Ch 10 The Ambivalent Scorpio in Bronzino's London Allegory

The Unseeing Masks: The Meaning of the Two Masks in Michelangelo Buonarroti's Venus and Cupid of 1532-1534., 2019

It is hard to ignore the satyr-like mask that ogles Venus and her son in Jacopo da Pontormo’s Venus and Cupid (1532-34) (Fig. 1), a painting based on a lost cartoon by Michelangelo (Fig. 2). Partly obscured by this mask, a more impassive mask faces the opposing direction, as if deliberately to evade the erotic interaction between the incestuous couple. Michelangelo was the first to introduce the motif of masks accompanying the goddess of love and her son, a motif that was soon replicated and elaborated upon by a number of sixteenth century artists. The masks themselves have received little attention in scholarly literature; they have typically been dismissed as symbols of love’s deceit. An explanation of how Michelangelo’s use of two masks accompanying Venus and Cupid was meant to be interpreted by the painting’s contemporary Florentine audience will argue for a more complex reading, and will question whether the masks were simply symbols of a single idea.

Sherry Lindquist (ed.), The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 47-64., 2012

In this paper I am concerned with the Renaissance reclining female nude, in particular with issues of the identity of mythological figures, their settings, and a difference between two of the media in which they appear, print and paint. Of these issues, identity was already a question in the classical models that were so important to the Renaissance artists. So, in the Classical period, we do not always find the particular trappings that often help us to identify the mythological characters in a particular work (for example, Hercules' club and lion-skin, or Polyphemus' pastoral crook), and while we may find recurrent compositional arrangements for particular mythological characters, we can also find one and the same compositional arrangement being applied to different sets of characters. As a result, identification can be tricky. There are also, in fact, analogues to this in the literature, as, for example, one storyline has one set of characters in Ovid's account of Diana and Actaeon (Met. 3) and another in Callimachus account of Tiresias and Athena (Hymn 5). We have to wonder to what extent it matters who the dramatis personae are and to what extent this doubt reappears in the Renaissance. In this paper, I am concerned with the reclining female nude format, and in particular the discovery or uncovering of the female by a male, and especially the sophisticated manipulation of tradition and setting in Tintoretto's hybridisation of the Jupiter and Antiope painting-format and the domestic interior setting of the discovery scenario in the medium of print in his Mars and Venus discovered by Vulcan. Complications in the reception of the nude arise in the aftermath of the Classical period and again in the transition into the Renaissance (not to mention in between). Increasingly in Late Antiquity, we see Christian narratives making a hostile takeover of stereotypical formats of pagan visual culture, without necessarily making major alterations to them.1 In turn, the dramatic resurfacing of the mythological nude in the Renaissance seems to ride on and to embody an element of secularisation. At the same time, the pervasive mythological and biblical frameworks suggest that the nude as an art theme now needed justification, but this brought tensions with it. The Biblical Bathsheba seen in the garden by David from his tower was often illustrated story Books of Hours, but it was also very like the narrative frame of

By examining the retellings of the story of Venus’s love for Adonis in the English Renaissance, this paper analyzes the imagery associated with the goddess and her imaginary temples. Marlowe, Spenser and Shakespeare rework the myth in the context of the ekphrastic tradition, creating verbal descriptions of visual images which allow one narrative to enclose another; Hero’s “wide sleeves green, and border’d with a grove, / Where Venus in her naked glory strove / To please the careless and disdainful eyes / Of proud Adonis that before her lies (Hero and Leander 1.11-14) allude to Spenser's tapestry in Malecasta's castle portraying Venus with Adonis (Faerie Queene III.i.35–37), both adaptations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses X. Either depicted in an embroidered garment, a tapestry, or as an art object herself, Venus represents the complexity and ambiguity of the perception of love and desire in early modern England. Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis, two of the most popular sixteenth-century epyllia, are not only obsessed with their own artifice, abounding in moments of self-reflexivity but also anxious about the sexual pleasure the period both cherishes and censors. By fixing Venus in place, as a visual representation, Elizabethan poets echo the words of Enobarbus describing Cleopatra as he and Antony first saw her: “O'er-picturing that Venus where we see / The fancy outwork nature” (Anthony and Cleopatra 2.2.200–1). By “over [or out] picturing” Venus, Marlowe and Shakespeare show the goddess of love as both object and subject of desire. Venus emerges as a pagan and enigmatic force within the conflict between nature and art as well as within the poetic contest for the superior representation of artistic illusion.

arina Mattei, The Roots of the Myth. The Personification of Eros and Psyche; Francesca Longo, The Physical and Psychic Components of the Human Being in the Cultural Tradition of Ancient Egypt; Marina Mattei, The Sufferings of the Soul, the Divine Couple, the Embrace and the Kiss. The Iconography of Cupid and Psyche; Marina Mattei, Literary and Figurative Themes. Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius' fabula, crucible of all the fairy-tales in the world; Marco Bussagli, Anatomy of the Soul; Maria Grazia Bernardini, The Tale of Cupid and Psyche; Livia Montagnoli, The Master of the Die Series: Thirty-two Prints Illustrating the Tale of Cupid and Psyche; Maria Grazia Bernardini, The Frieze by Perin del Vaga in Castel Sant' Angelo and the Tale of Psyche in the Art of the Renaissance; Sonia Cavicchioli, Romantic Mythical Revival in the Neoclassical Age; Mario Guderzo, An artistic enjoyment of great beauty. Cupid and Psyche by Antonio Canova; Miriam Mirolla, The Map of Cupid and Psyche in Rome. Instructions for Use; Catalogue: Section 1 - The Roots of the Myth, the Personification of Cupid and Psyche, the Sufferings of the Soul, the Divine Couple and Apuleius' Fabula.; Section 2 - The Tale of Eros and Psyche in the Art of the Renaissance; Section 3 - The Scene of the Lamp: the Irresistible Fascination of Mysterious Love; Section 4 - The Romantic Mythical Revival in the Neoclassical Age; Bibliography.

Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas, 2006

Acta Iassyensia Comparationis, 29 (1/2022), 2022

As paradigmatic emblems of fantasy and imagination, creative freedom and poetic license, hybrid monsters in Ovid’s Metamorphoses preside over the author’s playful engagement with traditional aesthetic, moral, and societal values, and gendered ideals. This article aims at a subversive reading of one monstrous creature in the final pentad of Ovid’s epic: Scylla (Met. 13.730-14.74). As a monster, Scylla incorporates several misogynistic stereotypes (“doggishness”, puella dura, self-laceration, vagina dentata), but she eventually escapes the objectifying male gaze and finds rest in a stable, permanent shape that is no longer the feminine-gendered battlefield for male heroism. Breaking away from the conventional epic plot structure “male hero wins over feminized beasts and/or beautiful girls”, Ovid considers the Roman national hero Aeneas with but a minimum of attention, while nymphs and women take center stage: Scylla’s transformation from a girl into a monster and, finally, into a geological rock formation, is intertwined with tales about female solidarity and intimacy and about women’s sexual desire, rage, and revenge. While Scylla’s canine bloodlust and Circe’s vengeful magic certainly reproduce typically patriarchal anxieties projected onto women, they are also traces of unruly, recalcitrant femininity within the canonical, male-dominated world of heroic epic.

Abstract: Anxieties surrounding the demonic and female beauty are connected in sixteenth and seventeenth century printed illustrations. With developments in printing methods early modern readers increasingly demanded images to accompany texts, and often these illustrations focused on the monstrous, the exotic, and the erotic. Edward Topsell's History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents (1658) and Ulisse Aldrovandi's Monstrorum Historia (1642) are copiously illustrated bestiaries which focus on the sensual and the dangerous aspects of the monsters, often including evidence of witchcraft in the narrative and conflating issues of monstrosity with contemporary witchcraft fears. This article looks at instances such as these which express the mating of the monstrous and the beautiful witch in seventeenth century monster stories, and explores the implications of this exoticised female and monstrous sexuality, and the attempts to catalogue, and therefore manage, it. Attention is given to the figure of Lilith, the mythical first wife of Adam, whose depictions in early modern illustrations represent her as simultaneously beautiful, monstrous, and dangerous. Her often half-human/half-animal appearance, coupled with her explicitly eroticized present in the images and accompanying texts, attests to the contemporary fears surrounding sensual pleasure, the female body, and the animalistic and monstrous nature of women's desire. Keywords: Lilith, Demons, Gender, Renaissance, Homosexuality, Erotic, Witch, Tarot, Deleuze, Bestiaries