Italian Renaissance 1350-1550 AD Essay Example for Free

Italian Renaissance 1350-1550 AD EssayItalian Renaissance Art remains the basis of all subsequent Western subterfuge despite the shattering innovations of the past hundred years. The formulas for imagemaking that were perfected in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, particularly in Italy, are those that painters still rely upon and, more significantly, that nurture conditi aned the way most of us touch on to see and even to photograph the mankind.Cities in Italy still alike(p) to celebrate their distant heroes. So the genus Galleria dArte in Ferrara and the Getty work up their shows with commitment and skill. Women in Italian Renaissance Art fill a void in the history of art. In distinct contrast to other eras, particularly the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Renaissance has until now been without a comprehensive examination of gender, representation, and identity. This work focuses on a single thought of womens involvement in the Italian Renaissance Art.Since t he time of Pythagoras, female/feminine and male/masculine require been defined in just such a comparative (or, more rightly, contradictive) relationship. As women continue to be integrated into all aspects of art history it is of critical importance that we do non lose weed of this strategy, for to do so would be to replace one skewed perspective with another.Women as a ordinary category functions in western culture as the absolute Other, a necessary construction in contrast to which the male is able to define himself as rational, strong, productive, and authoritative. Womens historic problem in this male-oriented representation of the world is that there is no Other of the Other woman has only male cultures projections of her identity on which to arrive at her own subjectivity since the most forcefully organized category operating to define her is the category of the not man (Lacan 73).For early modern women this lack of a discourse defining them as anything but mans unwanted opposite bound together promiscuous and chaste women as different and yet the same in a sharing of essential gender limitations that did not impose itself in analogous ways on the male category.However, there is biblical argument, which draws chiefly on Romans and Galatians, the epistles in which St. Paul had wrestled with problems of religious status and transmittable privilege in the nascent Church. Agrippa uses Pauls discussion of Jews and Greeks to propose an analogous case for men and women, as the apostle himself suggests in Galatians 328. By this logic, the age of male dominance parallels the age of Jewish exclusiveness in repurchase history but when Christ established a new, more inclusive dispensation accepting Jews and Gentiles on mates terms, he meant at the same time to abolish gender privilege.The male priesthood, like Jewish Christians in the Pauline Church, is declared to have only a historical and by no means a spiritual priority. If male supremacy still prevails i n spite of Christs intention, it is only because of the hard-heartedness of men, which women are entitled to arbitrator and find wantingIndeed, when men fall short and go astray, women have the power of judgment, to mens disgrace. Even the coffin nail of Sheba is to judge the men of Jerusalem. Therefore all men who, being justified by faith, have constitute sons of Abraham, which is to say sons of the promise, are subjected to woman and bound by the command that God gave to Abraham, saying Whatever Sarah tells you, see to her voice (Chambers 152).Pieros women, spiritually and physically, are as robust as his architecture. In The Queen of Sheba, Piero della Francesca has created an ideal type, especially in his women, with long, thick necks, oval faces and strong chins.We can see Rossos eccentric humor in his draft of a woman. The drawing is done in the manner of those exquisite female heads of Michelangelo. But whereas Michelangelos figures have an charge of grace and dignity, Rossos woman peers bizarrely over her shoulder at the viewer. Rossos lady is suggestive of the frequent satire of women in Renaissance literature, as for example, in Machiavellis roughly contemporary novella, Belfagor. In this satirical tale by the brilliant author of the comedies La Mandragola and La Clizia, Machiavelli humorously indicates how even a devil cannot deal with woman, a position also humorously illustrated by Bruegel in his Proverbs.The humor in Rossos drawing of a woman is evince through the subtly playful treatment of physiognomy. This playful handling of facial expression is also obvious in Rossos design for the Saturn and Philyra, which was engraved by Caraglio as part of the series of Loves of the Gods. If Raphael had already given a human quality to a horse in his St. George (Washington), Rosso now fully exploits this pathetic fallacy in his charmingly ridiculous image of a horse in love.The ambivalent humor in Bronzinos word-painting is especially apparent i n the female figure, identified by Panofsky as Deceit, and by Levey, following Vasari, as Pleasure. She is a cunning inventionShe offers a honeycomb with one hand while she hides a deadly little animal in the other, and moreover the hand is attached to her right arm, that is the hand with the honeycomb is in worldly concern a left hand, while the hand attached to her left arm is in reality a right one, so that the figure offers sweetness with what seems to be her good hand but is rattling her evil one, and hides poison in what seems to be her evil hand but is really her good one (Panofsky 226).This perverted duplicity, described perhaps not completely accurately but with mannered virtuosity by Panofsky, is associate to the duplicity of Venus who steals the arrow from Cupid and to the perversion in the erotic embrace between mother and son.Michelangelos poem, which evokes the treat tone of Lorenzo de Medicis Nencia da Barberino as well as the facetious poetry of Berni, would no doubt have been enjoyed by Shakespeare, who conceived of a similar, if more subtle, Petrarchan travesty, My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun. Michelangelos comic hag, with breasts like melons, also evokes the various hideous women in Renaissance art. She might be compared to the caricatured women in Leonardo da Vincis drawings and to the monstrous Ugly Woman of Quentin Metsys, who is closely related to the vain old women mocked by Erasmus in The adulation of Folly for wanting still to play the goat.