In the Courts of Religious Ladies: Art, Vision, and Pleasure in Italian Renaissance Convents by Giancarla Periti (review)

In Renaissance Italy, some female monastic communities commissioned surprisingly secular artwork: scenes from classical myths and courtly love. These works survive in diverse media, both high and low, including frescoes, maiolica tiles, wood intarsia and stalls, incised stone, and furnishings. Giancarla Periti refers to these commissions as "courtly conventual art," a term that captures their relationship to both worldly and sacred spheres. In part because this art is so difficult to neatly categorize, it has been largely overlooked by scholars. Impressively, Periti engages with this paradox head-on, asking: what are we to make of images like the frolicking putti and nude pagan gods created by Correggio and other artists for sacred women in cloistered spaces?

One answer that comes to the fore is that these nuns were curious, active viewers of the art with which they chose to surround themselves, appreciative not only of the works' edifying qualities, but also of their humorous or seductive features. Periti reads the images as having been "inscribed with unusual markers of the female self," demonstrative of these nuns' "yearning for knowledge and pleasure" (4), which is not surprising when we remember that nuns of this era were the well-educated daughters of some of Italy's grandest families. Periti emphasizes the women's agency as patrons, looking at these artworks as "a system of actions and intentions" (205); for example, she describes the Correggio commission in Parma's San Paolo convent as an opportunity for the artist and the abbess, Giovanna Piacenza, "to reinforce their agency" mutually (7).

In the Courts of Religious Ladies takes the reader on a tour of the Renaissance convent, moving with each chapter from the more public spaces to those increasingly private. It opens with a general introduction to monastic spaces; proceeds through examples of art in communal areas like the chapter house and choir; moves to the private rooms of Abbess Piacenza in San Paolo; and culminates in the much celebrated—but often decontextualized—decoration by Correggio of the private chamber at the heart of her apartments. This final chapter serves as the climax of the book, and will likely be of greatest interest to the largest number of readers, given the status of the artist, as well as the radical and puzzling nature of the frescoes, which include a prominent and sensuous Diana, a band of merry cherubs, and a series of lunettes encasing allegorical or secular (and often erotic) figures. The room has inspired much interest among art historians, including Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich. Periti builds on this scholarship, going beyond the impulse to decode Correggio's figures to inquire how they functioned within their larger monastic setting.

The primary locus of Periti's study is the Benedictine convent of San Paolo in Parma, home to the Correggio decorations and a number of other fascinating works; this rich site appears in every chapter. However, although San Paolo may have been a particularly fine example of the courtly conventual visual tradition, it was not unique: over the course of the book, Periti examines art in other Benedictine convents in Milan, Brescia, and Ferrara (the order was one favored by elite families, hence the number of artistic commissions). As a result, the book takes readers outside the Renaissance cultural capitals of Venice, Florence, and Rome to cities that have been less studied.

Although the primary audience of this book will be art historians, it will also interest scholars of literature. To give but one example, the polychrome maiolica pavement examined in the second chapter intersects with famous literary works in compelling ways. Created by Jacopo Loschi for San Paolo in the late fifteenth century, the floor tiles, now housed at Parma's Galleria Nazionale, include scenes from ancient epic and myth (the Judgment of Paris, Pyramus and Thisbe), as well as scenes of courtly love. Periti argues persuasively that...