Netherlandish and Italian Female Portraiture in the Fifteenth Century: Gender, Identity, and the Tradition of Power 9789048544899

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Table of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The Cultural Background of Female Portraiture
2. Women in Marriage Portraiture
3. Women in Profile Portraiture
4. Netherlandish Female Portraiture in Context
5. Netherlandish or Not Netherlandish? Is That the Question?
6. Fifteenth-Century Venice: Performing Imaging
Conclusions
Appendix
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Netherlandish and Italian Female Portraiture in the Fifteenth Century

Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies. Series Editor Allison Levy is Digital Scholarship Editor at Brown University. She has authored or edited five books on early modern Italian visual and material culture.

Netherlandish and Italian Female Portraiture in the Fifteenth Century Gender, Identity, and the Tradition of Power

Elisabetta Toreno

Amsterdam University Press

The publication of this book is made possible by a grant from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the Association of Art Historians.

Cover illustration: Rogier van der Weyden, Portrait of a Lady, ca.1460. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Andrew W. Mellon Collection, 1937.1.44. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout 978 94 6372 861 4 isbn 978 90 4854 489 9 e-isbn doi 10.5117/9789463728614 nur 654 © E. Toreno / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2022 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

to Aurora and Marco



Table of Contents

Table of Illustrations

9

Acknowledgements 15 Introduction 17 Portraiture from Antiquity to the Fifteenth Century: An Overview 21 Studies on Portraiture: A Critical Assessment 26 Method and Structure of this Book 33 Final Remarks 37 1. The Cultural Background of Female Portraiture 39 Social Literature 40 Amorous Literature 53 Surrender in Resistance 59 Conclusions 67 2. Women in Marriage Portraiture 69 An Illustrated Exegesis of the Institution of Marriage 71 Betrothal, Wedding, and Morgengabe Portraits 82 Conclusions 90 3. Women in Profile Portraiture 91 Looking as Feeling: A Culture of Seeing-as 93 Concinnitas, Urbanitas and Female Portraiture 101 103 Group One Group Two 108 Group Three 113 Conclusions 117 4. Netherlandish Female Portraiture in Context 119 Technical Observations 122 Female Portraiture in the Burgundian Culture 126 Garbed in Ootmoed: Spirituality of Humility 131 Seeing-In the Spiritual 136 Conclusions 141

5. Netherlandish or Not Netherlandish? Is That the Question? 143 Perspectives on Italian and on Netherlandish Portraiture 145 a. The Politics of a Style 147 b. The Politics of Nature 150 c. The Politics of Animated Portraiture 155 Italian Portraits à la Netherland? 160 Conclusions 170 6. Fifteenth-Century Venice: Performing Imaging 173 Considerations about Venetian Portraiture 175 Venetian Female Portraiture 178 Women’s Legal Status with Focus on Venice 181 a. Overview 181 Dowry 184 b. c. In Venice 188 Imaging as Performance 190 Conclusions 193 Conclusions 195 Anthropological Considerations 197 Technical Considerations 198 Conceptual Considerations 199 Gender and Identity in the Politics of Seeing 200 The Arnolfini Double Portrait: A Morgengabe? 202 Appendix 211 Bibliography 277 Index 313



Table of Illustrations

Introduction Fig. I.1 Fig. I.2

Ambrogio de Predis (ca.1455–after 1508). Bianca Maria Sforza, probably 1493. Oil on panel, 51 × 32.5 cm. Photo © The National Gallery of Art, Washington (1942.9.53). Jacopo Maestro (painted by). Maiolica dish (Cafaggiolo), 1510. Tin-glazed earthenware, painted in colours. Diameter: 23.9 cm. Photo © The Victoria & Albert Museum, London (1717-1885).

1. The Cultural Background of Female Portraiture Fig. 1.1

Masaccio (1401–1428). Expulsion of Adam and Eve, 1424–1428. Fresco. The Brancacci Chapel. In Evelyn Welch, Art in Renaissance Italy 1350–1500 (1997, rep.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 206.

2. Women in Marriage Portraiture Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2

Fig. 2.3

Fig. 2.4

Filippo Lippi (ca.1406–1469). Woman with a Man at a Casement, ca.1440. Tempera on panel. 64.1 × 41.9 cm. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (89.15.19). Pliny, Cristoforo Landino and Monte or Gherardo di Giovanni di Miniato (ca.1445–1497). Historia Naturale di Caio Plinio Secondo, tradocta di lingua latina e fiorentian per Christophoro Landino, pub. 1476. Manuscript illumination. Photo © Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, Arch. G b.6 (formerly Douce 310), f. 378r. Attr. Maestro delle Storie del Pane (Emilian, active later fifteenth century). Portrait of a Man, possibly Matteo di Sebastiano di Bernardo Gozzadini, 1494(?). Tempera on panel, 50.2 × 37.1 cm. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1975.1.95). Attr. Maestro delle Storie del Pane (Emilian, active later fifteenth century). Portrait of a Woman, possibly Ginevra d’Antonio Lupari Gozzadini, 1494(?). Tempera on panel, 50.2 × 37.1 cm. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1975.1.96).

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Fig. 2.5

Fig. 2.6

Fig. 2.7

Master of Frankfurt (active late fifteenth century-early sixteenth century). Self-Portrait of the Artist with his Wife, 1496. Oil on panel, 38 × 24 cm. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp (5096) – photo: Rik Klein Gotink, Collection KMSKA – Flemish Community (CC0). Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio (attr. Fra Bartolommeo, 1472?–1517). Costanza de’ Medici (Costanza Caetani), ca.1480–1490. Tempera and oil on wood, 57.2 × 37.5. Photo © The National Gallery, London (NG2490). Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494). Portrait of a Woman, ca.1490. Tempera on panel, 20 3/8 × 15 5/8 in. (51.8 × 39.7 cm.) without painted border: 19 1/4 × 14 1/2 in. (48.9 × 36.8 cm.) frame: 31 × 26 3/8 × 4 7/8 in. (78.7 × 67 × 12.4 cm.). The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. The Arabella D. Huntington Memorial Art Collection. 26.89 © Courtesy of the Huntington Art Museum, San Marino, California.

3. Women in Profile Portraiture Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4

Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6

Florentine (15th Century). Profile Portrait of a Young Man, 1430–1450. Tempera on panel, 42.4 × 32.5 cm. Photo © The National Gallery of Art, Washington (1937.1.14). Pisanello (ca.1395–ca.1455). Portrait of a Princess of the House of Este, 1435–1450. Tempera on wood. 43 × 30 cm. Photo © Musée du Louvre, Paris (RF 776). Franco-Flemish (early 15th Century). Profile Portrait of a Lady, ca.1410. Oil on panel. 53 × 37.6 cm. Photo © The National Gallery, Washington (1937.1.23). Attr. Lo Scheggia (Giovanni di Ser Giovanni Guidi, 1406–1486). Wedding Coffin (‘Cassone’ or ‘Forziere’), 1449–1475. Tempera on wood. 41.5 × 165 cm. Photo © Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (KMS4785). Attr. Giovanni di Francesco del Cervelliera (1412–1459). Portrait of a Woman, ca.1445. Tempera on wood, 41.3 × 31.1. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum, New York (32.100.98). Filippo Lippi (ca.1406–1469), Portrait of a Woman, 1440–1442. Tempera on wood, cm. 49.5 × 32.9. Photo © Staatliche Museen, Berlin (1700) – Aufnahame: Jörg P. Anders, Berlin/00.

Table of Illustr ations 

Fig. 3.7 Fig. 3.8

Fig. 3.9

Fig. 3.10 Fig. 3.11

Unknown maker. Standing Woman Wearing Chiton and Himation, Pudicitia, plaster casting of Roman Hellenistic statue. h. 206 cm. Photo © Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (KAS199). Scheggia (Giovanni di Ser Giovanni, active 1406–1486). Portrait of a Lady, ca.1460. Tempera and gold on panel, transferred to canvas 44.1 × 36.4 cm. Photo © The Philadelphia Museum of Art (cat.34). Italian. Belt with Profiles of Half-Length Figures, ca.1350–1400. Basse taille enamel, silver-gilt, mounted on textile belt. 175.3 × 2.5 × 1.7 cm. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (17.190.963). Italian painter (Lombard). Twelve Heads, first quarter sixteenth century. Tempera on wood. 45.7 × 46.4 cm. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (05.2.1-12). Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510). Portrait of a Young Woman, ca.1476. Tempera on panel. 61 × 40.5 cm. Photo © Pitti Palace, Florence (Inv.1912 n. 353).

4. Netherlandish Female Portraiture in Context Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). An Artist Drawing a Seated Man, 1525. Woodcut, sheet: 13.3 × 14.9 cm. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (17.37.90). Robert Campin (ca.1375/9–1444), Portrait of a Woman, ca.1435. Oil and egg tempera on oak panel, 40.6 × 28.1 cm. Photo © The National Gallery, London (NG653.2). Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden (ca.1398/1400–1464). Portrait of a Lady, ca.1460. oil with egg tempera on oak, 37 × 27.1 cm. Photo © The National Gallery, London (NG143). Rogier van der Weyden (ca.1398/1400–1464). Portrait of a Lady, ca.1460. Oil on panel. 37 × 27 cm. Photo © The National Gallery of Art, Washington (1937.1.44). Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden (ca.1398/1400–1464). Portrait of Isabella of Portugal, about 1450. Oil on panel. 46 × 37.1 cm. Photo © The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (78.PB.3). M. Bass, 2010, ‘anonymous, Portrait of Jacoba of Bavaria (1401– 1436), Countess of Holland and Zeeland, Northern Netherlands, after ca.1480’, oil on panel, 64 × 50 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, SK-A-498. in J.P. Filedt Kok (ed.), Early Netherlandish

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Fig. 4.7

Fig. 4.8 Fig. 4.9 Fig. 4.10 Fig. 4.11

Fig. 4.12 Fig. 4.13

Fig. 4.14

Paintings, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/ RM0001.COLLECT.6829 (accessed 29 April 2022) Workshop of Rogier Van der Weyden (ca.1398/1400–1464). Triptych of the Braque Family, ca.1450. Oil on wood. 41 × 68 cm (central panel); 41 × 34 cm (each wing). Photo © Musée du Louvre, Paris (RF 2063). Attr. Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494). Lucrezia Tornabuoni, ca.1475. Oil on panel. 53.3 × 39.9 cm. Photo © The National Gallery of Art, Washington (1952.5.62). Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553). Portrait of a Man, 1522. Oil on panel. 57.6 × 39.9 cm. Photo © The National Gallery of Art, Washington (1959.9.1). Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553). Portrait of a Woman, 1522. Oil on panel. 58 × 39.8 cm. Photo © The National Gallery of Art, Washington (1959.9.2). Petrus Christus (ca.1410, active 1444–1475/6). Portrait of a Young Woman, ca.1450. Silverpoint, framing lines with black chalk and with the pen in black ink, on grey prepared paper, 13.2 × 8.9 cm, MB 328 (PK) Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. from the estate of: F.J.O. Boijmans 1847 / Credit line photographer: Studio Buitenhof. Anonymous, drawing, seventeenth century (after Jan Van Eyck’s Portrait of Isabella of Portugal). Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisboa (PT-TT-CF-201). Rogier Van der Weyden (ca.1398/1400–1464), Portrait of a Woman with a Gauze Headdress, ca.1440/1445. Oil on oak panel. 47 × 32 cm. Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Acc. No. 545D – Aufnahame: Wolker- H. Schneider. Publikation nur mit Namensnennung. Petrus Christus (ca.1410, active 1444–1475/6). Portrait of a Young Woman, ca.1470. Oil on oak panel. 29 × 22.5 cm. Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Acc. No. Cat. 41.

5. Netherlandish or Not Netherlandish? Is That The Question? Fig. 5.1

Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494). Portrait of a Young Woman, ca.1490. Tempera on panel. 44 × 32 cm. © Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon (282). Photo: Catarina Gomes Ferreira.

Table of Illustr ations 

Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3

Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6

Fig. 5.7 Fig. 5.8 Fig. 5.9

Fig. 5.10

Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494). Portrait of a Girl, ca.1490. Tempera on wood. 44.1 × 29.2 cm. Photo © The National Gallery, London (NG1230). Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494). Portrait of a Lady, ca.1490. Tempera, oil, and gold on panel. 44.1 × 29.2 cm. Acquired by Sterling Clark, 1913. The Clark Art Institute (1955.938) Photo © The Clark Institute. Andrea del Castagno (1419–1497). Portrait of a Man, ca.1450. Tempera on panel. 54.2 × 40.4 cm. Photo © The National Gallery of Art, Washington (1937.1.17). Petrus Christus (ca.1410, active 1444–1475/6). Portrait of a Carthusian, 1446. Oil on panel. 29.2 × 21.6 cm. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (49.7.19). Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510). Portrait of a Lady at the window (Smeralda Bandinelli?), ca.1470–1475. Tempera on wood. 65.7 × 41 cm. Photo © The Victoria & Albert Museum, London (CAI. 100). Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). Ginevra de Benci (obverse), ca.1474/1478. Oil on panel. 38.1 × 37. Photo © The National Gallery of Art, Washington (1967.6.1.a). Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). Ginevra de Benci (reverse), ca.1474/1478. Oil on panel. 38 × 37 cm. Photo © The National Gallery of Art, Washington (1967.6.1.b). Agnolo (1466–1513) or Donnino (1460–after 1515) di Domenico del Mazziere. Portrait of a Young Woman, ca.1485–1490. Oil on wood. 45.4 × 34.8 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Cat. 80) – Aufnahame: Jörg P. Anders, Berlin/00. Portrait of Cassandra Fedele. llustration for ‘Cassandra Fidelis.’ In Giacomo Filippo Tomasini, Elogia virorum literis & sapiential illustrium ad viuum expressis imaginibus exornata (Padua: Sebastiani Sardi, 1644), 343-58 (344).

6. Fifteenth-Century Venice: Performing Imaging Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2

Vittore Carpaccio (1472–1526). Portrait of a Woman, ca.1493– 1494. Oil on panel. 28 × 24 cm. Photo © Galleria Borghese, Rome (450). Attr. Jacometto Veneziano (active ca.1472–d.before 1498). Portrait of a Lady with a Lagoon Landscape and Hills Behind,

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Fig. 6.3

1472–1494. Oil on panel and gilt. 25.4 × 19 cm. Polesden Lacey, Surrey (NT1246487). Photo © National Trust / Andrew Fetherston. Attr. Jacometto Veneziano (active ca.1472–d.before 1498). Portrait of a Woman (Possibly a Nun of San Secondo), ca.1485–1490. Oil and gold on wood. 10.2 × 7.3 cm. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum, New York (1975.1.85).

Conclusions Fig. 7.1

Jan Van Eyck (active 1422–d.1441), Portrait of Giovanni (?) Arnolfini and His Wife, 1434. Oil on oak. 82.2 × 60 cm. Photo © The National Gallery, London (NG186).

Acknowledgements In 2003, a small Italian curatorial establishment called Castel di San Michele (Cagliari) hosted an itinerant exhibition entitled La Ricerca dell’Identità da Tiziano a De Chirico. Dozens of faces gazed back at the visitors from their painted panels and canvases. Among them, the underrepresented category of women suggested the worth of an investigation that became a research project, thanks to the support of many, first among whom were Patricia de Montfort and Genevieve Warwick. That constituted the start of a journey towards this book. The title of this book makes explicit the primary material of this study. To trace this material is a task that can only be described as unending. At the onset, my quest was helped by the James McNeill Whistler and Beatrix Whistler Scholarship, through which I was able to undertake archival research in museum collections. Therefore, I am also indebted to the assistance of the staff of the Departments of Curatorial Records at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (Barcelona), Accademia Carrara (Bergamo), National Gallery (London), Museo d’Arte Antica e Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco (Milan), Museo Poldi-Pezzoli (Milan), Louvre (Paris), Archivi Capitolini (Rome), and the National Gallery of Art (Washington). To represent all, I should like to mention Marina Gentiletti (Pinacoteca Carrara) and Ann Halpern (National Gallery, Washington). During my visits, I was also honoured by the attentive ear of curators and directors Laura Basso, David Alan Brown, Margarita Euyas, John Hand, Elisabetta Mori, Giovanni Valagussa. In studying these paintings, I had to pursue disciplines that were far beyond my comfort zone. I cannot thank enough John Findlay and Olivia Robertson, who helped me interpret aspects of legal history, and Ruth Karras, who saved me from misinterpreting embarrassingly the complexity of medieval marriages and the sacramental formula of marriage. And I must express my gratitude to Graeme Small for pointing me to the right direction as I navigated the complexity of the history of the Duchy of Burgundy. Each chapter is also indebted to the generous and fresh eye of scholars and friends, among whom I wish to remember Christopher Black, Peter Black, Warren Carter, Mary Garrard, Eleanor Gordon, Jill Harrison, Gary Kemp, Catherine King, Elizabeth Robertson, and Tom Nichols. On en dashes, sentence-structures, and opaque lexicon and more, special thanks must go to Chris Powici, Chris Reid, and Sheilagh Wilson. Last but certainly not least, I am thankful to Evelyn Welch for her encouragement in pursuing the publication of the catalogue in this book. My friends also know my gratitude towards their patience and support, as do my students, whose interest in my research stimulated my desire to publish a book that, I hope, can be read at all levels of interest. I must also mention in abstract,

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but they know who they are, a group of women that read the chapter on marriage. I am indebted to their insights as women, mothers, and daughters. This book could not have become a reality without Erika Gaffney, whom I cannot thank enough for her continuous care from the early to the last stages of this publication with AUP. Similarly, I wish to thank everyone involved in the editing process, from the anonymous reader to the gatekeeper and the copyeditor, for their insightful feedback as the manuscript approached production. Also invaluable was the patronage of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and of the Association of Art Historians, whose awards supported this effort. A constant presence in this journey has been Aurora, my mother, from whom I received loving encouragement, comments, and enthusiasm for the beauty of these paintings. With Aurora, I want to mention Francesco, my brother, an artist whose ways of describing images is always inspirational to me; Marco, my father, whose thirst for questions is never quenched; and Maya, my beloved niece. To my family this book is dedicated but I consecrate its spirit to the disenfranchised – gender, ethnic others – as were the women who inhabit its contents.

COLOUR SEC TION 

Fig. I.1 Ambrogio de Predis (ca.1455–after 1508). Bianca Maria Sforza, probably 1493. Oil on panel, 51 × 32.5 cm. Photo © The National Gallery of Art, Washington (1942.9.53).

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Fig. I.2 Jacopo Maestro (painted by). Maiolica dish (Cafaggiolo), 1510. Tin-glazed earthenware, painted in colours. Diameter: 23.9 cm. Photo © The Victoria & Albert Museum, London (1717-1885).

III

COLOUR SEC TION 

Fig. 1.1 Masaccio (1401–1428). Expulsion of Adam and Eve, 1424–1428. Fresco. The Brancacci Chapel. In Evelyn Welch, Art in Renaissance Italy 1350–1500 (1997, rep.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 206.

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Fig. 2.1 Filippo Lippi (ca.1406–1469). Woman with a Man at a Casement, ca.1440. Tempera on panel. 64.1 × 41.9 cm. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (89.15.19).

COLOUR SEC TION 

Fig. 2.2 Pliny, Cristoforo Landino and Monte or Gherardo di Giovanni di Miniato (ca.1445–1497). Historia Naturale di Caio Plinio Secondo, tradocta di lingua latina e fiorentian per Christophoro Landino, pub. 1476. Manuscript illumination. Photo © Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, Arch. G b.6 (formerly Douce 310), f. 378r.

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Fig. 2.3 Attr. Maestro delle Storie del Pane (Emilian, active later fifteenth century). Portrait of a Man, possibly Matteo di Sebastiano di Bernardo Gozzadini, 1494(?). Tempera on panel, 50.2 × 37.1 cm. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1975.1.95).

COLOUR SEC TION 

Fig. 2.4 Attr. Maestro delle Storie del Pane (Emilian, active later fifteenth century). Portrait of a Woman, possibly Ginevra d’Antonio Lupari Gozzadini, 1494(?). Tempera on panel, 50.2 × 37.1 cm. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1975.1.96).

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Fig. 2.5 Master of Frankfurt (active late fifteenth century–early sixteenth century). Self-Portrait of the Artist with his Wife, 1496. Oil on panel, 38 × 24 cm. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp (5096) – photo: Rik Klein Gotink, Collection KMSKA – Flemish Community (CC0).

COLOUR SEC TION 

Fig. 2.6 Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio (attr. Fra Bartolommeo, 1472?–1517). Costanza de’ Medici (Costanza Caetani), ca.1480–1490. Tempera and oil on wood, 57.2 × 37.5. Photo © The National Gallery, London (NG2490).

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Fig. 2.7 Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494). Portrait of a Woman, ca.1490. Tempera on panel, 20 3/8 × 15 5/8 in. (51.8 × 39.7 cm.) without painted border: 19 1/4 × 14 1/2 in. (48.9 × 36.8 cm.) frame: 31 × 26 3/8 × 4 7/8 in. (78.7 × 67 × 12.4 cm.). The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. The Arabella D. Huntington Memorial Art Collection. 26.89 © Courtesy of the Huntington Art Museum, San Marino, California.

COLOUR SEC TION 

Fig. 3.1 Florentine (15th Century). Profile Portrait of a Young Man, 1430–1450. Tempera on panel, 42.4 × 32.5 cm. Photo © The National Gallery of Art, Washington (1937.1.14).

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Fig. 3.2 Pisanello (ca.1395–ca.1455). Portrait of a Princess of the House of Este, 1435–1450. Tempera on wood. 43 × 30 cm. Photo © Musée du Louvre, Paris (RF 776).

COLOUR SEC TION 

Fig. 3.3 Franco-Flemish (early 15th Century). Profile Portrait of a Lady, ca.1410. Oil on panel. 53 × 37.6 cm. Photo © The National Gallery, Washington (1937.1.23).

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Fig. 3.4 Attr. Lo Scheggia (Giovanni di Ser Giovanni Guidi, 1406–1486). Wedding Coffin (‘Cassone’ or ‘Forziere’), 1449–1475. Tempera on wood. 41.5 × 165 cm. Photo © Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (KMS4785).

COLOUR SEC TION 

Fig. 3.5 Attr. Giovanni di Francesco del Cervelliera (1412–1459). Portrait of a Woman, ca.1445. Tempera on wood, 41.3 × 31.1. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum, New York (32.100.98).

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Fig. 3.6 Filippo Lippi (ca.1406–1469), Portrait of a Woman, 1440–1442. Tempera on wood, cm. 49.5 × 32.9. Photo © Staatliche Museen, Berlin (1700) – Aufnahame: Jörg P. Anders, Berlin/00.

Introduction Abstract With one hundred and thirty portraits, this book traces the aesthetic and conceptual conditions of fifteenth-century Netherlandish and Italian individual female portraiture on panels. Their unprecedented quantity and characteristics signal the genre’s modernisation in European visual culture. Their provenance, both cultural and territorial, betrays relations with a new estate that was especially advanced in the urbanised regions of central-northern Italy and Flanders, and that rose to visibility from entrepreneurial capital. The androcentric organisation of powers, upon which societies operated across Europe, suited this new estate to an extent that deepened the gender dynamics of its patriarchal foundations. This book studies the relationship between life and imaging of women during this epochal moment in the European history. Its introductory chapter surveys the history of the genre until the fifteenth century and evaluates critically the studies on the subject. It explains the premise, method, and structure of the enquiry. It ends with technical clarifications. Key words: Painting – Antiquity – Portraiture – Renaissance – Women

A late fifteenth century panel painting shows the half-bust silhouette of a young woman with greenish eyes, a distinctive nose and brown hair neatly arranged into headgear ending with a coazzone. She is wearing a brocaded gamurra with Sforza emblems. Above the ear, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, diamonds, and pearls are fitted in a pendant in the shape of a brush bordered by a banderole inscribed with a motto merito et tempore [Fig. I.1].1 The design of this jewel was the impresa of Ludovico Sforza (1452–1508), known as the Moor. The woman likely represents Ludovico’s niece Bianca Maria, born on 5 April 1472, the daughter of the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1444–1476). After her father’s assassination on 26 December 1476, she and her brother, the new Duke Gian Galeazzo (1469–1494), fell under the wily tutelage of Ludovico, who de facto 1

Cat. 5. This painting is detailed and referenced at www.nga.gov

Toreno, E., Netherlandish and Italian Female Portraiture in the Fifteenth Century. Gender, Identity, and the Tradition of Power. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463728614_intro

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ruled as the Duchy’s Regent. After Gian Galeazzo’s mysterious death on 21 October 1494, Ludovico assumed formal control, which he lost in 1499, when the French invaded the principality. Meanwhile, Bianca Maria would come close three times to wearing the bridal dress. Then, shortly before she lost her brother, her uncle succeeded in sealing her union with none other than the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I (1459–1519), whom she married on 30 November 1493. She brought to the marriage an excess of four hundred thousand ducats and a corredo of jewels, fabrics, and silverware of unsurpassed value. The extravagance of this dowry gives us an inkling of Ludovico’s determination to be recognised as the legitimate heir to the Duchy of Milan by the dynastic powers of Europe.2 Bianca Maria went on to live an uneventful life in Innsbruck, where she died unloved and isolated on 31 December 1510. Yet, her likeness fashions her as a real catch in the competitive marriage market of the privileged classes. In such portraits, clothing and accessories formed a sign-system laden with symbolism that emphasised and romanticised the reasons for the commissions. For instance, around Bianca Maria’s waist a belt is studded with a lapidary-rich pattern that resembles carnations and there is also a red carnation tucked into the belt. Belts were nuptial gifts because their fasteners were seen as appropriate metaphors for the indissolubility of marriage and friendship, and carnations in Renaissance portraiture often symbolised marital love. Thus, this portrait was likely commissioned at the time of the sitter’s marriage with Maximilian. Jewels were indexes of material wealth and, simultaneously, of moral virtues. For example, pearls were routinely painted in female portraits because they symbolised Marian purity. The portrait format itself could carry symbolic values. The profile formula evoked ancient medallic portraiture and, in turn, the ideals of an ancient ruling patriciate.3 Its continuous silhouette invited scrutiny, whilst denying ocular connection with the viewer. Combined with sufficient resemblance with the sitter, it exacted their acknowledgement and admiration. Put simply, Bianca Maria’s profile format, lapidary ensemble, and emblematic and marital references exemplify a take on portraiture, whereby a sitter’s genealogical, moral, and financial pedigree prefigured momentous family alliances. In Europe, these were times of arranged marriages, and such characteristics encapsulated family ambitions because they stimulated discourses on kinship and lineage. To understand why gender was conducive to these discourses we need not go far. Consider the extent to which photographs of women, from personal to professional, 2 Luca Beltrami, “Gli Sponsali di Bianca Maria Sforza,” in Le Corti Italiane del Secolo XV, Emporium vol. III, no. 14 (1896): 83–95. 3 John William Parker, “Some Account of Coins, Ancient and Modern,” The Saturday Magazine, no. 556 Supplement (February 1841): 80–88.

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are routinely altered. Their inauthenticity reflects the habit of identifying personal accomplishments with one’s own body image.4 This conflation reflects misconceptions, which today we call misogyny, and which originated in the Aristotelian theories on female psychophysiological deficiency, and the Judeo-Christian identification of woman with Eve.5 As a result, women have been historically considered defective, morally corrupt, and fundamentally incapable of legal and social autonomy; and their worth has been codified under standards of appearance. Stanley Chojnacki has visualised this ideology as a “triptych of patriarchal, patrilineal and patrimonial principles.”6 These three ‘Ps’ converge in the practice of arranged marriages, in which women are transacted as the biosocial capital that increases family affiliations. As the humanist Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) put it, “[I]n this or that [woman], I could not desire more dowry, or more beauty, or a better family.”7 4 An outline of this debate is in Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices, 2nd ed. (East Sussex and New York: Routledge, 2015), esp. 5–40. 5 E.g., Corinthians 11:3: “But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ: and the head of the woman is the man.” From the vast scholarship on this subject see, Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Karen Raber, ed., A Cultural History of Women in the Renaissance (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Jennifer Ward, Women in Medieval Europe, 1200-1500 (Edinburgh and London: Pearson Education Limited, 2001); Letizia Panizza, ed., Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society (Oxford: Legenda, European Humanities Research Centre University of Oxford, 2000); James Grantham Turner, ed., Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Emilie Amt, ed., Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook (New York, London: Routledge, 1993); Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ed., A History of Women in the West: II. Silences of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1992); Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari, eds., Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991); Margaret King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991); Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy Vicker, eds., Rewriting the Renaissance: the Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986); Ian MacLean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Misfortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Maryanne Cline Horowitz, “Aristotle and Woman,” Journal of the History of Biology 9, no. 2 (Autumn 1976): 183–213. 6 Stanley Chojnacki, “‘The Most Serious Duty’: Motherhood, Gender, and the Patrician Culture of Renaissance Venice,” in Men and Women in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2000), 169–82 (169). 7 “[I]n questa o quella nella quale io non ai da desiderarmi o piu dota o maggior belezze o migliore parentado.” Leon Battista Alberti, “De Officio Senum Erga Iuvenes et Minorum Erga Maiores et de Educandis Liberis,” in In Questo Volume si Contiene Libri della Famiglia Composta da M. Batista degli Alberti da Firenze, 1433–1440, Urb.Lat.229, The Vatican Library, DigitalVaticana, 7v–44v (19v). In contemporary Italian: Leon Battista Alberti, “Liber Primus Familiae: de Officio Senum Erga Iuvenes et Minorum Erga Maiores et de Educandis Liberis,” in I libri della Famiglia, a cura di Ruggiero Romano, Alberto Tenenti, Francesco Furlan (Torino: Einaudi, 1994), 12–85. Trans.: Leon Battista Alberti, “The First Book on the Family: Of the Duties of the Old Towards the Young and of the Young Towards Their Elders, and of the Education of Children,”

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Writing about women in the Renaissance in 1977, Joan Kelly called it “the bourgeois sex-role system” because it served the socio-political consolidation of an emerging middling class.8 In Europe, this group came into existence as townspeople developed conditions of urban professionalism. It included the families enriched by entrepreneurial activities, such as commerce and banking, and was especially advanced in the urbanised areas of central-northern Italy, followed by the Low Countries.9 By the early fifteenth century, it had also become the indispensable administrative force of the local plutocracies, and was intermarrying with the impoverished nobility. In improving socially through their own commercial and networking skills, these families challenged the historical association of power with the aristocratic and clerical estates. A medley of emotions, from pride to the anxiety about being legitimised among the high ranks of power, stimulated their desire to create a trail of personal and genealogical legacies. Portraiture encapsulates this pursuit because, by producing visual evidence of one’s existence, it renders historically relevant both the sitters and the range of affiliations, cultural, ethical, civic, and so on, which arise from their social connections. Perhaps not coincidentally, the first portraits that today we call early modern are from central-northern Italy and Flanders. Among the media, those painted on individual panels date from the second decade of the fifteenth century. After then, commissions for female likenesses on single panel rose quickly and significantly. This book presents one hundred and thirty individual images of women from these regions. The quantity reflects my effort to compile what is now the largest survey to date on Renaissance female portraiture. Some were conceived as marital companions, others as autonomous. Some will be known to the reader because they are key examples of Renaissance art, others are less known. Among them, the aristocratic subjects, albeit fewer, bear witness to the cultural shift that permeated the genre. Absent are the nuns, whose cloister imposed their invisibility, and sex or manual workers, exploited in the everyday but unworthy subjects of portraiture. These portraits are in the Appendix, which also explains the rationale of their timeline. The catalogue is not complete because paintings have been lost to the inevitable damage of time or to the secrecy of private collections; or because in The Family in Renaissance Florence: Books One – Four, intr. and trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc., 2004 ed.), 33–91. 8 Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance,” in Women, History and Theory (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984 ed.), 19–50 (38). 9 Wim Blockmans, Bett De Munck and Peter Stabel, “Economic Vitality: Urbanisation, Regional Complementarity and European Interaction,” in City and Society in the Low Countries, 1100-1600, eds. Bruno Blondé, Marc Boone and Anne-Laure van Bruaene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 22–58 (28). For an overview of urbanisation in the middle ages, see Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonisation and Cultural Changes 950–1350 (1993; rep., London: Penguin Books, 1994).

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information is too mismatched for a firm technical evaluation.10 Even if we succeed­ ed in completing the task, their quantity could not compete with that of their male counterpart. To show the extent of the gap suffices to say that, for every female image I found, I reviewed roughly five male likenesses. The explanation must be sought in the androcentric nature of patriarchy, where men, as an anthropological group, have multidimensional experiences based on age, marital, professional status and so on. Their need and desire for portraiture are commensurate with a kaleidoscope of related activities. In the same culture, instead, women’s experiences are limited to the domestic and reproductive life. Early fertility, hence, marriageability is the quintessential, albeit not exclusive reason for a portrait. However, one hundred and thirty portraits are a considerable quantity to probe both the conceptual framework of the patriarchal culture and its feminine experience in the fifteenth century. My investigation began by asking not why but how both genders’ understanding of what it meant to be a woman, as an individual as well as a member of a community, shaped their pictorial characteristics. This Introduction explains, in sequence, the history of the genre until the fifteenth century, and the existing studies on Renaissance female portraiture. After a brief excursus into the practical implications of making a female likeness in the minefield of sexual morality, it explains the method and the structure of the book. It concludes with technical clarifications.

Portraiture from Antiquity to the Fifteenth Century: An Overview All agree that [the origin of painting] began with tracing an outline round a man’s shadow and consequently that pictures were originally done in this way […]. It was through the service of that same earth that modelling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter of Sicyon, at Corinth. He did this owing to his daughter, who was in love with a young man; and she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by a lamp. Her father pressed clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to fire […]. This happened before 146BC because the likeness of this effigy was preserved in the Shrine of the Nymphs until it was destroyed with the destruction of Corinth by Mummius.11 10 For instance, we have no portraits of Felice della Rovere (ca.1483–1536), the daughter of Pope Julius II (1443–1513) and the wife of Gian Giordano Orsini (d.1517). Yet, they must have existed because of her social prominence, and were also mentioned by Castiglione. See Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin Books, 2003 ed.), 252–53. 11 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 37 Books, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1952) Book XXXV. IV. 13–V. 16, 270–71; and XLIII. 151–152, 370-72 and 371–73.

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With this tale, Pliny the Elder (23/4–79CE) explained the birth of portraiture. Under its romantic cloak, the anecdote describes the power of portraits, in Graeco-Roman antiquity, to keep disbelief in a state of suspension by appealing to the imaginative faculties of the beholder. Like the images of the Gods, secular portraits stirred feelings in the beholder long after the death of the individual. Their style ranged quite radically, from veristic to classicising, depending on the social career of the person represented, and the purpose of the likeness. Sometimes, they were complemented by epigrammatic verses that spoke on behalf of the individual. By the time of Constantine the Great (ca.272–337CE), portraiture had become the privilege of the ruling elite, and had acquired schematic features that exuded authority and commanded fealty to an Imperial system that was otherwise crippled by short-lived rulers and civic dissents.12 Their communicative power outlived the Roman Empire. The activities of Alfonso X of Castile and Leon (1221–1284) are representative and encompassing examples. In a compilation of his decrees, El Espéculo, a passage in Section 14 declares it is obligatory to honour his likenesses, whether painted or sculpted, and that it is a sacrilegious crime to damage these items. In 1258, Alfonso started commissioning what would eventually be thirty-eight polychrome statues of his ancestors, the kings and consorts of Oviedo, Segovia, and Castile up to his own father. This group would have resembled the genealogical sculptures that still survive in the interior and exterior of Gothic church buildings.13 In Alfonso’s time, portraits were acquiring naturalism, coinciding with the propagation of physiognomic theories. One evidence of this stylistic change is the textual account of the poet Ottokar von Horneck (ca.1265–1318/22), who chronicled how a painter updated a likeness of the Emperor Rudolf of Habsburg (1218–1291) to make it reflect his aged appearance.14 From the fourteenth century, the genealogical portraiture of the type commissioned by Alfonso also became the subject 12 Eric Varner, From Caligula to Constantine: Tyranny and Transformation in Roman Portraiture (Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, 2000); John Pollini, ed., Roman Portraiture: Images of Character and Virtue, exh.cat. (Los Angeles: Fisher Gallery, University of Southern California, 1990); James D. Breckenridge, Likeness: A Conceptual History of Ancient Portraiture (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968). 13 Miguel Falomir, “The Court Portrait,” in Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian, eds. Lorne Campbell et al., exh.cat. (London: Yale University Press for National Gallery Company, 2008): 66–79 (66); G. M. Diez ed., Leyes de Alfonso X: I. Espéculo, trans. Michelle Marie Homden (Avila: Fundación Sánchez Albornoz, 1985), 167. 14 Stephen Perkinson, The Likeness of the King (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009); Erik Ingis, Faces of Power and Piety (London: The British Library and Los Angeles. J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008), 10. Stephen Perkinson, “Rethinking the Origins of Portraiture,” Gesta 46, no. 2, Contemporary Approaches to the Medieval Face (2007): 135–157; Georgia Sommers Wright, “The Reinvention of the Portrait Likeness in the Fourteenth Century,” Gesta 39, no. 2, Robert Branner and the Gothic (2000): 117–134.

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of fresco paintings, perhaps inspired by the medieval representations of the Nine Worthies. Although seemingly naturalistic, these figures were essentially idealised in features and miens according to courtly tropes on beauty, elegance, and valour. Their identification was entrusted to cyphers such as heraldry.15 The reliance on codes for this effect might have played a part in accelerating a more accurate type of resemblance in the fourteenth century. Now, with a growing demand for bespoke insigna by an equally growing number of social climbers, it must have caused some headaches to keep up with the who’s who of coats-of-arms!16 A growing demand for likenesses of contemporary religious figures such as St Francis (1181/82–1226), and a developing humanist culture also produced changes towards naturalistic portraits. The impact of humanism is epitomised by a text that the Paduan academic Pietro d’Abano (1246/57–1315/16) wrote sometime before 1310. This text discusses the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata Physica, a vast collection of questions on natural science probably composed in the third century BCE.17 In Book XXXVI, it is asked, “why do men make images which imitate especially the face of a man”? The text offers two answers: first, because a portrait represents the “structure” of the person represented, both in painting and in sculpture, “in order that thus we come to have the notion of that [person].” Secondly, this notion is possible because physiognomists pay great attention to the face, especially the eyes.18 These claims reflected the coterminous political efforts to demonstrate cultural affinity with antiquity.19 15 With the above, see also Julian Gardner, “Likeness and/or Representation in English and French Royal Portraits, ca.1250–1300,” in Das Porträt vor der Erfindung des Porträts, eds. Martin Büchsel and Peter Schmidt (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2003): 141–51; Enrico Castelnuovo, ‘“Propter quid imagines faciei faciunt’. Aspetti del Ritratto Pittorico nel Trecento,” in Le Metamorfosi del Ritratto, ed. Renzo Zorzi (Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venezia: Leo S. Olschki, 2002), 33–50; Herbert Furst, Portrait Painting: Its Nature and Function (London: John Lane the Bodley Head Limited, 1927). The courtly style influenced some non-aristocratic portraiture, as seen in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini discussed in the “Conclusions,” as explained in Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait-Painting in the 14th, 15th and 16th Centuries (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 41–44. 16 E.g., M. Michel Pastoureau, ‘L’effervescence emblématique et les origines héraldiques du portrait au XIVe siècle,’ Bulletin de la Société nationale des Antiquaires de France Année 1987 (1985), 108–115. Pastoureau and others have suggested a connection between the rise of profile portraits on panel and the development of a more sophisticated visual code of anthroponomy. See also Perkinson, The Likeness, 21–22. 17 The part of this text concerning portraiture is published in J. Thomann, “Pietro d’Abano on Giotto,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54 (1991): 238–244. 18 “Querit: Quare homines faciunt imagines representantes faciem hominis maxime.” And “quia per imagines faciei representatur qualis fuerit dispositio ipsius cuius est imago. […] Ut ea deveniamus in cognitionem illius ita. […] quo percipitur differentia distincta […], quod indicant physionomi attendentes magis ad signa que accipiuntur a facie ac ab oculis proprie.” Thomann, Pietro d’Abano, 241. 19 See his example of the Greek Philemon’s (ca.362–ca.262BCE) ability to recognise the character of Hippocrates from his portrait. Thomann, Pietro d’Abano, 243.

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D’Abano likened ancient Roman coins to exemplary sculpture portraits and bestowed on Giotto (1266/67/76–1337) the success of painted portraiture.20 With the profile on the obverse and an emblematic or allegorical device on the reverse, Roman medallic portraiture had conflated physical recognition with moral ideals, with which the sitter was presumed to be synonymous.21 By the mid-fourteenth century, ancient coins and medals had become collectable. New coins were also being produced featuring the likenesses of a new breed of Italian rulers, i.e., an elite emerged from imperial fealty and military appropriations.22 Their medallic portraits became quickly personalised, the obverse evoking the immortal virtues of the ancient emperors, the reverse suggesting the chivalric qualities of the miles Christianus popular in court culture. The modernisation of these ancient symbols was the work of a clique of intellectuals conversed in the culture of antiquity, who moved between these courts and the wealthy families of the Italian city-states. They too exchanged their own medallic portraits but as tokens of friendship and using an all’antica style that befitted the civic and moral foundations of their ideals of commonwealth.23 In the fifteenth century, female medallic portraits also circulated routinely, echoing the ancient items representing role models such as Faustina the Elder (ca.100–140CE).24 What D’Abano saw in Giotto’s skills was unarguably their acute interpretation of a trend that had begun in around ca.1250 in the Italian city-states. There had become popular what Enrico Castelnuovo has called “republican portraits,” viz. signifiers of the public offices or activities of the sitters.25 The faces of living people that populate Giotto’s frescoes are early examples of conspicuous collective portraiture in Italian Renaissance art. They are comparable to the northern dynastic images, as well as of the Nine Worthies, but with a republican twist. Seen alongside imaginary features of saintly figures, dressed in contemporary clothing, and surrounded by familiar sights, they enhanced the illusion that the frescoes were parallel realities, in which 20 Thomann, Pietro d’Abano, 241. 21 Michael Grant, “Roman Coins as Propaganda,” Archaeology 5 (Summer 1952): 79–85; Parker, Some Account of Coins. 22 Here, the term “imperial” refers to the Holy Roman Empire. 23 Luke Syson and Dillan Gordon, Pisanello: Painter to the Renaissance Court (London, National Gallery: Yale University Press, 2001), 109–130; Luke Syson, “Circulating a Likeness? Coin Portraits in Late Fifteenth-Century Italy,” in The Image of the Individual: Portraits in the Renaissance, eds. Nicholas Mann and Luke Syson (London: British Museum Press, 1998), 115–17. On chivalric culture in Italian courts, see Alison Cole, Italian Renaissance Courts: Art, Pleasure and Power (London: Lawrence King Publishing, 2016). 24 Luke Syson, “Consorts, Mistresses and Exemplary Women: The Female Medallic Portrait in FifteenthCentury Italy,” in The Sculpted Objects: 1400-1700, eds. Stuart Santini and Peta Motture (Aldershot, Hants, England: Scolar Press, 1997), 43–54. 25 Castelnuovo, Propter Quid Imagines, 44–45.

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the messages of good citizenship were reinforced by religious zeal. Furthermore, Giotto’s renditions of men and women, lay and saintly alike, are endowed with the sturdy physicality and penetrating gaze, which, together, make manifest their psychological dimension.26 The earliest extant autonomous portraits on panel since antiquity date to the fourteenth century. They both represent kings, and both capture the features of the sitters: the prof ile of King John of France (1319–1364), ca.1359, made possibly during the king’s captivity in England by his valet de chambre Gérard d’Orléans (d.1361); and Rudolph IV (1339–1365), ca.1360, in a three-quarter angle wearing a dubiously earned imperial crown.27 No female counterparts have survived from this period, but they surely existed since they are the subject of coterminous poetry, and they were made in other media. 28 The formats of these two heads would dominate the panorama of portraiture in the subsequent century, when the socio-political consolidation of the urban middling class augmented demand for individual and autonomous likenesses. In central-northern Italy, the interest in antiquity caused the prof ile format to prevail until mid-century and with an unscathed popularity for female likenesses until the last quarter of the century. In Italy, the healthy quantity of portraits of women also suggests encomiastic factors that need to be understood. In Flanders emerged a three- to eight-quarter angle with veristic traits and sombre colours. Among these, female portraiture stands in a quantity that is signif icantly lower than is its Italian counterpart. Yet, it is unprecedented for a northern territory. This phenomenon also requires analysis.

26 Julian Gardner, Giotto and His Public: Three Paradigms of Patronage (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2011); Aby Warburg, “The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie,” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, 2 vols., ed. Gertrud Bing, intr. Kurt Foster, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999 ed.), vol. I, 185–222; John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (London and New York: Phaidon Press Ltd, 1963), 27. 27 Falomir, The Court Portrait illustrates this shift to naturalism, which might have seen its epicentre in France. See also Perkinson, The Likeness; Stephen Perkinson, “From ‘Curious’ to Canonical: Jehan Roy de France and the Origins of the French School,” The Art Bulletin 87, no. 3 (Sep., 2005): 507–532; Andrew Martindale, Heroes, Ancestors, Relatives and the Birth of the Portrait (The Fourth Gerson Lecture, University of Groningen, 1988); Andrew Martindale, The Rise of the Artist in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972), 42–43. 28 Catherine E. King, “Self-Portrait,” in Renaissance Women Patrons: Wives and Widows in Italy ca.1300–1550 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 129–83; the Recueil d’Arras, a sixteenthcentury collection of sketches of individual and collective royal northern likenesses, from paintings to stained glass and sculptures, made during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries, in Lorne Campbell, “The Authorship of the Recueil d’Arras,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977): 301–313.

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Studies on Portraiture: A Critical Assessment My familiarity with many of the works featured in this book predates my academic career. Such is the likely experience of colleagues and lay readers alike, who would have seen them in museums, art history manuals, and on digital platforms. Thus, it seems extraordinary that, to date, an exegesis of female portraiture of the Renaissance does not exist. Of course, categorisations on the portraiture of the period exist. For instance, it is divided into narrative and independent portraits with an internal division into “portrait series,” “group portraits,” “double portraits,” and “single portraits.”29 It is classified by typologies, i.e. “donor portraits,” “devotional portraits,” and “independent portraits.”30 Or by the treatment of faces: “portrait features,” which reflected the effort to achieve a true likeness; “type features,” which evoked the traits of admired individuals, in order to create typecast images loaded with social and cultural implications; finally, “imaginary features” that were the products of the painter’s imagination.31 This treatment has also been subsumed under “idealisation” and “individualisation,” terms that speak for themselves, and “characterisation.” The latter intends to describe the process of enhancing, flattening, or distorting the most distinctive features of the sitter, such as eyebrows, nose, and lips, to improve their recognition.32 These taxonomies have stimulated reflections on male portraits and their relationship with Aristotelian and neo-platonic philosophies, and Christian ideals of male fraternity.33 Regarding female portraits, one approach echoes the oversimplification by Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt that early modern Italy had been a haven of gender equality.34 His theory peddled a pan-European psychobiographical enthusiasm for the Italian Renaissance artists, which fuelled an economy of misattributions and forgeries aimed at profligate art collectors, indifferent to and sometimes uninformed 29 This taxonomy is in Campbell, Renaissance Portraits. John Pope-Hennessy had already distinguished between independent and collective portraits, where he considered the former a “statement of the sitter’s personality,” or a “direct statement […] reinforced by literary means.” Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait, 205. 30 For example, Guy Bauman, “Early Flemish Portraits 1425–1525,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 43, no. 4 (Spring, 1986), 1–68. 31 F. David Martin, “On Portraiture: Some Distinctions,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Vol. 20, no. 1 (Autumn, 1961): 6172 (61–62). 32 Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, 9–22. 33 For example, Patricia Simons has classified male portraits into “overemphatic virility,” “ambiguous sexuality,” “melancholic sensitivity,” and “wary vulnerability,” in Patricia Simons, “Homosexual and Erotics in Italian Renaissance Portraiture,” in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester and NY: Manchester University Press, 1997), 29–51. 34 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, intr. Peter Burke, notes P. Murray, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (Penguin Books, London 1990).

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about their purchases, so long as they had Italian charm and signature.35 Consider how John Pope-Hennessy wrote on Renaissance portraiture in 1963. He placed extraordinary emphasis on the prominent patrons, sitters, and painters. As a result, he reduced the likenesses to court or allegorical fancies. Quite systematically, he emasculated female portraits by proposing, creatively if not unambiguously, artistic derivations from male iconographies.36 In 1990, Lorne Campbell published Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait-Painting in the 14th, 15th and 16th Centuries, which to this day remains an essential research tool, because of its staggering wealth of primary material. The author establishes the trajectory of the book as “what kinds of portraits were produced during the period, who produced them and from whom, how were they painted, why were they wanted, and how were they used.”37 These questions are crucial for identifying how gender discourses are visualised. Yet, whilst the observations on male portraiture are compelling, female likenesses are treated with undeserving simplicity. A case in point is the comparison of the two likenesses of Maria Baroncelli Portinari painted by Hans Memling (active 1465–d.1494) and Hugo Van der Goes (ca.1440–1482) in the 1470s,38 which claims that: [B]oth painters to some extent transformed Maria’s features by subjecting them to some fashionable ideals of beauty, but Memlinc flattered, disguising as far as possible the strange shape of Maria’s nose […]. Van der Goes does not hesitate to stress the ugly nose.39

It is worth remembering that in Memling’s rendition, Maria is fourteen or fifteen years of age, newly married and thus idealised, as images of young brides were. In Van der Goes’ painting, her facial traits reflect her maturity after the strain of three pregnancies. Her emaciation is too conspicuous to be considered the painter’s 35 As outlined in David Alan Brown et al., Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo’s Ginevra de Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women, exh.cat. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), 12–23. See also Evelyn Welch, “Engendering Italian Renaissance Art — A Bibliographic Review,” Papers of the British School at Rome 68 (2000): 201–216; Paola Tinagli, Women in Italian Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation, Identity (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), 7–9. 36 For example, his interpretation of Titian’s Flora as the “supreme example” of an implausible connection with Donatello’s David, subsequently adopted for “self-dramatizing portraiture.” Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait, 240. 37 Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, 9. 38 Hans Memling, Maria Portinari (right panel of the diptych), 1470s, oil on oak panel, 42 × 31.8 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, (14.40.626–27); Hugo van Der Goes, Maria Portinari and her Daughter Margherita presented by St Margaret and St Mary Magdalen (right wing of the Portinari Triptych), 1477–1478, oil on oak panel, 253 × 141 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (1890, nos. 3191–3192–3193). 39 Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, 22. Memling is also spelled as Memlinc.

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decision. It reveals a psychological dimension that is even enhanced by contrast with the idealised and imaginary features of the female saints behind her. Curiously, by placing aesthetic solutions solely in the artists’ hands, Campbell ignored the very questions that he had originally posited. Idealisation and characterisation in Renaissance portraits can deceive us as to their purpose. For instance, it is an established concept that the Italian female portraiture from this period reflects the paragone between painting and poetry informed by ancient texts such as Essays in Portraiture written by Lucian (ca.120–198CE), 40 and popularly debated in humanistic circles. Among the early proponents of this viewpoint, Elizabeth Cropper has argued eloquently that the Italian images from the 1470s gave rise to a conflict between the portrayal of beauty that is extrinsically evident, and that of an intrinsic beauty. 41 She has described this friction as the most “fertile paradox” that activated a permanent shift in focus from the sitter to her likeness, which became “a synecdoche for the beauty of painting itself.”42 However, as Cropper has also acknowledged, discourses on female beauty in the fifteenth century were influenced only partially by the revival of ancient ideas about portraiture. Medieval courtly love, Christian ideals, and overt misogynistic tropes carried as much weight. In other words, the synecdochal value of female portraiture suits more the early sixteenth-century attitude, redolent in the much-quoted manual on courtly etiquette The Book of the Courtier (pub. 1528) by Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529), 43 and confirmed by a literary genre that disseminated proto–eugenic fantasies about anatomical clues to a woman’s inner beauty: nose, teeth, hips and more. 44 Furthermore, discourses on portraiture in the sixteenth century became embroiled in the linguistic determinism that characterised the debates on artistic bravura. Thus, for example, the sculptor Vincenzo Danti (1530–1576) distinguished between “portraying,” i.e., reproducing the likeness with exactitude, and “imitating,” 40 Lucian of Samosata, “Essays in Portraiture,” and “Essays in Portraiture Defended,” in Lucian, 8 vols., trans. A. M. Harmon (London: William Heinemann Ltd, and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1961), vol. 4, 267–307 and 309–347. 41 Elizabeth Cropper, “The Beauty of Woman: Problems of Rhetoric of Renaissance Portraiture,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds. Margaret W. Fergusson, et al. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 175–90; Elizabeth Cropper “On Beautiful Women: Parmigianino, Petrarchismo and the Vernacular Style,” The Art Bulletin 58, no. 3 (September 1976): 374–394. 42 Cropper, The Beauty of Woman, 181 and 176. 43 As we know, this book was published in 1528, but the discussion it depicts took place in 1507. 44 For example, Galeazzo Flavio Capra, Della Eccellenza e Dignità delle Donne, ed. Maria Luisa Doglio (Roma: Bulzoni, 1988); Agnolo Firenzuola, Opere (Firenze: Sansoni, 1958). See also Mary Rogers, “The Decorum of Women’s Beauty: Trissino, Firenzuola, Luigini and the Representation of Women in Sixteenth Century Painting,” Renaissance Studies 2, no.1 (1988): 47–88; Cropper, On Beautiful Women.

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i.e., producing a perfected version of the actual appearance of the original.45 These distinctions abstracted the genre from the individualism prefigured by Giotto’s works, which reflected the importance placed on social bonds among the propertied classes before 1500. As the Florentine Paolo da Certaldo conveyed in ca.1360: “a body without soul is a man without friend.”46 Such a visceral psychosomatic parallel would grow into the Renaissance consideration of portraits as motions of the mind. 47 In western pictorial representations that include mirrors, Jonathan Miller has identified two categories: mirrors that reflect the individual and their surroundings in a factual way; mirrors that reveal the individual engaged on acts of self-improvement, in the self-conscious anticipation of moralising judgement.48 In medieval and Renaissance paintings mirrors were associated with wide-ranging metaphors at the root of which, however, remained the basic fact that these objects’ reflective properties help our real self approach our ideal best. My suggestion is, therefore, that idealisation and characterisation in fifteenth-century portraiture should be understood as technical strategies that met the anxieties associated with social conformity. The portraitist was at the centre of these anxieties, tasked with crafting the mirror image of our ideal best. As Roland Barthes outlined in 1980: In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture. 49

I therefore analyse these portraits from the known description of fifteenth-century art as a “deposit of a social relationship.”50 This leads me to the crucial consideration, historically neglected, that women as social actors were active agents in the pursuit of their ideal representation, however entangled with the patriarchal culture. I propose that in fifteenth-century female portraits, idealisation and characterisation were the zenith of what Édouard Pommier has called “le problème des rapports 45 In Paola Barocchi, Trattati d’ Arte del Cinquecento fra Manierismo e Contrariforma, 3 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1960), vol. 1, 246. 46 “Chente è il corpo senza l’anima, tale è l’uomo senza l’amico.” Paolo da Certaldo, Il Libro di Buoni Costumi (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1921), n. 46. 47 A review on this point is in Frank Zöllner, “The ‘Motions of the Mind’ in Renaissance Portraits: The Spiritual Dimension of Portraiture,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 68. Bd., H. 1 (2005): 23–40. 48 Jonathan Miller, On Reflections. exh.cat. (London: National Gallery Publications Limited, 1998), 142. 49 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage Books, 2000), 13. 50 Michael Baxandall, Painting as Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 1.

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entre l’idée et la Forme qui apparaît.”51 This problem was resolved in portraiture, as elsewhere, by raising women to poetical subjects, in a dialectical relation with their own environment rather than as de-socialised entities in men’s debates on art. To expand on this, the fifteenth century was a period of transition and of new balancing acts between the emerging urban elites and the impoverished aristocracies. Its cultural manifestations mirrored the ethical and practical preoccupations of these new realities. For instance, Italian portraits strove to visualise inner qualities by styling one’s outer appearance accordingly. This “mimetic idealism” fashioned what Harry Berger Jnr. has described as the “fiction of the pose.”52 It was clearly an oxymoron: how could these visual conceits be truthful accounts of the sitters? Yet, their pictorial details were consistent with the language and material culture produced by social, economic principles and so on. That is, by a shared milieu that put sitters and spectators in “descriptive affinity,” as John Shearman has explained.53 They were therefore the symbolic products of common beliefs and aspirations. Netherlandish portraits, instead, were highly characterised and enriched by a mood of spirituality that turned them into still-lifes akin to memento mori, for reasons that I will explain. However, was this not also a mimetic ideal? Furthermore, I argue that the imago feminae altogether formulated visually the biological cycle upon which the very survival of these social groups depended, and its metaphysical antitheses, presence vs. absence, or life vs. death. My rationale follows the versatility of portraiture in producing a visual mythopoiesis of social realities by acting simultaneously as a simulacrum of the absent person, and of the social and moral conventions of their milieu. This is something that David Martin perceived in an article published in 1961, where he further subdivided the foregoing definition of types, into “face,” “mask” and “effigy.” For instance, he described the portraits of Federigo da Montefeltro (1422–1482) and Battista Sforza (1446–1472) by Piero della Francesca (ca.1415–1492) as respectively a face, for its qualities that mirrored the character and spirit of the sitter; and a mask, i.e., “a set of clichés” determined by typecast immobility, which Martin 51 “The problem of the relationship between the idea and the form which appears.” Édouard Pommier, Théories du Portrait: de la Renaissance aux Lumières (Luçon: Gallimard, 1998), 27. My translation is technical. Basically, Pommier highlights the challenge of the early portraitists to capture the essence of the person represented. This was resolved, in fact, through the visual interpretation of the ideas and beliefs that connected the sitter to larger socio-cultural networks. 52 Harry Berger Jnr., “Fictions of the Pose: Facing the Gaze of Early Modern Portraiture,” Representations 46 (Spring 1994): 87–120 (99 and 96). 53 John Shearman, “Portraits and Poets,” in Only Connect… Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance: The A.W.Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1988 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 108–48 (142). Shearman further pointed out that the increasingly communicative quality of Italian portraiture relied on the cultural practices of Petrarchism and imitatio, as understood from the revival of classical texts. This aligns broadly with Cropper’s interpretation.

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interpreted as an index of genealogical and domestic virtues. In effect, he exposed the tension between her physical absence quite poignantly in fact, since Battista’s portrait is likely posthumous, and the perpetuity of her likeness. Finally, he drew a connection between the gender of the sitter, her image, and its consumption.54 Martin’s article came five years after Ruth Kelso’s seminal study Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (1956).55 Their insights prefigured the development of a feminist art history that seeks to understand the relationship between women and their representations.56 However, results from this approach, which has produced significant outcomes elsewhere, are delayed in Renaissance portraiture by an essentialism that reduces female representations to the object status of male agendas and female collusion with them.57 Such seems to be the conclusion of Patricia Simons’ important study of the Florentine female profile. Simons has proposed that the profile’s linear pattern abstracted the physical attributes of the sitters; that the refutation of eye contact marked her complete subservience to male control; and that the combined weight of these characteristics turned the painted surface into an emblem of patriarchal policies. Albeit appealing and, indeed, groundbreaking as an early microhistorical view on portraiture, the suggestion problematises how we should approach the existing male profiles, as well as women’s perception of and reactions to patriarchal restrictions.58 It also problematises how we should interpret evidence of female self-assertion. One such example is Isabella d’Este (1474–1539). The Marchioness of Mantua was a wise manager of her own identity. 54 Martin, On Portraiture, 65, 66, and 68; and Cat. 3. On Battista Sforza: Marinella Bonvicini Mazzanti, “Per Una Storia di Battista Sforza,” in Piero e Urbino, Pietro e le Corti Rinascimentali, ed. Paolo dal Poggetto, exh.cat. (Venezia: Marsilio Editori, 1992), 142–47. On this icon of Renaissance portraiture see Antonio Bertelli et al., Piero della Francesca e le Corti Italiane, exh.cat. (Milan: Skira, 2007); Ronald Lightbown, Piero della Francesca (New York, London, Paris: Abberville Press Publisher, 1992), 229–43. 55 Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956). 56 The development of a feminist art history cannot overlook Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979); Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1971). And also John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 1972), which maintains that women are perennially aware of being seen, hence conditioned into making themselves objects of gazes and judgements. Female representations in western art illustrate the standards of this conditioning, which encompass a range of provocations of male desire. 57 Limitations in feminist art history were already noted by the mid-1980s. See e.g., Griselda Pollock, “Women, Art and Ideology: Questions for Feminism Art Historians,” Women’s Art Journal 4, no. 1 (Spring – Summer 1983): 39–47. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds. Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany (New York: Harper and Row Publisher, 1982). 58 Patricia Simons, “Portraiture, Portrayal and Idealization: Ambiguous Individualism in Representations of Renaissance Women,” in Language and Images in Renaissance Italy, ed. Alison Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 263–311; Patricia Simons, “Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture,” History Workshop 25 (Spring, 1988): 4-30; Patricia Simons, “A Profile Portrait of a Renaissance Woman in the National Gallery of Victoria,” Art Bulletin of Victoria 28 (1987): 34–52.

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What may appear like an innocuous commission, a medal with her own profile from Gian Cristoforo Romano (1456–1512), amplified her involvement in cultural patronage and, further, her position within the public circuits of power.59 It is true that from the late Middle Ages, legal and social restrictions on women became stricter. From the mid 1980s, studies of these effects on women’s lives have been diverging, somehow mirroring the foregoing art historical reflections. On the one hand, there is the work of historians such as Margaret L. King and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber whose pioneering contextualisations have explained women’s life stages, careers, and adversities in the Renaissance. The message of this scholarship is that such restrictions were signs that the female sex was being defeated.60 It thus explains Simons’ interpretation of the Florentine likenesses. Their detailed jewelleries and fabrics showcased the economic and social value of the dowries. Dowries were mandatory and regulated by guidelines that could become the battleground of cognatic and agnatic disputes. Simons’ conclusion echoes Klapisch-Zuber’s view that Florentine women were passive victims of such quarrels. Other research has, instead, focused on the mechanism of female dealings with men and, simultaneously, with women within the larger network of kin. This line of enquiry tends to view the same restrictions as efforts to control a group that, in reality was resilient and resourceful. Stanley Chojnacki, Heather Gregory, Elaine Rosenthal, Sharon Strocchia, and Catherine King are among the early scholars who have demonstrated that women manipulated their limited legal, social, and domestic role to exert cultural and social influence. Artistic patronage and a shrewd use of their dowry funds were efficacious tools towards this achievement.61 At the time of writing, enquiries on this field are multiplying. With a more confident epistemological method, they demonstrate a successful navigation of the legal constraints that, however influenced by cognatic and natal ties, produced effective statements of personal agency.62 The visual clues in the portraits analysed here 59 Sarah D. P. Cockram, Isabella d’Este and Francesco Gonzaga: Power Sharing at the Italian Renaissance Court (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). 60 King, Women of the Renaissance; Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985). 61 Stanley Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice; King, Renaissance Women Patrons; Sharon Strocchia, “Remembering the Family: Women, Kin and Commemorative Masses in Renaissance Florence,” Renaissance Quarterly Vol. 42, No.4 (Winter, 1989): 635–654; Elaine G. Rosenthal, “The Position of Women in Renaissance Florence: Neither Autonomy Nor Subjection,” in Florence and Italy: Renaissance Studies in Honour of Nicolai Rubinstein, eds. Peter Denley and Caroline Elam (London: Westfield College, University of London, 1988), 369–81; Heather Gregory, “Daughters, Dowries and the Family in Fifteenth Century Florence,” Rinascimento 2nd series, 27 (1987): 215–237. 62 I wish to thank Rachel Delman for sharing her forthcoming Mary of Guelders: Female Power and Architectural Patronage in Late Medieval Scotland, which is an example of fresh research using this method.

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point in this direction. Finally, we must not forget that the changing economies of the early modern period created differing realities according to social standing, indigenous customs, geographies, and family economies.63 In describing the bourgeois sex-role system, Kelly was probing whether women had a renaissance during the Renaissance. As we move forward with new research, nowadays the question is rather what representations of women can tell us about women’s experiences of the period. In her 2013 essay on female portraits produced between the f ifteenth and the sixteenth century, Mary Rogers has addressed this issue but with no answer, because, by her own admission, the task is too complex for the scope of an article.64 Ultimately, although we have moved on from Burckhardt’s inaccuracies, the principles that guide the studies on Renaissance female portraiture have yet to overcome the tacit argument that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century portraits, and male and female portraiture belong in one, broad, and androcentric category. Books and exhibitions, which have now popularised Renaissance portraiture, perpetuate this assumption; one which this book hopes to recalibrate.65

Method and Structure of this Book Sitting for a portrait was not our predecessors’ idea of fun. It could be hampered by territorial distance, forcing painters to resort to verbal descriptions or existing images. It was often shortened or outright refused for being tedious, and technical examinations, surviving items, and archival research show that painters quickened the process by sketching on paper or directly on the panel. The Christian norms of gender propriety might have also prompted the presence of male guardians when the sitters were women.66 63 This point emerged with the seminal Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, E.P. Thompson, eds. Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe 1200–1800 (Cambridge, London, NY, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 64 Mary Rogers, “Artistic Representations,” in A Cultural History of Women in the Renaissance, 183–207. 65 From Campbell’s Renaissance Portraits to the exhibitions illustrated by Brown et al. Virtue and Beauty; Keith Christiansen and Stefan Weppelmann, eds. The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini, exh.cat. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011). 66 A host of examples are in Campbell, “Portrait Method,” in Renaissance Portraits, 159–91. It has also been suggested that the treatises on limning that rose in the sixteenth century, when portraiture started acquiring the status of a specialised artistic field, may explain some of these conditions. Francisco de Holanda (1517–1585) advised that painters and sitters should be alone possibly conversing until a suitable pose was found. In Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, 180. Nicholas Hilliard (ca.1547–1619) advocated the painter’s ref inement of manners and intellect, f itting to entertain his clients. Nicholas Hilliard, The Arte of Limning, eds. R.K.R. Thornton and T.G.S. Cain (The Mid Northumberland Arts Group: Carcanet

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An early sixteenth-century ceramic plate depicts a painter decorating a dish and observed by a man and a woman [Fig. I.2]. His concentration is on the lip of the dish and the well is still blank. The male onlooker pays close attention to the progress. His body language contrasts with the meek countenance of his companion, amplifying the visual effect of her mien and, with it, our perception of her respectability. Today’s knowledge of the popularity, then, of maiolica dishes decorated with belle donne should make us consider whether the painter may also paint her likeness in the well; in turn, whether such were the practical arrangements pertaining to women sitters, and whether women had words and judgement about their own likeness. Direct agency might have not been habitual, but we have knowledge of direct commissions and exchanges of likenesses among the women of the aristocracy. We know less about those from the propertied classes. The most colourful clue is perhaps a Florentine carnival song that rhymes in tongue-in-cheek about portrait-painters and their wishes to satisfy women’s search for their services.67 It seems, however, safe to assume that they too commissioned, acquired, and admired portraits.68 This book is founded upon such a premise. To address the enquiry, the primary and secondary sources include anthropology, family law, literature, philosophy, theology, and women’s studies. This span contextualises female portraiture within an established dual tradition of debates on women. One debate drew on the paradigm of Adam and Eve, and on influential pagan authors such as Aristotle (384–322BCE) and Galen (129–ca.200/16CE). It advocated the exclusion of women from the power structure because of their supposed biological and moral inadequacies, but it supported degrees of domestic agency. Another praised woman through the lens of Christian ideals and the etiquette of fealty in the medieval vassalage culture, directed to a lord, spiritual and lay alike. Although appearing encomiastic, this literature promoted but the two mono-dimensional models of bewitching and salvific beauty that were filial to the extreme examples of Eve and Mary. The revival of Platonism in the fifteenth century added further complexities, ultimately leading to the abstractions explored by Cropper and others. Because literacy was largely male, men were overwhelmingly the authors of the literature Press, 1992), esp. 44 and 54. These suggestions echo the story reported by Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) that Leonardo employed musicians, singers, and jesters to keep Mona Lisa engaged. Giorgio Vasari, “Vita di Lionardo da Vinci,” in Delle vite de’ scvltori, pittori, et architettori che sono stati da Cimabue in quà, 2 vols. (Fiorenza: Giunti, 1568), vol. 2, 1–11 (9). 67 “Canzona de’ Dipintori,” in Canti Carnascialeschi del Rinascimento, ed. Charles, S. Singleton, (Bari: Gius. Laterza e Figli, 1936), CXXXVI, 184–85. 68 Women also developed an attachment to their own likeness, as happened to Francesca Michiel, who took her own potrait with her, when she moved into her newly wedded husband’s house. Although it happened in 1567, this episode must have been by no means unique. Anna Bellavitis and Isabelle Chabot, “People and Property in Florence and Venice,” in At Home in Renaissance Italy, eds. Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis, exh.cat (London: V & A Publications, 2006), 76–85 (78 and note 9 [372]).

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on these themes. Restricted access to literacy and different priorities meant that fewer women wrote. Those who became accomplished writers were mainly from humanistic circles. Religion was also a strong stimulus for literary expressions. The results were exhilarating both in a mystical and in a somatic sense. They were also very dangerous, as Margarite Porete was to experience. She was burned at the stake on 1 June 1310 because her Mirror of Simple Souls described the journey of the soul towards the union with God through love but not the aid of priests.69 These issues are developed in Chapter One, The Cultural Background of Female Portraiture, which functions as the theoretical support for the subsequent chapters. In the conclusion it turns to story-telling to imagine the clatter of life around its protagonists. The subsequent chapters are object-based, with further primary and secondary material specific to the themes developed. Chapter Two, Women in Marriage Portraiture, explains how the institution of marriage, its rituals and material culture shaped the sign-system of marital portraiture. It also introduces the novel theory that among the marital commissions one at least served to confirm the premarital virginity of the bride. I call it the “Morgengabe portrait,” inspired by one of the descriptions of the medieval practice of a gift given to the bride on the morning after sexual consummation. Based on an assessment of fifty-six images, Chapter Three, Women in Profile Portraiture, investigates the enduring popularity of the profile format for female sitters in central-northern Italy. This chapter also presents the idea, developed over the course of the book, that the transalpine and the cisalpine image-spectator relations differed radically. To introduce this point, it compares the earliest surviving female profile portrait, a young aristocratic northern European woman, with the earliest Italian counterpart, also from a princely environment. The privileged reality of the sitter was to be seen–in the former. The latter was to be seen–as the configuration of the principles that defined the ideal commonwealth sought by the Italian urban elite. I call the Italian images “icons of urbanitas” to stress that they articulated an analogy between woman and the socio-political growth of these urban groups. Chapter Four, Netherlandish Female Portraiture in Context, evaluates the Netherlandish three-quarter female portraits, seventeen paintings, three drawings and one print which have hitherto not been studied as a group. It links their characteristics to the local socio-political complexities and the spiritual practices endorsed by the influential religious movement Devotio Moderna, with its epicentre in Flanders. Using this approach, I have discovered structural and aesthetic patterns aimed at illustrating an ideal elegance connected to religious morality. To describe these portraits, I have adapted into “icons of humility” the 69 Margaret Porete, The Mirror of Simple Soul, trans. Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., J.C. Marler, Judith Grant (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999).

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term ootmoed, translatable as a “spirituality of humility,” which Modern Devotion used to explain ideal female behaviours. Ootmoed became my matrix to understand the range of possible commissions, marital and not, among this stock. From it, one design stands out as the source of a pan-European representational development. In this chapter, I widen the parameters of seeing-in, which I bring to conclusion in Chapter Five by comparing it with the mode of seeing-as. In fact, Chapter Five, Netherlandish or not Netherlandish? Is That the Question?, assesses comparatively the modernity in Netherlandish and Italian portraiture. Its key concerns are pictorial styles, illusionistic settings, and mode of spectatorship. It concludes with the case study of Ginevra de’ Benci [Fig. 5.7] painted by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) in the 1470s, and the earliest European three-quarter female portrait against an expansive background. The analysis considers this painting’s successful amalgamation of Netherlandish and Italian artistic features as one evidence of women’s agency in defining their own mimetic identity. Chapter Six, Fifteenth-Century Venice: Performing Imaging, reinforces the trajectory of women’s self-imaging with focus on Venetian female portraiture. Why Venice? Throughout Europe, female sartorial styles were marks of family distinction. Among the entrepreneurial groups, they were perceived as evidence of the socio-economic success of the community because they were purchased with the dowry funds. With its prominent patriciate, the Serenissima boasted a culture of display that competed with that of the richest northern courts. This chapter connects areas of legislative changes and dowry regulations to the increasing social anxieties of the local patriciate to protect is own privileges. Its purpose is to show how women could acquire power in the patriarchal system. Subsequently, it proposes that the contrast between women’s everyday domesticity and formal public appearances amplified the symbolic value of the sartorial culture associated with each of these dimensions, and furnished platforms for acts of self-imaging that stressed the female immanence in the rhetoric of civic wealth and class distinction. The book ends with Conclusions that offer a critical summary of the overall contents and a novel analysis of the Arnolfini double portrait [Fig. 7.1]. The chapter on marriage and that on Venice complement each other because they provide an overview of the history of this institution, its customs, and legal requirements. The central chapters explain the difference between the modes of seeing-in and seeing-as of the northern and southern portrait culture, and they probe the extent to which the contradictions between misogynistic theories and practical interests in the patriarchal culture help us understand the feminine experience of such conditions. For instance, women’s agency in managing the domestic environment and the right to inheritance and to the dowry could result in forms of self-empowerment. Local women were idealised in poetical and visual imageries that encompassed what the humanist Vespasiano da Bisticci (1421–1498)

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called their “dowry of virtues.”70 However contrived, such flatteries must have stirred feelings akin to the elation when selfies on social media receive Likes. Poignantly, women knew that these praises entwined them with family and civic honour. Finally, women’s spiritual and literary endeavours created possibilities for personal accomplishments. Although these efforts were founded on internalised misogynistic biases, they sowed the seeds of a pro-women ideology.

Final Remarks Many of the footnotes of this book are unusually long because they are designed with the hope that they will be used as a tool for research. They provide bibliographical references, and the historical and technical information related to the images in the catalogue. In the footnotes, the catalogue entries are highlighted in bold. When possible, I used the primary sources in their original form and, unless stated, the translations are mine. The lexicon also requires clarifications: 1. With the term Renaissance, I refer to the fifteenth century and not later, as in today’s looser use. 2. To use the term middle class is historically premature, whereas middling class and attributes such as urban, civic, entrepreneurial, and propertied are more accurate reflections of the transitional characteristics of this social estate. At times, I also refer to this group as patriciate, or patricians. This denomination originated in ancient Rome to describe the oligarchy of families privileged by status, wealth, and legal protection. Social history has often borrowed it to designate the elites of the boroughs at the dawn of a European urban structure, and I follow this practice. 3. I describe the portraits as autonomous, independent, individual, in order to stress that they were conceived to be either alone or as companions but on separate panels. 4. Portraiture is often associated with the adjective “commemorative,” which can be a tribute to a living as well as to a deceased individual. To avoid possible confusions, here I use it in the sense of remembrance. 5. To describe the portraits’ backgrounds can also be a creative exercise. “Abstract” refers to a neutral background and when the background is not neutral, it means that it shows illusionistic settings, which, in the Conclusions, I also call “located.” I would have adopted this term earlier in the book but chose to avoid possible misunderstandings. 6. To familiarise with the Italian language of clothing, I suggest the glossary in Carol Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing (2002). 7. Whilst it is possible to ascertain signs of idealisation and characterisation, we cannot gauge the accuracy of likenesses of sitters long gone, entailed by the idea 70 Vespasiano da Bisticci, “Alessandra de’ Bardi,” in ‘Vite di Uomini Illustri del Secolo XV Scritte da Vespasiano da Bisticci, intr. Angelo Mai (Firenze: Barbera Bianchi e Comp., 1859), 531–58 (558).

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of individualisation. Therefore, I have avoided it, to stress that these portraits are windows into coterminous socio-cultural ideals. As Barthes noted: “Resemblance is a conformity […] to an identity. Now this identity is imprecise, even imaginary, to the point where I can continue to speak of ‘likeness’ without ever having seen the model.”71 With his remark in mind, in the chapters that follow I hope to to set new parameters and taxonomies for studies of female portraiture, and the experience of seeing and being seen in the patriarchal system.

71 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 100–02.

1.

The Cultural Background of Female Portraiture Abstract The views that women earn respect by disciplining their behaviour, and that such a respect is fused with their domestic identity are key aspects of the woman question in patriarchal culture. This chapter explains the roots of the arguments of the querelle des femmes from a selection of late medieval social and amorous literature. The quantity of male authors in this chapter is high because limited access to education meant that there were fewer women engaged in literary activities. However, this chapter also discusses women’s writings, their tone and contents. These are in the crucible of the biosocial ideal of femininity promoted by patriarchal tropes. A prolific strand also underscores a spiritual dimension, which women felt to be out of patriarchal control. This is explored in the final pages of this chapter, which altogether provides the theoretical framework for the contents of this book. Key words: Aristotle – Christianity – Humanism – Medieval Literature – Misogyny – Neo-platonism

“I’d really like to know why it is that men claim women to be so slow-witted,”1 the first professional female writer, the Italo–Franco Christine de Pizan (1364–ca.1430) asked in 1405. To explore the answer is to trace the legacy of the Greco-Roman patriarchal culture and the Judeo-Christian explanation of how humankind came to populate the Earth. For the Greeks, women were physiologically imperfect. Furthermore, the uterus, free to wander inside the body, caused irrationality and sexual lust.2 The purported inferiority of the female gender found evidence in the 1 Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 57. Worth consulting is also one of the earliest originals: Christine de Pizan, The Book of the Queen, created ca.1410–14, Harley MS 4431, British Library. 2 Ian MacLean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Misfortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), esp. 28–46. On the

Toreno, E., Netherlandish and Italian Female Portraiture in the Fifteenth Century. Gender, Identity, and the Tradition of Power. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463728614_ch01

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Christian explanation of the creation of Eve and the set of incidents that, spawned from her garrulity, arrogance, and coercion, lead to what would become a keystone of the Western cultural tradition: the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden [Fig. 1.1].3 This marriage of ideologies has since justified the patriarchal, patrimonial and patrilineal system mentioned in the Introduction. This chapter looks at the querelle des femmes in late medieval literature. One strand, which I call social, discussed female conduct and social identity. Another, which I call amorous, explored the realm of love. The overwhelming majority of these authors were men, as men were also the policymakers, thus indicating the extent of their control in shaping this narrative about women. There were only few female writers in these genres. Women’s literary expressions were mainly spiritual because religion did not require the intellectual education that was out of women’s reach. Crucially, spirituality was seen as synchronic with decorous piety, in itself a woman’s shield against a defaming reputation. Why women were attracted to religious discourses is, however, more complex than intellectual ignorance or fear of slander. It is an important story that needs telling. This chapter traces the key ideas that gave rise to this polyphony of voices.

Social Literature In the Middle Ages, theories about women’s psychophysical constitution and social identities reflected gendered interpretations of natural and divine laws, and discourses about the utility of marriage vs. celibacy. These arguments permeated all levels of society. From the thirteenth century, amid the rise in texts for the moral and social education of the aristocracy, there also rose a social literature that addressed the woman question. These were conduct and marriage manuals. Their universal principle was that women’s lives followed a straight-and-narrow path – marriageable, married and widow – dedicated to the physical and moral comfort of their fathers and husbands. A woman’s propriety was measured by the standards of her retiring nature and her control of the five senses: little speech, movement and so on. 4 Their instructions were entwined with socio-economic realities that benefited from fixed gender roles and the principle of the patria potestas. The following examples are cases in point. question of the uterus, 40–42. A useful summary of these ancient procreative theories is in Frederika H. Jacobs, “Woman’s Capacity to Create: The Unusual Case of Sofonisba Anguissola,” Renaissance Quarterly 47, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 74–101 (78-81). 3 Gen. 2:23; and Gen. 3: 1–24. 4 Glenn D. Burges, Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

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The thirteenth-century Somme du Roi educated wives on a strict control of their chastity and sobriety. Quickly translated into English as the Book of Vices and Virtues, it was used by priests with their parishioners.5 Del Reggimento e Costumi di Donna, which Francesco da Barberino (1264–1348) wrote in around 1309, remained popular throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Among its guidelines about female decorum were silence and obedience.6 In the Regole della Vita Matrimoniale, the Friar Cherubino da Spoleto (1414–1484) encouraged mutual love coupled with beating, from lenient to severe, to tame the “defective and wandering” nature of wives, “in order that she does not behave bad and worse.”7 This book was printed at least fourteen times between 1477 and 1495, and was published again in 1553.8 Some texts addressed women directly, as did Decor Puellarum, Gloria Mulierum and Palma Virtutem (1471), written by the fifteenth-century Carthusian monk Giovanni di Dio da Venezia for premarital virgins, married women, and widows. Decor Puellarum trained girls to domestic duties, and to appropriate dressing, personal hygiene, and a restrained demeanour.9 Similarly, the Ménagier de Paris (ca.1393) explained: [W]hen you go to town […] bear your head straight, keep your eyelids lowered and still, and look straight before you about four rods ahead and upon the ground, without looking nor turning your gaze upon any man or woman to right or to left, nor looking up, nor glancing from place to place, nor laughing, nor stopping to speak.10 5 Lorens d’Orléans, La Somme le Roi, created ca.1295, Add MS 54180, British Library. Modern English, Lorens d’Orléans, The Book of the Vices and Virtues, trans. Francis W. Nelson (London: University Press, 1942). 6 Francesco Barberino, Del Reggimento e Costumi di Donna, ed. Carlo Baudi di Vesme (Bologna: Gaetano Romagnoli, 1875) 7 “persona difettuosa ed errante [sia castigata e corretta e ripresa del suo delitto, difetto e peccato], per non fare male e peggio.” Frate Cherubino da Spoleto, Regole della Vita Matrimoniale, eds. Francesco Zamerini and Carlo Negroni (1477; rep., Bologna: Romagnoli dell’Acqua, 1888), 7–17 (10). Sometimes this text appears attributed to Cherubino da Siena because the original manuscript in the Biblioteca Riccardiana, Cod. 1411, shows the inscription “Fr. Cherubinus Senes”. Roberto Rusconi, “Cherubino da Spoleto,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 24 (1980), www.treccani.it 8 Gabriella Zarri, “Christian Good Manners: Spiritual and Monastic Rule in the Quattro- and Cinquecento in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society,” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. Letizia Panizza (Oxford: Legenda, European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford, 2000), 76–91 (80). 9 Sister Prudence Allen R.S.M, “The Early Humanist Education in Education for Women,” in The Concept of Woman: The Early Humanist Reformation, 1250–1500, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2002), vol. 2, 659–722 (659 and its note 1), which explains why some contemporary texts cite this manual as published in 1461. 10 Anonymous, Le Ménagier de Paris, trans. Eileen Power (London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd, 1928), 52. The author has been identified as Guy de Montigny, a knight of the Duke du Berry. In Jennifer Ward,

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The Ménagier was written by an aged French court official with the aim of making a competent and pious wife of his newly wed teenage bride. Its main concern was “the salvation of your soul and the comfort of your husband.”11 Widely read at that time, it is divided into three sections, each of which details her duties, as well as why, and how she must undertake them. The third section features a range of heroines in the style of Giovanni Boccaccio’s (1313–1375) De Claris Mulieribus (ca.1360, pub. 1374),12 a compendium of short biographies of worthy women from pagan and early Christian history. This literary genre claimed to illustrate the superiority of the female sex. In effect, it perpetuated the patriarchal attitude that from antiquity celebrated two types of female ideals. One was deemed responsible for socio-political changes that yet excluded women.13 The other was construed as a martyr–risen–to–icon. Two notable examples were Lucretia, wife of Collatinus or, as Boccaccio put it, the “most divine ornament of ancient frugality;”14 and Camilla, Queen of the Volscians. The former committed suicide to restore her family’s honour after she was raped. Her ultimate gesture also triggered the fall of the monarchy. The perpetrator was the son of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus (d.495BCE), subsequently the last king of Rome. Camilla on the other hand was Women in Medieval Europe 1200-1500 (Edinburgh and London: Pearson Education Limited, 2001), 64. For its original text, see Anonymous, Ménagier de Paris, Traité de Morale et d’Économie Domestique, Composé vers 1393 par un Bourgeois Parisien, eds. M. Juste de Noailles et M. Le Duc de Poix (Paris: Imprimerie de Chapelet, 1846). In contemporary English: Anonymous, The Good Wife’s Guide (Le Ménagier de Paris): A Medieval Household Book, trans. Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). 11 Anonymous, Le Ménagier, 43. 12 Giovanni Boccaccio, De Mulieribus Claris, created ca.1425–1450, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Shailor, B. Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Library, Marston MS 62. Because of its quality, I have also used this translation: Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women, ed. and trans. Virginia Brown (Cambridge Massachusetts, London England: The I Tatti Renaissance Library, 2001). Other texts in this vein are Juan Rodríguez de la Camera (or del Pardon, 13901450), The Triumph of Women (1438) and Bartolommeo Goggio (b. ca.1430), In Praise of Women (ca.1487). See Margaret Franklin, Boccaccio’s Heroines: Power and Virtue in Renaissance Society (Hampshire, England, Burlington USA: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2006). Further reference in Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil Jnr., “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: Introduction to the Series,” in Veronica Franco: Poems and Selected Letters, Veronica Franco with Ann Rosalind Jones and Margaret F. Rosenthal (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), ix–xxvi (xix–xx); Pamela Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman (United States of America: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1992), esp. “Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris: An Ambiguous Beginning,” (9–31) and “From Praise to Paradox: The First Italian Defenses of Women,” (33–64); Werner L. Gundersheimer, “Bartolommeo Goggio: A Feminist in Renaissance Ferrara,” Renaissance Quarterly 33, no. 2 (Summer, 1980): 175–200. 13 Rebecca Langlands, Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Douglas L. Cairns, Aidôs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 14 Boccaccio, “Lucretia,” in de Mulieribus Claris, 34v–35r (34v); and Boccaccio, “Lucretia, Wife of Collatinus,” in Famous Women, XLVIII, 96–98 (96).

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both virile and desexualised. Her virginal life, styled on the goddess Diana, ended on the battlefield against Aeneas’s army.15 Fictive characters were also created to teach feminine values. Remarkably popular was Griselda, the protagonist of the tenth novella of the tenth day in Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca.1349): a destitute but beautiful shepherdess, chosen as his wife by the local lord, the Marquis of Saluzzo, only to endure with impressive household management and undeterred obedience the insufferable cruelties of her husband’s perverse mission to test her integrity.16 Griselda became a household name in pan-European literature, vernacularising the hermeneutics of the sacrament of marriage, explained in Chapter Two. Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) wrote about Griselda in 1372–1373: [N]ot so much to encourage the married women of our day to imitate this wife’s patience, which to me seems hardly imitable, as to encourage the readers to imitate at least this woman’s constancy, so that what she maintained towards her husband they may maintain towards our God.17

Livre de la Vertu du Sacrement de Mariage (ca.1385) is a four-book sequential explanation of marriage as a mirror of the love and union between Christ and Church. Book Four presents Griselda’s story alongside Marian miracles.18 Similarly, in the Ménagier, her tale is used as socio-theological evidence of the laws of obedience.19 Authors like Boccaccio and Petrarch were the early products of an intellectual movement which began in Italy and known as Humanism.20 Humanists were the 15 Boccaccio, “Camilla,” in de Mulieribus Claris, 27r–28r; and Boccaccio, “Camilla, Queen of the Volscians,” in Famous Women, XXXIX, 76–78. 16 Giovanni Boccaccio, “Il Marchese di Saluzzo, da’ prieghi de’ suoi uomini etc,” in Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca (Torino: Utet, 1956), 867–79. Contemporary English: Giovanni Boccaccio, “How Marquis of Saluzzo, who has no time for women, marries a poor peasant girl etc.” in Decameron, trans. Guido Waldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 ed.), X. 10, 668–78. See also Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “The Griselda Complex,” in Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 213–46 (224–31). 17 Francesco Petrarca, Francis Petrarch: Letters of Old Age (Rerum senilium libri), 2 vols., trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernardo, (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992) Vol.2, XVII, 3, 655–68 (668). 18 Philippe De Mézières, Le Livre de la Vertu du Sacrement du Mariage, 4 books, ed. Joan B. Williamson (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1993), Book Four, 343–402 (359–76). This author attained eternal fame when, in 1370, he gifted the city of Venice with a fragment of the True Cross. In ca.1500, the Serenissima celebrated the miracles attributed to this relic by commissioning their stories to the most prominent painters of the time. These are considered among the treasures of Western art. 19 Anonymous, Le Ménagier, 113–36. 20 Margaret L. King ed., Renaissance Humanism: An Anthology of Sources (Indianapolis, US: Hackett Publishing Company, 2014); Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge:

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custodians of the studies of ancient pagan culture, which they coupled with early Christian sources. Because of their intellectual training, they were widely employed in educational and administrative positions. Therefore, they were active agents within the patriarchal fabric. Their tales of Lucretias and Griseldas dramatised a pathway to female nobility that was meant to derive not from the class system but, instead, from strict loyalty to patriarchal principles. The guidelines in conduct and marriage manuals made the extreme behaviours of these feminine models appear far from being extreme, because their sacrifice was to benefit the moral prosperity of their kin. This was, ultimately, the role of a wife. Hence, in De Re Uxoria (1415), the Venetian Francesco Barbaro (1390–1454) wrote that wives should “imitate the leaders of bees” in managing the household, and in imparting domestic and civic principles on their children, who were the socio-economic future of the family.21 In another De Re Uxoria (1433–1434), its author Alberti declared “how much utility is drawn from conjugal friendship and loyalty in preserving the household: in keeping the family unit, in maintaining and ruling its possessions.”22 If required, women entertained guests with musical and literary performances. Their duties would go as far as the management of the family’s financial and socio-political position, when husbands were absent either temporarily or permanently.23 Their mission was comparable to what anthropologists still note today in communities where women develop responsibilities and skills that help form the socio-economic identity of their spouses. These women have been called “incorporated wives.”24 Cambridge University Press, 2006 ed.); Robert Black ed., Renaissance Thought: Aa Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2001) and further references. 21 Francesco Barbaro, “On Wifely Duties,” in The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society, eds. Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt, trans. Benjamin G. Kohl (US: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 189–228 (217). As in the medieval Exultet, bees symbolised industriousness and chastity. See also Kohl and Witt, “Introduction,” in The Earthly Republic, 179–88; and the original Francesco Barbaro, De Re Uxoria, created 1435–1436, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Shailor, B. Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Library, Marston MS 250. 22 “quanta utilita si tragga da questa congiugale amicitia and sodalita in conservare la chasa domesticha: in contenere la famiglia in reggere e ghovernare tutta la masseritia.” Leon Battista Alberti, “De Re Uxoria,” in In Questo Volume si Contiene Libri della Famiglia Composta da M. Batista degli Alberti da Firenze, 1433–1440, Urb.Lat.229, The Vatican Library, DigitalVaticana, 45v-83r (49v). In contemporary Italian, Leon Battista Alberti, “De Re Uxoria,” in I libri della Famiglia, a cura di Ruggiero Romano, Alberto Tenenti, Francesco Furlan (Torino: Einaudi, 1994), 86-160. Trans.: Leon Battista Alberti, “De Re Uxoria,” in The Family in Renaissance Florence: Book One – Four, intr. and trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc., 2004 ed.), 92-154. 23 Gabrielle Langdon, Medici Women: Portraits of Power, Love and Betrayal (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Natalie R. Tomas, The Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence (Hampshire, England, Burlington USA: Ashgate, 2003), 21–23 and 30. 24 As noted by Tomas, The Medici Women, 29–32. See also Hilary Callan and Shirley Ardener, eds. The Incorporated Wife (Dover, Sidney: Billing and Son, Limited, 1984).

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In this covenant, canon lawyers described spouses as “equal and partners.”25 Their conjugal love was not today’s emotive experience but the maritalis affectio discussed by late medieval canon lawyers, which romanticised the responsibilities towards one another’s moral and material wealth. It was an exhortation to develop the sort of honesty and happiness in sharing the connubial practicalities emphatically preached by the charismatic Bernardino da Siena (1380–1444). However, this seeming equality was a delusion. First, a bride was selected according to specific standards: “[G]ood, lovely, wise, from good stock, self-controlled, God- and neighbours-loving. […] Charitable, modest, fertile,” as Fra Bernardino elaborated.26 To degrees that reflected a family’s affluence, this was a woman’s essential CV, her “dowry of virtues” mentioned in the Introduction, or in Leonardo Bruni’s (ca.1370–1444) words: “[G] ood family, a good appearance, modesty, fertility, children, riches and, especially, virtue and a good name.”27 At every turn, the desirable attributes in a woman shaped the same conventional ideal. Secondly, the patriarchal mechanisms based the relationship between husband and wife on the model of control and obedience between God and mankind. Unsurprisingly, the orations that humanists wrote for Italian aristocratic weddings compared State leaders to paterfamilias to explain how marriage was instrumental in collective prosperity.28 This simile did not pertain to the aristocracy alone; it dominated the classes of the wealthy. Within this organisation of powers, women as incorporated wives had degrees of public agency that gave them some purpose and authority. As Alberti explained in Economicus (1433–1434), husband and wife should behave “like the night-watch on the walls of the city; if one of them should fall asleep, he will not resent it if his companion wakes him up to pay his dues to his Country.”29 To be effective in this role, girls from the affluent patriciate and the nobility would receive formal education, 25 In Burgen, Conduct Becoming, 19. 26 “sia buona, sia bella, sia savia, di buon parentado, tutta moderata, con amore di Dio e del prossimo. […] piena di umiltà […], atta ad avere figlioli.” San Bernardino da Siena, “Come il Marito die Amare la Donna, così la Donna il suo Marito,” in Le Prediche Volgari, 2 Vols. (Siena: Tip. edit. all’inseg. di S. Bernardino, 1880), Vol. 2, XIX, 85–120 (88). 27 Tomas, The Medici Women, 14. 28 Anthony F. D’Elia, The Renaissance of Marriage in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: Harvard University Press, 2004). 29 “quelche noi fossemo chome chi fa la guardia lanotte in su lemura per la patria sua. Se forse diloro qualchuno sadormenta costui non a per male sel compagno lodesta a fare ildebito suo quanto sia utile alla patria.” Leon Battista Alberti, “Economicus,” in In Questo Volume si Contiene Libri della Famiglia Composta da M. Batista degli Alberti da Firenze, 1433–1440, Urb.Lat.229, The Vatican Library, DigitalVaticana, 129r–183r, (162r). In contemporary Italian: Leon Battista Alberti, “Economicus,” in I libri della Famiglia, a cura di Ruggiero Romano, Alberto Tenenti, Francesco Furlan (Torino: Einaudi, 1994), 161–277. In contemporary English: Leon Battista Alberti, “Economicus,” in The Family in Renaissance Florence: Book One – Four, intr. and trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc., 2004 ed.), 155–245.

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usually in nunneries or via male clerics.30 If expectations entailed acting politically and economically in lieu of their absent or deceased husbands, women would continue their studies during marriage.31 With fewer expectations, they received training in domestic management from their parents and, later, their husbands, as the purpose of the Ménagier shows.32 From the fourteenth century, women from the dynastic, patrician, and humanist families of northern and central Italy and the Kingdom of Naples gained access to private tutoring. This was aligned with the wider spread of the culture of Humanism and with their wifely duties. From the mid 1450s, this practice spread across northern Europe albeit less vigorously.33 The correspondence between Leonardo Bruni and Battista Montefeltro da Malatesta (1384–1448) after her marriage in

30 In the early modern period, families forced daughters to enter nunneries, in order to exploit the benefits of direct connections with clerical power; or to avoid dowry and inheritance losses. Nunneries also produced writers, whose work has since influenced mainstream Christianity. See Jessica Barr, “The Meaning of the Word: Language and Divine Understanding in Marguerite d’Oingt,” Mystics Quarterly 33, no. 1/2 (March/June 2007): 27–52; Silvia Evangelisti, Nuns: A History of Convent Life 1450-1700 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Gianna Pomata and Gabriella Zarri, eds., I Monasteri Femminili come Centri di Cultura fra Rinascimento e Barocco (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2005); K. J. P. Lowe, Nun’s Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Danielle Régneir-Bohler, “Literary and Mystical Voices,” in A History of Women in the West: II. Silences of the Middle Ages, ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1992), 427–82; Margaret L. King, “Daughters of Mary,” in Women of the Renaissance (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 81–156 (82–85 and 98); Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 31 An textual example of a widow’s duties is Alessandra Macinghi (negli) Strozzi (ca.1406–1471), Lettere di una Gentildonna Fiorentina del Secolo XV ai Figliuoli Esuli, Cesare Guasti (rep., Firenze: Sansoni, 1877 ed.). 32 See also D. H. Green, Women Readers in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Merry E. Wiesner, “Literacy and Learning,” in Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 143–74; Chiara Frugoni, “The Imagined Woman,” in A History of Women in the West: II. Silences of the Middle Ages, ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1992), 336–422 (esp. 397–407); Joan Gibson, “Educating for Silence: Renaissance Women and the Language Arts,” Hypatia 4, no. 1, The History of Women in Philosophy (Spring 1989): 9–27. 33 Carmel McCallum-Barry, “Learned Women of the Renaissance and Early Modern Period: The Relevance of their Scholarship,” in Rosie Wyles and Edith Hall, eds. Women Classical Scholars: Unsealing the Fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 29–47; Virginia Cox, “Origins,” in Women’s Writing in Italy: 1400–1550 (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1–36; Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jnr, eds. Her Immaculate Hand (Birmingham, New York: Medieval and Renaissance Text Studies, 1992), 16–30. Lisa Jardine, “‘O Decus Italiae Virgo’, or The Myth of the Learned Lady in the Renaissance,” The Historical Journal 28, no. 4 (December 1985): 799–819. Margaret L. King, “Thwarted Ambitions: Six Learned Women of the Italian Renaissance,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 59, no. 3 (Fall 1976): 280–304.

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1405 outlines a suitable syllabus.34 Bruni resented the fact that contemporary society lacked female learning and encouraged Battista to follow in the footsteps of ancient female writers. He identified suitable subject matters in the works of the early Latin and Greek theologians and Doctors of the Church; of the Roman pagan Cicero, Virgil, Livy, and Sallust; and in History, Greek and Latin poetry, oratorical and philosophical works, including those of Aristotle and Plato. His list was designed to help Battista acquire the qualities of divinity and moral philosophy, “the raisons d’être of your studies.”35 His wishes agreed with a folder of letters, dedications, encomia, and so on by celebrated humanists, each praising the same learned women in turn. Before marriage, these learned women were considered little prodigies, even though their literary activities were limited to epistolary and oratorical pieces in a rather formulaic and self-deprecating style. They performed what Susan Schibanoff has called a “rhetoric of impossibility:” their oratory and logic contradicted the inborn garrulousness of their sex, whilst amplifying the ordinariness of female ignorance.36 For example, at a diplomatic gathering, Ippolita Sforza (1446–1488) declared: “I, who suffer shyness and timidity because of my age, sex and frailty of mind, am struck with fear […] since I am aware that you are good-natured […] I shall undertake, bashfully and fearfully, the duty of speaking imposed on me.”37 In encompassing learning, filial duty, and the acceptance of her sex’s limitations, Ippolita gave an Oscar-worthy performance of her own dowry of virtues. Once married, women in her social position would go on to write diplomatic oratory and letters. It is difficult to ascertain whether male praises were sincere. The practice resembles the courtly male vassalage to virtuous ladies and produced a new catalogue of worthy female exempla that no longer listed ancient exempla but, instead, included members of the contemporary nobility and the prominent middling class. For some male humanists, women’s appetite for learning recalled their own disdain for the drudgery of everyday life, preoccupied as they were with being perceived as untainted by worldly ambitions. Hence, it has been suggested, these humanists aimed at cementing their place in male elite circles through the mediation of wives, mothers, 34 Leonardo Bruni, “The Study of Literature to Lady Battista Malatesta of Montefeltro,” in Humanist Educational Treatises, trans. Craig W. Kallendorf (USA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 47–63. 35 Bruni, The Study of Literature, 54. See also Allen, The Concept of Woman, vol. 2, 691–700. 36 Susan Schibanoff, “Botticelli’s Madonna del Magnificat: Constructing the Woman Writer in Early Humanist Italy,” PMLA 109, no. 2 (March 1994): 190–206. Also, D. H. Green, Women Readers, 84–114; Mary Rogers and Paola Tinagli, Women in Italy: Ideals and Realities, a Sourcebook (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005); Wiesner, “Literacy and Learning,” in Women and Gender, 143–74; Gibson, Educating for Silence. 37 Bianca Sforza, “Oration of the Illustrious Duchess of Calabria, Daughter of the Glorious Francesco, Duke of Milan, Delivered to the Highest Lord Pope Pius in the Consistory of Cardinals, Mantua, 1459, in the Month of July,” in Her Immaculate Hand, 47–48 (47).

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and daughters, whom they flattered with their intellectual accomplishments and epideictic skills.38 However self-regarding, this practice resulted in recognising a category of women within networks of power. The utilitarian nature of arranged marriages also meant to wed individual and collective socio-economic advantages, and women were the catalysts for these benef its. How they appeared and behaved in public therefore became a measure of this marriage, triggering a real competition in wardrobe and self-grooming. Religious authorities opposed it: Fra Bernardino ranted, “if they spent as much of it on their soul as they do on beautifying their bodies, they would turn into St Catherine.”39 Expenditures for women were topoi of female profligacy in anti-marriage literature, the first “joy” that any newly wed husband would discover according to the satirical Les Quinze Joies du Mariage (ca.1400). 40 Across Europe, they were targeted by Sumptuary Laws, which sought to curb excessive vanity, to regulate fashion according to social standing, and to increase communal revenues from f ines and tolls against the lawbreakers. 41 These laws were especially popular in Italy and equally ill-received, if not wilfully contravened, because female sartorial elegance, though expensive and begrudged, was endowed with transformative powers that suited the rhetoric of the good wife. As Boccaccio’s Griselda taught, dressed as a bride she “appeared to change inside and in her manners. She was […] of a lovely face and a lovely body, and thus, as lovely as she was, she became so graceful, so pleasant and so well-mannered, that she did not seem to have been […] a shepherdess, but from [the family of] a noble lord.”42 38 Cox, Origins, 17–18. 39 In Iris Origo, The World of San Bernardino (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963), 49–50. 40 Anonymous, Les Quinze Joies du Mariage, ed. and trans. Nelly Labère (Paris: Gallimard, 2016 ed.), 55–75. Brent Pitts, ed. The Fifteen Joys of Marriage = Les XV Joies du Mariage (NY: Peter Lang Publishing Inc, 1985). Owing to its use of an acrostic, this text is considered by Antoine de La Sale in the manuscript Le Quinze Joyes de Mariage, created 1480–1490, Bibliothèque Municipale, Rouen, Y. 20, 84v–150v. 41 Isis Sturtewagen and Bruno Bondé, “Playing by the Rules? Dressing without Sumptuary Laws in the Low Countries from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Century,” in The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, ca.1200-1800, eds. Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 74–95 (75); Thomas Kuhen, Family and Gender in Renaissance Italy: 1300–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 320–24; Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy 1200–1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); Jane Bridgeman, “‘Pagare le Pompe’: Why Quattrocento Sumptuary Laws did not Work,” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, 209–26; Diane Owen Hughes, “Sumptuary Laws and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy,” in Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 69–100. 42 “La giovine sposa parve che co’ vestimenti insieme l’animo e i costumi mutasse. Ella era, come già dicemmo, di persona e di viso bella, e così come bella era, divenne tanto avvenevole, tanto piacevole e tanto costumata, che non figliuola di Giannucole e guardiana di pecore pareva stata, ma d’alcun nobile signore.” Boccaccio, Il Marchese di Saluzzo, 870.

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According to the Lord of Rimini, Sigismondo Malatesta (1417–1468), elegant women brought prestige to a city.43 Even jurists complained because, as the canon lawyer Petrus Ancharanus (d.1416) explained: [O]n account of the general custom and usages of the city, such things are accustomed to be sent by the husband. And it would be a shame to him not to send [them], for it would violate custom, and as a result he would be convicted among good men weighty in authority […] Furthermore, what anyone does on account of the dread of disgrace, he is said to do by necessity. 44

In De Ornato Mulierum (1447), the Florentine Antonio Roselli (1381–1466) argued that elegance had neither ecclesiastical nor civil jurisdiction. Roselli drew a distinction between finery as expression of vanity and lust, and as a social necessity: it pleased the husbands; in fact, it helped unmarried girls find a husband!45 These male grievances betrayed social and material pragmatism. Consider the words costume and custom, both present in Romance and Germanic languages; and both deriving from the Latin consuetudo: a habit, a convention. Words as these show the etymological-semantic genesis of the standards of judgement of conduct and appearance in moral norms and traditions. 46 Female apparel suitably expressed these discourses because, owned and given by men in marital transactions, it represented family and, further, public decorum. In some cases, such as Venice and Florence, it even symbolised the very economies of manufactures and trade in luxury goods controlled by the urban elites. 47 In sum, Sumptuary Laws exposed the ethical, social, and fiscal paradoxes of the marriage market. Today, we may see these women as family ornaments. Unsurprisingly, the lexicon of their finery indirectly articulated their experience of patriarchy. Two female writers of the period will suffice to show the relation between language and practice. 43 Luke Syson and Dillan Gordon, Pisanello: Painter to the Renaissance Court (London, National Gallery: Yale University Press: 2001), 72. 44 In Jane Fair Bestor, “Marriage Transactions in Renaissance Italy and Mauss’s Essay on the Gift,” Past and Present 164 (August 1999): 6–46 (29). 45 Antonio Roselli, “De Ornatu Mumierum,” in The Virtue of Good Taste: A Translation of Antonio Roselli’s De Ornato Mulierum with Historical and Historiographical Commentary, trans. M. Christina Bruno, Master Diss. (Fordham University, 2008), Appendix. Concessions existed for un-betrothed and newly married girls: C. Mazzi, Due Provvisioni Suntuarie Fiorentine: 29 Novembre 1464 – 29 Febbraio 1471 [1472] (Firenze: Aldino, 1908), I: 18, (7); II: 10, (10). See also Maria Grazia Ciardi Duprè (a cura di), L’Oreficeria nella Firenze del Quattrocento (Firenze: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1977), 293. 46 This concept has a history of semantic associations. Fair Bestor mentions the Latin relation between decus (n.) and decet (v), in Fair Bestor, Marriage Transactions, 36. We trace its footprint in the Italian: decente, decoro; and English: decoration and “decorum. 47 Kuhen, Family and Gender, 322–23.

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On the one hand, in a tirade against sumptuary restrictions, its presumptive author, Nicolosa Sanuti (d.1505), argued that elegance was an essential mark of femininity. 48 Her harangue may appear comparable to women’s efforts nowadays to convey their femininity by exaggerating or altering their appearance. On the other hand, Laura Cereta (1469–1499) retiring from the world at her husband’s death, asked the receiver of her confession to “conjure up in your mind an ordinary woman, drab of face and drably dressed – for I care more for letters than for flashy clothes.”49 Due to family pressure, it was customary for young widows to remarry. Some managed to evade this duty, as Cereta did. Others managed to remain unmarried. In her lexical appropriation, Cereta proposed a tautology between education and chastity, something of a trope in the literary circles that praised the learned women, the literate, who rejected marriage. For instance, the humanist Ludovico Foscarini (1409–1480), commended Isotta Nogarola (1418–1466) on “the golden robes of your family, their full wardrobes and frequent changes, while you always wear the same dress, neither dirty nor ornate, which brings you closer to your creator.”50 Writing on Nogarola in 1490, the sycophantic Giovanni Sabadino (ca.1445–1510) wondered if words existed to commend sufficiently her “virginity and knowledge.”51 This tautology defied the preconception that women had inherited Eve’s sexual deviancy and were therefore unbridled sexual creatures. Aside from clerical misogyny, the squabbles went more or less as follows: In On the Convenience and Inconvenience of Wives by fifteenth-century Domenico Sabino, Hypolitus postulates that “it is much easier to defend an unfortified citadel on a low plain than to keep a wife free from shameless lust.”52 However, his interlocutor Emilia argues that men sin more culpably than women do because they engage in sodomy.53 Institutionalised misogyny was the backdrop of these retaliations. Fornication between unmarried couples had been heresy since 1287, and from the end of the fourteenth century both Church and secular officials tightened control of sexual 48 Catherine Kovesi Killerby, “‘Heralds of a Well Instructed Mind’: Nicolosa Sanuti’s Defence of Women and their Clothes,” Renaissance Studies 13, no. 3 (1999): 255–282. 49 “Laura Cereta to Augustinus Aemilius: Curse Against the Ornamentation of Women,” in Her Immaculate Hand, 77–80 (79). 50 “In Ludovico Foscarini to Isotta Nogarola,” in Her Immaculate Hand, 117–21 (118). On Nogarola’s complete works, Isotta Nogarola, Complete Writings: Letterbook, Dialogue on Adam and Eve, Orations, trans. Margaret L. King and Diana Robin (Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 51 “‘virginità et doctrina.” Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, “De Isota vergene da Nugarola,” in Gynevera de la clare donne, a cura di Corrado Ricci e A. Bacchi della Lega (Bologna: Romagnoli dall’Acqua, 1880), 173–180 (173). 52 Cited in Anthony F. D’Elia, “Marriage, Sexual Pleasure, and Learned Brides in the Wedding Orations of Fifteenth-Century Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 55, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 379–433 (407). 53 D’ Elia, Marriage, 408; See also Jeffrey Richards, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1994), 31.

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behaviour. Although legislation targeted both sexes, laws on women reached absurd heights. This was the case with the 1428 statute in the city of Belluno, which stated that women over the age of twenty were not virgins unless proven with evidence.54 Nogarola herself was a telltale example of this medley of prejudices. Educated by Martino Rizzoni (1404–1488), a pupil of Guarino da Verona (1374–1460), she sought literary recognition. Although Guarino was an apologist for female learning, he initially ignored her, causing derision among the women of her birthplace, Verona. Even his belated praise of her erudition did not prevent her from being accused anonymously of incest because “a fluent woman is never chaste; and the behaviour of many learned women also confirms its truth.”55 If women like Nicolosa Sanuti unconsciously stood for engrained misconceptions about female worth, a phallocentric premise also weakened the arguments of women like Cereta and Nogarola. Consider Nogarola’s most notable literary contribution. It is a moral exploration of the sin committed by Adam and Eve co-written with Foscarini in the form of a dialogue (1453), which concludes that Eve sinned excusably and less seriously than Adam, because she was made inferior and imperfect by God. In his perfection, therefore, Adam should have followed the commandment of the Creator and not that of a weak creature.56 With a Lacanian display of psychosexual castration, these literate strove to acquire, as Erasmus (1466–1536) would put it, “that masculine strength of mind that enables them to debate important matters.”57 Christine de Pizan laboured as a writer to “become a man.”58 In her Livre de la Mutacio de Fortune (completed 1403), she sought a psychophysical metamorphosis that would make her a fit commander of her own ship.59 Thus, it would be normative for 54 James A. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 492. 55 The letter is in Margaret L. King, “The Religious Retreat of Isotta Nogarola (1418–1466): Sexism and Its Consequences in the Fifteenth Century,” Signs 3, no. 4 (Summer 1978): 807–822 (809). 56 Isotta Nogarola and Ludovico Foscarini, “Of the Equal and Unequal Sin of Adam and Eve: An Honourable Disputation between the Illustrious Lord Ludovico Foscarini, Venetian Ddoctor of Arts and both Laws, and the Noble and Learned and Divine Lady Isotta Nogarola of Verona, Regarding the Judgement of Aurelius Augustine: They Sinned Unequally According to Sex, but Equally According to Pride,” in Her Immaculate Hand, 59–69. Some scholars attribute full authorship to Nogarola. In Cox, Women’s Writing, 11 and 266 (note 60). 57 Erasmus of Rotterdam, “The Institution of Marriage,” in Erasmus on Women, ed. Erika Rummel (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 21. Jacques Lacan, Formations of the Unconscious: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (Cambridge: Politi Press, 2017). King has called them “sexless virago[s]:” King, “Virgo and Virago,” in Women of the Renaissance, 157–239 (192). 58 In Régneir-Bohler, Literary and Mystical Voices, 438. On Pizan’s literary activity, see Kate Langdon Forhan, The Political Theory of Christine de Pizan (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2019). 59 Régneir-Bohler, Literary and Mystical Voices, 439. See also Nadia Margolis, An Introduction to Christine de Pizan (Gainseville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2011).

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the humanist Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494) to address another writer, Cassandra Fedele (ca.1465–1558), as the Volscian Camilla.60 Some were unimpressed by male praises. Cereta, for instance, identified herself and other like-minded women with the misandrist gorgon par excellence: “You pretend to admire me as a female prodigy, […] you wait perpetually in ambush to entrap my lovely sex […] but only a low and vulgar mind would think to halt Medusa with honey.”61 Like their male counterparts, female humanists created a canon of worthy women. However, theirs were not meant to be imitative models but evidence that female worth was inborn. Yet, in their polyphony of complaints against the treatment of women, their conclusions were prejudiced. Cereta considered female inferiority an untenable assumption but her evidence to the contrary were ancient martyrs, and her attitude towards her own sex was laden with unconscious biases: only “those in whom a deeper integrity yearns for virtue, […] harden their bodies with sobriety and trial, and curb their tongue” could achieve the highest intellectual goals.62 The most authoritative genealogy of worthy women in this respect is Christine’s City of Ladies (1405), a community of heroines, whose merits may provoke conflicting reactions in today’s reader, as encapsulated by a passage in her account of the rape of Lucretia. The modernity of Christine’s insights emerges in her rejection of the insult, enduring still, that this is what women want: “[I]t therefore angers and upsets me when men claim that women want to be raped.” Her interlocutor Rectitude supports her exasperation but with the damning discrimination that resonates with today’s tropes about women asking for violence: “[Y]ou can be sure that women who are chaste and lead a moral existence will find no pleasure in being raped.”63 Although seeking emancipation, these female writers ultimately struggled to unshackle the feminine ideal from its misogynistic truisms. Aside from Christine de Pizan, a widow with children after a happy marriage, the lives of the literate were laden with personal conflicts. Some entered convents; others married and, consequentially, struggled to continue their studies. Common 60 Jardine, O Decus Italiae Virgo, 805. 61 Laura Cereta, “Laura Cereta, to Bibulus Sempronius: Defense of the Liberal Instruction of Women,” in Her Immaculate Hand, 81–84 (81). And Albert Rabil, Laura Cereta: Quattrocento Humanist (New York: State University of New York at Binghamton, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1981). 62 In Cereta, to Bibulus Sempronius, 83. 63 Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, 147. In 1980, the Italian feminist historian Ginevra Conti Odorisio explained that before the French Revolution writings in favour of women were theoretical (femminismo teorico). Only afterwards, did they become militant (femminismo moderno). Ginevra Conti Odorisio, Storia dell’Idea Femminista in Italia (Torino: Eri, 1980). See also Kevin Browlee, “Christine de Pizan’s Canonical Authors: The Special Case of Boccaccio,” Comparative Literature Studies 32, no. 2 (1995): 244–261. Patricia Phillippy, “Establishing Authority: Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus and Christine de Pizan’s Le Livre de la Cité des Dames,” Romanic Review 77, no. 3 (1986): 167–193.

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life patterns involved childlessness, long periods of unknown illnesses, confinement within a convent or in their own house in widowhood. For instance, like Cassandra Fedele, the Florentine Antonia Giannotti Pulci (b.1452), author of considerable literary achievements, married in 1470. In 1473, she was sick until at least until 1480. Widowed in 1488 and with no children, she died in a convent.64 These women perpetuated a pan-European tradition that resonates in the earlier words of Beguine Mechthild of Magdeburgh (ca.1212–ca.1282): “[W]e wear our everyday work clothes when we are healthy. And, when we are ill, our bridal dress.”65

Amorous Literature Medieval literature described love for women as a vassal servitude. In this literature, women are routinely angelic and exquisitely mannered. Masculinity, exercised on the battlefield, capitulated hopelessly before the contemplation of such visions. Passion then led to spiritual elevation and sometimes to erotic experiences that transcended the artificiality of marital love. Although seemingly in control of the man’s destiny, the beloved was silent and passive: sometimes unaware, sometimes unresponsive, sometimes simply crushed by the lover’s persuasive wooing. Among the writings that explain the behavioural codes in this type of romance is the twelfth-century Art of Courtly Love. Popular for centuries, its contents are sequences of dialogues; thus, it is one rare text that invites us to imagine female voices, only to find that they are the foil for male rationality.66 In sum, the foundations of the ideal romance perpetuated the active-passive dichotomy and masculine-feminine hierarchy of gender interactions. From the thirteenth century onwards, in central Italy this feminine ideal became entwined with Christian mysticism and pre-Christian philosophy, as I explain through selected case studies.67 In Dolce Stil Novo, Dante Alighieri (ca.1265–1321) endowed this ideal with the body of a young Florentine, commonly 64 Anna Laura Saso, “Antonia Giannotti,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani Vol. 54 (2000), www.treccani. it; Franco Pignatti, “Cassandra Fedele,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 45 (1995), www.treccani.it 65 In Fiona Bowie, ed. Beguine Spirituality: An Anthology, trans. Oliver Davies (London: SPCK, 1989), 84. 66 Andrea Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, intr. and trans. John Jan Parry (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1959). Katherine C. Little and Nicola McDonald, eds. Thinking Medieval Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Sharon Kinoshita and Peggy McCracken, “Courtly Love and Feudal Society: Historical Context,” in Marie de France: A Critical Companion (Cambridge: D.S.Brewer, 2012), 51–112; Joan Tasker Grimbert and Carol J. Chase, Chrétien de Troyes in Prose: The Burgundian Erec and Cligés (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011); Lynette R. Muir, Literature and Society in Medieval France: The Mirror and the Image 1100-1500 (London: MacMillan Publisher, 1985). 67 Raoul Bruni, “Il divino entusiasmo del poeta: Ricerche sulla storia di un tópos,” PhD diss. (Università degli Studi di Padova, Dipartimento di Italianistica, 2008).

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identified as Beatrice Portinari (1265–1290), and his companion during his journey to Paradise.68 In the pastoral world of Ameto, or Comedia delle Ninfe Fiorentine (1341–1342), Boccaccio described its gentrifying power: the protagonist, the young Ameto, runs into a gathering of nymphs as he ambles along the Etrurian countryside. Among them, angelic Lia ignites his love. Meanwhile, the nymphs entertain him with amorous tales. Upon the last of the tales, Venus appears, “light of the sky, one and three, beginning and end of all things,” to an Ameto who has now grown urbane.69 The story allegorises the rise of humankind, Ameto, from its primitive state, fortif ied by the cardinal and theological virtues, the nymphs, and the power of love, Lia, under divine auspices embodied in Venus. Unarguably, she is the conflation of her multiple cults in antiquity with theological reinterpretations.70 In Laura, his own version of Beatrice, Petrarch probed the moral, philosophical, and psychological facets of male improvement through the contemplation of this feminine ideal. In her, he loved “not so much her body but her soul, pleased by that countenance that surpasses human condition […]. And if her death left me f irst, I would comfort my anguish […]: ‘Her virtue I loved, which is not extinguished’.”71 The debt of this concept to ancient discourses about the perpetuity of the soul became evident in the following century. In 1457, the humanist Cristoforo Landino (1424–1498), described love as one of the soul’s four fervours perceived from the contemplation of beauty.72 In 1476, the eminent Platonist, Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499),

68 Dante Alighieri, Vita Nova, a cura di Stefano Carrai, 3 rd ed. (Milano: BUR, 2011); Dante Alighieri, “Paradiso,” in La Divina Commedia, a cura di Natalino Sapegno (Firenze: La Nuova Italiana Editrice, 1974) 69 “luce del cielo […], principio e fine di ciascuna cosa.” Giovanni Boccaccio, “L’Ameto,” in Tutte le Opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, 5 vols., ed. Nicola Bruscoli (Bari: Laterza, 1940), vol. 5, 2–152 (141). 70 In antiquity Venus was worshipped as Genetrix (the mother of all things), Coelestis (of heavenly love), Naturalis (of earthly love) and Verecondia (of female chastity). Plato, Symposium, intr. and trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994 ed.). See also Irene Earls, Renaissance Art: A Topical Dictionary (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1987), 296. 71 “nec me tam corpus noveris amasse quam animam, moribus humana transcendentibus delectatum, quorum exemplo qualiter inter celicolas vivatur, admoneor. Itaque si – quod solo torque auditu – me prior moriens illa desereret, quid agerem interrogas? Com Lelio, romanorum sapientissimo, proprias miserias consolarer: Virtutem illius amavi, que extincta non est.” Francesco Petrarca, “Book Three,” in Secretum, 3 Books, ed. Enrico Carrara (Milano and Napoli: Einaudi, 1977), 110–195 (120). Also Francesco Petrarca, Le Rime, ed. and comm. Giosuè Carducci e Severino Ferrari (Firenze: Sansoni, 1965); Francesco Petrarca, Il Canzoniere di Francesco Petrarca riprodotto letteralmente dal Cod. Vat. Lat. 3195, ed. Ettore Modigliani (Roma: Società Filologica Romana, 1904). 72 Bruni, Il Divino Entusiasmo, 81–110. On the inter-texual imitatio of ancient and modern authors see Martin L. McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

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called it platonic.73 His Commentary of Plato’s Symposium (1467) clarified Agathon’s original speech on the interrelation between interior and exterior perfection: In any cases it is the internal perfection which produces the external. The former we call goodness, the latter beauty. […] beauty is the blossom, so to speak, of goodness. By the allurements of this blossom, as though by a kind of bait, the latent interior goodness attracts all who see it. But since the cognition of our mind has its origins in the senses, we would never know the goodness hidden away in the inner nature of things, nor desire it, unless we were led to it by its manifestations in exterior appearance.74

This hierarchical relationship between goodness and beauty, arising from the platonic dialectic between corporeal and incorporeal entities, was the quintessence of neo-platonism: When the body is beautiful and the soul is not at all, let us be slow and reluctant to worship the bodily beauty, like the shadowy passing image of beauty. When the soul alone is beautiful, let us love ardently this immutable beauty of the soul. When either beauty happens to coincide with the other, let us be especially adoring, and thus we shall testify to our having belonged to the Platonic family.75

This dialectic flourished in humanist writings on beauty, which are replete with analogies, hyperboles, and paradoxes akin to the death/memory oxymoron found in ancient literature. Among the countless examples of this theme, the Urbinate Angelo Galli (late fourteenth century–1459) left “these happy and dainty verses / will tell not idly about her / these verses that deserve gold / and not black ink / and that shall only die with the death of time.”76 Echoes of this oxymoron existed in the amorous literature that expressed feelings of loss and longing through ekphrastic portraiture. North and south of the Alps, this literature pivoted on the trope of 73 Marsilio Ficino, “As Love is, So is Friendship,” in The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, 12 vols. trans. the Language Department of the School of Economic Science, London (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1994), vol. 5, 81–83. See also, Marsilio Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, trans. Jane Sear Reynolds (A.M. Columbia: University of Missouri, 1944), 13–33. And James Hankins, “The Myth of the Platonic Academy of Florence,” Renaissance Quarterly 44, no. 3 (Autumn 1991): 429-475; Alison Brown, “Platonism in Fifteenth-Century Florence and Its Contribution to Early Modern Political Thought,” The Journal of Modern History 58, no. 2 (June 1986): 383–413. 74 Ficino, Chapter I, Fifth Speech, in Commentary, 164–65. 75 Ficino, Chapter IV, First Speech, in Commentary, 132. 76 “questi felici e graziosi versi / non gia per se ma diran de tal donna / che mertan doro questi inchiostri negri / cheduraranno fin che duraltempo.” Angelo Galli, Rime, created fifteenth cent., Urb.Lat.699, The Vatican Library, DigitalVaticana, 12v–13r.

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likenesses as the gifts or encomia of the absent lover, as redolently penned by Guillaume de Machaut (ca.1300–1377) and Jean Froissart (ca.1333–ca.1401).77 However, in the humanist culture the same oxymoron began resembling the ancient concept of ut pictura poesis,78 thus altering the perception of portraiture from mere substitute to revelatory of the beloved’s incorporeal beauty. Proto-examples of this phase are two cansos written by Jacopo da Lentini, notary during the reign of Frederick II (1194–1250) and exponent of the Sicilian School. They overtly liken the image in the poet’s heart to that of his beloved’s painted face, and the mnemonic effort of the lover to that of the painter in rendering her likeness.79 Using the same image/ memory simile, Petrarch’s Sonnet LXXVII of his Rime Sparse praises the painter, Simone Martini (1280/85–1344), for having rendered the likeness of Laura. As this is likened to her other-worldly representation, it implicitly encourages a paragone between art and reality. In the subsequent LXXVIII, the likeness soothes Petrarch with its silent acceptance of his pangs as he compares Simone to the ancient sculptor Pygmalion, whose gods brought his beloved statue to life, thus implicitly granting the genre a revelatory function.80 In the fifteenth century, the interconnection of text, image and memory was the expression of ad aeternum love. For example, in Sonnet LXXXII of his Canzoniere (ca.1473), the oligarch and prolific writer Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–1492) laments the inadequacy of the painted likeness of the beloved in comparison with her real traits: the former is perceived through intellectual faculties, the latter through the senses. However, he comforts himself, if beautiful the likeness will reveal the beloved’s true form, and hence her divine nature.81 77 A large selection of examples is in Crhysa Damianaki Romano, “‘Come se Fussi Viva e Pura.’ Ritrattistica e Lirica Cortigiana tra Quattro e Cinquecento,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance T. 60, no. 2 (1998): 349–394. See also Robert Baldwin, “‘Gates Pure and Shining and Serene’: Mutual Gazing as an Amatory Motif in Western Literature and Art,” Renaissance and Reformation 10 (1986): 23–48. 78 Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1967). 79 “‘Meravigliosamente / un amor mi distringe / e mi tene ad ogn’ora. / Com’om che pone mente / in altro exemplo pinge / la simile pintura, / così, bella, facc’eo, / che ‘nfra lo core meo / porto la figura. / In cor par ch’eo vi porti, / pinta come parete / e non pare di fore. / […] / Avendo gran disio, / dipinsi una pintura, / bella, voi simigliante, / e quando voi non vio, / guardo ‘n quella figura, / e par che crede / salvarsi per sua fede, / ancor non veggia inante.” See also Song III: “Io non poter mi turba, / com’om che pinge e sturba / e pure li dispiace / lo pingere che face – e si riprende, /chè non è da blasmare / omo che cade in mare – se s’aprende.” Rocco R. Vanasco, La Poesia di Giacomo da Lentini: Analisi Strutturali (Bologna: Patron Editore, 1979), 39–41 and 13. 80 Petrarca, Le Rime, Sonnets LXXVII and LXXVIII, 120–121 and 121–122; Petrarca, Il Canzoniere di Francesco Petrarca, f.52. 81 “Se dolce armonia due instrumenti / nella medesma voce alcun concorda, / pulsando l’una, rende l’altra corda, / per la conformità, medesmi accenti. / Cosí par dentro al mio cor si risenti / l’imago impressa, a’ nostri sospir’ sorda, / se per similitudin mi ricorda / del viso, ch’è sopra l’umane menti. / Amor, in quanti modi il cor ripigli! / Ché fuggendo l’aspetto del bel viso, / d’una vana pittura il cor pascendo, / o che non

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This poetic of beauty was not confined to platonic love. It encompassed friendship and domestic relations. In other words, it romanticised the social duties of patriarchy. As a passage from Alberti’s De Re Uxoria explains, “[e]ven an uncivilised, spendthrift, greasy and drunken [woman] could be physically attractive: but no one will ever regard her as a beautiful wife. The topmost habits extolled in a woman are modesty and cleanness.”82 Put simply, the ancient juxtaposition between the sensual and the sensuous, i.e., between the carnal and the spiritual contemplation of beauty, safely sheltered both adulterous thoughts and the “conjugal friendship and loyalty,” to which was attributed the household’s whole wealth.83 Lorenzo de’ Medici, also a consummate adulterer, cleverly glossed over this ambivalence. The proemio to his Comento (ca.1473–1474; 1482–1484; 1490) explains beauty as a natural magnet due to the human inclination to procreation. It is the nest of the greatness of God, and the pathway to excellent deeds. Eyes and physical appearance ignite love, which takes root as it discovers the virtues of intelligence, courtesy, honesty, good bearing and disposition, sweetness of voice, wisdom of words, constancy, and fidelity. Yet, perfection is attained only in requited love, which matures if the lover strives towards the same desirable qualities. In this mutuality, love encourages the spouses to overcome intellectual mediocrity and the sins of the senses, to which mortals are inclined.84 Religious moralists such as the Dominican Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498) used the same language to describe this bond: “The beloved is in the lover; because he is in the heart of the other; thence the groom said to his bride: seal your heart with me because this sacramental bond is as strong as death.”85 As Virginia Cox has argued, neo-platonism provided lay society with a spiritual alternative to the moral decadence of the very clerical authorities that regulated gender ethics. It promoted female beauty as a source of unceasing spiritual vegghino altro i nostri cigli, / o che il pittor già fussi in paradiso, / lei vidi propria: or va’ d’Amor fuggendo.” Lorenzo de’ Medici, “Canzoniere,” in Tutte le Opere, ed. Orvieto (Roma: Salerno Editrice, 1992), I, Sonetto LXXXII, 178–83. 82 “Che gia una barbara scialaquata unta and ubriaca poteva nelle fattezze essere formosa: ma sara mai chi lastimi bella moglie. Eprimi chostumi inuna donna lodatissimi sono modestia and nettezza”. Alberti, De Re Uxoria, 60v. 83 “congiugale amicitia & sodalita.” Alberti, De Re Uxoria, 49v. 84 Proemio in Lorenzo de Medici, “Comento dei miei sonetti,” in Opere, ed. Tiziano Zanato (Torino: Einaudi, 1992), 3–157 (4–6). 85 “lo amato è nello amante; perché egli è nello affetto di quello; onde lo sposo disse alla sposa: Poni me come un signacolo sopra il cor tuo perché la dilezione è forte come la morte.” Girolamo Savonarola, “Nella Prima Epistola di San Giovanni ed in altri luoghi della Sacra Scrittura,” in Sermoni e Prediche di F. Girolamo Savonarola de’ Predicatori (Firenze: Ranieri Guasti, 1846), 1–12 (7). The word dilezione indicates the spiritual bond of the Christian marriage, the precise nature of which is discussed in Chapter Two. On the simile comparing Passion and marriage in theological writing, see Robert Baldwin, “Marriage as a Sacramental Reflection of the Passion: The Mirror in Jan van Eyck’s ‘Arnolfini Wedding’,” Oud Holland 98, no. 2 (1984): 57–75.

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goodness.86 This explains the fetish for platonic muses in Medicean Florence, the putative mother culture of this movement. However, it does not follow that neoplatonism and humanism actually understood female psychology. It perpetuated a single, static ideal of angelic beauty, and its principles comfortably coexisted with a repulsive misogyny. Take Ficino himself: “[W]omen should be like chamber pots: hidden away once a man has pissed in them.”87 Ficino’s view echoes the emotional turmoil of the protagonist of the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose. Contrary to the benefits of social contracts, yet still avidly read in the fifteenth century, this text unsparingly reasons against love: [H]ostile peace and loving hatred, disloyal loyalty and loyal disloyalty […], demented reason and reasonable madness […]; a thirst that is always drunk, an intoxication drunk with thirst […]. A joyful sorrow and an unhappy joy […], sin touched by pardon tainted by sin […]. The whole world treads the path […] except those excommunicated by Genius.88

Both negative and positive attitudes towards women exploited the theme of the bewitching power of the female gaze to highlight the risks of love. The danger of the female glance haunted men for centuries, even portrait painters. For instance, Nicholas Hilliard (ca.1547–1619) advised that, “wee are all generally commanded to turne awaye ouer eyes frome beauty of humayne shape, least it inflame the mind, howe then the curious drawer wach, and as it catch those louely graces wittye smiling, and those stolne glances wch sudainely like lighting passé.”89 Women rarely wrote about earthly love. The twelfth-century twelve lays attributed to Marie de France are the most significant pre fifteenth-century writing on this theme.90 They are considered the work of a well-educated woman because of their literary references and the intensity with which the female characters convey feminine themes. Their moral lessons draw on the attitudes of a courtly audience, 86 Virginia Cox, Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 22. 87 In Dale Kent, “Women in Renaissance Florence,” in Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo’s Ginevra de Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women, eds. David Alan Brown et al., exh.cat. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), 26–45 (27). 88 Guillame de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, intr. and trans. Frances Horgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 ed.), 4263-4329. See also Douglas Kelly, Internal Difference and Meaning in the Roman de la Rose (London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). 89 Nicholas Hilliard, The Arte of Limning, eds. R.K.R. Thornton and T.G.S Cain (The Mid Northumberland Arts Group: Carcanet Press 1992), 56. 90 Marie de France, The Lais of Marie de France, intr. Keith Busby, trans. Glynn Burgess (England: Penguin Classics, 1999 ed.). See also Kinoshita and McCracken, Marie de France; Matilda Tomaryn et al., Songs of the Women Troubadours, Garland Library of Medieval Literature (New York: Rutledge, 2000).

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for which they might have been written. For example, Bisclavret is the story of a werewolf entrapped in his animal state by his wife, who has discovered his true nature and now has a lover. As a sentence for her extramarital affair, clearly a more serious crime than her husband’s lycanthropic transgressions, she and her female progeny receive the denasatio, nose’s cutting, a punishment inflicted on illegal prostitutes and a form of private vendetta against sexual crimes.91 Active around 1405, Medea or Amidea degli Aleardi may represent the early phase of a female lyrical tradition with a psychological dimension. In one of her two known surviving poems, she compares herself to famous suicidal pagan women abandoned by their lovers.92 The poems by Girolama Corsi (1494–1509) and Camilla Scarampa (1476–1520) describe the emotions of absent, unrequited, betrayed love in a style that reveals erudite knowledge of Dolce Stil Novo, Petrarchism, neo-platonism and classical Latin poetry.93 A madrigal poem by Scarampa stands out for its ocular expressiveness, when she describes her lover’s eyes as “gay, sad, proud, humble, haughty […] f illing me with hopes and fears.”94 Such an acute observation challenges the misgivings about the female gaze in the amorous literature and the guidelines on female conduct discussed above. It signals cultural changes in the wake of the sixteenth century, including a pan-European rise in literary activities by women, who today are studied according to their social career as “grande dame, women scholars, nuns, religious or political activists, cortegiane oneste and patricians.”95

Surrender in Resistance A diverse social theatre, instead, emerges from the contemporary novellas, popular imageries, and carnival songs, where prostitution, concubinage, adultery, sexual peccadillos, and social transactions by women from all social classes were everyday realities. Apart from working women, church-going and public festivities were among the obvious moments of female visibility. These were also moments for 91 Marie de France, The Lais, 68–72. Mutilations were designed to destroy the person’s social identity. For instance, men had their hands amputated to hamper their working life; women were disfigured to crush their unmarriageability. Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 109; Valentin Groebner and Pamela Selwyn, “Losing Face, Saving Face: Noses and Honour in the Late Medieval Town,” History Workshop Journal 40 (Autumn, 1995): 1–15.http://www.clas. ufl.edu/users/jshoaf/Marie/ 92 Cox, Women’s Writing, 71. 93 Cox, Lyric Poetry, 16-19; Cox, Origins, 2–36. 94 “Lieti, mesti, superbi, umili, alteri […] onde di speme e di timor m’empiete.” Cox, Lyric Poetry, 75. 95 “Introduction” in Catarina M. Wilson, ed. Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1987), iv–xl (xxviii).

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courtship. Therefore, the proliferation of conduct manuals during these centuries perhaps resulted from the difficulty in policing people’s behaviours.96 What’s more, in the marriage market, the goods were expected to be flaunted. For example, in his Trattato dell’Architettura (1460s) the architect Antonio di Piero Averlino, known as Filarete (1400–1469) proposed that girls from wealthy families should take Sunday forays in the company of guardians, neatly dressed in green gowns with the right shoulder embroidered with an olive garland around a sleeping unicorn. Panoptical strategies would stretch into window shopping: houses should have designated areas resembling monastic abodes but with windows to allow outsiders to assess the girls’ domestic skills, hence their suitability as wives.97 But beyond the ideal behaviour that would secure marriage, what women had in common was the religion that had shaped this ideal, regardless of class or social expectation. This, ironically, became the means of exiting from the patriarchal system. Religious messages reached women from street preaching and church sermons that mixed with the everyday noises of the medieval city. In most cases, they were double-acts with visual imageries, in keeping with the educational values of the history of Western religious art. For instance, in a 1427 sermon, Fra Bernardino orated before the Annunciation (ca.1333) by Simone Martini, then in the Siena Cathedral: Have you seen that [Virgin] Annunciate […]? She seems to me to strike the most beautiful attitude, the most reverent and modest imaginable. Note that she does not look at the angel but is almost frightened. She knew that it was an angel […]. What would she have done had it been a man! Take this as an example, you maidens.98

96 My observation is not new. See e.g., Guido Ruggiero, “Marriage, Love, Sex and Renaissance Civic Morality,” in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 10–30. On popular literature, see e.g., Lorenzo de Medici, “Canti Carnascialeschi,” in Opere, 2 vols., ed. Attilio Simioni (Bari: G. Laterza e Figli, 1914), vol. 2, 8–383; Lorenzo de’ Medici, Tutti i trionfi, carri, mascherate o canti carnascialeschi andati per Firenze dal tempo del Magnifico Lorenzo de’ Medici fino all’ anno 1559, ed. Anton Francesco Grazzini, J Verkruys, Rinaldo Maria Bracci (Lucca: Cosmopoli, 1750). 97 “uno luogho che alloro sia comodo e […] hordinato inmodo che nessuno huomo glipossa percagione niuna andare. […] come dire uno monisterio. […] ma […] in modo sipossino vedere, percagione s’aranno amaritare.” “an area that is convenient to them and […] organised so that no man can access for any reason. […] like a monastery. […] but […] to be seen, for the reason that they will get married.” Antonio Averlino (Filarete), Trattato dell’Architettura, created ca. fifteenth cent., Firenze, BNCF, Fondo Nazionale, ms. II.I.140, 299–300 (300). The standard translation of this text is Filarete (Antonio Averlino), Treatise on Architecture, intr. and trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965). 98 In Keith Christiansen et al., Painting in Renaissance Siena 1420–1550, exh.cat. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art pub., 1988), 4. Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, Annunciazione, ca.1333, tempera on panel, 263 × 305 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (1890 nos. 451, 452, 453).

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Like the Marian example, some visual models were especially suited for young girls. For Cardinal Giovanni Dominici (ca.1356–1419) in Regola del Governo di Cura Familiare (1416) houses should have images of: [Y]oung saints or virgins, by [the example of] which your child, still in swaddling clothes, may be entertained and enraptured […]. Thus young girls should wish to be raised in the guise of the eleven thousand virgins […] Agnes with the big lamb, Cecilia crowned with roses, Elisabet full of roses, Catherine on the wheel […].99

These images were mnemo-didactic tools, amid popular meditative practices in the Christian culture. Zardino de Oration (mid-fifteenth century), for example, recommended introspective and unceasing focus on hymns and psalms, to subject bodily desires to the control of the mind. It recommended its readers create a mental impression of the people, facts, and places in the life of Christ, and even to fashion Christ’s closest circle in the guise of individuals known to them for their virtues.100 The language of these instructions blurred the distinction between seeing and thinking. For instance, “the sixth meditation is […] looking at that sweetest little boy, who cries in the nativity.”101 The theologian Jean Gerson (1363–1429) explained this process explicitly: “[W]e ought thus to learn to transcend with our minds from the visible things to the invisible, from the corporeal to the spiritual. For this is the purpose of the image.”102 Depth of devotion was measured by somatic manifestations, from tears to grieving gestures, spasms and so on. The reason, the Zardino expounds, is that the soul in a state of self-reflection upon one’s sins generates heat and this, in turn, causes deep shaking. This paroxysm coincides with the soul’s purification thanks to divine splendour.103 The causes and effects of the positive interpretations of excessive physical reactions permeate the histories of severe monastic and eremitic lifestyles, which in Europe received new momentum in the thirteenth century. Unsurprisingly, the author of the Zardino Nicholas di Osimo (d.1453) was from the mendicant Order 99 “santi fanciulli o vergini giovanette, nelle quali il tuo f igliuol, ancora nelle fascie, si diletti come simile e dal simile rapito […] Ben sta la Vergine Maria col fanciullo in braccio […]. Così vorrebero nutricare le piccolo fanciule nell’aspetto dell’ undici mila vergini […] Agnesa col grasso agnello, Cecilia di rose incoronata, Elisabet di rose piena, Caterina in sulla ruota […].” Giovanni Dominici, Regola del Governo di Cura Familiare, ed. Donato Salvi (Firenze: Angiolo Gabinei Libraio, 1860), 131–32. 100 Nicholas di Osimo, Zardino de Oration: Fructuoso (Venice: Bernardinus Benalius?, 1494), 36–37, 156–58, 161–63. 101 “La sesta meditatione e contemplare che ti dei fare guardando quello dolcissimo picolino che piange nel presepio.” Nicholas di Osimo, Zardino, 163. 102 Cited in Bret L. Rothstein, Sight and Spirituality in Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 57–58. 103 Nicholas di Osimo, Zardino, 90.

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of the Franciscans. Aside from the obvious connections between the meditative themes, viz. the landmarks of Christ’s life, and the popular religious iconographies of devotion, these practices blurred the distinction between faith and fantasy in the devout Christian, whose contemplation gave life and interactive actions to the figures of devotion, whether painted or sculpted.104 Coupled with meditation was penitential self-harming, which was also encouraged by clerics. Also popular were fasting, and undergarments that “will hold you like a hairshirt of sheer chastity; not allowing any of your movements or temptations, and cleaning with discipline every sordidness that may threaten to grow.”105 Fasting was considered an expression of piety, and of penance for Eve’s gluttony. Altogether, it purified the body in preparation for the host. The effects were interpreted ontologically. For instance, the cramps of starvation evoked the longing for Jesus. The presence of Jesus himself was felt during fasting, as the hagiography of Mary Magdalene earnestly showed. She had been transported daily to heaven “lifted up in the air of angels, and heard the glorious song of the heavenly companies with her bodily ears. Of which she was fed and filled with right sweet meats […] as she had no need of corporal nourishing.”106 Surveys have shown that men usually chose this lifestyle in their early adulthood and after personal crises, whereas women started in childhood, often before the age of seven. The highest cohort came from the urban classes of central Italy especially, perhaps as a reaction to patriarchal restrictions.107 From nuns and anchorites to followers of mendicant orders, and even wives, whose private mystical universe compensated for their grim marital life, they gathered in droves around Christocentric practices, which opened a direct channel to the divinity removed from misogynistic biases. Consider the figures of bookish Mary and the third-century martyr Catherine of Alexandria, who had converted pagan philosophers to the 104 Jennifer Bryan, Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and Private Self in Late-Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Gordon Rudy, Mystical Language of Sensation in the Later Middle Ages (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). 105 “Farai una camicia bianca e monda, che ti pugnerà come ciliccio di pura castità; non consentendo ad alcun tuo movimento o tentazione, e colla disciplina nettando ogni bruttura di nascer minacciasse.” Dominici, Regola, 67. On bodily self-harming, see Jerome Kroll and Bernard Bachrach, The Mystic Mind: The Psychology of Medieval Mystics (New York and Oxon: Routledge, 2005). 106 Jacopo da Voragine, “Here Followeth the Life of S. Mary Magdalene, and First of Her Name,” in The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints Compiled by Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, 1275, first edition published 1470, 7 vols., ed. F.S. Ellis, trans. William Caxton (1483; rep., London: Temple Classics, 1900) vol 4, n. 36. On how mystics understood hunger, see also Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York: University of California Press, 1987). 107 Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

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Christian faith and became Christ’s mystical bride.108 The results could be explosive: “[F]or I am a woman, ignorant, weak and frail […]. Just because I am a woman must I therefore believe that I must not tell you about the goodness of God [?]”109 exulted the English visionary anchoress Julian of Norwich (ca.1342–after 1416). Beguine Marguerite Porete, mentioned in the Introduction, placed the doctrine of the annihilation of the soul above St Paul’s vision of the Trinity. She was among the promoters of the theory that the soul’s will is free to unite with God; this also enabled an independence from clerical control. Her Mirror of the Simple Soul remains a popular spiritual reference to the present.110 If female writers used the language of clothing to wrestle with the woman question, the visionary borrowed from the language of love to describe their visions of Christ. The results were, by today’s standards, explicitly erotic. The complexity of such emotions was increased by key theological concepts, which created an androgynous synthesis of genders and roles for Christ: simultaneously father and mother, son and husband, as God he created man; as God incarnate, he created the Church; as transubstantiated flesh and blood, he nourished his faithful. His bleeding on the cross, symbol of a new chance for mankind to be free of sin, echoed female fertility because medieval biology believed that menstrual blood fed the unborn child, and that the same matter produced milk; a beguiling idea that, emerging in thirteenth-century Low Countries, produced miraculous lactation in enraptured women.111 As their mysticism intensified, the mystic underwent psychophysical changes, which Elizabeth Petroff has classified as “Purgative, Psychic, Doctrinal, Devotional, Participatory, Unitive, Ordering.” The first stage entailed private and public self-humiliations, followed by prophetic and even revelatory visions concerning complex doctrinal issues. Then, came catatonic states understood as the surrender to God, followed by the imitation of and union with Christ.112 Mary, sometimes 108 Schibanoff, Botticelli’s Madonna del Magnificat; Jacopo da Voragine, “Here Followeth the Life of St Katerine, Virgin and Martyr, and First of Her Name,” in The Golden Legend, Vol. 7, n. 4. 109 Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, The Short Text, trans. Elizabeth Spearing (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 3–38 (10–11). 110 Ellen Babinsky, Marguerite Porete: The Mirror of the Simple Soul (Mahwah, New Jersey: Pauline Press, 1993); Suzanne Kocher, Allegories of Love in Marguerite Porete’s “Mirror of the Simple Souls” (Turnhout, Belgium: Brespol, 2008). 111 Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 181–238, (187 and 214–15); Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1982); Elizabeth Petroff, “Medieval Women Visionaries: Seven Stages to Power,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 34–45 (40). 112 Petroff, Medieval Women Visionaries, 35.

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the last vision before death, appeared as the mediator that allowed them to hold Christ as a child, or to unite with his adult self, mirroring St Catherine’s mystical marriage.113 This was precisely the pattern of Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510), now one of the authoritative sources of the Catholic faith.114 Many claimed impressive feats involving demons, stigmata, elongation of body parts, and even Eucharistic visions, viz. the revelation of the mystery of the transubstantiation otherwise induced by clerical rituals. These experiences and the ability to overcome physical needs were considered extraordinary victories over their imperfect sex, hence the by-product of sainthood and miracle working. Their para-mysticism added prestige to the local communities and gave them an agency otherwise unimaginable for women.115 Female mystics saw their devotion to Jesus as a marriage in its own rights, but one by choice and with a handsome and passionate lover. As his brides, they acquired a public identity. Nowadays, science would treat their conditions as psychosomatic reactions to a patriarchal environment.116 Their patterns fit the Freudian model of “family romances of neurotics” and “daydreaming.” Freud argued that early years’ unsatisfactory experiences of parental affection may lead young individuals to replace their real family with a grander cast selected from their knowledge of exemplary models. Similarly, early unfulfilled desires or fears are converted into fantasies that are “erotic” and “ambitious.” Ridden with shame, and in order to avoid scorn, daydreamers enact their fantasies in ways that elicit pleasure in others. Freud identified these as aesthetic gains. For the mystics, this was arguably the validation of their holiness, mirrored in people’s beliefs in their miracles and sanctity.117 Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) typified this scenario. At the age of seven, she decided to become a bride of Christ and started fasting and self-flagellating. As she entered puberty, she reconsidered her earlier decision, perhaps to appease her parents. Her sister’s death left her guilt-ridden and thus determined to take the vows. Housebound by her parents for refusing to marry, in her imagination she relocated herself to Nazareth, in a family where Jesus was her father, Mary her mother and the apostles her kin. In 1365, her parents finally allowed her to enter 113 Petroff, Medieval Women Visionaries, 42; King, Daughters of Mary, 118–19. 114 Donald Christopher Nuget, “St Catherine of Genoa,” in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, 67–80. 115 Rosalynn Voaden, “Women and Vision: The Devil’s Gateway,” in God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries (Suffolk, UK, Rochester, USA: York Medieval Press, 1999), 7–40 (9); Walker Bynum, The Female Body and Religious Practice; Weinstein and Bell, “Chastity,” in Saints and Society, 73-99; Walker Bynum, “Religious Women in the Later Middle Ages,” in Holy Feast, 13–30; Rudolph Bell, Holy Anorexia (London and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985); Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother. 116 Kroll, The Mystic Mind; Bell, Holy Anorexia. 117 Sigmund Freud “Family Romances,” and “The Creative Writer and Daydreaming,” in The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin Books, 2003 ed.), 23–34 and 35–41.

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a convent. Her final rejection of worldly pleasures was a dramatic fight against demons, who significantly visited her during Carnival, the feast in which roles and virtues are reversed. During the first three years of her monastic life, her only interlocutors were her confessor and God. In 1368, she claimed to have received the bridal gold ring from Christ in the presence of Mary, King David, and various saints. For the remaining days of her life, she assisted the poor and the sick, and practised compulsive fasting compounded by the ingestion of the purulent flesh of terminally ill people. Her public agency was extraordinary; she was even credited with ending the papal crisis that swept Europe between 1378 and 1417; and became an advisor to the newly appointed Pope Urban VI (ca.1318–1389).118 Christocentric devotion also inspired the phenomenon of women choosing to live by the rules of God but in shared houses, rather than convents. The Inquisition abolished some groups and formalised others under clerical control. Others succeeded outside male jurisdiction, such as the Spanish Beatas, the Italian Pinzochere and the northern European Beguines. Emerging in the Low Countries in the twelfth century, beguinage quickly became such a recruiting force in northern Europe, from Belgium to Bohemia; in 1320, in Cologne alone, it accounted for at least 15% of the adult population. Yet, as Porete’s execution indicates, this model was not without dangers. In the same city, exactly one century later it had shrunk to 7.5% because of ecclesiastical persecution. Thereafter, the surviving beguines joined the ranks of Sisterhood of Common Life of Devotio Moderna.119 Modern Devotion was a movement founded in Flemish Windersheim in 1379 under the guidance of Deacon Geert Groote (1340–1384). It grew rapidly in popularity and its followers, known as Brothers and Sisters of Common Life, lived in self-governing Common Houses located in urban areas. It received formal recognition by the Church during the Council of Basle (1431–1449), because it professed obedience to the Roman papacy, the Holy Scriptures, the Third Rule of the Order of St Francis, 118 Blessed Raymond of Capua, The Life of St Catherine of Siena, trans. George Lamb (London: Harvill Press, 1960). Also, St Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, ed. Giuliana Cavallini, trans. Suzanne Noffke, O.P. (London: SPCK, 1980). 119 In northern Europe beguinage caused the decline in number of convents. From the sixteenth century, the Reformers persecuted it for its informal organisation. Its survival was again tested during the French Revolution. Beguinage disappeared in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Wybren Scheepsma, Medieval Religious Women in the Low Countries: The ‘Modern Devotion’, the Canonesses of Windesheim and their Writings, trans. David F. Johnson (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2004); “Introductory Interpretative Essay,” in The Mirror of Simple Soul, by Margaret Porete, trans. Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., J. C. Marler, Judith Grant (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), xxxv–lxxxvii; Voaden, God’s Words; Emily Amt, ed. Women’s Lives: A Sourcebook (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 217-276; Beguine Spirituality; Walker Bynum, Holy Feast, esp. 17–30. “Introduction,” in The Mirror, ed. Babinsky, 5–61 (5–20); King, Daughters of Mary, 103–17. On the reformers’ persecution, see Erika Rummel, ed. Erasmus on Women (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1996).

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and gender hierarchies.120 In fact, on women Groote was unambiguous: “You have no power over your own body; indeed if you were to earn anything by your own work, it would come under the power of your husband.”121 The poor living conditions in these Common Houses were exacerbated by extreme asceticism, and the psychological harm caused by mutual encouragements to a life of complete self-debasement.122 Despite such ordeals, Modern Devotion attracted individuals from all social strata, including the aristocracy, and especially women, who were the first to have a House. Their enthusiasm was noted. As the modern devout Jan Brinckerinck (d.1419) explained, they received “more grace and […] greater favour with God than men do.”123 Sisters’ congregations received the patronage of court women and outnumbered those of the Brothers.124 Their appeal consisted in their free membership and self-governing conditions. The Sisters could undertake basic teaching for girls and children of the less affluent, and manual labour like copyist work that granted access to religious and non-religious writings, which the Sisters shared alongside their rapiaria, i.e., collections of suggestions on how to be a good Christian, personal accounts of mystical experiences and passages from the spiritual texts.125 The vernacular language of these rapiaria enabled the authors to be read by a wider section of society and to convey more spontaneously the immediacy of their relationship with Jesus.126 Yet, however shared, each of these accounts was unique, because divine reception was by definition personal, as was that of the para-mystics. Additionally, although Modern Devotion followed the norms on gender, its principles were emancipatory, as we read in De Imitatione Christi (ca.1420). This collection of short sayings and teachings for the Modern Devout is commonly attributed to Canon Thomas à Kempis (1379–1471).127 It circulated 120 In fact, some members cloistered themeselves voluntarily. Scheepsma, Medieval Religious Women, 6 and 12–14. See also John van Engen, ed. Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings (New York, Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1988), 18–27 and 121–36; R. R. Post, The Modern Devotion: Confrontation with Reformation and Humanism (Leiden: Brill, 1968); J.E.G De Montmorency, Thomas à Kempis: Hhis Age and Book (London: Methuen and Co., 1906). 121 Groote, “A Sermon Addressed to the Laity,” in van Engen, Devotio Moderna, 96. 122 Scheepsma, Medieval Religious Women, 18, 35, and 56–61; Van Engen, Devotio Moderna, 29 and 131–32 (the account of Sister Fye Vreysen, d.1454). 123 In Scheepsma, Medieval Religious Women, 1. 124 Karen S. Nicholas, “Countesses as Rulers in Flanders,” in Aristocratic Women in Medieval France, ed. Theodore Evergates (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc., 1999), 111–37 (132–34). 125 Scheepsma, “Living with Text,” and “Written Instructions,” in Medieval Religious Women, 83–110 and 110–34. 126 Interestingly, the increased production of manuscripts in the Low Countries seems connected with the activities of Devotio Moderna. Scheepsma, Medieval Religious Women, 21 and 65–70, 83–110 and 110–34; Régneir-Bohler, Literary and Mystical Voices, 442–48; Amt, Women’s Lives, 263–67. 127 There are several translations of this book. I have used Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, intr. and trans. Leo Sherley-Price (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1952).

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widely in northern Europe in manuscript copies and, from 1472, in printed Latin and translated versions. Its contents criticise the triviality of intellectual knowledge, and male prerogative, because “more noble is by far the learning infused from above by divine grace, than that painfully acquired by the industry of many.”128 The Modern Devout will receive further attention in Chapter Four.

Conclusions Let us imagine a public debate, conduct manuals in hand, between Christine De Pizan and Francesco Barbaro. Barbaro remarks that men “provision their homes by their labour, industry, and willingness to undergo hardship. Conversely […] women […] should diligently care for things concerning the household.”129 De Pizan retorts that women are sharper than men but untrained because “less exposed to a wide variety of experiences since they have to stay at home all day to look after the household.”130 He responds with a rhetorical ploy: “What is the use of bringing home great wealth unless the wife will work at preserving, maintaining and utilising it[?]”131 She quips about the inequalities in female literacy. Barbaro tries to flatter the shimmer of her beauty by reciting Petrarchan poems and even some chivalric lines. She hears none of it, lamenting the sacrifices of all the Lucretias in history. The female audience nod with Marian restraint at her wise eloquence, a paradox of female integrity, but bashfully giggle at his adulatory performance. Bedecked in their fineries, they whisper a word or two against the patrolling sumptuary police, and one or two gossip about some absent women, those literate buried at home penning their radical critique of misogyny thwarted by demonstrable female vanity. Those literate would have enjoyed the oratorical skirmish but the dearth of their wardrobe and their contempt for public outings prevailed. Besides, they will soon receive a detailed account from their epistolary male defenders. Also missing in the audience are those bound by religious vows, some resenting, others thriving within the walls of the cloister that fends off the bustle of the everyday. And the skirmish is simply irrelevant to the daily struggle of manual labourers and the poor. The literature discussed in this chapter spotlights the situations woven into this final tale. Albeit only a sample, is shows the repetitive nature of the discussions on women in a patriarchal culture. In this system, women were wives and mothers. Their social impact resulted from their domestic and maternal duties. 128 Thomas à Kempis, “On Forsaking Creatures to Find the Creator,” The Imitation, Book III, Chapter 31, 133. 129 Barbaro, On Wifely Duties, 215–16. 130 Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, 57. 131 Barbaro, On Wifely Duties, 216.

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Outside this system, the spiritual path was popular. This life choice was harmful psychosomatically, but medical ignorance and superstition interpreted the damages in positive terms: these women were even superior to men, because they overcame all that was negative about the female sex. As such, they enjoyed some of the same privileges as men. Women with an intellectual appetite found both the uxorial and the mystical careers restraining. Their pursuit of higher studies, however, entailed misogynistic attacks and physical seclusion. Although female literary achievements could be further evidence that inborn defectiveness could be corrected, a lifestyle based solely on learning had no recognisable purpose in patriarchal society. On a final note, women lacked clarity of perspective because the assessment of female psychophysical nature came from narratives which were institutionally set and controlled by men, and embedded in all forms of verbal and visual communication. Naturally, women internalised these biases and, in engaging on the woman question, they reflected as in a mirror, and thus validated, the same prejudices back on the community. However, as women’s writings and actions often showed, this was an anthropological group frustrated by lack of political practice, but often defying the system from within. How can this not be considered transgressive, even foreshadowing a pro-women ideology? The next chapters evaluate how female portraits engaged with these discourses. If any of these likenesses under-represent the social and the poetical dimensions explained here, they should be seen as a personal critique of the dominant, patriarchal system.

2.

Women in Marriage Portraiture Abstract This chapter surveys the genesis of Christian marriage. Its aim is to probe how the popular practice of this sacrament underpinned the continuity of its patrimonial, patrilineal, and patriarchal values. It considers the points of contact between nuptial rituals and marital portraiture in the fifteenth century. The visual analysed are rooted in three novel ideas: 1. Alongside betrothal and nuptial events, portraits celebrated the sexual consummation of the union. I have called these likenesses “Morgengabe portraits” to stress their affinity with gifts that women once received after their virginity was lost in the marriage bed. 2. Because of pre-marital uncertainties, the commissions for the portraits of the female betrothed received priority over those of their male companions. 3. The conditions of spectatorship were phenomenological and relational, and were augmented by mnemo-techniques and by the storage methods for these items. Key words: Betrothal – Folklore – Marriage – Phenomenology – Renaissance – Sexuality

“God established marriage; nature beckons us to use and enjoy it; people agree upon it; and individual cities have found rites and solemn ceremonies for it.”1 Thus, a fifteenth-century chronicler described the matrimonial oath: the natural path to social stability, its rituals and material culture inspired by its function. In practical terms, to get married was a multi-stage affair akin to economic and socio-political negotiations and coloured by bespoke rituals that sanctioned the union publicly. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber has visualised the dynamics as a triptych with a predella that illustrates the preliminary discussions between two families, including the value of the dowry negotiated by the men of the family or their trusted circle. Two wings show the formalisation of the agreement and the betrothal. The central

1 In Anthony F. D’Elia, “Marriage, Sexual Pleasure, and Learned Brides in the Wedding Orations of Fifteenth-Century Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 55, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 379–433 (392).

Toreno, E., Netherlandish and Italian Female Portraiture in the Fifteenth Century. Gender, Identity, and the Tradition of Power. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463728614_ch02

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panel describes the nuptials.2 Missing in the triptych is the sexual consummation of the newlyweds, but in many parts of medieval Europe this accounted for the validation of the marriage because it sealed the irreversibility of the contract. It was celebrated with a gift agreed beforehand and received by the bride on the morning after the first intercourse. For this reason, it was called a morning gift, Morgengifu, Morgengabe or Morgive. By the fifteenth century, the gift was no longer expected but rituals still celebrated the first marital night. This chapter surveys the genesis of the Christian marriage and relates marriage portraits to nuptial customs and rites. In doing so, it explains the differences between betrothal and nuptial portraiture, and argues that portraits were also commissioned to celebrate the bride after sexual consummation. I have called these items “Morgengabe portraits” and will defend my suggestion on the premise that they were especially relevant to societies, whose socio-economic expansion depended not on dynastic rights, but on the creation of family nucleuses that, through direct descendants, would build and improve social and material status. Whilst family names were handed down patrilineally, the legitimacy of a descendancy was secured by controlling the sexual life of women.3 2 Christiane Klapisch- Zuber, “Zacharias, or the Ousted Father: Nuptial Rites in Tuscany between Giotto and the Council of Trent,” in Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 178–212. 3 The Institutes of Justinian, int. and trans. Thomas Collett Sandars (1728; rep., Aberdeen: The University Press, 1962). And Philip L. Reynolds, How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments: The Sacramental Theology of Marriage from its Medieval Origins to the Council of Trent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Philip L. Reynolds and John Witte Jnr., eds., To Have and To Hold: Marrying and Its Documentation in Western Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Ruth Mazo Karras, “The History of Marriage and the Myth of Friedelehe,” Early Medieval Europe 14, no. 2 (2006): 119–151; O.F. Robinson, T.D. Ferguson and W.M. Gordon, An Introduction to European Legal History, 3rd ed. (London, Edinburgh, Dublin: Butterworth, 2000); Christopher Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Edwin Hall, The Arnolfini Betrothal: Medieval Marriage and the Enigma of Van Eyck’s Double Portrait (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994); J.B. Molin and P. Mutembe, Le Rituel du Mariage en France du XIIe au XVIe siècle (US: Pueblo Publishing Co., 1992); Charles M. Radding, The Origins of Medieval Jurisprudence, Pavia and Bologna 850–1150 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988); James A. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987); Klapisch-Zuber, Zacharias; Bricia Witthoft, “Marriage Rituals and Marriage Chests in Quattrocento Florence,” Artibus et Historiae 3 no. 5 (1982): 43–59; Christopher N. L. Brooke, “Marriage and Society in the Central Middle Ages,” in Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage, ed. R.B. Outhwaite (London: Europa Publication Limited, 1981), 17–34; Diane Owen Hughes, “From Brideprice To Dowry in Mediterranean Europe,” Journal of Family History 3 (1978): 262–296; Rudolf Huebner, A History of Germanic Private Law, trans. Francis S. Philbrick (South Hackensack, New Jersey, NY: Augustus M. Kelley Publisher, 1968); Antonio Pertile, Storia del Diritto Italiano dalla Caduta dell’Impero Romano alla Codificazione, 2nd ed. (Bologna: Arnaldo Forni, 1966), vol. III; Bernhard Windscheid et al,. Diritto delle Pandette: Traduzione dei Professori Carlo Fadda e Paolo Emilio Bensa con Note e Riferimenti al Diritto Civile Italiano (Torino: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1930).

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An Illustrated Exegesis of the Institution of Marriage The western definition of marriage is founded on ancient Roman practices and Christian precepts. By the second century BCE, unions were formalised under the principles of the patria potestas and sine manu, a formula that kept women and their property under natal control. 4 During the reign of Augustus (63BCE–14CE), they became bilateral contracts within the same social groups, with a focus on monogamy and procreation.5 From at least the ninth century, polygamy became a criminal offence alongside adultery, concubinage, endogamous unions, and unions that were not decided by paterfamilias.6 In the Middle Ages, the legal basis of sine manu still suited the burgeoning entrepreneurial communities of southern Europe, because its goal was to protect family assets from dispersion.7 The feudal territories instead redesigned the older Roman laws to suit local needs. Among the differences, there was the purchase of the legal guardianship of the bride and her possessions. The Lex Longobardorum of the Lombards, the best documented of all, called it Munt or mundium.8 Consensual sexual consummation also became a validating part of the marriage contract, whereas the Roman system was satisfied with the spouses’ mutual consent and the payment of the dos.9 The Church, whose authority influenced these evolving regulations, was divided on marital sex.10 It discouraged it on principle, because female sexuality was 4 Marital celebrations in Europe originated in the Roman nuptiae but the word “marriage” and its equivalent in the European languages date to the medieval times. Additionally, before the sine manu, it was common to transfer the bride and her property in manum viri, i.e., in the hand of her husband. See The Institutes of Justinian, xlii, and 30–32; Reynolds, How Marriage, 164–71. See also, Judith Evans Grubb, Women and the Law in the Roman Empire: A Sourcebook on Marriage, Divorce and Widowhood (London: Routledge, 2002); Gary B. Miles, Livy: Reconstructing Early Rome (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995); A.S. Gratwick, “Free or Not So Free? Wives and Daughters in the Late Roman Republic,” in Marriage and Property, ed. Elizabeth M. Craik (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1984), 38–57. 5 Brundage, Law, Sex and Society, 33 and 87. 6 As is unanimously understood, it does not follow that these were eradicated. 7 In Italy it is found in Ravenna, Ferrara, Bologna, Rome, Venice, Genoa, Lucca and in Corsica. Pertile, Storia del Diritto Italiano, 279; Radding, The Origins of Medieval Jurisprudence, 33. Dowries were supposed to be recovered in cases of deaths and divorces but, in reality, this was challenging, as Chapter Six explains. 8 This was basically the same principle of the ancient Roman in manum viri. Karras, The History of Marriage, 128–30 and 140–43. 9 In Roman law, the dos was the dowry from the bride’s father to the groom. The barbarian laws inverted the responsibilities. To map medieval marriages in northern Europe and their monetary exchanges is problematic, as discussed in Karras, The History of Marriage, and cited sources. An attempt at schematising is in Robinson et al., An Introduction; Brundage, Law, Sex and Society, 128–30; Pertile, Storia del Diritto Italiano, especially 274–429. 10 See for instance the attack of St Jerome (ca.347–420) to Jovinian (d. ca.405) in Jerome, Against Jovinianus, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Henry Wace (1892; rep., CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform: Aeterna Press, 2016.)

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believed to be intrinsically unchristian, and sexual impulses were considered to be psychophysical disorders leading to promiscuity, self-pleasure and, crucially, eternal damnation. Therefore, to some theologians, mutual consent alone was sufficient evidence of marital unions, and sexless marriages were preferred.11 Yet, sex was the necessary evil that kept society in perpetual renewal. St Augustine (354–430) proposed the solution.12 On the Good of Marriage he defined its “three good things”: proles, fides, sacramentum. For Augustine the marital fides mirrored the bond between the Church and Christ.13 Therefore, it was indissoluble, sacramental. Moreover, because on the dying bed, the cross, this union produced the Christian proles, marital fides was procreative.14 In allowing sexual intercourse for the purpose of procreation, Augustine resolved the issues of lustful intercourses and adultery. Consequentially, marital sex was a downgraded, venial sin, and procreative sex became a civic duty: God gives us some goods […]. For of these certain are necessary for the sake of wisdom […]; certain for the sake of health […]; certain for the sake of friendship, as marriage or sexual intercourse: for hence subsists the propagation of the human kind […]. These goods, therefore, which are necessary for the sake of something else, whoso useth not for this purpose, wherefore they were instituted, sins; in some cases venially, in other cases damnably.15

In 860, for the first time in the old Canon Law, Archbishop Hincmar of Reims (845–882) advised that “a true coupling in legitimate marriage between free persons of equal status occurs when a free woman, properly dowered, is joined to a free man with paternal consent in a public wedding [followed by] sexual intercourse.”16 In 11 On the relevant discourses, Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 3 rd edn (New York: Routledge, 2017); Merry Wiesner-Hanks, “Christianity to 1500,” in Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice. Christianity and Society in the Modern World (London: Routledge, 2000), 26–72; Jeffrey Richards, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1994); Brooke, “The Ecclesiastical Model,” in The Medieval Idea, 126–43; Guido Ruggiero, “Marriage, Love and Renaissance Civic Morality,” in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 10–30; Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society, 420–24; Bernard I. Murstein, Love, Sex, and Marriage Through the Ages (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1974). 12 On laypeople’s attitudes towards the moral obligations of marriage see Karras, “Sex and Marriage,” in Sexuality, 79–117. 13 Augustine, On the Good of Marriage, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Rev. C.L. Cornish M.A. of Exeter College, Oxford (1887; rep., Great Britain: Amazon, 2019). This idea was Pauline, as in Eph. 5:22-33 and Cor. 7:1–9. Reynolds, “Part 1: Augustine,” in How Marriage, 99–154. 14 St Augustine, On the Good of Marriage, 8–9. 15 St Augustine, On the Good of Marriage, 16. 16 In Brundage, Law, Sex and Society, 136.

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ca.1140, the Bolognese jurist Gratian dedicated cases twenty-seven to thirty-six in Part II of his three-part Decretals to such issues. These cases, known as Tractatus de Matrimonio, reiterated the Augustinian sacramental premise and Hincmar’s coital conciliation.17 After Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274) and others repeated the concept, sexual consummation, unmentioned in the marital formula, became the first step towards the procreative necessities, regulated by the missionary position and a calendrical schedule that honed religious festivities and superstitious misgivings on menstruation and lactation days.18 At the Council of Florence in 1439, Session 8 confirmed the Augustinian analogy as the seventh sacrament of the Church: The seventh sacrament is that of matrimony, which is a sign of the union of Christ and the Church according to the saying of the Apostle […] (Eph. 5:32). The efficient cause of matrimony is the mutual consent duly expressed in words relating to the present. A triple good is found in matrimony. The first is the begetting of children and their education to the worship of God. The second is the faithfulness which each spouse owes to the other. Third is the indissolubility of marriage, inasmuch as it represents the indissoluble union of Christ and the Church.19

This formula substantiated the notion of conjugal love explained earlier in the literature review. Mutual consent in the verba de presenti was its betrothing commitment and the implicit acceptance of the agreed dowry.20 Then, preparations would commence for the betrothal day. During this period, the prospective kin would hold banquets, culminating with the betrothal feast.21 Then came the wedding day, when the bride was escorted publicly to her new household.22 Her departure 17 Brundage, Law, Sex and Society, 231–42. 18 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, ed. F.J. Bartlett (London: Blackfriars, 1976), pt.3, qq. I. X-CX. See also Anton C. Pegis, Introduction to Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York: The Modern Library, 1948), and Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society, 447–53. 19 In Herbert Vorgrimler, Sacramental Theology (The Order of St Benedict, Inc., Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 1992 ed.), 296. 20 Briefly: Roman law called the initial dotal agreement desponsatio per verba de futuro. Germanic customs called it Muntvertrag. Additionally, different regions of Europe had different names for the day of the betrothal. For instance, the Florentines and the Romans called it sponsalia or matrimonium. In Florence, it was also called “ring-day” because the future bride received a ring during a ceremony called subarratio per anulum. The Northerners called this day Verlöbnis. It ritualised their precept of the Munt, although mutual consent in the verba de praesenti became increasingly the standard. Karras, The History of Marriage, 139; Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society, 128; Klapisch-Zuber, Zacharias, 185; Pertile, Storia del Diritto Italiano, 277. 21 E.g., Venice. Giulio Bistort, Il Magistrato alle Pompe nella Repubblica di Venezia: Studio Storico (Bologna: Forni, 1912), 96. 22 This was the legacy of the ancient deductio domum, later called traductio. In Rome it was called arraglia and subarratione. Francesco Brandileone, La Celebrazione Del Matrimonio In Roma Nel Secolo

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from the natal family, which was physical and patrimonial, was the climactic performance of the social and, indeed, commercial nature of marriages. Among the material culture that this practice ensued, commissions for portraits increased sharply across Europe in the fifteenth century. The visual signs of the Italian examples were especially rich in amatory-connubial suggestions that invited the spectators to view the images thematically rather than mimetically, as seen in the earliest known Italian double portrait commissioned for a marriage [Fig. 2.1]. This painting, now in the Metropolitan Museum, is known for its interpretative challenges. It was commissioned from the Florentine Filippo Lippi (ca.1406–1469) and it shows a female and a male profile in an interior. Their silhouettes are Lippi’s pictographic hallmark and their spheres of vision follow the geometrical integration of planes that Lippi probed from the late 1430s to create deep spatial recessions.23 The male fingers hold a coat-of-arms, identified as that of the Florentine Scolari family. The woman’s dress suggests a timeline and a nuptial fashion that coincide with an important Scolari marriage in 1440–1444.24 In 1439, Florence became the unexpected host of the final years of the seventeenth ecumenical Council (1431–1445), which had begun in Basel. During this time and later, the foreign delegations and the ecumenical nature itself of the event had their effect on the socio-cultural fabric of the city. My observation purposefully implies that this double portrait is in creative engagement with the Council’s sacramental iteration of the marriage oath. Imitation of northern aristocratic elegance is shown in the woman’s heart-shaped headdress that complements a fur-lined crimson cioppa with the sleeves a gozzi over a rich gamurra, possibly in velvet damask, which sports a marital brooch, pendetta da moglianza. Jewels were customarily worn on this left side to unburden the right, site of Christian righteousness, from the frivolous and transitory.25 The ensemble matches coeval Florentine descriptions of bridal wardrobe, as detailed in a letter that Alessandra (ca.1406–1471), from the prominent Macinghi Strozzi family, wrote to her son, to announce the marriage of her daughter Caterina: XV Ed Il Concilio Di Trento (Roma: Tipografia Editrice Romana, 1896), 3. See also Hall, “On Marriage Law and Ceremony,” in The Arnolfini Betrothal, 13–48; Klapisch-Zuber, Zacharie; Witthoft, Marriage Rituals and Marriage Chests. 23 Ronald Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli: Life and Work, 2nd ed. (New York, London: Abberville Press Publishers, 1989), 20. 24 These considerations challenge one suggestion that the commission celebrated the birth of a male heir. Keith Christiansen and Stefan Weppelmann, eds. The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini, exh. cat. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 96–98, (cat. 6). On the subjects’ identifications, Katalin Prajda, “The Coat of Arms in Fra Filippo Lippi’s Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 48, no. 1 (January 2013): 73–80. 25 These implications are an established concept, as explained in Chapter Three. On marital jewellery, see Adrian W.B. Randolph, “Performing the Bridal Body in Fifteenth-Century Florence,” Art History 21/2 (January 1998): 182–200 (196).

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[A] cotta of crimson silk velvet; […] a garland made with feathers and pearls, which cost eighty florins; and under this headgear there are two braids of pearls, which cost sixty florins or more: and when she be out, she will be wearing more than four-hundred florins. And he has ordered a crimson velvet to be cut with large sleeves, inlaid with marten, for when she will be taken as his wife.26

In purchasing it, the future son-in-law ensured that Caterina would dazzle the public on their wedding day. Thus, understandably, Megan Holmes and Joanna Woods-Marsden have called “portraits of the dowry” the likenesses with such nuptial accoutrements, in order to draw a connection with Vespasiano’s “dowry of virtue” mentioned in the Introduction.27 Furthermore, I have outlined the indexical significance of female ornaments, but one point remains to be clarified: in the process of getting married, women received a trousseau and a counter-trousseau. Caterina’s items were the latter.28 Originally considered investments in case of widowhood, when these provisions ceased sometime in the thirteenth century, counter-trousseaux remained customary because they had come to signify the completion of the marriage agreement.29 In the fifteenth century, the items of the counter-trousseaux had become so expensive that some were purchased using dowry funds. Husbands would resell or rent them out because, as Jane Fair Bestor has observed, they were given to the wives as gifts but treated as loans. This practice of recycling allowed husbands to seize profits from the dowry and add them to their own asset for benefits that were personal or directed to their immediate heirs. Additionally, by occurring within the same community, this practice increased social connections.30 Naturally, in the dress and jewels of the Scolari woman the viewers would have read the full range of these dynamics. 26 “Gli tagliò una cotta di zetani vellutato chermisi; […] E fassi una grillanda di penne con perle, che viene fiorini ottanta; e racconciatura di sotto, e’ sono duo trecce di perle, che viene fiorini sessanta o più: che quando andrà fuori, ara in dosso, più che fiorini quattrocento. E ordina di fare un velluto chermisi, per farlo colle maniche grandi, foderato di martore, quando n’andrà a marito.” Alessandra Macinghi (negli) Strozzi, Lettere di una Gentildonna Fiorentina del Secolo XV ai Figliuoli Esuli, pub. Cesare Guasti (Firenze: Sansoni, 1877), 5. Alessandra’s description of the “grillanda” refers to a gemmed headgear with peacock feathers. More on this ensemble is in Carole Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2002), 115–32, and 193–94. 27 Joanna Woods-Marsden, “Portrait of the Lady, 1430–1520,” in Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo’s Ginevra de Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women, David Alan Brown et al., exh.cat. (Washington, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), 62–87 (65). In this, Woods-Marsden seems indebted to Megan Holmes, Fra Filippo Lippi: The Carmelite Painter (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 129. 28 Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence, 117, 123–25, 128–31. 29 Jane Fair Bestor, “The Groom’s Prestation for the Ductio in Late Medieval Italy: A Study in the Disciplining Power of Liberalitas,” Rivista Internazionale di Diritto Comune 8 (1997): 129–177 (154–159). 30 Jane Fair Bestor, “Marriage Transactions in Renaissance Italy and Mauss’s Essay on the Gift,” Past and Present 164 (August 1999): 6–46.

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Albeit conspicuous, the woman vies for attention against the man, if only because of his awkward protrusion from an opening in the wall. It has been suggested that this detail pictures passage 2:9 from the Song of Solomon: “[M]y beloved is like a roe of a young hart; behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the window, shewing himself through the lattice.”31 This interpretation echoes contemporary Italian amatory literature, where windows symbolise access to a woman’s heart.32 The analogy was laced with eroticism. In Quattrocento paintings, as Diana Wolfthal has explained, windows were architectural metaphors for female genitalia and enhanced the liminality of sexual desire.33 The contemporary spectator would have also drawn a parallel with the images of the Annunciation, where Christ’s conception penetrates through a window, when Gabriel fatefully pronounces, as in Luke 1:35: “[T]he Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee.” The fenestrations’ subtext is understandable in nuptial portraiture and, perhaps, the Salomonic reference, if it existed, was but a cultural trope. I am more intrigued by the lack of window fittings, hinges and so on, both in the man’s niche and in the opening behind the female figure, which frames a landscape with an architectural settlement. These openings seem deliberately ambiguous: are they windows or, rather, thresholds into an imagined space, like paintings within a painting? Take the landscape itself, the distance and foreshortening of which would locate the room in a palazzo’s piano nobile. If so, we should be prepared to conjure the indecorous, if not comical consequences of the man perched outside a first floor.34 Furthermore, its documentary quality matches descriptions of local estates, whereby the settlement may even represent a monastery. As has been explained, women from the privileged classes received education in convents, and these were usually sited outside city walls. Therefore, rather than suggesting cartographic proximity, this detail could

31 Robert Baldwin, “‘Gates Pure and Shining and Serene’: Mutual Gazing as an Amatory Motif in Western Literature and Art,” Renaissance and Reformation 10 (1986): 23–48 (30–34). 32 E.g., “Dove lanympha e la mia dea terestra / cha ilabbra pien di ? e deviole / Dove son gli occhi vaghi inchi star sole / dentro nascoso amor quando balestra: / dove la bella e bianca tua mano dextra / la qual fu fede alle nostre parole / Dove quell petto piu` chiaro chel sole / che me mostro la descreta fenestra / Dove la gola del mio dolce canto / dovel danzar ch sci me fe dappresso / el pe ligiadro angelico e cortese / stasse da lunge e cresce el mar col pianto / e io crudel nemico di me stesso / son visso senza lei gia piu dun mese”. Angelo Galli, Rime, created fifteenth cent., Urb.Lat.699, The Vatican Library, DigitalVaticana, 28r–29v. 33 Diane Wolfthal, “The Woman in the Window,” in Sex Acts in Early Modern Italy: Practice, Performance, Perversion, Punishment, ed. Allison Levy (England, USA: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2010), 57–75. 34 Also, houses did not have internal windows then. Elizabeth Currie, Inside the Renaissance House (London: V & A Publications, 2006); Peter Thornton, The Italian Renaissance Interior 1400-1600 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991).

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have described the woman’s upbringing.35 Equally her inheritance, because, as Katalin Prajda has plausibly argued, the possible sitter Francesca di Matteo Scolari received an estate from her mother as part of her dowry.36 It was not unusual for the entrepreneurial families of Italy to raise the dowry in money, trousseau, and shares of land. For example, before his second marriage, the Florentine widower Gregorio Dati (1362–1435) was guaranteed “a dowry of 900 gold florins and […] the income on a farm […], which had been left her as a legacy by her mother.”37 Widowed again, his hopes for funds to expand his business rested on a third marriage. He succeeded within months, when he received a dowry of 700 florins in cash and a farm at Campi worth another 300 that, strikingly close to the present illustration, was “bounded on three sides by the road and on the fourth by the monastery of S. Giovanni.”38 Hence, this landscape may represent the sitter’s spiritual and material worth.39 It is also clear that the man is not making “himself” seen, as the Song sings, because his bride is unequivocally disengaged. For some, this detail betrays her posthumous commemoration. 40 Yet, her dress tells us a different story. Northern European and Italian courts used colours and woven devices to emblematise their formal garments. 41 Similarly, the word lealtà is embroidered on the wristband of her marital cioppa. This word means loyalty, as in “fidelity.” In implying the wearer’s forthcoming sacramental duty as a wife and mother, it has the same emblematic effect as the props of dynastic metanarrative among the aristocratic groups. The dress’s fashion that pays tribute to northern aristocratic elegance further underscores the metacritical engagement of the urban oligarchies with their aristocratic counterparts. The male’s right hand performs a gesture, which, as Russell Sale has argued, resembles that of the horned hand, mano cornuta. This image had survived from antiquity as a procreative talisman. However, I depart from Sale’s argument that, because of the disconnected gazes, it might symbolise 35 Megan Holmes has also suggested that the vegetation may symbolise the woman’s fertility. Holmes, Fra Filippo Lippi, 129. 36 Prajda, The Coat of Arms in Fra Filippo Lippi’s Portrait, 76. 37 Gregorio Dati, “The Diary of Gregorio Dati,” in Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence, ed. Gene Brucker, trans. Julia Martines (Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press Inc., 1967), 107–41 (114). 38 Dati, The Diary, 123. 39 An equivalent is also in contemporary donor paintings, e.g., Francesco Botticini (ca.1446–1497), The Assumption of the Virgin, ca.1475–76, tempera on panel, 228.6 × 337.2 cm, National Gallery, London (NG1126). Commissioned by Matteo Palmieri (1406–1475), another Florentine, it shows levelled with his wife’s head the estate that constituted part of her dowry. 40 Jeffrey Ruda, Fra Filippo Lippi: Life and Work, with a Complete Catalogue (London: Phaidon, 1993), 385. 41 Andrea Bayer et al., Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, exh.cat. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 123 (cat. 51); 125–26 (cat. 53), 126–27 (cat. 54); Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence, 298 (note 34); M. Michel Pastoureau, “L’Effervescence Emblématique et les Origines Héraldiques du Portrait au XIVe Siècle,” Bulletin de la Société Nationale des Antiquaires de France Année 1987, (1985): 108–115 (112).

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the man’s self-protection from the bewitching powers of her eyes: her garment stresses a genealogical narrative. 42 Furthermore, the man’s hands protrude from the frame in a manner that typifies Netherlandish portraiture and that, in holding a family crest, recalls genealogical likenesses. His head casts a shadow on the wall, evoking the Plinian tale about the genesis of the genre recounted in the Introduction. 43 For some, Pliny and Salomon together refer to the Petrarchan conceit on portraiture. 44 Certainly, such sources are relevant in the woman’s quasi-abstract, ethereal features, and in her posture that Lippi perfected by reworking the position of her hands. What seems mistaken is to ignore the social function of the commission. To expand, it seems improbable that the kinship of the original patrons and viewers would have privileged the visualisation of a literary web to that of the socio-economic investment in the marriage. We have a textual equivalent in Alessandra Macinghi’s account. X-rays show that Lippi conceived the male with a smaller head and with one hand raised to the chin, performing a gesture akin to that of Gabriel in the Annunciation iconographies. If this was the earlier intention then, echoing Luke 1:35, this room my have been meant to imply a comparison with Mary’s thalamus, i.e., the architectural amplification of her biological transformation that facilitated meditation upon the narrative-eschatological consequences of the Incarnation of Christ. 45 Plausibly, the Scolari iconography illustrates the process of transcending the ocular experience into a metaphysical reality through mnemonic practices. Portraiture, after all, transforms absence into presence. Literary tropes and social customs complemented each other in defining female beauty as a gentrifying agent. As has been shown, among these tropes was the challenge of the lover to sublimate yearning by impressing the beloved’s features, either in a painting or in his heart. Both instances entailed a mnemonic process that enabled the lovers to muster repeatedly the sensory experiences associated with the sight of the beloved. This, paradoxically, emancipated them from gazing on the beloved as a physical entity. It turned the act of seeing into an introspective examination of the origin of such emotions and their implications in the lover’s journey of self-knowledge. In this painting, the man, a portrait within a portrait, 42 J. Russell Sale, “Protecting Fertility in Fra Filippo Lippi’s Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 51 (2016): 65–84 (72 on self-protection). 43 As recognised by Alison Wright. See Alison Wright, “The Memory of Faces: Representational Choices in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Portraiture,” in Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence, eds. Giovanni Ciappelli and Patricia Lee Rubin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 86–113. 44 Christiansen and Weppelmann, eds. The Renaissance Portrait, 96. 45 On his gesture and the Annunciation iconography, Luke Syson, “Representing Domestic Interiors,” in At Home in Renaissance Italy, eds. Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis, exh.cat. (London: V & A Publications, 2006), 86–101 (93–98).

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is, simultaneously, the woman’s mimetic gazer and her own inner vision of her future companion. The contrast between her impenetrable state and his animation visualises their mnemonic synergy: as the bride’s preparedness to accept her uxorial status conjures his physical manifestation, her beauty and the inscription lealtà, in response, underpin his psychological awakening and erotic anticipation that the coat-of-arms translates into a bloodline. We must factor mnemonic practices into the early modern viewership of portraits because memory was part of daily practices, to the extent that it contributed to cementing social cohesion.46 Visual and verbal mnemo-techniques created the conditions to experience relationships otherwise separated by physical, chronological, and other ineffable conditions. Consider the panel painted on both sides, attributed to the Ferrarese Ercole de’ Roberti (ca.1455/56–1496) and now in a Milanese private collection: the obverse shows the profile of a man and the reverse that of a woman. The subjects have been recognised as Annibale Bentivoglio (1469–1540), the future lord of Bologna, and his mother Ginevra Sforza (1440–1507). 47 The identification is exciting because the combination predates by some four decades the rise of portraits of mother and child. The combination itself is intriguing because it portrays a filial bond as a mirror image in the locus of memory. Furthermore, in the Renaissance, painted likenesses were stored in cupboards, usually when their reverses were also painted, or hung in semi-private rooms. They were protected behind curtains, sliding mirrors or panels, inside boxes, or in velvet, felt, or leather pouches. Double portraits would be stacked inside boxlike frames, where the male likeness would be slid aside to reveal the female portrait. I wonder whether storage methods are in fact the genesis of the illusionistic backgrounds that, begun in this period, have since featured regularly in portraiture. Perhaps Bernardino de’ Conti (1450–1525) had one of these methods in mind, when he painted a woman against a curtain, which became a popular backdrop for the portraits of the following century. 48 46 An overview of these studies is in Patrick Geary, “The Historical Material of Memory,” in Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence, 17–25. 47 Francesco Caprara, “La Vertigine di uno Sguardo,” in Un Signore allo Specchio: Il Ritratto e il Palazzo di Giovanni II Bentivoglio, eds. Vera Fortunati et al., exh.cat. (Bologna: Editrice Compositori, 2003), 29–37 (32–35). 48 Cat. 18. As well as the curtain, the gloves in her hands are also unusual for its period. Gloves began to appear as evidence of one’s privileged status, quickly becoming psychophysical fetishes. See Evelyn Welch, “Art on the Edge: Hair and Hands in Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Studies 23, no. 3, (2008): 241–268 (260–68); Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones, “Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1, Things (Autumn 2001): 114–132. On storage methods, see Peter Humfrey, ed. Venice and the Veneto (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 347; Woods-Marsden, Portrait of the Lady, 1430–1520; Paola Tinagli, Women in Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation, Identity (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), 60; Jennifer Fletcher, “The Renaissance Portrait: Functions, Uses and Display,” in Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian, eds. Lorne Campbell et al., exh.

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Such storage items, I contend, stimulated the owners to imagine the sitters beyond their somatic existence into an idealised personhood. My observations find support in the similarities, otherwise puzzling, between the Scolari composition and the incipit of Book XXXV on painting from the manuscript translation of Pliny’s Natural History that the Florentine Filippo Strozzi (1424–1491) commissioned in the 1470s from Cristoforo Landino [Fig. 2.2]. Book XXXV is a chronicle of pictorial practices and practitioners. Therefore, it seems odd that this illustration should show a painter in a space that is unlike the busy Renaissance painters’ workshops. However, it is in Book XXXV that Pliny laments the state of the genre of portraiture, once distinguished by the veneration of loved and worthy individuals, now corrupted by the fad for celebrity portraits. And it is in this book that he relays the story of Butades’s daughter. Her commitment to the simulacrum of her beloved reflected the ancient mode of viewing and holding domestic portraits; crucially, it foreshadowed the sacramental devotion/death simile. I should think of the uncluttered room in the incipit as comparable to that of the Scolari painting because the domestic environments staged a reverence for kinship that domestic portraits, as in ancient times, were meant to encapsulate. Moreover, I should think of the Scolari woman as a Christianised Butades’s daughter who, during the momentous Coucil’s session, committed her sacramental fides to her betrothed, whose simulacrum already inhabited her heart. Italian Quattrocento marital portraits put up an operatic show of affectio maritalis. Those with a matching companion include the much-studied Battista Sforza and Federico da Montefeltro by Piero della Francesca. Inspired by medallic portraiture, these likenesses are complemented by ideal masculine and feminine virtues in the panel’s reverse. 49 The ruler of Bologna, Giovanni II Bentivoglio (1443–1508) and Ginevra Sforza, his wife and Battista’s sister, were immortalised by Ercole de’ cat. (National Gallery, London: Yale University Press, 2008), 46–65 (58–63); Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait-Painting in the 14th , 15th and 16th Centuries (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 65–67. Consider also the story of Baldassare Castiglione, who complemented Raphael’s (1483–1520) portrait of him with a poem that is written from the perpective of his wife. During his absence, the poem tells us, she and their son both find solace in looking at such a truthful likeness, the painting which is Raphael, Baldassare Castiglione, 1514–15, oil on canvas, 82 × 67 cm, Louvre, Paris (INV611). And the red velvet case now in the Louvre that was made for: Follower of Nicolas Froment, Matheron Diptych: Portrait of René of Anjou and Jeanne de Laval, ca.1479–1480 or 1485, oil on panel, 17.6 × 27 cm each, Musée du Louvre (RF665). 49 Cat. 3. On this prominent sitter, see Marinella Bonvicini Mazzanti, “Per Una Storia di Battista Sforza,” in Piero e Urbino, Pietro e le Corti Rinascimentali, a cura di Paolo dal Poggetto, exh.cat. (Venezia: Marsilio Editori, 1992), 142–47. On this diptych, see Antonio Bertelli et al., Piero della Francesca e le Corti Italiane, exh.cat. (Milan: Skira, 2007); Ronald Lightbown, Piero della Francesca (New York, London, Paris: Abberville Press Publisher, 1992), 229–243.

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Roberti in a diptych that is loosely based on the Sforza-Montefeltro companions.50 A third double portrait celebrates a union in the Gozzadini family from the lesser Bolognese nobility [Figs. 2.3 and 2.4].51 The couple are fastened by their continuous backdrop and an inscription: VT SIT NOSTRA FORMA SVPERSTES (in order that our features may survive).52 Together, they form a pair that Angela Ghirardi has called a “dialogue […] of the virtues of love and hopes for prosperity.”53 This description is vivid but does not convey the chief position of the woman. She clasps an orange or a peach, perhaps related to marital eroticism, as the man holds a twig of pinks, a symbol of betrothal. A florilegium of Christian-chivalric references to this eroticism originates from her pictorial background. Vegetation and a maiden with a unicorn allude to medieval symbolism of virginal powers, and the heraldic-matrimonial association of the unicorn with the future bridegroom tamed by his betrothed, hence with faithfulness in marriage.54 In the righthand corner, an ermine reiterates her purity, whilst the nearby rabbits, symbols of fecundity, advertise her fertility. These details are in dialogue with others in the background of the male companion: a falconer on a horseback, symbol of erotic fidelity; and a phoenix and a pelican feeding her young, symbols of resurrection and charity. The couple stands against a building, perhaps sketching their marital abode, with a recess that furnishes an aesthetic foil for her skin tone, and the erotic implications of fenestrations. The sacramental duty of the erotic insinuations is stressed by the exhortation across the building, which, exceeding the finality of portraiture as a lasting document of the sitters’ features, anticipates the progeny, the true translatio imagines, fostered by the woman’s fertile and chaste nature. I would not be surprised if her clasp, its little finger uncomfortably stretched, was meant to represent a mano cornuta because, however diverse, the sign-system of marriage portraits grew from the same conventions, which inspired visual details in conformity with the stages of 50 Cat. 4. Information on this portrait is available at www.uffizi.it. See also Filippo Trevisani and Davide Gasparotto eds., Bonacolsi, l’Antico: Uno Scultore nella Mantova di Andrea Mantegna e di Isabella d’Este, exh.cat. (Milano: Mondadori, Electa, 2008), 228 (VI, 6). 51 Cat. 7; The coat of arms of the Gozzadini family appears in both panels, perhaps referring to a marriage that took place in 1494. On this dipych, see Christiansen and Weppelmann, eds. The Renaissance Portrait, 279–81 (cat. 115a and 115b); Bayer et al., Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, 261–63 (cat. 121a and 121b); Fortunati et al., Un Signore allo Specchio, 53; John Pope-Hennessy with Laurence B. Kanter, The Robert Lehman Collection: Italian Paintings, 2 vols. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987), vol. 1, 214–19 (cat. 89 and 90). On the Gozzadini family, see Cecilia Ciuccarelli, “Bernardino Gozzadini,” Dizionario Biorafico degli Italiani, vol. 58 (2002). 52 As translated in Pope-Hennessy, The Robert Lehman Collection, 214. 53 “Un dialogo […] di virtù d’amore e di prospere speranze.” In Fortunati et al., Un Signore allo Specchio, 53. 54 Anna Nilsen, “The Lady with the Unicorn: on Earthly Desire and Spiritual Purity,” Studies in Art History 16 (1995): 225-227; Carol Nordenfalk, “The Five Senses in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 48 The Warburg Institute (1985): 7–11; Phyllis Ackerman “The Lady and the Unicorn,” The Burlington Magazine 66., no. 382 (1935): 35–36.

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the marriage agreements. In explaining this point with case studies, I will also propose a new type of portrait commission.

Betrothal, Wedding, and Morgengabe Portraits Fifteenth-century depictions of marriage vows show the spouses clasping their right hands, the dextrarum iunctio, to symbolise the union and the promise of faithfulness.55 Sometimes they show girdles over this clasp, in order to stress the indissolubility of the oath.56 The same metaphor appears in nuptial rituals. For example, in the Germanic territories during the Trauung the bride’s clan encircled her to represent the family’s public consent to her transfer.57 These rites were coloured with erotic innuendos. Whilst complaining about the deterioration of moral values in Florence, Matteo Palmieri (1406–1475) described how “trumpets go […] calling the people to come see the unbridled daring of meretricious passion. They take these brides-to-be to the jousting fields and circle them around the piazzas to show that they are going to lose their virginity.”58 In many of these depictions, the couple is in front of or inside a church building as a priest joins their hands. Religious ceremonies in Europe began gradually from the fourth century, perhaps starting in territories that lacked administrative structures.59 From the eighth century, people increasingly combined secular and religious blessings and, from the eleventh century, priests validated the union after the bride received a gift from her spouse.60 However, clerical involvement had no 55 The joining of the right hands developed from the Roman traditio puellae. Morganatic unions were usually distinguished by the clasp between the right and the left hand. Reynolds, How Marriage, 89–93; Hall, The Arnolfini Betrothal; Molin P. Mutembe, Le Rituel, 100; Jan Baptist Bedaux, “The Reality of Symbols: The Question of Disguised Symbolism in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait,” Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 16, no. 1 (1986): 5–28 (9–10). 56 The meaning was rooted in folklore, as described in an 1184 poem: “My bride shall wear a brooch – a witness to her modesty and a proof that hers will be a chaste bed. It will shut up her breast and thrust back any intruder, preventing its closed approach from gaping open and the entrance to her bosom from being cheapened by becoming a beaten path for any traveller, and an adulterous eye from tasting what delights the honourable caresses of a husband.” Johannes de Hauville cited in Mary Deevy “Ring Brooches in Medieval Ireland,” Archaeology Ireland 10, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 8–10 (10). 57 Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society, 128. 58 In D’ Elia, Marriage, Sexual Pleasure and Learned Brides, 382. Like all customs, these are also long lasting. See, for instance, the seventeenth-century Jan Steen (1626–79), A Village Wedding, 1655–60, oil on canvas, 52.9 × 47.9 cm, The National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (NG2801). Here, a groom has a foretaste of his wedding night by wearing a circular garland on his crotch, as his bride wearily approaches. 59 For example, in Ireland and in areas of France and England. Windscheid et al., Diritto delle Pandette, esp. “Introduction,” 1–20. 60 Murstein, Love, Sex and Marriage, 109.

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judicial weight. Rather, priests were trusted marriage brokers;61 and churches were as good as public squares, because they were fulcra of public visibility.62 Otherwise, where the administrative system was advanced, secular officials were considered more suitable. For instance, in Venice the Doge acted as a public witness;63 and in Rome the early meetings between the brokers, fidanze, took place outside the church but a notary registered the actual marriage.64 In early medieval times, at the start of betrothal negotiations the parties would have agreed on a pact known as arrha, a term that described contracts of sales to be forfeited if the marriage went ahead. Over time, this transfer-price became part of the dowry, but its former practice survived in the etymology of local betrothal ceremonies.65 Sometime in the Middle Ages, brides also began receiving a gift on the morning after sexual intercourse. Germanic in origins but dating to the ancient Roman supuesta morgengabe, this gift was inalienable because it showed that the marriage was now sexually consummated.66 Probably because of its cost, it petered out in some areas of Europe between the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. In others, it merged with the dower, or became part of the dotal contributions, as indicated in the 1427 catasto under the Tuscanised Morgincap.67 In France and Flanders, expensive furniture was expected for the 61 We have an example in the case of Jacques de Celles. De Celles off iciated the marriage between Jehan d’Argenteau and Marie de Spontin on 18 December 1463. He was a priest but also a notary. The contract itself typifies the stipulations of the time. The marriage document is in Timothy B. Husband and Jane Hayward, The Secular Spirit: Life and Art at the End of the Middle Ages, exh.cat. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975), 252. 62 The choice of public landmarks for the exchange of vows depended on the affluence of the families. Brundage discusses this well. See also Brooke, “The Church Porch: Marriage and Architecture,” in The Medieval Idea, 248–57. 63 Bistort, Il Magistrato alle Pompe, 99. 64 Marco Antonio Altieri, Li Nuptiali, ed. Antonio Narducci (1873; rev. and rep., Roma: Roma nel Rinascimento, 1995). This authentication was called instrumento delli futuri sponsalitii, a by-product of the desponsatio per verba de futuro in Roman law. See Brandileone, La Celebrazione, 6. Notarial involvement indicated developments in social trust. Over time, it created its own regulations, as the Venetian Sumptuary Law of 1425 on the employment and payment of the mediator nuptiarum, later called gollo demonstrates. Bistort, Il Magistrato alle Pompe, 109–10 (note 4). 65 Arrha in Roman Law was the expression of earnest (money) interest in the purchase. The etymology of arrha survived in the terms arra sponsalia, subarratione, and arraglia. See also Altieri, Li Nuptiali, 53; Klapisch-Zuber, Zacharias, 186; Hall, The Arnolfini, 61–63. Murstein, Law, Sex and Marriage, 137–38. 66 South of the Alps, it was added to the donatio propter nuptias of Roman law. See The Institutes of Justinian, 2:7, 3; Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual, 223; Pertile, Storia del Diritto Italiano, 277. Visigothic practices suggest that it also helped extra-dotal resources in the case of dowries that had exceeded the statutory maximum. See P.D. King, Law and Society in the Visigothic Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 226. See also Karras, The History of Marriage, 121 and 129. 67 No wonder it disappeared: the Merovingian King Chilperic (ca.539–584) bestowed five cities upon his bride! See Owen Hughes, From Brideprice to Dowry, 268. See also Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and

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bedchamber, chambre étoffée or chambre close, where the spouses had their first sexual intercourse.68 Bespoke rituals also celebrated the newly wed’s first night.69 In Germanic territories, warriors shared drinks, and so marked their values of loyalty and mutual protection. One such ceremony, the so-called distribution of St John’s wine, or the love-drink, was adopted to represent the final phase of a marrying couple and the commitment of the community to the marital tenets.70 Its survival in England into the mid seventeenth century suggests that it took place in the husband’s house during breakfast on the morning after consummation.71 Consider Self-Portrait of the Artist with his Wife by the Master of Frankfurt (active 1480–1520) [Fig. 2.5]. A man’s direct stare seeks our attention, as he firmly clasps the side of a woman. A halved bread on an ersatz table and a slice on the edge invite us to join in. She offers him a gillyflower, simultaneously symbolising her marital fidelity and the Guild of St Luke, which is also embematised in the bull above their heads. The reference to the Guild and technical considerations have suggested the identity of the subjects as the Antwerp based artist Hendrik van Wueluwe (1460–ca.1533) and Heylwich Thonis, a colleague’s daughter whom he married when they were respectively thirty-six and twenty-seven years old.72 She pulls her belt forward, perhaps to confirm their marriage vow. The bifurcation in the region of her genitalia seems to frame the reproductive future of this oath, resonating with the shape of the ceramic vase with gillyflowers on her side. Suggestive of the woman’s womb, this was the usual crockery in the Annunciation and in iconographies of the holy births. The bread and the pewter jug for wine, on the man’s side, and symbols of conviviality and of the Holy Communion, augment the sacramental nature of these allusions. The sharp blade next to the bread reminds me of a passage in Convivio (1304–1307), where Dante advises his audience to cut with a knife the “dishonest Ritual, 223 and 278-79; Huebner, “Chapter XI,” in A History, 583–693 (626); Pertile, Storia del Diritto Italiano, 316–320. The noun Morgengabe engendered the adjective “morganatic” which describes socially unequal brides. Widows who were remarrying, morganatic and unlawful wives from endogamous marriages, all forbidden by Roman and Germanic regulations, did not receive the morning-gift. 68 Bedaux, The Question of Disguised Symbolism, 21. 69 A selection of these rituals: in the south a sword and in the north a blanket were placed between and above the spouses to symbolise sexual consummation and the transfer of the bride from agnatic to cognatic custody. Among the Northerners, the bride brought her hand to her breast whilst holding a hair plait, to indicate the consummation of her marriage. Such gestures of validation were especially useful in the case of disputed unions. Huebner, A History, 626; Pertile, Storia del Diritto Italiano, 293 and 300. 70 Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 37. 71 Christine Peters, “Sacrament and Ritual: The Making and Meaning of Marriage in Late Medieval and Early Modern England,” Past and Present 169 (November 2000): 63–96 (92). 72 Geraldine A. Johnson, Renaissance Art: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 45–48; Catalogus schilderkunst. Oude meesters (Antwerpen: Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 1988), 494–95. See also www.rkd.en

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and the unreasonable” from the “bread” of wise knowledge.73 Most likely, analogies of this type were routinely discussed in the Netherlandish Chambers of Rhetoric. The gillyflowers were themselves symbols of the Violieren, the motto of which, “Wt lonsten versaemt,” i.e., united in friendship, fills a banderole across the image of the bull. This Chamber operated in Antwerp in association with the Guild of St Luke. Like all Chambers, it organised public plays, poetry competitions and so on. Its connection with public rituals and its motto resumes my analysis of St John’s wine.74 A fly approaches a tin plate filled with cherries, the fruit of paradise and symbol of purity and childbirth. Another one rests on the woman’s headdress in a manner often seen in northern paintings.75 Their depiction added realism to the images; it demonstrated artistic skills, and was believed to ward off the actual insects, considered then as contaminating and uninvited as they are today. Because of their short life, they were also memento mori.76 On female headgears, I suggest, they may have implied uxorial responsibilities. For example, the Menagier explains how to capture fleas and flies, so that the husband, upon his return from a busy day’s work, will look forward to an organised house and a caring wife.77 If sacramental poetics sexualise Heylwich’s duties, Hendrik’s exaggerated clutch is laden with the legal and social implications of his acquisition. Although dowry and dower absorbed the economic value of morning gifts, it is possible that, like rituals, portraits kept its legacy alive, and this panel could be one example of what I propose to call “Morgengabe portraits.” Independent female portraits might equally have served this purpose, and the following comparisons explain how they differed from betrothal and marriage likenesses. The workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494) produced a likeness with an inscription that identifies the sitter as Costanza de’ Medici, wife of Gian Francesco 73 Here Dante advises against self-regarding chat and intense conversations. In other words, the banquet should begin with pleasantries that “lo illicito e ‘l non ragionevole lo coltello del mio giudicio purga in questa forma.” See Dante Alighieri, Convivio, 4 books, (Raleigh, US: Aonia Edizioni, Lulu Press, 2020), I, chap. II, 32. For a translation, see Dante Alighieri, Il Convivio (The Banquet), trans. Richard H. Lansing (Garland Library of Medieval Literature, 1990). 74 For an overview of these Chambers, see Anne-Laure van Bruaene, “Brotherhood and Sisterhood in the Chambers of Rhetoric in the Southern Low Countries,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 36, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 11–35. 75 E.g., Swabian, Portrait of a Woman of the Hofer Family, ca.1470, oil on panel, 53.7 × 40.8 cm, National Gallery, London (NG722). 76 Syson, “Witnessing Faces, Remembering Souls,” in Renaissance Faces, eds. Lorne Campbell et al., 14–31 (29); James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols, intr. Kenneth Clark (1996; rev. and rep., Alan Murray: London, 1974), 126. 77 Anonymous, Le Ménagier de Paris (The Goodman of Paris), trans. Eileen Power (London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd, 1928), 175–77.

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de’ Gaetani [Fig. 2.6].78 Her left forearm stretches from a ledge into the picture plane and her right hand holds a shoot of nosegays. She wears a gamurra of plain wool over a white undershirt. Ringlets of brown hair frame her face and a white bonnet covers the rest of her head. On the ledge are a marital brooch, three rings and a sewing set with needles and thimble. These objects were typical of the dowry trousseaux, which differed from counter-trousseaux, because they consisted in the formal and informal donora assembled by the natal family.79 Formal donora were clothing and accessories rented or purchased by the male heads, valued by professional brokers, and recorded in family logbooks.80 In betrothal likenesses they elicited the socio-economic dynamics of how they were put together. In marital portraits, as in the Scolari panel, they are enmeshed with the counter-trousseau. Together, they spotlight the subject’s catalytic significance in the new marital alliance.81 Informal donora, which began to be logged as they increased in value and variety, were everyday domestic appurtenances such as “buckets, jugs, and boxes,” stockings, knitting tools, coral beads, aprons, headscarves, gowns in plain cotton, linen, and wool.82 They were made and assembled by the female members of the bride’s family. They represented the virtues that she inherited from her own mother, and that she would pass on to her own daughter as a matriarchal legacy ad infinitum. Recalling from contemporary literature how women contributed to civic order by shaping the morality of their children, this legacy was therefore a credit to their accomplishment. In the words of the Florentine Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli 78 Cat. 90. Costanza de’ Medici was born in ca.1469. She married Gianfrancesco de’ Gaetani, from a prominent Pisan family with papal and royal connections. In 1475, Gianfrancesco restored the castle of Castelfalfi (Montaione) and an inscription at the entrance explains, here in its translated version, that this was done for “himself and his descendants.” Did the marriage occur soon after? The style of her dress corresponds to the decade of the 1480s. 79 Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence; Roberta Orsi Landini and Mary Westman Bulgarella, “Costume in Fifteenth-century Florentine Portraits of Women,” in Virtue and Beauty, ed. Brown et al., 89–97; Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Le Zane della Sposa: La Fiorentina e il suo corredo nel Rinascimento,” Memoria: Rivista di Storia delle Donne 11-12 (1984): 12–23. 80 Sumptuary regulations allowed their use only for the first three years of marriage. The same laws excluded fur and crimson-dyed cloths. See C. Mazzi, Due Provvisioni Suntuarie Fiorentine: 29 Novembre 1464 – 29 Febbraio 1471 [1472] (Firenze: Aldino, 1908), I: 3, and 26 (5 and 8). See also Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence, 135–36, 139–41; Woods-Marsden, Portrait of the Lady, 1430–1520, 68 (note 78), and 72–73. On donora in the context of dowry transactions, see Jacqueline, Marie Musacchio, “The Bride and Her Donora,” in Attending to Early Modern Women: Gender, Culture, and Change, eds. Margaret Mikesell et al. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 177–202. 81 See also Cat. 89. The identification of the subect owes to an original inscription on the reverse that states “Clarice Orsini Moglie del Magco Lorenzo Medici.” 82 “bacili, bochali, casse biance” in Altieri, Li Nuptiali, 6. See also, e.g., the surviving list of the bridal trousseau that Nannina de’ Medici (1448–1493) received when she married Bernardo Rucellai (1448–1514). In Giovanni Rucellai, Un Mercante Fiorentino e la sua Famiglia nel Secolo XV, intr. G. Marcotti (Firenze: Tipografia di G. Barbera, 1881), 89–92.

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(1371–1444), she should have been “from a mother who was a chaste woman […]. Her mother’s mother […] should also have been a chaste a clean woman, and they should be known by everybody as good women.”83 The preselection of a bride was another operative manner of women’s influence: Decided when the young men will be the support of the elderly and the whole family, the mothers and their old female relatives and friends who, even from the grandmothers, know almost all the virgins of the neighbourhood and the custom that nourished their upbringing, select all the well-born and well-raised girls, the number of which they present to the new groom-to-be. May he elect the one that suits him best.84

Therefore, informal donora were not inferior artisanship but signifiers of a feminine influence that was excluded from the dominant narrative of idealised gender relations, yet formative for the lives of individuals. Naturally, they would have transported the spectator, irrespective of gender, into childhood memories, home chatters, mother-child relations. We may say that they preserved family memory that was both androcentric and gynocentric and that was, ultimately, collective treasure, because of the large networks that the marriage market created. Seen in paintings, they endowed the images with storytelling realism, whilst chronicling the circumstances of the paintings’ commissions. Portrait of a Woman, attributed to Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494), survives in three variants: one in the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Montpellier, on loan from the Louvre, one in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie, and one in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California [Fig. 2.7].85 In all three versions she has a male companion, and 83 In Mary Rogers and Paola Tinagli, Women in Italy, 1350–1650: Ideals and Realities, a Sourcebook (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), 117. 84 “Inducti che giovani saranno opera and consiglio devecchi e di tutta lachasa: le madri e laltri antiche congiunte and amiche: le quali persinodallavola conoschono quasi tutte le vergini della terra: diche chostume sieno nutrite. Queste scielgano tuttele ben nate and bene allevate fanciulle el quale numero porgano alnuovo che sara marito. Chostui elegga qual piu glitalenta.” Leon Battista Alberti, “De Re Uxoria,” in In Questo Volume si Contiene Libri della Famiglia Composta da M. Batista degli Alberti da Firenze, 1433–1440, Urb.Lat.229, The Vatican Library, DigitalVaticana, 45v-83r (59v). In contemporary Italian, Leon Battista Alberti, “De Re Uxoria,” in I libri deFamiglia, a cura di Ruggiero Romano, Alberto Tenenti, Francesco Furlan (Torino: Einaudi, 1994), 86-160. In contemporary English, Leon Battista Alberti, “De Re Uxoria,” in I Libri della Famiglia, intr. and trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc. 2004 ed.), 92-150. 85 Cat. 40. The Montpellier version is not noted here because it is extensively damaged. The Berlin version is Attr. Domenico Ghirlandaio, Portrait of a Woman, ca.1500, tempera on panel, 44.6 × 34.4 cm, Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (cat. 83). On the Berlin version, see Christiansen and Weppelmann, The Renaissance Portrait, 154–55 (cat. 40a and 40b); Bayer et al., Art and Love, 263–65 (cat. 122a and 122b). On the Huntington pair, see Brown et al., Virtue and Beauty, 194–97 (cat. 31).

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they are considered the only marital pair from an Italian city-state. Curiously, he is in three-quarter view. The combination is perceived as unique, but I have found another couple in this double format and from the same social group. They are fastened by a continuous background, and their figure-landscape relationship suggests knowledge of the Sforza-Montefeltro diptych. This marriage of compositional cues implies the existence of wide-ranging taste in portraiture, the extent of which still evades us.86 Of the three variants, the Huntington may be the earliest. The unpainted borders on all sides indicate the original presence of hinges for engaged frames which would have attached them as in a diptych. Additionally, unlike in the other versions, this couple seem to reciprocate the gaze, and she is the more lifelike of the three. In all versions, she is indoors and dressed in domestic garments. Her profile is silhouetted against the porphyry of a column in a way that seems calculated to augment her fair prettiness. The column supports the lintel of an opening onto outdoor scenery that amplifies the contrast with her retiring nature. A kerchief, coverciere, covers her shoulders. In Florence, a Sumptuary Law imposed this item in 1464, and it was immediately added to the list of informal gifts. 87 In the Huntington and Berlin versions, other donora are on display in a cupboard next to the window: a string of coral beads, a glass jug, and an expensive prayer book, a pendetta da moglianza, a ring, a small oval box and a long, metal stick like a knitting tool. Dressed in this way and surrounded by such objects, she encapsulates the sitter’s moral fitness. Similar items in Giovanna degli Albizzi by the same painter have tempted some to identify her as a Tornabuoni member.88 Perhaps she was but, unlike Giovanna, this is not a posthumous portrait and the ring, which appears as unstable on the edge of the box, elicits spatial and temporal precariousness, maybe jesting about the uncertainties of the marriage market. It seems fitting now to clarify that the male companions differ in each panel and that critics have proposed two husbands, and a lover or a relative.89 Yet, I wonder if in marriage commissions the grooms were painted after the brides. Was this, for instance, the reason for the changes in the Scolari man? The betrothing period was, in fact, not just fraught with events; it was also fraught with anxieties, including annulments for delayed dotal payments 86 Cat. 42. The female profile resembles closely that of the woman in Cat. 41, now in the Detroit Institute of Art. Both paintings are little studied. The former was sold at a Potomac auction and is now in a private collection. The latter is rarely featured in studies on female portraiture. See Virtue and Beauty, 18–19 (Fig. 9), where it is attributed to a follower of Verrocchio. 87 Mazzi, Due Provvisioni Suntuarie Fiorentine, I: 16 (7). 88 Cat. 57. Proposed by Gustav Friedrich Waagner in his 1833 assessment of the Berlin collection, the idea has gained some traction. On these and marital gifts in general see Luke Syson and Dora Thornton, Objects of Virtues: Art in Renaissance Italy (London: The British Museum Press, 2004), 37–50 (esp. 46–47). 89 Brown et al., Virtue and Beauty, 194–97 (cat. 31).

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or second thoughts, especially in hypergamous matches. Plausibly, female portraits were painted during the betrothing transactions in an effort to elicit in their audiences the urgency so carefully romanticised in the Scolari panel. Finally, a likeness could be reused if the woman were to marry again. The spectators’ knowledge of these conditions would have likened such images to indexes of the pragmatic and psychological facets of arranged unions. The same criterion of spectatorship is at work in Costanza but with a twist. Her elbow and the architectural layers shield her from her surroundings. Her domestic dress and the objects scattered on the ledge, appropriately interpreted as symbols of her uxorial responsibilities after consummation of marriage,90 visualise the instructions in marital manuals: she is a domestic busy bee. The nosegays in her hand typify betrothal portraits but an inscription on her right states that she is married. In female portraiture, onomastic references such as coats-of-arms appear when there is a male companion, one that Costanza does not have. Perhaps she had already gifted her virginity, as maybe Heylwich Thonis also had, because in Italy as in other pockets of Europe flowers are also metaphors for female goodness, fiore di virtù, and for the female genitals. Thus, her gesture may indicate less an offer but rather a declaration of a physical change. As such, a variant within the rubric of marital portraiture, it signifies the genealogical duties following the first sexual intercourse. Finally, the inscription, in a legal- commemorative style that is unusual for a marital portrait, and altogether unique in a portrait, simultaneously states the formation of a new kin and her attachment to her natal family, reflecting the sine manu principle, and placing the panel within the timeline and function of a Morgengabe. The well-known Portrait of Young Woman with Unicorn that Raphael painted in 1505–1506 magnifies the virginal symbolism of the unicorn. Restoration undertaken in 1935 revealed this fantasy animal under a wheel and a palm leaf, overpainted sometime in the seventeenth century in order to turn the subject into a St Catherine of Alexandria. Consensus that this was a marital portrait is based on the principle that portraits of young women were commissioned at times of marriage. Yet, whilst she sports a marital pendant on her neck, her youthful beauty is in keeping with betrothal likenesses, and she wears no rings.91 These sparing details are sufficient to challenge essentialist conclusions. With them, there are also the contrasting colours between her overskirt and her dress, which form a segment below the unicorn that seems to imply a sexual undertone. This and other paintings may therefore fulfil Morgengabe commissions. 90 Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtues, 48. 91 Raphael (1483–1520), Portrait of Young Woman with Unicorn (Giulia Farnese o Maddalena Strozzi?), 1505–06, oil on canvas, 65 × 61 cm, Galleria Borghese (371). On this portrait, the museum website suffices.

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Conclusions Nowadays, in most parts of the Christian world, marriages are personal choices. Once, they forged social, economic, and even political alliances and, as such, were social and even political stabilisers. Love was a moral obligation that the Christian sacramental formula came to summarise. Like all alliances, they involved lengthy negotiations between two parties, as Christiane Klapisch-Zuber has imaginatively visualised. In a variety of regional expressions, public rituals, bespoke personal and formal gifts, clothing including, informed and celebrated with the community the phases of these transactions. Naturally, marriage portraiture too expressed the ethical, social, and economic principles that underlined these contracts. Its visual signs reflected the purpose of the commissions: betrothal, marital, and a type that I have called Morgengabe to indicate that it marked the bride’s lost virginity. To recognise the latter among others is not a mere interpretative exercise. These commissions flattered the sitters on the threshold of an experience that was arguably terrifying because it was shadowed by their upbringing in the name of the Marian model of chastity, and the risks of death in childbirth. Crucially, by implying coital success, these portraits made it impossible to rescind the marital contracts. The same premarital uncertainties might have prioritised the commissioning of the likenesses of the brides-to-be over those of the grooms. These visual signs elicited in the viewers their own experience of the habits and bonds of affections that constituted social cohesion. This mode of seeing was thus psychologically relational, in fact a phenomenological liminality that, I have argued, was enhanced by mnemo-techniques and by how people stored and handled these objects. I will expand on this concept in the chapters to come. Finally, the portraits in this chapter are primarily Italian but this was not a deliberate choice. Northern artists also painted marital portraiture, but other concerns overshadowed the cultural significance of the performative and material expressions of marriage contracts, as shall be seen. The next chapter contains an analysis of the cisalpine profile format and the context in which it thrived.

3.

Women in Profile Portraiture Abstract In the fifteenth century, the formats commonly used for panel portraits were the profile and the three-quarter view. The former was popular in central-northern Italy, especially for female likenesses. With fifty-seven works, this chapter attempts a taxonomy of the Italian profile likenesses by studying the format’s entwined aesthetic and conceptual origins, and its perceived suitability for portraying women. With analyses that also consider the spreading popularity of profiles to decorate nuptial and domestic items, it concludes that these paintings are “icons of urbanitas,” as I call them, because they represent the civic and civil ideals of the social network that commissioned and viewed these works. I foreshadowed this trajectory in the previous chapter’s suggestion about relational and mnemonic conditions of spectatorship. Linked to this concept is a distinction that I introduce here between a mode of seeing-in of the northern audiences and seeing-as of the Italian audiences. I will expand the terms of this difference throughout the book. Key words: Italy – Maiolica – Profile Portraiture – Seeing-as – Seeing-in

In the fifteenth century, the formats commonly used for independent portraits on panels were the profile and the three-quarter view. The latter’s putative origin is considered to be the region of Flanders, then part of the Duchy of Burgundy, and its characteristics are discussed in the next chapter. The profile format was popular in central-northern Italy. Their commissions rose alongside those of sculpted likenesses, perhaps betraying an emulation of the ancient cultures that honoured the effigies of the dead as a reminder of ideal behaviours. Due to their unchanging characteristics, it is difficult to date the early paintings with precision, as the chronology of a Portrait of a Man, now in Washington DC, shows [Fig. 3.1]. From ca.1450, male portraiture developed a wider range of angles, but the profile remained steadily in use for women.1 The task here is to understand this phenomenon. 1 The earliest modern record of a three-dimensional portrait bust is in a 1421 inventory from a house in Prato. Its great hall displayed a “large and beautiful head of terracotta.” Cited in Patricia Rubin,

Toreno, E., Netherlandish and Italian Female Portraiture in the Fifteenth Century. Gender, Identity, and the Tradition of Power. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463728614_ch03

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I have traced f ifty-seven female portraits: seven from the central Italian principalities, 2 one Venetian or Ferrarese,3 three from Venice, 4 sixteen from the Duchy of Milan;5 and a staggering thirty from Florence.6 There may be more and, indeed, I have found others that are not included in the catalogue because I could not verify their originality. Yet, even if these leftovers were forgeries, they stand as an indication of the health of the market for these items. The enduring popularity of this format, in Italy, for female likenesses is attributed to how its design translated the ethics of an inflexible patriarchal culture: whilst lacking engagement with the spectator, the profile made the subjects into objects of sight and, further, merchandise on display.7 Yet, patriarchy was not localised, it was a pan-European reality. Additionally, women were both subjects and viewers of portraiture. It seems therefore plausible that this format was not the mere visualisation of a situation, whereby women were both guarded and exposed. Even if they deny ocular contact, these portraits draw the viewer into intimate scrutiny of their facets. These include the pictographic tracing of the silhouette, and the modelling of the volumes in a manner awash with Albertian technical suggestions, the haptic evocation of sartorial details, and the conceptual suggestion of personality status and civic ideals that the profile formula amalgamated. More broadly, this intimacy was created from “the stock of patterns, categories, and method of inference,” which “Understanding Renaissance Portraiture,” in The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini, eds. Christiansen, Keith and Stefan Weppelmann, exh.cat. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 2–25 (11). On ancient, medieval, and Quattrocento sculpted busts, see Irving Lavin, “On the Sources and Meaning of the Renaissance Portrait Bust,” The Art Quarterly XXXIII, n. 3 (1979): 207–215. See also Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 37 books, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1952), Book XXXIV, VIII 14–IX. 17, 138 and 141. 2 Cat. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 3 Cat. 9. 4 Cat. 10, 11, 12. I found three more that are not in the catalogue in the Appendix because I could not verify the authenticity of two, and one represents a fourteenth-century sitter. 5 Cat. 13 to 28 inclusive. Because Milanese portraits from this period appear in many European inventories, the current number does not reflect the extent of their actual quantity. For instance, in the catalogue I did not include three paintings with an unverif iable provenance. Furthermore, the Bella Principessa and the Speyer Lady, both attributed to Leonardo, are excluded because they are on paper and vellum. 6 Cat. 29 to 57 inclusive and Cat. 128. From this list I excluded a likeness, which an iscription on the upper edge of the panel claims to be Maddalena de’ Medici (1473–1528). I could not find sufficient information. Cat. 36 shows a second likeness that seems original but with insufficient information. As seen in Chapter Two, there are at least two more copies of Cat. 40. Finally, I did not include a painting by Piero di Cosimo which is now in the Pitti Palace, because it is paper on wood. 7 Since the influential Patricia Simons, “Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture,” History Workshop 25 (Spring 1988): 4–30; and Patricia Lee Rubin, “Seeing and Being Seen,” in Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007), 93–134 (108).

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Michael Baxandall has called the “cognitive style” of its culture.8 It remains to be asked why this portrait style was prevalent in the portrayal of women. I will code these portraits and their physical boundaries as communicative spaces. My argument begins with a comparison between the two earliest female profile portraits of the European tradition. One depicts an unidentified northern woman, and the other is a member of the Ferrarese Este House. This comparison is entwined with a review of the socio-political background of the portrait culture of Italy. My intention is to introduce the concept that Italian portraiture elicited relational experiences that involved both genders individually and intersubjectively. Its formal properties and sign-system articulated the values enshrined in the viewers’ lived experiences of the interpersonal obligations, practical as well as emotional, that connected individuals to the wider community. My second step will be to explain why this portrait type was considered suitable for female likenesses. To this end, I will discuss the Florentine portraits. As echoes of methods of inference reverberate in my approach, I shall consider these images as the by-product of the humanist zeitgeist. I will therefore support my analyses with examples of contemporary writing that add to the literature already reviewed, and reflections on female portraiture as a decorative pattern in nuptial and domestic items. In establishing their subtext from this broader range of sources, I hope to demonstrate how integral they were to the transmission of the tangled ideals of social refinement, concinnitas, and cohesion. Towards the end of the century, the profile angle stiffened into a formula that from Florence will take us to Milan. This will conclude the chapter.

Looking as Feeling: A Culture of Seeing-as In the fifteenth century, central-northern Italy was a patchwork of principalities and city-states. The latter are the earliest European examples of a self-governed urban class, dating back to the turn of the millennium and enriched by local and international entrepreneurial activities. One historian has described their advanced professionalism in unambiguous terms: “[T]he Italians formed a circulatory system for information as well as goods and capital. The dramatic expansion of their horizon between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries had turned Latin Christendom into an integrated network in a way that it had never previously been.”9 This system 8 Michael Baxandall, Painting as Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 30–32. 9 Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonisation and Cultural Changes 950–1350 (1993; rep., London: Penguin Books, 1994), 191. See also, David Abulafia, ed. The Short Oxford History of Italy: Italy in the Central Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealth

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included administrative and banking services for the principalities. To consolidate their socio-economic position, these new professionals reinvested their capital in land and in marriages with the impoverished nobility. An advanced agricultural industry further entwined the prosperity and interdependence of this geopolitical hodgepodge, whose overall economy was, however, exposed to the risks inherent in its markets, which included banking bankruptcies and the loss of goods during transportation across sea-routes and land-routes disrupted by raids and warfare. And whose political stability was undermined by recurring political infighting and the interference, if not outright invasions from European powers and the Papal state. From 1453, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire became another tangible threat. For mutual protection, these Italian States followed carousels of temporary alliances against common adversaries. In an important study on the use of the oath from the mid thirteenth to the mid fifteenth century, Paolo Prodi called these city-states “incorporated societies,” because they sought networks of mutual obligations – confraternities, guilds, consanguinity and so forth – in the medieval manner of private, sworn agreements that did not see “international treaties joining political dynasties as different in nature from ordinary marriage contracts.”10 As has been shown, this mode of securing legal, fiscal, and civic stability increased socio-economic connections, and was further augmented when marriages with the impoverished aristocracy became the norm. This phenomenon mirrored the marriage alliances between ruling members of the principalities and prominent European Houses. Their ties already existed in vassalage forms and mercenary military services but now intermarriages furnished direct access to important geopolitical positions. In sum, these contracts were at the heart of the Italians’ socio-political survival and expansion.11 and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1993), esp. 12–67. 10 Paolo Prodi, Il Sacramento del Potere: Il Giuramento Politico Nella Storia Costituzionale dell’ Occidente (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992), 161 and 199. On the language of this social intercourse, see Lauro Martinez, Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore, Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001). 11 On these conditions, see Paula Findlen, ed. The Italian Renaissance (USA, UK, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2007); Paul D. McLean, The Art of the Network: Strategic Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007); Julius Kirchner, ed. The Origins of the State in Italy 1300–1600 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. Giorgio Chittolini, “‘The Private’, the ‘Public’, the ‘State’” (34–61); Benjamin G. Kohl and Alison Andrew Smith, eds. Major Problems in the History of the Italian Renaissance (Lexington, Massachusets, Toronto: D. C. Heath and Company, 1995); Goldthwaite, Wealth, esp. 159–175; Claudio Donati, L’Idea di Nobilità in Italia: Secoli XIV-XVIII (Bari: Laterza, 1988), esp. 3–51; Francis William Kent and Patricia Simons, Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Francis William Kent, Households and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori and Rucellai (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

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To legitimise the control of the structures of dominance, this multilayered society feigned à la mode Christian-chivalric affectations but drew strength from recherché humanism that styled an alternative to the culture of the northern aristocracies. Consider the archetypal princely humanism of Lionello d’Este (1407–1450), discussed below, whose cultural patronage overshadowed his illegitimate birthrights. Or the elitist circle established in the 1460s by the Florentine oligarch Piero de’ Medici (1416–1469), which became the Laurentian and, in 1638, the Neo-platonic Academy. Instances of spectacular ancestry were also rampant, such as the Venetian Contarini, who rooted their origins and vital agency in the foundation of Venice during the invasions of Attila the Hun (ruled 434–453). Graeco-Roman antiquity had shown a model of rulership steeped in intellect and moral values rather than dynastic privilege. The Italians claimed this as their cultural heritage, one that entitled them to their political ambitions.12 Medallic portraiture naturally flourished in this climate. The equivalent in painting was the combination of iconic profile and emblematic background.13 One such example is the portrait of a member of the Este House, and currently the earliest existing Italian female court likeness. It is attributed to Pisanello (ca.1395–ca.1455), leading painter of the International Gothic, accomplished medal maker, and the putative creator of the emblematic portrait [Fig. 3.2]. The silhouette of her profile negotiates a sophisticated balance between characterisation and idealisation. Her standard prettiness and her bust, turned towards the viewer in a gentle swayback posture, confer on the composition the signature elegance of the Gothic style. On a European scale, she is predated by a profile likeness that represents a young English

12 Jane Fair Bestor, “Bastardy and Legitimacy in the Formation of a Regional State in Italy: The Estense Succession,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 38, no. 3 (July 1996): 549–558; James Hankins, “The Myth of the Platonic Academy of Florence,” Renaissance Quarterly 44, no. 3 (Autumn 1991): 429–475; Alison Brown, “Platonism in Fifteenth-Century Florence and Its Contribution to Early Modern Political Thought,” The Journal of Modern History 58, no. 2 (June,1986): 383–413; Margaret L. King, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986), 26. On humanist literacy and power, Christopher S. Celenza, “Creating Canons in Fifteenth-Century Ferrara: Angelo Decembrio’s ‘De politia litteraria’,1.10”, Renaissance Quarterly 57, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 43–98. Martinez, Strong Words. In Wealth, (170–175) Goldthwaite makes the complementary point that chilvaric affectation in the Italian courts had no impact on their model of networking for socio-economic consolidation, amid widespread issues of illegitimacy and statecraft indebted not to vassalage bonds but to administrative professionalism. 13 Beverly Louise Brown, “Portraiture at the Courts of Italy,” in The Renaissance Portrait, eds. Christiansen and Weppelmann, 26–47; Luke Syson, “Consorts, Mistresses and Exemplary Women: The Female Medallic Portrait in Fifteenth-Century Italy,” in The Sculpted Objects: 1400–1700, eds. Stuart Santini and Peta Motture (Aldershot, Hants, England: Scolar Press, 1997), 43–54 (52); Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait-Painting in the 14th, 15th and 16th Centuries (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 81.

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or French aristocrat, painted in ca.1410 [Fig. 3.3].14 When the Duveen Brothers purchased this northern likeness in 1922, it was damaged. Although her face was repainted following the original traces, the restoration was determined by the taste and expertise of their restorer and of the eminent Bernard Berenson, the Duveen’s trusted consultant on Italian art. His misattributed authorship to Pisanello, naively or intentionally, surely appealed to the many collectors of the Italian Renaissance at the time. With the caution warranted by its current conditions, a comparison with the Este woman can be made. Both subjects are on their heraldic left. This angle was common in individual portraiture but was reserved for female likenesses in marriage commissions, because it subtexted the Christian antithesis between the sinister and the dextera Domini, viz. between inferior and superior beings.15 Therefore, the few surviving individual portraits of women from their heraldic right might have had laudatory intentions.16 Both subjects are fashionably charming with hair fair and plucked, or perhaps shaved, high on the forehead. In the northern woman, it is coiled behind the ears into a net inside a bourrelet, which is painted over what was left of the previous headdress. Her pleated houppelande of the colours à la française is woven with gold threads repainted during the first restoration and fastened to the body with a belt. A choker of five rounds of gold metal mesh accessorises the garment. From the shoulders runs a double string of gold beads, also once damaged, which heightens the gentle twist of her torso. A high collar reveals fur lining over an undershirt from which emerges a glimpse of double chin that, whilst enhancing the decorative effect of the silhouette, adds a touch of characterisation, perhaps enough for her 14 Cat. 1. When this panel appeared on the market in 1885, it was believed to represent Blanche (1392–1409), daughter of Henry IV of England (1367–1413). However, although damaged, the style of her dress suggests the early fifteenth-century French royal fashion. Alongside areas of the dress, the face and headdress had survived only in their outlines and priming. In 1923, after its purchase, the Duveen Brothers instructed the restoration. The headdress and hair were redone. The turban, perhaps once decorated with pinned metalwork, was enlarged. The double necklace with gold beads, which had been painted over, was reconstructed, although a missing goldsmith item fastened to the chains was not replaced. Blue and gold were added to the damaged areas, and the background was repainted in black. Erroneously, the work was attributed to Pisanello, and the subject identified as Isotta degli Atti (1432/33–1474), the mistress of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta (1417–1468). Since its acquisition by the National Gallery in 1937, other names have been proposed; Isabeau (ca.1370–ca.1435) or Margaret of Bavaria (1367–1423), Margaret of Flanders (1350–1405), Margaret of Anjou (1430–1482). National Gallery Archives. And Rubin, Understanding Renaissance Portraiture, 21–22; David Alan Brown et al., Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo’s Ginevra de Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women, exh.cat. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), 100, (cat. 1); Campbell et al., Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian, exh.cat. (London: Yale University Press for National Gallery Company, 2008), 84 (cat. 1). 15 E.g., Matthew 31:34, or Psalm 110:1: “The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.” 16 Cat. 3, 17, 19, 25, 26, 32, 37, 38, 49, 50.

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facial traits to be recognised. Richly attired, pretty, and sufficiently characterised to evoke the sitter, the portrait conjures family wealth in a court environment, suggesting a marital or a genealogical function.17 The Italian subject is also sufficiently recognisable and Pisanello took pains to reveal her milieu. The left sleeve of her giornea is decorated with a vase with olive branches and chains attached to its handles. This was the impresa del bocchale, which Lionello d’Este adopted in 1441 after becoming Marquis of Ferrara, Lord of Ferrara, Reggio, and Modena. Afterwards, he had it routinely embroidered on his clothes.18 Above, a twig of juniper, ginepro in Italian, may allude to Lionello’s sister, Ginevra (1419–1440) but there are at least three plausible identifications suggesting three different functions for the portrait.19 Emblem notwithstanding, the dress seems modest for a woman of the Este court. The composition altogether distracts from a genealogical purpose. I suggest that its details reveal an attitude towards image making that I explain using De Politia Litteraria (On Literary Polish) that the Milanese humanist Angelo Decembrio (?1413/22–after 1466) wrote whilst living in Ferrara, where he moved in 1430. This text reimagines the soirées among conspicuous names from the Italian literary clique at Lionello’s court.20 Pars LXVIII shows an ante litteram enthusiasm for sprezzatura that praises in artefacts the properties of truthfulness, calibrated variety, and draughtsmanship. Lionello’s guests would have appreciated how the head, face, nape of the neck, and the bust of 17 A similar point is made in Hans Belting, “The Coat of Arms and the Body: Two Media of the Body,” in An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011 ed.), 62–83. 18 For this, he entrusted Amadio da Milano (active 1437–1483) to purchase gold and silver. Lionello Venturi cited in Dominque Cordellier et al., Pisanello, exh.cat. (Louvre: La Documentation Française, 1998), 12, and 47 (note 10) and 49 (note 43). Chapter Two explains this practice and this giornea may be one pictorial example. 19 Cat. 2. This painting is well preserved with only fine, horizontal craquelures, deeper in the lower part. Reflectography indicates that there was no underdrawing. The main candidates are Ginevra (b.1419), daughter of Niccolò III d’Este, Marquis of Ferrara (1383–1441) and Margherita Gonzaga (1418–1439), Lionello d’Este’s first wife. Supporters of Ginevra have suggested a commission on her marriage to Sigismondo Malatesta (1417–1468) in 1434. Those of Margherita have dated it ca.1441, after her death in 1439. On the sitter as Ginevra see Joanna Woods-Marsden, “Portrait of the Lady, 1430–1520,” in Virtue and Beauty, ed. Brown et al., 62–87 (74). On the sitter as Margherita Gonzaga: Lorne Campbell et al., Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian, exh.cat. (National Gallery, London: Yale University Press, 2008), 25; Luke Syson and Dillan Gordon, Pisanello: Painter to the Renaissance Court (London, National Gallery: Yale University Press, 2001), 102–05; Giovanni Paccagnini, Pisanello, trans. Jane Carroll (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1973), 153. The Louvre Archives also have Lucia d’Este (1419–1437) as another presumptive sitter. 20 Angelo Decembrio, De Politia Letteraria, created ca.1415–1466, Vat.Lat.1749, The Vatican Library, DigitalVaticana. For the translated citations, I have relied on Michael Baxandall, “A Dialogue on Art from the Court of Lionello d’Este: Angelo Decembrio’s De Politia Litteraria Pars LXVIII,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 26, no. 3/4 (1963): 304–326. See also Celenza, Creating Canons in Fifteenth-Century Ferrara, 56–80.

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this likeness fit into the shapes of ovals, scaled and nestled uniformly, and skilfully camouflaged.21 Possibly the first known fifteenth-century female portrait with an illusionistic background,22 they would have relished the challenge of deciphering the significance of its pinks, columbines and butterflies that perhaps articulated the death/memory oxymoron redolent of Petrarchan and ancient imageries. 23 In the colours of her clothing, red, green, and white, they would have recognised the theological virtues of Faith, Charity, and Hope.24 These visual complexities owed a debt to the humanists’ interest in the Horatian ut pictura poesis. As these guests argued: The poets […] often describe the appearance of natural objects […]. And besides, those things that cannot be shown by painting but can only be perceived by the mind – things that nature alone can paint – they represent with poets in description, just like that of the painters in colouring or of the sculptors in carving, may be seen as if put before our eyes.25

As already explained, portraiture, like memory, transcended the ineffable frontiers of time and space. To view portraits as silent poetry meant to discern in them the aura of the sitters’ innate charm from a range of signifiers of the socio-cultural habits common to patrons and audiences. In other words, Shearman’s descriptive affinity in the Introduction.26 This mode of spectatorship exacted perceptual and cognitive attention, translating the act of seeing into an emotional experience of the interpersonal bonds already noted in the topography of the intimate worlds of the Scolari and the Huntington portraits. I suggest that the Franco-Flemish likeness is representative of a type associated with a social group, the membership of which was exclusive. In such portraits, the 21 This technical observation is in the Louvre Archives. 22 My claim is fraught; the Metropolitan Museum believes that the earliest is Lippi’s Woman and a Man at a Casement. In both cases, the exact chronology is yet to be established. 23 Woods-Marsden, Portrait of the Lady, 1430–1520, 74 and 86 (note 88); Syson and Gordon, Pisanello, 105. Frank Zöllner, “The ‘Motions of the Mind’ in Renaissance Portraits: The Spiritual Dimension of Portraiture,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 68. Bd., H. 1 (2005): 23–40 (33–35). Following one of Leonardo’s aphorisms, Zöllner interprets the butterflies as evocative of life after death, because they symbolise the soul entrapped in the mortal body but striving to return to its creator. See also Paola Tinagli and Mary Rogers, Women in Italian Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 51–52. 24 E.g., Woods-Marsden, Portrait of the Lady, 1430–1520, 82; Syson and Gordon, Pisanello, 104. 25 Baxandall, A Dialogue on Art, 318–20. 26 John Shearman, “Portraits and Poets,” in Only Connect… Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance: The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1988 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 108–148.

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spectators would have seen, like shields of arms, the genealogical alliances that, through those very sitters, would have protected the God-given exclusivity of the club. The stiff projection of the figure on an abstract background heightened the banner-type message, thus forsaking an intersubjective spectatorship. Conversely, the portrait culture of Italy encouraged the viewer to see portraits as configurations of collective histories. The resulting connection with the image, which I consider a phenomenological liminality, fashioned the genre as a metonymy of the enduring effects of social bonds. These attachments were considered ad aeternum because the actualisation of the true soul was what mattered, not the actual presence of the individual.27 Leon Battista Alberti made it clear in a wellknown and truly Plinian passage, that portraiture retained “a divine force which not only makes absent men present, as friendship is said to do so, but moreover makes the dead seem almost alive.”28 In proposing this argument, I find myself processing two trajectories. The first requires a prefatory explanation. My distinction between seeing-in and seeing-as is not perceptual in the tradition of a Ludwig Wittgenstein or Richard Wollheim. Instead, it implies the lack or the existence of an immersive experience, as understood by the phenomenologists. I explain this distinction in the chapters ahead, ending with a summary in the Conclusions.29 My second trajectory unwittingly challenges the important essay on Quattrocento female profile portraits by Patricia Simons, which has insisted that “civic fame and individualism are not terms applicable to fifteenth-century women and their imaging.”30 In the patriarchal system of marriages, women were links that increased kinship. Additionally, as has already been explained, women’s domestic duties ramified into the civic fabric. The phenomenon explored by Giovanni Ciappelli is therefore understandable. Ciappelli has noted that Florentine diaries and account books, ricordanze, recorded individual dealings and ties with public offices, in order to create social memories against the protean conditions of the patriarchal modes of networking. Although these documents rarely mention them by name, 27 This conclusion may resemble the funerary ends proposed by others, such as Édouard Pommier and Frank Zöllner. However, I consider eulogising the dead to be only one of the manifestations of the period practice of idealising social intercourse. 28 Leon Battista Alberti, “Book Two,” in On Painting, intr. and trans. John R. Spencer (1956; rep., New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1966), 63–85 (63). 29 For a summary of the philosophical points mentioned here, see Maurice Merlau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, intr. and trans. Donald A. Landes (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2012 ed.), vii–li and lxx–lxxxv. Emmanuel Alloa, “Seeing-as, Seeing-in, Seeing With: Looking Through Images,” in Image and Imaging in Philosophy Science and the Arts Series, eds. Richard Heinrich et al. (Frankfurt, Lancaster, Paris: New Brunswick, 2011), vol. 1, 179–90. 30 Simons, Women in Frames, 5.

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wives and daughters are the implied links of these networks.31 Moreover, in these incorporated societies and in the Italian civic culture at large, these networks were actualised by men, yet extolled verbally in forms, quite sycophantic by today’s taste, which were effeminised because they were borrowed from the language of the amatory tradition. In many cases, as Chapter One explained, women were invoked either as mediators or as role models in this system. However artificially, this habit subverted the hierarchy of genders by showing men’s dependence on the mercy of women.32 Therefore, because of their catalytic role and familiarity with this language of praise, the notion that women and their own imaging were denied public recognition seems untenable. To varying extents, women were visible and included in public discourse. The reason for the popularity of the profile in female portraiture in Italy now begins to acquire focus. The format’s cultural lineage was from ancient Rome and, indeed, claims of Imperial majesty were to be seen-in northern profile portraiture from Charlemagne’s (?742/48/68–814) medallic profiles to the Franco-Flemish. In the fifteenth century, the same propagandistic efforts were at work in the Italian principalities. Yet, Rome had not been a monolithic entity. Its history had been one of swift adaptability to geopolitical changes that, crucially, did not impose restrictions on the social mobilities brought about by its territorial expansion. The one provisio was the strictest adherence to the moral and cultural ideals that underpinned the Romanitas of Republican and, later, Imperial Rome. The Italian patchwork of new elites hanged by such ideals. This was, de facto, the legacy of the format in the south. By virtue of their singular biosocial position, women personified this legacy. To wit, women were the catalyst for the economic, civic, and moral cooperation that defined each and everyone’s identity and very existence, from ancient Rome to Quattrocento Italy. Moreover, these portraits were domestic by definition. The house itself, the theatre of women’s agency, originated biological and social life cycles that were recorded, from echoes of footsteps to furnishing, in habits and objects. To experience its space was thus to experience its intersubjective history. To experience its tidiness and its daily activities was to experience women’s touches. How could women not be its allegories? To this effect, I am intrigued by the analogy in Filarete’s Trattato between the love of the architect for his building and that of the lover for his beloved, which he quenches when she is in his sight.33 Below, I 31 Giovanni Ciappelli, “Family Memory,” in Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence, eds. Giovanni Ciappelli and Patricia Lee Rubin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 26–38. 32 Read for instance Martinez, “Verbal Web of Patronage,” in Strong Words, 13–36. 33 “come uno quando è innamorato volentieri va avedere lasua amorosa, e quando ella è inluogho che egli lavegga nongli rincresce e non gliviene anoia iltempo.” [As when one, happily in love, goes to see his beloved, and when she is in his sight he feels no pain or boredom]. Antonio Averlino (Filarete), Trattato

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discuss the notion of seeing-as and the richness of this type of portrait using the Florentine likenesses as a case study.

Concinnitas, Urbanitas and Female Portraiture In 1936, the New York art critic Jean Lipman compiled the most extensive survey to date on Florentine profiles, male and female, amounting to fifty-four. Lipman called their style “rhythmical-decorative” and suggested that it reflected the Florentine’s ability to memorise the silhouette of a face.34 In 1965, Rab Hatfield grandiloquently described these paintings as “the striking apparent manifestation of reason […]. They are excellent men.” With extraordinary blindness for gender and a taste for the dramatic, he concluded grimly that this format ended abruptly in ca.1450, when Florentine portraiture, so he thought, encountered crises-ridden decades as it struggled to adjust to new iconographical requirements.35 More recently, Alison Wright has suggested that its efflorescence in Florence arose from the coalescence of a burgeoning naturalism in art and the desire to be remembered. In keeping with the Italian socio-political conditions, this was the combined effect of the revival of antiquity, the familiarity with profile donor portraiture, and the medieval mnemonic use of devotional images. Wright highlights the absence of female tomb portraiture against the wealth of independent portraits on panel, which she is tempted to consider commemorative. Yet, she notes that these are replete with social signifiers, and relates their quantity to the effects of the courtly taste of the later Quattrocento Florentine culture that, in promoting the theme of the fair, chaste, and unattainable woman, turned her into a poetical subject.36 dell’Architettura, created ca. fifteenth cent., Firenze, BNCF, Fondo Nazionale, ms. II.I.140, 34. On its trans.: Filarete (Antonio Averlino), Treatise on Architecture, intr. and trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965). 34 Lipman noted also the format’s lack of transitive spectatorship, which, decades later, feminist scholarship would consider a form of objectification of the sitter. Jean Lipman, “The Florentine Portrait in the Quattrocento,” The Art Bulletin 18, no. 1 (March 1936): 54–102 (68 and 97 on the proto-feminist observations). The argument is popular; see, e.g., Christiansen and Weppelmann, eds. The Renaissance Portrait, 106. 35 Rab Hatfield, “Five Early Renaissance Portraits,” The Art Bulletin 47, no. 3 (September 1965): 315–334 (324). 36 Alison Wright, “Portraiture,” in The Pollaiuolo Brothers: The Art of Florence and Rome (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 115–50; Alison Wright, “The Memory of Faces: Representational Choices in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Portraiture,” in Art, Memory, and Family in Renaissance Florence, eds. Giovanni Ciappelli and Patricia Lee Rubin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 86–113. Wright’s inference that Florentine female profiles are posthumous is in her Portraiture. Her observation seemingly considers the fact that marital portraits are not mentioned in contemporary inventories. The same argument is in Paola Tinagli, Women in Italian Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation, Identity

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My contribution to the study of these images concerns the function of this poeticising element, which I locate within the extent to which these images were seen-as allegories by an audience educated to exert an interactive mode of looking. My trajectory, anticipated by the Scolari analysis, aligns with Adrian Randolph’s study on Quattrocento small boxes and cassoni. These were used to transfer and store bridal possessions; as they opened and closed, they were metaphors for amatory ideals, guarded and declared. This metaphor was actualised in the mnemonic awareness of the stored objects, and their significance in the field of amorousconnubial expectations.37 I am intrigued by the correlation between the backdrop of many of the extant cassoni, and both the picture planes and the backdrops in these portraits. In the cassoni, the interior of the lid frames the customary reclining figure within a box-like illusion that elicits an anthropomorphic manifestation of the amatory ideal [Fig. 3.4]. I believe that portraits were also haptic stages in the formulation of connections that began with the ritualised action of opening and closing their storage items and ended in the imagination. This process received panoptical stimuli. These included the interpretation of the borders of the panels, sometimes marked by faux cornices, as liminal fenestrations into the world of the painted figures. The backgrounds of these portraits are of three types: 1. with openings; 2. abstract; 3. replicating the airy atmosphere of the sky. The openings are routinely called windows or frames, even though they often lack the relevant fittings, and are associated with eternity in death. In my view, they too constitute props for a liminal panopticism. Similarly, the abstract backgrounds suggest metaphors for intimacy, whereby the accountable action of opening and closing of the storage item controlled the haptic and sensuous relationship with the image inside and, further, the mnemonic process that such ritual activated. In a painting attributed to Giovanni di Francesco del Cervelliera (1412–1459) a nocturnal atmosphere envelops a f igure, warmed sparingly by the crimson of the sleeves of the underdress seen through the dagging of the overgown and its neckline [Fig. 3.5].38 The facial traits are exaggerated: sunken eyes, hollow cheekbones, a distinctive nose-tip, pursed lips, and misaligned spine. A headgear (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), 47–53. In Portrait of the Lady, 1430–1520, Woods-Marsden has criticised this conclusion, which I also find difficult to accept. 37 Adrian W.B. Randolph, Touching Objects: Intimate Experience of Italian Fifteenth-Century Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), esp. 103–67. In this context, see also the essential Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l’Espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958); trans. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Spaces, foreward John R. Stilgoe, trans. Maria Jolas (1964; rev. and rep., Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1994). 38 Cat. 29. This painting was once attributed to Giovanni di Franco (1426–1498). Detailed information is available at www.metmueum.org. See also Annamaria Bernacchioni, “’Proposte e conferme sulla ‘vexata Quaestio’ Maestro del Trittico Carrand e Maestro di Pratovecchio: Una perduta tavola per i Buonarroti di Giovanni di Francesco da Rovezzano,” Studi di Storia dell’Arte 31 (2020): 1–12.

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holds the hair tight, save for some tresses on the temples. The figure inhabits a box-like space with an opening into the sky, now repainted, from which nightlight enters projecting a shadow on the wall. The sharp modelling of the face evokes the style of coeval sculpted portraits and their commemorative efficacy. The profile captures simultaneously the presence and the other-worldliness of the figure. This composition seemingly illustrates the idea that portraits were contained and containers: contained, as stored in suitable closets; containers, as storages of thoughts and emotions. To explain this mode of seeing-as, an assessment of the Florentine likenesses appears below. They are divided into three groups. If these groups create a taxonomy, this will be a bonus. Group One Beyond their obvious differences, the physiognomy of a likeness by Lippi, of four presumptive Simonetta Cattaneo (1453–1476), the platonic object of Giuliano de Medici (1453–1478), and of Giovanna degli Albizzi by Domenico Ghirlandaio appear so imaginary that the term idealisation is but a feeble description. Their hyperidealisation, which is also seen in the Scolari bride [2.1], summarises the amatory tropes surveyed in Chapter One. These tropes appeared to fetishise women, in Lauro Martinez’s words, as men’s “moral, social, political, or cosmic superior.”39 In reality, they concealed pursuits of social alliances when marriage contracts were not on the cards. 40 Lippi’s panel, now in Berlin, may be the earliest known Quattrocento autonomous likeness that is animated [Fig. 3.6]. 41 A cuffia decorated with pearls, symbols of purity, covers her head. From the head falls a diaphanous veil, drawn towards the chest by her right hand, whilst her left pinches the sleeve of her cioppa. The composition differs from the Scolari only superficially if, as I have proposed, the Scolari man represents a portrait animated in the locus of the imagination. In other words, both compositions emphasise the stimulation of the imagination by means of fenestrations. In the Berlin woman, the physical boundaries of the panel may thus coincide with those that frame the image of her ideal recipient, our eyes coinciding with theirs and enlivened by the ideals enshrined in her features. Take her right hand. Originally in a lower position, it has been interpreted as performing 39 Martinez, Strong Words, 15. 40 Paola Ventrone, “Simonetta Vespucci le le metamorfosi dell’immagine della donna nella Firenze dei primi Medici”, in Simonetta Vespucci: La nascita della Venere Fiorentina, eds. Giovanna Lazzi, Paola Ventrone (Firenze: Polistampa, 2007), 7–49. And its bibliography. 41 Cat. 30. Christiansen and Weppelmann, eds. The Renaissance Portrait, 98–101 (cat. 7); Brown et al., Virtue and Beauty, 110 (cat. 4). On Lippi’s portraiture, Megan Holmes, Fra Filippo Lippi: The Carmelite Painter (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 128–40.

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wifely virtues or the humility and submission to God’s will of the Annunciation iconographies. It has also been associated with classical portrait busts. 42 Arguably, these interpretations converge into its peremptory claim, drawn on the chest, of the first-person pronoun I. Its frontal contrast against the head-to-waist profile enhances its fetishistic elegance, redolent of Petrarchan poetry. La Bella Mano (pub. 1472) is a canzoniere written by Giusto de’ Conti (ca.1390–1449) during the years around 1441. This poet, whose biography is otherwise murky, was in Florence between 1438 and 1440 and possibly the pentimento that rose this hand to the chest owes a debt to his literature. 43 Rays, now abraded, descend from a shell-like lunette to kiss her head. From the window, the outlines of a distant landscape with houses clustered on a bay complete the set of details that remind me of a passage by Giusto: “As I come close to the fine land / where the might of Love leads me to and again, / I sense the rays of the light / that brighens the whole clear Sky.” In the same context, I also recall his simile between rays and “golden arrows,” which captures the bittersweet pain of amatory yearning. 44 Amorous voyeurism seems as justified here as it is in the Scolari panel, because the bejewelled fingers of the woman’s hand spotlight a betrothing or, more convincingly, an early uxorial identity, since the foregoing interpretations also converge, I believe, into one archetype. I refer to the ancient Roman statue of Pudicitia, symbol of the propriety, honour, and chastity that ancient heroines like Lucretia also evoked. Characterised by Fig. 3.7, this design circulated in statuary, Imperial coinage, and ancient funerary portraits, known in Lippi’s times through established proto-antiquarian and proto-philological studies. 45 Furthermore, the panel’s verso simulates porphyry marble, a symbol of indestructible bonds, 46 as does the windowsill levelled with the right hand, fortifying metacritically the endurance of the woman’s gesture. The shell-like lunette, seemingly borrowed from Roman and early Christian art, haloes her head in a manner akin to religious iconographies. Moreover, the string of pearls merges with the window’s lintel. Therefore, she is

42 A summary of this portrait’s various interpretations is in Christiansen and Weppelmann, eds. The Renaissance Portrait, 98–101 (cat. 7). 43 Giusto de’ Conti, La Bella Mano, ed. Giuseppe Gigli (Lanciano: Carabba, 1916). An example of the attributes of the hand is sonnet XXI, 30–31. On his biography, see Paolo Procaccioli, “Giusto de’ Conti,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 28 (1983), www.treccani.it 44 “Mentre che io mi avvicino al bel terreno / dove per forza Amor mi riconduce, / apparir sento i raggi della luce / che fa ovunque splende il Ciel sereno.” De’ Conti, La Bella Mano, CXLIV, (121). On the “aurati strali,” see e.g., VIII, 28–29 (29), where other details find also a match in the Berlin head. 45 For instance, Flavio Biondo (1392–1463) was in Florence in the late 1430s. Biondo Flavio, Italia Illustrata: Text, Translation, and Commentary, 2 vols., trans. Catherine J. Castner (Binghamton, New York: Binghamton, Global Academic Publishing, 2005). 46 An image of this obverse is in Christiansen and Weppelmann, eds. The Renaissance Portrait, 110.

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morphologically part of the architecture or, as Filarete’s analogy conceals, she personifies her inhabited space, itself an index of eroto-sacramental promises. Arguably, her ideal femininity personifies the donna angelicata of the poststilnovista tradition: beautiful, pious, and married, foundation of civil and civic growth. Finally, the colour palette may be resolved as the “certain friendship of colours” proposed by Alberti: “[R]ose near green and sky blue gives both honour and life. White not only near ash and crocus yellow but placed near almost any other gives gladness.”47 These chromatic values, which herald a new chapter in the semiotics of colours, complement the elusive sensuality of her soft contours and of the malleable fabric of her cioppa. Together, they show affiliation with the definition of uxorial qualities, which Alberti himself described: “[L]et us pray God to grant the new husband a good, peaceful, honourable and, as we shall say, a prolific wife.”48 The earliest renditions of Simonetta Cattaneo, both posthumous and shaped by neo-platonic ideals, propose a similar interplay, ostensible in one where the subject seems literally entrapped in a dark space between the picture plane and a window, the height of which conjures her seclusion. 49 A hairband severs her jawline from the neck, somehow apprehending Simonetta’s death from consumption at the premature 47 Alberti, Book Two, 85. 48 “Di questo molto siprieghi dio che alnuovo marito dia gratia diricevere buona pacificha honesta and chome diremo prolificha sposa.” Leon Battista Alberti, “De Re Uxoria,” in In Questo Volume si Contiene Libri della Famiglia Composta da M. Batista degli Alberti da Firenze, 1433–1440, Urb.Lat.229, The Vatican Library, DigitalVaticana, 45v–83r (63v.). In contemporary Italian: Leon Battista Alberti, “De Uxoria,” in I libri della Famiglia, a cura di Ruggiero Romano, Alberto Tenenti, Francesco Furlan (Torino: Einaudi, 1994), 86–160. Trans.: Leon Battista Alberti, “De Re Uxoria,” in The Family in Renaissance Florence: Book One – Four, intr. and trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press Inc., 2004 ed.), 92–150. 49 Cat. 48. The others are 49, 50, 51. Simonetta Cattaneo was a Genoese noblewoman. A celebrated beauty, she married the Florentine Marco Vespucci in 1469 and was Giuliano de Medici’s platonic muse. In 1475, during a tournament, he paraded with a banner that Sandro Botticelli painted with her features as Pallas Athena. Under the image, an inscription in French claimed that she was “the unparalleled one.” Giuliano won the tournament, and she was nominated the “Queen of Beauty.” She is associated with a few idealised likenesses made in Florence after her death. A window into the extravagances of such spectacles is Anonymous, Ricordo di una giostra fatta in Firenze al dì 7 di Febbraio del 1468 and Notizia della festa fatta in Firenze la notte del Carnevale da Bartolommeo Benci in onore della Marietta di Lorenzo Strozzi, a cura di Pietro Fanfani (Firenze: Stampería sulle Logge del Grano, 1864). Cat. 48 and 49 are discussed in Christiansen and Weppelmann, eds. The Renaissance Portrait, 120-23 (cat. 19 and 20). Cat. 49 features a cameo. The real jewel was designed by Giuliano specifically for her. The association with Simonetta is therefore undisputed. Cat. 51 is discussed in Woods-Marsden, Portrait of a Lady, 1420–1530, 68-9, as the epitome of a fantasy beauty. She is indeed the most fantasy-like of the four, a neo-platonic vision of eternal beauty reinforced by the way the clouds that frame the profile evaporate into the clear sky. The inscription “SIMONETTA IANVENSIS VESPUCCIA” in the lower edge of the panel identifies her and it dates roughly to the same period. Vasari mentions “la testa di Cleopatra che si fa mordere da un’Aspide.” In Giorgio Vasari, “Vita di Domenico Puligo,” in Delle vite de’ scvltori, pittori, et architettori che sono stati da Cimabue in quà, 2 vols. (Fiorenza: Giunti, 1568), 103–06 (105).

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age of twenty-three. Her gesture-less body lacks the assertive stance of the Lippi woman. Yet, the chest seems again the target of the composition, in this instance by means of the light that is directional and revelatory of the sensual yet lifeless pallor of its flesh-tone, and of the locus of the heart. Its sensuality is increased by the eroticism of her hairdo, evocative of the poetical descriptions of nymphs in Arcadian literature, and by the titillating twist of her head, just enough to produce a hint at the hidden side.50 The chest therefore claims the acknowledgement of the interplay between the visible and the invisible, which the portrait magnifies as a paradox of absence vs. permanence. By the time of Giovanna degli Albizzi, this paradox had fully matured.51 Her husband Lorenzo Tornabuoni (1465–1497) commissioned this portrait in 1488, two years after her death, and his initial L appears on the shoulder of her giornea. The composition is famous for the objects displayed in a cupboard behind the figure, which possibly inspired the background of the Huntington portrait [Fig.2.7]. The panel is large in comparison with those used for marital commissions, producing the effect in the experienced viewer of an image made truly autonomous by the sitter’s passing. At once desexualised by death and empowered by the 50 The link is direct: Venus in Agnolo Poliziano’s Stanze per la Giostra, written for a tournament that the de’ Medici organised and held on 29 January 1475. This event was meant to celebrate Giuliano’s feelings for this Genoese beauty. Angelo Poliziano, “Stanze,” in Stanze – Orfeo – Rime, intr., note e indici Davide Puccini (Milano: Garzanti, 1992 ed.), 3–141 (I, 100). 51 Cat. 57. Born on 18 December 1468, on 15 June 1484 Giovanna married Lorenzo Tornabuoni. She died during her second childbirth on 7 October 1488. Nine years later Lorenzo was executed for treason. In 1985, Patricia Simons matched this portrait with the painting described among the items in Lorenzo’s suite of his family’s palace: “uno quadro chon chornicione messo d’oro chon testa et busto della Giovanna degli Albizi.” It is one of the few Renaissance portraits for which we know the original location. The subject wears a pendetta da moglianza. A niche in the background displays a jewel with a dragon, a prayer book, a string of coral beads, and a cartellino with Martial’s epigram XXXII, on which see note below. The likeness is based on a marriage medal by the medal-maker Niccolò Fiorentino (1430–1514). The same likeness appears in the Visitation fresco by the same painter, in Santa Maria Novella, Florence. The two stemmed clearly from each other, and critics are divided as to which was first executed. In the seventeenth century, the painting was acquired by the Pandolfini family, and, later, by Baron Achille Seillière, then his heiress, the Princess de Sagan, and Henry Willet for his collection, where it is recorded in 1878. From there, to Rodolphe Kann, until it was acquired by J. Pierpoint Morgan in 1907, for his Morgan Library. In 1935, it was acquired by the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection. See also Lorne Campbell et al., Renaissance Faces, 148–51 (cat. 34); Patricia Simons, “Portraiture and Patronage in Quattrocento Florence with Special Reference to the Tornaquinci and Their Chapel in Santa Maria Novella,” PhD diss. (University of Melbourne, 1985), 143–44. Useful questions regarding the symbolism of her garment and accessories and the size of the panel are in Maria DePrano, Art Patronage, Family, and Gender in Renaissance Florence: The Tornabuoni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 141–152. I regard DePrano’s analysis with caution. For instance, the author is under the impression that coterminous Florentine female portraits did not feature books. Because we know of the Huntington portrait at least, does she refer to a specific period? Other remarks seem to overlook other aspects of the Florentine portrait culture.

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true image of the soul, Giovanna is the real jewel in this cofanetto of precious memories. A cartellino in the cupboard makes this explicit. It cites the f inal lines of an epigram that the Latin epigrammatist Martial (38/41–102/04) wrote on a portrait of the Roman senator Marcus Antonius Primus (20/35–after 81). Translated, these lines read, “Would that art could have painted his character and his mind! There would then be no fairer portrait in the whole world.”52 Ancient epigrammatic verses had circulated since the early fourteenth century. Texts such as the Planudean Anthology, a compilation of Greek epigrams collated in ca.1300, were well known. Latin epigrammatists such as Martial and Ausonius (ca.310–ca.396) were treasured in the Italian libraries, which were reawakening after centuries of bibliophilic stagnation.53 With Petrarchan humanism now a sophisticated philological pursuit, the act of seeing-as was accelerating the broader abstractions relevant to Cropper’s synecdochal proposition explained in the Introduction. That portraits were contained and containers of thoughts and emotions seems confirmed by the otherwise unexpected similarities between Giovanna and the Este Princess. Their socio-cultural references, including the evocation of their patrilineal lines, overlap with considerations about the fragility of life that, channelled into the love/death simile dear to humanism, found its ultimate eschatological expression in the female reproductive cycle and its associated risks. Appropriately, another passage in Decembrio’s otherwise torturous reading, muses: And for my part […] what I keep, framed in this small pyxis, is the countenance of a golden-haired maiden – no ancient Roman monument, but one of the modern glories of our Ferrara girls. Not long ago I wrote a tearful elegy on her death, and now I treasure this proof of sweet and everlasting remembrance: nothing, it seems, is lacking in it but her voice.54

52 Martial, The Epigrams of Martial, trans. Herny George Bhon (London: Bell and Daldy, 1888), Book 10, XXXII (p. 462). A standard translation is also: “Art, if only you could reproduce the character and the spirit / there would be no finer portrait in the world.” 53 Poggio Bracciolini, Two Renaissance Book Hunters: The Letters of Poggius Bracciolini to Niccolaus, ed and trans. Phyllis Goodhart Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Poggio Bracciolini, Lettere (Firenze: Olschki, 1984–1987). See also Peter Howard, “Preaching Magnificence in Renaissance Florence,” Renaissance Quarterly 61, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 325–369 (331); Larwin Armstrong, “Usury, Conscience and Public Debt: Angelo Corbinelli’s Testament of 1419,” in Renaissance of Conflicts: Visions and Revisions of Law and Society in Italy and Spain, eds. John A. Marino and Thomas Kuehn (Toronto: Victoria University in the University of Toronto, 2004), 73-240; Celenza, Creating Canons in Fifteenth-Century Ferrara, 43–55; Berthold Louis Ullman, The Public Library of Renaissance Florence: Niccolò Niccoli, Cosimo de Medici (Padova: Editrice Antenore, 1972). 54 In Baxandall, A Dialogue, 326.

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Group Two Eighteen portraits are on panels, the sizes of which are between 17.3 × 12.7 and 62.9 × 40.6 cm.55 Their small dimensions picture a network of domestic exchanges. Two are attributed to a pupil of Lippi known as Master of the Castello Nativity 55 Cat. 31 to 47 included and Cat. 128. I could not verify all the measurements but, when possible, I acknowledged if sections of panels had been cut off. Cat. 31 is discussed in Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers, 524 (no. 55). It is often associated with entry 33 of David Alan Brown, “A Young Lady of Fashion,” in Eye of the Beholder: Masterpieces from the Isabella Gardner Museum, ed. Alan Chong et al., exh.cat. (Boston: ISGM and Beacon Press, 2003), 50. Cat. 37 is an example of how, in the nineteenth century, original paintings were retouched to attract collectors of Renaissance art. The area of the plucked and shaved forehead was diminished, the neckline was softened, more vigorously shadowed, and embellished with a scoop neck over a white undershirt. The eyes were given a more languid look, the eyelashes were stressed, and more texture was added to the hair. The dress was retouched, and its colour changed. See Old Master Paintings, Sotheby’s, Catalogue 03 June 2010, Lot 13. Cat. 38 may seem peculiar but the seller is a reliable authentication of the panel’s originality. Cat. 43 was ascribed in 1894 to Piero della Francesca. In 1897, the German art historian and curator Wilhelm von Bode noticed its resemblance with a female profile in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan (Cat. 44), was also then believed to be by Piero. For both paintings, he proposed Domenico Veneziano (ca.1410–1461) and this remained the attribution until 1972. In 1911, Adolfo Venturi reattributed the painting to Antonio del Pollaiuolo (1431/32–1498). This has since been considered plausible. Reasons include the contrast between the contour of the silhouette and the blue background; the marble balustrade with incrusted panes that recall the altarpiece of the chapel of the Cardinal of Portugal in S. Miniato al Monte; the quasi-sculptural effect of the fabric, perhaps indebted to Antonio’s training as a goldsmith, and embroidery designer. Sometimes this portrait is identified with Lucrezia Landiani (b. ca.1440), the mistress of Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1444–1476). More recently, Antonio’s brother Piero (1441/2–85/96) has also been proposed as its author but with little success. Cat. 44 is attributed to the latter and it is excellently preserved. Like other portraits of the period, it is a tour de force of material culture: the woman’s hair is tucked into a hairnet bejewelled with pearls, reticella gemmata a cuffia, and a gallone. A double string of pearls, franello, decorates her head. Popular amongst the wealthy Florentines, it appears in the Sumptuary Laws of 1464. A brooch with gems and pearls adorns her head. At her neck she wears a necklace with alternated three-to-one white and black pearls, complemented with a pendant with three pearls and a ruby. The sitter’s identity is unknown, but the obverse of the panel once had the inscription: UXOR JOHANNIS DE BARDI. This was later removed, believed not to be original. Museum Archives and Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers, 552–53 (no. 52). Cat. 45 was attributed to Piero del Pollaiuolo on comparison with six panels of Virtues that he and his brother painted for the Mercanzia in Florence. Its surface is damaged; the dress, the background, and the frame have been heavily restored. See Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers, 524 (no. 55) and in the Metropolitan Museum website, which owns it. Details of Cat. 46 are worth mentioning. The headgear was created from a round of pearls that held the hair at the back to resemble a beehive, vespaio. The head sports a brooch with six pearls around a gem. The neck has a pearl necklace with a pendant showing an angel holding a large red gem with three pearls alternated with a red and a blue gem, all presumably rubies and sapphires. As elsewhere, when these objects are rendered with such precision, they suggest that they were real belongings. See Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers, 524–25 (no. 56) and www.polomuseale.firenze.it. The portrayal of the woman in Cat. 47 seems a little risqué but I suggest that it visualises the advice in marital manuals to keep husbands occupied to prevent them committing adultery. This was also something that Antoninus, the Bishop of Florence (1389–1459) preached. The panel has endured many restorations, leading to the present characterisation of her face, which is detailed to an extreme. Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers, 523 (no. 53).

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(active ca.1445–1475). One of them shows a variant of the gesture of the Berlin woman in Group One. Four likenesses are attributed respectively to Paolo Uccello (1397–1475), Lo Scheggia (active 1406–1486), and Alesso Baldovinetti (ca.1426–1499), another three to the workshop of the Ghirlandaio brothers, and four still await attribution. Finally, five are by the Pollaiuolo brothers. The latter’s thickened paint imitates the materiality of the garments and hair, conjuring the presence of the sitters, whilst elevating their portraits to luxury objects in their own right.56 The painters’ personal styles create variety within this group but with common characteristics. They verge on characterisation of facial traits yet polished by the uninterrupted prof ile line and delicate modelling of the cheekbones, nose, and jaws. Elegantly dressed, these subjects are placed against neutral backgrounds, sometimes heightened by faux cornices along the borders of the panels. Their head-bust structure coincides with the panel’s vertical axis, redolent of medallic profile portraiture and female sculpted busts, commissions of which rose concurrently.57 Similarities with the surviving examples outside Florence suggest that, in its variants, this was the dominant design for female portraiture in Italy. A correlation exists between their aesthetic features and Alberti’s guidelines on painting. Alberti advocated a pictorial style defined by congruity between the execution and the function of the compositions. This style, as we know, relies on a strict control of planes, outlines, and interplay of light and shade that create forms akin to solid bodies. Alberti encouraged the juxtaposition of contrasting details such as ugly vs. beautiful, large vs. small, to emphasise each by antithesis.58 He believed that correct anatomical measurements and a discriminating and congruous use of colours convey truthfulness and dignity in a composition.59 To this effect, imperfections should be corrected without altering the likeness 56 As also noted in Wright, Portraiture. 57 Arnold Victor Coonin, “The Most Elusive Woman in Renaissance Art: A Portrait of Marietta Strozzi,” Artibus et Historiae 59 (2009): 41–64; Shelley Zuraw, “The Medici Portraits of Mino da Fiesole,” in Piero de’ Medici ‘il Gottoso (1416–1469), eds. A. Beyer and B. Boucher (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), 317–39; Irvin Lavin, “On the Sources and Meaning of the Renaissance Portrait Bust,” Art Quarterly 33 (1970): 207–226. 58 Alberti, “Book One,” in On Painting, 41–59 (54–5). Alberti’s idea is steeped in the Italian aesthetic tradition. See e.g., Dante: “And as for my remark that anyone should embellish his lines as much as he can, I declare that this is true; […] for true adornment consists in the addition of something appropriate. As for the point that superior material mixed with inferior enhances the inferior, I say that this is true when the distinction between the two is lost, as when gold is blended with silver; but if the distinction survives, then the inferior material actually loses value, as when beautiful women are seen in the company of ugly ones.” Dante Alighieri, “Book Two,” in De Vulgari Eloquentia, 2 vols., ed. and trans., Steven Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 46–89 (49). 59 Alberti, Book Two, 74.

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of the thing depicted.60 Similarly, variety should be applied in moderation.61 His suggestions imply that simplification produces a clarity of meaning. It is the key to facilitating the recognition of contents that Christopher Peacocke has identified with the Wöfflinian linear style that saw in Alberti its leading advocate. Further, recognition by comparison and resemblance in pictorial representations fosters contiguity between the image and the spectator.62 How is this reflected in these portraits? Their gently modelled volumes within the pictographic outline of the profile and few but significant details synthesise an ideology of social cohesion. Consider a likeness now in Philadelphia [Fig. 3.8].63 The abstract background sharpens her silhouette, whilst the modelling of her face softens the result. The viewers would have deciphered the letters G, P and I on the upper edge of the panel, perhaps the initials of the person or her family name. These are combined with notarial marks, which add a metanarrative of legal records, echoed in the neckline of the gamurra that, in compliance with a local Sumptuary Law, seems to be within 3.3 cm from the base of the neck.64 Likewise, the value of the subject’s sartorial ensemble avoids the excesses disapproved by lawmakers, whilst focusing on quality. And if the pink of her cheeks may have a reproachable touch of vanity, it may equally declare that “some roses […] are quite purple, others are like the cheeks of young girls.”65 She appears, in fact, as a young girl garbed in uxorial elegance, synonymous with a body at the threshold of childbearing, the implications of which I have already discussed. Her downcast eyes showcase her restraint. As Francesco da Barberino explained: “[M]ay her glance refrain from [looking at] everyone except him.”66 Her traits are recognisable because, after all, portraits were family records but, with the stark background shrouding her in archetypal dignity, she invites us to be seen-as an icon of the tenets of civic cohesion.

60 “[T]he ancient painters depicted the kings, if there were some flaw in them […], they ‘corrected’ it as much as they could while still keeping a likeness.” Alberti, Book Two, 76–77. 61 Alberti, Book Two, 75–76. 62 Christopher Peacocke, “Depiction,” The Philosophical Review 96 (1987): 383–410. And, Richard Wollheim, “On Pictorial Representation,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no.3 (Summer 1998): 217–226. 63 Cat. 34. 64 Roberta Orsi Landini and Mary Westerman Bulgarella, “Costume in Fifteenth-century Florentine Portraits of Women,” in Virtue and Beauty, eds. Brown et al., 89-97 (90); Diane Owen Hughes, “Sumptuary Laws and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy,” in Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 69–100 (83). 65 Alberti, Book One, 50. 66 “froch’ogni suo sguardo s’astenga da tutti fuor che da lui.” Francesco Barberino, Del Reggimento e Costumi di Donna, ed. Carlo Baudi di Vesme (Bologna: Gaetano Romagnoli, 1875), 32.

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In proposing this analysis, I have considered the enduring popularity of typecast portraits on Italian nuptial and domestic objects.67 They decorated belts like the rare item made in ca.1350–1400, where the profiles are interspersed with decoration seemingly in the shape of carnations [Fig. 3.9]; and their fasteners, as seen in another item which is now in the British Museum. Engraved on both sides, this fastener combines the frontal view of a woman holding a pink on the one side with the profiles of a young, embracing couple on the other.68 Portraits decorated tableware, as on a Venetian glass goblet now in the V & A collection,69 or a betrothal pair of goblets in the British Museum, where medallions frame a female and a male profile with, respectively, a cornucopia, symbol of fertility, and a scroll bearing amor.vol.fee (love requires faith).70 Like the word lealtà sported by the Scolari woman, this phrase evoked the sacramental nature of conjugal love. It came in variants, as in a Florentine engraving of ca.1470, detailing a young man in the company of a nymph and a scroll claiming amor.vvolfe.edove.fe.nonve.amor.non.pvo (love requires faith and where there is no faith love is powerless).71 Or in an earthenware inkstand from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where the profiles of a couple flank a medallion with two clasping hands and the motto io.te.do.la.mane / dame.la.fede (I give you my hand / you give me your faith).72 In countless quantities, these objects exploited the verbal/ visual connection between nymph, woman, and love in the semantic field of male urbanity that was the theme, as discussed in Chapter One, of amatory and Arcadian literature. Similarly, from the mid 1450s, a parallel inhered between the encomiastic literature directed to contemporary women and the vogue for visages of belle donne in earthenware basins, jugs, cups, storage jars, tiles, and dishes. I interpreted the dynamics illustrated in the maiolica dish in the Introduction upon this vogue [Fig. I.2], because, as Marta Ajmar and Dora Thornton have explained, from the early sixteenth century these faces became iconicised evocations of women known locally.73 67 Andrea Bayer et al., Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, exh.cat. (London: Yale University Press, 2009); Luke Syson and Dora Thornton, Objects of Virtues: Art in Renaissance Italy (London: The British Museum Press, 2004). 68 Anonymous, Niello Plate Buckle Belt, ca.1450–1500, 34 × 31 cm, silver-gilded engraving, The British Museum (2004, U.4). See also Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtues, 53. 69 Unknown, Goblet (Venetian), 1475–1500, Green glass, foot blown in a dip-mould, with enamelled and gilded decoration, V & A, London (409.1854). 70 Italian (Venice), ‘Betrothal’ goblets, end of the 15th century, green glass, enamelled and gilded, H.22.3 × .D: 10.5 cm, The British Museum, London (S.361). 71 Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtues, 52–53. 72 Italian (probably Faenza), Inkstand, tin-glazed earthenware (maiolica), 8.25 × 20 × 27.94 cm, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (56.310). 73 Marta Ajmar and Dora Thornton, “When is a Portrait Not a Portrait? Belle Donne on Maiolica and the Renaissance Praise of Local Beauties,” in The Image of the Individual: Portraits in the Renaissance, ed. Nicholas Mann and Luke Syson (London: British Museum Press, 1998), 138–53 (143). More examples are in Timothy Wilson, Ceramic Art of the Italian Renaissance (London: The Trustee of the British Museum,

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Breaking with the tradition of status objects in expensive metals, these items’ new materials and processes of making reaffirmed the ancient notion of magnificence admired in Decembrio’s De Politia. Drawing on the Aristotelian model of a sophisticated society, the humanist Giovanni Pontano (1426–1503) explained: “It does happen occasionally that the excellence of the gift is not judged so much by its cost, as by its beauty, its rarity, and its elegance.”74 Alberti’s Economicus is the fifteenth-century rule of thumb of the social duty to live by the rubric of ref inement, which domestic objects helped demonstrate.75 The admiration of these items was the praxis of the social and the moral transactions that bound givers and receivers. The three complete series of ceiling portraits of men and women, tavolette da soffitto, for the Vimercati family from Crema, who rose to prominence through successful intermarriages and legal professions, demonstrates the extremes to which the domestic spaces of the entrepreneurial patriciate staged the values of these transactions.76 This type of decorative portrait, which would be soon adopted by the aristocracy, spread from the Lombard region in the last quarter of the Quattrocento [Fig. 3.10]. The facial traits border on the imaginary but the garbs are fastidiously detailed. For instance, two tavolette now in Mantua and painted ca.1460 in the workshop of the Brescian Bonifacio Bembo (active 1444–1477) wear a marital head brooch, brochetta da testa.77 Its design reappears in a likeness now in Melbourne, dated ca.1475, evoking the recycling habit of the formal donora.78 Belle donne in marriage gifts and domestic decorations reiterated the biosocial engine of urban harmony, amplified in the aesthetic and material showcase of the 1987). An example of painted tiles is: follower of Domenico Ghirlandaio, Portrait of a Lady, ca.1490, fresco on a tile base, 52.9 × 39.2 cm, Yale University Art Gallery (1871.52a-b). 74 In Evelyn Welch, “Public Magnificence and Private Display: Giovanni Pontano’s De Splendore (1498) and the Domestic Arts,” Journal of Design History 15, no. 4, Approaches to Renaissance Consumption (2002): 211–221 (212). And Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross, int. Lesley Brown (New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2009) 75 Leon Battista Alberti, “Economicus,” in In Questo Volume si Contiene Libri della Famiglia Composta da M. Batista degli Alberti da Firenze, 1433–1440, Urb.Lat.229, The Vatican Library, DigitalVaticana, 127r–183r. In contemporary Italian: Leon Battista Alberti, “Economicus,” in I libri della Famiglia, a cura di Ruggiero Romano, Alberto Tenenti, Francesco Furlan (Torino: Einaudi, 1994), 161–277. Trans.: Leon Battista Alberti, “Economicus,” in The Family in Renaissance Florence, intr. and trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc., 2004 ed.), 155–245. 76 Lidia Ceserani Ermentini, “Le Tavolette da Soffitto Rinascimentali,” Rassegna di Studi e Documentazioni di Crema e del Cremasco, Museo Civico di Crema, Insula Fulcheria XV Dicembre 1985: 80–109. 77 Workshop of Bonifacio Bembo, Female Profiles, ca.1460, oil on panel, Collezione Freddi, Castello Sforzesco, Mantua. 78 Cat. 6. This panel was restored in 2006–07, during which process, later extensions and the painted surface on the left and top edges were removed, thus requiring a new frame. See also the online information of the National Gallery, Melbourne.

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individual portraits. For this reason, these portraits were to be seen-as the range of the conditions necessary for this harmony and, for this reason, I propose to call them “icons of urbanitas.” Group Three In the 1470s, as it started competing with the three-quarter view, the bust-length silhouette stretched into half-length. Like their bust-length and emerging threequarter counterparts, these variants donned sartorial modesty, redolent perhaps of wifely duties and of the sign-system of the informal trousseaux but not only. There are at least five Florentine portraits in this larger format: three by Sandro Botticelli (ca.1445–1510), one by Raffaellino del Garbo (ca.1466 or living 1479?–1524/27?), and one by Sebastiano Mainardi (ca.1460–1513).79 On the surface, they display a Griselda’s sort of syndrome. In Fig. 3.11, for instance, the cosmetic-red lips show the woman’s effort to appear tidy, whilst a loosened flock of hair remind us of unceasing housework. Various identifications have shrouded both her identity and her marital status in mystery.80 Yet I wonder if, amid increasing control that patrician women acquired over their fiscal status, literacy, and civic and entrepreneurial agency, portraits like this may reflect a growing selfhood and a rejection of stereotypical elegance by the sitters themselves. Outside Florence, the success of the half-length format in the 1490s within the formal ritrattistica Milanese is noteworthy. This was already an amalgamation

79 Cat. 52 to 56 included. Cat. 52 shows the emerging trend of endowing likenesses with attributes of saints of special relevance to the sitters. Cat. 54 resulted from Botticelli’s outlining the profile of the sitter probably in ink and perhaps some wash, thereby suggesting that she was in front of him when he sketched her likeness. The panel was sold by Sotheby’s in 2007. Information on its provenance, conservation, and related literature is in the Sotheby’s catalogue 24 January 2007 – 26 January 2007, Important Old Master Paintings and European Works of Art, Lot 41. Cat. 55 was once attributed to Botticelli’s workshop. See Gabriele Mandel, The Complete Works by Botticelli (Milano: Rizzoli, 1967), 90 (cat. 49). See also Mark Evans and Stefan Weppelmann, Botticelli Reimagined, exh.cat. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2016). Notable in Cat. 56 is how the woman holds her belt. Similar gestures are found elsewhere, for example in Ambrogio de Predis, 1490s, silverpoint and white heightening on blue prepared paper, 13.7 × 20.5 cm, Kupferstichkabinett, Hamburger Kunsthalle (21478). In individual portraits, the symbolic relation between belts and marriage oaths makes it possible this gesture is indexical of Morgengabe commissions. 80 Cat. 53. Her wardrobe has been seen as evidence of her nubile condition. The history of its attempted identifications is couched in the Medici milieu. Among these are Fioretta Gorini (1453/60–1478?), Giuliano de’ Medici’s mistress and mother of the future Pope Clement VII (Giulio de’ Medici, 1478–1534), Simonetta Vespucci and, Alfonsina Orsini. See Carlo Montresor, Monografia d’Arte (Botticelli) (Roma: ATS Italia Editrice, 2010), 42–43; Sheryl E. Reiss, “Widow, Mother, Patron of Art: Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici,” in Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy, eds. Sheryl E. Reiss and David Wilkins (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001), 125–57 (128).

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of French influences, which seeped in though the House of Savoy, and Italian humanism.81 Stiffened into a mannequin type, Bianca Maria Sforza [fig. I.1] summarises its characteristics in their excess. 81 An example of the tradition is Cat. 13. This portrait of Bianca Maria Visconti (d.1468) is the companion to Francesco Sforza (1406–1466), in the same collection (2238, 949). They are discussed in Christiansen and Weppelmann, eds. The Renaissance Portrait, 253–54 (Cat. 100a and 100b). The novelty is notable in Cat. 14 to 25 included. Cat. 15 was once attributed to Piero della Francesca. Lionello Venturi proposed the Lombard School and the subject as Beatrice d’Este because her facial traits recall those of Beatrice. Additionally, the white of the string of pearls and pear-shaped pearl, the green of the emerald, and red of the ruby of her pendant evoke the heraldic colours of her husband, Ludovico Sforza. Thus, this could represent the marital gift that he sent to her six months before their wedding. Corrado Ricci has proposed a new identification with Barbara Pallavicino (d.1539), daughter of Rolando Pallavicino (d.1529), Marquis of Roccabianca. The painting is in this section because, although it tends to be attributed to the Parmense milieu, it is in the Milanese style recognised by the early scholarship, as are the painting’s copies. Among them, Lombard School, Beatrice d’Este, Duchess of Milan, late fifteenth century, oil on panel, 51 × 34.5 cm, bequeathed by General John Guise, 1765, to Christ Church Collection, University of Oxford (JBS156). See also Katherine McIver, “Daddy’s Little Girl: Patrilineal Anxiety in Two Portraits of a Renaissance Daughter,” in Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe: Gender, Agency, Identity, ed. Andrea Pearson (England and USA: Ashgate, 2008), 85–98; Gli Uffizi: Catalogo Generale (Firenze: Centro Di, 1980), 137 (P18). Cat. 16 is in a good state of preservation but has sustained some damage. In the lower centre of the panel, paint loss caused extensive retouches from the bottom edge to the right half of the green sleeve, into the white cloth on her shoulder. The six ribbons attached to this cloth are also later additions. Those that decorate her back are, instead, original. The top edge and the lower left side of the neutral background have also been retouched, together with small parts on her breast and the line of her hair on her forehead. Originally, the curve of the hair covered part of her neck and the back of the headdress seems to have been slightly modified. Retouches perhaps occurred on the right side of the woman’s cheek, the eyelid, and part of the eyebrow into the forehead. Her profile is original but with extremely fine craquelure. The maker was first thought to be Leonardo da Vinci, then Ambrogio de Predis. Maria Teresa Fiorio rejected this attribution in 2018, when the most recent owner Antonio Morassi auctioned it. It is now considered to be the work of Bernardino de’ Conti. There are also questions about the sitter. Her dress recalls, albeit it is more restrained, that of Beatrice d’Este in Master of the Pala Sforzesca, Virgin and Child Enthroned with the Doctors of the Church and the Family of Ludovico il Moro (‘Sforza Altarpiece’), 1494–95, tempera and oil on panel, 230 × 165, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan (451). Note the sleeves decorated with ribbons; the shape of the bodice; and the large ruby-brooch worn on the side of the head, here attached to a cuffia that, together with a lenza or cordellina, a cord partially covers her hair. This is parted in the centre, falling over the ears and gathered at the back in a long-laced plait inside a plait-case, trinzale. Another example of this style of dress is in the marble bust of Beatrice d’ Este by Gian Cristoforo Romano of about 1490–91, now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris (ML10); and Leonardo’s La Belle Ferronière, also in the Louvre (Cat. 102). Isabella of Aragon, who married Gian Galeazzo Sforza in 1498, brought this Spanish fashion to Milan. It became popular throughout Lombardy in the last decade of the fifteenth century and into the early years of the sixteenth century. Old Masters Evening Sale, Sotheby’s, Catalogue 04 July 2018, Lot 43. Cat. 19 might be the copy of an original, now lost, in the collection of Baron Herzog (Budapest), and attributed to Ambrogio de’ Predis. The original of the reproduction in this catalogue shows the left side of the face. Willheim Suida and Maria Teresa Fiorio, Leonardo e i Leonardeschi, (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2001), 217 and 420 (Fig. 173). Cat. 21 was once attributed to Vincenzo Foppa (1427/30–1515/16) and Ambrogio de’ Predis. It is well documented on the website of its collection. See also Pieter J.J. van Thiel, Cornelius Johannes de Bruyn Kops et al., All the Paintings of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam: A Completely Illustrated Catalogue (Amsterdam, Maarssen: Rijksmuseum,

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Milan had become a Duchy in 1395, when Giangaleazzo Visconti (1351–1402) purchased the title from the Holy Roman Emperor, Wenceslas (1361–1419). This acquisition cemented the connections with the European royal courts that had begun with the marriage in 1350 between Galeazzo II Visconti (ca.1320–1378) and Bianca (1337–1387), the sister of Amadeo VI of Savoy (1334–1383). The subsequent history of the Duchy is one of power contests between the Visconti and the cognate Sforza, which prompted propagandistic efforts that manifested in architectural and decorative projects that spread coats-of-arms, emblematic colours, and portraits across the territory. Portraitists were among the few specialised artists with regular court commissions.82 These contests ended when Ludovico gained formal control in 1495 – he lost this control in 1499 to the French invasion – having already been the de facto ruler for eighteen years, as explained in the Introduction.83 Gary Schwartz, 1976), 230. Cat. 22 was listed among the bequests of Cardinal Borromeo in 1618 as “ritratto di duchessa di Milano opera di Leonardo da Vinci.” In 1886, Morelli proposed the attribution to de Predis and the identification with a portrait that Marcantonio Michiel saw in Casa Contarini in 1525: “ritratto in profilo in sino alle spalle de Madona […] fiola del Sig. Ludovico da Milano maritata nello imperatore Massimilano, de mano de […] Milanese.” Anonimo Morelliano, Notizia d’Opere di Disegno nella Prima Metà del Sec. XVI, Esistenti in Padova, Cremona, Milano, Pavia, Bergamo, Crema, e Venezia Scritta da un Anonimo di Quel Tempo (Iacopo Morelli: Bassano, 1800), 65. Since then, more identifications have been suggested: Isabella d’Aragona, a woman from the Trotti family, Domitilla Trivulzio, Annamaria Sforza, Cecilia Gallerani, Violante Bentivoglio. The most intriguing remains Bianca Giovanna, Ludovico’s natural daughter, who married Galeazzo di Sanseverino and died in 1496. This hypothesis is based on the emblem in the roundel of the lenza, which shows two crossed axes, the Sanseverino coat-of-arms. The attribution to de’ Predis has been debated. Recent restoration has highlighted stylistic similarities with a male portrait by the artist, now in Brera (2123). A thriving market for forgeries developed in the nineteenth century. Many panels like this were reproduced and sold, either as copies or as originals. In fact, this portrait exists in at least one copy, but its current location is unknown. See Mercedes Precerutti Garberi, Capolavori d’Arte Lombarda: i Leonardeschi ai Raggi-X, exh.cat. (Milano: AGFA-GERVAERT S.p.a, 1972), 8–9. Cat. 25 is a seventeenth-century copy. It is included here because of the truthfulness of the costume, which suggests a direct connection with an original, albeit unknown but speculated to be by Leonardo or one of his followers. The subject holds a carnation, symbol of betrothal, and an apple, symbol of eroto-connubial love, as seen also, among other examples, in Cat. 7. Her right elbow rests on a parapet in the Netherlandish manner. Other copies, perhaps from the same original, exist, such as the engravings in printed books that first appeared in Giacomo Filippo Tomasini, Petrarcha Redivivus (Padua, 1650). These are all considered variants of this presumed lost original. On this backdrop see J.B. Trapp, “Petrarch’s Laura: The Portraiture of an Imaginary Beloved,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 64 (2001): 55–192 (esp. 127–31). 82 At the time of Ludovico, Bonifacio Bembo, Baldassarre da Reggio (1432–1506) and Ambrogio de Predis (ca.1455–after 1508) were popular. The Milanese rulers even sent their favourites for periods of training with northern painters. Creighton E. Gilbert, “The Two Italian Pupils of Rogier van der Weyden: Angelo Macagnino and Zanetto Bugatto,” Arte Lombarda Nuova serie, 122, no. 1 (1998): 5–18 (14–17); Luke Syson, “Zanetto Bugatto, Court Portraitist in Sforza Milan,” The Burlington Magazine 138, no. 1118 (May 1996): 300–308. Maria Teresa Fiorio, “Per il Ritratto Lombardo: Bernardino de’ Conti,” Arte Lombarda Nuova Serie, 68/69, no. 1-2 (1984): 38–52. 83 On the history of this Duchy see Jane Black, Absolutism in Renaissance Milan: Plenitude of Power Under the Visconti and Sforza, 1329–1535 (Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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Anxious to legitimise his authority, Ludovico granted to his subjects the rights to use objects of special ducal significance, and to wear his emblem and colours on clothing and accessories. His apparent benevolence meant to weave a direct dependence of the city’s magnificence upon his magnanimity.84 For example, in a likeness by Ambrogio de Predis (ca.1455–after 1508), the subject wears a belt with a Moor’s head, hinting at his nickname, and the initials L.O.85 The woman may not even be from the local aristocracy. As Richard Goldthwaite pointed out in 1993, the court of the Lombard rulers was shaped on a “tradition of administration,” rather than on the “chilvaric sense of the state.”86 Its rhetoric of power was therefore influenced by the cultural model provided by the elite of professional administrators. With visual results that are comparable with those in group two, the structural simplicity of the Milanese portraits, and in most cases in the depiction of their clothing, encapsulated the feigned sobriety of this humanist culture, whilst acting as a foil for selected objects; only, in this case, it also drew on ducal propaganda. Furthermore, Bianca Maria’s head pendant is Ludovico’s personal emblem, but she wears a coazzone. This headgear had been introduced by Beatrice d’Este (1475–1497), who arrived at Milan in 1490, as Ludovico’s bride-to-be, even if she was from a genealogy that greatly surpassed his. Although in aristocratic marriages wives would typically adopt the fashion of their husband’s culture, Beatrice retained and, in fact, turned hers into a trend..87 Such a determination betrayed the politics of the Italian hypergamous marriages and flawed legitimacies that, I argue, were to be seen-as the network that made social mobility possible. In fact, this type of formal portraiture coexisted with one decisively affected by the arrival of Leonardo da Vinci in 1482/83. His observations of the psychological effects of light and shade on a person’s countenance is notable in four likenesses.88 The soft modelling of the 84 On Ludovico’s patronage, see Evelyn S. Welch, Art and Authority in Renaissance Milan (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995). 85 Cat. 20. Some have proposed her identification with Bianca Maria at the time of her betrothal to Maximilian. Because her face is clearly dissimilar and her attire is inconspicuous for the occasion, the sitter is likely to be someone connected with Ludovico socially rather than dynastically, as also noted in Welch, Art and Authority, 248. See also, Alessandro Ballarin con Marialucia Menegatti, Barbara Maria Savy, Leonardo a Milano: Problemi di Leonardismo Milanese tra Quattrocento e Cinquecento. Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio Prima della Pala Casio, 2 vols. (Verona: Edizione dell’Aurora, 2010), vol. 1, 576. 86 Goldthwaite, Wealth, 174. 87 On the coazzone and the implications of the Este fashion, see Evelyn Welch, “Art on the Edge: Hair and Hands in Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Studies 23, no. 3 (2008): 241–268 (243–60). 88 Cat. 24, 26, 27, 28. Cat. 24 was described by Charles Le Brun (1619–1690) in the inventory of the cabinet of Louis XIV (1638–1715), under whom he served as administrator of painting and decorative arts: “Un auutre portrait de profil de Leonnard da Vinci represénant la Belle ferronière, demie figure, hault d’un pied 6 pounces sur 1 pounce de large [48.6 × 35.1 cm], peint sur bois avec sa bordure dorée.” On the margin, he wrote: “veu a Paris le 8 Aoust 1690.” Note 25, LB 17, p. 101. Later, it features in the Catalogue des Tableaux du Cabinet du Roi of 1784. The subject is dressed in the French style. The sitter has not been identified,

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hands, a certain physiognomic sweetness, and dynamic contrapposto between the face in profile and the torso in three-quarter angle are reminiscent of Simonetta Cattaneo, now nudging towards three-quarter likenesses such as his portrait of Ludovico’s mistress Cecilia Gallerani.89 Their plump sensuality as an imaging of intimate desires deserves to be highlighted.

Conclusions This chapter has suggested that the northern portrait culture encouraged its spectators to recognise the sitters in the context of their dynastic function. Italian portraiture activated an immersive experience of the socio-cultural framework that entwined individual and collective interests in the multifaceted society of the territory. Such a distinction is of no little importance. This framework circumscribed networks of interdependency that transcended blood rights, and that were meant to last ad aeternum. In it, women were the efficient wives, nurturing mothers, and empathic mediators. They were the transacted daughters and the vessels of biosocial transmission. Although subjected to patriarchal control, without them this system could simply not function. How they personified this framework is at the heart of the history of female likenesses in profile view. From city-states to principalities, this format interpreted Italian societies’ shared interest in and determination to assert political and intellectual continuity with a classical tradition that overshadowed although Felix Ravaisson proposed an identification with Marguerite of Angoulême (1492–1549), Francis I’s (1494–1547) sister. In 1968, Bernard Berenson attributed the painting to Bernardino de’ Conti and it is now ascribed to the School of Leonardo. Preference for a date to the beginning of the sixteenth century is because the panel is from walnut, common in the Lombard school at the turn of the sixteenth century. It has been also proposed that this is the item listed in the 1500 inventory of Anne of Brittany. See Laure Fagnart, Léonard de Vinci en France, collections et collectioneurs: XVème – XVIIème siècles (Roma: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2009), 77. Cat. 26 might have been a donor portrait but this is yet to be confirmed. 89 Cat. 101. The sitter became one of Duke Ludovico Sforza’s mistresses when she was fifteen years old. She was an accomplished musician and a poet. Leonardo met her in 1494, whilst working for the Duke, who commissioned her likeness in 1496. In her arms, she holds an ermine, which perhaps because the Greek for ermine is galle, evokes Gallerani; or it could be because one of Ludovico Sforza’s emblems was an ermine, or because the ermine with a popular symbol of purity, as Leonardo also discussed in his notes. Ludovico interrupted his relationship with Cecilia when he married Beatrice D’Este but gave her a dowry and a castle outside Milan. There, she spent the rest of her life with her husband Count Ludovico Carminati de’ Brambilla, whom she married in 1492. When she left Milan, Cecilia took her own portrait with her, and it may be the one celebrated in a poem written by the court poet Bernardo Bellincioni (1452–1492). See Bernardo Bellincioni, “Sonetto XLV,” in Le Rime, ed. Pietro Fanfani (Bologna: Gaetano Romagnoli, 1876), 72. See also Luke Syson, Larry Keith et al. Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, exh.cat. (National Gallery Company, London: Yale University Press, 2011), 111–13; and Janice Shell and Grazioso Sironi, “Cecilia Gallerani: Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine,” Artibus et Historiae 13, no. 25 (1992): 47–66.

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the medieval achievements of the northern dynasties. These images were “icons of urbanitas” because they iconicised the perceived harmony of these ambitions. The domestic spaces magnified this narrative, as the domestic ornaments discussed in this chapter confirm, whilst reinforcing the normative sexual politics. As Pontano has explained, “the ornamental objects, which should be as magnificent and various as possible, should each be arranged in their own place. Thus one is fitting for the hall, another for the women’s apartments.”90 Perhaps this played a part in the rising popularity of likenesses in restrained fashion from the last quarter of the century. Perhaps these images don domestic wardrobes rather than the garments of family networks precisely in order to assert women’s competence beyond stereotypical femininity, and thus suggestively criticise the reality of the everyday and the hypocrisy of conventional praises of women. In other words, just because we do not often hear them, it does not mean that women did not speak. Likewise, just because their portraits do not turn their glance, it does not mean that the sitters did not look. Women’s biology also encapsulated the protean nature of this entwined sociopolitical system and not just because of the risks of pregnancy. Portraits such as the Este Princess and Giovanna degli Albizzi illustrate the metaphysical angle of the imago feminae, the locus of the nostalgic, bittersweet, existential meditation upon the Horatian carpe diem that gripped humanism from Petrarch to Lorenzo il Magnifico and beyond. The combined mnemo-techniques and ritualistic handling of storage items stimulated compositional solutions that mirrored the nooks of the mind and the heart. The resulting images encapsulated imagination in motion. The symbolic complexity of this portrait type was felt, as a taste for medallic and panel profile portraiture rose outside Italy in the latter quarter of the century.91 Among the striking transalpine examples are the multiple posthumous likenesses of Mary of Burgundy (1457–1482).92 90 In Welch, Public Magnificence and Private Display, 215. On the social value of art in middle class culture, see also Patricia Lee Rubin, Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence (London: Yale University Press, 2007). 91 E.g., Daniel Shmutz, “Giovanni Candida: An Italian Medallist at the Court of Charles the Bold,” in Splendour of the Burgundian Court: Charles the Bold (1433–1477), eds. Susan Marti, Till-Holger Borchert and Gabriele Keck, exh.cat. (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, Cornell University Press, 2009), 224–25. Ambrogio de’ Predis left a similar legacy when he followed Bianca Maria Sforza, now married to Maximilian I, to the Innsbruck court. 92 The presumptive original is Attr. Michale Pacher (ca.1435–1498), Mary of Burgundy, ca.1479–90, private collection. Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian I were each other’s first spouses. Ann Roberts has suggested that Maximilian commissioned these images merely for propaganda. In considering that Mary is on her dextera side as a sign of respect, and the spouses’ genuine affection for each other, perhaps these were not just propagandistic efforts. I have not included this portrait in the catalogue because its maker was not Netherlandish. See Ann M. Roberts, “The Posthumous Image of Mary of Burgundy,” in Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe: Gender, Agency, Identity, ed. Andrea Pearson (Hampshire, England and Burlington, USA: Ashgate, 2008), 55–70.

4. Netherlandish Female Portraiture in Context Abstract The term Netherlandish portraiture is associated with a type of three-quarter view that became popular in the early fifteenth century among the wealthy community of the Duchy of Burgundy, a territory roughly comparable with Belgium today. Its quasi-photographic effects were achieved through the slow-drying process of their oil medium, used for the first time on panel. This style brought to maturity a pre-existing trend towards naturalistic physiognomy and, this chapter argues, encapsulated the complex social identity of the short-lived Duchy. Central to this analysis are the female likenesses, which have never received attention as a group. The subjects’ miens and the muted colours of their clothing create an aura of solemnity that is enhanced by the neutral backgrounds. I propose to call them “icons of humility,” a term that paraphrases the description of female followers of the evangelical group Devotio Moderna, popular in the region. The discussion includes technical, contextual, and taxonomical considerations which have hitherto been unresolved. Key words: Devotio Moderna – Flanders – Gothic – Netherlandish – Three-quarter Portraiture

The term Netherlandish portraiture conjures a type of likeness in three-quarter facial angle. It became popular in the fifteenth century among the wealthy urban communities of the Duchy of Burgundy, a territory that is roughly comparable with Belgium today. It is on autonomous panels, and in diptychs and triptychs with devotional purposes. It appears so veristic that it could be described as photographic. The slow-drying oil medium, which until then had not been applied on panels, allowed painters to attain such naturalistic results that they still distract us from the disproportionally large head of the figures in comparison with their torso, especially in the early autonomous examples. Similarly, in many of these portraits the nose, eye, and lip corner of the less exposed side of the face are flattened, perhaps to help

Toreno, E., Netherlandish and Italian Female Portraiture in the Fifteenth Century. Gender, Identity, and the Tradition of Power. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463728614_ch04

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recognise the sitters, as has been suggested.1 These images confirm the maturity of an existing trend towards more naturalistic physiognomy. They have survived in large quantities, and in the individual portraits the subjects’ miens and the muted colours of their clothing seem to purposefully create an aura of solemnity that is often enhanced by neutral backgrounds. It has been proposed that the characteristics of Netherlandish paintings and their inaugural oil medium together represented a cultural departure from the aristocratic taste by an urban patriciate anxious to claim a cultural identity, thus compensating for self-perceived social inadequacies.2 Furthermore, the individual portraits have been associated with memorialising or funerary commissions in a medium that would have been cheaper than stone or marble.3 Although these aspects may appear to be the spark that modernised the genre, and Chapter Five will expand on this point, these portraits still preserve the Gothic disdain for accurate anatomical proportions. 4 Also, coats-of-arms, inscriptions in the paintings, and official records trace many of these likenesses to a diverse society that includes a local administrative patriciate, as well as the aristocracy, and the communities of foreign, rich tradespeople.5 Finally, an element of memorialisation is naturally intrinsic to the function of portraiture. Indeed, their desire to be seen as historically relevant was a key psychological factor in the new urban patriciate’s commissions of likenesses, but the same could be said of the declining ruling classes. Thus, since both the style and subjects of these portraits served diverse social identities, I will consider their “selective inhibition about display,” as Michael Baxandall has described it, “with elusive moral overtones” as evidence of the peculiar history of the territory.6 The aristocratic and patrician, local and foreign ranks of Burgundian society had a taste for opulence. In fact, many donor portraits, however pious, are fastidiously depicted in luxury fabric and surroundings that betray a conspicuous consumption, 1 Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait-Painting in the 14th, 15th and 16th Centuries (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 12. 2 From Panofsky to, more recently, e.g., Felix Craig Harbison, Jan Van Eyck: The Play of Realism, 2nd ed. (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2012), 125-27. 3 Hans Belting, “The Coat of Arms and the Body: Two Media of the Body,” in An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 62–83 (71). 4 Herbert Furst, Portrait Painting: Its Nature and Function (London: John Lane the Bodley Head Limited, 1927), 38-39. 5 Ingrid Falque, Devotional Portraiture and Spiritual Experience in Early Netherlandish Painting (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2019); Bernhard Ridderbos, “Creating Frameworks: The Social Function of the Ghent Altarpiece,” in Vision, Text and Image: The Cultural Turn in the Study of Arts, eds. Herman W. Hoen and Mary Kemperink (Leuven: Peeters, 2008), 33–52; John Oliver Hand and Ron Spronk, Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych, exh.cat. (New Haven and London: Cambridge and Yale University Press, 2006). 6 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, 2nd ed. (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 14.

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an index of the sitter’s race for socio-economic success.7 Conversely, the individual likenesses are cloaked in a solemnity that rises above such concerns. Arguably, the latter’s characteristics interpret the Burgundian marriage between corporate requirements, amid complex socio-economic conditions, and a culture influenced by religious practices popularised by Devotio Moderna, which, as seen in Chapter One, advocated detachment from the everyday. The cultural impact of this religious strand is central to my investigation, because of its significance in the life of women. My primary evidence are seventeen female likenesses painted on panel.8 One marital pendant is attributed to Robert Campin (ca.1375/79–1444) and another pendant is a sixteenth-century copy that is considered faithful to an original also painted by Campin.9 The likeness of his wife Margareta is painted by Jan van Eyck (ca.1395–1441).10 One painting is attributed to Jacques Daret (ca.1404–1470), one of Campin’s assistants.11 Five panels are attributed to the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden (ca.1398/1400–1464), another pupil of Campin, including a mature likeness of Isabella of Portugal (1397–1472), the third wife of Duke Philip “the Good” (b.1396, ruled 1419–1467).12 One painting is by Petrus Christus (ca.1410, active 1444–1475/76);13 7 E.g., Jan van Eyck, The Virgin and Child with Chancellor Rolin, ca.1430, oil on panel, 66 × 62 cm, Musée du Louvre (1271). On the famous lavishness of the Burgundian court, see Susan Marti, Till-Holger Borchert and Gabriele Keck, Splendour of the Burgundian Court: Charles the Bold (1433–1477), exh.cat. (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, Cornell University Press, 2009); Rembrandt Duits, Gold Brocade and Renaissance Painting: A Study in Material Culture (London: the Pindar Press, 2008); and their bibliography. The term “conspicuous consumption” was coined in 1899 by the American-Norwegian sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929). 8 Lacking sufficient information, I omitted from this group a likeness by Memling, now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York; a likeness, the photograph of which is in the Louvre Archives, and Portrait of a Woman added to Cat. 67. 9 Cat. 58, 59. Cat. 59 is the copy of an original, representing the wife of a ranking member of the Burgundian administrative class, Barthélémy Alatruye de Le Vigne (d. ca.1446). His wife, Marie de Pacy (d.1452) was the daughter of one of the three maîtres of the French Chambre des Comptes. Portraits of both spouses are recorded in the Recueil d’Arras, where he wears a chaperon in the style of some likenesses of Philip the Good. The frame of this copy has an inscription and a date, 1425, that may refer to the original portrait. The genealogy of these two individuals is available online. See also Felix Thürlemann, Robert Campin: A Monographic Study with Critical Catalogue (Munich; New York: Prestel, 2002), 79. 10 Cat. 60, on which see Lorne Campbell et al., Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian, exh.cat. (London: Yale University Press for National Gallery Company, 2008), 180 (cat. 47). Jill Dunkerton and Rachel Billinge, Beyond the Naked Eye (London: National Gallery Publications 2005), 10–13. 11 Cat. 61 shows a woman in a half-length, three-quarter pose. On the top left of the neural background there is the inscription “Sibylla Agrippa.” She holds a book. In a 1900 photograph, the same painting had a second inscription, “Aloisia Sabauda” above the book. Although both later additions, these inscriptions have been considered to be related to the House of Savoy. An identification of the subject with Francis I’s mother, Louise of Savoy, Duchess d’Angoulême (1476–1503) has been proposed. The proveance and bibliographical references of this painting are detailed on the website of the Dumbarton Oaks Museum. 12 Cat. 62 to 66 inclusive 13 Cat. 67, 73, 74.

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four are by Hans Memling (ca.1435/40–1494), a prolific portraitist of male sitters, two of which are marital pendants.14 The remaining three portraits are by unknown masters.15 Although excluded from the catalogue because of their media, this discussion is also informed by a seventeenth-century drawing of the betrothal portrait of Isabella by Van Eyck, now lost, and by three drawings that are clearly portraits and not details for or from larger compositions. Two are from Rogier’s workshop and one is by Christus. These four items are essential evidence for the present analysis.16 Below I intertwine technical and socio-cultural observations and propose to describe these portraits with the term “dowry of humility”, to draw a link between them and the qualities that were routinely attributed to the female modern devout. I will propose that the mature likeness of Isabella by Rogier represents the mother-image of a pan-European design. Finally, I will evaluate compositional characteristics in the context of spectatorship. For this, I will return to my definition of seeing-in. The Duchy ceased to exist with the death of its last rightful heir, Mary of Burgundy (1452–1482). However, the catalogue includes portraits made until ca.1500 in the same region, because this portrait culture did not change abruptly with her death.

Technical Observations As a group, these images afford several observations. One is taxonomical: five likenesses are marital, but they appear so only because they are paired with a male companion rather than showing symbols associated with marriage. Van Eyck’s Margareta might have also been paired with the painter’s self-portrait. Its 14 Cat. 69, 70, 71, 72. 15 Cat. 68. 16 Many of these portraits are discussed in Netherlandish art scholarship, of which the following is a short selection: Harbison, Jan Van Eyck, 125-27; Lorne Campbell and Jan Van der Stock, Rogier van der Weyden 1400–1464: Master of Passions (Davidsfond, Leuven: Waanders Publishers, Zwolle, 2009); Maryan W. Ainsworth and Maximilian Martens, Petrus Christus: Renaissance Master of Bruges, exh.cat. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2005); Till-Holger Borchert ed., Memling and the Art of Portraiture, exh.cat. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005); Lorne Campbell, “Jan Van Eyck, Early Netherlandish Painting and Southern Europe,” Bruges Review ‘The Burlington Magazine’ 144, no.1191 (June 2002): 357, 367–371; Fritz Koreny and Erwin Pokorny eds., Early Netherlandish Drawings from Jan Van Eyck to Hieronymus Bosch, exh.cat. (Antwerp: Rubenshuis, 2002); Felix Thülemann, Robert Campin: A Monographic Study with Critical Catalogue (Munich, Berlin, London, New York: Prestel, 2002); Albert Châtelet, Rogier van der Weyden: problèmes de la vie et de l’oeuvre (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1999); Dirk de Vos, Rogier Van der Weyden: The Complete Works (Antwerp: Harry N. Abrams, 1999); Lorne Campbell, “Campin’s Portraits,” in Robert Campin: New Directions in Scholarship, eds. Susan Foister and Susie Nash (London, The National Gallery: Brespol, 1996), 123–33; Peter H. Schabacker, Petrus Christus (Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker and Gumbert, 1974).

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function is stated along the original frame: “CO(N)IU(N)X M(EU)S IOH(ANN)ES ME (COM)PLEVIT A(N)NO. 1439˚. 15˚. IUNII.”17 Similarities with the early image of Isabella, documented as a betrothal likeness, suggest that two paintings and the three drawings had a nuptial purpose. What prompted the commission for the remaining nine is opaque. In other words, Netherlandish female portraits did not reveal their purpose through the visual signs of a material culture, as the Italians did. A second observation is contextual: together with these seventeen portraits, I found forty-seven Netherlandish male likenesses, in addition to the five marital companions. Translated into a percentage, and excluding the pendants, male portraits make up 79.6% of all the likenesses. Moreover, all surviving donor diptychs are male.18 On the other hand, I traced only four drawn male likenesses. Although I am not claiming absolute investigative accuracy, I doubt that more discoveries would change these findings significantly. I do not know why the male-female gap is so insignificant in drawings, but I am inclined to elaborate on my remarks in the Introduction about the challenges of portraying women: sketching a likeness would have reduced the number of sittings and, in turn, of contacts with unrelated male individuals.19 This is also relevant to a third observation: this group of female portraits shows a morphology that is so accurate and repeated that I am confident it reveals a method concerned with regulating the space and distance of the figure’s details, whilst harmonising their geometries. The bodies form a trapezoid demarcated by the base of the panel, the diagonals of the arms and the shoulder line. The diagonals of the headdresses enhance this geometry. Of the seventeen likenesses, twelve seem further enclosed within an invisible visual triangle emphasised by the headgear, its left diagonal intersecting the right eye, and the central axis intersecting the left eye.20 Among the remaining five, two show the subjects on their right side, and the right diagonal of the triangle intersects the left eye.21 Of the twelve, six have 17 “my husband John completed me in the year 1430 on 17 June / I was thirty-three years old.” 18 Andrea Pearson, Envisioning Gender in Burgundian Devotional Art 1350–1530 (England and USA: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2005). One important example of a female devotional diptych after the end of the Duchy is Jean Hey (Master of Moulins), Portrait of a Young Princess (Margaret of Austria), 1490–1491, tempera and oil on wood, 33 × 23 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1975.1.130). This book cannot include the portraits of male sitters. However, their sheer quantity in monographs on Netherlandish art gives a measure of their success. 19 Reflecting on the recurring pentimenti in the surviving portraits and on the popularity of the iconography of St Luke drawing the likeness of the Virgin, Lorne Campbell has suggested that this practice was routine. The suggestion does not take gender into account. Lorne Campbell, “The Making of Early Netherlandish Portraits,” in The Image of the Individual: Portraits in the Renaissance, eds. Nicholas Mann and Luke Syson (London: The British Museum Press, 1998), 105–12; Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, 168–69. 20 Cat. 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73. 21 Cat. 62, 68.

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the horizontal axis across the chin. Translated visually, they seem well positioned in a middle ground. In the other six, the head is above the axis, and so they seem further away from the picture plane. The heads of the drawings also occupy the upper half of the sheet and the eyes, again, have a positional function. Conversely, most male likenesses appear closer to the picture plane, as their chins fall far below the horizontal axis of the panel. Finally, of the twelve portraits, six seem checked within an invisible squaring grid that intersects important details of the composition. Let us imagine a horizontal line across the upper quarter of the panel, which would run through the eyebrows and the curves of the headgear. Its intersection with a line along the first vertical left quarter of the surface would fall just above the subject’s right eye, and the vertical line would terminate at the centre of the clutched hands.22 Comparable conditions surface in some male portraits, such as Van Eyck’s Cardinal Albergati (1438) that also survives in its preparatory drawing (1431–1435), but nowhere near this compositional control.23 Although unverifiable, a squaring method of sorts seems therefore to have existed. In other genres of Netherlandish paintings, sometimes it is so intrinsic to the composition that it reveals itself to the naked eye, as in Rogier’s Crucifixion (ca.1455) now in Madrid. Similarly, geometrical patterns created compositional unity, as in the Columba triptych (ca.1455), also by Rogier.24 And it has been noted that Memling arranged the position of the sitters by making the eye and its pupil match with the centre of the panel’s width.25 Moreover, it is tempting to link a squaring method in 22 Cat. 58, 63, 64, 65, 71, 72. 23 Jan van Eyck, Cardinal Albergati, ca.1431–1435, silverpoint on whitish prepared paper, 21 × 18.8 cm, Staatliche, Kunstsammlungen, Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden (KK-C-775-PS01); ca.1438, oil on panel, 34.1 × 27.3 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Gemäldegalerie, 975). 24 Rogier van der Weyden, Crucifixion, ca.1455, oil on panel, 325 × 192 cm, El Escorial, Madrid. Rogier van der Weyden, Columba Triptych, ca.1455, oil on panel, 138 × 153 cm (central), 138 × 70 cm (each wing), Alte Pinakothek, Munich (WAF1189, 1190, 1191). Lorne Campbell, “The New Pictorial Language of Rogier van der Weyden,” and “The Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden,” in Rogier van der Weyden 1400–1464, Campbell and Van der Stock, 32–61 (esp. 47–52), and 104–29 (esp. 113–15). And Rachel Billinge et al., “Methods and Materials of Northern European Painting in the National Gallery, 1400–1550,” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 18, Early Northern European Painting (1997): 6–55 (25–30, esp. 27). 25 Campbell also has noted that Memling modelled seven-eighth and three-quarter angles to fit the sitters’ physiognomy; as the catalogue in the Appendix implies, the portraits by Memling are mostly of male sitters. And that the eyes look in different directions (strabismus). This was perhaps a strategy to simulate the movement of the sitter’s head. In at least a dozen portraits, the iris emerges from below the eye socket. In other cases, it seems to be floating, perhaps to enhance the mystic exaltation of the sitter, which he also considers as endowing the sitter with beauty. Lorne Campbell, “Memling and the Netherlandish Portrait Tradition,” in Memling and the Art of Portraiture, ed. Till-Holger Borchert, exh.cat. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 49–67; Dider Bodart, “Da Jan Van Eyck a Pieter Bruegel: il Ritratto nei Paesi Bassi,” in Il Ritratto: gli Artisti, i Modelli, la Memoria, ed. Gloria Fossi (Firenze: Giunti Gruppo Editoriale, 1996), 30–60 (40). Additionally, Maryan W. Ainsworth, “Intentional Alterations of Early Netherlandish Paintings,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 40, Essays in Memory of John M. Brealey (2005):

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individual portraiture to the much-discussed chequering veils explained by Alberti, one of which has survived in a drawing now in the Royal Collection. However, chequering veils were the Italian manner.26 Thus, this method may conceal the use of an optical instrument. Optical devices were becoming common in the fifteenth century, fostering praxes that perfected the tools later illustrated by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) [fig. 4.1].27 This method could have also helped harmonise facial and sartorial geometries, and reckon suitable distances between painters and sitters, especially if demanded by gender decorum.28 Sobriety of colours, self-possessed miens and a painterly technique camouflaged this approach, thus creating a northern idealisation of female beauty. Below, I contextualise the reasons for this. 51–65; Maryan W. Ainsworth, “The Business of Art: Patrons, Clients, and Art Markets,” in From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, eds. Maryan W. Ainsworth et al., exh.cat. (New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc. for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 23–37 (35). 26 Florentine, Profile of a Woman, ca.1470–1480, black chalk over metal point, squared in pen and ink on paper, 36.3 × 21 cm, the Royal Collection (RL 12808). Unlike the Italian manner, these portraits also lack the punching marks that betray the transfer of the image from drawing to panel. E.g Cat. 102. The Belle Ferroniere by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was painted from a cartoon: La Belle Ferronière, Centre de Recherce et de Restauration des Musée de France, conservation report, 20 June 2016: 1–11. The name of the painting refers to one of Ludovico Sforza’s mistresses but, over the years, several alternative sitters have been proposed: Ann Boleyn (ca.1501–1536), Lucrezia Crivelli (1452–1508), Cecilia Gallerani (1473–1536), Isabella of Aragon (1470–1524), and Isabella d’Este (1474–1539). Janet Cox-Rearick has also speculated that she may be a portrait mentioned by the cleric Antonio de Beatis, who lived between the fifteenth and the sixteenth century. In France to visit Leonardo, in the the bibliothéque of the Blois castle he saw, on 11 October 1517: “ancho in quatro dove è pintata ad oglio una certa signura di Lombardia di naturale assai bella, ma al moi iuditio non tanto come la signora Gualanda.” In the margin, the note continues: “quadro dove è di naturale une S.ra Milanese. S.ra Isabella Gualanda.” This Lombard Signora Gualanda was the sitter for a likeness that Leonardo had in his studio in Cloux. An entry in the inventory of 24 July 1500 of the collection in Ambois is also related to this item: “ung autre tableau paint sur boys d’une femme de fasson Ytalienne.” The inventory mentions twenty-seven portraits from the Lombard school. The 1495–1511 inventories of the paintings, reliquaries, and tapestry of Anne of Brittany (1447–1514) recorded these paintings as well. Speculations aside, it seems safer to suggest that this portrait represents a woman from Ludovico Sforza’s court. Louvre Archives. And, with further references, Laure Fagnart, Léonard de Vinci en France: Collections et Collectioneurs (XVème – XVIIème siècles) (Roma: l’Erma di Bretschneider, 2009), 53–54; Roberta Battaglia ed., Leonardo e i Leonardeschi [Giovanni Boltraffio and other] (Firenze: Il Sole 24 Ore, E-ducation.it, 2007), 16; Janet Cox-Rearick, Chefs-d’oeuvre de la Renaissance. La Collection de Francois I (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), 145. 27 The sixteenth-century chronicler Marcantonio Michiel mentioned numerous times Netherlandish self-portraits “fatti allo specchio” that he saw in the collections of the Venetian patriciate. Anonimo Morelliano, Notizia d’Opere di Disegno nella Prima Metà del Sec. XVI, Esistenti in Padova, Cremona, Milano, Pavia, Bergamo, Crema, e Venezia Scritta da un Anonimo di Quel Tempo (Iacopo Morelli: Bassano, 1800). Trans.: Marcantonio Michiel, The Anonimo: Notes on Pictures and Works of Art in Italy, ed. George C. Williamson, trans. Paolo Mussi (London: George Bell and Sons, London, 1903). On this vast field of research, see the bibliography in Stephen James Hanley, “The Optical Concerns of Jan van Eyck’s Painting Practice,” 2 vols., PhD diss. (University of York, 2007). And Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, 159–61. 28 The lines under the paint in Cat. 65 are interesting, and discussed below.

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Female Portraiture in the Burgundian Culture The sitters of these portraits resided in the heavily urbanised chartered towns of the Duchy of Burgundy. Their likenesses, sombre and unpretentious, glossed over conflicting socio-political interests by evoking a moral sameness, the “firm faith in the goodness of God” exhorted by the formidable Jean Gerson.29 Their veristic faces, however, simultaneously betray the sitters’ unique spiritual dimension and the individualism that shaped the socio-economic model of the Duchy.30 This was, in Robert Stein’s description, a “composite monarchy” of principalities that were politically and economically interdependent but socio-culturally distinct.31 In 1363, Philip “the Bold” (1342–1404), the youngest son of the Valois King John II of France (1319–1364) and brother of Charles V (1338–1380), was given the Duchy in apanage by his father. In 1369, Philip married Margaret III of Flanders (1350–1405). At the death of her father, Louis of Male (1330–1384), they inherited the Counties of Flanders and Artois, and other territories. The domain expanded further with the handover and purchase of adjacent principalities under Philip’s son, John “the Fearless” (1371–1419), and especially his grandson Philip “the Good,” becoming one of the economic cornerstones of fifteenth-century Europe. When Charles “the Bold” (1433–1477), Philip’s son and successor died in 1477, Mary of Burgundy, his only daughter, inherited the Duchy. Mary married the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian. She died in 1482, and the Duchy’s counties were divided between the Habsburg Empire and France. Maximilian married again, his third wife being Bianca Maria Sforza, whose portrait illustrates the beginning of this book.

29 Jean Gerson, “The Mountain of Contemplation,” in Early Works, intr. and trans. Brian Patrick McGuire, preface Bernard McGinn (New York, Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1998), 75–127 (80). 30 On Netherlandish art, Susan Frances Jones, Van Eyck to Gossaert: Towards a Northern Renaissance, exh.cat. (London: Yale University Press for the National Gallery Company, 2011); Bernhard Ridderbos, Anne van Buren, Henk van Veen, Early Netherlandish Paintings: Rediscovery, Reception, and Research, exh.cat. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005); Bret Rothstein, Sight and Spirituality in Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Ainsworth et al., From Van Eyck to Bruegel; Lorne Campbell, National Gallery Catalogues: The Fifteenth Century Netherlandish School (London, National Gallery Publications: Yale University Press, 1998); Jean C. Wilson, Painting in Bruges and the Close of the Middle Ages (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1998); Bodart, Da Jan Van Eyck a Pieter Bruegel; Otto Pächt, Van Eyck and the Founders of Early Netherlandish Painting, trans. David Britt (London: Harvey Miller Publisher, 1994); Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, 2 vols. (1953; rep., New York, Hangerstown, San Francisco, London: Icon Editions, Harper and Row Publisher, 1971). 31 Robert Stein, Magnanimous Dukes: The Unification of the Burgundian Netherlands, 1380–1480 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 12. The concept of a “composite monarchy” was coined by Helmut G. Koenigsberger in 1975 and popularised by John H. Elliott. Strictly speaking, Tournai was a bishopric but dependent on Burgundy in all effects.

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The Duchy employed f iscal and administrative policies that were based on feudal laws, even if they were out-of-date for its diverse population, and uneven because shaped by the acquisition of each territory. Municipal and Court offices were filled by an urban elite that increased in number as the Duchy expanded. Rising in social prominence, these individuals developed personal expectations of socio-economic progress against collective interests. In an effort to create interregional cohesion, Philip the Good established a permanent court in Brussels in 1459, and temporary residences in wealthy cities such as the Flemish Bruges and Ghent. To cement his own popularity, whilst promoting the growth of a national identity, he implemented strategies that eventually entangled his ambitions with those of the burghers. For example, he transformed existing civic events into regal rituals that required the participation of all town residents. He granted peerages to the nouveaux riches and favoured inter-class marriages, which he and his wife oversaw personally. This was a double-edged tactic: on the one hand, it obtained social and f iscal control; on the other hand, it fuelled social antagonism and nepotism. Moreover, access to power ultimately remained exclusive because the court privileged a minority of French-speaking subjects over the majority that spoke the local languages. Such ambiguities were exacerbated by economic policies that unevenly addressed the needs of the countryside, causing social friction and periodic unrest.32 Flanders was the most socially diverse of these counties. One thing that Philip had achieved during his reign was the stability and, in turn, economic prosperity of the territory after a long period of disorder, which had brought the region to its knees. Administratively, it operated through the Great Council and the Council of Flanders, but much power rested on the Members of Flanders, viz. the juridical heads of, and intermediaries for, the corporations of Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, and the Franc of Bruges. Conducting official business in their local idiom, the Members also controlled the fiscal policies of the corporations and expected to be consulted by the Duke, often overriding his ambitions and those of the local aristocracy. Simply put, they had a fierce sense of identity. However, because each Member was

32 With the above, see Bruno Blondé, Marc Boone and Anne-Laure van Bruaene, eds. City and Society in the Low Countries, 1100–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Andrew Brown and Graeme Small, Court and Civic Society in the Burgundian Low Countries ca.1420–1530 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007); D’Arcy Jonathan Dacre Boulton and Jan R. Veenstra, eds. The Ideology of Burgundy: The Promotion of National Consciousness 1364–1565 (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2006); Richard Vaughan, Philip the Good (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2004 ed.); Wim Blockmans and Walter Prevenier, The Promised Land: The Low Countries Under Burgundian Rule, 1369–1530, ed. Edward Peters, trans. Elizabeth Fackelman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); David Nicholas, Medieval Flanders (London and New York: Longman, 1992).

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legally empowered to protect their own individual interests, mutual cooperation was fraught with political and economic acrimonies.33 Prosperity had created working opportunities for women that tested gender expectations to an extent that still in the sixteenth century the Italian commentator Ludovico Guicciardini (1521–1589) found confounding.34 Guicciardini also recorded Bruggian women as exempla of beauty, grace, and sobriety,35 perhaps teasing out, inadvertently, the impeccable morality that countered such a progressive attitude. Judging by these portraits, travellers of the previous generation must have seen the same Bruggian self-assurance and charm, one that a woman portrayed by Campin certainly possesses [Fig. 4.2].36 The subject is paired with a male companion, likely depicted as husband and wife. They wear the clothing of wealthy townspeople. Their reverse, now damaged, resembled red-brown marbling, as might have been also the decoration of the frame, symbolising the strength and permanency of their union. To paint the woman, Campin employed the compositional control illustrated above and more. The following are but a few highlights. The nose stretches into a set of parallel lines that divide the face into two sides, and its tip hides the lower curve of the right cheek. Eyes and lip corners are visibly asymmetrical, and the right side is flattened. Geometries entwine the face with the headgear, where the curves of her wimple above the cones are a larger version of the eyelids, somehow recalling the schematisation of forms in medieval drawings. In both panels, technical examination shows lines scored into the paint to stress the contours of both of the head coverings. In her case, its rendition conjures the female decorum described in conduct manuals: “[Y]our hair, your wimple […] and the rest of your attire be full neatly and simply ordered, so that […] you should be made an ensample of good and simple and decent array before all the others.”37 33 E.g., Nicholas, Medieval Flanders, 347. 34 “Le donne sono di forma bellissima and candide and di spirito; and sono generalmente tanto travagliative, and tanto volunterose, che elleno bona parte degli esercitij degli huomini, and massimamente nella mercatura occupano.” Ludovico Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (Anversa: Christofano Plantino, 1588), 283. Also instructive are his list of female painters, 129–31; and his description of marital customs, 140–41. Although tempting, this should not be taken as evidence of easier patriarchal conditions. See Martha C. Howell, “The Problem of Women’s Agency in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” in Women and Gender in the Early Modern Low Countries 1500-1750, eds. Sarah Joan Moran and Amanda Pipkin (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2019), 21-31; Bruno Blondé, Frederik Buylaert, Jan Dumolyn, Ford Hanus and Peter Stabel, “Living Together in the City: Social Relations Between Norm and Practice,” in City and Society in the Low Countries, 59–92 (75 and 78). Martha C. Howell, The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1330–1550 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 35 “Le donne di Bruggia sono belle, gratiose, civili et sobrie quanto in parte alcuna di questi paesi.” Guicciardini, Descrittione, 327. 36 Cat. 58. A technical study of this portrait is in Methods and Materials. 37 Anonymous, Le Ménagier de Paris, trans. Eileen Power (London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd, 1928), 51.

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Unlike the man, she is endowed with a sparkle that brightens her irises, which seems altogether too easy to liken to amorous and Petrarchan descriptions of female eyes and their bewitching effects, as has been proposed.38 Albeit a popular one, this trope does not apply to all pictorial instances, especially as Netherlandish marital likenesses can hardly be described as bursting with passion. Sparkles could illustrate the phenomenon of directional light, whilst creating the impression of coextension between the real and the fictive spaces. For instance, Margareta’ s eyes reflect a window. They could also signify spiritual joy. In the Bible and in theological discourse, ocular reactions are often associated with the experience of divine love, as in Eph. 1:18: “The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints.” In Campin’s Christ and the Virgin (1430–1435), a work considered germane to the artist’s development of his secular portraiture, the catch-light on the Virgin’s eyes does not seem merely directional but, rather, enlightening. In Rogier’s triptych of the Braque family [Fig. 4.7], an elaboration of Campin’s earlier painting, only the figures directly related to the doctrine of the resurrection, Christ, Mary, and Mary Magdalene have shining eyes.39 A portrait from Rogier’s workshop has the reverse painted with the head of Christ with thorns and halo, a variant of the acheiropoeta (imago non manufacta), amid the northern popularity of the Holy Face connected with Christocentric devotion [Fig. 4.3]. 40 Its damaged condition makes it difficult to ascertain conclusively whether it was painted concomitantly with the obverse. However, panels had to be primed before being painted. If a single board was meant to be painted on both sides, they 38 This argument, proposed in Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. 2, 292, has found acolytes, such as Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, 72–74. 39 Robert Campin, Christ and the Virgin, ca.1430–1435, oil and gold on panel, 28.6 × 45.6 cm, Museum of Art, Philadelphia (332). 40 Cat. 65. Reverses with the head of Christ are extremely rare. On the Holy Face in Netherlandish art, see John Oliver Hand, “Salve sancta facies: Some Thoughts on the Iconography of the Head of Christ by Petrus Christus,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 27 (1992): 7–18. This portrait belonged to the mother-in-law of the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens (1823–1906). It was in the Ash Collection before entering the National Gallery. Both the obverse and reverse were cleaned in 1967, revealing the extent of the damage and overpaint of the reverse. Infrared reflectography has shown only a little underdrawing under the female figure and none under the head of Christ. The obverse has three lines close and parallel to each other on the top edge, one to the left and two to the right of the head. A thin line appears in the background, parallel to the contour of the right arm. Similar thin lines appear in the areas of the belt, the fingers, the chin and the neck. Broader lines are notable in the headdress, the white cloak and the neck. The woman has blue eyes and a small red spot on her right cheek. Proposals for her identif ication are Isabella of Bourbon (ca.1436–1465), Countess of Charlorais, and Beatrice of Portugal (d.1461). She appears, however, to be dressed as a wealthy townswoman. The brown dress seems to be made of wool but is not of the best quality. The lining, however, resembles dark blue damask. It is patterned with darker blue floral motifs and and scrolls. The belt has a silk effect. National Gallery Archives.

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needed primed at the same time, in order to avoid damaging the one finished work, whilst painting the other. It is appealing to think that the Holy Face was already painted, when this panel was chosen to execute the likeness of the woman because of the technical characteristics of her rendition. Her eyebrows are plucked in the fashion of the Burgundian court, and thus she may represent a member of the local nobility. In common with the Campin woman, she has the retinal spark and strict compositional control. However, her chin falls below the horizontal axis of the panel, indicating proximity with the picture plane. Her hands invade its threshold and a shadow in the background, now imperceptible, enhances the reality effect of her body and of the faux frame. 41 In devotional and donor portraiture, the spatial coexistence between the secular and the religious figures interpreted the advice by church authorities to look at devotional images until these were transfigured in the mind as aniconic forms of themselves. 42 The advice was theologically blessed. For instance, Thomas Aquinas had argued that God can be understood imaginatively, and, in the imagination, divine love can be consummated, for it is impossible “for our intellect to perform any actual exercise of understanding except by attending to phantasms.”43 Phantasms were sensory manifestations of knowledge. The followers of this practice ranked the influential Flemish mystic Jan Roosbruec (1293/94–1381), Geert Groote, the father of Devotio Moderna, Jean Gerson and, of course, the evangelicals met in Chapter One. 44 Groote explained: “It is necessary to make extended use of external writings, signs, and images for a long time in our meditations, and they are not to be left behind […] until Christ and the spiritual understanding have again taken shape within us.”45 Similarly, Gerson instructed that “we ought thus to learn to transcend with our minds from the visible things to the invisible, from the corporeal to the spiritual. For this is the purpose of the image.”46 Gerson, who wrote in French rather than 41 Originally, the index overlapped middle finger of the left hand. For a technical analysis, see Rachel Billinge et al., “The Materials and Technique of Five Paintings by Rogier van der Weyden and his Workshop,” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 18 (1997): 68–86. 42 On this historical backdrop, see Miri Rubin and Walter Simons, eds. Christianity in Western Europe ca.1100–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); J.E.G De Montmorency, Thomas à Kempis: his Age and Book (London: Methuen and Co., 1906), esp. 1–105. 43 Jessica Barr, “The Meaning of the Word: Language and Divine Understanding in Marguerite d’Oingt,” Mystics Quarterly 33, no. 1/2 (March/June 2007): 27–52 (36). 44 Wybren Scheepsma, Medieval Religious Women in the Low Countries: The ‘Modern Devotion’, the Canonesses of Windesheim and their Writings, trans. David F. Johnson (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2004); John van Engen, “Introduction,” in Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings (New York, Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1988), 7–61; R. R. Post, The Modern Devotion: Confrontation with Reformation and Humanism (Leiden: Brill, 1968); Henry Carr, The Function of the Phantasm in St Thomas Aquinas (Kingston, Ontario: Queen’s University Press, 1922). 45 Van Engen, Devotio Moderna, 113. 46 Cited in Rothstein, Sight and Spirituality, 57–58.

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in Latin so that women could read his works, reminded his “beloved sisters” that “it is true that we can do nothing without the special Grace of God […] obtained more by good contemplatives than by active persons. Contemplatives are like the body’s eyes, which enlighten and direct all the deeds done by the other members of the body.”47 Ocular reactions could be thus synonymous with moral chastity in marriage portraits, and with the longing for a mystical union, as appears to be the relation between the obverse and the reverse of this portrait. Absorbed in contemplation, the woman’s proximity is not with the spectator’s space, which her remote glance forswears, but with Christ. Two decades later, Memling produced a likeness that corroborates my argument: the subject wears a marital jewel, but this is not the key to the painting. In an ostensible state of meditation, she spreads her presence into the frame, to hold a banderole inscribed with a Marian text. 48

Garbed in Ootmoed: Spirituality of Humility Its underdrawing shows that one of the alterations in Margareta is the addition of the hands on the lap in a manner that, in variants, appears across these portraits. 49 This afterthought was not a mere compositional improvement. It finds an ekphrastic match in the tribute to Gese Broekelants (d.1407), a Common House Sister: “At work, if she had little time, she sat with folded hands.” To describe the sum of the qualities, for which someone like Gese was remembered, the modern devout used the term ootmoed, translatable as “spirituality of humility”: “[D]evotion, thoughtfulness, humility, modesty, sobriety, chastity, and tranquillity.”50 This praise overlooks social dimension and, as such, it should make us reflect. An architecture of social hierarchies and rituals, as well as buildings, demarcated the space of mainstream Christian worship. On the other hand, as explained in Chapter One, Christocentric devotion occurred within limitless psychological spaces. The presence of people like Gese in the lay world further increased the 47 Gerson, The Mountain, 100–01. 48 Cat. 72. On this portrait, see Dirk de Vos, Hans Memling, exh.cat. (Bruges: Ludion, 1994), 86–7 (Cat. 16). 49 The underdrawing shows Margareta’s head and headdress in what resembles a combination of spontaneous and calculated sketch-lines. The original shapes of the headgear make the slant of the fabric replicate the curve of the right cheek. Diagonals appear across the visible ear signalling that perhaps it was to be covered. Both eyes, especially the left, were originally in a higher position. The painting was restored following the exhibition “Renaissance Faces” (15 October 2008 – 18 January 2009) and its results are available online at www.nationalgallery.org.uk. 50 Both citations: Van Engen, Devotio Moderna, 124. On ootmoed, Scheepsma, Medieval Religious Women in the Low Countries.

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perception that Christocentric spirituality was simultaneously collective and personal. Many of these believers were from the highest ranks of society, as was Duchess Isabella. The canonical text of this movement, De Imitatione Christi, was amongst her possessions and she even had it translated into Portuguese, her native language.51 These women would have understood ootmoed as the formula for an ideal behaviour that I call their “dowry of humility”. This book’s earlier chapters engaged with women’s biosocial asset in the marriage market, their “dowry of virtues.” The “dowry of humility” defined something that, instead, was lasting and psycho-personal. In transcending social conditions, it had a hand in smoothing the local socio-economic frictions. A likeness, now in Washington DC, wears the fashion of the Burgundian court [Fig. 4.4].52 Especially precious is the scarlet-red belt with a gold filigree buckle. Yet, her self-isolating mood overrides her social status. Her downcast gaze is apparently unresponsive, and the juxtaposition between her firmly clutched fingers and the relaxed facial muscles enhance inward tension. Her ears are unnaturally high on the neckline, and the curve of her shoulders outlines the slim silhouette of her body, which, X-radiography has revealed, was originally even more slender. Her frame combined with the prominent jaws captures an anorexic look.53 As has already been noted, it was believed that extreme fasting would be rewarded with divine visions which were paradoxically described in terms of nourishment. Her projecting lips seem to evoke an appetite akin to holy desires popularised by Christocentric discourse. Marking the sensorial nuances of this portrait, De Imitatione Christi explains: Blessed are the ears that listen to Truth teaching inwardly, and not the voices of the world. Blessed are the eyes that are closed to outward things, but are open to inward things. Blessed are those who enter deeply into inner things, and daily prepare themselves to receive the secrets of heaven.54

51 Jennifer Ward, Women in Medieval Europe 1200–1500 (Edinburgh and London: Pearson Education Limited, 2001), 145. 52 Cat. 63. This portrait is well documented on the website of the National Gallery, Washington. See also David Alan Brown et al., Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo’s Ginevra de Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women, exh.cat. (Washington, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), 136 (cat. 13); Lorne Campbell, Van der Weyden (London: Oresko Books Ltd, 1979), 10. 53 The structure of this figure is wholly controlled by the manner explained earlier. See, for instance, the diagonals of the veil at 60 degrees angle, forming an equilateral triangle and parallel to the lines of the arms. 54 Thomas à Kempis, “How Christ Speaks Inwardly to the Soul,” in The Imitation of Christ, intr. and trans. Leo Sherley-Price (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1952), Book III, Chapter One, 89. These passages conflate various lines from the Old Testament.

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A third image from Rogier’s workshop is coarser in quality but is stylistically related to these pensive women: same slim figure, long face, and absorbed expression. If the current given date of execution is accepted, it is the earliest of the three.55 Her hands are crossed in a manner also found in Isabella of Portugal, now in the Paul Getty Museum [fig. 4.5], also from Rogier’s workshop. Reusing designs was a common practice, and these similarities suggest the existence of a prototype that, I contend, spread across Europe as a formula unique to female portraiture, the characteristics and reasons of which I will investigate with a focus on the Getty portrait.56 The daughter of John I, King of Portugal (1358–1433) and Philippa of Lancaster (1360–1415), Isabella became the third wife of Philip the Good in 1430. In 1457, she retired to La Motte-au-Bois, near Lille, and dedicated the remaining years of her life to charitable activities. The Getty portrait was painted in the early 1450s, when demand for her likenesses rose, because of the love that the Duchess’s piety inspired in her subjects.57 Here, the slim figure is in half-length, her spine arched forward and her hands on her lap. Technical analysis has shown her dress to be more opulent than the original, which must have endowed the figure with a sobriety that surpassed even the sober type of three-quarter formal royal portraiture [Fig. 4.6]. Because of the style of dress and headgear, Lorne Campbell has suggested a filial connection with the figure of Isabella on the righthand of the enthroned Virgin and Child in an altarpiece that also featured her husband and their son, Charles the Bold. The painting was in the monastery of Our Lady of the Victory, founded by Isabella’s father as the family’s burial place at Batalha, north of Lisbon, and was destroyed during the Peninsular War (1807–1814). Shortly before its destruction, on a visit to the convent in 1808, the Portuguese painter Domingos Antonio de Sequeira (1768–1837) made a sketch of it.58 The morphology of the Getty portrait is notable in female likenesses of the Duchess, painted later and with results that are formulaic. Intriguingly, it appears in female portraits that were also painted later but outside the Duchy.59 Could we, 55 Cat. 64. 56 Cat. 66. See Lorne Campbell and Yvonne Szafran, “The Portrait of Isabella of Portugal, Duchess of Burgundy in the J. T. Paul Getty Museum,” The Burlington Magazine 146, no. 1212 (March 2004): 148–157. 57 Miguel Falomir, “The Court Portrait,” in Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian, eds. Lorne Campbell et al., exh.cat. (London: Yale University Press for National Gallery Company, 2008), 66–79 (66); Harbison, Jan Van Eyck, 23–24. 58 Antonio de Sequeira Domingos (after Rogier van der Weyden), Virgin and Child with Donors, 1808, Graphite on paper, 20.3 by 27.2 cm, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon. Campbell and Szafran, The Portrait of Isabella of Portugal, 152. 59 At least another three likenesses are related to this portrait, but their heads are in quasi-profile. On a curious note, one of these versions is painted over a Madonna and Child: Netherlandish (early sixteenth century), Portrait of a Noblewoman, Probably Isabella of Portugal (1397–1472), oil on wood, 34.6 × 27 cm, Metropolitan Myseum of Art, New York (50.145.15). A rarity in Netherlandish portraiture, the prof ile

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therefore, pursue a connection with a mother design in Rogier’s workshop rather than one with the Batalha altarpiece? A female figure, a saint or a sibyl is attributed to Rogier, and it survives in a drawn copy from the circle of Hans Pleydenwurff (ca.1425–1472).60 It is in turn indebted to the series of Sibyls and Wise Men that Campin produced in 1432 for the Cathedral at Münster in Westphalia.61 This lost group is known from copies and adaptations in sketches, paintings, prints, and in sculptures. They comprised fifteen three-quarter to frontal figures, with bodies almost in half-length, probably conceived as groups of three, two sibyls flanking a wise man. Today they are considered influential in the development of both secular and religious portraiture.62 Rogier reworked this drawing into the Mary Magdalene of the Braque triptych, and, in her design, we recognise the slim frame that also outlines the Getty portrait [Fig. 4.7].63 Conflated with Mary Magdalene, this design would have layered female likenesses with epistemological and eschatological nuances: Mary Magdalene, the embodiment of spiritual redemption, experienced a theophany when Jesus, resurrected, appeared to her, first amongst his followers. Crucially, her life after his resurrection was considered the archetypal Christocentric model. Mary Magdalene was also a keystone of Burgundian history, responsible for the conversion to Christianity, and subsequent baptism of the first king and queen of Burgundy in 14CE.64 Therefore, an image of the Duchess based on this design would have projected an unequivocal message. Isabella was praised for her piety and political acumen, but disagreements with her husband over the education of their son progressively estranged her from court after 1454. Fashioned thus at such a fraught time, she seemingly situated perhaps afforded a quicker execution. The Keiser Fridrich Museum, Berlin, has also an oval lead plaque with the Duchess in the same style. Her name and the date of the item, 1470, are in the margin. Since the Metropolitan version has been dated to the early sixteenth century, the three paintings reworked the design of the plaque, or they and the plaque originated from the same design. See Jane Friedman, “A New Look at the Imageries of Isabelle of Portugal,” Notes in the History of Art 1, no. 4 (Summer 1982): 9–12. 60 Circle of Hans Pleydenwurff (copy after Campin), Sibylla Tiburtina, ca.1460–1470, pen and wash, dimensions unavailable, New York, the Ian Woodner Family Collection. Available online, this image is in Rainer Kahsnitz, William D Wixom et al., Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg: 1300–1550, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986), 169 (Cat. 39). 61 The upper left corner of this panel has the inscription Persica Sibylla. Because it postdates the portrait, this detail does not affect my argument. 62 See, for example, Thülemann, Robert Campin, 141–154. 63 Relevant is also Rogier van der Weyden, Study for the Figure of Mary Magdalene on the right wing of the Jean Braque Triptych, ca.1452, metalpoint on cream-prepared paper, 17.6 × 13 cm, The British Museum (Oo,9.2). De Vos considers this an autograph in De Vos, Rogier, cat. B9. Fritz Koreny deems it a copy from ca.1460–1670. In Koreny and Pokorny, eds. Early Netherlandish Drawings, cat. 19 64 As explained in La Chronique des Royz. The importance of this text for the ducal propaganda is debated in, e.g., Graeme Small, “Of Burgundian Dukes, Counts, Saints and Kings (14 C.E.– ca.1500),” in The Ideology of Burgundy, 151–94 (153).

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herself within the ducal propaganda, whilst claiming her own surrender to the mysteries of God through prayer and piety. This pictorial formula could have allegorised saintly qualities for lay women from the privileged classes. The expectations were that, once married, they would express their “dowry of humility” in the patronage of religious individuals and institutions, thus becoming active if not indispensable civic agents. For example, like Isabella of Portugal, Lucrezia Tornabuoni (1427–1482) was a loyal wife and mother, accomplished author of religious writing, and civic and religious patron. Her portrait attributed to Domenico Ghirlandaio is believed to be posthumous because of the stiffness of the body, and the neutral background that forms an aura around the head [Fig. 4.8].65 The painting is unarguably in conference with a Netherlandish type. In fact, it has been proposed that Lucrezia’s religiosity and mature age at her death inspired Ghirlandaio to turn to Netherlandish portraits for inspiration, because these were by-products of donor portraiture.66 More debatable is the suggestion of a connection with the likeness by Petrus Christus [Fig. 4.14] based, in turn, on the unverifiable assumption that the latter corresponds to the Netherlandish female portrait listed in the 1492 Medici inventory.67 Differing designs aside, there is no proof that Christus’ painting was ever in Italy.68 Conversely, the similarities between Lucrezia and the Getty Isabella are so self-evident that we may speculate about Ghirlandaio’s knowledge of the design. After all, to the Italians Rogier was “the outstanding painter of our time”69 and second only to “the foremost painter of our age,” who was Van Eyck. Moreover, he is believed to have visited Italy in ca.1450.70 In a marital group by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553), the woman appears more distant than is her husband from the picture plane, therefore articulating their marital hierarchy. Her figure recalls the Isabella design [Figs. 4.9 and 4.10].71 Double portraits such as these multiplied in Reformed territories, where the virtues summarised in the “dowry of humility” were highly esteemed, because they 65 Cat. 75. Information on this painting is at www.nga.gov. 66 Conservation Archives, NGA, Washington. See also Maria DePrano, Art Patronage, Family, and Gender in Renaissance Florence: The Tornabuoni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 23-29; Natalie R. Tomas, The Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence (Hampshire, England, Burlington USA: Ashgate, 2003), 66–67. 67 DePrano, Art Patronage, Family, and Gender, 32–33; Nuttall, From Flanders to Florence, 210–21. 68 Maryan W. Ainsworth in Petrus Christus, 169. 69 Ciriaco d’Ancona writing in 1449. Cited in Julien Chapius, “Early Netherlandish Painting: Shifting Perspectives,” in From Van Eyck to Bruegel, eds. Ainsworth et al, 3–21 (15). 70 Bartolommeo Fazio cited in Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. 1, (2). On the trading of Netherlandish art in Italy, see Lorne Campbell, “Notes on Netherlandish Pictures in the Veneto in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” The Burlington Magazine 123, no. 941 (August 1981): 467–473. 71 These portraits are not in the catalogue.

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illustrated the moral health of the Reformed marriage model.72 In conclusion, the Getty Isabella may represent the existence of a portrait type that promoted the “dowry of humility” as an ideal mature femininity.

Seeing-In the Spiritual Recurring features of this stock of images are ersatz repoussoirs on the picture plane that produce the impression of a coextension between the real and the f ictive space.73 In portraiture, this illusion may elicit an active reaction in the viewer, which is enhanced if the f igure’s hands stretch into the picture plane, as “speaking parts” of the painted body.74 In a culture as sensitive to sensory stimuli as was that of the f ifteenth century, reactions could be rather visceral. For example, Leonardo reported that he removed the holy attributes from a painting of a female saint at the behest of his client, whose discombobulation about his erotic yearnings for the painted woman eventually drove him to dispose of the item.75 This modern Pygmalion found himself confronted with an ethical question that he could not resolve even while knowing that the object of his desire was but a painted face. His experience encapsulates the psychosocial catharsis described by anthropologists, whereby the experience itself assesses the validity of the principles that repress those very desires.76 By producing the semblance of physical spaces, illusionistic devices heightened this reaction. As such, they recreated, in Edward Muir’s words, “fantasy states

72 Michael Parson, Reformation Marriage: The Husband and Wife Relationship in the Theology of Luther and Calvin (Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 2005). 73 Andre Chastel, Il Gesto Nell’Arte, trans. D. Pinelli (Bari: Laterza, 2008). 74 Pächt, Van Eyck and the Founders of Early Netherlandish Painting, 108. 75 “Il pittore dice havere in arbitrio di fare il medesimo e in questa parer anch’egli e poeta e sil poeta dice di fare accesi dei gli homini ad amare e cosa prinicipale della specie di tutti gli animali il pittore a` potenzia di fare il medesimo e tanto piu che si mette in anzi al amante la propria effigaie della cosa amata il quale spesso fa con quella bacciandola e parlando con quella quello che non farebbe con le medesime bellezze postole innanzi dallo scrittore e tanto piu` supera gli ingegni delli uomoni ad amare ed innamorarsi de pintura che rapresentava una cosa divina la quale comperava dell’amante di quella volse levarne la rapresentazione di tal deita` per poterla pacciare senza sospetto ma infine la conscientia vinse li sospiri e la libidine e fu forza che ei se la levasse di casa.” Leonardo da Vinci, Il Libro della Pittura, created sixteenth cent., Urb.lat.1270, The Vatican Library, DigitalVaticana, f.16v. 76 See the classic Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine Publisher Co., 1969); Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1960). And Caroline Walker Bynum, “Women’s Stories, Women’s Symbols: A Critique of Victor Turner’s Theory of Liminality,” in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 27–51.

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that provide a useful index of the deepest desires of the period.”77 Therefore, when female portraits deliberately stirred sensory overload in the viewer, we must probe the reasons. For this investigation, I must return to the terms seeing-in and seeing-as, which I have used to distinguish different elicitations of spectatorship. My theory regarding seeing-in began with the suggestion that the Franco-Flemish painting [fig. 3.3] represents a portrait culture that encouraged a contemplative gaze upon the exclusiveness of God-given, elite power. Of course, the portraits in this chapter have a different cultural and artistic background and, because they promote a semblance of contiguous real/fictive spaces, they do not appear to impose on us a mode of seeing-in. Yet, their knuckles obstruct our approach, headgears protect their bodies, and expressions appear detached. Therefore, they stress our exclusion from their world. Further, in the Introduction I proposed a parallel between portraiture and mirrors. This parallel is important to the present context, whereby the glazing effects of the wet-on-wet, oil technique had reflective properties that Netherlandish painters exploited with complexities that I will discuss in Chapter Five. In individual portraits, the veristic quality of the facial traits acted as a mirror image of the sitter, whilst their anatomical inaccuracies stressed that these likenesses were but manufactured objects of the represented subject.78 The deceptively veristic style itself draws our ocular scrutiny to the quality of the painting rather than on the individual. They predate what has been noted in seventeenth-century Dutch portraiture, i.e., that it responded to the Protestant attitude towards the separation of the represented object from its prototype.79 My hypothesis is that this separation served the purpose of mirroring the sitter’s morally irreprehensible self beneath their physical substance. Why? The late Middle Ages witnessed the rise of iconographies singled out from their narrative contexts, such as the Man of Sorrows. These Andachtsbilder opened the path towards the aniconic communion with the subject of their meditation. This path is captured by the inward-looking gaze of the secular figures seen close to the religious iconography in devotional portraiture, which Ingrid Falque has characterised as a mise en image of the sitters’ spiritual progression. Individual portraits too could be considered the person’s “double effigy,” to borrow Falque’s descriptions.80 It is therefore tempting to conclude that their brushstrokes visualised 77 Edward Muir, “Images of Power: Art and Pageantry in Renaissance Venice,” The American Historical Review 84, no. 1 (February 1979): 16–52 (51). 78 In proposing this, I am influenced by Rothstein, Sight and Spirituality, 76. 79 Joanna Woodall, “Introduction,” in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester and NY: Manchester University Press, 1997), 1–18 (10). 80 Falque, Devotional Portraiture, 121 and 160–63. German art historians Wilhelm Pinder and Georg Dehio introduced the concept in the 1920s. See also Erwin Panofsky , Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism

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the belief, common to painters and sitters and aligned with Scholastic mysticism dear to Gerson, that God’s existence was demonstrable “from his creation rather than a priori.”81 Although religious devotion was a collective experience, the history of Burgundy shows that it never cemented social cohesion. Additionally, the mysticism of Modern Devotion might have permeated the social fabric but its model was the separation from the everyday, in order to follow the love of God. In Gerson’s words, “this love is the universal end of all activities.”82 Arguably, the redolently spiritual layout of these portraits illustrates this apprehension and further: these portraits could not be seen as the by-products of civic networks, in the Italian manner. In such portraits, the spectators would have seen individual cells of God’s grand design. Two images in this group, however, project transitive communication towards the viewer. One is a drawing by Christus [Fig. 4.11].83 The clothes of the subject do not indicate a royal status, but the composition bears close similarities with a copy of the betrothal portrait of Isabella of Portugal [Fig. 4.12], which Van Eyck painted upon his journey to Lisbon in 1428–1429.84 Assuming its faithfulness to the original, the betrothal Isabella is puzzling on two grounds. First, there are hints that the original followed the schematisation espoused earlier. Secondly, her hands extend into the viewer’s space, and she smiles in an exceptionally coquettish fashion for a female portrait of the period. With her, Christus’ drawing shares the format, the angle, the direct gaze, and the left hand clasping a ledge in a comparable way that cannot be accidental, (1951; rep., New York: Meridian Books, 1957), 18–20. 81 Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, 7. 82 Gerson, The Mountain, 91. 83 Christus is credited for having introduced illusionistic settings in secular portraiture with his Portrait of a Carthusian and Edward Grimston, both dated 1446. Yet, this overlooks the early Italian examples such as the Scolari panel. Petrus Christus, Portrait of a Carthusian Monk, 1446, 29.2 × 21.6 cm, oil on panel, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Portrait of Edward Grimston, 1446, Oil on wood, 34 × 25 cm, The National Gallery, London (NG2593). 84 I must thank Teresa Resente from the Divisão de Comunicação of the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisboa, for providing a digital copy of the record of this embassy. Except for Jacques Paviot, cited in Harbison, Jan Van Eyck, 23–24, it is accepted that in 1428–1429 Van Eyck travelled to Portugal with this purpose. Vaughan transcribes the document in Vaughan, Philip the Good, 178–184 (esp. 180). Miguel Falomir has proposed that, during this trip, the encounter between Van Eyck and Lluís Dalmáu (active 1425–1461), the court painter to Alfonso V of Aragon (1394–1458), occasioned the popularity of parapets in Netherlandish portraiture. Yet, Netherlandish influences are notable in Dalmáu’s work, perhaps absorbed through his knowledge of the Burgundians in his King’s collection, or from his years in Flanders at the behest of his patron. In any case, parapets were regular pan-European features in aristocratic portraiture from the later Middle Ages. One therefore wonders if, after all, these illusionistic details developed, in fact, as separations if not even a podium on which the subject was elevated from the viewer. On the Netherlandish influences in Dalmáu’s work, see Rafael Cornudella, “Alfonso el Magnánimo y Jan van Eyck. Pintura y tapices flamencos en la corte del rey de Aragón,” LOCVS AMOENVS 10 (2009-2010): 39–62.

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thus suggesting the appropriation of a formula from a royal betrothal type by the middling class. As for the right hand, whilst Isabella has it superimposed, Christus’ woman twists it upwards. The gesture is analogous to one from a ca.1430 drawing by Rogier, which seems to hold a flower or a ring. This amorous subtext is unusual in Netherlandish female portraits.85 Male sitters hold flowers, rings, arrows, but only these drawings and a portrait by the unknown Master of the Legend of St Ursula (active 1480–1500) make overt amatory references.86 Perhaps this explains the freer quality of Woman wearing a Gauze Headdress painted by Rogier in ca.1440–1445, which can be subsumed under the present rubric, because her hands indicate a supporting surface of sorts, and especially because with Isabella’s betrothal portrait she shares the same bust-length, left angle and outward gaze [Fig. 4.13]. This portrait is the second example of transitive communication. It is considered Rogier’s earliest and his most Campinesque because, like Campin, he correlated the torso and the head of his female subjects by exaggerating the diagonals of the headdress. A comparison with the woman in Fig. 4.2 indicates how surface similarities conceal opposite results. Customary in marital portraiture, Campin’s composition is on the sinister side. Pentimenti show that her headgear once made a downward shape across the forehead, below the current upward curve. Campin also modified the shadow on the right temple from an inward to the present outward curve. In framing the woman’s oval, these changes augment her solemn expression, and turn the headdress into a psychological barrier against the viewer.87 Conversely, Rogier’s composition encompasses the curvilinear rhythm of the wimple, the jaw, and the curve of the veil on the forehead, thereby stretching the subject’s otherwise barely perceptible smile into the crease of the headdress. The figure is off-centred, and her body is angled as if the artist observed her under conditions that were more informal. This may indicate a more relaxed relationship between sitter and artist, thus raising questions about her identity. It has been suggested that she represents the artist’s partner in life;88 or, because she is garbed in plain clothes, that the portrait was made as a gift to a friend or for the artist’s own delight.89 These hypotheses are appealing. For instance, Jan van Scorel (1495–1562) achieved similar results when he painted his partner Agatha Van Schoonhoven using spatial and structural solutions that are freer compared to his traditional approach. He complemented 85 Rogier Van der Weyden, Portrait of a Young Woman, ca.1430, silverpoint on paper, 16.7 cm × 11.7 cm, The British Museum (PD 1874-8-8-2266). 86 Cat. 74. The woman holds a white carnation, unlike the more popular red. The colour agrees with the muted tones of the composition, thus sobering the forwardness of the amatory gesture. 87 As discussed in Thülemann, Robert Campin, 80 and 265–66. 88 Christa Grössinger, Picturing Women in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 60. 89 Campbell, Van Der Weyden, 10.

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these characteristics with a tonal colour-chart that enhances Agatha’s smiling nod, effectively attaining the warm familiarity found in this portrait.90 Its reverse is decorated with details associated with Philip the Good. The likenesses of two of the duke’s mistresses are in a collection of drawings known as the Recueil d’Arras. Albert Châtelet has proposed this as the duke’s third. With her he had a son, David of Burgundy (1427–1496), in 1427.91 These varying views may not be as different as they seem, because they all promote ideas about love and courtship. Furthermore, it was common for royal mistresses to go on to marry and live a principled life. In fact, the woman’s retinal spark may be a Petrarchan reference but, equally, I am inclined to suggest, evidence of a betrothed’s promise of affectio maritalis, which her simple clothing bodes to be chaste and industrious. After all, Gerson considered the life of Martha an example as instructive as that of Mary Magdalene.92 My final remarks are concerned with three portraits, all with illusionistic backgrounds: two marital pendants and an autonomous likeness. They are discussed in the next chapter but here I want to anticipate something about the latter, a maiden of high rank painted by Christus in ca.1470 [Fig. 4.14]. She is presented in bust-length, her hair tucked into a truncated, black velvet henning with the brim embroidered with gold and bejewelled with pearls.93 From the top of the henning a sash encircles her chin, complementing visually the precious choker around her neck, and enhancing her physiognomy and enigmatic expression. The V-neck of her blue dress, in the style of the period, is studded with ermine. Behind, some sort of panelling seemingly interprets her mood and that of any woman’s fate spelled out in texts like Le Ménagier, for which she could provide the perfect cover-image as a version of the bride, to whom the book is dedicated at “the age of fifteen years and in the week that you and I were wed.”94 90 Jan Van Scorel, Portrait of Agatha van Schoonhoven, 1529, oil on oak, 38.3 × 27.1 cm, Galleria Dora Pamphili, Rome (FC216). 91 Châtelet, Rogier van der Weyden, 112-114. Lorne Campbell, “The Authorship of the Recueil d’Arras,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977): 301–313. 92 Gerson, The Mountain, 91. 93 Cat. 67. This delightful girl, the only known female likeness painted by Petrus Christus, was once thought to represent Isabella von Bourbon (d.1465), the second wife of Charles the Bold, or Alice, the wife of Edward Grymeston, whose portrait (1446) by Christus is in the London National Gallery. When the Berlin Gemäldegalerie acquired this painting in 1821, it was still in the original frame, which had an inscription: “Opus Petri Christophori.” Gustav Waagen believed that she represented the niece of Lord John Talbot (d.1453), the first Earl of Shrewsbury, who died in 1421. The connection with the Earl is plausible. Talbot’s granddaughters Anne and Margaret, the daughters of the second Earl of Shrewsbury, could have been in Bruges in 1468 with their aunt, Elizabeth Talbot (1442/43–1506/10), Duchess of Norfolk, for the wedding between Charles the Bold and Margaret of York (1446–1503). Her identification remains unresolved. In the catalogue, I have paired it with a portrait that seems original, but on which I could not verify the information. 94 Anonymous, Le Ménagier, 41.

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Conclusions In fifteenth-century Burgundy, the demand for portraiture rose. The sitters were from a heterogeneous, wealthy social mix. Their portraits, highly characterised in three-quarter view, shrouded in muted colours and poised countenances produced veristic effects, enhanced by the slow-drying process of the oil medium. This chapter has argued that they reflect the intrinsic contradictions of the Duchy’s heterogeneous socio-economic fabric. Central to this argument is the assessment of seventeen female portraits on panel, and four drawings, one of which is a seventeenth-century copy of an original painting. It appears that painters persistently used a technical process to position the subjects in a middle ground that suited their gender, whilst twining the compositional details together using harmonies of geometries. This encompassing method seems to have outlived the early generation of portraits, where, however, it is especially notable. The nature of their commissions only becomes clear contextually. Five portraits are recognised as marital because they have male companions. Six may be betrothal commissions, including three drawings. Among those, four seem unusually animated for the regional style of female portraiture. Before her marriage to Philip the Good, Van Eyck portrayed Isabella of Portugal. Her betrothal likeness, known now only from a seventeenth-century print, seems a reasonable contender to explain their peculiarity. Still, their composed bearings surrender their bridal beauty to a mood, which I associate with a leitmotif best seen in the remaining likenesses. These are an assortment, the purpose of which is difficult to ascertain, because they suggest a spiritual rather than a social subtext. Notable is a design represented by four portraits from Rogier’s workshop that I have connected with one of Campin’s figures from his 1432 series of Sibyls and Wise Men. This design successfully wove the eschatological thread between women, religiosity and, plausibly, personal agency because in religious spirituality women exerted a freedom of choice. A mature likeness of Isabella of Portugal summarised how and why it became a pan-European portrait type. To describe this spiritual dignity, I have reworked into “dowry of humility” an original phrase, “spirituality of humility,” which the evangelical followers of Devotio Moderna used to describe the devotion, thoughtfulness, humility, modesty, sobriety, chastity, and tranquillity of its female members. This appellative counters that of the “dowry of virtues” discussed in the previous chapters. The latter described an ideal femininity with an expiry date, because it was based on biosocial expectations. The “dowry of humility” encapsulated standards that were psycho-personal and permanent. Its acquisition transcended the socio-economic tensions of this heterogeneous society. Spectatorship of these portraits coincides with seeing-in

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them this spirituality, and in terms that can be summarised with the words of the High Scholastic Peter Aureolus (ca.1280–1322): “[E]verything is individual by virtue of itself and by nothing else.”95 For this reason, today’s spectator cannot escape the feeling of being a gatecrasher of a private conversation between the subjects and their God. They inhabit a self-enclosed environment that leaves us in the cold, seeing-in them the affirmation of their individualistic values. Their juxtaposition between physiognomic verisimilitude and a spurning of worldly concerns reminds me of how Johan Huizinga once described the Burgundian “spirit of tremendous materialism that could not bear the thought of the passing of beauty without despairing of beauty itself.”96

95 In Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, 12. 96 Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 160.

5.

Netherlandish or Not Netherlandish? Is That the Question? Abstract It is often claimed that the oil medium, three-quarter format, and deceptive illusionism of Netherlandish likenesses represented a watershed between medieval and modern portraiture in Europe. Some have also proposed that this style of portraiture helped the Italians break free from the tradition of the profile format. This chapter considers how these two portrait cultures expressed fifteenth-century modernity. My reflections are rooted in the rendition of the female likenesses in relation to what I consider relevant to the enquiry: pictorial styles, use of backgrounds, and quality of spectatorship informed by my distinction between seeing-in and seeing-as. The discussion is entwined with the woman question, concluding with a critical assessment of Leonardo’s Ginevra de’ Benci (1474–1478). With this work, I define the psychological relationship between women and their own imaging. Key words: Flemish – Italian – Leonardo da Vinci – Spectatorship – Tempera

The painting of Flanders […] will generally satisfy any devout person more than the painting of Italy […]; they paint […] only to deceive the external eye […]. Their painting is of stuffs […], which they call landscapes […], without care in selecting or rejecting […]. Neither do I speak so badly of Flemish painting because it is all bad, but because it tries to do so many things at once […] so that it does not do anything really well.1

With this verdict, Michelangelo (1475–1564) summarised how the Italians saw Netherlandish paintings: pregnant with religiosity and accomplished in naturalism but lacking in pictorial and conceptual synthesis. Yet, it has been claimed that the Italians owed to the Northerners key steps in the modernisation of their pictorial 1 Francisco de Holanda, Dialogues with Michelangelo, intr. David Hemsoll (London: Pallas Athene, 2006), 46–47.

Toreno, E., Netherlandish and Italian Female Portraiture in the Fifteenth Century. Gender, Identity, and the Tradition of Power. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463728614_ch05

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language, which, in portraiture, manifested in the use of the oil medium, threequarter format, and deceptive illusionism.2 In this chapter, I probe the signs of fifteenth-century modernity in these portrait cultures. Female portraiture is relevant to this investigation because modernity and patriarchy seems an unlikely partnership. I focus my enquiry on styles, use of backgrounds, and quality of spectatorship. Broader considerations have provided nuance for this challenge. In Italy, the three-quarter format eclipsed the male profile in around 1450, but female likenesses in angles other than the profile appeared some twenty-five years later. Chapter Three explored the reasons for this slow uptake. These reasons had expired by the turn of the sixteenth century, when the painters that now we call the masters of the Italian Renaissance were perfecting the communicative artifices of the genre, under the impetus of a more widespread humanism. The patrician families were becoming hereditary entities, and social networking was cementing into a praxis cum etiquette. From domestic to state portraiture, the psychological connection with the viewer signalled the complexities of what Shearman called the “transitive animated portrait” of the Cinquecento.3 The signs of this transformation affected how I set the terminus post quem of my survey. Could this book realistically discuss, say, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and its embranchments across the spectrum of coterminous portraiture? The present catalogue thus features only likenesses from the turn of the Cinquecento, which adhere to a fifteenth-century idiom. This group of fifty-two works is a motley collection of regional varieties with the highest number from Florence (seventeen)4 and Venice (twenty).5 The latter will be discussed in Chapter Six. The former will be the basis of my considerations. Although I will propose conclusions, the intention is to invite further research, because the definition of fifteenth-century modernity, and the motivations and social dynamics that supported the practice of portraiture, cannot be fully explored in a short study. I entwine my discussions with the woman question, leading to an analysis is Ginevra de’ Benci, painted by Leonardo in 1474–1478. With this work, I settle on a firm definition of the psychological relationship between women and their own imaging. 2 This is the mainstream perspective. See the important exhibition The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini organised jointly by the Bode Museum (Berlin, 25 August – 20 November 2011) and the Metropolitan Museum (New York, 21 December 2011 – 18 March 2012). See also, Tobias Schwarz, “Major Exhibition on the Genesis of the Italian Portrait Opens at the Bode Museum in Berlin,” www.ArtDaily. org Thursday, 25 August 2011. 3 John Shearman, “Portraits and Poets,” in Only Connect… Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance: The A.W.Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1988 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 108–48 (142). 4 Cat. 75 to 91 included. 5 Cat. 107 to 126 included.

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Fig. 3.7 Unknown maker. Standing Woman Wearing Chiton and Himation, Pudicitia, plaster casting of Roman Hellenistic statue. h. 206 cm. Photo © Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (KAS199).

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Fig. 3.8 Scheggia (Giovanni di Ser Giovanni, active 1406–1486). Portrait of a Lady, ca.1460. Tempera and gold on panel, transferred to canvas 44.1 × 36.4 cm. Photo © The Philadelphia Museum of Art (cat.34).

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Fig. 3.9 Italian. Belt with Profiles of Half-Length Figures, ca.1350–1400. Basse taille enamel, silver-gilt, mounted on textile belt. 175.3 × 2.5 × 1.7 cm. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (17.190.963).

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Fig. 3.10 Italian painter (Lombard). Twelve Heads, first quarter sixteenth century. Tempera on wood. 45.7 × 46.4 cm. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (05.2.1-12).

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Fig. 3.11 Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510). Portrait of a Young Woman, ca.1476. Tempera on panel. 61 × 40.5 cm. Photo © Pitti Palace, Florence (Inv.1912 n. 353).

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Fig. 4.1 Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). An Artist Drawing a Seated Man, 1525. Woodcut, sheet: 13.3 × 14.9 cm. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (17.37.90).

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Fig. 4.2 Robert Campin (ca.1375/9–1444), Portrait of a Woman, ca.1435. Oil and egg tempera on oak panel, 40.6 × 28.1 cm. Photo © The National Gallery, London (NG653.2).

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Fig. 4.3 Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden (ca.1398/1400–1464). Portrait of a Lady, ca.1460. oil with egg tempera on oak, 37 × 27.1 cm. Photo © The National Gallery, London (NG143).

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Fig. 4.4 Rogier van der Weyden (ca.1398/1400–1464). Portrait of a Lady, ca.1460. Oil on panel. 37 × 27 cm. Photo © The National Gallery of Art, Washington (1937.1.44).

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Fig. 4.5 Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden (ca.1398/1400–1464). Portrait of Isabella of Portugal, about 1450. Oil on panel. 46 × 37.1 cm. Photo © The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (78.PB.3).

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Fig. 4.6 M. Bass, 2010, ‘anonymous, Portrait of Jacoba of Bavaria (1401–1436), Countess of Holland and Zeeland, Northern Netherlands, after ca.1480’, oil on panel, 64 × 50 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, SK-A-498. in J.P. Filedt Kok (ed.), Early Netherlandish Paintings, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001. COLLECT.6829 (accessed 29 April 2022)

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Fig. 4.7 Workshop of Rogier Van der Weyden (ca.1398/1400–1464). Triptych of the Braque Family, ca.1450. Oil on wood. 41 × 68 cm (central panel); 41 × 34 cm (each wing). Photo © Musée du Louvre, Paris (RF 2063).

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Fig. 4.8 Attr. Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494). Lucrezia Tornabuoni, ca.1475. Oil on panel. 53.3 × 39.9 cm. Photo © The National Gallery of Art, Washington (1952.5.62).

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Fig. 4.9 Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553). Portrait of a Man, 1522. Oil on panel. 57.6 × 39.9 cm. Photo © The National Gallery of Art, Washington (1959.9.1).

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Fig. 4.10 Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553). Portrait of a Woman, 1522. Oil on panel. 58 × 39.8 cm. Photo © The National Gallery of Art, Washington (1959.9.2).

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Fig. 4.11 Petrus Christus (ca.1410, active 1444–1475/6). Portrait of a Young Woman, ca.1450. Silverpoint, framing lines with black chalk and with the pen in black ink, on grey prepared paper, 13.2 × 8.9 cm, MB 328 (PK) Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. from the estate of: F.J.O. Boijmans 1847 / Credit line photographer: Studio Buitenhof.

Fig. 4.12 Anonymous, drawing, seventeenth century (after Jan Van Eyck’s Portrait of Isabella of Portugal). Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisboa (PT-TT-CF-201).

Ne therl andish or Not Netherl andish? Is That the Question? 

Perspectives on Italian and on Netherlandish Portraiture Netherlandish art in the context of fifteenth-century cultural modernity is conditional on the inaugural employment on panel of the oil medium. Its slow-drying properties rendered possible the addition and amalgamation of colours, hence wet-on-wet improvements directly on the support. The translucency of the oil’s glazes represented the painted surface as a sequence of reflections, which, we may propose, were metaphors, in turns, for the sitters’ imagined spaces, for the paintings as mirrors of reality, and for art’s power of illusion. The very mirrors in these pictorial representations – consider the Arnolfini’s mirror [fig. 7.1] – were not just metafictional artifices, as in images within images, but tautologies of the act of painting.1 In portraiture, this web of metaphors results in the quasi-photographic reproduction of the sitters, immersed in other-worldly contemplation of the relation between their soul and its creator, God.2 Italian art also entwined praxis and theory towards the same tautology but from different premises and towards different ends. The geometrical order of Trecento paintings acquired a codified system after Filippo Brunelleschi’s (1377–1446) muchdiscussed optical-mathematical experiment on the Baptistry of Florence, which showed the flat surface as a mirror image of the observed reality. The Italians’ partiality towards the tempera technique resulted from workshop training, which often included goldsmithing.3 Crucially, its properties required consummate skills and painstaking preparatory procedures. Disegno underpinned these procedures and the medium’s quick-drying application on the surface enforced a process of isolation and synthesis of forms akin to sculpture, thereby suggesting the paragoni that constituted the engine of Italian art theory. In portraiture, the figures emerged as in the now, aligned with the cultural secularisation produced by the recovery of the ancient Arab-Mediterranean cultures that, as humanists put it, improved “this degenerate age of ours.”4 This is not to say that the north was ignorant of antiquity; quite the opposite. Nevertheless, its cultural cornerstones were enshrined in late 1 An excellent overview of these issues is in Genevieve Warwick, “Looking in the Mirror of Renaissance Art,” Art History 39, no. 2 (2016): 198–209. Jonathan Miller has also asked whether the interest in reflective surfaces developed by northern painters may have been triggered by the very rainy climate of the regions, where the moistness of the air creates a shimmering effect on surfaces. See Jonathan Miller, On Reflections, exh.cat. (London: National Gallery Publications Limited, 1998), 26. 2 Urban T. Holmes, Medieval Man: His Understanding of Himself, His Society, and His World (T. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). 3 E.g., Jean K. Cadogan, Domenico Ghirlandaio: Artist and Artisan (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 23–29. 4 Felice Feliciano writing to Antonio di Leonardo, both from the circle of Ciriaco d’Ancona (1391–before 1457). In Francesco Scalamonti, Charles Mitchell and Edward W. Bodnar, “Vita Viri Clarissimi et Famosissimi Kyriaci Anconitani,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society New Series, 86, no. 4 (1996):

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medieval religious tradition.5 If portraiture is an expression of the community of its people, the Netherlandish tradition stressed its spiritual and the Italian showed its social concerns. The prodigious quantity of the Italian likenesses in this catalogue attests to these trajectories. Altogether, they confirm John PopeHennessy’s conclusion that Netherlandish and Italian likenesses were “rooted in disagreement as to the premises of portraiture.”6 These considerations make some current claims about Netherlandish art appear radical, perhaps emerging from an understandable frustration: the centuries-long historiographical focus on Italian art has eclipsed the appreciation of other pictorial forms. Nevertheless, the due obligation to invigorate priorly neglected pictorial styles has been tinged with unnecessary rivalry. For example, the work of Susie Nash on methods, markets and so on has invaluably shown the sophisticated conditions of Netherlandish art. Yet, it is difficult to accept her suggestion that the Italians emulated the Northerners but that a mixture of conspiracy and historical accidents have undeservedly recognised them as the instigators of the Renaissance.7 It seems equally difficult to accept, as some maintain, that a Botticelli or a Leonardo modernised Italian portraiture simply by following northern archetypes. Paula Nuttall has gone so far as to argue that Italian portraitists were slavish imitators of the Lowlanders. Nuttall finds the enduring popularity of the profile in Italy “puzzling” because the faces “obviously lacked breath” and it was “out of step with the current artistic trend towards increased realism.” In her view, the situation changed when Italian merchants and bankers docked in the canals of Bruges.8 The continuous trading between Flanders and Italy fostered meaningful exchanges. In calling it “divine rather than human,” the Italians understood both the novelties and the conservativism of Netherlandish art.9 Italian collectors in Flanders and across Italy owned Netherlandish paintings.10 At the same time, i-vii+1:246 (4). On the cultural backbone of the Renaissance, see also Robert Black, ed. Renaissance Thought: A Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). 5 For this context Erwin Panofsky’s work remains useful. See Erwin Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955; rep., London: Penguin Books, 1993), 51–81 (esp. 67–81). 6 John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (London and New York: Phaidon Press Ltd, 1963), 54. 7 Susie Nash, Northern Renaissance Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004 ed.). 8 Paula Nuttall, “Memling and the European Renaissance Portrait,” in Memling and the Art of Portraiture, ed. Till-Holger Borchert, exh.cat. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 69–91 (80); Paula Nuttall, From Flanders to Florence: The Impact of Netherlandish Painting, 1400–1500 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 210–21. 9 Ciriaco d’Ancona on Rogier van der Weyden in Wolfgang Stechow ed., Northern Renaissance Art: Sources and Documents 1400–1600 (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 8–10 (9). 10 For instance, Gabriele Vendramin’s house displayed eight small portraits by Netherlandish artists and a Mary and Christ by Rogier, alongside portraits by Italian painters. Anonimo Morelliano, Notizia

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Netherlandish painters responded to the aesthetic preferences of their Italian customers. For example, two-thirds of Memling’s patronage was Italian. It has been noted that for them he delivered likenesses that, in comparison with others, were more flattering, more sculptural, and sensitive to the sitters’ social identity. He even Italianised his illusionistic settings with classicising motifs such as columns.11 Thus, it seems reasonable to settle on an understanding of pan-European dialectical exchanges between makers and consumers of art that, however, did not shake the aesthetic and conceptual foundations of either culture. a. The Politics of a Style In 1927, Herbert Furst explained the genesis of the detailed realism of the Netherlandish three-quarter portraits in the diminutive and documentary illustrations in illuminated manuscripts; and the style of the Italian profile likenesses as originated in an attitude for the sculpted and intentionally ornamented surface.12 In 1936, Jean Lipman recognised that the three-quarter type conflicted with the Florentine desire for order and systematisation, and with the characteristics of the preferred medium of tempera.13 Naturalistic three-quarter portraiture also seemed also contrary to the Italian aesthetic taste. Leon Battista Alberti, for instance, wrote: d’Opere di Disegno nella Prima Metà del Sec. XVI, Esistenti in Padova, Cremona, Milano, Pavia, Bergamo, Crema, e Venezia Scritta da un Anonimo di Quel Tempo (Iacopo Morelli: Bassano, 1800), 80–81. See also Cardinal Grimano’s collection, 75–78. Trans.: Marcantonio Michiel, The Anonimo: Notes on Pictures and Works of Art in Italy, ed. George C. Williamson, trans. Paolo Mussi (London: George Bell and Sons, London, 1903). 11 Keith Christiansen, “Cat. 27,” in The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini, eds. Keith Christiansen and Stefan Weppelmann, exh.cat. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 134–35; Maryan W. Ainsworth, “Intentional Alterations of Early Netherlandish Paintings,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 40, Essays in Memory of John M. Brealey (2005): 51–65; Maryan W. Ainsworth, “Minimal Means, Remarkable Results: Memling’s Portrait Painting Technique,” in Memling and the Art of Portraiture, ed. Till-Holger Borchert, 93–111 (102); Till-Holger Borchert, “Memling – Life and Work,” in Memling and the Art of Portraiture, ed. Till-Holger Borchert, 11–47 (26); Lorne Campbell, “Memling and the Netherlandish Portrait Tradition,” in Memling and the Art of Portraiture, ed. Till-Holger Borchert, 49–67; Dider Bodart, “Da Jan Van Eyck a Pieter Bruegel: il Ritratto nei Paesi Bassi,” in Il Ritratto: gli Artisti, i Modelli, la Memoria, ed. Gloria Fossi (Firenze: Giunti Gruppo Editoriale, 1996), 30–60 (40). And Maryan W. Ainsworth, “The Business of Art: Patrons, Clients, and Art Markets,” in From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, eds. Maryan W. Ainsworth et al. exh.cat. (New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc. for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 23–37 (35); Dirk De Vos, Hans Memling: The Complete Works (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator Paribas and Ludion Press, 1994). 12 Herbert Furst, Portrait Painting: Its Nature and Function (London: John Lane the Bodley Head Limited, 1927), 35–37. 13 Jean Lipman, “The Florentine Profile Portrait in the Quattrocento,” The Art Bulletin 18, no. 1 (March 1936): 54–102 (64, 54, 57–58, and 93). Leonardo discusses profile portraiture in Leonardo da Vinci, “Il Libro della Pittura,” created sixteenth cent., Urb.lat.1270, The Vatican Library, DigitalVaticana, 108v–109r.

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A face which has its planes here large and there small, here raised and there depressed – similar to the face of old women – would be most ugly in appearance. Those faces which have the planes joined in such a way that they take shades and lights agreeably and pleasantly, and have no harshness of the relief angle, these we should certainly say are beautiful and delicate faces.14

By the 1470s, this aversion was less radical. Interest in portraiture in three-quarter view had grown, and Netherlandish inflections are notable in the Italian paintings from the period. The female likenesses from the Ghirlandaio workshop and the presumptive Lucrezia Tornabuoni [fig. 4.8] are a strong case in point.15 Their designs and neutral backgrounds endow the subjects with a northern sobriety. However, we must not overlook the key components of these compositions: the pictorial synthesis noted by Lipman and the subjects’ social dimensions, which tally with the mode of seeing-as expounded in Chapter Three. A comparison between the Berlin portrait by Petrus Christus [Fig. 4.14] and a likeness by Domenico Ghirlandaio [Fig. 5.1] exemplifies these points.16 The subjects are comparable in age and the compositions are similar, down to the directional light from their right. However, Christus obscured the left side of the face, slimming, stretching, and amalgamating it with the dim atmosphere of the setting, which complements the figure’s mood. For her sartorial ensemble, he selected colours that, also consistent with the background, subdue the subject’s elegance and gaze. Ghirlandaio outlined and modelled the details of the figure evenly but rendered with sculptural effects the coral vezzo that decorates her neck. Its haptic quality instantaneously evokes the real object, used as a talisman against evil, and the sitter’s feminine world, because women of all ages owned it and it was part of the bridal corredo.17 Her domestic attire completes this narrative. 14 Leon Battista Alberti, “Book Two,” in On Painting, intr. and trans. John R. Spencer (1956; rep., New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1966), 63–85 (72). 15 Cat. 83 is an especially interesting comparison. The design of the body is almost identical, but the woman is surrounded by landscape. A horse-rider with a hunting-dog is on a track that leads to a house with a woman at the threshold. A hunter with a net seems to be approaching the rider. It is likely that the scene has an amorous context. This painting was once attributed to Sebastiano Mainardi, who worked with Domenico Ghirlandaio and was his brother-in-law. It can also be compared with the Gozzadini couple [Figs. 2.3. and 2.4] and Cat. 7. See Konrad Scheurmann, ed. Newly Discovered: Thuringia – Land of Residences, exh.cat. (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2004) 171 (Cat. 844). 16 Cat. 78. This woman resembles one of the female members in one of the artist’s frescoes in the Sassetti chapel (1483–1485) of Santa Trinità in Florence. It is well doumented at www.gulbenkian.pt. A copy was sold by Leslie Hindman Auctioneers, Post-War and Contemporary Art, Chicago, on 13 December 2009, Lot 55, as Florentine School, Portrait of a Lady, sixteenth century, oil on panel, 20 1/2 × 12 inches. 17 Maria Grazia Ciardi Duprè, L’Oreficeria nella Firenze del Quattrocento (Firenze: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1977), 294. On the properties of coral, 330–36. Vezzi are often seen in coeval paintings of the infant Christ.

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Finally, her averted gaze endows her simultaneously with a state of modesty and of happenstance. The dark background brings the subject into focus, enlivens her identity, and enhances the monumentality of her bust in a manner consistent with the appreciation of antiquity. The medium-sized panel increases the perception of the sitter’s presence. Fig. 5.2 is another example of this portrait type.18 The young woman’s features are defined by a linear style with sculptural shading that avoids strong chiaroscuro. Touches of white highlight the beads, the iris of the right eye and the lower lip, resembling flakes on the surface. The undulating hair appears as if tooled by a goldsmith. Tucked in by her right ear is a carnation, symbol of betrothal. It is rendered with painterly strokes, also adopted for her coral red lips, closed in a feeble smile, and gently merging with the skin tone. The pictorial contrast intensifies the sensory reaction to the image, inviting the viewer to internalise the practical and emotional ramifications of the matrimonial commission. One final note must be made about the three-quarter Milanese female portraits of the period. Endowed with psychological regards for their audience, as is the small cluster mentioned in Chapter Three, these too are either by or influenced by Leonardo.19 18 Cat. 79. This painting was initially attributed to Sebastiano Mainardi. It is now classif ied under “workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio.” The original panel has been extended. 19 Cat. 101 to 106 included. Cat. 101 and Cat. 102 are Cecilia Gallerani and La Belle Ferronière, already discussed. In 1935, the panel in Cat. 103 was cleaned, revealing an eye on a stick held by the right hand, a clear reference to Saint Lucy, from which the panel now takes its title. As seen also in Cat. 52, early modern portraits used such details to convey the sitters’ personal association with saints, either for devotion or as namesakes. This woman’s facial traits also closely resemble those of the Virgin in the Casio Madonna, ca.1500, oil on panel, 186 × 184 cm, Louvre, (RF103) by the same painter, Giovanni Boltraffio (1466/7–1516). She represents what Antonio Mazzotta has called a “sexless ideal human beauty” to describe the sitter’s psychological state typif ied by Boltraff io’s style of portraiture, for which he was esteemed. For this reason, I omitted his Portrait of a Woman as Artemisia (ca.1494) in the Mattioli collection, which shows a woman dressed for mourning and holding a bowl, perhaps to evoke the fourth-century BCE Artemisia II of Caria, who drank the ashes of her husband. Her garb resembles that of Neapolitan widows, prompting scholars to speculate whether this may be a portrait of Isabella of Aragon after her husband’s death. See also Luke Syson, Larry Keith et al., Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, exh.cat. (National Gallery Company, London: Yale University Press, 2011), 128–29. Cat. 104 was once in the collection of the Milanese scholar and patrician Bartolomeo III Arese (1610–1674). The Arese collection was acquired by the Borromeo family likely after his death in 1674, because his daughter Giulia had married Renato Borromeo II in 1652. The object was inventoried throughout the nineteenth century, but the sitter is still unknown. Her dress, gold-woven damask velvet with wide, puffed sleeves, complemented by a veil held by a lenza, is in the aristocratic fashion of the time. The original background was probably of intense blue, and her left arm rested on a ledge. She might have held a book. The work recalls Leonardo’s style, which Boltraffio, the painter of this panel, knew well because he had been one of the master’s pupils. Various sitters have been proposed: Clarice Pustrela, Camilla Casio, wife of the Bolognese poet Girolamo Casio, and Laura, wife of Girolamo’s stepbrother, Francesco. This woman too seem associated with Boltraffio’s Casio Madonna. On this panel see Alessandro Morandotti and Lauro Natale, Collezione Borromeo: la Galleria dei Quadri dell’Isola Bella (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2011), 115–18 (Cat. 5); Maria Teresa Fiorio, “Per il

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b. The Politics of Nature According to the annotations by the sixteenth-century Venetian chronicler Marcantonio Michiel (1484–1552), the houses of wealthy Venetians were rich with portraits by the “ponentini,” or Transalpins.20 After seeing St Jerome (ca.1475) by Antonello da Messina (ca.1430–1479) in one of these collections, he did not fuss about its convergence of two different styles: the small painting with St Jerome […] deemed by some to be by the hand of Antonello da Messina: but most people, and more plausibly, attribute it to Hans, that is the ancient northern painter Memling: and thus it shows that style, although the face is polished in the Italian manner. And so it seems by the hand of Iacometto. The buildings are in the northern manner, the little village is verisimilar, minute, refined.21

Michiel’s identif ication of the Italian signature in St Jerome’s “polished face” reverberates with the foregoing technical considerations. His sympathy for the misattributions implies the extent to which the Italians had engaged with the Netherlandish style of painting. Finally, his unhesitating recollection of the Netherlandish manner in the miniature village reveals an Italian appreciation of the precision of the Northerners’ picturesque background scenes. In the context of Netherlandish art, these background features reflected the northern manuscript tradition and the Gothic proclivity towards details. They Ritratto Lombardo: Bernardino de’ Conti,” Arte Lombarda 68/69 (1984): 38–52 (45). Cat. 105 is damaged. Its original collector considered it to be by Leonardo and contemporaneous with his Ginevra de’ Benci. Federico Zeri reattributed it to a more generic Lombard school and the circle of Giovanni Boltraff io during the first decade of the sixteenth century. Cat. 106 shows the style of Leonardo and Perugino and its attribution is divided between Andrea Solario (1460–1524) and Boltraffio. The sitter is unknown, but the name of Isabella of Aragon has been proposed, based on a 1498 letter by Isabella to the Duke of Mantua that requests a portrait by Boltraffio of her deceased brother Ferrante of Naples (1423–1494). The woman wears a red dress with detached sleeves. The bodice is rimmed in black damascened satin, the same fabric used for the detached sleeves. Her hair is loose but tidied at the top of her head into a fine net, rimmed perhaps also with black satin, and with a small decoration in the centre. Her only jewel is a necklace of black pearls. See also Mercedes Precerutti Garberi, Capolavori d’Arte Lombarda: i Leonardeschi ai Raggi-X, exh.cat. (Milano: AGFA-GERVAERT S.p.a, 1972), 18–19. 20 Anonimo Morelliano, Notizia d’Opere, e.g., Cardinal Grimano’s collection, 75–78. 21 “el quadretto di San Ieronimo […] alcuni credono che el sii stato de mano di Antonello da Messina: ma li più, e verisimilmente, l’attribuiscono a Gianes, ovvero al Memling pittor antico Ponentino: e cussì mostra quella maniera, benchè el volto è finito alla Italiana. Sicchè par de man de Iacometto. Li edifici sono alla Ponenetina, el paesetto è naturale, minuto, finito.” Anonimo Morelliano, Notizia d’Opere, 74–75. Antonello da Messina, St Jerome in His Study, ca.1475, oil on wood, 45.7 × 36.2 cm, National Gallery, London (NG1418).

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are entwined with the foreground by means of tonal hues evenly mixed through the viscous quality of the oil medium, as if merging, in Erwin Panofsky’s words, “two infinites, the infinitesimally small and the infinitely large.”22 The “infinitesimally small” are urban scenes or bird’s-eye views of rural landscapes painted with topographical, geological, and botanical precision. Rural landscapes appeared in donor and religious paintings in ca.1430, first as vistas from indoor settings, then as open expanses. They have been linked to the relationship between ruler and land in seigniorial governances, not only in terms of control. The countryside, in fact, provided produce essential for the towns, was the residence of the feudal aristocracy, and the space in which the propertied townspeople relaxed. 23 Like the urban backgrounds, their detailed renditions have also been seen as an interpretation of the immanency of God, and as hints of the unseen qualities of the foreground figures.24 Moreover, the landmarks and the trails that we see in these landscapes were meant to trace the metaphorical journey of the devout, as in meditation, towards the object of their devotion.25 The Scolari painting [fig. 2.1] and the Este Princess [fig. 3.2] show that by the late 1430s outdoor scenery was a feature of Italian independent portraiture. Its inclusion has been explained with the influence of Netherlandish donor portraiture.26 However, and crucially, the outdoor world appeared late in Netherlandish independent portraiture. A male likeness by Dieric Bouts (1400?–1475) dated 1462 is the earliest known example. The man inhabits a space with a window on his right. Outside, there is a church at the end of a track, levelled with his upward gaze, indicative of his thoughts.27 Female portraits-with-landscape appeared even later and seemingly in the context of devotional portraiture: I have found only two marital companions, both from ca.1480, both resembling the figures in prayer that flank the religious icon in donor triptychs.28 Hans Memling painted one of the two couples when the sitters 22 Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, 2 Vols. (1953; rep., New York, Hangerstown, San Francisco, London: Icon Editions, Harper and Row Publisher, 1971), Vol. 1, 3. 23 Bruno Blondé, Frederik Buylaert, Jan Dumolyn, Ford Hanus and Peter Stabel, “Living Together in the City: Social Relationships Between Norm and Practice,” in City and Society in the Low Countries, 1100–1600, eds. Bruno Blondé, Marc Boone and Anne-Laure van Bruaene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 59–92 (66). 24 Jelle de Rock, The Image of the City in Early Netherlandish Painting (Turnhout, Belgium: Brespol, 2019); Martin Warnke, Political Landscape: The Art History of Nature (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 1994), esp. 39–52. 25 Ingrid Falque, Devotional Portraiture and Spiritual Experience in Early Netherlandish Painting (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2019), 122–60. 26 Among the most vocal proponents is Paula Nuttall, From Flanders to Florence: The Impact of Netherlandish Painting, 1400–1500 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 212. 27 Dieric Bouts, Portrait of a Man (Jan van Winckele?), 1462, oil on panel, 31.6 × 20.5, National Gallery, London (NG943). 28 Because they were wings of devotional triptychs, my catalogue omits two important works by Memling: Willem Moreel and Barbara van Vlaenderberch, wife of Willem Moreel, in the Musées Royaux

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were no longer in their youth.29 Levelled with the male’s eyes, the landscape leads to the gates of a city. She is, instead, in a rural setting. Till-Holger Borchert explains their style as “an original invention combining Rogierian influences – such as the continuous landscape background in the Braque Triptych – with the innovation of his own early portraits.”30 However, the examples in Chapter Two indicate that to gender a landscape was not uncommon in Italian marriage portraiture. Here, such details unarguably conjure the public and domestic dimensions of the sitters. Significantly, the fact that these sitters were perhaps Italian confirms, as noted before, that Memling used background landscapes for Italian likenesses more regularly than he did for others.31 The second Netherlandish example with a landscape portrays a Florentine couple residing in Bruges because of banking affairs, and only the wife stands against a vista from an open window.32 The earliest female three-quarter portrait against landscape is also Italian.33 Ginevra de’ Benci explores the limitless air of an open expanse. In Florentine portraiture only, there are six more three-quarter likenesses with such an expanse,34 to which we must add another four where the background recedes from indoor to outdoor settings.35 These images do not have male companions. As such, they invite questions about gender constructs that cannot be explained as sterile exercises after Leonardo’s pictorial accomplishments, as has been commonly agreed,36 especially since he held traditional views about the importance of painting women as chaste: “[W]omen must be rendered in shy acts, their legs and arms firmly gathered with their heads down and askew.”37 Thus, the question is not what Ginevra and, later, Mona Lisa did to become Leonardo’s pictorial playground. Somehow, the Italians

des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels (1451 and 1452). And Maria Portinari, wife of Tommaso Portinari, in the Metropolitan Museum, New York (14.40.626–27). 29 Cat. 71. 30 Till-Holger Borchert et al., Memling and the Art of Portraiture, exh.cat. (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2005), 155–56 (156). See also Nuttall, Memling, 74–75 and 91, note 26. For a more balanced view, see e.g., Philippe Lorentz, Hans Memling au Louvre, exh.cat. (Paris: Réunion des Musée Nationaux, 1995), 70; De Vos, Hans Memling, 367; Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Paintings, 349. 31 As the Louvre, which owns the female portrait, explains, “this was one of the earliest portraits of a couple in a loggia and, as such, was probably painted for Italians living in Bruges. It is a fairly late work, painted in around 1484–85.” Louvre Archives and www.louvre.fr 32 Cat. 73. 33 Cat. 81. 34 Cat. 82 to 87 inclusive. 35 Cat. 88 to 91 inclusive. 36 E.g., David Alan Brown, Leonardo da Vinci: Origins of a Genius (Hew Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1998), 101–21 (121). 37 “le donne si debeno figurare con atti vergognosi le gambe insieme strete le braccia racolte insieme con teste basse et piegare intraverso.” Leonardo, Il Libro della Pittura, 51v.

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considered landscape views suitable supports for the figure in portraiture and, interestingly, for female likenesses. As Jacob Burckhardt has put it, Netherlandish influences never “prevented the characteristic interest of the Italian eye for nature from finding its own expression.”38 These different expressions seem to reflect the medieval juxtaposition between natura naturata, typical of the northern tradition, and natura naturans, akin to the Italian environmental culture.39 This culture was couched in Aristotelian materialism and ancient Roman intellectual hedonism. For instance, Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger (ca.61–ca.112CE) had extolled the health-inducing otium of country villas and Vitruvius (d. after 15BCE) had explained the relationship between natural sites, architecture, and living conditions. The pastoral poetry of Virgil (70BCE–19BCE) was a vital influence for the Christian and early humanist writers such as Dante and Petrarch. Meanwhile, in the wake of the Black Death (1347–1351), the horror vacui caused by the recurring pandemics and famine that affected the demography of the cities renewed the pleasure-seeking delights of the countryside richly illustrated in Boccaccio’s Decameron. It also exposed the instrumentality of rural life in the demographic, economic, and social reconstruction of the urban environment. 40 A comparison between Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegories of Good and Bad Government (ca.1337–1340) and the fifteenth-century Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry commissioned from the Limbourg brothers should cut short the temptation to suggest similarities with northern habits. 41 38 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, intr. Peter Burke, notes P. Murray, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (Penguin Books, London 1990), 195. 39 Later elaborated by Baruch Spinoza (1732–1677): Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley, Intr. Stuart Hampshire (London: Penguin Books, 1996 ed.). 40 Giovanni Rucellai (1475–1525) vividly describes the gardens around these villas in Giovani Rucellai, Un Mercante Fiorentino e la sua Famiglia nel Secolo XV, intr. G. Marcotti (Firenze: Tipografia G. Barbera, 1881), 72–80. Together with Pliny the Elder, Natural History, see also Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1960); Mary Garrard, “Leonardo da Vinci: Female Portraits, Female Nature,” in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, eds. Norma Broude and Mary Garrard (NY and Oxon: Routledge, 2018 ed.), 59–85; Elizabeth Hyde, ed. A Cultural History of Gardens in the Renaissance (London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013); Roy K. Gibson and Ruth Morello, Reading the Letters of Pliny the Younger (Cambridge University Press, 2012); Grazia Gobbi Sica, The Florentine Villa: Architecture History Society, trans. Ursula Creigh (Oxon and New York: Routledge 2007); James Ackerman, The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990); Ernst Gombrich, “The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape,” in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London and New York: Phaidon, 1971 ed.), 107–21. 41 Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Allegories of Good and Bad Government, 1337–1340, frescoes, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena; Limbourg brothers (late fourteenth-early fifteenth century), Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, fifteenth century, manuscript on parchment, Condé Museum, Chantilly. On the transformation of the pictorial landscape in Italy, A. Richard Turner, The Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1966).

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Humanist culture perceived landscape in painting as an imaginative reconstruction of cosmic harmony. From the foregoing writers, it had acquired the language to explain its thaumaturgical effects, and the Vitruvian lesson loomed large in early Italian treatises on architecture. In the spirit of such growth, and seemingly repudiating its earlier advocacy of celibacy, fifteenth-century humanism extolled marriage as a celebration of the laws of nature, of a system that drew its sustenance from the fecundity, simultaneously sexual and social, of its own components. A world without this system was contra naturam: Nature has written in you the law of being born and giving birth, and parents have obliged you to bring up and nourish grandchildren […]. But if they had complained about this, they would rightly have been punished, since they would […] be spurning the laws of nature, which gave all animals the desire to copulate for procreation. This is obvious even in birds, which are held by such a strong desire to nest that they seem like married couples, who procreate and nourish so that their lineage may be perpetual. 42

This concept was expounded in marriage literature. In the treasure-trove of social ideals that are Alberti’s four books of The Family in Renaissance Florence (begun ca.1434), one passage adequately explains the utility of marriage as “the primeval nature of society, the procreation of dynastic heirs, the increase and amplification of the family.”43 In female portraits-with-landscape, it is easy to imagine a connection between the organics of nature and women’s generative properties. Consider the Gozzadini woman [Fig. 2.4] or even the dry land in Battista Sforza from the SforzaMontefeltro dyptich, indicative of her posthumous portrayal. Similarly, it is easy to imagine this concept anthropomorphised by the fast-growing neo-platonic obsession with Venus: Venus Genetrix (the mother of all things), Venus Naturalis (earthly love) and Coelestis (heavenly love). Finally, Venus Verticordia (female chastity), arguably the mirror image of the donna angelicata dear to the earlier generation of humanists 42 Ludovico Carbone (1430–1485) in Anthony F. D’Elia, The Renaissance of Marriage in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: Harvard University Press, 2004), 126–27. 43 “La società costituita da essa primera natura, la procreatione de successori heredi, laccrescimento and amplificatione della famiglia.” Leon Battista Alberti, “De Officio Senum Erga Iuvenes et Minorum Erga Maiores et de Educandis Liberis,” in In Questo Volume si Contiene Libri della Famiglia Composta da M. Batista degli Alberti da Firenze, 1433–1440, Urb.Lat.229, The Vatican Library, DigitalVaticana, 7v–44v (19v). In contemporary Italian, Leon Battista Alberti, “Liber Primus Familiae: de Off icio Senum Erga Iuvenes et Minorum Erga Maiores et de Educandis Liberis,” in I libri della Famiglia, a cura di Ruggiero Romano, Alberto Tenenti, Francesco Furlan (Torino: Einaudi, 1994), 12–85. Trans.: Leon Battista Alberti, ‘The First Book on the Family: Of the Duties of the Old Towards the Young and of the Young Towards Their Elders, and of the Education of Children,” in The Family in Renaissance Florence: Books One – Four, intr. and trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc. 2004 ed.), 33–91.

Ne therl andish or Not Netherl andish? Is That the Question? 

as explained in Chapter One. Characteristically, the only portraits-with-landscape by Leonardo, Ginevra and Gioconda, were painted in the city that reinvented the culture of otium and neo-platonism. Woman and landscape together represented natura naturans in its biosocial and spiritual facets. I will broach the latter with Ginevra [Fig. 5.7]. Fig. 5.3 shows the former. 44 By the time this portrait was painted, birds’-eye views had become a bucolic vision of the local countryside with a city in the distance. In the Netherlandish manner, a parapet and the woman’s animated hands occupy the picture plane. Unlike the austere Netherlandish sill, it is upholstered in a manner that evokes an elegant domestic environment. The woman’s right hand, her ring finger bejewelled, rests on its edge whilst holding a marital orange blossom. She wears domestic attire enriched only by a pendetta da moglianza in the shape of a cross with three pearls hanging from the extremities and encased with a ruby and four sapphires. 45 As seen, these jewels reflected social practices; and their materials functioned as visual adjectives. For example, together with pearls, rubies symbolised Virginal purity, and sapphires the flame of charity. 46 Additionally, she is treated as a jewel: note the richness of the medium! The woman’s chaste domesticity strikes a contrast with the expansive background, but her bodice and detached sleeves follow the curves of the winding trail, connecting her with a distant city. Along the visual journey, the lush vegetation, river water, and geological variety invite the viewer to perceive a wealthy territory at the centre of which she stands as both a domestic creature and the magnet for its growth. c. The Politics of Animated Portraiture With their still-life atmosphere, both the religious and secular iconographies in Netherlandish paintings encouraged a contemplative attitude in the viewer. In 44 Cat. 82. The subject is most likely a girl at the time of her marriage because of what she holds and wears. She has been associated with the Rucellai family and, less plausibly, with Giovanna degli Albizzi. When Sterling Clark purchased it, the subject had a halo, a crown and the studded wheel, symbols of Saint Catherine of Alexandria. These later additions were removed when the panel was cleaned in 1913. Traces of the halo are still noticeable. See also Lorne Campbell et al. Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian, exh. cat. (London: Yale University Press for National Gallery Company, 2008), 146–47 (Cat. 32). 45 This pendant is a simpler version of the one on the woman with the newborn in Domenico Ghirlandaio, Birth of Mary, 1486–1490, fresco, width 450 cm, Cappella Tornabuoni, Santa Maria Novella, Florence. 46 Emerald too was believed to ward off evil and to preserve beauty and chastity. Ciardi Duprè, L’Oreficeria, 311–14 and 346. In an essay on portraits of Barbara Pallavicino, Katherine McIver interprets the three pearls that hang from many of these jewels as symbols of the Medici heraldic palle. The idea seems difficult to defend. See Katherine McIver, “Daddy’s Little Girl: Patrilineal Anxiety in Two Portraits of a Renaissance Daughter,” in Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe: Gender, Agency, Identity, ed. Andrea Pearson (England and USA: Ashgate, 2008), 85–98 (96).

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Italy, since the time of Giotto, paintings elicited the onlooker’s active engagement that, from the fifteenth century, was made explicit through the outward-gazing figures that Alberti would call “commentators.” In portraiture, this simulated communication between subject and spectator led to transitive animated likenesses. 47 Andrea del Castagno’s (ca.1419-1457) Portrait of a Man (ca.1450) explains this concept well [Fig. 5.4]. The bust-length subject is modelled with sculptural effects. His confident body language, redolent of ancient senatorial poise, penetrates the viewer’s space, turning the spectator into the victim of his gaze, and showcasing the painter’s engagement with the paragone between art and reality that would become the Vasarian paradigm of the terza maniera.48 Furthermore, the regulatory structure of the linear perspective connected, and thus created a space for, the viewer’s vantage point with the vanishing point of the composition. Even when the compositions did not adhere strictly to one-point perspective, their illusory three-dimensionality remained rigorously planar, thereby enforcing the viewer with a spatial and, consequentially, a narrative relation that the outward-gazing figures cemented. Additionally, compositional unity, informed by drawing methods, literally shared with the written language the graphic line of the stylus. Its tracing defined visual signs and imbued them with semantic affinities – here is Shearman’s definition – with the viewers’ socio-cultural heritage. 49 The very borders of the panels demarcated “a quadrangle […] which is considered to be an open window through which I see what I want to paint,” as Alberti put it in this well-known explanation.50 Through this “window,” such imagined realities built upon lines, brushstrokes, colours, perspectival geometries heightened both the material and the conceptual quality of these affinities. This pictorial method amplified the communicative conditions of portraiture. From the Scolari painting [fig. 2.1] I have progressively developed the suggestion that compositional solutions in fifteenth-century Italian portraits were imaginative interpretations of mnemonic evocations. Netherlandish portraiture, too, created 47 Shearman attributed the earliest examples of this type to Raphael. John Shearman, Only Connect… Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance: The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1988 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 113–14. See also my Introduction and Chapter Two. 48 Some have attributed this painting to Piero del Pollaiuolo. See Patrizia Zambrano, “Sandro Botticelli and the Birth of Modern Portraiture,” in Botticelli Past and Present, eds. Ana Debenedetti and Caroline Elam (London: UCL Press, 2019), 10–35 (11–13). 49 On Renaissance perspective, see the seminal 1927 study by Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (1991; rep., New York: Zone Books and Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2020); and the influential Hubert Damisch, L’Origine de la Perspective (1987; rep., Paris: Flammarion, 2012). A summary of the semantic origins of and connections between the visual and the written notion of style is in Willibald Sauerländer, “From Stilus to Style: Reflections on the Fate of a Notion,” Art History 6, no. 3 (September 1983): 253–270. 50 Alberti, Book One, 56.

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panoptical displays, but as has been seen, this was partly an effort to manifest hyper-natural versions of the sitters’ contemplative state. A comparison between Portrait of a Carthusian Monk [Fig. 5.5] and the painting by Giovanni di Francesco del Cervelliera [Fig. 3.5] illustrates the difference. Chapter Three has explained how the latter engages silently with humanist discourse. Conversely, the Carthusian’s self-display is an end in itself. As the fly on the ledge openly affirms, it is a code for pictorial prowess and, ultimately, a memento mori. In Italian portraiture, the mnemonic subject sought disclosure and communication, posing simultaneously as an object of representation and as the sitter’s ideal doppelgänger. By imagining the interior of storage items, the backgrounds of the paintings, both illusionistic and abstract, furnished the illusion of the doppelgänger’s tenancy, whose apprehension depended, as it would be with any common storage space, on the actions of opening and closing. These actions can be likened to rituals of revealing and concealing that, thus, increased both the haptic and the conceptual dimension of the image. Here I leave Netherlandish art behind and return to the woman question, in order also to conclude my argument that by means of metapictorial artifices and semantic allusions, Italian portraits were to be seen-as metacritical representations of the environment that both sitters and spectators inhabited.51 Sandro Botticelli’s Portrait of a Lady is in three-quarter profile and length [Fig. 5.6].52 Her reddish hair and asymmetrical face reflect Botticelli’s three-quarter style of portraiture, which, posthumous images aside, stressed the distinctiveness of the subjects.53 Her hair is tight inside a cuffia, and a choker decorates her neck. She 51 My elaboration is partly influenced by my interpretation of Gérard Wajcman, Fenêtre: Chroniques du regard et de l’intime (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2004); Victor Stoichita, L’instauration du Tableau: Métapeinture à l’Aube des Temps Modernes (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1993) and its recent revised translation The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting. New, Improved and Updated Edition with an Introduction by Lorenzo Pericolo (London: Harvery Miller, 2015). Also Lorenzo Pericolo, “What is Metapainting? The Self-Aware Image Twenty Years Later,” in Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image, 1–31. 52 Cat. 88. The subject has been identified from an inscription added in the early seventeenth century by Baccio Bandinelli the Younger (1578–1636), whose family owned this painting. The sitter could have been Smeralda Donati (b.ca.1439), wife of Viviano Brandini and grandmother of the sculptor Baccio Bandinelli (1494–1560). Documents from the Florentine land registry state that Smeralda was thirty years old in 1469, an age that fits the appearance of the subject and the approximate date of the panel. However, this identification is not universally accepted. Among the subsequent owners of this panel was the pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriele Rossetti (1828–1882), who purchased from Christie’s in 1869 for £20. Influences of this portrait’s style are notable in Rossetti’s works thereafter. Rossetti sold it in 1880 to one of his patrons Constantine Ionides and the latter gave it to the V & A, in 1900. The painting is discussed on the museum website. See also Christiansen and Weppelmann, eds. The Renaissance Portrait, 112-14 (Cat. 14) and Ronald Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli: Life and Work, 2nd ed. (New York, London: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1989), 57. 53 On the style of his portraits see Frank Zöllner, “Botticelli as Portraitist,” in Botticelli (New York and London: Prestel, 2015), 47–63.

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wears a red silk cotta with gold-embroidered edges under a diaphanous guarnello also embroidered at the edges, as is the muslin handkerchief in her left hand.54 Her ensemble is a collection of expensive donora for indoor use.55 A mullioned window with a classicising column on her right conjures the living space of a Renaissance townhouse. There may be a question mark on Paula Nuttall’s hypothesis of a filial connection with portraits by Memling based on this detail, because Memling started using it at the time of this painting, and possibly at the behest of his Italian clients.56 A Netherlandish trademark may be the ersatz frame across the panel’s borders, which looked longer before the lower section of the board was cut off.57 The woman occupies an area between this frame and its shutter on the left. The communicative magnitude of her presence leads me to re-evaluate current interpretations. For example, she is far too alive and sartorially self-conscious to be a posthumous visual eulogy, as Frank Zöllner has proposed.58 For similar reasons, I feel lukewarm about an association with Dante’s sonnet “Videro li occhi miei quanta pietate,” suggested by Joanna Woods-Marsden and repeated by others.59 The sonnet praises the sympathetic look received from a woman at a window, but her forwardness is unconscionable behaviour by fifteenth-century patriarchal standards. David Alan Brown’s crediting Botticelli for ignoring them, in order to overcome the stiff profile and convey the lifelikeness of the sitter, also seems unconvincing.60 What if this frame did not represent a window? In Carpaccio’s Dream of St Ursula (1495), a corner of the room shows a mullioned window on the one side and a dark 54 Because the guarnello was perhaps used by pregnant women, some have suggested that she is expecting, thus consigning the portrait to a very rare, if not unique, example in the Quattrocento. Gloria Fossi, “Virtù Terrene e Bellezze dell’Animo,” in Il Ritratto: gli Artisti, i Modelli, la Memoria ed. Gloria Fossi (Firenze: Giunti Gruppo Editoriale, 1996), 61–72 (69). 55 See for instance the bridal gifts that Nannina de Medici received when she was betrothed to Bernardo Rucellai (1448–1514) in 1461. Among the many items there were a type of guarnello, also gold-embroidered, called cioppa di moscavoliere; various handkerchiefs including one with gold threads and one with pearls and silver; and several cuffie. Rucellai, Un Mercante Fiorentino, 89–92. 56 Nuttall, From Flanders to Florence, 135. Stefan Weppelmann criticises her position in Christiansen and Weppelmann, eds. The Renaissance Portrait, 112. Ronald Lightbown has suggested that Botticelli reinterpreted the way in which the Netherlanders explored chiaroscuro in interiors by taming their dramatic effects with a more diffused light. Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli. 57 On the pre- and post-restoration of this panel, see Nicola Costaras and Clare Richardson, “Botticelli’s Portrait of a Lady Known as Smeralda Bandinelli: A Technical Study,” in Botticelli Past and Present, eds. Ana Debenedetti and Caroline Elam (London: UCL Press, 2019), 36–52. 58 Zöllner, Botticelli, 50–51 and 195–96, no. 20. 59 Dante Alighieri, Vita Nova, a cura di Stefano Carrai (Milano: Bur, Rizzoli, 2009), 24, 152–53. On this theory, see Joanna Woods-Marsden, “Portrait of the Lady, 1430–1530,” in Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo’s Ginevra de Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women, eds. David Alan Brown et al., exh.cat. (Washington, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), 65–87 (70–72). 60 Brown, “Cat. 25,” in Virtue and Beauty, ed. Brown et al., 172–175 (172).

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recess behind half-opened shutters. The partial view of the dark space arguably invites the viewer to conjure its storage and, metaphorically, the nooks of St Ursula’s dream. This corner resembles Botticelli’s arrangement of fenestrations, perhaps a variant of the Scolari composition.61 The same design appears again in two male likenesses with amatory-connubial associations. One is attributed to Botticelli or someone from his circle. The man’s right hand holds a marital flower, whilst resting on the ledge.62 Later, in a male portrait painted by Raffaellino del Garbo (ca.1466–ca.1527), the subject appears boxed into a space with two windows and an opening corresponding to the picture plane. Drawn-back curtains reveal him to us, looking towards his left as if caught in a pensive mood that suggests action despite and beyond our presence. His right hand, resting on a ledge, holds a diaphanous handkerchief, perhaps appertaining to a beloved, who would be, as amatory poetry suggests, the receiver and reason of his existence.63 By patriarchal standards, love was a biosocial duty. Women actualised it as incorporated wives. This, I argue, is the poetry seen in Fig. 5.6. Stefan Weppelmann has proposed that her apparent movement and directness served to create a lifelike image for private and semi-official use.64 I further suggest that her act of looking conflates the evocation of her husband’s stored portrait with her psychological awareness of his own gaze as the living beholder of her features in his own memory. This mnemonic liminality turned panoptical would also enable complimentary and infinite dialogues between the sitter and the ever-changing, empirical viewer, turning us into guests of a competent patrician housemistress.65 It does not require specialist knowledge in psychology to suggest that Botticelli’s sitter understood the implications of this dynamic of gazes. One can easily imagine a knowing convergence, within the portrait’s simulated immediacy, the painter’s pictorial interests, and her own familiarity with discourses about women and domestic spaces. Thus fashioned, this likeness represents the archetypal feminine experience of a physical space as a social practice that, to paraphrase Henri Lefebvre, the sitter expressed and constituted.66 In sum, the Italians did not see portraits as mimeses as in the medieval fashion. This was the prerogative of northern portraiture with 61 Vittore Carpaccio (1472–1526), Dream of St Ursula, 1495, 270 × 270 cm, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. 62 The Swiss Institute for Art Research (Zürich), its owner, sold this portrait in 2019. Jonathan Franks and Alex Capon, “Sold for 914 Times Top Estimate: £5m ‘Botticelli’ Stuns Saleroom,” Antiques Trade Gazette: The Art Market Weekly, Print Edition 2400 – 13 July 2019; See also Zambrano, Sandro Botticelli, 16. 63 Raffaellino del Garbo, Portrait of a Man, ca.1500, tempera and oil on wood, 51.5 × 31.2, National Gallery, London (NG3101). 64 Christiansen and Weppelmann, eds. The Renaissance Portrait, 112. 65 On the distinction between ideal and empirical spectatorship, see Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History,” The Art Bulletin 73 (1991): 174–208. 66 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991), 16.

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its impenetrable individualism. Rather, they saw portraits as syncretic repositories of intersubjective realities, as phenomenological loci that provoked the political animal in the viewers, the Aristotelian ζῷον πoλιτικόν considered the nucleus of collective identities: [W]e see even the most highly esteemed of capacities to fall under this [politics] e.g. strategy, economics, rhetoric. […] For even if the end is the same for a single man and for a state, that of the state seems at all events something greater and more complete, whether to attain or to preserve; though it is worth while to attain the end merely for one man, it is finer and more godlike to attain it for a nation or a city-state.67

In accepting that women, already producers of a material culture, co-participated in shaping this portrait culture, we must expect to find the alter-ego of the patriarchal imago feminae. As has been shown, women’s experience of patriarchy was neither linear nor was it simple, and opposition existed within this system. Plausibly, some likenesses expressed the sitters’ conflicts. They would be the visual maxim of “don’t be born a woman if you want your own way.”68 When Nannina de’ Medici (1448–1493) uttered this complaint in 1479, she was speaking from a critical perspective that takes us back to the complexities of the period’s literature, as has already been discussed. To find these portraits, I suggest looking for clues in the likenesses’ evocation of a detached mood à la Netherland, and of the Sanuti/Cereta juxtaposition of sartorial details in Chapter One. The earliest significant result is Ginevra de’ Benci [Figs. 5.7 and 5.8].

Italian Portraits à la Netherland? Ginevra de’ Benci is the first known portrait by Leonardo and female non-profile likeness-with-landscape in the western tradition. We know that the sitter was born in August 1457 into the family of Amerigo Benci (after 1431–before 1474), part of an echelon of the banking and cultural elite of Florence and close ally of the De’ Medici. On 15 January 1474, she was wedded to Luigi di Bernardo Niccolini, fifteen years her senior, who died in 1505. Her dowry of 1400 florins was substantial but apparently insufficient for her husband’s expenditure, since his 1480 entry in the catasto laments his precarious finances aggravated by the costs for the care of his 67 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross, int. Lesley Brown (New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2009), 1.2, 1094b. 68 Dale Kent, “Women in Renaissance Florence,” in Virtue and Beauty, ed. Brown et al., 26–45 (26).

Ne therl andish or Not Netherl andish? Is That the Question? 

wife, now twenty-three and “in the hands of doctors for a long time.”69 The cause and manifestations of this poor health are unknown. Her popular status in Florentine intellectual circles was unmatched by her husband. Encomia were written in her name, including at least eleven commissioned by the eminent humanist Bernardo Bembo (1433–1519), who was in Florence as Venetian ambassador in 1475–1476 and 1478–1480: six from Cristoforo Landino, four from Alessandro Braccesi (1445–1503), and one from Naldo Naldi (1439–after 1513). We learn more about her life from an epistolary exchange with a viola player known by his initials “G + H.” Particularly informative is a letter dated 12 August 1490 that he sent from Rome to “his magnificent patroness,” probably in response to her request for religious items blessed by the Pope.70 The letter reports that during a convivial discussion on female virtues he proposed her as a Florentine feminine model, much to the interlocutors’ approval. In cheering the birth of one of her nieces, it also complains: “[F]rom excessive haughtiness [you] refuse to present us mortals with [your] descendants – well, have it your way.”71 Finally, it makes a request for her poem that begins with “I beg for mercy and I am a tiger of the mountain.”72 It seems therefore that Ginevra was a prominent woman, that childlessness was her own decision, and that she produced literature which is now sadly lost. Since the letter does not mention her poor health, perhaps she had recovered by then. The painting shows her face in seven-eighth angle and her body in three-quarter view. She projects a stony, inscrutable look, her cheeks framed by ringlets. She wears a gamurra in monachino laced at the front with blue ribbons, and a black scarf over a coverciere. Behind her, a bush of juniper that was originally of intense green evokes her name botanically. In the background, a river flows into the distance where hills surround an urban settlement. The reverse is painted with a twig of juniper framed by a wreath of bay and palm leaves on a background in faux porphyry marble. Caught between the sprigs, a banderol claims Virtutem Forma Decorat. However, infrared reflectography reveals another caption underneath, Virtus et Honor. The panel lost approximately 12-15 cm from the low register, and 3-3.80 cm from the right side.73 This increases the interpretative challenge of this portrait. 69 In Brown, Leonardo da Vinci, 101–21 (104). On her biography, see Ada Alessandrini, “Ginevra de’ Benci,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 8 (1966), www.treccani.it; Mary Garrard, “Who Was Ginevra de’ Benci? Leonardo’s Portrait and Its Sitter Recontextualized,” Artibus et Historiae 27, no. 53 (2006): 23–56. 70 Alessandrini, Ginevra de’ Benci. 71 Garrard, Who Was Ginevra de Benci?, 42. 72 This is the standard translation of “chieggo merzede e sono alpestro tygre.” 73 This part was cut off sometime before 1789, following damage. Later a side strip was added that brought the panel to its present appearance. On the technical conditions of this panel, see David Bull, “Two Portraits by Leonardo: ‘Ginevra de’ Benci’ and the ‘Lady with an Ermine’,” Artibus et Historiae 13, no. 25 (1992): 67–83 (72–76).

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For Elizabeth Cropper, the obverse represents the beginning of the transformation, explained in the Introduction, of female portraiture into a synecdoche of art. Seeing it as the harbinger of future accomplishments, Jennifer Fletcher considers it the product of Leonardo’s genius unleashed by Bernardo Bembo, who suggested its design from his knowledge and appreciation of modern portraiture, from Pisanello’s Este Princess [fig. 3.2] to Netherlandish likenesses.74 David Alan Brown ascribes it to Leonardo’s innovative desire to convey not a real individual but, rather, his progressive views on women at the time when they “were still shown carefully sheltered within the walls of their family homes.”75 His reconstruction, the most popular in studies on this portrait, supposes that the missing elements were comparable to a drawing by Leonardo and a painted likeness attributed to Lorenzo di Credi (ca.1456–1536).76 The drawing shows a right and a left hand in a manner similar to that of the marble Portrait Bust of a Lady with Flowers by Andrea del Verrocchio (1435–1488), the subject of which has been speculatively identified with Ginevra.77 If Leonardo’s Ginevra held a flower, Brown has argued, it was made during the period leading to the sitter’s wedding, for her family in lieu of her absence or for her future in-laws before the nuptials.78 In Credi’s painting, the figure stands against vegetation, her face is Ginervesque and her posture recalls the marble bust. A sixteenth-century inscription on the verso states “Ginevra de Am […] Benci.” 74 Jennifer Fletcher, “Bernardo Bembo and Leonardo’s portrait of Ginevra de Benci,” The Burlington Magazine 131, no.1041 (December 1989): 811–816. 75 Brown, Leonardo, 121; and Museum Archives. 76 This idea was first proposed by Aby Warburg. See also Fletcher, Bernardo Bembo, 811-12; and Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Study of Female Hands, ca.1474 or ca.1478–80 or ca.1490, silverpoint heightened with white on pink prepared paper, 21.5 × 15 cm, The Royal Collection (RL 12558); Cat. 85: as the Metropolitan Museum website states, the originality of the inscription is unconfirmed. On the original location of the portrait see Valentiner, in Garrard, Who Was Ginevra de Benci?, 43. The painting is damaged. Its earliest published reproduction (Bode, 1903) shows it in better conditions and the figure has a closer resemblance with Leonardo’s Ginevra. There are pentimenti in the position of the head and in the dress’s neckline, which appear rectangular as in Leonardo’s painting. However, the sitter has not always been identified with Ginevra de’ Benci. Some have proposed Ginevra di Giovanni di Niccolò, the widow of the painter’s brother, who was a goldsmith. Her black dress, the ring on her left hand and the juniper bush may refer to her husband’s death, his profession and her name. Berenson first attributed the panel to Lorenzo di Credi in 1896. The artist trained in Andrea del Verrocchio’s workshop, where Leonardo also worked. Nowadays he is commonly accepted as the author of this portrait but, in 1998, David Alan Brown put forth a follower of Credi, known as Tommaso. The aesthetic connection with Leonardo has also prompted some to date it to ca.1505, when Leonardo started working on Mona Lisa. However, it is more likely that Credi painted it in the late 1470s, when he was copying early works by Leonardo. 77 Andrea del Verrocchio, Bust of a Young Woman, 15th century, white marble, 43.3 × 48.7 × 23.8 cm, the Frick Collection (1961.2.87). On the attribution, see John Goldsmith Phillips, “The Lady with the Primrose,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 27, no. 8 (April 1969): 385–395 (392). 78 Brown, Leonardo, 105. The marriage theory was first proposed in 1939, in Kenneth Clark, Leonardo da Vinci: An Account of His Development as an Artist (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1959 ed.), 27–29.

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Finally, its presumptive original location was Le Murate, a convent at the edge of Florence, and a hub of Florentine learned women.79 The Medici and Benci were its most generous patrons, and it was there that Ginevra received her education.80 The argument is appealing but could be questioned. For instance, the similarities between Ginevra and both Credi’s painting and the sculpture are descriptive rather than structural and, in the former, the ring held by the woman was added later. The date itself of the Windsor drawing is still debated because its style is closer to ca.1490, when Leonardo was no longer in Florence.81 Importantly, the original Virtus et Honor on the reverse of Ginevra was Bembo’s motto. However complex, as shall be seen, his connection with the painting is irrefutable and fatal to the marriage theory. On the reverse Brown originally proposed that Bembo commissioned this design after having seen the obverse. 82 More recently, he has proposed a comparison between this painting, a Portrait of a Nun by Jacometto Veneziano (active ca.1472– before 1498), and the lost likeness of Carlo (1472–1503), Bembo’s son. Bernardo commissioned the portrait from him, then took it to Florence, where it inspired Ginevra.83 For Fletcher, who was the first to recognise the link between the motto and Bembo, the sitter and her likeness together inspired the ca.1478 letter that Marsilio Ficino addressed to Bembo and Lorenzo de’ Medici, arguing for the superior power of sight in matters of love. Ficino’s inspiration resulted from the almost frontal angle of her face; the twigs redolent of Petrarchan tropes and Christian purity; and the counterfeit porphyry, symbol of the endurance of love. Bembo, with the aid of his friend Bartolomeo Sanvito (d.1511), was the inventor of these details.84 Similarly, Zöllner, who has suggested that the ambassador took to Florence a panel that already bore his impresa, has interpreted both obverse and reverse as Petrarchan and neo-platonic visualisations, concluding that “Ginevra de’ Benci […] is portrayed […] not as a bride but as a partner and a literary equal for Bernardo Bembo. For this reason, the artist portrays her in three-quarter view – something previously reserved primarily for portraits of men and granting the sitter greater personal presence in the picture.”85 79 Kate. J. P. Lowe in Garrard, Who Was Ginevra de Benci?, 43 and 52, note 100; Natalie R. Tomas, The Medici Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence (Hampshire, England, Burlington USA: Ashgate, 2003), 86. 80 Garrard, Who Was Ginevra de Benci?, 44. 81 See information at www.rct.uk 82 Brown, Leonardo, 116–19. 83 In Brown et al., Virtue and Beauty, 145. 84 Fletcher, Bernardo Bembo, 811-12 and 816. On Sanvito, see Maddalena Signorini, “A Scripta of Bartolomeo Sanvito,” Getty Research Journal 2011, no. 2 (2011): 151–162. 85 Frank Zöllner, “Leonardo da Vinci’s Portraits: Ginevra de’ Benci, Cecilia Gallerani, La Belle Ferronière, and Mona Lisa,” Rafael i jego spadkobiercy. Portret klasyczny w sztuce nowozytnej Europy; materialy

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Because of the technical challenges of painting two sides of the same wood, it is likely that Ginevra’s obverse and reverse were painted at once.86 Furthermore, although the motto points to Bembo, from this accomplished humanist one would have expected more effort or, at least, a formula for feminine virtues, such as the popular “beauty and manners” in the contemporary female medallic portraiture.87 Moreover, both Petrarchism and neo-platonic declarations were but cultural exercises. Consider Landino’s description of Ginevra’s “golden hair,” and the comparison between her facial features and “white lilies and […] red roses […]. In the spring red flowers glow like fire, but they are nothing compared to the beautiful lips of your lady […] her snow-white brow, her teeth like ivory, and her dark eyes set in rosy cheeks.”88 The aesthetic qualities of the portrait eclipse Landino’s prosaic homage. Crucially, Leonardo’s dislike of Petrarchism is known, and Bembo never acquired this panel.89 Fletcher has argued that perhaps Leonardo, renowned for his tardiness, had not finished the painting when the ambassador left Florence; or perhaps the latter was in financial difficulties and could no longer afford the purchase.90 Contemporary commentators wrote about her grief after his departure, and Fletcher has wondered whether her illness was the heartache of a forsaken lover.91 Yet, men routinely employed these tropes, and Bembo’s platonic commitment would have entailed a lifetime attachment to Ginevra’s likeness.92 If he was really the dishonourable patron of this painting, one may thus wonder if her heartache was caused by the humiliating unfulfillment of his duties. Then, there is the influence of Netherlandish portraiture in the sober expression of the subject and in the bird’s-eye view of the landscape. This influence is persistently attributed to Bembo’s knowledge of northern art.93 Because both Leonardo and the Benci were close to the Medici family, for Brown this influence ses- ji naukowej, 24 – 25 × 2002 (Sztuka i kultura, Bd. 4), Torun 2003, S.: 157–183, (158–62, citation 162). 86 Garrard, Who Was Ginevra de Benci?, 28–29. 87 Luke Syson, “Consorts, Mistresses and Exemplary Women: The Female Medallic Portrait in FifteenthCentury Italy,” in The Sculpted Objects: 1400–1700, eds. Stuart Santini and Peta Motture (Aldershot, Hants, England: Scolar Press, 1997), 43–54 (49). 88 Cristoforo Landino, “VII To the same [Bernardo Bembo]’ in ‘Ginevra de’ Benci by Leonardo da Vinci’,” in Report and Studies in the History of Art, ed. John Walker, trans. John F. Richard (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1967), 32–35 (35). 89 All also pointed out in Garrard, Who Was Ginevra de Benci?. 90 Fletcher, Bernardo Bembo, 813. 91 Fletcher, Bernardo Bembo, 814. 92 At his death, Lorenzo de’ Medici still owned the portrait of Lucrezia Donati, the platonic lover of his youth. A portrait of Simonetta Vespucci was given to Luciano as a token after her death. Bembo’s son Pietro (1470–1547) kept a lock of Lucrezia Borgia’s hair until the end of his days. Platonic declarations were serious business! 93 E.g., Zöllner, Leonardo da Vinci’s Portraits, 159; Fletcher, Bernardo Bembo, 816.

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was a manoeuvre by the ambassador, eager to entreat Lorenzo de’ Medici by appealing to his admiration of the Lowlanders.94 It is crucial to recall the rarity of female likenesses-with-landscape in Netherlandish portraiture, as well as the fact that Leonardo’s familiarity with the northern manner of landscape is to be found among the Florentine painters of his time, including his master Verrocchio. These observations appear to indicate a possible redundancy of the Bembian influence. Furthermore, Leonardo’s assimilation of the northern style of landscape quickly converged, as seen in Ginevra, into the interconnection of landscape and figure that would be the visual hallmark of his lifelong interest in the structural analogies between all elements in nature. For similar reasons, we may cautiously approach Nuttall’s suggestion that Leonardo transmuted into Ginevra the features of the Berlin portrait by Christus [fig. 4.14], which is based, as seen, on the questionable assumption that the latter was in the Medici collection.95 Additionally, pouncing marks appear along the eyes, nose, lips, and the right side of Ginevra’s face, indicating the use of a preparatory drawing.96 Because the Lowlander woman is much smaller, Leonardo would have had to re-scale her face. Then, he would have certainly noticed that her beauty emerges from the comparable curves of the eyelids, nostrils, chin, sash, and choker. It seems strange that an artist as experimental and sensitive to interconnecting patterns as Leonardo would have missed the temptation to test this style.97 The predominant reactions to this painting betray the broader tendency to assume that artists and men in general used images of women to quench their own fetishist vagaries, and that women lacked ideas and expectations about their own imaging. Could we, instead, approach the novelty of this painting from the sitter’s vantage point? This line of enquiry is made possible by the fact that, as Mary Garrard has convincingly demonstrated, Bembo did not invent the motto Virtus et Honor. He adopted it in around 1482, perhaps during his efforts to create a monument to Dante near the Florentine’s tomb in Ravenna. His endeavours on this project and on Ginevra arose during the bilateral efforts of Venice and Florence to improve their unstable relations.98 This political backdrop interests me: his effusions on Ginevra align with the use of platonic flatteries for political gains discussed in Chapter Three. Ginevra’s father had been the director of the Medici’s banking branch in Geneva, “Ginevra” in Italian, and had been involved in a 1454 alliance 94 Brown, Leonardo, 110. 95 Nuttall, From Flanders to Florence, 210-21; Brown, Leonardo, 110. 96 Bull, Two Portraits, 80. 97 Technical examination has also revealed the painstaking rendition of pictorial homogeneity between face and landscape but less attentive care to the clothing. Bull, Two Portraits, 70. On Leonardo, suffices Brown, Leonardo. 98 Garrard, Who Was Ginevra de Benci?, 37-41.

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between Venice and Florence.99 By seeking a connection with the portrait, Bembo could have added another string to his diplomatic bow. Let us consider a productive friendship between the painter and the sitter. Ginevra’s physiognomy appears closer to Leonardo’s early female types such as Madonna of the Carnation.100 If her sombreness derives from northern iconographies, these could have been religious. In the same Carnation Madonna, for instance, the tenebrous interior with two windows onto a landscape has a Netherlandish flavour. I am also persuaded by Garrard’s reconstruction of the original design from a portrait by Donnino (1450–1515) or Agnolo (1466–1513) di Domenico del Mazziere, painted a decade after Ginevra, because its aesthetic characteristics underscore a synthesis of Netherlandish and Ginevra’s qualities [Fig. 5.9].101 The subject in this painting stands between a faux cornice with the inscription Noli me Tangere and the parapet of a balcony. Behind, an expansive landscape has an ostensibly Netherlandish inspiration. The inscription is a reference to the Magdalene’s recognition of Christ after the Resurrection. It is universally interpreted as symbolising the sitter’s chaste mind in marriage, but it could express her psychosexual unavailability. The dry land and the subject’s solemn expression stress this mood. Furthermore, the reverse displays a laurel wreath, evocative of Ginevra’s, with an inscription: “FV CHE IDIO VOLLE .-. SARACHE IDIO VORRA .-. TIMORE DINFAMIA..E.SOLO DISIO.DONORE.- .PIANSI GIA QUELLO CHIO VOLLI.. POI CHIOLEBBI.”102 These are the final lines of a sonnet on the psychological tension between ambitions and reality, before reaching moralising conclusions.103 Finally, 99 On the life of Amerigo Benci, see Yves Renouard and Eugenio Ragni, “Amerigo Benci,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 8 (1966), www.treccani.it 100 The traits of a Lady with Unicorn in a sketch believed to be the first emblematic design for the verso of this panel recall those of Ginevra and the Carnations’ Madonna. Leonardo da Vinci, A Maiden with a Unicorn, ca.1474, brown ink on paper, 9.4 × 7.4 cm, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (WA1855.83.1); Madonna of the Carnation, 1478–80, oil on panel, 62 × 47.5 cm, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (7779, Bavarian State Painting Collection). 101 Garrard, Who Was Ginevra de Benci?, 34–35. That Ginevra was the prototype for this portrait is possible because Leonardo was not new to the use of ersatz architectures on the picture plane. E.g., Cat. 102: La Belle Ferronière. 102 “It was God’s will – it will be God’s will – fear of dishonour.and.only desire of honour – I decried what I wanted once I had it.” 103 “Chi non può quel che vuol, quel che può voglia;/Che quel che non si può, folle è volere./Adunque saggio l’uomo è da tenere,/Che da quel che non può suo voler toglia./Però che ogni diletto nostro e doglia/Sta in sì e no saper, voler, potere./Adunque quel sol può, che col dovere/Ne trae la ragion fuor di sua soglia./Nè sempre è da voler quel che l’uomo potè;/Spesso par dolce quel che torna amaro./Piansi già quel ch’io volsi, poi ch’io l’ebbi./Adunque tu, lettor di queste note,/S’a te vuoi esser buono e agli altri caro,/Vogli sempre poter quel che tu debbi.” The sonnet was once attributed to Leonardo but it is by the Florentine Antonio di Matteo di Meglio (1384–1448). Gustavo Uzielli, “Sopra un sonetto attribuito a Lionardo da Vinci,” in Ricerche Intorno a Leonardo da Vinci (Roma: Tipografia Salviucci, 1884).

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her undergarment seems comparable to the scarf around Ginevra’s neck because of the unusual colour black. Garrard has interpreted the scarf as a scapular of the monastic habit that nuns and laywomen wore to mark their religious membership. Although it does not resemble a scapular, I believe, with her, that its colour referred to the Murate, whose nuns had worn black since 1433.104 Ginevra was buried there in 1521 in the vest of the order, and she spent spells of time there throughout her life.105 Her life pattern was consistent with that of many women whose marriage was an imposition against their own spiritual and intellectual desires. It is plausible that Ginevra was among them, as was perhaps the Mazziere woman, their clothing and distant expression symbolising their ideal lifestyle. The scarf alone could have been indexical of this lifestyle. I have found this item around the neck of only two other likenesses. One is Poliziano’s Volscian Camilla, the Venetian humanist Cassandra Fedele in a late fifteenth-century woodcut and in a seventeenth-century etched copy of an original from the last decade of the Quattrocento [Fig. 5.10].106 Cassandra became ill after an unwanted marriage; and she had no children.107 The second is now in the Ashmolean Museum, and her scarf is white against a dark ensemble.108 The figure is removed from a landscape, itself uninhabited, by distance and by dark fabric in the style of the northern Italian Enthroned Madonnas, the implications of which I discuss in Chapter Six. She reveals herself to us from an open curtain of the same malleable fabric as her overgown, perhaps of wool edged with fur, over a black garment. Her ensemble altogether suggests a wealthy patrician society. Her somberness and the remoteness of her gaze fashion her closely à la Netherland. However, the spiritual mood is woven with a social subtext. As I have argued, curtains implied a synergic connection with the ideal spectator in the realm of memory. The left hand holds a folded piece of paper, whilst its middle finger points to rings on the right hand. Sabadino’s hagiography of Nogarola which was discussed in Chapter One describes black garments as indicative of women’s exemplary morality.109 It must be remembered that, in the female world, this reputation was a metonymy for the psychophysical 104 Garrard, Who Was Ginevra de Benci?, 43. See also Cordelia Warr, Dressing for Heaven: Religious Clothing in Italy 1215–1545 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2010), 59–60, 79, 84, 86, 119, 134–35. 105 Garrard, Who Was Ginevra de Benci?, 43; Alessandrini, Ginevra de Benci. 106 See also “Cassandra Fedele,” woodcut from J. F. Bergomensis – Frate Filippo Foresti, De claris selectisque mulieribus (Ferrara: Rossi, 1497), rep. in Maria Bandini Buti, Enciclopedia Biografica e Bibliografica Italiana: Poetesse e Scrittrici (Roma: Istituto Editoriale Italiano, 1941), vol. 1, 258. Cassandra is mentioned in Chapter One. 107 Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jnr. eds. Her Immaculate Hand (Birmingham, New York: Medieval and Renaissance Text Studies, 1992), 22. 108 Cat. 100. I also encourage a comparison between this portrait and Cat. 130 109 Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, “De Isota vergene da Nugarola,” in Gynevera de la clare donne, a cura di Corrado Ricci e A. Bacchi della Lega (Bologna: Romagnoli dall’Acqua, 1880), 173–180 (177–78).

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self-discipline that made intellectual education acceptable. Perhaps this woman is a widow, relinquishing her procreative duties. Perhaps she is simply a woman stressing a dimension beyond her social duties. As has been shown, humanism had produced a class of women whose yearning for education led to a lifestyle that by patriarchal standards was self-serving and unproductive. However, their activities did produce networks, both directly and circuitously. These were cultural, sometimes civic. Here is another sartorial metaphor by this society of fabrics connoisseurs: alongside the dowry of virtues, in Alessandra de’ Bardi (1412–1465) Vespasiano da Bisticci saw the embodiment of excellence, because her mother and nuns raised her to wear the “gown of virtue.”110 If the “dowry of humility” served both the secular and religious paths, the “gown of virtues” was the psychological armour of women who sought self-isolation, against the dominant feminine model. Only eighteen months after her marriage in 1484, Laura Cereta became a widow. It is worth recalling her appeal mentioned in Chapter One. As she retired from public life she asked to be conjured as an “an ordinary woman, drab of face and drably dressed – for I care more for letters than for flashy clothes.”111 The portraits of Ginevra and Cassandra visualise the same syllogism between sobriety in appearance, learning, and independence in the locus of chastity. As seen, this syllogism was effective because it was in semantic antithesis with biosocial ideals, and because it existed in a tradition that dressed female integrity with the gown of virtues and crowned it with learning. The present caption in Ginevra’s portrait, Virtutem Forma Decorat, f its tightly this interpretation because it is found in popular literature such as Barberino’s Del Reggimento: “Perfected form; You, f illed with knowledge, and garbed in chastity.”112 This chastity was cultivated, as Cereta explained when she fled “to the country” and in “tranquil leisure delighted in [humane] studies.”113 So did Ginevra, or at least this appears to be the case. In a sequence of biblical evocations, two sonnets that Lorenzo de’ Medici wrote in her praise show that, rather than for sentimental brooding after Bembo’s demise, she “fled […] the city / which is aflame with every 110 “L’abito delle virtù.” Vespasiano da Bisticci, “Vita di Alessandra de’ Bardi,” in Vite di Uomini Illustri Del Secolo XV Scritte da Vespasiano da Bisticci (Firenze: Barbera Bianchi e Comp., 1859), 525–58 (539). On Alessandra de Bardi: Ada Alessandrini, “Alessandra Bardi,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani Vol. 6 (1964), www.treccani.it 111 “Laura Cereta to Augustinus Aemilius: Curse Against the Ornamentation of Women,” in Her Immaculate Hand, 77-80, (79). Marco Palma, “Laura Cereta,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 23 (1979), www. treccani.it 112 “Assai compiuta forma; Voi piena di dotrina, Vestita d’onestae.” Francesco Barberino, Del Reggimento e Costumi di Donna, ed. Carlo Baudi di Vesme (Bologna: Gaetano Romagnoli, 1875), 9–10. 113 Laura Cereta to Augustinus Aemilius, 78.

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vice,” in order to follow the religious ardour that had caused her “blessed, happy madness […] oh, new citizen of Bethany.”114 The one surviving fragment of her sonnet, “I beg for mercy and I am a tiger of the mountain,” conveys a space of seclusion, away from urban distractions, analogous to the writings of the female humanists of the period. The fifteenth-century Camilla Scarampa declared in defiance, “blame me if you will for my hardness, since I must follow my chaste mind.”115 We should consider Leonardo’s use of the juniper. As well as recalling her name, it provides a botanical aura from which her chastity radiates. She comes close to the Este Princess, in effect identifying a visual niche for Venus Verticordia long before Dante Gabriele Rossetti (1828–1882) painted his own version.116 Garrard has re-evaluated a theory proposed in the 1930s by Emil Möller that this portrait was Leonardo’s gift to her family as a keepsake when she left her paternal home, and that it represents the psychosocial condition of the sitter.117 Undoubtedly, Leonardo’s style suited the feminine voice. Intriguingly, he routinely used the pyramid structure as a unifying compositional form but Ginevra, in its original size, adheres closely to the structure of Netherlandish female portraiture, which the other Italian three-quarter likenesses follow only loosely, preferring an alignment between the nose and the arm. I cannot explain the origin of this similarity, but it seems the most powerful point of the painting’s surrender to the Netherlandish spiritual mood. Intriguingly also, James Mundy has proposed that reverses painted as faux porphyry have funerary meanings, and that in Ginevra it was possibly sparked by the sitter’s ill health, whilst the twigs reimagined Verrocchio’s design for the Medici tomb. Thus, this could be a commission encompassing the sitter’s predicament and her eternal glory.118 Mundy’s and Garrand’s discussions imply that the sitter played an active role in the creation of this portrait. I believe that she did and that her portrait represents the most lucid visualisation in her 114 “Tu hai fuggito, […] la citta’ che arde sempre in ogni vizio”; “in questa santa tua felice insania, […] o nuova cittadina di Betania.” These sonnets CXLIX and CL are often singled out in Lorenzo’s main collection because of their religious content. Their sequence is unclear although their titles, Alla Medesima and Alla Ginevra de’ Benci, present the second as first and vice-versa, as also in the publication used for this analysis: Lorenzo de’ Medici, Tutte le Opere, a cura di Paolo Orvieto (Roma: Salerno Editrice, 1992), Tomo I, 1097–1100 (citations 1099 and 1100). 115 Cox, Women’s Writing, 47. 116 Dante Gabriele Rossetti (1828–1882), Venus Verticordia, 1864–1868, oil on canvas, 98.1 × 69.9, RussellCotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth, England (BORGM 01897). 117 Garrard, Who Was Ginevra de Benci?, 26 and 30. 118 James Mundy, “Porphyry and the Posthumous Fifteenth-Century Portrait,” Pantheon Internationale Jahreszeitschrift für Kunst XLVI (1998): 37-43 (40). This conclusion chimes with Kenneth Clark’s reflections on the subject’s melancholic expression, in Clark, Leonardo da Vinci, 27. Andrea del Verrocchio, Tomb of Giovanni and Piero de’ Medici, 1469–1472, porphyry marble, serpentine, bronze and pietra serena, h. 540 cm, San Lorenzo, Florence.

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time of a woman’s deconstruction of the verbal and visual culture that otherwise communicated commonplace gender expectations.

Conclusions The aim of this chapter was to reflect on how Italian portraiture related to the Netherlandish. These styles were in creative communication with each other, often stimulated by patronage, and they showed two sides of fifteenth-century modernity. Female portraiture seems especially suited to explore these differences. Three-quarter likenesses of women became popular in Italy in the 1470s. In some, the Netherlandish design is clear, but the pictorial characteristics are faithful to the sculptural and chromatic synthesis of the Italian style. The subjects showcase domestic identities, mirroring a trend found also in the profiles from ca.1470. The transitive communication of their uxorial competence is ostensible. The genesis of illusionistic devices is universally attributed to Netherlandish art. In Chapter Four I noted an early use of faux repoussoirs in royal portraiture. The origin of illusionistic backgrounds is also complex. In individual likenesses, and although already popular in donor portraiture, the Netherlanders used them from the early 1460s. The Italians used them some thirty years earlier, perhaps following aspects of Netherlandish paintings. However, we should not overlook cultural dissimilarities. For the Northerners, illusionistic backgrounds distracted from the message conveyed by individual portraiture. This was concerned with presenting the sitters in the context of their individual dimensions. Additionally, the narrative flavour of illusionistic settings did not agree with the portrayal of women. From late medieval times, Italian painters placed figures into contemporary settings that entwined moral and civic messages. By the 1470s, open vistas became regular features in female portraiture. These topographical expanses, I have explained, articulated the woman/nature simile: women embodied the primordial mother deity. Furthermore, the Netherlandish way of connecting interiors and exteriors perhaps influenced Italian portraiture but the Italians subjected this manner to compositional control also inspired by an imaginative reconstruction of mnemonic responses to how panel portraits were handled and stored. As in the profiles, some three-quarter likenesses are in an abstracted atmosphere, others locate the subjects between the panel’s border and architectural backgrounds. In both instances, the images intertwine a haptic and a panoptical quality that, in evoking the mnemonic occupancy of the sitter, present the subjects as ambassadors of socio-cultural cohesion. From north to south, women were conscious contributors in their respective portrait cultures. The most fruitful point of contact between Italian and Netherlandish

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female portraits appears when women’s voices speak through their spiritual identities. In the Italian likenesses, this spirituality, coupled with a deconstruction of the patriarchal cyphers of the marital and domestic culture, implied a critique of the androcentric system that thwarted their life choices. In donning the “gown of virtues,” these portraits claimed selfhood and psychic independence from male authority. This embryonic pro-woman position had its caveats, but we cannot underestimate how radical they stand in the context of their period. The earliest extant of this type is Ginevra de Benci.

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6. Fifteenth-Century Venice: Performing Imaging Abstract The portraiture hitherto discussed is representative of the modernisation of the genre in fifteen-century Europe. As urban professionalism settled within the spheres of power, it stimulated cultural and material by-products that also constitute the visual signs of these portraits. A study of these signs should consider the extent to which mimetic expressions betrayed the practical and psychological concerns of shifting social orders. Regarding female portraiture, it should also consider the extent to which the economy of this urban professionalism had benef ited from the patriarchal system. The Venetian culture of display suits an exploration of these questions. Therefore, it is the subject with which I shall conclude this book. This final chapter probes the effects of the laws on dowries and marriage on the Venetian patriciate. In treating this subject as a case study, I propose that portraiture as an object of display was complemented by symbolic actions in the public sphere, the theatre for self-imaging. Key words: Dowry – Performance– Sumptuary Laws – Theatre – Venice

In fifteenth-century Europe, a strengthened urban professionalism produced new dynamics within the spheres of power, and the development of an awareness of agency and personhood in its players. The portraits discussed in this book illustrate the complexity of this emerging outlook. However, this takeaway suggests a definition of mimesis from the perspective of the everyday efforts to consolidate personal and, in turn, collective accomplishments. Attention must be paid also to the fact that the economic and political gamut of the entrepreneurial groups that fuelled this professionalism had been enhanced by the exploitation of the patriarchal system. This chapter argues that the social and legal anxieties of the patriarchal system can be traced in women’s symbolic actions beyond the painted image in performative self-imaging. The Venetian culture of display suits this last task, and further, its portraiture shows a fruitful reinterpretation of the Netherlandish style. Therefore, it is the subject with which I shall conclude this book.

Toreno, E., Netherlandish and Italian Female Portraiture in the Fifteenth Century. Gender, Identity, and the Tradition of Power. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463728614_ch06

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As explained, the number of surviving fifteenth-century male likenesses across Europe is conspicuously higher than that of women because it reflects men’s multidimensional experiences as they aged in life: marriage, productive friendships, professional networking, and so on. This phenomenon is therefore the by-product of patriarchy but not necessarily of an anti-women agenda, as has been argued. For instance, in Venice it has been interpreted as the ambition in a taut patriarchal environment to eradicate associations between women and family lineage.1 A comparison across the regional clusters of the extant female portraits suggests instead a story that is yet to be told. For example, from Siena, only three likenesses from the cusp of the century have survived but this city-state had a reputation for a relatively progressive gender attitude.2 From Venice, by contrast, we have the healthy number of twenty-three likenesses that place the Serenissima only second to Florence with forty-seven, and above the Milanese twenty-two. Therefore, in seeking answers, we must consider local conditions. Women’s involvement in domestic management and charitable activities integrated them in public discourse; and everyday activities and public events integrated them in the mise en scène of life. In Venice, patrician women put on a compelling “see me, see me not” performance, which I propose to interpret as the effect of the marriage market on dowry and inheritance regulations; the increased scrutiny of matrilineal lineages; the socio-economic preoccupations of the Republic; the amplification in the Dogaressa’s figurehead of the civic necessity of marriage. 1 Research shows that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century male portraits combined are approx. 90% of the total output. The reported one-hundred and thirteen portraits of men and fourteen of women that Titian (active ca.1506–d.1576) painted in his career give a measure of this disproportion. See Rona Goffen, Titian’s Women (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997). On the proposed explanation regarding patriarchy, see Peter Humfrey, “The Portrait in Fifteenth-Century Venice,” in The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini, eds. Keith Christiansen and Stefan Weppelmann, exh.cat. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 48–63 (60); Rona Goffen, “Crossing the Alps: Portraiture in Renaissance Venice,” in Renaissance Venice and the North: Crosscurrents in the Time of Bellini, Dürer, and Titian, eds. Bernard Aikema and Beverly Louise Brown, exh.cat. (New York: Rizzoli, 1999), 115–131 (116–17); Elfriede Regina Knauer, “Portrait of a Lady? Some Reflections of Images of Prostitutes from the Later Fifteenth Century,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 47 (2000): 95–117. On fifteenth-century Venetian portraiture, see also Peter Humfrey, ed. Venice and the Veneto (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Bernard Aikema and Beverly Louise Brown, eds. Renaissance Venice and the North: Crosscurrents in the Time of Bellini, Dürer, and Titian, exh.cat.(New York: Rizzoli, 1999); Patricia Fortini Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998); Patricia Fortini Brown, “Caste, Class, and Gender,” in Art and Life in Renaissance Venice (London: Laurence King Publishing Limited, 1997), 143–67. 2 Not for lack of trying, I only found Cat. 92, 93, 94. On Siena, see Diana Norman, Painting in Late Medieval and Renaissance Siena: 1250–1550 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003); Diana Norman, Siena and the Virgin: Art and Politics in a Late Medieval City State (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999).

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How they “performed” these conditions is a case study in self-imaging as symbolic action by the disenfranchised. I will introduce this concept with a brief overview of portraiture in Quattrocento Venice.

Considerations about Venetian Portraiture In the fifteenth century, the Serenissima was one of the oldest international powers. Its trading and territorial dominions stretched across the entire Mediterranean Sea and beyond. Yet, rising new markets and trade routes were weakening its economic position. Engaged in an expansionistic war in Dalmatia and in a conflict with the Ottomans over maritime control, she would soon lose her Eastern dominions. The disruptive events of the Italian Wars (1494–1559), especially the League of Cambrai (1508–1516), jeopardised its survival in the terraferma. Nostalgia for a bygone era characterised the local culture, known for its advanced humanism that also possessed a conservative, pedagogical attitude that not even the large influx of foreigners destabilised. It seems, in fact, that foreign presence reinforced the local parochialism.3 Patricia Fortini Brown has suggested that the thirteenth-century mosaics of St Mark may be the earliest local examples of portraiture, although hieratic and imaginary. 4 Although there is evidence of steady demand for secular portraits in frescoes, on paper, in tombs, miniatures, and medals during the fifteenth century,5 3 Venetian society was divided into into nobili, cittadini, popolani, but recent debates have indicated that social expectations caused these categories to intermingle. On early modern Venice, see Stanley Chojnacki’s scholarship. Also, Dennis Romano, Patricians and Popolani: The Social Foundations of the Venetian Renaissance State (1987; rep., Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 2019); Alexander Cowan, Marriage, Manners and Mobility in Early Modern Venice (England and USA: Ashgate, 2007); Anne Jacobson Schutte et al., Time, Space and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe (Kirksville, Mo: Truman State University Press, 2001); Margaret L. King, Humanism, Venice and Women: Essays on the Italian Renaissance (Great Britain and USA: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2005); Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis, eds. Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy (London and New York: Longman, 1998); Patricia Fortini Brown, “Venezianità: The Otherness of the Venetians,” in Art and Life in Renaissance Venice, 9–37; James Grubb, “Memory and Identity: Why Venetians Didn’t Keep Ricordanze,” Renaissance Studies 8, no. 4, Venice and the Veneto (December 1994): 375–387; Margaret L. King, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986); Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Edward Muir, “Images of Power: Art and Pageantry in Renaissance Venice,” The American Historical Review 84, no. 1 (February 1979): 16–52; Margaret L. King, “The Patriciate and the Intellectuals: Power and Ideas in Quattrocento Venice,” Societas 5, no. 4 (1975): 295–312. 4 Fortini Brown Venetian Narrative Painting, 9–30, 220 and 227–31. 5 E.g., Michele Giambono, Portrait of a Man, ca.1432–1434, tempera and silver on wood, 53 × 40 cm, Musei di Stada Nuova, Palazzo Rosso, Genova; Jacopo Bellini, Jacopo Antonio Marcello, 1453, tempera on vellum, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris; Antonio Rizzo, Tomb of Doge Niccolò Tron, ca.1476–1480, marble,

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the surviving items indicate a sudden increase in commissions for private and official likenesses during the last quarter of the period, prompting John PopeHennessy in 1963 to set the 1470s as the terminus post quem.6 The phenomenon is generally explained as a response to the Netherlandish influences acquired from direct contacts with Burgundian culture,7 and from Antonello da Messina, who arrived in Venice in 1474, and whose paintings have an undisputed northern flavour.8 The studies on sixteenth-century inventories of private Venetian palaces suggest that families hung their portraits in the porteghi next to sacred images, and for the same twofold purpose that underscored donor portraiture: they displayed their virtues to their present and future audiences, and they sought salvific effects from a proximity with the sacred figures. As in the Netherlandish culture, individual portraiture, in fact, appeared to be less popular than donor portraiture.9 Similarly, individual portaits of civic figures hung on the halls of the Republic’s civic buildings, alongside civic commissions for large narrative paintings replete with likenesses of real people as the witnesses of miraculous events in the heart of the city. As the Contarini story in Chapter Three summarises, the Venetians romanticised their prosperity as the convergence of individual accomplishments into one common good through divine blessing. It follows that commissions for individual portraits for private use rose but in the shadow of those inspired by collective interests.10 Are we to find in the former the same sensitivity to public ideals? Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice; Leonardo Bellini (act. 1443–1490), Promissione of Cristoforo Moro, 1465, British Library, London, Mss. 15816, f. 5°; the medallic portraits, including his own, of Giovanni Boldù (active 1454–1475); Anonymous (Venetian), Portrait of a Young Woman, 15th cent., bronze, Procuratie Nuove Museo Correr. Consider also the lost decoration of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Doge’s Palace, with a genealogy of portrait-types of the Doges from the ninth century onwards. Perhaps these likenesses formed the basis for the profile portraits of Doges made in the workshop of Gentile Bellini. Humfrey, Venice, 52. 6 John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (London and New York: Phaidon Press Ltd, 1963), 19. 7 Peter Stabel, “Venice and the Low Countries: Commercial Contacts and Intellectual Inspirations,” in Renaissance Venice and the North, 31–45; Lorne Campbell, “Notes on Netherlandish Pictures in the Veneto in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” The Burlington Magazine 123, no. 941 (August 1981): 467–73. Critics have also suggested that Follower of Van Eyck, Portrait of Marco Barbarigo, ca.1449, oil on oak 24.2 × 16 cm, National Gallery, London (NG696), commissioned by the sitter when he was working abroad, stirred the interest for Netherlandish painting in Venice. Oskar Bätschmann, Giovanni Bellini (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2008), 23; Humfrey, The Portrait, 50. 8 Even Giorgio Vasari recorded this influence. Giorgio Vasari, “Vita di Antonello,” in Delle vite de’ scvltori, pittori, et architettori che sono stati da Cimabue in quà, 2 vols. (Fiorenza: Giunti, 1568), vol.1, 375–78. This is where Vasari attributes the invention of the oil technique to Jan van Eyck. 9 Margaret A. Morse, “Domestic Portraiture in Early Modern Venice: Devotion to Family and Faith,” in Domestic Devotions in Early Modern Italy, eds. Maya Corry, Marco Faini, Alessia Meneghin (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 117–38; and its bibliography. 10 Rona Goffen, Giovanni Bellini (New Haven, Conn, and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 197; Fortini Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting, 54–5; Norbert Huse and Wolfgang Wolters, The Art of Renaissance

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Contemporary texts give us a lively account of a domestic portrait culture. In private collections, Marcantonio Michiel saw genealogical images dating back to the fourth generation, and likenesses by painters that included Antonello, Giovanni Bellini (ca.1436/38–1516) and Jacometto Veneziano, an established painter according to textual references as Michiel’s diary, but nowadays known only from a handful of paintings.11 Giorgio Vasari praised Alvise Vivarini (1445/46–1503/05) as a portraitist with the ability to imitate nature.12 He wrote about many ritratti di naturale by the Bellini workshop, from father Jacopo (ca.1400–ca.1470) to sons Giovanni and Gentile (ca.1429–1507). Giovanni seems to have started as a portrait painter, and Gentile made many civic portraits.13 Their fame even reached the Turkish court of Sultan Mehmet II (1432–1481), whom Gentile portrayed, having been summoned for that purpose. Vasari describes how Giovanni’s talent ignited interest in individual portraits amongst people “of some social standing.”14 Giovanni seems to have been a prominent portraitist of women in and outside of Venice, such as “the small picture of a woman painted in quarter length from life,” which Michiel noted in the collection of Taddeo Contarini.15 His clients were from the Italian elite. He is reported to have painted female likenesses that Isabella d’Este (1474–1539) compared in bravura to Leonardo’s Cecilia Gallerani.16 According Venice: Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, 1460–1590 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 204. 11 In addition to Michiel’s praises, the prominent Tuscan Girolama Corsi, married into the Ramos family and mentioned in Chapter One, wrote the sonnet Ad Iacometum Pictorem. In a letter dated September 1497 to the court of Francesco Gonzaga (1466–1519), the humanist Michele di Paciola called Jacometto “the first man in the world” in relation to his miniature work. Both Corsi and Michiel mention his colouring manners, thereby indicating that this was a characteristic of his work. Anonimo Morelliano, Notizia d’Opere di Disegno nella Prima Metà del Sec. XVI, Esistenti in Padova, Cremona, Milano, Pavia, Bergamo, Crema, e Venezia Scritta da un Anonimo di Quel Tempo (Iacopo Morelli: Bassano, 1800). And its trans.: Marcantonio Michiel, The Anonimo: Notes on Pictures and Works of Art in Italy, ed. George C. Williamson, trans. Paolo Mussi, 2012 ed. (London: George Bell and Sons, London, 1903). Rosario Contarino, “Girolama Corsi,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 29 (1983), www.treccani.it. And Christiansen and Weppelmann, eds. The Renaissance Portrait, 344–45 (Cat. 151); Rosella Lauber, “’Opera Perfettissima’: Marcantonio Michiel e La Notizia d’Opere di Disegno,” in Il Collezionismo a Venezia e nel Veneto ai Tempi della Serenissima, eds. Bernard Aikema, Rosella Lauber, Max Seiled, exh.cat. (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Floremz Max-Plank Institut: Marsilio, 2005), 77–116 (97–100). 12 This is in Vasari, “Vita di Jacopo, Giovanni e Gentile Bellini,” in Delle Vite, vol. 1, 429–36 (433). 13 Vasari, Vita di Jacopo, Giovanni e Gentile Bellini, 431–32. 14 “Chi era in qualche grado.” Vasari, Vita di Jacopo, Giovanni e Gentile Bellini, 435; and 434–35 on the Sultan’s portrait: Gentile Bellini, The Sultan Mehmet II, 1480, Oil (19th-century repaint) on canvas, perhaps transferred from wood, 69.9 × 52.1 cm, The National Gallery, London (NG3099). 15 “el quadretto della donna retratta al naturale insino alle spalle fu de mano de Zuan Bellino.” Anonimo, Notizia, 65. 16 Isabella d’Este sent a letter to Cecilia Gallerani, asking for her portrait painted by Leonardo da Vinci, in order to compare it to others by Giovanni Bellini. Cecilia replied, warning the receiver that the likeness

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to Vasari, Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) commissioned from Giovanni the portrait of one of his mistresses,17 and Giovanni painted enfant prodige Cassandra Fedele at the age of sixteen.18 His skills became also the catalyst for a fictional trial of an adulterous woman in a novella about illicit love that plays on the trope of the substitutive function of portraiture.19

Venetian Female Portraiture Of the twenty-three examples of Venetian female likenesses, only three are in the profile format. These are also the earliest.20 Their small sizes confirm Michiel’s remarks and the oldest of the three, with its coat-of-arms in the upper left corner, recalls Vasari’s comments about genealogical portraiture. The other two are Venetian “icons of urbanitas.” Twenty portraits in three-quarter view from the last quarter of the century vindicate Pope-Hennessy’s observation.21 Five are attributed to Jacometto.22 Four could be from the circle of Giovanni Bellini or by the great narrative painter Vittore Carpaccio (1460/66?–1525/26).23 Four are authored to Carpaccio. Among them, one now in Denver could be the likeness of the Tuscan literata Girolama Corsi, also discussed in Chapter One.24 The subject is depicted holding a book before a backdrop that typifies that of the enthroned Virgin in the Venetian Sacre Conversazioni, no longer resembled her. Janice Shell and Grazioso Sironi, “Cecilia Gallerani: Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine,” Artibus et Historiae 13, no. 25 (1992): 47–66 (49–50). See also Humfrey, Venice, 62. 17 Vasari, Vita di Jacopo, Giovanni e Gentile Bellini, 435. 18 This portrait is lost but was probably the prototype for her funerary effigy and a portrait in an early edition of her writing published by G. F. Tommasini in 1636. See Franco Pignatti, “Cassandra Fedele,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 45 (1995), www.treccani.it 19 Niccolò Liburnio, Le selvette di Messer Nicolao Lyburnio (Vinegia: I. de Penci da Lecco, 1513); Una Roman d’Elia, “Niccolò Liburnio on the Boundaries of Portraiture in Early Cinquecento,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 37, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 323–335. 20 Cat. 10, 11, 12. They could have been six but the authenticity of two was not verifiable; and one portrays a fourteenth-century sitter. 21 This discussion omits Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), Portrait of a Venetian Woman, 1506–1507, oil on poplar panel, 28.5 × 21.5 cm, Dahlem Museum, Berlin (557G); Portrait of a Young Venetian Woman, 1505, oil on elm panel, 35 × 26 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (GG_6440). Dürer painted these likenesses upon his visit to Venice in 1505–1507. Katherine Luber Crawford, Albrecht Dürer and the Venetian Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 22 Cat. 110 to 114 included but Cat. 112 could be an allegory of prostitution rather than a subject proper. 23 Cat. 107, 108, 109, 122. On Carpaccio, G. Nepi Scirè, ed. Carpaccio: Pittore di Storie, exh.cat. (Venezia: Marsilio, 2004). 24 Cat. 119. In a sonnet, Girolama expressed her satisfaction with a portrait of her by Carpaccio. The sonnet, “Quel che l’ingegno suo volse mostrare,” praises the resemblance of the likeness to the original. Contarino, Girolama Corsi; Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy 1400–1650 (Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 2008), 50–51.

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and that appears in another likeness now in Boston.25 One portrait is attributed to Francesco Pietro Bissolo (1475–1554).26 A portrait by Gentile Bellini shows the subject in half-length. It is probably a commission by the sitter, Caterina Cornaro (1454–1510).27 The remaining five are currently attributed to Leonardo Boldrini (active 1452–d.1497/98), Marco Marziale (active ca.1489–1507), Marco Baisati (1496–1530), Jacopo de’ Barbari (active 1500–d.1516?), and Vincenzo Catena (ca.1480–1530).28 These likenesses have a subtle Netherlandish flavour: small panel sizes, distinctive traits, austere mood, overall economy of colours, and a more or less accurate triangular structure. Their subtext is, however, alien to that of the Netherlandish type. For instance, an unknown subject now in the Borghese collection is dressed in the local fashion of a wealthy woman [Fig. 6.1]. Her naked shoulders propose an erotic identity that is not unique in Venetian renditions of women. Consider by the same artist the Two Ladies at the Balcony (ca.1490–1495), once thought to represent sex workers, but now socially rehabilitated.29 Reflecting on my earlier discussions on the gaze in female portraiture, her piercing expression invites the viewer to consider the sitter’s own psychosocial identity. A triple string of silver links and a pearl necklace, a symbol of chastity, decorate her nude flesh. Combined with the erotic overtone, the likeness seems to celebrate the synergy between the aesthetic experience of the female body and wifely virtues. In his infinite wisdom on the ideal conduct of married women, the Venetian Francesco Barbaro, seen in Chapter One, explained: “[B]y maintaining an honest gaze in their eyes, they can communicate most significantly as in painting, which is called silent poetry.”30 This painting’s neutral background is predominant in coterminous Venetian portraiture, perhaps inspired by Netherlandish counterparts arguably as much as by the historical Venetian attachment to Byzantine art, where the figures are 25 Cat. 120. The others are Cat. 118 and Cat. 121. However, the attribution of the latter to this painter is also problematic because the location has been unknown for some time. 26 Cat. 117. On Bissolo, Maria Maddalena Palmeggiano, “Francesco Bissolo,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 10 (1968), www.treccani.it 27 Cat. 116. Vasari mentions a portrait of “Caterina reina di cipro” painted by Iacopo Bellini. Vasari, Vita di Jacopo, Giovanni e Gentile Bellini, 430. On Bellini, see Otto Pächt, Michael Pächt and Margareta Vyoral-Tschapka, Venetian Painting in the Fifteenth Century: Jacopo, Gentile and Giovanni Bellini (London: Harvey Miller Publisher, 2003). 28 Cat. 115, 123, 126, 124, 125. 29 Vittore Carpaccio, Ladies on a Balcony, ca.1490–1495, oil and tempera on panel, 94.5 × 63.5 cm, Museo Civico Correr (Cl. I n. 0046). On this panel see Susannah Rutherglen, “Painting at the Threshold: Pictures for Doors in Renaissance Venice,” The Art Bulletin 98, no. 4 (December 2016): 438–465 (445–51); Simona Cohen, “’The Enigma of Carpaccio’s ‘Venetian Ladies’,” Renaissance Studies 19, no. 2 (April 2005): 150–184. 30 Francesco Barbaro, “On Wifely Duties,” in The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society, eds. Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt, trans. Benjamin G. Kohl (US: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 189–228 (204). These portraits are much more nuanced than Goffen’s interpretation that “all patricians adopt the same facial expression of impassivity.” Goffen, Crossing the Alps, 121.

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shrouded in abstracted atmospheres. If we also consider the two likenesses, whose backdrops recall those of the enthroned Madonnas, these compositional choices created spiritual dimensions. Such dimensions were not claimed as private property, as in the Netherlandish counterparts, but were inherent in the venezianità of this proud Republic. The two portraits-with-landscape in this group, both by Jacometto, confirm this point. One shows the subject on her heraldic right, a mark of respect towards the sitter, which she asserts with her unhesitating gaze [Fig. 6.2].31 Her hairstyle is Venetian and her dress, exposing her shoulders, is extravagantly rich. Her corset of stiff, patterned ochre fabric, perhaps damask velvet, is replete with pearls, and a sash around its outer seam is embellished with star-shaped cutouts with pearls and other gems. A vezzo of brown opaque stones, perhaps quartz, decorates her neck. Behind, a landscape contains two settlements separated by water. At equal distance from the figure, one appears to be a monastery, a small jetty indicating its access; the other is a fortified city with towers. I have argued for an interpretation of Italian female portraits-with-landscape as metaphors for biosocial fertility. Consistently, in this likeness the outline of the cleavage merges with that of distant hills. Naturally, the central-Italian landscape is replaced with that of the laguna. Its explicit secular and religious complementarity echoes the local conservatism, whereby the experience of the image morphs into that of local traditions. Poignantly, this portrait has a backing panel painted with the image of a saint, perhaps Venice’s patron Mark, holding a book. A second portrait-with-landscape is so small as to approach miniatures [Fig. 6.3]. It is universally assumed that, with a male companion, Michiel saw this item in the Contarini collection: There is a small portrait of Messer Alvise Contarini of M […] who died some years ago, and in the same picture there is the portrait of a nun of San Secondo. On the cover of these portraits is represented a landscape, and the leather case of the whole picture is adorned with gold foliage. It is a perfect work by Iacometto.32

It has been suggested that the small island surrounded by walls on the left, levelled with the woman’s breasts, may represent San Secondo. San Secondo was a convent located on the laguna between Venice and Mestre. It housed the daughters of 31 Cat. 114. This painting is well documented online, under Jacometto Veneziano, in the collection Polesden Lacey, Surrey (Accredited Museum of the National Trust Collections, UK). 32 “vi è un ritratto piccolo di M. Alvise Contarini q. M […] che morse già anni, e nell’istesso quadretto v’è il ritratto d’una monaca di San Secondo, e sopra la coperta di detti ritratti un paese, e nella coperta di cuoro di detto quadretto fogliami di oro masenato, di mano di Iacometto, opera perfettissima.” Anonimo, Notizia, 84. Jacometto Veneziano, Portrait of Alvise Contarini (?), ca.1485–1895, oil on wood, 11.7 × 8.5 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1975.1.86).

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prominent Venetian families, including Michiel’s two sisters. The subject resembles another individual likeness, and they appear garbed in religious uniform that, however, in revealing naked skin seems incompatible with the religious vocation. Perhaps this detail did not shock Michiel because it illustrated the image of a future bride, whilst still cloistered for her education. Or perhaps the image portrayed a young widow entering the convent, since his description of the object infers that the male companion was a posthumous effigy.33 These analyses confirm that female portraiture in Venice painted local sitters, possibly patricians, and Vasari’s account that the wealthy habitually recorded their family members. They also show confident eroto-connubial identities that, with topographical and sartorial references, stand as objects status of the Venetian society.34 In proposing this conclusion, I refer back to Chapters Two and Three, where I discussed how marriage donora in paintings drew the viewers into the world of monetary exchanges, and activated a phenomenological perception of the experiences and necessity of social bonds. The same items certainly evoked equal reactions when seen on the person. Thus, in painting as in life, women carried the weight of the system of exchanges, social and monetary, for which they were the catalysts. To explain this point, below is a survey of women’s legal status and dowry regulations with special attention to Venice. The analysis of the remaining portraits in the catalogue finishes here, as I invite the reader to approach them heuristically. With the section below, I imply that mimetic efforts were not confined to reproductive media: the public theatre was also a platform for women’s symbolic actions.

Women’s Legal Status with Focus on Venice a. Overview The history of marriage provisions dates as far back as Mediterranean 3000BCE. Over time, these became dowry, dower, inheritance, and bespoke gifts. Once 33 The similar likeness is Cat.111. Interestingly, the church of San Secondo was one of the chosen locations for nuptial blessings. In Cowan Marriage, Manners and Mobility, 158–61. On these interpretative complexities, see Lauber, Opera Perfettissima, 98–99. And Giancarla Periti, In the Courts of Religious Ladies: Art, Vision, and Pleasure in Italian Renaissance Convents (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 59–60; Christiansen and Weppelmann, eds. The Renaissance Portrait, 346-49; Humfrey, Venice and the Veneto, 347–48; David Alan Brown et al, Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo’s Ginevra de Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women, exh.cat. (Washington, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), 154–57 (Cat. 19). 34 Goffen suggested that these portraits do not represent Venetian women and that “when different portrait types were employed for different subjects, the distinction was determined […] not by the subject’s sex.” I disagree. Goffen, Crossing the Alps, 118.

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institutionalised, Roman law established that women’s endowments in marriage were to be returned to the natal family upon divorce or death. Later, the northern European peoples conflated into the Munt both the dower, of which the bride was the beneficiary, and what they called meta.35 Initially negligible in value, a plain nil amongst the Francs, by the fifteenth century the dower had increased to match one-third, sometimes half of the value of the dowry, in money, jewels, dresses, and land.36 In the later Middle Ages, a counter-dower also became customary. This was a token to the future bride from her future groom. Still active in the sixteenth century in areas such as central Italy and Corsica, it was possibly one reaction to the termination of the Morgengabe and was a financial cushion for wives and offspring in case of widowhood.37 How patrilineal inheritance was acquired depended on the caste of the spouses, local demographics, indigenous needs, and economic interests. Among the upper classes tended to prevail the “lineage system,” which kept the patrimonies of the spouses separate because largely based on the Roman principle of the patria

35 Siwan Anderson, “The Economics of Dowry and Brideprice,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 21, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 151–174, (152 and 161–62). Also, Christine Meek, ed. Women in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe (Dublin and Ireland: Four Courts Press, 2000); Zoë A. Schneider, “Women Before the Bench: Female Litigants in Early Modern Normandy,” French Historical Studies 23, no.1 (Winter 2000): 1–32; Maristella Botticini, “A Loveless Economy? Intergenerational Altruism and the Marriage Market in a Tuscan Town, 1415–1436,” The Journal of Economic History 59, no. 1 (March 1999): 104–121; Thomas Kuehn, “Person and Gender in the Laws,” in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, eds. Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis (London and New York: Longman, 1998), 87–106; Anthony Mohlo, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); Thomas Kuehn, Law, Family and Women: Towards a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Women (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991); Charles M. Radding, The Origins of Medieval Jurisprudence, Pavia and Bologna 850–1150 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988); Jacques Anthony Pluss, “Reading Case Law Historically: A Consilium of Baldus de Ubaldis on Widows and Dowries,” The American Journal of Legal History 30, no. 3 (July 1986), 241–265; Elizabeth M. Craik, ed. Marriage and Property (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1984); Julius Kirshner and Anthony Molho, “The Dowry Fund and the Marriage Market in Early Quattrocento Florence,” The Journal of Modern History 50, no. 3 (September 1978): 403–438; Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, E. P. Thompson, eds., Family and Inheritance, Rural Society in Western Europe 1200–1800 (Cambridge, London, NY, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Antonio Pertile, Storia del Diritto Italiano dalla Caduta dell’Impero Romano alla Codificazione, 2nd ed. (Bologna: Arnaldo Forni Ed, 1966), vol. III, 314. An overview of the subject through case studies is in Jutta Sperling, Shona Kelly Wray, eds., Across the Religious Divide: Women, Property, and Law in the Wider Mediterranean, ca.1300–1800 (New York and Oxon: Routledge, 2011). 36 Pertile, Storia del Diritto Italiano, 303–304 and 327–330. On land donation, see Goody et al., Family and Inheritance, 16; Ann J. Kettle, “‘My Wife Shall Have It’: Marriage and Property in the Wills and Testaments of Late Mediaeval England,” in Marriage and Property, 89–103. Kettle highlights the Europe-wide tendency to contravene the duty of the dower and the feeble legal procedures to enforce this right. She also points to cases of husbands relinquishing part of their goods to negotiate peace with their unloved wives. 37 Pertile, Storia del Diritto Italiano, 314.

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potestas.38 However, husbands controlled their wives’ possessions, and there were many instances in which the rights of the former over the latter clashed with her natural and legal bonds with her own family. Among examples are the reclaim of dowry and inheritance after divorce. Then, in-laws, emancipated children, even kin could try to embezzle these assets, especially when their restitution caused impoverishment. Women could even be forced to abandon their offspring.39 In contrast, the “community system,” preferred by the less wealthy, combined individual patrimonies that, thus, became stronger, resulting also in stronger marriages and safer remarriages in widowhood.40 An example was Flanders, where, since the eleventh century, communities had endorsed the equal division of property, ensuring that women had the same inheritance rights as their male siblings did, and enjoyed a share of marital assets. The benefit was threefold: the marriage assets received better protection from confiscation in case of bankruptcy; arranged marriages were less needed; dowries tended not to inflate. However, the lineage system still prevailed among the wealthy Flemish. 41 From the fourteenth century, women inherited matrilineal patrimony. Studies on Venice and Florence show how, in some areas, it increased over time and how, alongside other non-paternal inheritance, it contributed to inflating dotal values. In Venice, for instance, it came to amount to a quarter of the overall dowry. 42 Male guardians oversaw women’s legal transactions. 43 The concept of guardianship originated in the mundualdus of the Lombard law. In the Middle Ages, it penetrated areas controlled by Roman law and became established by the late fourteenth century. Mundualdi were husbands of married women, and fathers or 38 The Institutes of Justinian, int. and trans. Thomas Collett Sandars (1728; rep., Aberdeen: The University Press, 1962), 151–53. 39 Klapisch-Zuber has likened their condition to that of “passing guests” and “cruel mothers.” Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “The Cruel Mother,” in Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 117–31. See also Francis William Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori and Rucellai (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977). 40 As in England between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries. See Goody et al., Family and Inheritance, 11, and 23–25. 41 David Nicholas, Medieval Flanders (London and New York: Longman, 1992), 314–15. 42 Stanley Chojnacki, “Dowries and Kinsmen in Early Renaissance Venice,” in Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 132–152. On the consequences of maternal inheritance in Venice, see Donald E. Queller and Thomas F. Madden, “Father of the Bride: Fathers, Daughters, and Dowries in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly 46, no. 4 (Winter, 1993): 685–711; On Florence, see Sharon T. Strocchia, “Remembering the Family: Women, Kin and Commemorative Masses in Renaissance Florence,” Renaissance Quarterly 42, no.4 (Winter 1989): 635–654. 43 Among the examples are the widows and nuns of Siena, who could even directly commission artworks. Norman, Painting in Late Medieval and Renaissance Siena, 21.

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brothers of nubile or widowed women, especially where the patria potestas was most felt. Clerics and lawyers were also on the list of options. 44 Of course, legal restrictions and guardianship frustrated women’s personal rights and space, and even safety. Yet, the very protean nature of the marriage system could empower them to use to their own advantage the inalienable rights to own the dowry, and the entitlement to receive the support of their direct kin in widowhood. Furthermore, if all the men of their family died, women acquired dowry, paternal and maternal inheritance, dower, and husband’s inheritance including their usufruct. 45 Additionally, in lieu of their absent husbands, they managed their children’s inheritance.46 True, mundualdi would oversee all their actions but women had the right to choose such persons and the length of each appointment. Notarial documents show that at the heart of their personal decisions were their ties to their own children. For instance, Luca Mattei dei Firidolfi’s mother devolved her dowry to him so that he could set up his own business. Soon after, he started his ricordanze, failing to mention his own father but providing her genealogy: “Mattea, my mother and daughter of the late Andrea del Benino,” somehow acknowledging the benefits that he received from her financial and loving support.47 Such instances of emotional and economic reward call for attention. b. Dowry Under the Emperor Justinian (r.527–565), Novel 117 of the Corpus Iuris Civilis made the dowry mandatory for patrician marriages, together with a written proof of the dotal agreement. 48 This decree created the legal conditions for demonstrable

44 On female guardianship, see Tovah Bender, “Their Fathers’ Daughters: Women’s Social Identities in Fifteenth-century Florence,” Journal of Family History 38, no. 4 (2013): 371–386; Marvin Becker, “The Italian Urban Experience,” in Major Problems in the History of the Italian Renaissance, 1–8; Thomas Kuehn, “Understanding Gender Inequality in Renaissance Florence: Personhood and Gifts of Maternal Inheritance by Women,” Journal of Women’s History 8, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 58–80, (esp. 63–65); Thomas Kuehn, “‘Cum Cunsensu Mundualdi’: Legal Guardianship in Quattrocento Florence,” in Law, Family and Women, 212–37; John Anthony Crook, Law and Life in Rome (New York: Cornell University Press, 1967), 103. 45 Robert C. Davis, “The Geography of Gender in the Renaissance,” in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, eds. Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis (London and New York: Longman, 1998), 19–38. The possibilities and hopes generated by the rights of inheritance are illustrated in the case of Lena di Francesco di Giovanni, in Thomas Kuehn, “‘As if Conceived within a Legitimate Marriage’: A Dispute Concerning Legitimation in Quattrocento Florence,” in Law, Family and Women, 176–193. 46 Schneider, Women before the Bench, 9. 47 Bender, Their Fathers’ Daughters, 6. 48 James A. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 114.

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unions, harder divorce processes, and stronger protection against the rejection of brides after the first sexual intercourse. 49 From the early twelfth century, as urbanisation expanded and the entrepreneurial groups became socio-political players, the dowry received stronger legal protection. It became a woman’s entitlement and lifetime possession, to pass to her chosen beneficiaries upon her death. As described by Thomas Kuehn, “to force a woman to alienate her dotal property ran against the intent of a lex (Ubi adhuc, CA. 5.12.29) that did not want women left undowered,” particularly after divorce or widowhood.50 Husbands were the recipients of its revenues, considered contributions towards the onus of the domestic economy. However, it was protected from legal or criminal actions against husbands, including confiscation of patrimony, bankruptcy, and exile.51 Additionally, anything taken directly from the dowry was a loan, and the dowry itself was refundable in death and divorce. In the lineage system, modes of repayment followed a maze of legal codicils entrenched in a logic of protectionism and could carry on literally for centuries.52 Because of the risks associated with its recovery, the law also used ad hoc deliberations to protect female claimants.53 As middling class families became richer, dowries also attracted marriage alliances with members of higher socio-political standings, including the now endemically financially strained aristocracy. Consequently, the marriage market became a battleground of competitions that caused dotal inflation.54 From the early fifteenth century, banking services offered saving schemes that allowed fathers to buy shares at the births of daughters and claim their profits in due time. These were among the services that knitted together the private and public interests of the 49 P. D. King, Law and Society in the Visigothic Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), esp. Chap. 8, 222–50. 50 Thomas Kuehn, “Family Solidarity in Exile and in Law: Alberti Lawsuits of the early Quattrocento,” Speculum 78, no. 2 (April 2003): 421–439 (433). 51 See, for example Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi in Chapter Two or Tanai de’ Nerli. A supporter of the exiled De Medici in Savonarola’s times, he had all his possessions confiscated. His children lost their paternal patrimony, but his wife’s dowry was left untouched. See Marino Sanuto, I Diari di Marino Sanuto (MCCCCXVI-MCXXXIII), Autografo Marciano Ital. cl. VII codd. CDXIX.CDLXXVII, eds. Rinaldo Fulin, Federico Stefani, Niccolò Barozzi, Guglielmo Berchet, Marco Allegri, auspice ‘La R. Deputazione Veneta di Storia Patria, F. Stefani (Venezia: F. Stefani, 1879), vol. 1, 572. 52 An overview of these issues is in Pluss, Reading Case Law Historically. 53 E.g., dowries given by members outside of the family or reclaimed by widows could furnish favourable conditions for female f inancial emancipation. See Pluss, Reading Case Law Historically. On the law on female inheritance, see Thomas Kuehn, “Some Ambiguities of Female Inheritance Ideology in the Renaissance,” in Law, Family and Women, 238–57. 54 As explained in Botticini, A Loveless Economy. Some have suggested that women enjoyed greater financial freedom in commemorative patronage. For instance, women tended to channel their assets towards enterprises that celebrated their natal rather than their marital family. Strocchia, Remebering the Family.

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growing urban economies. For instance, after two subsequent military campaigns against Milan and Lucca, Florence was left with great fiscal pressure. Then, in 1424/25, the government proposed to create the Monte delle Doti (Dowry Fund), the earliest of these schemes. Its investments were used towards the public debt, whilst guaranteeing a future dowry asset for the daughters of the stakeholders.55 Finally, raising an agreed dowry could take several months. Delays could not exceed two years from the announcement of the wedding and, underscoring the risk of second thoughts by men grudgingly accepting a marriage, broken deals received fines as much as twice the amount agreed for the dower.56 This minefield at the threshold of marriage prompted my questions in Chapter Two about the sequence in which the spouses were painted in marriage portraiture. The increasingly onerous economic commitments of these arranged marriages decreased the number of marriageable girls, hence the quantity of marriages, whilst increasing enforced monachism. They also depleted family finances, hence the inheritance of the male members.57 Concerned about these strains, from the thirteenth century municipalities had already tried to impose statutory dotal limits, which were ignored because they collided with people’s familiarity with the indexical connection between individual property and public identity. “Nearly all of them more than 3000 ducats and some […] 10000 ducats and more,” the Venetian diarist Marino Sanudo (or Sanuto, 1466–1536) explained, “although they were very costly for us, they nevertheless took place because of the great wealth found here.”58 Characteristically, Venetian patricians considered inevitable the rise that brought the average dowry from 650 to 1000 ducats from the mid to the end of the fourteenth 55 Anthony Molho, “The State and Public Finances: A Hypothesis Based on the History of Late Medieval Florence,” in The Origins of the State in Italy 1300–1600, ed. Julius Kirchner (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 97–135 (115); Mohlo, Marriage Alliance, 27–33; Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual, 109, 116, 191–92, 210–11, 214–15 and 222–23; Kirshner and Molho, The Dowry Fund. 56 Radding, The Origins of Medieval Jurisprudence, 108. 57 Among the indigent there was an increase in child-labour, female infanticide and prostitution. Corporate and individual charity intervened to prevent the latter, deemed un-Christian for the community, and to support spinsters. In addition to the bibliography in Chapter One, see Jutta Sperling, Convents and the Body Politics in Renaissance Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Dennis Romano, “Aspects of Patronage in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly 46, no.4 (Winter 1993): 712–733 (716). 58 Marin Sanudo, Patricia H. Labalme, Laura Sanguineti White and Linda Carroll, “How to (and How Not to) Get Married in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Selections from the Diaries of Marin Sanudo),” Renaissance Quarterly 52, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 43–72 (47). Further is on Marino Sanuto, I Diari di Marino Sanuto (MCCCCXVI-MCXXXIII), Autografo Marciano Ital. cl. VII codd. CDXIX.CDLXXVII, ed. Rinaldo Fulin, Federico Stefani, Niccolò Barozzi, Guglielmo Berchet, Marco Allegri with La R. Deputazione Veneta di Storia Patria (Venezia: F. Stefani, 1879). Comparable examples are in the Acts of Siena, Mario Ascheri e Donatella Ciampoli, Siena e il suo territorio nel Rinascimento (Siena: Il Leccio, 1990), 202 (135v–137v; 8 VI.1425; CG, 5).

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century, and up to 8000 ducats in 1521.59 The Senate tried to halt this trend for fear that the financial strain would force families to “carcerare,” i.e., incarcerate their own daughters in convents or at home.60 A law of 22 August 1420, reconfirmed in 22 March 1425, set the maximum to 1600 ducats for patrician marriages, two-thirds for the dowry proper, and one-third for the trousseau; and to 2000 ducats for inter-class unions, in which the woman was from the aristocracy.61 By then, the situation was irremediably dysfunctional: on the one hand, dowries were impoverishing families and the communal coffers; on the other, legal restrictions were worsening the already strained challenges of matchmaking. Anxious to increase marriages, subsequent legislation, dated 21 January 1443, lifted all sumptuary restrictions for girls with physical deformities.62 A new law on 4 November 1505 increased dotal allowances to 3000 ducats,63 topped to 4000 in 1535.64 Yet, the wealthy still considered these concessions insufficient and began adding bridal gifts, dimissorie, to the dowry. They even ignored the law outright, and raised dowries as exorbitant as that, in 1517, of one of the Capello women with Francesco Soranzo: 15000 ducats, plus 500 ducats in investment and 500 in trousseau.65 These extravagances were engrained in the Italian cultivation of magnificence: Hence the magnif icent man, called magnif icent […] for the performance of which not all men have sufficient wealth, as in the celebration of weddings which should be celebrated with the greatest expense, and the more worthily because they occur rarely.66

The “icons of urbanitas” show that the cultivation of magnificence outlined the family’s outer adherence to the moral principles of the community. Crucial to my present argument, as the gap widened between the women who reached the altar and those who did not, those who did became the symbol of the privileges of the 59 Stanley Chojnacki, “Daughters and Oligarchs: Gender and the Early Renaissance State,” in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, 63–86. 60 Giulio Bistort, Il Magistrato alle Pompe nella Repubblica di Venezia: Studio Storico (Bologna: Forni, 1912), 106-113 (107). 61 Stanley Chojnacki, “Marriage Regulation in Venice 1420–1535,” in Women and Men in Renaissance Venice, 53–75 (57); Bistort, Il Magistrato alle Pompe, 108; Margaret Mary Newett, “The Sumptuary Laws of Venice in the 14th and 15th centuries,” in Historical Essays: First Published in 1902 in Commemoration of the Jubilee of the Owens College, Manchester, eds. T.F. Tout and James Tait (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1907), 245–281 (271–72). 62 Bistort, Il Magistrato alle Pompe, 108. 63 Chojnacki, Daughters and Oligarchs, 81 64 Chojnacki, Marriage Regulation in Venice, 70. 65 Bistort, Il Magistrato alle Pompe, 109 and 111. 66 Giovanni Caldeira, cited in King, Humanism, 559.

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affluent. The Venetian ceremonials of the dowry transfer celebrated this axiom: “[A]bout 4000 ducats, part of the bride’s dowry, was brought in six basins. The first one contained gold [coins], the rest [silver] coins. Well done, for those who can afford it.”67 c. In Venice From the foregoing we glean that the lineage system restricted women’s agency, but its dysfunctions created self-empowering conditions. We also garner that women’s appearance personified the customs of the marriage market. This combined conclusion corroborates my suggestion that female portraiture in Italy was to be seen-as an iconic representation of the local urbanitas. The high quantity of Florentine portraits should not surprise us: they emerged during the epochal social changes in this city-state. Was the situation comparable in Venice? From the late Trecento, the Venetians witnessed the economic decline of some historically important families and the rise of others. With ordinances called serrate, the Great Council began to restrict access in governmental offices to a selected oligarchy. From 1376, illegitimate children of patrician men could not acquire their paternal status and, from 1422, such restrictions were extended to sons of highborn fathers and mothers of lesser condition. By the mid Quattrocento, the increasingly impoverished patriciate drew a silent alliance with the new rich, interested, in turn, in consolidating their own social position. Jointly, they began abusing the opportunities of their civic employments to enforce regulations that ring-fenced their privileges.68 Sanudo glamourised the reason: “[T]o keep our nobility refined and immaculate […] and to provide for the peace and honour of our State, that men born of low condition would not come to the councils.”69 The apex of caste protection was reached in 1506 with the institution of a register of male high births, known as the Libri d’Oro, which required paternal information and “the birthplace and surname of the mother” and of the grandmother.70 This was followed in 1526 by the institution of a civil procedure for patrician marriages, consisting in the public declaration of the quality of the bride’s lineage, and the official registration of the union.71 To become part of the Great Council, the Venetian young males had to meet 67 Cited in Sanudo, How to (and How Not to) Get Married 48. 68 Muir, Civic Ritual. 69 Sanuto, I Diarii, vol. 2, 41. For this translation, I have used Fortini Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting, 245 (note 84). 70 Cited in Chojnacki, Marriage Regulation in Venice, 64 and 274 (note 53). See also Chojnacki, Daughters and Oligarchs, esp. 67. 71 Chojnacki, Marriage Regulation in Venice, 65. Subsequent developments are in Cowan, Marriage, Manners and Mobility.

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these requirements. Therefore, by regulating lineage rights, these laws established a connection between biological and social reproduction, between private and public interests. In the process, they also legalised the connection between women, social rank, and public magnificence, further ensuing competition on the dotal and inheritance front, and more regulations, as seen above.72 Perhaps in this context, we can understand the habit that Venetian women had developed from the fourteenth century of writing their wills, which eventually outnumbered those of men. These documents show that the testators had equal attachment to agnatic and cognatic groups; that they used their guardians to protect their own decisions against pressures from their in-laws; and that they exposed their own children to both matrilineal and patrilineal groups, thus shaping their social identity in the round.73 Finally, they reveal that women did not passively accept the conditions of a male-driven system, as exemplified by the following three cases. Petronella Falier, the wife of Zilio Morosini, drafted a will in 1464, in which she organised the nuptial plans and supervision of the dowry of their daughter, Paolina. She recognised her husband’s authority by appointing him to select a suitor. However, she hired procurators, separate from her husband’s circle of interests, to help him in his selection and to execute her will. This made provisions for Paolina to receive a dowry of one-third of her mother’s estate, plus 1000 ducats that Paolina had inherited from her maternal grandmother. These arrangements safeguarded the future of Petronella’s estate and ultimately that of her daughter against possible conflicts from other contenders in her patrimony, Zilio included. In her will of 1479, Maria Bembo made appropriate provisions for her daughter should she decide to marry, become a nun, or simply remain unmarried.74 Giovanni Caldeira, a known champion of patriarchy, had his hopes shattered by his wife. When the son of his close friend, the celebrated Guarino Veronese, wished to marry his daughter Catteruzza, Giovanni rejoiced. However, supported by her mother, Catteruzza insisted on her decision to pursue a religious vocation.75 Through a careful manipulation of their legal rights, women like Petronella, Maria, and Caldiera’s wife were able to enfranchise their daughters with little opposition from their husbands, especially if the value of what they owned was higher than that of their spouses. In these instances, husbands were bound to a condition of dependence, arguably augmented by the sine manu principle of Roman

72 Chojnacki, Marriage Regulation in Venice, 66–75. 73 Stanley Chojnacki, “‘The Most Serious Duty’: Motherhood, Gender, and the Patrician Culture of Renaissance Venice,” in Men and Women in Renaissance Venice, 169–82. 74 Chojnacki, The Most Serious Duty. 75 Juliana Hill Cotton, “Giovanni Caldiera,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani vol. 16 (1973), www. treccani.it

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law that the Venetian system followed.76 It has also been found that when dowries made them richer than their prospective husbands, women had more freedom to select a husband and, later, to establish more equal marital relationships.77 These points shaped the persona of the female patriciate and this is my conclusion, which I expand on below.

Imaging as Performance Corporate pride ran deep in Venice. By channelling their individual morality towards a common good, Venetians believed that they were preserving centuries of a collective history.78 To this end, married men from both the upper and the lower classes dressed sombrely and conducted their public daily business in strictly controlled tones of voice and manners. From the early fifteenth century, ceremonial occasions also increased. Their centrepiece were the processions, which choreographed an illusory social equality by pairing men of different classes in processional duties.79 By customs and law, respectable women restricted their lives to their private homes and the convents that dotted the city and its surroundings.80 When in public, they would take precautions against indecorous gazes. Still in the sixteenth century, Cesare Vecellio (ca.1530–ca.1601) reported that “married women and noblewomen, when leaving home have the convenience of arriving at the doors of the palaces and churches […] and from there of returning to the doors of their own houses” by boats that, however, were made comfortable by beautiful carpets, white silk, and cushions.81 76 The emasculation of male authority is documented, and especially from the early Cinquecento. It manifested in perennial bachelorship and laxity in official duties that, according to the Senate, were caused by living off wives’ dowries. Chojnacki, Marriage Regulation in Venice, 70–71. 77 Stanley Chojnacki, “Wives and Husbands in Late Medieval Venice,” in Major Problems in the History of the Italian Renaissance, eds. Benjamin G. Kohl and Alison Andrews Smith (Lexington, Massachusetts, Toronto: D.C. Heath and Company, 1995), 326–336. Some fathers took extravagant measures to recover their property: in one of his wills, Giovanni Caldiera appointed his daughter as his sole heir, with the codicil that, should she die and come back in life according to his platonic belief in the regenerative cosmic cycle known as apocastasis, she must return the inheritance to him. Hill Cotton, Giovanni Caldiera. 78 Here I am paraphrasing Freud: “The extent to which cultural rules have been internalized – […] the moral level of the members – is not the only psychical asset to be considered if one is estimating the value of a culture. In addition there is its heritage of ideals and artistic creations, that is to say, of the satisfaction they both yield.” Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. W.D. Robson-Scott (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1928), 21. 79 Fortini Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting, 14 and 29, and Muir, Civic Ritual, esp. Part Three, 185–250. 80 Dennis Romano, “Gender and the Urban Geography of Renaissance Venice,” Journal of Social History 23, no. 2 (Winter 1989): 339–353. 81 Cesare Vecellio, The Clothing of the Renaissance World, trans. Margaret F. Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2008), 176.

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Their garments were so restricting that foreigners reportedly wondered “how they can see where to go in the street.” 82 The pièce de résistance were the headgears, fazzuoli or cappe that covered both head and breasts over black clothes. An Act of August 1443 tests the sincerity of these habits by noting disapprovingly: [A]n abominable fashion has been introduced among our ladies and other females of every condition, who go about with the head and face covered […] under which dishonest mode various dishonest acts have been and every day are committed against the honour of God and of our dominion.83

The same Act restricted the practice to: These ladies and other good persons who desire to hear mass, and sermons, and divine service, and attend confession […] Further, all ladies and other females may go covered to the earliest communions in their parish churches, or in the convent churches near, but only on Sundays and in the prescribed festivals, and they may return home covered.84

This fashion contrasted with the sartorial gaiety of the flourishing number of sex workers, for which Venice was also famed.85 It also contrasted with the grandiose spectacle during the public celebrations, religious and civic alike, which involved the city’s parishes and thoroughfares, and which were internationally renowned showcases of marvel.86 From the earliest known laws of 2 May 1299, Venetian Sumptuary Laws targeted female fashion. The Senate added its own impositions by routinely prohibiting the use of gold, silver, brocade, and silk garments that dressmakers were also banned from providing. A special force was even created on 17 November 1476, Provveditori sopra le Pompe, to ensure abidance by these regulations. However, restrictions were creatively circumvented if only because these fabrics were the pride of the production and trade of Venetian commerce. Moreover, in order to elicit the admiration of foreign visitors during public festivities, the same Senate ordered 82 Pietro Casola (1427–1507) in Davis, The Geography of Gender, 21. Fazzuoli were silk headscarves and cappe were a more precious version. Vecellio, The Clothing, 177. They can be seen in narrative paintings. See, for example, Gentile Bellini, Procession in Piazza San Marco 1496 Tempera and oil on canvas, 367 × 745 cm Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice (Cat.567). 83 In Newett, The Sumptuary Laws of Venice, 268. 84 Newett, The Sumptuary Laws of Venice, 268. 85 Davis, The Geography of Gender, 32. 86 E.g., Muir, Civic Ritual. Venetian narrative paintings often depict these celebrations.

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patrician men and women to be richly festooned.87 On those occasions, female fashion was so extravagant as to challenge the boundaries of moral respectability. Visitors “would not believe them to be Christian ladies, but Trojan matrons, even hand-maidens of Helen and of Venus.”88 Wearing jewels, heavy dresses with long trains that hid intolerably high shoes, they could hardly walk without aid. These shoes were platforms, zoccoli or chopines, hopelessly targeted by sumptuary regulations throughout the fifteenth century.89 However encumbering, they literally contributed to raising the sartorial dazzle to spectacular heights. Thus bedecked, opulently dressed, and accompanied by retinues of servants to support their steps, these women acquired a state function because it was upon the reputation of its wealth that the Serenissima had the upper hand in war and peace negotiations.90 This was ultimately the reason for the contradictions of the lawmakers, caught between economic protectionism and public diplomacy in the wake of the Republic’s international challenges. The chapters of this book have discussed the implications of Barbaro’s analogy between women and the “leaders of the bees” in domestic matters. They have discussed the extent to which women’s sartorial etiquette expressed economic and civic discourses, the importance of which overrode its fiscal impact on families and the community at large. Indeed, men controlled both the domestic and the public spheres. This system’s sexual politics involved a mechanism of socio-economic transactions that turned women into ambassadors of patriarchy. However, the laws that protected women’s ownership of their assets weakened men’s ability to sustain this control. Over time, the situation created conditions for self-empowering actions. Both female portraits and an adroit performance of public appearances revealed women’s place in the negotiation of power. This could not be more true than in Venice where, as Holly Hulburt has noted, in the very figurehead of the Dogaressa women saw not only a magnification of their public persona but the role model of a consort that navigated a complex, often fraught reality, yet recognised by dedicated ceremonials at the intersection between aristocratic and patrician duties.91 87 Bistort, Il Magistrato alle Pompe, 35; 44–60 and 68–69; and 122–24 (134 for an entertainting episode). Newett, The Sumptuary Laws of Venice, 250. 88 In Fortini Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting, 166. 89 Davis, The Geography of Gender, 33; Newett, The Sumptuary Laws of Venice, 274–75. These clogs perhaps originated from the necessity of avoiding the dirt of the unpaved and mudded streets of Venice. 90 “le donne del patriziato assumevan allora una funzione di stato: la funzione di far conoscere una parte di quelle immense ricchezze che al governo di Venezia facevano ottenere e la pace e la guerra, a seconda dei suoi disegni.” Bistort, Il Magistrato alle Pompe, 34, and 32–33 for the examples of these excesses. 91 Holly S. Hurlburt, The Dogaressa of Venice, 1200–1500: Wife and Icon (New York and England: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 27; on the involvement of local women in her celebrations, esp. 61–80.

COLOUR SEC TION 

Fig. 4.13 Rogier Van der Weyden (ca.1398/1400–1464), Portrait of a Woman with a Gauze Headdress, ca.1440/1445. Oil on oak panel. 47 × 32 cm. Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Acc. No. 545D – Aufnahame: Wolker- H. Schneider. Publikation nur mit Namensnennung.

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Fig. 4.14 Petrus Christus (ca.1410, active 1444–1475/6). Portrait of a Young Woman, ca.1470. Oil on oak panel. 29 × 22.5 cm. Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Acc. No. Cat. 41.

COLOUR SEC TION 

Fig. 5.1 Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494). Portrait of a Young Woman, ca.1490. Tempera on panel. 44 × 32 cm. © Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon (282). Photo: Catarina Gomes Ferreira.

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Fig. 5.2 Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494). Portrait of a Girl, ca.1490. Tempera on wood. 44.1 × 29.2 cm. Photo © The National Gallery, London (NG1230).

COLOUR SEC TION 

Fig. 5.3 Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494). Portrait of a Lady, ca.1490. Tempera, oil, and gold on panel. 44.1 × 29.2 cm. Acquired by Sterling Clark, 1913. The Clark Art Institute (1955.938) Photo © The Clark Institute.

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Fig. 5.4 Andrea del Castagno (1419–1497). Portrait of a Man, ca.1450. Tempera on panel. 54.2 × 40.4 cm. Photo © The National Gallery of Art, Washington (1937.1.17).

COLOUR SEC TION 

Fig. 5.5 Petrus Christus (ca.1410, active 1444–1475/6). Portrait of a Carthusian, 1446. Oil on panel. 29.2 × 21.6 cm. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (49.7.19).

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Fig. 5.6 Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510). Portrait of a Lady at the window (Smeralda Bandinelli?), ca.1470–1475. Tempera on wood. 65.7 × 41 cm. Photo © The Victoria & Albert Museum, London (CAI. 100).

COLOUR SEC TION 

Fig. 5.7 Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). Ginevra de Benci (obverse), ca.1474/1478. Oil on panel. 38.1 × 37. Photo © The National Gallery of Art, Washington (1967.6.1.a).

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Fig. 5.8 Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). Ginevra de Benci (reverse), ca.1474/1478. Oil on panel. 38 × 37 cm. Photo © The National Gallery of Art, Washington (1967.6.1.b).

COLOUR SEC TION 

Fig. 5.9 Agnolo (1466–1513) or Donnino (1460–after 1515) di Domenico del Mazziere. Portrait of a Young Woman, ca.1485–1490. Oil on wood. 45.4 × 34.8 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Cat. 80) – Aufnahame: Jörg P. Anders, Berlin/00.

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Fig. 5.10 Portrait of Cassandra Fedele. llustration for ‘Cassandra Fidelis.’ In Giacomo Filippo Tomasini, Elogia virorum literis & sapiential illustrium ad viuum expressis imaginibus exornata (Padua: Sebastiani Sardi, 1644), 343-58 (344).

COLOUR SEC TION 

Fig. 6.1 Vittore Carpaccio (1472–1526). Portrait of a Woman, ca.1493–1494. Oil on panel. 28 × 24 cm. Photo © Galleria Borghese, Rome (450).

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Fig. 6.2 Attr. Jacometto Veneziano (active ca.1472–d.before 1498). Portrait of a Lady with a Lagoon Landscape and Hills Behind, 1472–1494. Oil on panel and gilt. 25.4 × 19 cm. Polesden Lacey, Surrey (NT1246487). Photo © National Trust / Andrew Fetherston.

COLOUR SEC TION 

Fig. 6.3 Attr. Jacometto Veneziano (active ca.1472–d.before 1498). Portrait of a Woman (Possibly a Nun of San Secondo), ca.1485–1490. Oil and gold on wood. 10.2 × 7.3 cm. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum, New York (1975.1.85).

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Fig. 7.1 Jan Van Eyck (active 1422–d.1441), Portrait of Giovanni (?) Arnolfini and His Wife, 1434. Oil on oak. 82.2 × 60 cm. Photo © The National Gallery, London (NG186).

Fif teenth- Century Venice: Performing Imaging 

Conclusions The entrepreneurial communities of Europe pursued their social ambitions through marriage contracts. Dowries were their necessary preconditions and, paradoxically, their very enemies: marriage contracts were regulated by socio-economic profits that caused dotal inflations. With fewer families able to afford spiralling dowries, the marriage market opened up to inter-class unions that downgraded the status of the old oligarchy. Women’s pedigree became a measure to prevent what the upper classes viewed as a social calamity: a substandard patriciate. But dowries were women’s lifetime entitlement and, with fewer women in the marriage market, the combination of social recognition and a richer asset strengthened their negotiating power. Studies on Venice have shown the full extent of these complexities, due to the Serenissima’s unique historical and political circumstances. Women’s legal manoeuvres to exert their growing personal status evidence a practical and a psychological approach to the woman question. The higher number of surviving male portraits from the fifteenth century mirrors men’s corporate dimension. Women of the ruling elite perhaps had similar experiences but, for the majority, the scope and quantity of their portraits reflects the monotony of their lives. The twenty-three Venetian likenesses in this survey are no different: they were commissioned for family and marriage. Their style amalgamates the Italian and Netherlandish portrait cultures, and with an element of Byzantine stillness. It encompasses the private and the public image of its sitters, in whom merge the contradictions between the traditionalism and the excesses of the Venetian culture of display. Put differently, they wed an erotic and a moral identity, prompting in the viewer a social experience of the sitters’ beauty as an icon of the local urbanitas, as an allegory of venezianità. As an expression of such an identity, these icons did not confine their communicative potentials to the reproductive medium. The Venetian case is an example of how the urban arena was a stage on which the subject pronoun I conflated the acts of watching and performing. In this collective awareness of acting and judging, women played the dynamics of the polis, the stateliness of which, in turn, was a propagation of their personal worth. Plainly speaking, in the public sphere women fashioned a mimetic ideal that complemented the intimate relationship between their painted image and its selected spectators. It remains to conclude that women’s self-imaging in its wide-ranging media reinforced the presence of a gynaecocracy with its own negotiating system, beyond today’s interpretation of the binary fixity of patriarchy.

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Conclusions Abstract This book has mapped the aesthetic and conceptual characteristics of fifteenthcentury Netherlandish and Italian individual female portraiture on panel. These images represent the early modern form of the genre, stimulated by the sociopolitical rise of a new entrepreneurial oligarchy. The power structure of this oligarchy was androcentric. Thus, these portraits are also a window into women’s lives in this structure. This book is the first systematic study of their sign-system, and the feminine experience of seeing and being seen within the patriarchal matrix. This conclusive chapter summarises my findings with further clarifications when appropriate. Its coda is a new interpretation of the iconic Arnolfini double portrait. This panel symbolises early Netherlandish portraiture at its best but also portrays an Italian couple. Its technical and iconographical merits combine the lavishness and sobriety of Italian and Netherlandish cultures. Perhaps it tells a marital story that is yet to be deciphered. It is therefore the fitting synthesis of everything discussed hitherto. Key words: Arnolfini – Feminism – Gender – Patriarchy – Masculinity

In the Middle Ages, what we now call the genre of portraiture had been the privilege of the aristocracy. Its purpose was essentially dynastic. By the end of the fourteenth century, patronage networks founded by a growing entrepreneurial oligarchy became central instruments of statecraft. As their economic and political power increased, this new estate outgrew their subsidiary role to the aristocracy, in fact subordinating the latter to dependence on their own administrative and economic expertise. It was in the fifteenth century that this phenomenon reached its maturity, emanating from the highly urbanised areas of Italy and Flanders. The modernisation of the genre is linked to the socio-cultural refinement of this oligarchy. The organisation of powers followed a practice rooted in Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian patriarchal traditions. Patriarchy is an androcentric system that leads to extreme forms of female subjugation. At the time of writing, it is still the transnational sociocultural hegemony. Political leadership is still largely male

Toreno, E., Netherlandish and Italian Female Portraiture in the Fifteenth Century. Gender, Identity, and the Tradition of Power. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463728614_concl

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and, therefore, legal and cultural discourse is still male-driven. Studies on female physiology are predominantly in the hand of male medical specialists, and women are included notably less than men in trial studies on humans. UNICEF and the United Nations report damning figures: 750 million girls forced into marriage before the age of 18; an estimated 200 million women in 30 Countries subjected to FGM. Legal disenfranchisement, illiteracy, and violence against women are institutionalised in at least 49 countries, to which we must add the repercussions of the 2021 Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. The world is experiencing also the repercussions of the pandemic that history will remember as Covid-19. Studies conducted on its social impact are showing an erosion of progress made towards gender equality in the workplace, an exponential increase in domestic violence and a widespread subculture of violent misogyny, rife on social media. A contemporary “neo-masculinity” agenda asks, “How can any man who approaches a girl today see her as more than a cum bucket?” Its disgusting rhetoric paraphrases Ficino’s comment in this book’s early pages: “[W]omen should be like chamber pots: hidden away once a man has pissed in them.”1 Institutions that monitor the dangers of this online propaganda, such as the Southern Poverty Law Centre, describe women-hating groups like “incels” as “the online male supremacist ecosystem.” In its effective succinctness, the SPLC explains it as an ideology that “misrepresents all women as genetically inferior, manipulative and stupid and reduces them to their reproductive or sexual function.”2 Dishearteningly, not even the language has changed from medieval times. This anti-woman propaganda reflects the inability to adapt to the fact that society is a heterogeneous mix. Here is the difference from the fifteenth century, when communities worked collectively to establish consensus in all areas of civic engagement. Of course, personal and class ambitions existed but these were linked to larger economic, socio-cultural, and political networks that sought unifying “public affection and bonds. […] the beginning and the principle that formed the commonwealth, that established its laws […], reason and customs defining what connects this union.”3 Here are the similarities with today’s patriarchal propaganda: 1 In Dale Kent, “Women in Renaissance Florence,” in Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo’s Ginevra de Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women, eds. David Alan Brown et al., exh.cat. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), 26–45 (27). 2 https://www.splcenter.org/ (last accessed 16.04.2022) 3 “et chosi questo aver bisognio luno huomo dellaltro sia chagione and vinculo aconservarci insieme con pubblica amicitia and congiunttione. Et forse questa necessita fu exordio and principio di formare le republice, di costituirvi le leggi […], ragione e chostumi colligata unione demarcali.” Leon Battista Alberti, “De Re Uxoria,” in In Questo Volume si Contiene Libri della Famiglia Composta da M. Batista degli Alberti da Firenze, 1433–1440, Urb.Lat.229, The Vatican Library, DigitalVaticana, 45v–83r (74r). I understand “republice” in the sense of res publica, which I therefore translate as “commonwealth,” whereas the traditional interpretation, “republics,” omits the fact that different governances shared the same civic

Conclusions 

the public affection and bonds to which Alberti referred in this passage from his De Re Uxoria depended on women’s biosocial performances, whilst the laws, reason, and customs suppressed women’s agency. We have seen, for instance, how rarely women were even mentioned in diaries and legal documents. The portraits in this book are a window into their world. In studying their details, I have tried to consider their feminine perspective because, as Émile Durkheim once posited, “we are at the same time actors and acted upon, and each of us contributes to forming this irresistible current, which sweeps […] along.”4 In six chapters, I have combined considerations that are strictly art historical with others that are from the anthropological spectrum. A comparison of the findings has spotlighted similarities but, equally, amplified the differences between Netherlandish and Italian portraiture.

Anthropological Considerations Commissions for female portraits were less frequent than male portraits because men had multidimensional and public lives and women had limited and domestic roles. However, the culture of the feminine world, both material and otherwise, was tied to civic and social practices, and this is where the story begins. Female portraiture in Italy in the f ifteenth century was commissioned for betrothals, marriages, and early uxorial years but rarely during widowhood. The portraits illustrate, quite literally, the doctrine of marriage and its legal and social outcomes. Their emphasis is on the salvific elegance of women which was also extolled in courtly and humanist writing, and in neo-platonic discourses. At the convergence of these facets, the female figure is a metonymy of biosocial lifecycles. Although some have marital ingredients, the Netherlandish portraits are so pervasively sober as to make us pause on the actual purpose of their commissions. The characteristics of these paintings were likely inspired by evangelical spirituality and projected the sitters’ ideal psychic life. I have suggested that, when it was assimilated, the Netherlandish mood in Italian portraits fashioned for the sitters a space of freedom from patriarchy, due to the fact that women perceived evangelical devotion as outwith male bounds. In these Italian likenesses, sobriety is coupled with the deconstructed cyphers of marriage portraiture. Perhaps representing learned ideals. See, for example in Leon Battista Alberti, “De Re Uxoria,” in The Family in Renaissance Florence: Book One – Four, intr. and trans. Renée Neu Watkins (Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc. 1969, 2004 ed.), 92–154 (137). 4 In Anthony Giddens, “Part Two: Durkheim,” in Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writing of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber, 5th ed. (Cambridge, London, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 65–118 (71, note 31).

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women, they constitute the visual contribution to an emerging pro-women ideology that was flawed because it lacked an intellectual independence from misogynistic biases, and it misunderstood psychosomatic emasculations for emancipation. However, we cannot underestimate how radical this ideology was in the context of its time. I have also argued that the first marital intercourse engendered demand, from north to south, for what I have called “Morgengabe portraits.” These objects were receipts of successful transactions, whereby the marriage, now consummated, was no longer rescindable. I should also like to hope that Morgengabe portraits were meant to put a positive spin on marriage, in order to assuage these young girls’ anxieties at a threshold that was redolent of religious superstition, physical risks, and perhaps distress for thwarted personal aspirations.

Technical Considerations Italian female portraits have dominated this account but this was unintentional: the Italians embraced the genre with enthusiasm hitherto unprecedented. The Italians’ preference for the profile format betrays their ideal membership in GraecoRoman culture and the distinctive endurance in female portraiture, with its elegant silhouette, had aesthetic and conceptual advantages. It created pleasant degrees of idealisation that I have subdivided into three categories, and it conjured the civic and moral ideals that the patriarchal system actualised through women’s biosocial cycle. From the 1450s, the Italians adopted other formats. This wave of change reached female portraiture in the 1470s. From profile to other angles, the pictorial characteristics of these portraits correspond to the aesthetic ideals that Leon Battista Alberti codified in his treatise on painting. By drawing this connection, I intended to suggest that these images and this treatise reflected one particular zeitgeist. In Flanders, the popular three-quarter portraiture retained the Gothic care for minute details that shun overall anatomical and spatial precision. The likenesses, on small panels, show the schematisation inherent in the Gothic process of image making. This schematisation is more sophisticated in female than in male portraits. Perhaps it served to reckon appropriate distances between sitters and painters, and to create geometric harmony, in turn, the manifestation of an ideal northern beauty. Thanks to the oil technique, and in common with donor portraiture, the faces and the countenances are hyper-naturalistic. Over the course of the century, the two styles of portraiture integrated each other’s characteristics. The Italians started appreciating the qualities of the oil medium, as they branched towards wider-ranging designs already in use by the Netherlanders. Among these designs, a type, best represented by a likeness of

Conclusions 

Isabella of Portugal from the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden in the 1450s, is seen in regional variants across Europe. Netherlandish painters began utilising classicising motifs, and painting figures with more robust, sculptural effects. Although they used illusionistic backgrounds and landscape views early in donor portraiture, the same props made their appearance in individual portraiture after 1460 and after the Italians, whose earliest survived portraits in illusionistic settings date ca.1438-40. Debates about such mutual influences dominate the broader question about modernity in the pictorial expressions of the genre.

Conceptual Considerations It is argued that Netherlandish portraiture, especially in the donor format, modernised the style of the Italians but I am not convinced that the story is so simple. My misgivings are grounded in how we define modernity in this genre. The notion that humans are conscious, self-actualised beings did not exist in the fifteenth century but was gaining insights in the humanist culture that shrouds Italian likenesses. The Netherlandish portrait culture encompassed a semblance of moral sameness within the fragile socio-political fabric of the Duchy and the individualism upon which the local economic model was founded. The strong influence of Devotio Moderna in the region made possible this difficult marriage but, as a result, likenesses appeared as dependent on a divine purpose aligned with the medieval Scholastic tradition. From this premise, I sought to understand the apparent contradictions of the animation of Italian female portraiture notwithstanding its stifling sculptural effects, and of the stiffness of the Netherlandish likenesses notwithstanding their quasi-photographic rendition. These contradictions are resolved by how each portrait style “located” its subjects: architectures, frames and so on. In Netherlandish portraits, the faux architectures along the picture planes demarcated the boundaries of the subject’s space. Additionally, female likenesses were routinely against dark, abstracted backgrounds that heightened their other-worldly concerns. The Italians had stories to tell. When an abstract background was used, it brought attention to the subject and their garbs, in effect amplifying the sign-symbols of the socioeconomic exchanges in the secular world. The architectural and the landscape backgrounds were plain reminders of the theatre of life. The presumptive filial relation between Netherlandish donor portraiture and Italian located portraiture, as is often argued, therefore requires a more cautious approach. In Netherlandish donor portraiture, subtle references to the subjects’ social status and illusionistic backgrounds, landscape or urban views, entrenched the sitters in a complex moral and socio-political reality under seigneurial control. In individual portraiture, were

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such reality needed not be shown, spiritual values could and did prevail. In Italian portraiture, topographical views were cyphers of biosocial fertility. Unsurprisingly, it became popular for female likenesses. Interestingly, the only two Netherlandish female portraits-with-landscape that I found have an Italian connection. Ultimately, I took the position that in the north, the inaugural use of the oil medium attained technical results that were novel and, thus, modern. However, these results were put to tests that responded to spiritual considerations rooted in late medieval discourse. In the south, the relationship between form and concept produced phenomenological reverberations of the secular world. In female portraiture, I called the former results “icons of humility,” because they were contiguous with the spirituality of humility praised in the life of the people that took the evangelical vows, and the latter “icons of urbanitas” to stress how their psychophysical beauty allegorised the state/family simile. This took me to the considerations about spectatorship and the role of women in image making.

Gender and Identity in the Politics of Seeing Phenomenology is a philosophical investigation of how we, as individuals, experience the world and its objects, their physical properties, and their meanings. In experiencing our surroundings, we become relational with the emotional, cognitive, physical, spatial, and temporal evocations that they afford, because we are ourselves objects within them. Portraiture overarches the reality of being and seeing an individual. It is therefore a liminal platform akin to the synthesis of the mental operations built over time upon the first-person sensory and cognitive awareness of what it means to be and to experience a person.5 The higher the visual signs are of these apprehensions, from how we come to wear such clothing to why we make such gestures, the higher the phenomenal reaction is to the image. Individual northern portraits likened the subjects to dynastic coats-of-arms or employed a quasi-photographic rendition of the sitters’ unique facial traits. In each case, they were therefore self-referential and, as such, enforced a mode of seeing-in the image meanings, which were exclusive. Conversely, through their evocative references to transactional activities, the individual Italian portraits were to be seen-as the configuration of the ideals promoted by the network of people formally and informally around the portrait’s patrons. As such, they were not mimetic identities but representatives of such networks. This consideration made me reflect on the effects of storage methods 5 Or “world of thoughts.” Maurice Merlau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. and intr. Donald A. Landes (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2012 ed.), 131.

Conclusions 

and mnemo-techniques, which I probed as responsible for the composition and animation of these Italian likenesses. To imply phenomenological conditions in portraiture means also to consider the subjects as living beings. This was my point in Chapter Six. Furthermore, even without employing psychoanalytical and Marxist theories we can agree that a social system like patriarchy, which acts on the pretence of inclusiveness whilst de facto marginalising from within, must appear to offer rewards to the disenfranchised. This secures cooperative behaviour. In fifteenth-century Europe, women received these recompenses in the forms of domestic agency, and of visual and textual approbations. In addition to these allowances, women had knowledge of how to exploit their limited provisions, i.e., the dynamics of inheritance and dowry rights. It follows that, although ostensibly symbolising the patriarchal beliefs and practices, ultimately the material and performative dimensions of the feminine had epistemic consequences within the network of gazes, male and female, ocular and mnemonic, that were linked to one’s situational awareness of patriarchal conditions. To explain this point, I return to the characteristics associated with Eve and Mary, which I encode, respectively, into α and ω.6 To the male gaze ω was a positive symbol of patriarchy. At once unattainable and salvific, she empowered men to fantasise beyond their own sexual repressions, whilst affirming their misogyny in their day-to-day interactions with women as α. This explains, for instance, Ficino’s quoted comment notwithstanding neo-platonic culture. The opposite mechanism would have happened under the female gaze, whereby α stood for their socially and sexually repressed self, and ω for an instrument of self-empowerment, however emasculated and desexualised. In portraiture, fashioning women as ω was therefore not a rhetorical device but the sublimation of the moral contradictions that affected both genders. These conditions were even more powerful because the painted portrait was the final step of a conscious process that, from commissioning to making, negotiated an ideal imaging. Furthermore, the same viewing mechanism is not applicable to male portraiture because, as the gender in power, men did not experience a psychological split as women did. I hope that this conclusion will clarify further my points regarding the mode of seeing-as, as well as encouraging a heuristic understanding of Netherlandish likenesses and of those exemplified by Ginevra de’ Benci [fig. 5.7]. This book ends with the Arnolfini panel painted by Jan van Eyck in 1434 [Fig. 7.1]. It is an icon of early Netherlandish portraiture, but it portrays an Italian couple. Its technical and iconographical merits combine the lavishness and sobriety of 6 Here I am influenced by Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (London: Imago Publishing, 2011 ed.).

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the Italian and the Netherlandish cultures. Its documentary flavour of a possible marital story has yet to be settled with firm conclusions. How could it not be the fitting synthesis of all discussed hitherto?

The Arnolfini Double Portrait: A Morgengabe? Full-length panel portraiture was extremely rare in 1434. Its precursors would have been images of modern saints and imaginary portraits of the Nine Worthies, the Gothic style which is also represented by this couple.7 A plaited, black-dyed straw hat covers the man’s head. He wears a black doublet, perhaps in satin damask, with sleeves ending with silver and purple hems under a dark-crimson garment, perhaps a silk velvet heuque lined in brown fur, possibly sable. The woman’s hair is under a horn headdress covered by a ruffled kruseler. She wears a blue kirtle with wristbands that complement her belt, and an emerald-green woollen overgown lined in white fur and with long, elaborate dagged sleeves. As she lifts it, the abundance of the fabric underscores the opulence of the attire.8 Less jewellery and the warm 7 In this discussion, I have integrated research on NG186 in the National Gallery Archives into the extensive scholarship on this panel. Here, I acknowledge what most closely pertains to my argument: Barbara von Barghahn, “Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait and Copies after His Woman and Her Toilette: Recollection of the Alhambra’s Constellation Halls, the Hamman and Alchemy,” in Making Copies in European Art 1400–1600: Shifting Tastes, Modes of Transmission, and Changing Contexts, ed. Maddalena Bellavitis (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2018), 21–86; Herman Th. Colenbrander, “‘In Promises Anyone Can Be Rich!’ Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Double Portrait: A ‘Morgengave’,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschlichte 68 Bd., H. 3 (2005): 413–424; Bernhard Ridderbos, Anne van Buren, Henk van Veen, Early Netherlandish Paintings: Rediscovery, Reception and Research, exh.cat. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 59–77; Margaret L. Koster, “The Arnolfini Double Portrait: A Simple Solution,” Apollo 158, no. 499 (September 2003): 3–14; Lorne Campbell, National Gallery Catalogues: The Fifteenth Century Netherlandish School (National Gallery Publication, London: Yale University Press 1998), 174–211; Edwin Hall, The Arnolfini Betrothal: Medieval Marriage and the Enigma of Van Eyck’s Double Portrait (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994); Linda Seidel, Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Craig Harbison, “Sexuality and Social Standing in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Double Portrait,” Renaissance Quarterly 43, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 249–291; Jan Baptist Bedaux, “The Reality of Symbols: The Question of Disguised Symbolism in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait,” Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, 16, no. 1 (1986): 5–28; Robert Baldwin, “Marriage as a Sacramental Reflection of the Passion: The Mirror in Jan van Eyck’s ‘Arnolf ini Wedding’,” Oud Holland 98, no. 2 (1984): 57–75; Lucy Freeman Sandler, “The Handclasp in the Arnolfini Wedding: A Manuscript Precedent,” The Art Bulletin 66, no. 3 (Sept., 1984): 488–491; James Snyder, “Jan van Eyck and Adam’s Apple,” Art Bulletin 58 (1976): 511–515; Peter Schabacker, “De Matrimonio ad Morganaticam Contracto: Jan Van Eyck’s ‘Arnolfini’ Portrait Reconsidered,” Art Quarterly xxxv (1972): 375–398; Martin Davies, Early Netherlandish School, 3 rd ed. (London: National Gallery Catalogues, 1968); Erwin Panofsky, “Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 64, no. 372 (March, 1934): 117–119+122–127. 8 The clothing of this couple is detailed in Campbell, National Gallery Catalogues, 190–91.

Conclusions 

season heralded by a cherry tree blossoming with fruits, seen from a window on the man’s right, make these winter fabrics appear even more luxurious. Luxury items also surround the couple: a bed, crimson-dye fabrics, an Anatolian rug, a six-branched brass chandelier, and a concave mirror with an ornate frame. The painting itself was a status object because to be portrayed by Van Eyck implied aesthetic, religious, and social judgement. The painter was a pioneer of the oil medium, a successful interpreter of the Netherlandish religiosity, and Philip the Good’s valet de chambre. Perhaps the commission developed from a friendship between the painter and the sitter, who were likely from the same clique. Lorne Campbell has persuasively identified the latter with Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini (b. ca.1390), a Tuscan from Lucca but lifelong in Bruges because of his business. He married the Lucchese Costanza Trenta (b.1413) on 23 January 1426, but she died before 26 February 1433. Whether he remarried is unknown but certainly plausible because it was customary.9 He was on business and personal terms with Philip the Good, and this may explain the earliest recorded owner of this painting, Diego de Guevara (ca.1450–1520), a Spanish nobleman brought up at the Burgundian court. Don Diego left the object to the Archduchess Margaret of Austria (1480–1530), Regent of the Spanish Netherlands. It was hung above the f ireplace of her bedroom in Mechelin (Malines in French) and appears in the 17 July 1516 inventory of her collection, drawn under her supervision: “un grand tableau qu’on appelle Hernoul le Fin avec sa femme dedens une chambre, qui fuit donné à Madame par Don Diego, les armes duquel sont en la couverte dudit tableau fait du painctre Johannes.”10 A second inventory, drawn between 9 July 1523 and 17 April 1524, describes the panel as a man and a woman taking each 9 Campbell, National Gallery Catalogues, 193–95. Before then, the couple was thought to be Giovanni’s cousin Giovanni di Arrigo (1405–1472) and his wife Jeanne Cenami. The earliest identification of the male figure with a member of the Arnolfini family is by Joseph A. Crow and Giovanni B. Cavalcaselle, The Early Flemish Painters (London: John Murray, 1857), 65–66. Margaret Koster and Barbara von Barghahn consider this painting a homage to the dead wife. To argue their case, both authors had to sacrif ice some details. For instance, von Barghahn places sole agency on the painter, his purported mastering of complex alchemical knowledge, and of the Islamic and regional cultures absorbed during his journey to the Iberian Peninsula in 1428–1429. Unfortunately, her analysis appears to misinterpret the handclasp. I am also unsure about her alchemical interpretations, leading her to suggest, as some before her had, that van Eyck’s Woman Bathing, which survives in two copies, was a companion to or even the shutter of the Arnolfini. Von Barghahn, Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait; Koster, The Arnolfini Double Portrait. See also Campbell’s argument in Campbell, National Gallery Catalogues, 201. 10 The standard translation is “a large picture which is called Hernoul le Fin with his wife in a chamber, which was given to Madame by Don Diego, whose arms are on the cover of the said picture; done by the painter Johannes.” In Campbell, National Gallery Catalogues, 174; Davies, Early Netherlandish School, 174. The original inventory entry is in Le Cabinet de l’Amateurs et de l’Antiquaire. Revue des Tableaux et des Estampes Anciennes; des Objects d’Art, d’Antiquité et de Curiosité (Paris: Au Bureau du Journal, 1842) Vol. 1, 215–223, (215).

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other’s hands, painted by Van Eyck in 1434 and, again, with shutters showing Don Diego’s coat-of-arms.11 In 1556, the panel travelled to Spain as part of the inheritance of Margaret’s niece, Mary of Hungary (1505–1558). In a 1588 inventory, it is mentioned as a panel with shutters, and showing a couple holding hands. 12 In 1599, it was in the Alcazar of Madrid. King Philip II (1527–1598) had it on the right wall of the salle chiqua, the cabinet-room with some of his favourite paintings. Jacob Quelviz, a traveller from Leipzig, described it as “una imagen donde un moço ÿ donçella juntan las manos como se prometiessen del futuro Casamiento.”13 Inscribed on its frame, he also noted the verses 1:443-44 from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (ca.2CE) that, in today’s translation, read: “Make promises: what’s the harm in promises? Here’s where anyone can play rich.”14 For Campbell this was a moralising addition from Philip II’s time but there is no evidence of request for such an alteration, presumably by the king. It also seems strange that Philip would have willingly damaged one of his favourite paintings. 15 Maybe the early inventories overlooked the quote because it was either well understood or overshadowed by other details. The citation introduces a cynical discussion on the corruption of materialism, spiralling into advice on winning a woman’s heart but gift- and duty-free.16 It is therefore tempting to give credence to Myriam Greilsammer’s interpretation of the painting as a spectacle of the “pre-eminence of patrimony and the male sex.”17 It would align with contemporary literary satire on female profligacy. However, thus singled out the citation spotlights a vocabulary of promises familiar in marriage formulae, and synonymous with the social and moral enrichments from fides that were esteemed in Ovid’s times as much as among fifteenth-century people. It concurs with the first inventory, in which the couple is understood to be related by marriage, and it iterates Quelviz’s interpretation of their betrothing. To some extent, it also supports the account on which the earliest popular theory on this panel is based, caveats notwithstanding. In 1568, the historian Marcus Van Vaernewijck (1518–1569) wrote about “a marriage of a man and a woman who are married by 11 Campbell, National Gallery Catalogues, 176. 12 Campbell, National Gallery Catalogues, 198. 13 “[A] young man and young woman joining hands as if they are promising future marriage.” As translated in Campbell, National Gallery Catalogues, 198. 14 “promittas facito, quid enim promittere laedit? Pollicitis diues quidlibet esset potest.” Ovid, “The Art of Love,” in The Erotic Poems, intr. and trans. Peter Green (London: The Penguin Classics, 1982), 1:443–44. 15 Campbell, National Gallery Catalogues, 198–99. 16 Ovid, The Art of Love, 1:437–86. 17 Cited in Hall, The Arnolfini Betrothal, 101. My analysis does not seem to sit well with Harbison’s suggestion that this panel is a satire of romance, amid a taste for sexual satire at the Burgundian court. Harbison, Sexuality and Social Standing, 278–79. See also Seidel, Jan Van Eyck’s.

Conclusions 

faith.”18 The caveats consist in the painting’s incorrect size and acquisition, because van Vaernewijck probably never saw it. Yet, Carel Vermander (1548–1606) liked and included van Vaernewijck’s description in his biography of Jan van Eyck (pub. 1604).19 And, in 1934, Panofsky published his seminal theory, in which he interpreted “by faith” as a Germanic nuptial formula of mutual consent.20 Then, he produced several ingenuities apt to fit his explanation. Among these, his explanation of the male’s raised hand was fatal: a matrimonial oath in the style of the fides levata.21 Panofsky’s pursuit of this iconographical route is reasonable. For instance, oranges appear on the ledge of the window and on the lid of the wooden chest. At the time, citruses were among the luxury items traded by Lucchese merchants in Bruges. Therefore, they can be interpreted as status symbols. In Netherlandish paintings they also symbolised the “tree of knowledge” and the original sin. In Italy, orange blossoms were bridal ornaments.22 Conflated, and together with the early descriptions of the couple, these meanings shaped the social high ground of upper-class marriages. However, fides levata concealed one problem: this oath did not exist. Furthermore, this man is holding the woman’s right hand on the palm of his left hand. True, period illustrations of the betrothal and marriage of the Virgin show various combinations of clasping hands.23 In secular marriages, couples that were clandestine or among the less wealthy would be less fussed about exact formulae. 24 However, the iunctio dextrarum was required among those from respectable pedigrees. Panofsky acknowledged the clandestine hurdle but offered no reconciliation with Arnolfini’s social standing. Noting the inaccuracy, Edwin Hall proposed the theory of a betrothal from the premise that Lucca followed the 18 “een trauwinghe van eenen man ende vrauwe / die van Fides ghetrauwt worden.” In Campbell, National Gallery Catalogues, 198. Panofsky, Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini, 118. 19 For a summary of the interpretations of these descriptions over the decades, see Ridderbos et al., Early Netherlandish Paintings, 63–66. 20 Panofsky, Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini, 123. 21 Panofsky, Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini, 118 and 123. 22 Snyder, Jan van Eyck. In Italy, orange blossoms, fiori d’arancio, are still popular on wedding days. Mirella Levi D’Ancona, The Garden of the Renaissance: Botanic Symbolism in Italian Painting (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1977), 272–73. 23 These combine aesthetic and conceptual solutions. For instance, in Ghirlandaio’s Marriage of the Virgin the priest joins the spouses’ left hands, arguably to allow the viewer’s clear sight of the union, as Joseph and Mary have swapped sides to keep Mary on the priest’s left, and God’s right side. Domenico Ghirlandaio, The Marriage of the Virgin, 1486-90, fresco, 450 cm, Tornabuoni Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence. 24 See also Harbison, Sexuality and Social Standing, 252. Lucy Freeman Sandler has discussed the meaning of the left-right handclasp but the research appears to require further investigation. Freeman Sandler, The Handclasp. Rejecting the universal identification of the male sitter with an Arnolfini, the iconography has also been considered allusive to a morganatic marriage. Schabacker, De Matrimonio.

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same nuptial phases and dowry regulations found in Florence.25 Hall’s explanation is insightful and thorough, yet it belies the customs that would have prevented the betrothed from being alone in a bedchamber.26 It is clear that the couple is already married.27 The chandelier is a focal detail of the marriage theory. It has eight sconces but only one candle and above the man’s head. Because in Van Eyck’s times, candles were expensive items, in this scarcity Hall gleaned marital manuals’ bourgeois advice on thriftiness.28 Yet this candle is wastefully lit in broad daylight. Other interpretations include Panofsky’s “all seen wisdom of God,”29 an unspecified welcoming custom,30 and an analogy with candles lit in the nuptial chamber on the first night of the newly weds.31 Jan Baptiste Bedaux has also studied the coeval Franco-Netherlandish custom of measuring the duration of the negotiations for commercial contracts using a candles’ extinguishing flames, as the wax melted.32 The hypothesis seems consistent with the residual wax in a sconce above the woman’s head. If contractual conditions were inferred, Bedaux and another critic have suggested, these may relate to a Morgengabe contract.33 Could it not be that the panel itself was a morning gift? Technical examination has revealed changes to Arnolfini’s gestures, which make me wonder, as I have proposed regarding marriage portraiture, if they were induced by the developing conditions of the couple’s marital agreement. Originally his left fingers formed a clasp that later the painter stretched to accommodate the back of the woman’s hand. He added the ring on the index finger and reconsidered the position of the right hand.34 Arnolfini’s body language and stare are directed towards the picture plane, or towards the two individuals reflected in the mirror. One is dressed in blue and one in red. They were certainly part of his circle because the view from the window situates the room in the piano nobile of the house, simultaneously showing the privileged relation between hosts and guests and the symbolism associated with the cherry tree. The hypothesis that the man in blue may be Van Eyck is popular and augmented by the inscription above the mirror, 25 Hall, The Arnolfini Betrothal. 26 Christine Peters, “Sacrament and Ritual: The Making and Meaning of Marriage in Late Medieval and Early Modern England,” Past and Present 169 (November 2000): 63–96 (82–85). 27 Campbell has rejected completely the marriage theory. For him, the composition is a triumph of Van Eyck’s pictorial competence. Campbell, National Gallery Catalogues, 204. 28 Hall, The Arnolfini Betrothal, 116–17. 29 Panofsky, Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini, 126. 30 Campbell, National Gallery Catalogues, 201. 31 Harbison, Sexuality and Social Standing, 263. 32 Bedaux, The Question of Disguised Symbolism, 10. 33 Bedaux, The Question of Disguised Symbolism; Colenbrander, In Promises. 34 Campbell, National Gallery Catalogues, 183.

Conclusions 

Johannes de eyck fuit hic/ .1434.35 However, the painter often signed his paintings, and the perpetual liminality between Arnolfini’s gesture and the ever-changing spectator contradicts the verb in the past tense. Moreover, the signature is relevant to the metonymic relation between mirrors and the act of painting, discussed in Chapter Five. Then, the phrase may simply suggest that the painter and the sitter engaged in mutual social flattery. Beside artistic conceits, the reflective properties of mirrors had engendered an array of theological analogies. Among them, the husband/wife relation as a mirror of the marriage between Christ and the Church,36 and the speculum immaculatum, Mary’s purity and chastity or, as in one of Jacopo da Voragine’s sermons, “Mary the mirror – Christ the image.”37 Suitably, the decoration on the mirror-frame is encased with ten small roundels, the number of Christ and Christian perfection, illustrating the episodes of Christ’s passion from his Agony in the Garden to his Resurrection. The mirror itself and the faithful dog function as virtual hinges between the left and the right side of the painting, further marked by the juxtaposition of the man’s pattens and the woman’s slippers. The former in the foreground might have reminded the viewer of the sitter’s elite position, since Philip the Good introduced this fashion. Hall has suggested that their uncomfortable shape represented the idleness afforded by the wealthy.38 Panofsky linked them to Exodus 3:5: “And he said: draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from of thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”39 Yet, worn out as they appear, they may imply the man’s active life, the foil for the woman’s retiring nature encapsulated by her pristine slippers far in the background. Female slippers were wedding gifts and used in nuptial rituals. For instance, in England the groom marked his authority over the bride by placing her slippers on his side of the head of the bed. The amount of the dowry was read aloud, and silver coins were given to non-guests, gathered to witness

35 Less popular is perhaps the suggestion that the second man may be his brother Hubert (1385/90–1426). Von Barghahn, Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait. For Campbell he may be an assistant, Campbell, National Gallery Catalogues, 189. 36 Originally, the frame was eight-sided as in a baptismal font, as one critic has pointed out, therefore strengthening the mirror/soul analogy. Baldwin, Marriage as a Sacramental Reflection, 65–66. On mirrors as Christological metaphors, see also Jan Bialostocki, Man and Mirror: Reality and Transience (New York: Irving Lavin and John Plummer, 1977); Heinrich Schwarz, The Mirror of the Artist and the Mirror of the Devout (Studies in the History of Art Dedicated to William E Suida on his Eightieth Birthday) (1954; rep., New York: Phaidon Press, 1959), 90–105. 37 In Schwarz, The Mirror of the Artist, 104. 38 Hall, The Arnolfini Betrothal, 110. 39 Panofsky, Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini, 117–18.

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the ceremony. 40 The location of the pairs in the painting invites us to navigate the composition as a diptych of masculine and feminine virtues, inevitably emphasising the acceptance of female obedience to male authority. Plainly, the woman is under the spotlight. In a ca.1700 inventory of the collection of Charles II of Spain (1661–1700), she was assumed to be German and pregnant. 41 Now we know that she is painted in the style that typifies Netherlandish female figures and, of course, her hand on her belly points emphatically to the quantity and quality of the dress’s fabric. 42 However, the iconography engages with concerns about pregnancies. The carved finial of the bedpost representing the patron of childbirth, St Margaret with the dragon at her feet, was a talisman of fertility. Its proximity with the grotesque figurines on the arms of the bench is a reminder of the rules on marital sex because caricatures like these held moralising messages in Christian lore.43 Below St Margaret hangs a cloth-brush, symbol of the cleanness of the soul and of Marian chastity. With the string of amber beads, a popular item in informal trousseaux, it flanks the mirror and reinforces its theological meanings. The woman wears the colours that confirm her virtues, the augured progeny, and Arnolfini’s privileged position at court. To expand on this, green and white symbolised the theological virtues of hope and purity; and blue was redolently Marian. The green of her overgown also resonates with the fifteenth-century chambre verte, the confinement room for mothers and newborns of the highest aristocracy, queens and princesses, which for some time thereof became associated with nurseries. 44 If Arnolfini could get the valet de chambre to paint this double portrait for him, he could have certainly garbed his new wife in green to symbolise his connection with the highest northern social ranks, and the hope for the children that his first wife did not produce. It should be noted that the sombre colours of his clothes would have also appealed to the Duke’s taste. 45 The woman’s colour combination seems also pregnant with amatory-heraldic nuances. In courtly poetry, white garments evoked the joy of love, green the new, and blue the true love.46 Thus, she appears like a semiotical declaration of Arnolfini’s 40 Bernard I. Murstein, Love, Sex, and Marriage Through the Ages (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1974), 140. See also Harbison, Sexuality and Social Standing, 261 (notes 31–32). 41 Campbell, National Gallery Catalogues, 176. 42 A review of these interpretations is in Harbison, Sexuality and Social Standing, 265–68. 43 As noted in Bedaux, The Question of Disguised Symbolism, 20. 44 Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 57. 45 Harbison, Sexuality and Social Standing, 270. 46 As Guillame de Machaut (1300–1377) in Normand R. Cartier, “Le Bleu Chevalier,” Romania 347 (1966): 289–314. See also Huizinga, The Autumn, 142.

Conclusions 

satisfaction with his new and true darling! Pentimenti on her nose, eyes, and lips make her beauty chime with poetical discourses. 47 References to the etiquette of the Ordre de l’écu verd à la dame blanche are also notable. The military leader, Jean II Le Maingre (1366–1421), founded this Order in 1399 to protect the honour of women. Jean was also known as Boucicaut. A miniature from a Book of Hours, which claims his patronage, shows the figure of St Catherine wearing the same colours as the Arnolfini woman. 48 If Campbell’s identification is correct, even the grandfather of Arnolfini’s deceased wife owned a missal in the style of the Boucicat Master. 49 Finally, the emblem of the Order was a shield framed in enamelled gold, and with the figure of a woman in green and white.50 My point is not so much that specific sources but that a culture used to blending amatory, civic, and religious themes converged on the Arnolfini woman. Note how the mirror produces an emblematic vignette that, in effect, conflates courtly and Christian ideals of affection. We can now begin to fathom the couple’s sartorial extravagance. She is meant to stand in front of the spectator as a Griselda blossoming through a change of clothing into a hardworking, Christian wife. Yet, the absence of home comforts such as a fireplace and domestic utensils begs the question about the nature of her industriousness in this interior, the conspicuousness of which is, rather, fit for the northern Morgengabe that was the chambre étoffée.51 Marriages in domestic settings would have likely required a special licence by church authorities that Arnolfini’s connections could have granted.52 Let us consider that he remarried and, as he likely would, to someone from his hometown. Away from Lucca, lavish nuptial celebrations would have been impractical. Therefore, evidence of the successful contract would have been even more important. The explicit illustration of a post-coital bedchamber would have served the purpose to perfection. In Chapter Two, I introduced the idea of Morgengabe portraits with Hendrik van Wueluwe and Heylwich Thonis. The dynamic of their glances recalls the Arnolfini’s. Cherries and the emblem of the Guild of St Luke above Hendrik and Heylwich resonate with this panel’s mix of connubial and artistic discourses. Both paintings seek 47 E.g., François Villon, “Le Testament: Les Regrets de la Belle Heaulmiere,” in Poésies Complètes, ed. Claude Thiry (Librairie Général Française: Le Livre de Poche, 1991), 89–253 (131, verses LII). 48 “Boucicat Praying to St Catherine” in the Boucicat Master, Hours of Jean de Boucicat, f irst decade fifteenth cent., parchment, Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris, ms. 2. 49 Campbell, National Gallery Catalogues, 194. 50 Huizinga, The Autumn, 79. 51 As also noted in Bedaux, The Question of Disguised Symbolism, 47. On the Arnolfini bed, see Diane Wolfthal, In and Out of the Marital Bed: Seeing Sex in Renaissance Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 37–41. 52 Diana Webb, “Domestic Spaces and Devotion in the Middle Ages,” in Defining the Holy: Sacred Spaces in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Sarah Hamilton and Andrew Spicer (Abington, Oxon and New York, USA: Routledge, 2016), 27–48 (43).

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communication with the spectator’s world, which the Arnolfini mirror makes so explicit as to imply a coextended space, whilst referring to a range of discourses on feminine virtues that indicate the purpose of the panel as a Morgengabe portrait. The Arnolfini iconography summarises many of this book’s themes. My investigation started from the desire to set forth a more systematic approach to the study of female portraiture at the onset of modernity, and that emancipates female from male, and fifteenth- from sixteenth-century portraits. For this undertaking, I collated a catalogue of individual portraits painted on panels between ca.1400 and ca.1500. These are in the Appendix. However, the intention was never to submit hard conclusions. Rather, with this book I hope to stimulate further discussion. It is therefore with questions that I wish to conclude. Can we take further the technical conditions of Netherlandish female portraiture? Can we say more about the affinities between female portraiture and nuptial rites? Can we look deeper into the psychology of mnemo-techniques in Renaissance portraiture? Is there space for deepening the concepts of seeing-in and seeing-as? Crucially, can we deepen the notion of women as active agents of their own imaging, painted, performed, spilled if not spelled on the surface of patriarchal biases?

Appendix This catalogue lists one hundred and thirty female portraits painted on panel by fifteenth-century Netherlandish and Italian painters. The images come from museums and private collections, records of auctions houses, and digital archives. When access to the image was possible, the painted reverse is shown next to the obverse. Similarly, paintings that are relevant to the discussions in the book are seen next to the catalogued portraits. These are marital pairs; and copies of the original, or even possible originals but with information that was unverifiable or uncertain. Lack of information determined the fate of others. For instance, a Giovanna Tornabuoni attributed to Domenico Ghirlandaio seems to be in the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum. However, it is not listed in this catalogue because I could not verify the accuracy of my source and my attempts to contact the collection failed, perhaps because at the time or writing communication is still challenged by the Covid-19 pandemic. The first image in the catalogue is the earliest extant fifteenth-century female likeness on panel. The items that follow are listed by their regional provenance, starting with the profile format. The terminus ante quem of this collection is ca.1500, when portraiture began to reflect the sociocultural conditions encapsulated by the manual on courtly etiquette The Book of the Courtier (pub. 1528) by Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529), and by the attitudes that would bring about the Reformation movements. The artistic demarcation was not easy to apply and the late portraits in the catalogue could be seen, in fact, as conservative in mood as much as stylistically forward-looking. Therefore, there could have been more of them. The paintings are catalogued by maker, date, medium and support, dimensions, acquisition credit, name of the collection, inventory number. When information was not available, the affected field is marked as n/a. Some credit lines are more substantial than others due to issues of authenticity or histories of complex handovers. In the final stages of completing the book, I discovered four more paintings, which are at the end of the catalogue rather than in order of classification. Their addition is a testament to the never-ending task of compiling a catalogue such as this. That these four images are by Italian artists is also a testimony to the extent of the phenomenon of portraiture in Italy at that point in time. I hope that this catalogue will be useful to you, the reader and student of the Renaissance and women’s lives. And that you will fill its gaps with new information on and new images to the present paintings.

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NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

1. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Anonymous (Franco–Flemish, early 15th century)

DATE

ca.1410

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

53 x 37.6 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Andrew W. Mellon collection, 1937

COLLECTION

The National Gallery of Art, Washington

INVENTORY NO.

1937.1.23

2. Portrait of a Princess of the House of Este

ARTIST

Pisanello (Pisan, ca.1395–1455)

DATE

1436–1438

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

tempera on wood

DIMENSIONS

43 x 30 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

acquired, 1893

COLLECTION

Musée du Louvre, Paris

INVENTORY NO.

R.F.766

213

Appendix 

3. Battista Sforza

ARTIST

Piero della Francesca (Borgo San Sepolcro, 1416–1492)

DATE

1472–1473

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

47.6 x 33.6 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

17 June 1945, fully acquired 24 October 1948

COLLECTION

Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze

INVENTORY NO.

3342, nctn 00281147 (4)

4. Ginevra Bentivoglio

ARTIST

Ercole de Roberti (Ferrara, 1456–1496)

DATE

1474–1477

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

54 x 39 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Samuel H. Kress Foundation, gifted 1939

COLLECTION

National Gallery of Art, Washington

INVENTORY NO.

1939.1.220

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5. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Baldassarre d’Este (Ferrara, 1432–after 1504)

DATE

1455–1504

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Painting on panel

DIMENSIONS

53.9 x 41.9 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

From the Collezione Albertini (Pistoia). Last sold, 1957, by Wildenstein & Co., NY

COLLECTION

Private Collection

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

6. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Unknown (Northern Italian, second half 15th century)

DATE

ca.1475

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera and oil on poplar panel

DIMENSIONS

40 x 26.5 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Felton Bequest, 1946

COLLECTION

National Gallery, Melbourne

INVENTORY NO.

1541-4

215

Appendix 

7. Profile Portrait of a Lady (Ginevra d’Antonio Lupari Gozzadini?)

ARTIST

Attr. Maestro delle Storie del Pane (Emilian, active later 15th century)

DATE

ca.1485–1495

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

50.2 x 37.1 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Robert Lehman Collection, 1911.

COLLECTION

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

INVENTORY NO.

1975.1.96

8. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Amico Aspertini (Bologna? 1474/75–1552)

DATE

1500–1505

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

45.5 x 35.5 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

n/a

COLLECTION

Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie

INVENTORY NO.

Gemäldegalerie, 1621

216 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

9. Small Female Head

ARTIST

Attr. Angelo Maccagnino (Maccagnini, Angelo da Siena, Siena, active 1439–1457)

DATE

1440–1460

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

42 x 33 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

n/a

COLLECTION

Museo Correr, Venice

INVENTORY NO.

Cl. I n. 0669

10. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

In the style of Jacopo Bellini (Venetian, ca.1400–1470)

DATE

1497?

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

43 x 37 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

May 5, 2009, AAG Auctioneers, Amsterdam, Netherlands

COLLECTION

Private Collection

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

217

Appendix 

11. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Anonymous (Venetian)

DATE

1450–1499

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil o panel

DIMENSIONS

23 x 17 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

n/a

COLLECTION

Museo Correr, Venice

INVENTORY NO.

Cl. I n. 0429

12. Portrait of a Venetian Lady

ARTIST

Anonymous (Venetian School)

DATE

ca.1475–1480

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

28.1 x 22.1 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

John G. Johnson Collection, 1917

COLLECTION

Philadelphia Museum of Art

INVENTORY NO.

Cat. 164a

218 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

13. Portrait of Bianca Maria Visconti

ARTIST

Attr. Bonifacio Bembo (Cremona school, active by 1444–d. before 1482)

DATE

ca.1460s or 1480s

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on canvas

DIMENSIONS

49 x 31 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

donated by the Associazione degli Amici di Brera, 1932

COLLECTION

Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

INVENTORY NO.

Reg. Cron. 2239, nos. 950

14. Bianca Maria Sforza

ARTIST

Ambrogio de Predis (Milanese, ca.1455–after 1508)

DATE

prob. 1493

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

51 x 32.5 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Widener Collection, 1942

COLLECTION

National Gallery, Washington

INVENTORY NO.

1942.9.53

219

Appendix 

15. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Alessandro Araldi (Parma school, ca.1460–1528/30)

DATE

ca.1510

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

46.5 x 35.2 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

from Palazzo Pitti, Museo degli Argenti, Firenze, 1948

COLLECTION

Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

INVENTORY NO.

1890, n. 8383

16. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Circle of Leonardo da Vinci (near Florence, 1452–1519)

DATE

1490s–early 1500s

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Panel

DIMENSIONS

60 x 41 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

David Didier Roth to Baron James de Rothschild (1792–1868). Sold, 15 October 1863 as by Leonardo. Sold as by Ambrogio de Predis to the Morassi family Galerie Charpentier (Paris), 9 May 1952, lot 102. Sold, Sotheby’s London, 4 July 2018, Lot 43.

COLLECTION

Private Collection

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

220 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

17. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Bernardino de’ Conti (Milanese, 1450–1525) 

DATE

1490s–1520s

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Painting

DIMENSIONS

30 x 21.4 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

n/a

COLLECTION

n/a

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

18. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Bernardino de’ Conti (Milanese, 1450–1525) 

DATE

1495–1500

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

unframed 39 x 28.6 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Galerie Trotti, Paris; sold, Christie’s, sale 8414, Lot 109, Old Master Paintings, 15 May 1996, New York

COLLECTION

Private Collection

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

221

Appendix 

19. Profile Portrait of a Lady (Isabella of Aragon)

ARTIST

Circle of Leonardo da Vinci (formerly in the manner of Ambrogio de’ Predis, Milanese, ca.1455–after 1508 – formerly attributed to Bernardino de’ Conti)

DATE

1495–1500

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

unframed 42.8 x 28.6 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

21-30 July 2020, online auction 19640, Remastered: Contemporary Art and Old Masters, Lot 6; 29 November 2018, sold by Wannenes Art Auctions, Genoa, sale 8414, Lot 596, Old Masters and Nineteenth-Century Paintings

COLLECTION

Private Collection

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

20. Profile Portrait of a Lady Wearing a Belt with Ludovico Maria Sforza’s Initials

ARTIST

Attr. to Ambrogio de Predis (Milanese, ca.1455–after 1508)

DATE

ca.1495–1499

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on walnut panel

DIMENSIONS

52.1 x 36.8 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Presented by Mrs Gutekunst in memory of her husband Otto Gutekunst, 1947

COLLECTION

National Gallery, London

INVENTORY NO.

NG5752

222 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

21. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Anonymous (Milanese)

DATE

1480–1499

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

45 x 31 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1923, gift of the Leden van de Vereniging Rembrandt

COLLECTION

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

INVENTORY NO.

SK-A-3008

22. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Attr. Ambrogio de’ Predis (Milanese, ca.1455–after 1508) and Leonardo da Vinci (near Florence, 1452–1519)?

DATE

1485–1500

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil and tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

51 x 34 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Bequest Cardinale Federico Borromeo, 1618

COLLECTION

Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan

INVENTORY NO.

100 1971 000100

223

Appendix 

23. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Ambrogio de Predis (Milanese, ca.1455–after 1508)

DATE

1475–1510

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Painting on panel

DIMENSIONS

n/a

ACQUISITION CREDIT

n/a

COLLECTION

Musée Jacquemart André, Paris

INVENTORY NO.

666

24. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci (near Florence, 1452–1519)

DATE

late 15th century–early 16th century

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Painting on panel

DIMENSIONS

50 x 35 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

From Royal collection

COLLECTION

Musée du Louvre, Paris

INVENTORY NO.

785

224 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

25. Petrarch’s Laura

ARTIST

Anonymous (Milanese, 17th century, follower of Leonardo da Vinci, near Florence, 1452–1519)

DATE

17th century

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

oil on canvas laid on walnut panel

DIMENSIONS

approx. 61 x 46 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

purchased, 1865

COLLECTION

V & A, London

INVENTORY NO.

764:1-1865

26. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Anonymous (Lombardy, late 15th century)

DATE

ca.1500

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

55.2 x 34.9 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

John G. Johnson Collection, 1917

COLLECTION

Philadelphia Museum of Art

INVENTORY NO.

Cat. 265

225

Appendix 

27. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Bernardino de Conti (Milanese, 1450–1525) 

DATE

1495–1499

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

oil on canvas (transferred from panel)

DIMENSIONS

78.7 x 57.2 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

The Arabella D. Huntington Memorial Art Collection

COLLECTION

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

INVENTORY NO.

26.97

28. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Anonymous (Milanese, 15th–16th century, follower of Leonardo da Vinci, near Florence, 1452–1519)

DATE

ca.1500

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

oil on panel transferred to hardboard

DIMENSIONS

47.3 x 34.3 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Originally from Count of Castel-Pizzuto, Milan. (E. & C. Canessa, Naples). sold to Samuel H. Kress Collection from Duveen Brothers, Inc., London and New York), October 1947; 1952, gifted to NGA

COLLECTION

National Gallery, Washington

INVENTORY NO.

1952.5.66

226 

NE THERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

29. Profile Portrait of a Woman

ARTIST

Attr. Giovanni di Francesco del Cervelliera (Florentine, 1412–1459)

DATE

ca.1445

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

41.3 x 31.1 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

The Friedsam Collection, Bequest of Michael Friedsam, 1931

COLLECTION

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

INVENTORY NO.

32.100.98

30. Profile Portrait of a Woman

ARTIST

Filippo Lippi (Florentine, 1406–1469)

DATE

1440–1442

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

49.5 x 32.7 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1913, purchased

COLLECTION

Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

INVENTORY NO.

1700

227

Appendix 

31. Profile Portrait of a Woman

ARTIST

Master of the Castello Nativity (Florentine, active ca.1445–1475)

DATE

1450s

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera and gold on canvas transferred from wood

DIMENSIONS

40 x 27.3 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1943, from the Jules Bache Collection

COLLECTION

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

INVENTORY NO.

49.7.6

32. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Master of Castello Nativity (Florentine, active ca.1445–1475)

DATE

ca.1460

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

57.2 x 38 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

n/a

COLLECTION

Private collection

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

228 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

33. A Young Lady of Fashion

ARTIST

Attr. Paolo Uccello (Florentine, 1397–1475)

DATE

Early 1460s

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

44.1 x 31.8 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1914, Purchased as by Domenico Veneziano from Böhler and Steinmeyer, New York

COLLECTION

Isabella Gardner Museum, Boston

INVENTORY NO.

P27w58

34. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Scheggia (Giovanni di Ser Giovanni, Florentine, active 1406–1486)

DATE

ca.1460

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera and gold on panel, transferred to canvas

DIMENSIONS

44.1 x 36.4 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

John G. Johnson Collection, 1917

COLLECTION

Philadelphia Museum of Art

INVENTORY NO.

Cat. 34

229

Appendix 

35. Portrait of a Lady in Yellow

ARTIST

Alesso Baldovinetti (Florentine, ca.1426–1499)

DATE

ca.1465

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera and oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

62.9 x 40.6 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

purchased, 1866

COLLECTION

National Gallery, London

INVENTORY NO.

NG758

36. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Unknown (Florentine, second half 15th century)

DATE

1460–1670

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil and tempera on wood

DIMENSIONS

42x 29 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

purchased, 1857

COLLECTION

1857, purchased as by Piero della Francesca

INVENTORY NO.

NG585

230 

NE THERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

37. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Unknown (Florentine, second half 15th century)

DATE

last quarter of the 15th century

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

45.1 x 33.3 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Count Isolani, Bologna; Baron Michele Lazzaroni, Paris; Duveen Brothers, New York & London. Before 1919, purchased, Mr. William Salomon, New York; 26-27 January 1923, lot 214, sold as part of his deceased sale, (“Notable Paintings and other Rare Examples of the Art of the Italian Renaissance and Earlier Italian Periods”), New York, American Art Association; before 1926, acquired by Mr. Nils B. Hersloff, East Orange, New Jersey; 3 June 2010, Lot 13, sold by Sotheby’s, Old Master Paintings

COLLECTION

Private collection

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

38. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Florentine circle

DATE

1450–1499

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Panel

DIMENSIONS

35.5 x 23.5 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1963, Sold by Sotheby’s, London, 27 November, Lot 111, from the Thyssen collection, Lugano (Switzerland)

COLLECTION

Private collection

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

231

Appendix 

39. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Attr. Domenico Ghirlandaio (Florentine, 1449–1494)

DATE

1475–1494

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Panel

DIMENSIONS

17.3 x 12.7 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1888, Donation by the collezione L. Carrand, Florence

COLLECTION

Museo Nazionale, Bargello, Florence

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

40. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Domenico Ghirlandaio (Florentine, 1449-1494)

DATE

ca.1490

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

without painted border: 48.9 × 36.8 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. The Arabella D. Huntington Memorial Art Collection.

COLLECTION

The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

INVENTORY NO.

26.89

232 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

41. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio (Florentine, 1449–1494)

DATE

1470–1480

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Panel

DIMENSIONS

36.2 × 25.4 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1936, purchased with Edsel B. Ford Fund and General Membership Fund from John Levy Galleries, New York, New York, USA

COLLECTION

Detroit Institute of Arts

INVENTORY NO.

36.90

42. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Anonymous (follower of Sandro Botticelli, Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, Florentine, 1444/5–1510)

DATE

Late 15th century

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

34.9 x 27.3 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Sold by Potomack Company, Platinum House, Alexandria, VA, USA, 11 and 12 June 2011, Lot 46.

COLLECTION

Private collection

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

233

Appendix 

43. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Antonio del Pollaiuolo (Florentine, 1431/2–1498)

DATE

ca.1460–1465

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

oil and tempera on poplar panel

DIMENSIONS

52.2 x 36.2 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1897-98, purchased from the Paul & Dominic Colnaghi art store, London

COLLECTION

Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

INVENTORY NO.

1614

44. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Piero del Pollaiuolo (Piero di Jacopo Benci, Florentine, 1441/2–85/96)

DATE

ca.1467–1470

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera and oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

45.5 x 32.7 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1875, purchased by Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli

COLLECTION

Museo Poldi Pezzoli

INVENTORY NO.

442

234 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

45. Profile Portrait of a Woman

ARTIST

Piero del Pollaiuolo (Piero di Jacopo Benci, Florentine, 1441/2–85/96)

DATE

ca.1475–1480

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

48.9 x 35.2 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1940, Bequest of Edward S. Harkness

COLLECTION

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

INVENTORY NO.

50.135.3

46. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Piero (Piero di Jacopo Benci, Florentine, 1441/2–85/96) or Antonio? (Florentine, 1431/2–1498) del Pollaiuolo

DATE

ca.1475

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

55 x 34 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1940, from Palazzo Pitti, Museo degli Argenti

COLLECTION

Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

INVENTORY NO.

1491 00285481

235

Appendix 

47. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Piero del Pollaiuolo (Piero di Jacopo Benci, Florentine, 1441/2–85/96)

DATE

ca.1500

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

48 x 30.5 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1907, purchased from Duveen Brothers

COLLECTION

Isabella Gardner Museum

INVENTORY NO.

P16w7

48. Ideal Portrait of a Lady (Simonetta Vespucci?)

ARTIST

Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, Florentine, 1444/5–1510)

DATE

1475–1480

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on poplar panel

DIMENSIONS

55.4 x 43 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1875, purchased from the art dealer Stefano Bardini (originally in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, Florence)

COLLECTION

Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

INVENTORY NO.

106A

236 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

49. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, Florentine, 1444/5–1510)

DATE

1475–1480

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on poplar panel

DIMENSIONS

81.8 x 54 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1849, purchased

COLLECTION

Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main

INVENTORY NO.

936

50. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Workshop of Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, Florentine, 1444/5–1510)

DATE

ca.1490

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on wood

DIMENSIONS

59.1 x 40 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1906, bequeathed by the Misses Cohen as part of the John Samuel collection

COLLECTION

National Gallery, London

INVENTORY NO.

NG2082

237

Appendix 

51. Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci

ARTIST

Piero di Cosimo (Florentine, 1462–1521)

DATE

ca.1480

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

57 x 42 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Property of the Vespucci family; 1841, purchased by the French collector Marie Frédéric Eugène de Reiset for the Duke of d’Aumale; 1886, donated subject to usufruct by Henri d’Orléans Duke d’Aumale; 1887, entered the collection

COLLECTION

Musée Condé, Chantilly

INVENTORY NO.

PE 13

52. Woman with Attributes of St. Catherine

ARTIST

Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, Florentine, 1444/5–1510)

DATE

ca.1475

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

81.3 x 53.2 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

n/a

COLLECTION

Lindenau Museum, Altenburg

INVENTORY NO.

100

238 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

53. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, Florentine, 1444/5–1510)

DATE

ca.1476

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

61 x 40.5 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

n/a

COLLECTION

Galleria Palatina, Pitti Palace, Florence

INVENTORY NO.

1912 n. 353

54. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, Florentine, 1444/5–1510)

DATE

ca.1480

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

49.5 x 35.6 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

purchased from Sotheby’s, New York, 26 January 2007, lot 41

COLLECTION

Private collection

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

239

Appendix 

55. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Raffaellino del Garbo (Florentine, ca.1466 or living 1479? –1524/27?)

DATE

1485–1890

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

38.7 x 24.8 cm; framed: 50.2 x 35.9 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1932, sold by Arnold Seligmann, Rey and Company, New York to Edith A. and Percy S. Strauss; 1944, gifted to MFAH

COLLECTION

The Edith A. and Percy S. Straus Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

INVENTORY NO.

44.554

56. Profile Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Sebastiano Mainardi (ca.1460–1513)

DATE

Late 15th century

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on canvas transferred to panel

DIMENSIONS

59.2 x 32.4 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1965, sold to Duveen Brothers, New York; 1965, sold to The Norton Simon Foundation

COLLECTION

The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA

INVENTORY NO.

F.1965.1.040.P

240 

NE THERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

57. Portrait of Giovanna degli Albizzi

ARTIST

Domenico Ghirlandaio (Florentine, 1449–1494)

DATE

1488–1490

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

77 x 49 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1935, acquired from Morgan Library in NY

COLLECTION

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

INVENTORY NO.

158 [1935.6]

58. Portrait of a Woman

ARTIST

Robert Campin (Netherlandish, ca.1375/9–1444)

DATE

ca.1435

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

oil and egg tempera on oak panel

DIMENSIONS

40.6 x 28.1 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1860, purchased, 1860

COLLECTION

National Gallery, London

INVENTORY NO.

NG353.2

241

Appendix 

59. Portrait of Marie de Pacy, wife of Barthélemy Alatruye

ARTIST

16th century (after Robert Campin, Netherlandish, c.1375/9–1444)

DATE

ca.1562 after the original ca.1425

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

44.5 X 31.5 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1821, first mentioned n. 265, from Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België, Brussels, inv./cat.nr 407, 1821

COLLECTION

Musées des Beaux-Arts, Tournai

INVENTORY NO.

407

60. Portrait of Margareta van Eyck

ARTIST

Jan Van Eyck (b. before 1395, Maaseik–d.1441, Bruges)

DATE

1939

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

32.6 x 25.8 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

n/a

COLLECTION

Groeninge Museum, Bruges

INVENTORY NO.

0000.GRO0162.I

242 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

61. Portrait of a Woman

ARTIST

Attr. Jacques Daret (Netherlandish, ca.1401/3–1468)

DATE

ca.1430–1440

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

49.5 x 39.6 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1858, first recorded in the Pozzi Collection in Cremona. Three more owners. Sold, Paris 15 May 1900, lot 143. Purchased, 7 October 1923, by Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss (Dumbarton Oaks Collection) from Wildenstein, Paris (dealer)

COLLECTION

Dumbarton Oaks Collection, Washington DC

INVENTORY NO.

HC.P.1923.01.(0)

62. Portrait of a Woman with a Gauze Headdress

ARTIST

Rogier Van der Weyden (Netherlandish, ca.1399/40–1464)

DATE

ca.1440–1445

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

49.3 x 32.9 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1908, acquired

COLLECTION

Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

INVENTORY NO.

545D

243

Appendix 

63. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Rogier Van der Weyden (Netherlandish, ca.1399/40–1464)

DATE

ca.1460

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

37 x 27 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1937, donated by Andrew W. Mellon Collection

COLLECTION

National Gallery of Art, Washington

INVENTORY NO.

1937.1.44

64. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Workshop of Rogier Van der Weyden (Netherlandish, ca.1399/40–1464)

DATE

c.1445–1455

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

38.5 x 29 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1996, donated by J.W. Frederiks

COLLECTION

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

INVENTORY NO.

3384 (OK)

244 

NE THERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

65. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Workshop of Rogier Van der Weyden (Netherlandish, ca.1399/40–1464)

DATE

ca.1460

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil with egg tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

37 x 27.1 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Bequeathed by Mrs Lyne Stephens, 1895

COLLECTION

The National Gallery, London

INVENTORY NO.

NG1433

66. Portrait of a Isabella of Portugal

ARTIST

Workshop of Rogier Van der Weyden (Netherlandish, ca.1399/40–1464)

DATE

ca.1450

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

46 x 36.2 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1883, sold by Christianus Johannes Nieuwenhuys, Brussel, May 4, 1883, lot 4 as by Jan van Eyck. 1898–1927, Rothschild family, 1927–1976 Rockefeller family. Sold to Thomas Agnew & Sons, Ltd. London; 1977–1978, Thomas Agnew & Sons, Ltd., London, sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1978

COLLECTION

Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

INVENTORY NO.

NUMBER: 78.PB.3

245

Appendix 

67. Portrait of a Young Woman

ARTIST

Petrus Christus (Netherlandish, ca.1425–1475/6)

DATE

ca.1470

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

29 x 22.5 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1821, Acquisition from the collection of the merchant Edward Solly, Berlin

COLLECTION

Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

INVENTORY NO.

Cat. 41

68. Portrait of a Lady with a Veiled Headdress

ARTIST

Anonymous (Netherlandish)

DATE

ca.1470

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

22 x 15 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1926, in the private collection of A. W. Volz, Le Hague, from the Amsterdam dealer Nicolaas Beets. 1947, sold The Hague Amsterdamsche Kunsthandel Paul Cassirer & Co, Amsterdam to a private collection. 1963, sold, Duitsland art dealer Heinz Kisters, Kreuzlingen

COLLECTION

Private collection

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

246 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

69. Portrait of a Woman

ARTIST

Attr. Hans Memling (b. ca.1440, Seligenstadt–d.1494, Bruges)

DATE

ca.1475

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

23.2 x 18.4

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1950, bequest of Mary Stillman Harkness to the Metropolitan Museum of, Art, New York; 2013, Sold by the Metropolitan Museum, Sotheby’s, 31 January 2013, Sale N08952, Lot 9

COLLECTION

Private collection

INVENTORY NO.

50.145.28, when at the Metropolitan Museum

70. Portrait of an Old Woman

ARTIST

Hans Memling (b. ca.1440, Seligenstadt–d.1494, Bruges)

DATE

ca.1475

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

25.6 x 17.7

ACQUISITION CREDIT

The Edith A. and Percy S. Straus Collection

COLLECTION

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

INVENTORY NO.

v.44.530

247

Appendix 

71. Portrait of an Old Woman

ARTIST

Hans Memling (b. ca.1440, Seligenstadt–d.1494, Bruges)

DATE

ca.1480–1485

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

35.4 x 29.3 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1908, acquired from the dealer François Kleinberger, Paris

COLLECTION

Musée du Louvre, Paris

INVENTORY NO.

R.F.1723

72. Portrait of a Young Woman (Sibyl)

ARTIST

Hans Memling (b. ca.1440, Seligenstadt–d.1494, Bruges)

DATE

1480

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

46.5 x 35.2 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

n/a

COLLECTION

Stedelijke Musea, Memlingmuseum, Bruges

INVENTORY NO.

Sint-Janshospitaal, inv. OSJ 174.1

248 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

73. Portrait of Maria Bonciani

ARTIST

Master of the Baroncelli Portraits (active in Bruges, late 15th century)

DATE

ca.1480–1490

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

51 x 31 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1843, acquired

COLLECTION

Uffizi, Florence (the Church in San Piero Scheraggio)

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

74. Portrait of a Lady with Carnation

ARTIST

Master of the Legend of St. Ursula (active in Bruges, 1480–1500)

DATE

ca.1480–1500

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

24.5 x 20.3 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

n/a

COLLECTION

Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp

INVENTORY NO.

MMB.0008

249

Appendix 

75. Lucrezia Tornabuoni

ARTIST

Attr. Domenico Ghirlandaio (Florentine, 1449–1494)

DATE

ca.1475

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera and oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

53.3 x 39.9 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1952, Samuel H. Kress Collection, donated

COLLECTION

National Gallery, Washington

INVENTORY NO.

1952.5.62

76. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Benedetto Ghirlandaio (Florentine, 1458–1497)

DATE

later part 15th century

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

44.13 x 31.43 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Bequest of Miss Tessie Jones in memory of Herschel V. Jones, 68.41.9

COLLECTION

Minneapolis Institute of Arts

INVENTORY NO.

68.41.9

250 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

77. Selvaggia Sassetti

ARTIST

Davide Ghirlandaio (Florentine, 1452–1525)

DATE

1487–1488

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

57.2 x 44.1 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1931, The Friedsam Collection, Bequest of Michael Friedsam

COLLECTION

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

INVENTORY NO.

32.100.71

78. Portrait of a Young Woman

ARTIST

Domenico Ghirlandaio (Florentine, 1449–1494)

DATE

ca.1490

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

44 x 32 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1860, sold from the Savonelli collection, Rome. June 1929, purchased by Calouste Gulbenkian from Arthur Julius Goldschmidt through Duveen Brothers

COLLECTION

Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon

INVENTORY NO.

282

251

Appendix 

79. Portrait of a Girl

ARTIST

Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio (Florentine, 1449–1494)

DATE

ca.1490

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

44.1 x 29.2 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1887, purchased

COLLECTION

National Gallery, London

INVENTORY NO.

NG1230

80. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Bastiano di Bartolo Mainardi (San Gimignano, ca.1460–1513)

DATE

15th or 16th century

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

32.1 × 26.4 cm; Framed: 51.4 × 45.7 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1953, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alfred J. Fisher

COLLECTION

Detroit Institute of Arts

INVENTORY NO.

53.469

252 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

81. Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci

ARTIST

Leonardo da Vinci (near Florence, 1452–1519)

DATE

ca.1474–1478

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

overall (original panel only): 38.1 x 37 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1967, purchased, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund

COLLECTION

National Gallery, Washington

INVENTORY NO.

1967.6.1.a

82. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Domenico Ghirlandaio (Florentine, 1449–1494)

DATE

1475–1494

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera, oil and gold on panel

DIMENSIONS

56.1 x 37.7 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1913, acquired by Sterling Clark

COLLECTION

Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA

INVENTORY NO.

1955.938

253

Appendix 

83. Portrait of a Woman Before a Landscape

ARTIST

Domenico Ghirlandaio (Florentine, 1449–1494)

DATE

1480–1485

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

49.6 x 37.7 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

n/a

COLLECTION

Lindenau Museum, Altenburg

INVENTORY NO.

102

84. Portrait of a Young Woman

ARTIST

Agnolo di Domenico del Mazziere (Master of Santo Spirito, 1466–1513)

DATE

1485–1490

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

48.1 x 32.1 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

n/a

COLLECTION

Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

INVENTORY NO.

Cat. 80

254 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

85. Portrait of a Lady (Ginevra de’ Benci?)

ARTIST

Lorenzo di Credi (Lorenzo d’Andrea d’Oderigo, Florentine, 1490–1500)

DATE

1490–1500

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

58.7 x 40 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1943, bequest of Richard De Wolfe Brixey

COLLECTION

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

INVENTORY NO.

43.86.5

86. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Anonymous (Florentine)

DATE

ca.1500

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

69 x 46 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

In the Von Ingenheim collection. 1926, sold to A. S. Drey, New York, then to Gallery Colnaghi, London. 1929, sold to Knoedler, New York. In 1931 it appears to have been in the Payson collection, New York, after which its handovers become confused and, ultimately, unknown.

COLLECTION

Unknown

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

255

Appendix 

87. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Biagio d’Antonio Tucci (Florence, 1446–1516)

DATE

Late 15th century

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

45 × 33 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

From the Grassi collection, Florence

COLLECTION

Museo Civico Amedeo Lia, La Spezia (Liguria)

INVENTORY NO.

204

88. Portrait of a Lady at a Window (Smeralda Bandinelli?)

ARTIST

Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, Florentine, 1444/5–1510)

DATE

1470–1475

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

65.7 x 41 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1900, bequeathed by Constantine Alexander Ionides

COLLECTION

Victoria and Albert Museum, London

INVENTORY NO.

CAI. 100

256 

NE THERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

89. Portrait of a Lady (Clarice Orsini?)

ARTIST

Anonymous (Florentine, circle of Domenico Ghirlandaio, Florentine, 1449–1494)

DATE

1475–1494

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

75 x 52 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1959, purchased with Shaw Funds from Mr C. Marshall Spink

COLLECTION

National Gallery of Ireland

INVENTORY NO.

1385

90. Costanza de’ Medici (Costanza Caetani)

ARTIST

(attr. Fra Bartolommeo) Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio (Florentine, 1449–1494)

DATE

ca.1480–1490

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera and oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

57.2 x 37.5 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1910, Salting bequest

COLLECTION

National Gallery, London

INVENTORY NO.

NG2490

257

Appendix 

91. Presumed Portrait of Caterina Sforza Riario

ARTIST

Lorenzo di Credi (Lorenzo d’Andrea d’Oderigo, Florentine, 1490–1500)

DATE

1481–1483

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on canvas

DIMENSIONS

75 X 54 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

n/a

COLLECTION

Pinacoteca Civica di Forlì

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

92. Portrait of a Young Woman

ARTIST

Neroccio de’ Landi (Sienese, 1447–1500)

DATE

ca.1485

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

46.5 x 30.5 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1942, donated, Widener Collection

COLLECTION

The National Gallery of Art, Washington

INVENTORY NO.

1942.9.47

258 

NE THERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

93. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Girolamo di Benvenuto (Sienese, 1470–1524)

DATE

ca.1505

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

60 x 45.4 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1939, donated, S. H. Kress Collection

COLLECTION

The National Gallery of Art, Washington

INVENTORY NO.

1939.1.353

94. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Anonymous (Sienese)

DATE

Late 15th century

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

panel

DIMENSIONS

n/a

ACQUISITION CREDIT

n/a

COLLECTION

n/a

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

259

Appendix 

95. Portrait of a Lady with a Pearl Necklace

ARTIST

Lorenzo Costa (Ferrara, ca.1460–d. Mantua, 1535)

DATE

1485–1495

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

44 x 33.9 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

sold by Ranghiasci Brancaleoni, 12-20 aprile 1882, n. 151, to Mary Rich Richardson, who lent (1883), then bequeathed the painting (1925) to the MFA

COLLECTION

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

INVENTORY NO.

25.227

96. Portrait of a Lady with a Lapdog

ARTIST

Lorenzo Costa (Ferrara, ca.1460–d. Mantua, 1535)

DATE

ca.1500–1505

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

45.4 x 35 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1666, first recorded at Whitehall, store no. 516

COLLECTION

Royal Collection, Windsor

INVENTORY NO.

RCIN 405762

260 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

97. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Lorenzo Costa (Ferrara, ca.1460–d. Mantua, 1535)

DATE

ca.1506

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on canvas (transferred from panel)

DIMENSIONS

57 x 44 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Originally in the L.M. and E.L. Kochubey collection. 1921, the Hermitage from the State Museum Fund.

COLLECTION

The Hermitage, St Petersburg

INVENTORY NO.

ГЭ-5525

98. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Attr. Domenico Panetti (Ferrara, ca.1460–1530)

DATE

1500–1509

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

39 x 32 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Collezione Pio di Savoia

COLLECTION

Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome

INVENTORY NO.

PC 22

261

Appendix 

99. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Bernardino Zaganelli da Cotignola (Cotignola, 1460–1510)

DATE

ca.1500

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

33 x 25 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

2003, re-acquired by Prince Hans-Adam II von und zu Liechtenstein

COLLECTION

Liechtenstein Museum, Wien

INVENTORY NO.

GE935

100. Portrait of an Unknown Lady

ARTIST

Attr. Master of the Baldraccani (Forlì, active ca.1480–1510)

DATE

1480–1510

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

50.4 x 35.2 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1940, Bequeathed by Miss Emily G. Kemp

COLLECTION

Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

INVENTORY NO.

WA1945.61

262 

NE THERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

101. Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (Lady with Ermine)

ARTIST

Leonardo da Vinci (near Florence, 1452–1519)

DATE

1483–1490

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

55 x 40 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

c.1800, purchased by Adam Jerzy, the son of Princess Izabela Czartoryska. Donated to the Puławy Museum

COLLECTION

Czartoryski Museum, Cracow

INVENTORY NO.

134

102. Portrait of a Woman (la Belle Ferronière)

ARTIST

Leonardo da Vinci (near Florence, 1452–1519)

DATE

ca.1493–1494

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

63 x 45 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Collection of Francis I

COLLECTION

Musée du Louvre, Paris

INVENTORY NO.

778

263

Appendix 

103. Portrait of a Lady as Saint Lucy

ARTIST

Giovanni Boltraffio (Lombard, 1466/7–1516)

DATE

ca.1509

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

51.5 x 36.5 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Originally in the collection of Count Febo Borromeo. 1934, acquired by the Museum through Mercuria Gallery (Lucerne)

COLLECTION

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

INVENTORY NO.

52 (1934.44)

104. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (Lombard, 1466/7–1516)

DATE

ca.1500

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

50 x 40.5 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

The Borromeo Collection, Isola Bella

COLLECTION

Lichtenstein Museum, Wien

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

264 

NE THERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

105. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Circle of Giovanni Boltraffio (Lombard, 1466/7–1516)

DATE

ca.1500–1520

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil and tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

36.3 x 28.5 cm (originally larger)

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1976, bequest, Collezione Marcenaro, Genoa

COLLECTION

Fondazione Cariplo

INVENTORY NO.

1222

106. Portrait of a Woman

ARTIST

Attr. Andrea Solario (Milanese, ca.1465–1524)

DATE

1505–1507

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil and tempera on panel

DIMENSIONS

55 x 42 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1912, inheritance, Emanuele d’Adda

COLLECTION

Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco

INVENTORY NO.

00659535

265

Appendix 

107. Portrait of a Woman

ARTIST

Anonymous (circle of Giovanni Bellini, active ca.1459–1516, formerly attr. to Vittore Carpaccio, Venetian, 1460/66?–1525/26)

DATE

1450–1470

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

28.5 X 22.5 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1952, on loan from the DRVK to the museum, (inv. no. SK-C-1419); 1960, transferred to the museum

COLLECTION

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

INVENTORY NO.

SK-A-3993

108. Portrait of a Woman

ARTIST

Anonymous (Venetian, last quarter 15th century, formerly attributed to Vittore Carpaccio, Venetian, 1460/66?–1525/26)

DATE

ca.1475–1510

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Panel

DIMENSIONS

26.5 x 20 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1978, purchased from Sotheby’s, New York, 7 June 1978, Lot. 251

COLLECTION

Private collection

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

266 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

109. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Anonymous (Venetian, latter part of the 15th century, formerly attributed to Vittore Carpaccio, Venetian, 1460/66?–1525/26)

DATE

ca.1475–ca.1510

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Panel

DIMENSIONS

26.5 x 20 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1978, purchased from Sotheby’s, New York, 7 June 1978, Lot. 251

COLLECTION

Private collection

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

110. Portrait of a Woman (A Nun of San Secondo?)

ARTIST

Jacometto Veneziano (Venetian, active ca.1472–d. before 1498)

DATE

1485–1495

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on wood; (verso: oil and gold on wood)

DIMENSIONS

10.2 x 7.3 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1967, acquired, Robert Lehman

COLLECTION

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

INVENTORY NO.

1975.1.86

267

Appendix 

111. Portrait of a Woman (Possibly a Nun of San Secondo)

ARTIST

Jacometto Veneziano (Venetian, active ca.1472–d. before 1498)

DATE

1475–1498

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

23.4 x 17.14 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1975, E. V. Thaw, New York

COLLECTION

The Cleveland Museum of Art

INVENTORY NO.

1976.9

112. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Attr. Jacometto Veneziano (Venetian, active ca.1472–d. before 1498)

DATE

1475–1498

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

33.7 x 27.3 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1917, John G. Johnson Collection

COLLECTION

Philadelphia Museum of Art

INVENTORY NO.

Cat. 243

268 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

113. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Attr. Jacometto Veneziano (Venetian, active ca.1472–d. before 1498)

DATE

1475–1498

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Panel

DIMENSIONS

25.4 x 19 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Sold from the Collezione Papa Pio IX by Christie’s, London, 29 March 1968, Lot 104

COLLECTION

Private collection

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

114. Portrait of a Lady with a Lagoon Landscape and Hills Behind

ARTIST

Attr. Jacometto Veneziano (Venetian, active ca.1472–d. before 1498)

DATE

1475–1494

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

oil on panel and gilt

DIMENSIONS

25.4 x 19 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Bequeathed by Margaret McEwan, The Hon. Mrs Ronald Greville (1863–1942)

COLLECTION

Polesden Lacey, Surrey (Accredited Museum of the National Trust Collections, UK)

INVENTORY NO.

NT1246487

269

Appendix 

115. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Attr. Leonardo Boldrini (Venetian, active 1452–d.1497/8)

DATE

1490–1499

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

42 x 33 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1901, gift from Antonia Noli Marenzi

COLLECTION

Accademia Carrara, Bergamo

INVENTORY NO.

58AC00250

116. Caterina Cornaro

ARTIST

Gentile Bellini (Venetian, ca.1430/34–1507)

DATE

ca.1500

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

63 x 49 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1836, presented to the Szépművészeti Múzeum by János Lászlo Pyrker, Patriarch of Venice (before 1830)

COLLECTION

Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest

INVENTORY NO.

101

270 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

117. Portrait of a Young Woman

ARTIST

Attr. Francesco Bissolo (Venetian, 1470/72–1554)

DATE

ca.1500

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

24.13 x 20.32 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Gift of Anna Bing Arnold

COLLECTION

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

INVENTORY NO.

53.28.17

118. Portrait of a Woman

ARTIST

Vittore Carpaccio (Venetian, 1460/66?–1525/26)

DATE

1493–1494

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

28 x 24 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

n/a

COLLECTION

Galleria Borghese, Rome

INVENTORY NO.

450

271

Appendix 

119. Portrait of a Lady with a Book

ARTIST

Attr. Vittore Carpaccio (Venetian, 1460/66?–1525/26)

DATE

ca.1495–1500

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

42.6 x 31.1 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Gift of the Samuel H. Kress Foudation

COLLECTION

The Denver Art Museum

INVENTORY NO.

1961.168

120. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Attr. Vittore Carpaccio (Venetian, 1460/66?–1525/26)

DATE

ca.1500–1520

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

41 X 30.8 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1917, Edward Wheelwright Fund, purchased from the Kleinberger Galleries, Paris. Private collection, Taranto, Italy. 1911–1917, Ercole Canessa, Paris and Colnaghi, London (owned jointly; Colnaghi stock no. A105). 1917, Kleinberger Galleries, Paris; 1917, sold by Kleinberger to the MFA

COLLECTION

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

INVENTORY NO.

17.1081

272 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

121. Portrait of a Woman

ARTIST

Vittore Carpaccio? (Venetian, 1460/66?–1525/26)

DATE

ca.1500

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

57 x 44 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

n/a

COLLECTION

Private collection

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

122. Portrait of a Venetian Woman

ARTIST

Anonymous (formerly attr. Vittore Carpaccio, Venetian, 1460/66?–1525/26)

DATE

ca.1505

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel with traces of tempera

DIMENSIONS

26.46 x 22.40 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Purchase: the William Rockhill Nelson Trust

COLLECTION

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City

INVENTORY NO.

47-39

273

Appendix 

123. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Marco Marziale (Venetian, active ca.1489–1507)

DATE

Late 15th–early 16th century

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Panel

DIMENSIONS

n/a

ACQUISITION CREDIT

c.1957, purchased from French & Co, New York

COLLECTION

Private collection

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

124. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Jacopo de’ Barbari (active in Venice, 1500–1516?)

DATE

Late 15th–early 16th century

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Panel

DIMENSIONS

44.5 x 33 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1929, purchased from J. Levy Galleries, New York

COLLECTION

Private collection

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

274 

NE THERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

125. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Attr. Vincenzo Catena (Venetian, ca.1480–1530)

DATE

ca.1500–1505

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Panel

DIMENSIONS

58 x 43 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

6 August 1960, purchased from Lanckoronski collection, Wien 

COLLECTION

Private collection

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

126. Portrait of a Lady

ARTIST

Attr. Marco Baisati (active in Venice, 1496–1530, formerly attr. Marco Marziale, Venetian, active ca.1489–1507)

DATE

Early 1500s

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

33.3 x 27.6 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Museum purchase

COLLECTION

Worcester Art Museum, Worcester (Massachusetts)

INVENTORY NO.

1922.153

275

Appendix 

127. Portrait of a Lady, Bust-Length, in a Red Dress

ARTIST

Circle of Amico Aspertini (Bologna? 1474/75–1552)

DATE

Early sixteenth century

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

32.38 x 21.59 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Sale, Christie’s, London, 19 June 1942, lot 130; The Collection of Edward and Maria Goldberger; Old Master Paintings, Bonhams New Bond Street, Dec. 09, 2015

COLLECTION

Private Collection

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

128. Portrait of a Woman in Side Profile

ARTIST

Paolo Uccello (Florentine, 1397–1475)

DATE

Fifteenth century

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

25.3 x 17cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

Dreweatts, Donnington Priory, May 27, 2021

COLLECTION

Private Collection

INVENTORY NO.

n/a

276 

NE THERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

129. Portrait of a Woman

ARTIST

Lorenzo Costa (Ferrara, ca.1460–d. Mantua, 1535)

DATE

ca.1490

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on canvas transferred from panel

DIMENSIONS

44.77 cm x 34.61 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1947, purchased from Nicholas M. Acquavella Galleries, New York, NY

COLLECTION

Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, US

INVENTORY NO.

1947.4

130. Portrait of a Woman

ARTIST

Domenico Panetti (Ferrara, ca.1460–1512)

DATE

Early sixteenth century

MEDIUM AND SUPPORT

Oil on panel

DIMENSIONS

44.2 x 33.5 cm

ACQUISITION CREDIT

1919, the Hermitage; formerly in the A.A. Obolenskaya collection

COLLECTION

State Hermitage, St Petersburg

INVENTORY NO.

ГЭ-4721

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Index

Numbers in italics refer to images. Alberti, Leon Battista 19, 44, 45, 57, 87, 99, 105, 109, 110, 112, 125, 147, 148, 154, 156, 185, 196-198 Alighieri, Dante 53, 54, 84, 85, 109, 153, 157, 158, 165, 169 Andachtsbild 137 Animated (likeness, portrait) 103, 141, 144, 155, 156 Annunciation 60, 76, 78, 84, 104 Antiquity 21-25, 42, 54, 77, 95, 101, 145, 149 Antonello da Messina 150, 176, 177 Aquinas, Thomas 73, 130 Aristotle 19, 34, 47, 112, 160 Arnolfini 23, 36, 57, 70, 74, 82, 83, 145, 195, 201, 202-210 Arrha 83 Augustine, St 51, 72 Aureolus, Peter 142 Background (abstract, continuous, emblematic, illusionistic, neutral, pictorial) 37, 79, 81, 88, 95, 98, 99, 102, 109, 110, 114, 119, 120, 121, 135, 140, 143, 144, 148, 157, 170, 179, 199 Baisati, Marco 179 Baldovinetti, Alesso 109 Barbaro, Francesco 44, 67, 179, 192 Barthes, Roland 29, 38 Beauty 19, 23, 27, 28, 33, 34, 54-58, 75, 78, 79, 89, 105, 112, 124, 125, 128, 141, 142, 149, 155, 164, 165, 193, 198, 200, 209 Beguine 53, 63, 65 Bellini 1, 74, 92, 144, 147, 174-178, 179, 191 Belts 18, 111, 113 Bembo, Bernardo 161-166, 168, 178 Bembo, Maria 189 Bernardino, Fra 45, 48, 60 Betrothal 69, 70, 73, 74, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 89, 90, 111, 115, 116, 122, 123, 138, 139, 141, 149, 197, 202, 204-207 Bird’s-eye views 151, 155, 164 Bissolo, Francesco 179 Black Death 153 Boccaccio, Giovanni 42, 43, 48, 52, 54, 153 Boldrini, Leonardo 179 Botticelli, Sandro 47, 63, 74, 105, 113, 146, 156-159 Boucicaut 209 Bouts, Dieric 151 Bride 27, 35, 42, 45, 48, 50, 57, 63, 64, 69-71, 73, 77, 79, 82-84, 86-88, 90, 103, 116, 140, 163, 181-183, 185, 188, 207 Broekelants, Gese 131 Brunelleschi, Filippo 145 Bruni, Leonardo 45-47 Burgundy, Duchy of 15, 91, 119, 126, 127, 134, 138, 141 Caldeira, Giovanni 187, 189 Campin, Robert 121, 122, 128-130, 134, 139, 141

Canon Law 45, 72 Carpaccio, Vittore 159, 174, 178, 179 Cassoni 102 Castello Nativity, Master of 108 Castiglione, Baldassare 21, 28, 80, 211 Catena, Vincenzo 179 Catherine of Siena 64, 65 Cattaneo, Simonetta 103, 105, 117 Cereta, Laura 50-52, 160, 168 Cervelliera, Giovanni di Francesco del 102, 157 Chambre étoffée 84, 209 Chambre verte 208 Characterisation 26, 28, 29, 37, 95, 96, 108, 109 Chastity 41, 44, 50, 54, 62, 64, 90, 104, 131, 141, 154, 155, 168, 169, 179, 207, 208 Cherry 85, 203, 206, 209 Christ 43, 64, 65, 73, 129, 129, 130, 132, 146, 166, 207 Christocentric 62, 65, 129, 131, 132, 134, Christus, Petrus 121, 122, 129, 135, 135, 138, 139, 140, 140, 148, 165 Cioppa 74, 77, 103, 105, 158 Clothing 18, 24, 37, 63, 75, 86, 90, 98, 116, 119, 120, 128, 140, 165, 167, 190, 191, 200, 202, 209 Coazzone 17, 116 Cognitive style 93 Commentator 128, 156, 164 Common House 65, 66, 131 Community system 183 Composite monarchy 126 Contarini 95, 115, 176, 177, 180 Convent 46, 53, 133, 163, 180, 191 Cotta 75, 158 Council of Florence 73 Counter-trousseau 75, 86 Coverciere 88, 161 Cranach the Elder, Lucas 135 Dalmáu, Lluís 138 Daret, Jacques 121 De’ Bardi, Alessandra 37, 168 De’ Barbari, Jacopo 179 De’ Benci, Ginevra 27, 36, 58, 75, 96, 132, 143, 152, 158, 160, 163, 164, 181, 196, 201 Decembrio, Angelo 95, 97, 107, 112 De’ Conti, Bernardino 79, 114, 115, 117, 150 De’ Conti, Giusto 104 Degli Albizzi, Giovanna 88, 103, 106, 118, 155 De Imitatione Christi 66, 132 Del Castagno, Andrea 156 Del Garbo, Raffaellino 113, 159, 159 Della Francesca, Piero 30, 31, 80, 108, 114 Del Mazziere brothers 166 Del Reggimento 41, 110, 168

314 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

Del Verrocchio, Andrea 88, 162, 165, 169 De’ Medici, Costanza 85, 86, 89 De’ Medici, Giuliano 103, 105, 106, 113 De’ Medici, Lorenzo 56, 57, 60, 86, 118, 163-165, 168, 169 Denasatio 59 De Pizan, Christine 39, 51, 52, 67 De’ Predis, Ambrogio 113-116, 118 De’ Roberti, Ercole 79 Descriptive affinity 30, 98 D’Este, Beatrice 114, 116, 117 D’Este, Isabella 31, 32, 81, 125, 177 D’Este, Lionello 95, 97 Devotio Moderna 35, 65, 66, 119, 121, 130, 131, 141, 199 Di Credi, Lorenzo 162, 163 Dimissorie 187 Dogaressa 174, 192 Donora 86-88, 112, 158, 181 Donor portraiture 101, 130, 135, 151, 170, 176, 198, 199 Dower 83, 85, 181, 182, 184, 186 Dowry 18, 19, 32, 36, 46, 69, 70, 71, 73, 75, 77, 83, 85, 86, 117, 160, 174, 181-189, 201, 206, 207 Dowry of humility 122, 132, 135, 136, 141, 168 Dowry of virtues 37, 45, 47, 75, 132, 141, 168 Dürer, Albrecht 125, 174, 178, 178 Eve 19, 34, 40, 40, 50, 51, 62, 201 Eyes 17, 23, 57-59, 78, 98, 102, 103, 108, 110, 124, 128, 129, 131, 132, 152, 164, 165, 179, 209 Falier, Petronella 189 Fedele, Cassandra 52, 53, 167, 168, 178 Ficino, Marsilio 54, 55, 58, 163, 196, 201 Fides 205 Filarete 60, 100, 101, 105 Flanders 17, 25, 35, 66, 83, 91, 126-128, 135, 138, 143, 146, 151, 165, 183, 195, 198 Florence, Republic of 49, 58, 73, 74, 83, 88, 92, 93, 101, 104, 105, 108, 109, 113, 144, 160, 161, 163-166, 174, 183, 186, 206 Fly 85, 157 Franciscans, Order of the 63, 65 Friendship 18, 24, 44, 55, 57, 72, 85, 99, 105, 166, 174, 203 Gallerani, Cecilia 115, 117, 125, 149, 163, 177, 177, 178 Gamurra 17, 74, 86, 110, 160 Gaze 25, 30, 31, 41, 58, 59, 77, 88, 92, 132, 137-139, 148, 149, 151, 156, 159, 167, 179, 180, 190, 201 Gerson, Jean 61, 126, 130, 138, 140, Ghirlandaio, Domenico 85, 87, 103, 109, 112, 135, 148, 148, 149, 155, 205 Giornea 97, 106 Giotto 23-25, 29, 156 Gloves 79 Gothic 22, 95, 120, 134, 137, 138, 142, 150, 198, 202 Graeco-Roman 22, 95, 195, 198 Gratian 73 Griselda 43, 44, 48, 113, 209

Groote, Gert 65, 66, 130 Guardian (guardianship) 33, 60, 71, 183, 184, 189 Guicciardini, Ludovico 128 Hands 28, 59, 78, 79, 82, 111, 116, 117, 124, 130, 131, 133, 136, 138, 139, 155, 161, 162, 204, 205 Headdress (headgear) 17, 74, 75, 85, 96, 102, 108, 114, 116, 123, 124, 128, 129, 131, 133, 137, 139, 191, 202 Hincmar of Reims 72 Houppelande 96 Humanism 23, 43, 46, 56, 58, 95, 107, 114, 118, 144, 154, 168, 175, 187 Holy face 129, 130 Icons of humility 35, 119, 200 Icons of urbanitas 35, 113, 178, 187, 200 Idealisation 26, 28, 29, 37, 95, 103, 125, 198 Incorporated societies 94, 100 Incorporated wives 44, 45, 159 Inheritance 33, 36, 46, 77, 129, 174, 181-186, 189, 190, 201, 204 Inquisition 65 Isabella of Portugal 121-123, 132, 133, 133-135, 136, 138, 139, 141, 199 Jacometto 163, 177, 178, 180, 180 Jesus 62-64, 66, 134 Jewel (jewellery) 17, 18, 32, 74, 75, 105, 106, 131, 150, 155, 182, 192, 202 Judeo-Christian 19, 39, 195 Julian of Norwich 63 Kruseler 202 Landino, Cristoforo 54, 80, 161, 164 Landscape 76-88, 104, 143, 148, 151-155, 160, 164-167, 180, 199, 200 Lealtà 77, 79, 111 Legend of St Ursula, Master of the 139 Le Ménagier de Paris 41-44, 85, 128, 140 Le Murate 163, 167 Leonardo da Vinci 34, 36, 114, 115, 116, 117, 125, 136, 144, 146, 147, 149, 150, 152, 153, 160, 161-165, 169, 177 Libri d’oro 188 Limbourg brothers 153, 153 Lineage system 182, 183, 185, 188 Linear perspective 156 Lippi, Filippo 74, 74, 75, 77, 78, 103, 104, 106, 108 Lombard Law (Lex Longobardorum) 71, 183 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio 153 Love (courtly, divine, marital, platonic 18, 28, 35, 41, 43, 45, 53-55, 57, 58, 63, 73, 90, 100, 104, 107, 111, 115, 129, 130, 138, 140, 154, 159, 163, 208 Lucretia 42, 44, 52, 67, 104 Magnificence 107, 112, 116, 118, 187, 189 Mainardi, Sebastiano 113, 148, 149 Maiolica 34, 111, 111 Mano cornuta 77, 81

315

Index 

Martini, Simone 56, 60 Mary of Burgundy 118, 122, 126 Mary Magdalene 62, 129, 134, 140, 166 Mary the Virgin 34, 62-65, 78, 129, 201, 207 Marziale, Marco 179 Material culture 30, 35, 69, 74, 108, 121, 123, 160 Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor 18, 116, 118, 126 Medallic portraiture 18, 24, 80, 95, 168, 174 Memling, Hans 27, 121, 122, 124, 131, 147, 150-152, 158 Michiel, Marcantonio 115, 125, 147, 150, 177, 178, 180, 181 Milan, Duchy of 18, 92, 93, 115, 186 Mimetic 30, 36, 79, 173, 181, 193, 200 Mirror 29, 35, 43, 53, 57, 63, 68, 79, 137, 145, 154, 202, 203, 206-210 Misogyny 19, 50, 58, 67, 196, 201 Modernity 36, 52, 143-145, 170, 199, 210 Monte delle Doti 186 Morgengabe 35, 69, 70, 82-85, 89, 90, 113, 182, 198, 202, 206, 209, 210 Mundualdus 183 Munt 71 Mystic (mystical, mysticism) 35, 46, 51, 53, 62-64, 66, 68, 124, 130, 131, 138, 190 Natura 153, 155 Naturalism 22, 25, 101, 143 Neo-platonism (neo-platonic, platonic) 26, 55-59, 95, 103, 105, 154, 155, 163-165, 197, 201 Nogarola, Isotta 50, 51, 167 Nuptial 18, 69, 70, 74-76, 82, 91, 93, 111, 123, 162, 181, 189, 205-207, 209, 210 Oil (medium) 119, 120, 137, 141, 143-145, 151, 198, 200, 203 Ootmoed 36, 131, 132 Paragone 28, 56, 156 Patria Potestas 71, 184 Patriarchy 21, 49, 57, 92, 144, 160, 174, 189, 192, 193, 195, 197, 201 Patrician 19, 37, 46, 59, 95, 113, 120, 144, 159, 167, 174, 175, 179, 181, 184, 187-189, 192 Patrilineal 19, 40, 69, 70, 107, 114, 155, 182, 189 Patrimony 183, 185, 189, 204 Pearls 17, 18, 75, 103, 104, 108, 114, 140, 150, 155, 158, 180 Petrarch, Francesco (Petrarchan, Petrarchism) 30, 43, 54, 56, 59, 67, 78, 98, 104, 107, 115, 118, 129, 140, 153, 163, 164 Phenomenology (Phenomenological) 69, 90, 99, 160, 181, 200, 201 Philip the Good 121, 127, 133, 138, 140, 207 Piety 40, 62, 133 Pisanello 24, 49, 95, 96, 97, 162 Pliny the Elder 21, 22, 78, 80, 92, 153 Pontano, Giovanni 112, 118 Porete, Margarite 35, 63, 65 Provveditori sopra le Pompe 191

Rapiaria 66 Recueil d’Arras 25, 121, 140 Religion 35, 40, 60 Repoussoir 136, 170 Ricordanze 99, 175, 184 Rituals 35, 64, 69, 70, 74, 82, 84, 85, 90, 127, 131, 157, 207 Roman Law 71, 73, 83, 182, 183 Roosbruec, Jan 130 Sacrament (sacramental) 43, 57, 69, 70, 72-74, 77, 80, 81, 84, 85, 90, 105, 111, 202, 206, 207 San Secondo 180, 181 Sanudo, Marino 186, 188 Sanuti, Nicolosa 50, 51, 160 Savonarola, Girolamo 57 Scarampa, Camilla 59, 169 Scarf 161, 167 Scheggia (Giovanni di Ser Giovanni) 102, 109, 110 Scolari 74, 75, 77, 78, 80, 86, 88, 89, 98, 102, 103, 103, 104, 111, 138, 151, 156, 159 Seeing-as 36, 91, 93, 99, 101, 103, 107, 137, 143, 148, 201, 210 Seeing-in 36, 36, 91, 99, 122, 136, 137, 141, 143, 200, 210 Self-imaging 36, 173, 175, 193 Serenissima 36, 43, 174, 175, 177, 192, 193 Serrate 188 Sex (sexual, sexuality) 19-21, 26, 28, 32, 33, 35, 39, 42, 47, 50-52, 59, 64, 68-73, 76, 82-84, 89, 118, 154, 179, 181, 184, 185, 191, 192, 196, 201, 202, 204, 208 Sforza, Battista 30, 31, 80, 154 Sforza, Bianca Maria 17, 18, 18, 114, 116, 118, 126 Sforza, Ludovico 17, 18, 114-117, 125 Siena, Republic of 174, 183, 186 Sine manu 71, 89, 189 Soul 29, 35, 42, 48, 54, 55, 61, 63, 65, 85, 98, 99, 107, 132, 145, 207, 208 Spectatorship 36, 69, 89, 91, 98, 99, 101, 122, 137, 141, 143, 144, 159, 200 Spirituality of humility 36, 131, 141, 200 St Luke, guild of 84, 85, 209 Storage (items, methods) 69, 79, 80, 102, 103, 118, 157, 159, 200 Sumptuary 48-50, 67, 83, 86, 88, 108, 110, 187, 191, 192 Tavolette da soffitto 112, 112 Tempera (medium) 145, 147 Thonis, Heylwich 84, 89, 209 Tornabuoni, Lucrezia 135, 148 Trauung 82 Trusseau (counter-trousseau) 75, 77, 86, 113, 187, 208 Uccello, Paolo 109 Unicorn 60, 81, 89, 166 Urban 20, 25, 30, 35, 37, 49, 54, 62, 65, 77, 93, 112, 119, 120, 127, 151, 153, 161, 169, 173, 186, 193, 199

316 

NETHERL ANDISH AND ITALIAN FEMALE PORTR AITURE IN THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY

Urbanitas 35, 91, 101, 113, 118, 178, 187, 188, 193, 200 Ut pictura poesis 56, 98 Van der Goes, Hugo 27 Van der Weyden, Rogier 115, 121, 122, 124, 129, 130, 133, 134, 134, 135, 139, 139, 140, 141, 146, 152, 199 Van Eyck, Jan 22, 23, 57, 70, 82, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 133, 135, 136, 138, 141, 147, 176, 201, 202-207 Van Scorel, Jan 139 Vasari, Giorgio 34, 105, 156, 176-179, 181

Vecellio, Cesare 190, 191 Venice, Republic of 36, 43, 49, 71, 73, 83, 92, 95, 144, 165, 166, 173-178, 180, 181, 183, 188, 190-193 Venus 54, 106, 154, 169, 169, 192 Virgil 47, 153 Vitruvius 153 Window 38, 60, 76, 88, 102, 104, 105, 129, 151, 152, 156, 158, 159, 166, 195, 197, 203, 205, 206 Woman question 40, 143, 144, 157, 193