Download Baldwin Lottos Portrait of Lucrezia Valier

Lotto, Lucrezia Valier, 1533
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
Connecticut College
New London, CT 06320
[email protected]
www.socialhistoryofart.com
(This essay was written in November, 2009.)
Introduction
Lucrezia Valier was a Venetian noblewoman named after the famously chaste Roman matron.
This in itself was nothing special as the spread of humanism made classical names popular
among the Italian nobility after 1475. In 1533, she married Benedetto Pesaro from a prominent
Venetian noble family. Most scholars believe the painting was commissioned around the time of
her marriage.
By showing Lucrezia Valier holding a drawing of the famously chaste Roman matron,
Lucretia, Lotto’s portrait enshrines chastity as the highest female virtue. Although dating back to
the early Christian period with some roots in late antiquity, the primacy of chastity was for a
thousand years deeply linked with Christian examples, above all the Virgin Mary. Indeed,
Mary’s example remained primary right through the seventeenth century and beyond for
Christian (Catholic) women. To switch from Mary’s chastity to that of the raped Roman matron,
Lucretia, offers a dramatic example of the impact of Renaissance humanism and the search for
classical rather than medieval models in many arenas.
Lest modern viewers wonder how a married women could exemplify chastity, it helps to
remember that writers through the nineteenth century commonly understood two forms of
chastity, one before marriage (virginity) and one after (fidelity). Renaissance treatises on
marriage and family always described marriage as a second form of chastity. Both forms were of
paramount importance in constructions of female identity. In Lotto’s painting, Lucrezia Valier
demonstrates an exemplary feminine virtue which she learned as a child and which she proudly
upholds in a portrait advertizing her chastity, beauty, and wealth. Here we see the perfect
qualities of a noblewoman, celebrated in a portrait commissioned near the time of her wedding.
Chastity as Republican Virtue to Offset Courtly Splendor and Beauty
Chastity also worked here as a moral balance to the striking outward beauty and courtly
splendor of the young Lucrezia Valier. Dressed in a sumptuous gown with a magnificent jeweled
pendant, she appears not unlike a bride in the height of splendor. By holding an emblem of her
chastity, Lucrezia offset the potential materialism of her physical beauty and expensive clothes
with a display of moral perfection. In a sixteenth-century princely regime, noblewomen did not
feel constrained in displaying beauty and wealth. But in republican Venice where conjugal
themes and mottos of moderation regularly appeared in lavishly decorated palaces and villas,
Lucrezia Valier was eager to infuse beauty and luxury with a legitimizing virtue.
Chastity Eroticized
The combination of beauty and wealth also allows chastity to be eroticized as it was in
countless Renaissance images of woodland nymphs, Diana, Judith, and Mary Magdalen (Titian),
not to mention images of the naked Lucretia or Danae. Understood this way, we can recognize
another level to the image of the naked Lucretia whose nudity is not required by the subject of
her rape or suicide. In part, Lucretia appears naked to heighten the clothed chastity of her
Renaissance counterpart. This helps explain the curious distance of the drawing, held at arm’s
length as if to maximize this contrast. But set within the context of a very beautiful Renaissance
noblewomen whose decolletage offers generous glimpses of her bosom, the striking nudity of
Lucretia allows male viewers to imagine and enjoy the very beauty which the chaste Lucrezia
must conceal. In short the painting goes out of its way to allow male spectators enjoy their cake
and eat it too.
The Republic Politics of Lucretia and the Patriarchy of Venice
The choice of Lucretia has other implications as well. For she was long the icon of the ancient
Roman republic, and of every major republic which followed through the seventeenth century.
Lucretia was a married Roman woman known for her fidelity, virtue, and moderation. While her
aristocratic friends were out partying, she stayed home sewing with her maids well into the night.
After her rape by Tarquin, the lecherous son of the tyrannical Roman king, Tarquinus, Lucretia
killed herself out of shame at her own violation. The next day, her outraged male kin overthrew
Tarquinus and established the Roman Republic which lasted for the next five hundred years. In
ancient antiquity as in the Renaissance, Lucretia dramatically embodied a female chastity more
important than life itself. For upper class men, and presumably some women, the dishonor
brought on Lucretia by her own rape made her suicide all the more noble, allowing her to claim
dignity and virtue in a dramatic act of self-annihilation.
Needless to say, only a profoundly patriarchal republic could make the suicide of a raped
matron into an icon of republican liberty, honor, and family values. The same idea circulated in
the patriarchal values of Renaissance humanist society where upper class men (noble and
burgher) worried continually about the fidelity and purity of daughters and wives. This was
particularly true of Renaissance republics like fifteenth-century Florence where Botticelli painted
four paintings on the rape of Lucretia and the foundation of the Roman Republic. By the mid-
fifteenth century, the only republic remaining in Italy was Venice. This explains the popularity of
Lucretia as a subject in Venetian art. Tintoretto even painted a portrait of a Venetian nobleman
holding an imaginary classical statue of Lucretia killing herself.
The patriarchal politics inscribed into the narrative of Lucretia is particularly clear in the
final words given to her in the most influential of all classical accounts, Livy’s History of Rome.
Instead of attacking male violence or sexual predation, Lucretia condemns lascivious women.
“Never shall Lucretia provide a precedent for unchaste women to escape what they deserve.”
By modern standards, Lucretia’s final utterance is particularly shocking because it comes close
to blaming the victim for her own rape even as it justifies her self-obliteration. Yet few if any
writers before the modern women’s movement ever doubted the nobility of these sentiments or
of Lucretia’s own self-destruction. Indeed, Lotto’s portrait carefully displays Lucretia’s famous
last words on a piece of paper toward which the sitter proudly points.
Woman as Male Marionette
It’s quite possible Lucrezia Valier bought into the patriarchal republican politics of sixteenthcentury Venice. But we’ll never know as this painting can’t depict the inner thoughts of the sitter
any more than Livy knew the feelings or words of the original Lucretia who killed herself five
hundred years before he wrote his History of Rome. Here final words were actually made up my
Livy. Indeed, the whole character of Lucretia was invented by Livy as a stirring moral and
political fable.
This brings us to Lotto’s painting. Did Lucrezia Valier value female chastity as highly as Livy
or the Venetian nobility which raised her? Did she understand and accept the double standard
which required female chastity to protect aristocratic property and inheritance while openly
celebrating courtesans and mistresses for noblemen? Did she want Lucretia’s final speech
included in her portrait or was this determined by a male authority figure such as her father (if
commissioned before the marriage) or her husband (if commissioned afterwards)? Who was the
patron and who determined its basic imagery and content? The answer to these questions will
probably never be known. Even if Lucrezia Valier exercised full control over the painting, she
had to operate within the constraints of Venetian society where she had little control over many
things she did and said and where many of her deepest personal beliefs were socialized into her
from the earliest age.
It’s quite possible that Lucrezia Valier had nothing to do with this portrait and that the men
charged with supervising her life – father and husband - used the opportunity of a portrait to have
their daughter or wife display all the right values of a well-educated, sixteenth-century Venetian
noblewoman. Such a portrait presented Lucrezia Valier as the perfect wife to any and all
onlookers while reminding Lucrezia herself of her obligations as the wife of Benedetto Pesaro. If
this is true, then Lucrezia Valier resembles the ancient Roman Lucretia on one more level. For
both were fashioned as a useful marionette for the patriarchal values of male writers, readers,
artists, and patrons.