Re-membering Masculinity in Early Modern Florence: Widowed Bodies, Mourning and Portraiture (review)

This is an ambitious and challenging book, one which is truly interdisciplinary in its approach, drawing upon insights from cultural studies, gender studies, critical race theory, psychoanalytic theory, disability studies and art history. Levy argues for a new category of portraiture: 'the widow's portrait within the Medici family in the sixteenth century' (p. xvii). She detects an 'ambivalent relationship between the widow and the man she is meant to remember' (p. xvii), which ambivalence and instability are central to her project that suggests that both widow portraiture and an alternative male portraiture fail to ensure that dead men are always remembered. Levy uses a number of visual images from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and in the later chapters more modern, recent examples are used, including images of the author and her father that are discussed in the afterword (chapter 6).

At its core are a number of portraits from the Medicean court in sixteenth-century Florence: the widowed mother of Duke Cosimo I, Maria Salviati (chapter 3), and portraits of male Medici ancestors: in particular, the assassinated Duke Alessandro de' Medici (chapter 4) and Cosimo 'the Elder' (chapter 5). Levy reads the many images that illustrate her book as part of 'a project on the anxieties of loss' (p. 1), one in which 'pictorial practice, death and masculinity' are key themes (p. 6). She begins with Fra Angelico's San Marco altarpiece and the depiction of Cosimo the Elder as St Cosmas, in particular, providing an in depth analysis of the predella panel of the painting, The Miracle of the Black Leg, in which the miracle of ss Cosmas and Damian is told. Anxious masculinity, amputation and the prosthetic as well as discourses about race are key themes in this chapter (chapter 1). In this introductory chapter, Levy engages critically with John Pope Hennessey's discussion of the Medici's 'almost morbid interest in self perpetuation' (p. 14) in the sixteenth century through portraiture, arguing that it is not political insecurity, as Pope-Hennessey suggests, that is driving Duke Cosimo, but rather memorial uncertainty and the loss of self. This idea is very suggestive, but how useful is our modern sense of self in explaining a sixteenth century psyche? A sense of self in sixteenth-century Italy would have been intimately connected with concepts of dynastic imperative and political instability. But the author does not examine the early modern concept of self, which was collective rather than individualistic in nature. If Cosimo commissioned widow portraiture as a kind of pre-mortuary mourning to ease his anxiety about being forgotten, and to reduce his fear about loss of self, then that sense of self in sixteenth-century Florence also encompassed fear and anxiety on Cosimo's part about loss of nation and political legitimacy.

The book's first part – 'The Anatomy of Mourning' – argues convincingly that displays of grief in the period were something that decidedly belonged to the female sphere and that male expressions of grief were effeminate (chapter 2). The responsibility of women (widows) to mourn their dead was a device that alleviated male anxieties about death and their being no one to mourn them. Levy argues, in fact, that Cosimo's portraits of his mother, Maria Salviati, dressed in black widow's weeds for his father, the famed mercenary soldier, Giovanni de' Medici, were designed to alleviate his anxiety about having no one to mourn him. Therefore as widows' portraits they served a double purpose.

Part 2 – 'The Melancholy of Anatomy' – is not quite so convincing. Levy's discussion of Bronzino's portrait of Duke Alessandro in about 1534 as a portrait in which Alessandro, dressed in black, mourns his father, Giulio de' Medici (Clement VII) is problematic. Alessandro's clothing is appropriate for noble men of his day...