Download Baldwin Renaissance Beauty Aesthetic and the Old Woman

Robert Baldwin, The Old Woman and the Beauty Aesthetic in Late Medieval and
Renaissance Art (Oct 15, 2008)
The Ages of Mankind
The significance of old age in late Medieval and Renaissance culture depended on the
context. In allegories of the Ages of Mankind, old age was a Medieval Christian or
Renaissance humanist reminder of the brevity and emptiness (vanitas) of earthly
existence, the certainty of death and Last Judgment, and the choice between heaven or
hell. In Renaissance humanist culture, the Ages of Mankind also imaged the cosmic
cycles of life and rebirth, thereby offsetting Christian linear time with its bleak ending in
death with classical themes of transcendence and renewal (renaissance).
Gender and the Beauty Aesthetic
Positive images of old men abound in art from the Late Middle Ages to the Baroque,
usually showing them, as scholars, sages, wise elders, senior statesmen, and God the
Father. In contrast, European art produced few images of old women at this time and
most of them were allegorically negative or satirical. The old woman was largely absent
as a subject because beauty and especially female beauty emerged as an important theme
in Late Medieval art and took on a primary importance in the classicizing aesthetics of
the Renaissance. Indeed, female beauty could be seen as the most important subject in
Renaissance and Baroque art, appearing in hundreds of different subjects, whether
Christian, classical, or contemporary. In the new world of the Renaissance beauty
aesthetic, the subject of the old woman was banished. It flew against the most important
principles of Renaissance art. Here, we need a brief history of this beauty aesthetic as it
rose in the later Middle Ages.
The Rise of the Beauty Aesthetic: Late Medieval to Renaissance Court Culture
The rise of chivalric culture in the later middle ages (1275-) restored a new celebration of
worldly pleasures and delights within the larger spectrum of medieval values. From the
start, Late Medieval court culture focused on youth, beauty, and love. Age was largely
banished, along with death and decay. Indeed, it was reversed in the new Late Medieval
courtly theme of the Fountain of Youth. When courtly lovers did occasionally die, they
usually died in the full flower of their youth.
Although Late Medieval literature offered numerous extended descriptions of male
beauty, the lion’s share of literary and artistic beauty fell to women in line with
traditional gender stereotypes of male reason and female body. Men aspired to power and
intellect. Women (according to male writers) aspired to chastity, virtue, and beauty.
Different writers stressed different elements in this ideal woman but there was a general
shift away from the spiritual to the worldly between Dante in the early fourteenth century
and the Platonic sonneteers of the 16th and 17th centuries. In epic form, Dante’s Divine
Comedy narrates the spiritual quest of the lover, Dante, for the chaste, beautiful beloved,
Beatrice, who died in the virginal perfection of her youth and sits just below the
enthroned Madonna for the poet to glimpse in the beatific vision which ends the poem.
Forty years later, the more worldly humanist, Boccaccio, spent 60 pages describing
female beauty in highly erotic terms, scanning the bodies of seven nymphs slowly from
tip to toe in his Nymph of Fiesole. Although Boccaccio shifted abruptly and implausibly
in the final pages to a medieval Christian view downgrading earthly beauty, the story
marked a dramatic shift away from Dante’s medieval monastic Platonism to a new
Renaissance humanist beauty aesthetic not that different from the erotic mythological
paintings of Botticelli executed 130 years later.
Looking at the courtly beauty aesthetic more broadly, we can see important continuities
between Late Medieval court culture and Renaissance humanist court culture. The
relentless spiritualizing of female beauty in Dante and other late medieval writers worked
to sanction the beauty culture and made it much easier for later writers and artists to focus
more on earthly beauty (without abandoning its ties to a higher, divine beauty). Despite
the spread of Renaissance humanism in Italy after 1400, the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries have more in common than not with respect to this beauty aesthetic. Until the
last two decades of the fifteenth century, beauty remains chastely clothed in most images
and texts. (The nymph-like woman so common from Bocaccio to Botticelli wears a
diaphanous robe so that her nudity retains at least the pretense of decorum. After
Botticelli, complete nudity became widely acceptable in art and the theme of female
chastity, like the enclosed sacred garden, receded in importance without ever
disappearing.)
To see the relative chastity of female beauty in 14th and 15th century art is to recognize
the important continuities between the late medieval “religion” of female beauty, seen in
Dante and, in more early terms, in chivalric romance and Petrarchan sonnets, and the
early Renaissance humanism of the fifteenth century. Indeed, it was late fifteenth-century
Platonic humanists such as Ficino, Pico, and Benvieni, who produced the first treatises on
beauty.
The Renaissance humanist beauty aesthetic reached maturity only after Michelangelo and
Titian as images of heroic, erotic nudes exploded in Western Art. While homoerotic love
and beauty was prominent in some writers like Ficino and artists like Michelangelo, the
beauty aesthetic focused even more relentlessly on young women with new, more
popular literary discussions of female beauty (Bembo, Castiglione, Firenzuola) as the
most perfect and uplifting expression of the divine in the visible world. With the beauty
aesthetic came new themes which made beauty the central subject such as the Judgment
of Paris and Venus at the Mirror. Indeed, female beauty was sufficiently important to
become its own artistic subject in the hundreds of paintings and prints representing
female beauties from Bellini and Titian in the early 16th century to Vermeer at the end of
the 17th. While the subject matter varied – Venus, Flora, nymphs, shepherdesses,
courtesans, sirens, femme fatales, saints – none of the particular names were terribly
important. Female beauty was the primary subject just as it became the sufficient subject
for whole books, starting with Firenzuola. The same focus on beauty informed sets of
majolica plates from the early sixteenth century each depicting a different beauty. The
inclusion of women violated by men such as Lucretia and Bathsheba and penitents such
as Mary Magdalen shows the power of beauty to vanquish all other considerations, even
disturbing realities tied to beauty such as rape, suicide, murder, harlotry and penitence.
The Dilemma of the Old Woman in an Age of the Courtly Beauty Aesthetic
Needless to say, the growing focus on female beauty and the larger triumph of the
classical beauty aesthetic in Renaissance art left the older woman almost completely out
of the picture. She could appear only in negative terms, as in Boccaccio’s Corbaccio
where the narrator-lover savages the aging body of the women he once loved as foul and
stinking. As usual in such descriptions from classical antiquity to Zola’s Nana, the most
horrific feature was the older woman’s vagina which Boccaccio called an all-devouring
“infernal abyss” like Scylla and Charybdis or the Mouth of Hell.
In art, the old woman appeared in a Northern Renaissance and Baroque depictions of
witches, in Northern all-female allegories of the Ages of Mankind, in satires of “female”
greed and wrath such as Bruegel’s Mad Meg, and in a few vanitas paintings (Massys,
Ugly Duchess, Strozzi, Vanitas). Interesting, the vast majority of vanitas allegories
depicting women focused on youthful female beauty, implying the inevitable changes of
age rather than showing them. Ironically, the Renaissance beauty aesthetic triumphed
even in works of art allegorizing the insignificance, transience, and deceptive nature of
beauty. Presumably the market for ugly subjects in paintings was limited. Indeed, the
ugly painting was, to some extent, an oxymoron in the age of Renaissance aesthetics.
Positive images of the old woman were all but unknown in Renaissance and Baroque art.
One rare example is Donatello’s Magdalen which shows Mary Magdalen late in life
while she lived in penitential solitude and poverty in a cave for thirty years, covered only
by her hair. Although the subject of the penitent Magdalen invited artists to depict the
elderly saint, no other artist known to me from this period ever depicted her as an old
woman. Interestingly, the older, penitent Magdalen invariably appeared in art as a young,
beautiful noblewoman, especially after the rise of a fully-blown Renaissance beauty
aesthetic in the early sixteenth century. In Erhart and Titian and hundreds of other
examples through the seventeenth century, the penitent Magdalen was frequently shown
as a bare-breasted courtesan, nymph, or Venus. In a subject ostensibly repenting of all
carnal beauty, the painting adhered to the ruling classical-courtly beauty aesthetic. (Other
old women also appeared with strangely youthful bodies such as the dying Virgin or
Bernini’s Blessed Ludovica Albertoni on her deathbed.)
In sharp contrast to the beautiful penitent Magdalen (and his earlier classical nudes like
the David and the Amor), Donatello depicted a gaunt, emaciated yet muscular desert
ascetic, more like traditional images of John the Baptist including his earlier statue of that
saint also commissioned for the Baptistery in Florence. In this way, Donatello used
masculine anatomical rhetoric to image the spiritual depth and strength of the aged
Magdalen just as Renaissance writers frequently praised intelligent or powerful women
as “manly”.