Italian Renaissance 1350-1550 AD Essay Example for Free

Italian Renaissance 1350-1550 AD Essay Italian Renaissance Art remains the basis of all subsequent Western art despite the shattering innovations of the past hundred years. The formulas for imagemaking that were perfected in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, particularly in Italy, are those that painters still rely upon and, more significantly, that have conditioned the way most of us continue to see and even to photograph the world. Cities in Italy still like to celebrate their distant heroes. So the Galleria dArte in Ferrara and the Getty work up their shows with commitment and skill. Women in Italian Renaissance Art fill a void in the history of art. In distinct contrast to other eras, particularly the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Renaissance has until now been without a comprehensive examination of gender, representation, and identity. This work focuses on a single aspect of womens involvement in the Italian Renaissance Art. Since the time of Pythagoras, female/feminine and male/masculine have been defined in just such a comparative (or, more rightly, contradictive) relationship. As women continue to be integrated into all aspects of art history it is of critical importance that we do not lose sight of this strategy, for to do so would be to replace one skewed perspective with another. Women as a general category functions in western culture as the â€Å"absolute Other,† a necessary construction in contrast to which the male is able to define himself as rational, strong, productive, and authoritative. Womens historic problem in this male-oriented representation of the world is that there is no â€Å"Other of the Other†: woman has only male cultures projections of her identity on which to build her own subjectivity since the most forcefully organized category operating to define her is the category of the â€Å"not man† (Lacan 73). For early modern women this lack of a discourse defining them as anything but mans undesirable opposite bound together promiscuous and chaste women as different and yet the same in a sharing of essential gender limitations that did not impose itself in analogous ways on the male category. However, there is biblical argument, which draws chiefly on Romans and Galatians, the epistles in which St. Paul had wrestled with problems of religious status and hereditary privilege in the nascent Church. Agrippa uses Pauls discussion of Jews and Greeks to propose an analogous case for men and women, as the apostle himself suggests in Galatians 3:28. By this logic, the age of male dominance parallels the age of Jewish exclusiveness in salvation history; but when Christ established a new, more inclusive dispensation accepting Jews and Gentiles on equal terms, he meant at the same time to abolish gender privilege. The male priesthood, like Jewish Christians in the Pauline Church, is declared to have only a historical and by no means a spiritual priority. If male supremacy still prevails in spite of Christs intention, it is only because of the â€Å"hard-heartedness† of men, which women are entitled to judge and find wanting: Indeed, when men fall short and go astray, women have the power of judgment, to mens disgrace. Even the queen of Sheba is to judge the men of Jerusalem. Therefore all men who, being justified by faith, have become sons of Abraham, which is to say sons of the promise, are subjected to woman and bound by the command that God gave to Abraham, saying: â€Å"Whatever Sarah tells you, listen to her voice† (Chambers 152). Pieros women, spiritually and physically, are as robust as his architecture. In The Queen of Sheba, Piero della Francesca has created an ideal type, especially in his women, with long, thick necks, oval faces and strong chins. We can see Rossos eccentric humor in his drawing of a woman. The drawing is done in the manner of those exquisite female heads of Michelangelo. But whereas Michelangelos figures have an air of grace and dignity, Rossos woman peers bizarrely over her shoulder at the viewer. Rossos lady is suggestive of the frequent satire of women in Renaissance literature, as for example, in Machiavellis roughly contemporary novella, Belfagor. In this satirical tale by the brilliant author of the comedies La Mandragola and La Clizia, Machiavelli humorously indicates how even a devil cannot deal with woman, a situation also humorously illustrated by Bruegel in his Proverbs. The humor in Rossos drawing of a woman is expressed through the subtly playful treatment of physiognomy. This playful handling of facial expression is also evident in Rossos design for the Saturn and Philyra, which was engraved by Caraglio as part of the series of Loves of the Gods. If Raphael had already given a human quality to a horse in his St. George (Washington), Rosso now fully exploits this pathetic fallacy in his charmingly ridiculous image of a horse in love. The ambivalent humor in Bronzinos painting is especially apparent in the female figure, identified by Panofsky as Deceit, and by Levey, following Vasari, as Pleasure. She is a cunning invention: She offers a honeycomb with one hand while she hides a poisonous little animal in the other, and moreover the hand is attached to her right arm, that is the hand with the honeycomb is in reality a left hand, while the hand attached to her left arm is in reality a right one, so that the figure offers sweetness with what seems to be her â€Å"good† hand but is really her â€Å"evil† one, and hides poison in what seems to be her â€Å"evil† hand but is really her â€Å"good† one (Panofsky 226). This â€Å"perverted duplicity,† described perhaps not completely accurately but with mannered virtuosity by Panofsky, is related to the duplicity of Venus who steals the arrow from Cupid and to the perversion in the erotic embrace between mother and son. Michelangelos poem, which evokes the mocking tone of Lorenzo de Medicis Nencia da Barberino as well as the facetious poetry of Berni, would no doubt have been enjoyed by Shakespeare, who conceived of a similar, if more subtle, Petrarchan travesty, â€Å"My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun.† Michelangelos comic hag, with breasts like melons, also evokes the various hideous women in Renaissance art. She might be compared to the caricatured women in Leonardo da Vincis drawings and to the monstrous Ugly Woman of Quentin Metsys, who is closely related to the vain old women mocked by Erasmus in The Praise of Folly for wanting still â€Å"to play the goat.†