Lecture 5: Women as Patrons of the Visual Arts in Early Modern Europe

Background

• Time period

• Assumptions about Art (1)

• Why study women patrons?

Time period

‘Early modern’ here refers to the Renaissance/Baroque

Assumptions about Art

• Art is always used to express the artist’s personal concerns/thoughts

  • Vs. reality: for a long time, the patron was the initiator of artistic projects

    • Determined a work’s final appearance (e.g. its artist, material, composition, mode of display)

Why study women patrons?

• Linda Nochlin: Women, whether artists or patrons, were outsiders/exceptions to the rule of the early modern period

  • Comparing female patrons to their male contemporaries gives us new insights on the insiders (men)

• In fact, there was a notable no. of woman patrons in the early modern ages

  • A woman’s elite status & wealth (NOT her gender) was the most important factor determining if she could engage in patronage ⭐

Woman Patronage

• Largest demographic

• Struggles

• Unique characteristics

Largest demographic

• Nuns & widows

  • Only these women had the financial, legal, social independence to commission a work for herself

  • A girl/married lady would’ve been legally controlled by her father/husband

Struggles

• External forces

  • E.g. widows (esp. younger ones): their families + in laws often tried to influence their art patronage

  • E.g. nuns: were often still under the legal & financial control of a male branch of the monastic order

Unique characteristics

• Gender impacts the iconography favoured by the patron

  • E.g. alignment w/ female ideals of beauty & behaviour

• Gender impacts the patron’s approach to patronage

  • E.g. women patrons exerting more control over the creation of artworks due to social expectations placed on women

    • Women had to ensure the final work would NOT reflect poorly on her = scandal & embarrassment

Isabella d’Este (age 60) (1534), Titian

Provenance

• D’Este:

  • Marchioness of Mantua (a small but influential town in Italy)

• Wife, NOT a widow

  • Married into the ruling family

• Active patron

  • Always tried to buy the best antiquity she could afford, and hire the most famous artists of her time to work for her

    • Similar to male contemporaries

  • Described as ‘meddling & overcontrolling’ by artists she hired

    • Her letters evidence her efforts to ensure the artists stuck closely to her desired imagery

      • E.g. very detailed instructions about how each figure in a painting should look/be doing

    • Due to early modern social expectations about patronage & women: women had to ensure the final work would NOT reflect poorly on her = scandal & embarrassment

Description

• Instead of brazenly looking the viewer in the eye, she looks slightly towards our left

• Smooth, white skin

• Elaborate, yet decorously-covered hairdo

• Expensively elegant clothing (no metal, feathers)

Interpretation

• Strategic manipulation of d’Este’s physical appearance to make her appear more youthful/beautiful

  • Aligns w/ typically female ideals of beauty & behaviour

    • A virtuous, married woman

    • Chaste & decorous

    • Youthful

    • Elegant

• Vs. Francesco Maria I della Rovere, Duke of Urbino (ca. 1536-38), Titian

  • In armour, holding a phallic baton

  • Wrinkles & stoic facial expression; receding hairline; baggy eyes

  • Strategic manipulation of male physical appearance to make him appear more wise/powerful

    • Emphasis on age, wisdom & experience

The Education of Marie de’ Medici (1622-25), Peter Paul Rubens

Historical context

Marie de’ Medici

• Part of the famous Medici family in Florence

• Married the King of France, Henri IV in 1600

  • He had become King only by agreeing to convert to Catholicism & annulling his marriage to his 1st Protestant wife

• Became Queen regent when Henri IV was murdered shortly after she was crowned Queen (son was too young to rule on his own)

• Concerns as a patron:

  • Asserting her status as the King’s legitimate & Catholic wife

  • Asserting her status as the mother of the King’s legitimate & Catholic children

Description

• 3 nude graces

  • As an attribute to the Queen

  • Attest to her femininity

• Centre: young Marie de’ Medici

  • Shown turning away from the 3 graces

  • To devote her attention to the teachings of Minerva (the Goddess of Wisdom)

• Left foreground: Male God Orpheus

  • Gazes directly at the seductive nude graces rather than the future Queen of France

Interpretation

• Orpheus assumes the role of the applied male viewer

  • Tensions between Rubens’s pictorial language & the main female subject

    • Iconography normally deployed for elite male patrons

    • Inability to control contemporary viewers’ actual responses

      = easily misinterpreted in negative terms

  • Demonstrating (presumably inadvertently) how distracting Rubens’s use of bare female bodies as allegorical figures can be for contemporary male viewers

    • Since the palace’s most important visitors would’ve been male courtiers/the King himself

The Meeting of Maria de’ Medici & Henri IV in Lyons (1622-25), Peter Paul Rubens

Historical context

Marie de’ Medici

• Part of the famous Medici family in Florence

• Married the King of France, Henri IV in 1600

  • He had become King only by agreeing to convert to Catholicism & annulling his marriage to his 1st Protestant wife

• Became Queen regent when Henri IV was murdered shortly after she was crowned Queen (son was too young to rule on his own)

• Concerns as a patron:

  • Asserting her status as the King’s legitimate & Catholic wife

  • Asserting her status as the mother of the King’s legitimate & Catholic children

Description

• Depicts, in highly allegorical terms, Marie’s 1st meeting w/ her husband Henri IV

  • Marie looks humbly downwards

  • Presents her bare breast to her husband

• Recalls Rubens’s paintings of the Madonna and Child (the Madonna’s breast similarly bare)

  • Marie’s holy namesake

Interpretation

• Maria’s bare breast intended to be understood as proof of her virtuous motherhood & status as an ideal bride

• BUT the bare breast could also have negative associations in this period

  • Signifying the dangers of female seduction

  • E.g. Samson and Delilah (17th century), Peter Paul Rubens

    • Evil women using their bare breast to seduce unwary men (e.g. the hero Samson)

    • His hair, a symbol of his virile masculinity, is being cut off

The Armada Portrait (ca. 1588), George Gower

Historical context

• NEITHER a wife NOR a widow

• Single woman who was rich & powerful in her own right

• Concerns as a patron:

  • Initially concerned w/ asserting herself as the rightful, Protestant heir of her father, Henry VIII

    • Made clear references to her father

  • Later concerned w/ asserting herself as a chaste, virgin & ever-youthful queen

    • She was in her late 40s and knew she would probably never marry and produce an heir to her throne

    • Tried to reassure her increasingly worried subjects visually that they shouldn’t worry about who would succeed her

• Actively tried to control how she was portrayed

  • E.g. approved a limited no. of models that could be used to produce numerous approved replicas paid for by her courtiers

Provenance

• Highlights her role in the English victory over the Spanish armada in 1588

• Made when the Queen was >40 years old

  • Unmarried w/ no children

• Her courtiers were encouraged to commission (approved) representations of her at their own expense

  • She approved a limited no. of models that could be used to produce numerous approved replicas paid for by her portraits

Description & Analysis

• Spanish armada on the left, passing the Queen to meet their eventual downfall on the right (as the viewer’s eyes move from left to right)

  • E.g. ships sinking in storms

  • The Queen as a divine figure in this event

• The Queen as chaste, ever-virgin and always-youthful

  • Symbols of chastity

    • E.g. draped in pearls, pink bow firmly tied over her genital area

• Old-fashioned style of painting

  • E.g.

    • Blank, expressionless face

    • Depiction without any convincing sense of 3D space

  • Recalls earlier portraits of her father, Henry VIII by Hans Holbein the younger

    • Same anti-naturalistic & archaised style

    • Flat, almost cutout

Interpretation

• Reminds viewers of the Queen’s quasi-saintly virtue & eternal chastity

Geraldine A. Johnson and Sara F. Matthews Grieco, (eds.). Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (1997), Introduction

1. Overall failure to completely integrate the lives & works of woman artists into the disciplinary fabric of art history

   • Should go BEYOND merely inserting women into the canon of (male) artistic ‘genius’

   • Linda Nochlin’s challenge to critique/even dismantle the discipline is still relevant

     • BUT many believe it has ben taken up too sporadically & usually w/ limited success

2. Although questions central to the practice of art history should NOT be disregarded (e.g. attribution, dating, iconography)

3. By engaging works of art from the POV of women as pictured & picturing, one gains a much more complex understanding of both images & the culture in which they were produced

   • The ways in which the real & ideal lives of women are reflected in & shaped by works of art

   • The gendered specificity of women’s activities as as creators, consumers, & subjects of visual culture

Possible connections to other case studies

Sarah Beetham, ‘From Spray Cans to Minivans’

Women in the South had a unique ability to memorialize the Confederate cause

• In a tense postwar environment (American Civil War)

• Women could couch their interest in giving soldiers proper burials and decorating their graves in the language of the domestic sphere

  • Grief & mourning as the prerogative of women

• BUT Caroline E. Janney discovered that many of the women who participated most visibly in postwar commemorations were from elite families that did NOT have a close relative who had served in the Confederate army

  = suggests that mourning was not always a primary motivation

• Memorializing the Confederate soldier was an opportunity for women to engage in a political act without arousing suspicion/accusations of treason, which would’ve followed their male counterparts