I had to give a talk today on Mannerism as a period of artistic development in Western Art History. I actually had a lot of fun preparing it, and the themes are still ringing in my head. The talk wasn’t only on the visual arts during the Mannerist period, but also on how women were depicted during the time.
The following has some personal opinions and value judgments in it and is not meant to be taken seriously. Facts however, have been researched.
The Mannerist period spans the 16th century, coinciding with the late High Renaissance at the start of the century and the Baroque, at the end. It was a rather tumultuous era where a lot of norms were challenged and overthrown. It coincided with the popular acceptance of the Heliocentric principal (Copernicus had published his phamplet on the Heliocentric principal in 1514), the Sack of Rome, the Reformation and the Church of You Dirty Bastard (more popularly known as The Church of England formed for King Henry the VII’s pleasure to marry and execute his wives as he pleased), and Shakespere. It was in the wake of Queen Isabella sending Christopher Columbus to the New World and Elizabeth becoming absolute monarch over England. In light of the social and political events of the time, and the fact that the patron house of arts, the Medici, were being marginalized due to a revolt against them by the peasant class, art was given a free reign to experiment. And experiment they did.
Venus and Cupid, Folly and Time, Bronzino, 1545.
This painting depicts Venus contorted in a strange manner to face the viewer, displaying her lovely assets while spreading her thighs. It is an overtly erotic painting, with cupid by her side to both signify and encourage her arousal. (Young muscular boy fondling the fully grown, fully figured goddess of love? If that isn’t kinky enough, perhaps you should read the details of the Polanski case… and then watch Chinatown)
One of the scholars all art student are made to study is John Berger, and his “Ways of seeing’ is apparently a seminal text for studying art history in the Western tradition. It is a decent book, but for someone living in the aftermath of that writing, a lot of the points seem obvious. The rest of them are simply open to debate.
One big bug up his ass, and actually one big bug up the ass of all of the feminist movement is that women are always depicted as sexual objects. Apparently this is degrading. I would argue that is is some of the time, but not all of the time. Likewise one can say that men in the western art tradition are always depicted through material wealth and status because that is what women desire in them. Anyway, in his arguments against the misogynistic view of the Mannerist artists, he says that the woman in the painting is being put on display for all toe see, at the expense of anatomical accuracy. Basically he is saying, look at these dirty bastards! They are revealing as much of the woman as possible so that the sexist male pig can view her and devour every inch of her. He didn’t say it in quite those words, but it is one plausible interpretation.
Of course this is such a bloody boring argument. How many times have we heard that men before the 20th century were sexist pigs. But I mentioned Shakespeare previously. Shakespeare wrote plays that portrayed women as sexually non-passive and sexually independent. For example Anthony and Cleopatra, where Cleopatra and her maid servants make plenty of jokes about Cleopatra’s conquests (isn’t she every little girl’s hero! She was definitely mine, along with Athena, goddess of wisdom. These days I worship myself and on weekends find a follower, or two to join me in this most fruitful and self-affirming endeavor). I know Shakespeare practiced his art in England and only had The Church of England to contend with, while Italy had the Spanish Inquisition at their doors, but perhaps one could assume a certain spirit of the times and suggest that female emancipation has been going on ever since the Enlightenment. So this painting, and others like it, while revealing the female full frontal is also suggesting her own sexual appetite with her slightly spread thighs. If you look at paintings before Mannerism, most females had their legs crossed and/or covered with a piece of diaphanous cloth which would have looked more like silk if it had been painted in oils instead of tempera.
The funny thing about Mannerist nudes is that a hell of a lot of the women have their legs spread in them, with male figures touching some part of their bodies. They are also all in strange, contorted positions. It is the strange contortions that are fascinating, because the next time we will see these contortions in western art would be during the industrial age and the advent of colonial art. The contorted women of those times were usually oriental, and the contortions and distortions in them, which were more sensual in nature, emphasized the exotic-ness of the Odalisque. And still yet, further into the future, the next time we see women presented such that they bared as much as possible was in Pablo Picasso’s nudes in n-dimensions. In those, ever single damn thing of the woman is shown, although you really cannot figure which breasts belong to which nude. Personally, I don’t think anyone thinks Picasso’s nudes are erotic, but he was a pervert, so who is to understand what got him ticking. All artists are driven by 1. passion 2. money, and Picasso, who was rich, with his many lovers, was definitely driven by the passion of his loins. The common thread here is that all these times were times of social and political turmoil, which gave rise to experimentation from the accepted norms.
Given the status of aristocratic women of these times, and the presence of literary work that depicted women as sexually non-passive, I don’t think we can dismiss many of the nudes to be painted for the viewership and ownership of their patrons. Apparently most of them were hung in places in the house that were the domain of men, and hidden behind velvet curtains, but some of the work was commissioned by both the mistress and her master (the master and his mistress?) and surely the lady must have both a sense of her sexuality and a sense of humour to have co-commissioned it.
The problem I think with the way we view Western art, tinted through the glasses of hard-lined feminism, is that everybody immediately assumes these paintings were not also enjoyed by women (even though it seems obvious they were made for men, this should not be assumed). But also that no one has actually really thought very much about female sexuality outside contemporary times. Yes, women were objectified, we still are (big fucking deal), but perhaps someone should do some research into how, perhaps, the Renaissance woman views nude pictures of other women. One famous argument is that even if it is a woman looking on the painting, her gaze is ‘male’. She is put into the role of the male viewer, simply because that was the way it was painted, and who it was painted for.
Is that really so?
Anyway, I have a headache after 24 hours of preparing all that nonsense (and more, but I didn’t want to bore you) and it’s time to crack the Astronomy textbook and get going with my Python problem sets, so enough art for now.
X
WHAT TO DO NOW?