Beauty Adorns Virtue: Renaissance Portraits of Women
October 5–6, 2001
East Building Auditorium
Held in conjunction with the exhibition
Virtue
and Beauty: Leonardo's "Ginevra de Benci" and Renaissance
Portraits of Women
The Power of Princesses: Portraits of Ginevra Sforza Bentivoglio
Eleonora Luciano, research associate, departments of sculpture and Renaissance paintings, National Gallery of Art
Courtly ruler portraits provided visual models for the female likenesses that flourished in late-fifteenth-century Florence, the subject of the exhibition Virtue and Beauty. But their function, public and political, was different from that of the portraits in the exhibition, which are for the most part private memorials. This lecture will examine female ruler portraits produced in the Italian principalities during the second half of the quattrocento through the example of Ginevra Sforza (c. 1440-1507), wife of the lord of Bologna, Giovanno Bentivoglio. She was a patron not only of the arts, but also of literature, in which she is praised effusively. The visual and literary image of Ginevra Sforza that emerges from the portraits and from her historical context is one of power and influence. It seems fair to conclude that since power was based on rank and family in the autocratic political structure of the Italian Renaissance principalities, it was relatively blind to gender -- a happy paradox.
The National Gallery of Art owns two portraits of Ginevra Sforza. An early medal by Antonio Marescotti shows the young princess probably around the time of her first marriage, to Sante Bentivoglio, in 1454. Ginevra's dynastic success is celebrated on a much grander scale in a newly restored portrait diptych by Ercole de' Roberti, in which she appears facing Giovanni Bentivoglio. In the 1470s, when the portraits were painted, the Bentivoglio were at the height of their power, a condition that is reflected in the paintings. An example of Ginevra's religious patronage is her prominent donor portrait in the Bentivoglio altarpiece by Lorenzo Costa in the church of San Giacomo Maggiore, Bologna (1488).
In the literary sphere Ginevra Sforza was the dedicatee of a volume of biographies of famous women by the humanist Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, eloquently entitled Gyevera de le clare donne (1483). It naturally included her own biography, a glowing literary portrayal to complement her visual memorials. Literary description and physical likeness eventually came together in a woodcut portrait of Ginevra used to illustrate her biography in Jacopo de Foresti's, De claris mulieribus(Ferrara, 1497).
Portraits as Personae of Italian Renaissance Women: "Virtue and Beauty?"
Patricia Simons, associate professor of the history of art and women's studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Virtue and beauty, as reflected in the title of the current exhibition, were expected, exemplary feminine attributes that were necessarily applied to most portrayals of women in the Renaissance, no matter their actual personalities or social circumstances. To be portrayed was in itself a social act, making a visible statement about the sitter's worthiness. Hence, with each portrait, artists faced the challenge of giving the sitter that distinction, and we need to be specific about what kinds of "virtue and beauty" were accredited to female sitters.
This paper argues that the vehicle of a woman's depicted body and visage served a variety of purposes, ones less concerned with her individuality than with how her representation catered to public, dynastic, political, erotic, and artistic ends. The chief focus is on late fifteenth-century Florentine panels such as Leonardo's Ginevra de' Benci and Domenico Ghirlandaio's Giovanna degli Albizzi as well as his portrait of the Medici widow Lucrezia Tornabuoni. The usual sense is that female portraits of the time--and thence a woman's "virtue and beauty"--were centered on her nuptials or thereafter her chastity within marriage. To simply repeat that formula is to invest in a patronizing ideology about the essential core of femininity and its dependence upon self-definition through heterosexual, familial relations. Instead, we can consider virtue and beauty to be historically contingent and multivalent values with public resonance. Furthermore, the two terms can read like a convenient binary, "virtue" standing for inner values of character, "beauty" for external ones of the body. Yet character was formulated according to social standards more than personal qualities, and virtue and beauty were each rendered visible and thus external in a portrait. Both mind and body were treated as part of a communicable persona, a public face.
"No Picture More Beautiful on Earth:" Domenico Ghirlandaio Paints Giovanna Tornabuoni
Josef Schmid, independent scholar, Munich/Florence
In 1488 Domenico Ghirlandaio painted a half-length profile portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni, daughter of one of the most powerful families in quattrocento Florence. While the identity of the figure has never been disputed, the means of arriving at this attribution are worth reconsidering. A more secure way will be proposed.
The portrait, traditionally viewed as posthumous, was indeed painted during Giovanna's lifetime. Neither the profile nor the integrated titulus, or inscription (previously argued), nor the other background objects point to a memorial portrait. Moreover, an identical portrait of Giovanna in the Cappella Tornabuoni solidifies an almost exact date for the Ghirlandaio panel.
A close examination of Giovanna's dress and accessories -- jewels, book, coral chain, and written sheet -- reveals an upper-class, quattrocento interior, largely void of iconographic connotations. Especially the titulus in the painting's background, taken from Martial but brilliantly modified, must not be read as a reference to the concept of virtue and beauty but as an art-heoretical statement. Furthermore, Ghirlandaio's presentation of Giovanna's beauty corresponds with various descriptions in contemporary sources and focuses primarily on her physical appearance and less on her inner virtues.
Telling Hands
Adrian Randolph, associate professor of art history, Dartmouth College
In portraiture, as in life, likeness and expression seem lodged in the visage. Gazing at the meticulously rendered faces of long-dead sitters in fifteenth-century Italian portraits, we seem to detect qualities often associated with Renaissance art: individualism and psychological presence. With this paper, however, I would like to shift attention toward a more corporeal zone of the spectator's engagement by focusing on hands in Renaissance portraits.
As mediators between the subject and the physical, tactile world, hands are not only essential tools of perception and interaction, but they also possess enormous communicative value. In portraiture, the presence of hands -- gesturing or still, bejeweled or unadorned, gloved or bare -- or their very absence serves to structure the suggested agency of the sitter and his or her relation to the beholder. As such, the emergence of hands in single-sitter portraiture also presents an important moment in early modern formations of gendered subjectivity.
Concentrating on fifteenth-century Italian painting and sculpture, with special emphasis on the portrayal of women, this paper examines the social coding of hands in conduct literature, love poetry, and religious drama, seeking to understand the importance of hands as expressive tools, as meaningful signs, and as telling markers of gender difference.
Adorning Beauty and Portraying Love
Charles Dempsey, professor of art history, Johns Hopkins University
I intend to examine the state of the question with regard to the emergence of the female portrait in the second half of the fifteenth century. The essays collected in the catalogue of the exhibition admirably set forth various avenues of inquiry that have been pursued, and fruitfully so, in recent years. Enormous advances have been made in the study of costume, which is discussed in the essay by Roberta Orsi Landini and Mary Westerman Bulgarella; in Florentine social history, the position of women in which is treated by Dale Kent; in the development of the portrait as a type and its social and cultural status, a theme treated by both David Alan Brown and Joanna Woods-Marsden; and in the relationship between painted portraits and normative poetic images of the poet's beloved in Italian literature, the subject of Victoria Kirkham's essay. As the very subjects of these essays indicate, the state of the question now entails bringing together into a coherent relationship two different realities. The first concerns the reality of the subject, as an individual likeness, shown in her best clothes and finest jewels, together with the reality of the particular social functions served by such a portrayal. The second concerns the reality of the role such images played in the imagination, as portrayals not only of individual beings but of the ideas invested in them by the artist, the beholder, and the sitter herself.
Heroes and Lovers: Male Beauty in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Portraiture
Alison Wright, lecturer in the history of art, University College, London
The power of beauty to suggest virtue and inspire love has been a recurrent theme in the discussion of portraits of women in Renaissance Florence. This lecture asks how far such notions were applicable to the contemporary reception of portraits of men. It addresses two distinct types of male portraiture developed in roughly the same period as Leonardo's Ginevra de' Benci: first the male sitter as lover/devotee associated particularly with Botticelli, and second the all'antica and anonymous "portraits" of beautiful youths of the type explored in Leonardo's drawings and familiarized by Andrea del Verrocchio and his shop. In each case these image types will be addressed in terms of their different public and private functions and their intimate relation to contemporary developments in female portraiture. The paper will also try to assess to what extent such different representations of young men are related.
Motions of the Mind in Renaissance Portraiture
Frank Zöllner, professor of art history, University of Leipzig
The idea that a portrait expresses the motions of the mind is one of the most important issues in the literature on Renaissance portraiture, though even today one has not sufficiently dealt with both the function and the limits of expression. Therefore, I will address the question: why do portraits express something we usually call the motions of the mind, and how do they achieve expression and how do they not?
In answering this question I will analyze some of the most popular examples from Renaissance portraiture, such as Donatello's Bust of a Young Man (Florence), Domenico Ghirlandaio's Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni (Madrid), Pisanello's Portrait of a Young Lady (Paris), and some Renaissance portrait medals.
The Enigmatic Ginevra de' Benci: A Problem of Genre
Mary D. Garrard, professor of art history, American University
Leonardo's portrait of Ginevra de' Benci does not easily fit the genre that it transformed. Despite its pivotal position in the development of the quattrocento female marriage portrait from profile to three-quarter view, the Ginevra de' Benci has rarely been interpreted as a simple marriage portrait; instead, scholars have defined it, in part or exclusively, as the product of an extramarital chivalric love or that of the personal initiative of Leonardo da Vinci.
Against the earlier opinions that the portrait was painted as a gesture of Leonardo's friendship with the Benci family (Müller), or that it commemorated Ginevra's marriage in 1474 to Luigi Niccolini (Clark), John Walker (1967) set it in the context of Ginevra's platonic love relationship with Bernardo Bembo, the Venetian ambassador to Florence in 1475-1476 and 1478-1480, suggesting that Bembo was perhaps involved in the painting's genesis. In 1989, Jennifer Fletcher argued that Bembo commissioned the picture, having discovered that his personal device matched the emblem on the Ginevra de' Benci verso. In 1998, David Brown proposed that Bembo modified a portrait originally painted for Ginevra's marriage, commissioning and designing its reverse.
Significant problems remain with the Bembo patronage theory, some of which I pointed out in an article of 1992. For example, Bembo apparently never owned the painting of his Petrarchan lover, although the very purpose of such an image would have been to substitute for the absent beloved. On the occasion of this symposium, which provides a valuable opportunity to reconsider the Ginevra de' Benci in the context of key related works, I will address the question that is still open: is this curious painting a marriage portrait, a Petrarchan beloved portrait, a friendship portrait, or an as yet undefined combination of these?
Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" in Context
Joanna Woods-Marsden, professor of art history, University of California, Los Angeles
Arguably the best-known painting in the history of Western art, Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of Mona Lisa has, for the most part, been considered in isolation from similar Renaissance portraits. This paper will try to resolve some of the puzzling questions that the work raises by reintegrating it into the contexts of Renaissance gender ideology and the history of earlier female likenesses.
The symposium was organized by the National Gallery of Art in conjunction with the Solow Art and Architecture Foundation.