiping the brow or shielding their eyes from the glare. They squat or kneel, and in combination with their caricatured form they give the impression of dull servants attending to the fire, permanently suffering the effects of overheating.
However, four or five copper busts from Venice and dated c. 1500 depict more dignified African men, clothed in fine brocades. These fire-blowers are related to but distinct from ancient and Renaissance lamps, in which the flame arises from the penis or mouth of a caricatured figure, often marked as African. In part associated with the classical revival, these objects also depend upon the notion that Africans were black due to the “the great heat of the sun,” as Jean de Mandeville put it. The idea was common in ancient literature, especially the geographies of Ptolemy and Strabo, both of which had recently been translated and printed in Venice. Features such as dark skin or male genital arousal were associated with physiological heat and masculine spiritus (spirit or breath), and thus were particularly appropriate for objects that produced or exacerbated fire. Noisily and vigorously blowing, placed close to the fire that the medieval body language indicates is fierce, they act as apotropaic guardians as it were, not only encouraging the embers but also ensuring that they will neither be, nor seem to be, dangerous or frightening. Amusing subordinates in the medieval examples, the Renaissance fire-blowers are instead dignified, fashionable African men whose efficacy rests on key assumptions made about their physiology as well as their sex.
However, four or five copper busts from Venice and dated c. 1500 depict more dignified African men, clothed in fine brocades. These fire-blowers are related to but distinct from ancient and Renaissance lamps, in which the flame arises from the penis or mouth of a caricatured figure, often marked as African. In part associated with the classical revival, these objects also depend upon the notion that Africans were black due to the “the great heat of the sun,” as Jean de Mandeville put it. The idea was common in ancient literature, especially the geographies of Ptolemy and Strabo, both of which had recently been translated and printed in Venice. Features such as dark skin or male genital arousal were associated with physiological heat and masculine spiritus (spirit or breath), and thus were particularly appropriate for objects that produced or exacerbated fire. Noisily and vigorously blowing, placed close to the fire that the medieval body language indicates is fierce, they act as apotropaic guardians as it were, not only encouraging the embers but also ensuring that they will neither be, nor seem to be, dangerous or frightening. Amusing subordinates in the medieval examples, the Renaissance fire-blowers are instead dignified, fashionable African men whose efficacy rests on key assumptions made about their physiology as well as their sex.
Research Interests:
Material Culture Studies, Masculinity Studies, Masculinity, Masculinities, Studies On Men And Masculinity, and 11 moreMaterial Culture, Transcultural Studies, Black Masculinity, Material Culture & Materiality, Hearths, Fireplaces, Critical studies on men and masculinities, Black masculinities, Visual Representations of Africa, Representations of race and gender, and Cartographic Representation of Race and Ethnicity
Scholars estimate that one silver saltcellar cost the equivalent of 200 maiolica pieces. Yet fifteenth- and sixteenth-century comments rarely and only ironically address cost, instead favorably comparing maiolica with silver. The praise... more
Scholars estimate that one silver saltcellar cost the equivalent of 200 maiolica pieces. Yet fifteenth- and sixteenth-century comments rarely and only ironically address cost, instead favorably comparing maiolica with silver. The praise chiefly occurs as thanks for gifts, but it nevertheless reveals the problem with using monetary expense as a yardstick for cultural value and appreciation. This paper examines the documentary evidence anew, pointing to the importance of novelty and skill but also to such factors as its contrast to cheap pewter and its absorption into the fantasized re-creation of antiquity well before the development of actual istoriato ware. As a new medium in households, women played a special role in its patronage and sociable value. Too often regarded as a cheap substitute for metalware and as subserviently imitating more expensive forms, maiolica was instead a new complement in Renaissance culinary and display culture, ingenious, entertaining, colorful and alchemical.
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Too often the eroticism of religious imagery is ignored or, when acknowledged, as in the case of Susanna, the implication is that such paintings have no religious efficacy. Yet plentiful textual and visual evidence speaks to a rich,... more
Too often the eroticism of religious imagery is ignored or, when acknowledged, as in the case of Susanna, the implication is that such paintings have no religious efficacy. Yet plentiful textual and visual evidence speaks to a rich, affective and sensual piety. The primary focus here is the subject of Susanna, which has been endowed with a merely smutty and voyeuristic rather than pleasurable or inspirational character. This outmoded, reductive model of “the (male) gaze” takes little or no account of the way in which paintings rather than classical Hollywood films work, nor of non-identificatory modes of viewing and of roaming or vagabond practices of optical engagement, of different registers of nakedness, or of how allegory might contain and redirect ostensible narratives. These factors will be examined in relation to fifteenth-century domestic paintings of Susanna (one in Chicago) and canvases by Veronese and Tintoretto.
Research Interests:
Gender Studies, Gender and Sexuality, Women in Art, Women and Gender Studies, Renaissance Italian art, the representation of women in the Renaissance period, and 11 moreSusanna and the Elders, Tintoretto, Women in the Renaissance, Male and Female Gaze, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, The Male Gaze, Paolo Veronese, Jacopo Tintoretto, Nude Art, Male Gaze, and Veronese
In the 1980s and ‘90s, from very different viewpoints, scholars like Posner and Rand insisted that ancien régime artists such as Boucher and Fragonard catered to “the libidinous instincts of a male audience.” Using psychoanalysis, in 1990... more
In the 1980s and ‘90s, from very different viewpoints, scholars like Posner and Rand insisted that ancien régime artists such as Boucher and Fragonard catered to “the libidinous instincts of a male audience.” Using psychoanalysis, in 1990 Lipton attempted to recoup female viewing pleasure; more recently Hyde and Sheriff explored alternative approaches, though the effect tends to disembody desire and dissolve into ambiguity and fluidity. This paper revisits gender and sexuality in rococo art, taking into account not only contemporary art criticism but also memoirs, poetry and pornography. Rather than essentially collapse the pastoral with the pre-Oedipal and the feminine, I characterize an historically specific mode that overlapped with pornographic fantasies of female initiation and plenitude, yet distinguished itself by means of mythological delight, idyllic innocence, conventional sentiment, pictorial skill and playful sensuality. Thus, male viewing entailed numerous modes, from the pornographic or libertine to the foppish or disinterested, and so too women varied in their commissions and responses.
The “preliminary,” safe mood and facile manner of rococo images accorded with what French authors characterized, in memoirs and pornographic tales, as inconsequential, unthreatening female-female intimacies that bore no stigma of cuckoldry. With this in mind, the paper then focuses on images of Diana, goddess of chaste corporeality, adopted often as a persona for the portraits of noblewomen (including royal mistresses), and popular as a subject when coupled with beguiled Callisto. The masquerade of insignificance enabled the true mask, the nonchalant disguise of innocence, which nevertheless luxuriated in sensuality.
The “preliminary,” safe mood and facile manner of rococo images accorded with what French authors characterized, in memoirs and pornographic tales, as inconsequential, unthreatening female-female intimacies that bore no stigma of cuckoldry. With this in mind, the paper then focuses on images of Diana, goddess of chaste corporeality, adopted often as a persona for the portraits of noblewomen (including royal mistresses), and popular as a subject when coupled with beguiled Callisto. The masquerade of insignificance enabled the true mask, the nonchalant disguise of innocence, which nevertheless luxuriated in sensuality.
Research Interests:
18th Century France, 18th Century, 18th Century French Painting, 18th Century French Art, History of Pornography, and 12 moreFrançois Boucher, Rococo visual culture, Goddess Diana, Male and Female Gaze, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Male Gaze, Male Gaze, Rococo, 18th Century French Art and Culture, Rococo Art, Rococo Painting, and Diana and Callisto
Ridicule was a common feature of Renaissance visual humour, from pitture infamanti humiliating criminals to depictions of powerful women like Omphale, in each of which mocking representation of the upside down world enforced existing... more
Ridicule was a common feature of Renaissance visual humour, from pitture infamanti humiliating criminals to depictions of powerful women like Omphale, in each of which mocking representation of the upside down world enforced existing norms. Standards of decorum, social and ethnic status, gender and sexual norms were regularly satirized. This paper examines the politics and practice of visual satire chiefly in relation to Leonardo’s caricatures and the resultant “head of dicks” decorating a maiolica dish in the Ashmolean Museum and dated 1536.
The common strategies of word play and visual punning feature on the dish, literally in the case of inscriptions and figuratively by way of jokes about words like “head” and “hood.” In reverse writing that recalls Leonardo’s mirror script, the banderole declares that “every man looks at me as if I were a head of dicks,” a state that is visibly true because the head is indeed a composite of male genitals that attracts the gaze. On the reverse a sentence comments on reversals: “If you want to understand the meaning, you will be able to read the text like the Jews do” (i.e. one must read the text from right to left). Just as jokes occur on both sides of the plate, so too do the vulgar and the erudite combine in the double-sided game of serio ludere that was central to emblem books. Certain features, such as the earring, make anti-semitic references to Jews and the inscription mocks Hebraic and syncretistic scholarship. The artifact suits the occasion of banquets held by academies at Carnival time. It was probably made as a mock gift, of the sort presented by learned members like Annibal Caro to the “king” at a series of feasts celebrated by the “Academy of Virtue” in Rome during the 1530s.
The dish offers a learned insult, one that had to be laughed at by the receiver and all other viewers in order to deflect its attempt at one-upmanship. It is an example of what Caro called a metaphor (metafora), a word for “sticking it out or sticking it in” (metter fuora, o metter dentro). The topsy turvy dish mocks and bonds at the same time, uniting privileged men who enjoy jokes that are double-sided but overt rather than hidden, witty in both their literalness and literary mode.
The common strategies of word play and visual punning feature on the dish, literally in the case of inscriptions and figuratively by way of jokes about words like “head” and “hood.” In reverse writing that recalls Leonardo’s mirror script, the banderole declares that “every man looks at me as if I were a head of dicks,” a state that is visibly true because the head is indeed a composite of male genitals that attracts the gaze. On the reverse a sentence comments on reversals: “If you want to understand the meaning, you will be able to read the text like the Jews do” (i.e. one must read the text from right to left). Just as jokes occur on both sides of the plate, so too do the vulgar and the erudite combine in the double-sided game of serio ludere that was central to emblem books. Certain features, such as the earring, make anti-semitic references to Jews and the inscription mocks Hebraic and syncretistic scholarship. The artifact suits the occasion of banquets held by academies at Carnival time. It was probably made as a mock gift, of the sort presented by learned members like Annibal Caro to the “king” at a series of feasts celebrated by the “Academy of Virtue” in Rome during the 1530s.
The dish offers a learned insult, one that had to be laughed at by the receiver and all other viewers in order to deflect its attempt at one-upmanship. It is an example of what Caro called a metaphor (metafora), a word for “sticking it out or sticking it in” (metter fuora, o metter dentro). The topsy turvy dish mocks and bonds at the same time, uniting privileged men who enjoy jokes that are double-sided but overt rather than hidden, witty in both their literalness and literary mode.
Research Interests:
Verbal puns chiefly play with sound and sense, visual puns with shape and sense. The paper’s focus is the punning composition of a human head and neck that is made up of many smaller “heads,” that is, male genitals with their glans. An... more
Verbal puns chiefly play with sound and sense, visual puns with shape and sense. The paper’s focus is the punning composition of a human head and neck that is made up of many smaller “heads,” that is, male genitals with their glans. An unfinished drawing, two small medals and a now-lost print all represent variants of the type, but the only dated example occurs as a maiolica painting on a shallow bowl inscribed on the reverse 1536. Surrounding the head, a scroll carries a statement that speaks as though in the voice of the person implicitly portrayed by the painter: “every man looks at me as if I were a head of dicks” (testa de cazzi). Since viewers see precisely such a head, the speaker’s denial is denied, his honour insulted, the figurative and the literal fused, the pun asserted.
This paper examines the cultural habit of anthropomorphization, of both vessels and genitals, which enabled such a pun to signify. Plato and Augustine imagined the male genitals as a beast with a mind of its own, an animal that features on late medieval badges. Having usurped the seat of reason with the drive of lust, the phallic region of demons or Lucifer is sometimes depicted as a second face. Pots also assumed humanoid features, including phallic spouts. Ludic word usage amplified the wit of material culture. Testa had a clear sexual connotation, evident in the face at the end of several surviving metal codpieces made for armour, as well as in carnival songs and works by authors such as Boccaccio and Aretino. Another pun concentrated on the “hood” or “cap” of the foreskin (a burlesque poem by Michelangelo and a drawing attributed to him will be examined, as will several cheap badges in which the nose is clearly penile).
This paper examines the cultural habit of anthropomorphization, of both vessels and genitals, which enabled such a pun to signify. Plato and Augustine imagined the male genitals as a beast with a mind of its own, an animal that features on late medieval badges. Having usurped the seat of reason with the drive of lust, the phallic region of demons or Lucifer is sometimes depicted as a second face. Pots also assumed humanoid features, including phallic spouts. Ludic word usage amplified the wit of material culture. Testa had a clear sexual connotation, evident in the face at the end of several surviving metal codpieces made for armour, as well as in carnival songs and works by authors such as Boccaccio and Aretino. Another pun concentrated on the “hood” or “cap” of the foreskin (a burlesque poem by Michelangelo and a drawing attributed to him will be examined, as will several cheap badges in which the nose is clearly penile).
Research Interests:
As a shipbuilder, Noah was often depicted in Venetian art, his Ark a subject inventoried in palaces during the sixteenth century. But the Drunkenness of Noah, a biblical tale about patriarchal shame as well as phallic authority, was also... more
As a shipbuilder, Noah was often depicted in Venetian art, his Ark a subject inventoried in palaces during the sixteenth century. But the Drunkenness of Noah, a biblical tale about patriarchal shame as well as phallic authority, was also popular in the city, appearing at the civic monuments of San Marco and the Palazzo Ducale. It featured in a courtesan’s inventory and Giovanni Bellini treated the subject in a painting of unknown provenance. The tale has been considered a foundational myth about the necessity for the patriarchal phallus to remain unseen, mysterious and hence potent. Yet, visual representations show Ham’s disobedience to audiences of women and men, usually in conjunction with the elder’s actual, ordinary genitals. This paper considers contradictions, and the interplay of a viewer’s fictive blindness with actual vision, in the picturing and politics of the mocked patriarch, within the context of a Venetian gerontocracy but also the city’s sensual visual culture.
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In 1623, when investigating whether the Pescian nun Benedetta Carlini was a valid mystic, officials were surprised to hear, in explicit detail, about her sexual relations with her assistant Bartolomea. The case, published by Judith Brown... more
In 1623, when investigating whether the Pescian nun Benedetta Carlini was a valid mystic, officials were surprised to hear, in explicit detail, about her sexual relations with her assistant Bartolomea. The case, published by Judith Brown in 1986, shows that cloistered women could have clear ideas about how to attain sexual pleasure. The devotional literature and imagery that formed the cultural context of a nunnery was crucially reimagined by the abbess and her servant so that the passion of mysticism was experienced on a physical register. There was a third, divine, only partly masculinized presence in the room, active by way of the voice of an androgynous angel or a nurturing Christ. Through the triangulation of desire, the women enjoyed a longterm erotic relationship. The paper focuses on the part played by Benedetta’s key role model, and dedicatee of her convent, the fourteenth-century St. Catherine of Siena.
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Perspective was a core tool of Renaissance naturalism, traditionally taken to be a transparent, objective and consistent practice. However, it created a new, often unsettled relationship between viewers and fictive visualization. Like... more
Perspective was a core tool of Renaissance naturalism, traditionally taken to be a transparent, objective and consistent practice. However, it created a new, often unsettled relationship between viewers and fictive visualization. Like other strategies of pictorial illusionism, perspective calls attention to itself as well as to its subject, thereby proclaiming artistic skill and heightening the communicative efficacy of the image. My investigation focuses on cases, by such artists as Uccello and Fra Angelico, that have been ignored or dismissed as “meaningless,” geometrically erroneous or excessive, instead arguing that they have powerful valence and self-reflexive import. Disjunctive effects insist on the immanence of the divine and the spiritual truth of the Incarnation. Perspective tells lies. Strategies that draw attention to this falsity are one way of tackling the artist’s task to activate the viewer and animate the absent, to figure the celestial in the form of the contingent.
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Post-Renaissance notions of academic sobriety, especially when combined with a focus on the straightforward, penetrative phallus, have tended to blind us to some of the erotic wit exercised in Renaissance culture, especially that staged... more
Post-Renaissance notions of academic sobriety, especially when combined with a focus on the straightforward, penetrative phallus, have tended to blind us to some of the erotic wit exercised in Renaissance culture, especially that staged in so-called ‘academies’ or by artists who are sometimes taken too seriously. During carnival, for example, the popolo sang bawdy songs filled with clever double entendres (which literati soon collected), and similar humor was exercised in the banquet speeches of scholars like Annibal Caro or Fabio Vigile. Caro’s joke in 1539 that metaphor (metafora) was just another word for ‘sticking it out or sticking it in’ (metter fuora, o metter dentro) suggests that strategies of ‘disguise’ in certain emblems or seeming learnedness in some images might bear re-examination. If we take a wider view of somatic sexuality, taking account of the importance of testicles and what I term semen-otics, then more sexual jokes become clear. In a legal sense an acceptable witness (testis) was male, in a medical sense the testicles “witness strength and man-hood” and thus for writers such as Aretino and Firenzuola a euphemism for the balls was “testimoni”. The very act of being an eye-witness of art might then be erotically charged. To examine the issue, this paper’s focus will be Parmigianino’s painting of Cupid carving his bow (c. 1531-32) and Agostino Carracci’s “Ogni cosa vince l’oro” engraving of c. 1590-95.
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Renaissance art instigated flight and fearful responses as well as reactions like awe, worship, sorrow and desire. What has recently been called “visceral culture” boomed during the early modern period, with sensate appeals and somatic... more
Renaissance art instigated flight and fearful responses as well as reactions like awe, worship, sorrow and desire. What has recently been called “visceral culture” boomed during the early modern period, with sensate appeals and somatic interactions multiplying in relation to imagery. In particular, the visual mode of deceptive naturalism sparked theoretical and physical engagements. The macula noted famously by Pliny and others on the Knidian Aphrodite was a classical precedent oft cited during the Renaissance when art’s ability to deceive and literally arouse was celebrated, when stone and flesh seemed to transmogrify. This paper puts that ancient, exemplary masturbation into conjunction with both literary evidence (including the paragone debate) and visual themes, primarily scenes of masculine arousal adjacent to female nakedness (for example, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Lotto, Carracci).
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Deciding whether to practice in the “Early Modern” or “Renaissance” field currently positions oneself as either a progressive or traditional art historian, yet both terms depend upon the fulcrum of modernism and its supposed opposite,... more
Deciding whether to practice in the “Early Modern” or “Renaissance” field currently positions oneself as either a progressive or traditional art historian, yet both terms depend upon the fulcrum of modernism and its supposed opposite, classicism. Instead, we might reconsider the taxonomy of periodization and canon formation, and also embrace such “postmodern” aspects of the era as multivalent reception, intersectionality, nostalgic recycling, vernacular worlds, and fragmented meanings. We must move beyond tired orthodoxies and binaries, and away from the current habit of aestheticizing (and thus isolating) the period all over again. Revivification of the field means understanding ideological inflections that have produced politicized readings masked as universal, timeless messages about Art.
Some of the above generalities are tested here by focusing on what influential textbooks and countless syllabi posit as the initiation of the Renaissance, the competition announced c. 1401 to select who would produce doors for the Florentine Baptistery. Two submissions survive, bronze reliefs treating Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac, now isolated in a museum and displayed in textbooks to tell a teleological tale of rivalry and clear victory. This clash of future titans structured a Cold War story of Florentine classicizing rhetoric opposed to Milanese tyrannical militarism, of either individualistic citizenship or communal patronage setting an example for modern students, of medieval detail overcome by modern fluency, and of awkward, macho Brunelleschi falling to the more civilizing, suave Ghiberti.
Rather than discerning aesthetic isolation, heroic individualism or civic siege, we can re-evaluate such matters as the rhetoric of crisis; the role of classicism, including its homoerotic appeal; and imperialist, normative and paternalistic functions of “civic humanism”. For the building devoted to Florence’s patron saint, contestants had to visualize a crucial tale of obedience, loyalty, manliness, sacrifice, fatherly love and aggression.
Like the judges, the documents are marked by undecidability, yet textbooks present an inevitable, coherent agenda, effected by a civic entity enticed by classical equilibrium and elegance just when tyranny threatened republican liberty. In contradistinction to an ideology of consensus, this paper tries to avoid the pitfalls of hindsight and heed Manetti’s reference to a city tutta divisa. Clear, binary divides can be replaced by different integrative concepts, such as “courtly classicism” when discussing Ghiberti’s panel, and clichéd metanarratives can be overtaken by recognizing more multivalent, complex motives and processes.
Some of the above generalities are tested here by focusing on what influential textbooks and countless syllabi posit as the initiation of the Renaissance, the competition announced c. 1401 to select who would produce doors for the Florentine Baptistery. Two submissions survive, bronze reliefs treating Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac, now isolated in a museum and displayed in textbooks to tell a teleological tale of rivalry and clear victory. This clash of future titans structured a Cold War story of Florentine classicizing rhetoric opposed to Milanese tyrannical militarism, of either individualistic citizenship or communal patronage setting an example for modern students, of medieval detail overcome by modern fluency, and of awkward, macho Brunelleschi falling to the more civilizing, suave Ghiberti.
Rather than discerning aesthetic isolation, heroic individualism or civic siege, we can re-evaluate such matters as the rhetoric of crisis; the role of classicism, including its homoerotic appeal; and imperialist, normative and paternalistic functions of “civic humanism”. For the building devoted to Florence’s patron saint, contestants had to visualize a crucial tale of obedience, loyalty, manliness, sacrifice, fatherly love and aggression.
Like the judges, the documents are marked by undecidability, yet textbooks present an inevitable, coherent agenda, effected by a civic entity enticed by classical equilibrium and elegance just when tyranny threatened republican liberty. In contradistinction to an ideology of consensus, this paper tries to avoid the pitfalls of hindsight and heed Manetti’s reference to a city tutta divisa. Clear, binary divides can be replaced by different integrative concepts, such as “courtly classicism” when discussing Ghiberti’s panel, and clichéd metanarratives can be overtaken by recognizing more multivalent, complex motives and processes.
Research Interests:
It is a current, but misguided, commonplace that many Venetian paintings of a reclining nuda were wedding pictures. Rather than worry whether the figure represents an ethereal goddess, worldly prostitute or model wife, here I investigate... more
It is a current, but misguided, commonplace that many Venetian paintings of a reclining nuda were wedding pictures. Rather than worry whether the figure represents an ethereal goddess, worldly prostitute or model wife, here I investigate the erotic, multivalent connotations of the pudica gesture painted by Giorgione and Titian. From ostensible classical modesty to Renaissance wit, from Praxiteles to Carracci, the pudica gesture shifted from less overt sensuality to a parody of invisibility and untouchability. Playing on connotations of both shamed decorum and alluring pleasure, Venetian artists were not painting a figure that must be seen as exclusively only a wife, a goddess, or a prostitute. Instead, the nuda embodied a witty sense of masculine and artistic prerogatives. It offers a critique or parody of a shaming culture by seeming to cover, yet inviting voyeuristic focus and tactile fantasies, declaring the artists’ status as visual artificers of revelation.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Review of Douglas Biow, On the importance of being an individual in Renaissance Italy. Men, their professions, and their beards (2015), in Renaissance Quarterly 69 (Spring 2016): 286-87.
Research Interests:
A bibliography of over 30 pages, with sections on Art and Visual Culture, Critical Race Theory, History, Contemporary artists engaging with issues of race in relation to European art of c. 1300-1700, and Online Resources. Current... more
A bibliography of over 30 pages, with sections on Art and Visual Culture, Critical Race Theory, History, Contemporary artists engaging with issues of race in relation to European art of c. 1300-1700, and Online Resources. Current subsections are The Black Madonna; Black Saints (chiefly St Maurice), The Trecento, and Heliodorus’s ‘Aethiopica.’
Hot links often enable direct connection with published items, or works of art.
This is a GOOGLE DOC, OPEN ACCESS, and all suggestions and additions are welcome.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aPgPgXUVTWel8aXe1lzUrgmS4t30Xiye/edit
Pat Simons
26 Oct 2020
Hot links often enable direct connection with published items, or works of art.
This is a GOOGLE DOC, OPEN ACCESS, and all suggestions and additions are welcome.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aPgPgXUVTWel8aXe1lzUrgmS4t30Xiye/edit
Pat Simons
26 Oct 2020
Research Interests:
Over 380 pages of publications and online resources about women artists and patrons, chiefly in Western Europe from ancient times to c. 1700, but with sections on Asia (China and Japan) and Islamic cultures, as well as such media as... more
Over 380 pages of publications and online resources about women artists and patrons, chiefly in Western Europe from ancient times to c. 1700, but with sections on Asia (China and Japan) and Islamic cultures, as well as such media as textile arts and needlework, printmaking, sculpture and metalworking, and architecture. It is a GOOGLE DOC, OPEN ACCESS, and comments or additions are welcome.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qciG2ndN2dOfg4KDgL9LwCOl8HUZP5liSKtwRcJ_Ah4/edit?usp=sharing
The TABLE OF CONTENTS is listed here.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qciG2ndN2dOfg4KDgL9LwCOl8HUZP5liSKtwRcJ_Ah4/edit?usp=sharing
The TABLE OF CONTENTS is listed here.
Research Interests:
Nearly 60 pages of publications and online resources about female artists and patrons, chiefly in Western Europe from ancient times to c. 1700, but with sections on Asia (China and Japan) and Islamic cultures. Suggested additions... more
Nearly 60 pages of publications and online resources about female artists and patrons, chiefly in Western Europe from ancient times to c. 1700, but with sections on Asia (China and Japan) and Islamic cultures. Suggested additions welcome!
AS OF 29 MAY 2020 THE BIBLIOGRAPHY IS NOW A GOOGLE DOC OF 130+ PAGES. IT IS OPEN ACCESS AND COMMENTS ARE WELCOME.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qciG2ndN2dOfg4KDgL9LwCOl8HUZP5liSKtwRcJ_Ah4/edit?usp=sharing
AS OF 29 MAY 2020 THE BIBLIOGRAPHY IS NOW A GOOGLE DOC OF 130+ PAGES. IT IS OPEN ACCESS AND COMMENTS ARE WELCOME.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qciG2ndN2dOfg4KDgL9LwCOl8HUZP5liSKtwRcJ_Ah4/edit?usp=sharing
Research Interests:
Bibliography on early modern women artists, mainly in Italy and the Netherlands; a sporadic compilation of 45+ pages. Updated 29 April 2020. BUT see now my Bibliography_Premodern Women Artists (posted on 14 May 2020), which has expanded... more
Bibliography on early modern women artists, mainly in Italy and the Netherlands; a sporadic compilation of 45+ pages. Updated 29 April 2020. BUT see now my Bibliography_Premodern Women Artists (posted on 14 May 2020), which has expanded geographically and chronologically, to include medieval women, and female artists and patrons working in China, Japan and Islamic cultures.
AS OF 29 MAY 2020 THE BIBLIOGRAPHY IS NOW A GOOGLE DOC OF 130+ PAGES. IT IS OPEN ACCESS AND COMMENTS ARE WELCOME.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qciG2ndN2dOfg4KDgL9LwCOl8HUZP5liSKtwRcJ_Ah4/edit?usp=sharing
AS OF 29 MAY 2020 THE BIBLIOGRAPHY IS NOW A GOOGLE DOC OF 130+ PAGES. IT IS OPEN ACCESS AND COMMENTS ARE WELCOME.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qciG2ndN2dOfg4KDgL9LwCOl8HUZP5liSKtwRcJ_Ah4/edit?usp=sharing
Research Interests:
Women Artists, queen Christina of Sweden, Sofonisba Anguissola, Women patrons, Maria Sibylla Merian, and 15 moreItalian Female Artists, Artemisia Gentileschi, Women As Art Patrons, Clara Peeters, Italian Baroque Women Artists, Judith Leyster, Elisabetta Sirani, Italian Renaissance Women Art Patrons, Plautilla Nelli, Women Renaissance Artists, Italian Women Artists, Lavinia Fontana, Properzia de' Rossi, Giovanna Garzoni, and Rachel Ruysch
This course looks at the conditions of production that enabled the emergence of European women as independent artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Our primary focus will be Italy and the Netherlands, but comparative... more
This course looks at the conditions of production that enabled the emergence of European women as independent artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Our primary focus will be Italy and the Netherlands, but comparative material will be drawn from England, France and Spain. We examine spaces and modes of production (courts, convents, and cities), and the social networks of patronage, marketing, and gift exchange within which women made and viewed art. Our investigations concentrate on areas in which women artists made notable achievements, such as still life, portraiture, and self-portraiture. We also consider the engagement of women in other areas of visual culture such as needlework, printing and anatomical wax models.