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  • Re-Membering Masculinity in Early Modern Florence: Widowed Bodies, Mourning, and Portraiture
  • Linda S. Aleci
Allison Levy . Re-Membering Masculinity in Early Modern Florence: Widowed Bodies, Mourning, and Portraiture. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006. xx + 194 pp. index. illus. bibl. $99.95. ISBN: 0-7546-5404-4.

Re-Membering Masculinity contributes to the now-substantial scholarship relocating early modern cultural production from the narratives of "Renaissance Man" — "self-assured, whole, omnipotent, and eternal" — to the more unsettled frame of the male body, "a locus of crisis and fragmentation" (14). For portraiture, the journey is particularly fraught. As the quintessential genre of recollection and commemoration (not until the nineteenth century was it more completely aligned with the documentary projects of history), portraiture here is scrutinized within discourses of anxiety and forgetfulness, the fearsome oblivion of death that was wedded to the Renaissance obsession with Fama and immortality. The tension that portraiture embodies, and a preoccupation of this book, is between loss (of the body, of self, of memory) and the recuperative promise — impossibly made — of the rituals of remembrance. [End Page 534]

Levy's scope is broad, and her interests frankly theoretical. While she broaches an argument for "widow portraiture" as a new category of portrayal within the Medici family during the sixteenth century, this is not her primary interest. Rather, "widowhood" is asserted as a rhetorical element in the ritual practices of mourning, hence the "widowed body" of her title (literally the body without a spouse; metaphorically the body detached from identity). As a mythic point of origin linking fragmentation, commemoration, and the Medici, she begins with the San Marco altarpiece and its predella, depicting the amputation and reattachment of the Black Leg performed by Saints Cosmas and Damian. Levy sets this miraculous story of man-made-whole against Pope-Hennessy's early reading of the Medici's obsession with self-perpetuation: whereas he sees this as the result of dynastic insecurity, Levy proposes a memorial anxiety born from a century-old "politics of gender and sexuality, race and disability intertwined with Medicean identity, memory and the anxieties of loss" (4).

Levy returns to the Medici istoria in the latter part of the book. Part 1 ("The Anatomy of Mourning") shifts to examine the sociopolitical restructuring of mourning rituals in fifteenth-century Florence and the displacement of the lamenting widow within them. As the primary bearer of her dead husband's memory, the widow was necessarily present, yet her social identity — unmarried ("unattached") but sexually experienced — was disruptive. Largely silenced by the funeral orations given by humanists, she nonetheless continued to haunt the cultural project of memorialization in her lived experience and as the subject of pictorial reproduction.

Pressing beyond portraiture as a strategy to "fix" the fluidity of the widow's cultural identities, Levy sees some of these ambiguities coded in the representation of male and female mourning bodies: Pontormo's portrait of Alessandro de' Medici, Michelangelo's self-portrait mourning Christ, the portrait commissions of Cosimo I, double portraits of Medici men alongside their widows. This receives the fullest and most theoretically charged exegesis in part 2 ("The Melancholy of Anatomy"). Here representational systems are set against early modern and contemporary discourses on mourning and melancholy to lay bare their gendered form and expose the symbolic order, one "that has engendered the male subject in terms of a loss that he can represent — and that represents him — as a legitimate, if not privileged, participant in the Western tradition" (Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia [1992]). The coda, a reflection on masculinity in contemporary discourse and ritual practice (including the performance of a New Orleans jazz funeral and the carnival procession of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club), reprises the politics of gender and sexuality, race and disability, that opens the book, this time intertwined with postmodern anxieties of memory, identity, and the masculine body.

This is a complex work, by turns compelling and self-indulgent. Levy's own rhetorical stance is highly stylized, self-consciously fracturing and compounding historical narrative. Endlessly layered and circling, with a near-fetishistic attraction to postmodern theory, Re-Membering Masculinity perhaps is best...

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