The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (review)

Jacqueline Marie Musacchio. The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. xiv + 212 pp. Ill. $50.00.

A great deal of recent art-historical research into the art of the Italian Renaissance has been heavily influenced by the work of social and economic historians, and considers works of art under the rubric of material culture, using them as documents that preserve information about the myriad forms of societal appearances, transactions, behavior, and ritual. Musacchio's book is a good example. Her first chapter, entitled "The Social, Physical, and Demographic Context for Renaissance Childbirth," is succeeded by one devoted to an exceptionally well documented test case ("Caterina di Ser Girolamo da Colle and the Material Culture of Renaissance Childbirth").

Despite the book's title, it is concerned especially with Tuscany--in particular, Florence and Siena, for which the visual evidence is very rich. The many depictions of the birth of John the Baptist, patron of Florence, are especially important, as well as those of the birth of the Virgin, patroness of Siena. These show scenes of lying-in in loving detail: the infant being washed by nursemaids who carefully test the water for warmth, rolls of swaddling at the ready; the mother washing her hands and being greeted by female relatives and friends, who bring her food and drink on painted or intarsiated birth trays, called deschi da parto. Many of these trays survive--among them, one painted by none other than Masaccio, and many by his brother, called Lo Scheggia, including one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art painted for the birth of Lorenzo the Magnificent, which shows the Triumph of Fame. To these trays Musacchio devotes her third chapter, which ends with a birth bowl for serving fruit, or tafferia da parto, painted by Pontormo around 1525. However, by this date the earlier taste for painted birth services had largely ceded to maiolica ceramic ware, the subject of the absorbing fourth chapter. These often appear as single pieces, but they also appear in ingeniously constructed assemblages, all richly historiated, made up of as many as five or six interlocked plates and bowls.

The book ends with a chapter entitled "Maternal Mediators," which enters into the domain of the anthropological. It is devoted not so much to sacred images on birth services as to profane depictions of various types. One of the more common (and amusing) motifs shows infant boys in various activities, often rude: sometimes they urinate, and sometimes they appear in mock combat, groping at each other's genitals. Musacchio plausibly reads such images as a kind of apotropaic device, expressing hopes for a male child, and for his health, wealth, beauty, and fecundity. An astounding example--again in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and still not well understood--appears on a birth tray painted in 1428 by Bartolomeo di Fruosino. It shows an infant boy seated on a rocky island, upon which he urinates in two streams, and carries a damaged inscription around its border, which I give in English translation: "May God grant health to every woman who gives birth and to the fathers . . . and may the birth be without fatigue or peril. I am a baby [bambolino] who lives on an island. I make pee-pee of silver and gold."

Musacchio's book originated as a doctoral dissertation, and it contains a few lapses of judgment and slippages that are hardly surprising given the highly interdisciplinary nature of its subject. It is thorough in its research, is prefaced by an indispensable glossary of Italian terms, and ends with four documentary appendices. Musacchio has a sharp eye for detail and inexhaustible zeal, and no reader will come away from her book uninstructed.

Charles Dempsey
Johns Hopkins University

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