The Cloister and the Square: Gender Dynamics in Renaissance Florence

Feminist scholars have effectively unmasked the misogynist messages of the statues that occupy and patrol the main public square of Florence—most conspicuously, Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus Slaying Medusa and Giovanni da Bologna’s Rape of a Sabine Woman (Figs. 1, 20). In groundbreaking essays on those statues, Yael Even and Margaret Carroll brought to light the absolutist patriarchal control that was expressed through images of sexual violence.¹ The purpose of art, in this way of thinking, was to bolster power by demonstrating its effect. Discussing Cellini’s brutal representation of the decapitated Medusa, Even connected the artist’s gratuitous inclusion of the dismembered body with his psychosexual concerns, and the display of Medusa’s gory head with a terrifying female archetype that is now seen to be under masculine control. Indeed, Cellini’s need to restage the patriarchal execution might be said to express a subconscious response to threat from the female, which he met through psychological reversal, by converting the dangerous female chimera into a feminine victim.²

Figure 1.

Benvenuto Cellini, Perseus Slaying Medusa, 1545–54. Bronze, 320 cm (height of statue). Florence, Loggia dei Lanzi, Piazza della Signoria. Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY.

But what prompted Cellini’s violent and vicious assault on the feminine? Even and Carroll convincingly linked the commissions with Medici ducal politics and power, yet their studies do not fully account for the sudden and sustained eruption of unusually misogynist art in this highly charged public setting. We scholars often regard the control and repression of women as a given, something that simply happens in a patriarchal society. Yet political history shows that repression is often a dominator’s response to assertion by the dominated, which produces further assertion. Moreover, as postcolonial scholars have observed, repressed groups evoke anxiety in their dominators, whose unconscious ambivalence about their exercise of power threatens that power from inside.³ To maintain power, the dominant entity must police the Other, a tense relationship that initiates a cycle: insecurity calls for a show of force, which produces resistance, which in turn produces insecurity.

Such principles can be applied to the political forces of gender. Feminist scholarship in recent decades has revealed that early modern women wielded considerable cultural agency as artists, patrons, and consumers of art, and their achievements and activities are now taking a place alongside those of men, who were previously considered to represent culture as a whole. In Renaissance Italy, masculine and feminine cultures, largely identified with the public and private spheres respectively, coexisted and in many ways flourished independently. But how did they intersect? What was the effect of women’s culture on men’s culture, and vice versa, conceived not simply as relations between men and women but as abstract gender entities that respond to each other psychologically? By and large, this is a terra incognita, and perhaps with good reason, those of a positivist mentality might say, because it is an approach not well suited to proof: who can document his unconscious motivations? Yet, as with a distant star, which we cannot see directly but whose presence can be inferred by measuring its effect on other bodies, so women’s response to masculinist oppression, or the masculine fear of the feminine, might be inferred from works of art that unconsciously express it.

One scholar who has brought a consideration of gender to the study of public art is Adrian Randolph. In Engaging Symbols, Randolph examines images that deploy gender as metaphor for the political in the cultural imaginary—e.g., the state as a wife—and that can express masculine insecurities and ambivalences.⁴ Yet “gender” appears in this book as an abstraction of the feminine, whether as virtue or chimera—in other words, as a projection of masculine fantasies about and fears of women, to the almost complete exclusion of real women, and the values they might actually have promoted and stood for. Masculine projection is one piece of the puzzle...