Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe (review)

One of my Monash History colleagues used to enjoy quoting the paradigmatic dictum of the Florentine Renaissance patron Giovanni Rucellai, that man (sic) has two main purposes on earth: to procreate and to build. The implication would seem to be that, in each case, activation of the same male appendage was involved! Rucellai, like Leon Battista Alberti, or Vitruvius for that matter, would hardly have been surprised, then, by the idea that architecture is gendered, but all these men may have been taken aback by much of the analysis in this volume.

Despite the spate of art-historical studies of gender and women's roles from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century over the past two decades, the way in which these issues affected the built environment has been treated negligently. Often, architecture is still addressed sketchily in discussions of early modern visual culture, although by comparison with painting, for example, it was generally far more time-consuming, expensive and prestigious and hence (arguably) more strongly indicative of dominant themes and ideals. Making similar points in her introduction, Hills makes a strong case for the importance of this volume and its nine component essays. Taking her cue from a range of (almost all male) theorists such as Lefebvre, Bourdieu, Foucault and De Certeau, Hills argues that early modern patrons and architects alike were involved in a complex process of negotiating social and sexual attitudes and ideals, in their approach to architecture.

The essays included here address a range of topics and periods, from the Charterhouse at Dijon, founded in 1385, to eighteenth-century French aristocratic housing. Not unexpectedly, the predominant emphasis is on women's use and experience of architecture in the early modern era. Most readers will discover stimulating material here, although I found some of the individual essays more lively and engaging than others. Eunice Howe, for instance, adds an important chapter to the history of the design and decoration of Italian Renaissance hospitals, arguing that Alberti and Filarete betrayed their patriarchal attitudes in their planning of such institutions, for instance in recommending the segregation of women from men, in parallel with the separation of incurables from the curable. By contrast, though, most of the other essays investigate ways in which individual women, or groups of women in convent settings, could take some control of the architecture they inhabited and used. Dagmar Eichberger, for instance, contributes a beautifully nuanced and meticulously researched account of Margaret of Austria's personalising of her Netherlandish quarters at Mechelen, in the early sixteenth century. Likewise, Elizabeth Chew draws on intimate diaries to develop a detailed image of how the English aristocrat Anne Clifford understood and used domestic architectural space in the seventeenth century. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, women were specifically excluded from practising as architects, but could still be influential as patrons, as two of these essays demonstrate. Jennifer Germann treats the Val-de-Grâce in Paris as, in effect, a gigantic self-portrait of Anne of Austria, Louis XIV's mother. Tanis Hinchcliffe makes a fascinating case for the substantial and in some respects subversive influence of female clients on the male architects who designed suburban houses for them in late eighteenth-century Paris.

The book is of a high scholarly quality throughout, but a few critical comments are in order. Inevitably, and in common with many other recent studies, there is a bias towards upper-class women, a point acknowledged in Hills' introduction. A wider range of themes could have been covered; Venice is a noticeable absentee, for example, and there is little attention to gardens, apart from brief but suggestive remarks in Eichberger's essay. As it stands, the book can become a little repetitive at times, especially in the concluding sequence of essays on female monastic architecture, in Renaissance Italy, Spain and Burgundy. Among the French theorists...