Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe

Gender, Agency, Identity

Andrea Pearson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351872263
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

As one of the first books to treat portraits of early modern women as a discrete subject, this volume considers the possibilities and limits of agency and identity for women in history and, with particular attention to gender, as categories of analysis for women's images. Its nine original essays on Italy, the Low Countries, Germany, France, and England deepen the usefulness of these analytical tools for portraiture. Among the book's broad contributions: it dispels false assumptions about agency's possibilities and limits, showing how agency can be located outside of conventional understanding, and, conversely, how it can be stretched too far. It demonstrates that agency is compatible with relational gender analysis, especially when alternative agencies such as spectatorship are taken into account. It also makes evident the importance of aesthetics for the study of identity and agency. The individual essays reveal, among other things, how portraits broadened the traditional parameters of portraiture, explored transvestism and same-sex eroticism, appropriated aspects of male portraiture to claim those values for their sitters, and, as sites for gender negotiation, resistance, and debate, invoked considerable relational anxiety. Richly layered in method, the book offers an array of provocative insights into its subject.

Chapter 1
Gender and the Configuration of Early Netherlandish Devotional Skill

Bret Rothstein

This essay is a study of devotional competency in early Netherlandish art, especially as it pertains to double portraits of women and men. My aim is to indicate ways in which competency before the devotional image took forms very different from those the modern viewer might expect, and to demonstrate that it was ascribed to people in ways that were actually quite interesting and subtle. Specifically, I will shed light on an important coordination of spiritual primacy that took place among men and women.

Of particular interest in this respect is Rogier van der Weyden’s Vienna Crucifixion triptych of 1443–45 (Fig. 1.1), which appeals, remarkably, to both hearts and minds. As Antje Maria Neuner has noted, the triptych accommodates both affective and seemingly more cerebral piety by distributing prompts to each across all three panels.¹ At left, Mary Magdalene provides a role model for the empathic viewer, while at right St. Veronica presents to us the vera icon – an image that, as much recent writing has demonstrated, pointedly interrogates the distinction between image and referent.² The central panel then mediates between the two by means of a careful balance between functions narrative and emblematic. The Magdalene’s weeping activates narrative resonances on the central panel, while Veronica’s sudarium echoes the visible form of Jesus, reflexively embedding one form of display within another. Consequently, the left wing engages the central panel in such a way as to cultivate a strongly emotional interpretation of the narrative, while the right wing and central panel tend to accommodate a more intellectual, though not necessarily disinterested, response to the image as such.

The portrait pair reinforces this schema. The male donor looks upward toward Jesus, while his female counterpart gazes out and downward. The posture and depicted attention of the man are striking, for they echo the sort of narrative emphasis one finds in, for example, a Crucifixion by van der Weyden from the mid-1450s (Fig. 1.2). There, too, St. John looks at Jesus on the cross, casting his hands up in lament. The result is an exemplar of psychological and spiritual pain – associations to which the male donor portrait in the Vienna triptych also lends itself. Free of any explicit engagement with the surrounding narrative, by contrast, the female donor seems almost detached. Indeed, unlike her counterpart, she appears lost in thought. Rotated away from the cross, her depicted experience becomes more intellectual than emotional, suggesting that she performs the same sort of operation cued by the reflexive showing of the sudarium – an operation in which one reflects in part on the narrative of the Passion itself and, crucially, in part on objects or emblems deriving from it.

One might ask if the configuration of these two portraits is accidental, or at least incidental, rather than a planned thematic element. After all, the female donor is in something of a tight spot, tucked between her spouse and a sliver of background landscape as if an afterthought. This, plus a certain difference of palette used for her figure, versus that of the male donor, might lead us to dismiss her appearance as simply the result of workshop practice: if the female donor portrait was added after the initial completion of the triptych, the orientation of her body and the direction of her gaze might derive from patterns frequently used for fifteenth-century depictions of supposedly demure women. A notable example may be found in the Merode Triptych (New York, The Cloisters Collection): presented in three-quarter view, the female donor gazes obliquely down and away from the primary scene.³ According to such a thesis, the seemingly greater emotional restraint of the woman in the Vienna Crucifixion, like her close compositional quarters, would merely result from ad hoc modifications to the painting after its initial completion.

This seems unlikely, though. For one thing, infrared reflectograms (IRRs) indicate no overlap between the underdrawing of the female figure and that of the (admittedly sparse) background (Fig. 1.3).⁴ For another thing, they also reveal a set of telling changes made to both donor portraits during execution. Unsurprisingly, some of the changes visible in the IRR assembly seem to have resulted from simple compositional fiddling. Modifications to the upper margins of the female figure’s headdress, for instance, enabled the painter and his workshop to establish a less facile extension of the implied line in the background hillock at right across her forehead and into the right shoulder of her male counterpart. Most such changes, however, are of greater consequence. Indeed, they suggest that the pair was conceived as both integral to the thematic focus of the painting and, what is more, unified. The female figure’s hands, for example, were brought upward during execution of the painting, while her eyes were redirected slightly downward and away from the cross. In addition, the shape of her headdress became increasingly broad and square during the execution of her portrait. Changes to the male donor are no less intriguing: his proper right hand was originally placed further from its counterpart, and his head was initially rotated more toward the cross and inclined to his proper left.

The importance of such changes is profound. For one thing, they indicate a desire to maximize the visual unity of the two figures within the triptych. Insofar as the male donor kneels in closer proximity to the cross, he occupies a privileged position. By increasing the expanse of white that frames the face of the female donor, van der Weyden and his assistants accentuated her features and, consequently, the mental and spiritual activity they signal. At the same time, by bringing the lower edge of the headdress up to slightly above her shoulders, they tempered the vertical qualities of her figure and integrated her more with the adjacent male donor.

Changes to the donor portraits during execution of the painting also suggest an interest in extending interpretation beyond a simple grasp of the depicted narrative. The male figure had originally embodied a more emotionally charged response. Raising his hands in a gesture more redolent of shock than of prayer or meditation, the first attempt at depicting his response linked that figure more directly and less ambiguously with the crucifixion scene. While it does not elide affect, his final form does temper the emotional import of his location and pose. His gesture, for example, now conveys an activity carefully located between prayer and explicit lament. This is especially so, since the rotation of his head slightly away from the cross and the direction of his gaze almost beyond the cross subtly dissociate him from that episode, even as his cloak spills across the rift in the landscape designed to keep the donors at a decorous remove. As a result, he becomes less a participant in that episode than one who relates to it through affect.

Modifications to the design of the female figure suggest a related set of interests. Her hands have been raised somewhat, bringing her gesture more into parallel with that of her counterpart. At or about the same time, her eyes were redrawn: the lids were lowered, the pupils directed downward. This change, even more than the alteration of the man’s face, dissociates the sitter from the events at left. Whereas before she had been depicted looking in the direction of Mary, her gaze now suggests someone who turns from external stimuli inward. It defines her as the sort of devout who prays, in the words of one contemporaneous Francophone writer, ‘in the silence of the heart’ and with ‘the oversight of thought.’⁵ Simply put, her final form marks her as a thoughtful devout whose depicted pictorial dissociation from the crucifixion scene signals a concentrated effort to consider the implications of that scene.

True, as Sixten Ringbom rightly suggested, it is rarely possible to tell what, if anything, people depicted in early Netherlandish paintings have in sight.⁶ But the differentiation of attention here is so marked that it constitutes a significant visual statement in its own right. In so pointedly directing her attention elsewhere, van der Weyden establishes an alignment of interests parallel with, but carefully differentiated from, those of the male donor: both figures attend to something, each to her or his own. In this case, the object to which she corresponds stood below and before the painting and most likely was an altar. Accordingly, her depicted inwardness allows the female figure to serve as an important bridge between the visible world of the fifteenth-century observer and the visual field of the triptych. Oriented toward the locus of the sacrament she does more than simply evince perceptual detachment and meditative absorption; her posture and the direction of her eyes also provide something of a choric gesture, directing our attention beyond the boundaries of the frame and into the realm of Real Presence. Thus, as her partner concerns himself with the physical and psychological torments of the Passion so does she help us attend to corollary physical realities.

For contemporaneous viewers of this painting, the Eucharist both corresponded to old wounds and, with each ostension, reopened them. St. Ambrose, for instance, wrote that, ‘[t]hrough the hand of the Holy Spirit, this bread is formed within a virgin and baked on the Cross by the fire of the Passion.’⁷ The source for this passage tells us much about the currency of such ideas: drawn ultimately from Ambrose’s De Sacramentis, the text as quoted here appears above the Elevation of the Host in the central panel of van der Weyden’s Altarpiece of the Seven Sacraments of 1440–45 (Fig. 1.4), an object nominally dedicated to teaching wayward souls about the mind’s road to God. Within the central panel of that painting, we see precisely the sort of parallelism that the female donor on the Vienna Crucifixion generates by engaging the space before and below the painting. In each case, it is a coordination of (depicted) historical events with a central element of the liturgy: no mere artificial sign, the Eucharist is itself the tortured body to which each painting refers. As a result, the parallelism of devotion in the Vienna Crucifixion seems less one of contrast than of complementarity: as he activates sensitivity to the intangible aspects of suffering, she calls attention to the tangible.

That is why I suggest that the double portrait in this painting advances a distinction between religious experiences that is analogous to the devotional prompts at work in the triptych as a whole (Fig. 1.5). Specifically, the male donor demonstrates an affective experience linked to the painting’s narrative resonances, while the female donor amplifies the theme of visible religious technologies activated by St. Veronica and her reflexive display. This is an interesting strategy, for it allows van der Weyden to differentiate between varieties, and thus objects, of attention in donor portraiture.

Consequently, while the position and gaze of the male donor link him forcefully to the central narrative, the female donor’s rotated position and concomitant redirection of gaze raise important questions about both gender and devotional skill. She might, I suppose, be said to look at nothing. That is, we might think of her as exemplifying aniconic and therefore relatively pure devotion.⁸ I doubt this, though, not least because such an interpretation would cause her partner to exemplify mediocrity. Also, it must be noted that aniconism appears inconsistently as a thematic component of devotional imagery, tending to manifest itself as an aspect of high cultural devotion rather than its popular counterpart.⁹ Whereas the former advoca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Portraiture’s Selves
• 1 Gender and the Configuration of Early Netherlandish Devotional Skill
• 2 Productions of Meaning in Portraits of Margaret of York
• 3 The Posthumous Image of Mary of Burgundy
• 4 Effaced: Failing Widows
• 5 Daddy’s Little Girl: Patrilineal Anxiety in Two Portraits of a Renaissance Daughter
• 6 Engaging Negation in Hans Holbein the Younger’s Portrait of Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan
• 7 All the Queen’s Women: Female Double Portraits at the Caroline Court
• 8 Troubling Identities and the Agreeable Game of Art: From Madame de Pompadour’s Theatrical ‘Breeches’ of Decorum to Drouais’s Portrait of Madame Du Barry En Homme
• 9 Sculpting Her Image: Sarah Siddons and the Art of Self-Fashioning
• Bibliography
• Index