Women of the Italian Renaissance

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Women of the Italian Renaissance

This essay deals with some of the different ways in which women have been represented in Italian Renaissance . It attempts to place these images of women within the cultural context of the artist who painted them and of the patrons who commissioned them . It also tries to make accessible to the modern viewer some of the meanings which were the common currency of the period , and to uncover some of the problems with which artists grappled . A careful

selection has been made from the vast range of representations of women produced from the early fifteenth century to the second half of the sixteenth , and these are examined in to demonstrate the immensely complex and varied landscape of the past

The images are grouped according to their `functions ' - the ways in which they were used , and the reasons why they were commissioned Considering functions helps us to shift the emphasis from the present to the past , and to highlight the differences between a modern viewer 's perception , assumptions and expectations , and those belonging to the culture in which these paintings were produced

Introduction

Man may be the expression of the perfect proportions of the universe , as Leonardo 's famous image of the Vitruvian man implies , but to the average tourist visiting the Uffizi or the Louvre it is images of women which embody the ideals of beauty and harmony of the Italian Renaissance Women are the subject matter of paintings , so well known that they are in fact part of the visual baggage even of people who have never entered a museum or an art gallery . Who is not familiar with the grace and ethereal beauty of Botticelli 's Primavera and of his naked Venus ? Who cannot recognize the smile of Leonardo 's Mona Lisa ? Who has not seen in reproduction the maternal sweetness of a Raphael Madonna , or the opulent Venetian sensuality of Titian 's Venus of Urbino ? From the public 's point of view , the terms `Renaissance ' and `Woman ' seen to be synonymous

The familiarity of the images and the painters ' mastery of technique may lead the viewer to believe that these paintings are like mirrors which reflects the reality of the past . It is easy to be `tricked ' into believing that , when we look at a painting produced during this period we are looking at `the real world . Leon Battista Alberti , humanist writer , painter and architect , wrote in the mid 1430s in his treatise On Painting that the painter is concerned solely with representing what can be seen . Alberti expresses the notion that knowledge is derived from sensory perception , and that painting is based on the observation of objects made visible by light

The images of women discussed in this report are not direct representations of `reality , or of `what the painter saw . They are the embodiment of a set of ideals and values , both aesthetic and social shared by the artists and by...