The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (review)

In this accurate and extensive study Patrizia Bettella guides the reader through the evolution of the canon of the "ugly woman" in the history of Italian literature from its inception in the thirteenth century to its blossoming in Baroque poetry. The unifying theoretical tenet of this riveting essay is that all the male poets considered by the author ultimately lack any genuine interest in the world of women. The male gaze and its poetic manifestations invariably tend, beyond the specific poetic agenda of the moment, to objectify and dismember female beauty.

After a brief introduction, the first chapter is dedicated to the investigation of the patristic antecedents of the misogynistic attitude responsible for the efflorescence of the poetic cliché of female unattractiveness in the so-called comic-realistic poetry of Rustico Filippi and Guido Guinizzelli in the thirteenth century. The investigation is further broadened to include the relevance of female ugliness as a poetic manifesto of anti-Stilnovismo in the compositions of Cecco Angiolieri and Nicolò de' Rossi as well as its peculiar appearance as an antidote to lovesickness in Cavalcanti's and Niccola Muscia's poems.

The second chapter ushers us into the Italian Quattrocento, a special stage in the development of this literary commonplace. The poets of this century, indeed, assign the "negative" aesthetic category of ugliness to the "old guardian" of a younger and attractive woman, to the "witch," and to the '"prostitute." Bettella provides the reader with a clear overview of the classical precedents of the description-vituperation of the old ugly female guardian, embodiment of a threatening feminine power, and dwells also on the sociopolitical implications of invectives against witches (filtered as they were through poesia giullaresca and poetry for music). The author devotes the two concluding sections of the chapter to "The Witch in Burchiello and Giovan Mateo di Meglio" and "The Old Prostitute in Angelo Poliziano."

The centerpiece of Bettella's essay is undoubtedly the third chapter, in which she explores the description of the ugly woman as "peasant" or "anti-Laura" during the Renaissance. In this phase, "ugly women are no longer vituperated for their disgusting old body and lust, nor attacked for the power of their eyes or speech, but praised — though mockingly — for sporting bodily features and manners in contrast to the models of ideal beauty glorified in the courtly codes of Renaissance" (81). The paradoxical encomia of female ugliness produced by authors such as Berni, Doni, and Aretino are pitted against the canone corto and canone lungo of female beauty as Giovanni Pozzi has defined them. Petrarch's model is thus subverted for the purpose of parody and comic entertainment. Perhaps even more interesting, on the other hand, is the description of the ugly female peasant in Strascino, Berni, and Firenzuola. Their poetic representation of the ugly peasant constitutes, in Bettella's view, an example of double (gender- and class-based) dominance: "that of being a woman and at the same time a peasant, of belonging to the dominated gender and to an inferior social group. The female grotesque body then produces infraction and inversion, but not true subversion, since it does not allow the woman to escape male dominance" (99). The chapter's concluding section discusses the anonymous "Stanze in lode della donna brutta" of 1547 as an interesting case of amalgamation of medieval vituperation of ugliness — as a departure from ideal beauty — and Renaissance paradoxical praise.

Equally stimulating is the fourth and final chapter of the book, devoted to the unique Baroque stance on female ugliness. Here female unattractiveness becomes "unconventional beauty" and an opportunity for the poet to show how artifice can surpass bodily limitations. The baroque quest for novelty, excessiveness, and the marvelous is clearly exemplified in Bettella's study of the many praises of the dark-haired and dark-skinned woman (with all...