Sexualities, Textualities, Art and Music in Early Modern Italy: Playing with Boundaries by Marshall, Melanie L., Linda L. Carroll, and Katherine A. McIver (review)

Musicologists, historians, linguists, and art historians contribute their expertise in this engaging exploration of early modern Italian sexuality. The book reveals the ways that expressive arts promoted and subverted the boundaries between ideal and practised behaviours. Its discussion of the production and reception of texts exposes the distinctions and interplay between men and women, spirituality and carnality, sincerity and satire, autonomy and heteronomy, homo- and hetero-sexuality, and patricians and the poor. While the chapters (developed from conference papers) demonstrate inconsistent degrees of framework to align with the book’s focus, the introduction and arrangement of the book into three parts artfully accentuates the chapters’ conceptual ties and innovations.

‘Part i: Performing Sexuality’ offers readings of early modern expressions of sexuality that foreground satire and subversion ahead of the Neoplatonic values that tend to dominate scholarly analysis. Katherine A. McIver’s opening chapter considers interpretations of the sexual innuendo in two works from Titian’s ‘Venus with a Musician’ series (c. 1550–52) and in so doing establishes the book’s themes of satire, sensuality, and subversion. The chapter sets out questions concerning the evocation of the senses and how the imaginative experience of the viewer/voyeur would contribute to a work’s meaning. These questions are further explored in Catherine Baxter’s chapter that investigates the implications of Boccaccio’s claim that his Decameron only used ‘honest’ words and the readers’ recognition of sexual metaphors depended on their imaginations. Baxter emphasizes Boccaccio’s knowingly subversive approach, evidenced by his rhetorical reference to Galeotto who both shielded and facilitated illicit behaviour. Paul Schleuse’s chapter continues to consider the use of metaphor to (un)veil the obscene, through case studies of bawdy songs sung recreationally or as part of lower-class street-performances in the sixteenth century.

‘Part ii: The Erotics of Religion’ follows a chronological trajectory, engaging with sources that threatened the virtuous image of the Church by introducing erotic content in religious contexts. Catherine Lawless discusses the challenges medieval Tuscan artists faced when depicting female martyrs. Lawless, like Baxter and Schleuse, acknowledges the power of the invisibility of language to arouse contemplation. While hagiographies were able to engage the empathy of the reader by evoking the mental image of beautiful (often naked) women being martyred, artists had to select scenes more delicately, representing the beauty of the women as rhetorical evidence of their virtue without inspiring unchaste voyeuristic responses in devotees. Anthony M. Cummings’s chapter presents lengthy accounts of classically inspired and bawdy performances in Rome (largely held during carnivale 1518–21, under Leo X) to consider the kind of behaviour that so offended Luther on his visit to Rome (1510–11, under Julius II) that it spurred him toward reformation. The chapter does not make a case for Luther’s having attended such performances, nor does it directly engage with Luther’s criticisms of the papacy. Flavio Rurale’s chapter picks up on the extended papal community’s struggle to practise the chastity it preached in the wake of the Reformation. Rurale supports his argument with reference to the entrenched cultural and behavioural ties between the laity and the clergy with case studies ranging from cardinals’ illegitimate children and Jesuits’ silk shirts, to the clichéd seduction of nuns by their confessors.

‘Part iii: Images of Country Life, Realistic and Artistic’ considers the ways that artists and composers utilized the trope of the lenient sexual mores of the lower classes as a way of speaking to the subversive desires of the elite. Christopher Brouard challenges and extends art historians’ interpretations of pastoral images by considering the ways artists, appealing to Arcadian imagery, evoked the Neoplatonic ideal of love as context for homoerotic expression otherwise condemned in patrician...