Images of Sex and Desire in Renaissance Art and Modern Historiography ed. by Angeliki Pollali, Berthold Hub (review)

The introduction to this volume, by the co-editor Angeliki Pollali, lays out clearly the issues raised by feminist approaches to the Renaissance or early modern period, and particularly to the study of images. She plots an arc from Jakob Burckhardt’s astonishing claim that “women stood on a footing of perfect equality with men” to Linda Nochlin’s “Why have there been no great women artists?” and Joan Kelly’s “Did Women Have a Renaissance?”—then on to more recent decades when the very concept of “women” has been replaced by “gender” (1–2). “Women” is indeed one of the smallest entries in the index, with only four hits as opposed to twelve for “sodomy” and eighteen for “masculinity.” No female artist, artisan, or patron is studied, or even mentioned in the text (except for two passing references). On the other hand, ten of the twelve authors are women, reflecting a widespread shift in the academy. (The co-editor Berthold Hub is not acknowledged among the contributors’ biographies.) They are based in Britain, Greece, Austria, Germany, Canada, and the United States.

The volume’s cover displays a beautiful color reproduction of Titian’s Bacchanal of the Andrians, but inside the figures are mostly too gray and too small. This medium favors relatively simple woodcuts over large and complex paintings, which makes some essays hard to follow. François Quiviger’s fine perceptions about the Andrians, Yvonne Owens’s subtle reading of the extraordinary Witch and Dragon drawing by Hans Baldung Grien, and Robin O’Bryan’s iconographic decoding of Filippino Lippi’s unusual fresco of Adam in the cupola of the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, Florence, depend on details that are difficult to make out on the page. Linda Hults compares Dürer’s woodcut Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand Christians to the even more elaborate painting of the same grisly theme, in which the artist himself and the poet Conrad Celtis walk among the all-male martyred bodies—but the painting is barely visible. Though this volume is part of the Ashgate series “Visual Culture in Early Modernity” (and priced as a luxury item out of reach of most scholars), the format does not emphasize the visual, much less the pleasure of looking. “Desire” is smuggled into Hults’s essay by means of forced parallels, supposedly sexy film stills of Mel Gibson and Rambo being tortured. Hilaritas does appear in Peter Bell’s study of another all-male spectacle, Filarete’s bronze doors of St. Peter’s in Rome, but it is reduced to mocking Greek men for their bad clothes and homosexual habits. Women are considered almost entirely as objects of repulsion or fear, with this period rising to “a new level of critique of women’s supposed lustful and deceitful behaviour and exposing the male body to frightening possibilities” (115). Chapter titles insist relentlessly on “blame,” “fetishist impulses and violence against the female body,” “conflicted sexual identity,” “pollution,” “drunkenness”. . .even Quiviger clamps down the effect of Titian’s canvas by naming it “pornography” and calling in Foucault. There are in fact only two “images of sex” among the figures (one involving a bull mounting a wooden model of a cow), two of groping, four of defecation (three of them women), and nineteen of mutilation.

The title promises “Renaissance Art and Modern Historiography,” but the emphasis falls heavily on the latter, on summarizing the secondary literature and adding a new critical twist more than presenting new primary evidence. This gives many essays the feel of dissertation chapters, even though contributors range from emerging scholars to veterans of the profession. Nancy Frelick, for example, has been publishing since 1989 on Maurice Scève’s 1544 poem Délie (here studied for its woodcut emblem of Narcissus), while also making major contributions to our understanding of French...