Rape and the Gendered Gaze: Susanna and the Elders in Early Modern Bologna (original) (raw)
Related papers
Stripped of Her Power: Sebastiano Ricci's "Susanna and the Elders"
Susanna and the Elders has been a popular theme in art for centuries. Based on a story from the Apocrypha in the Hebrew Bible, it is a story of good triumphing over evil. Susanna and the Elders was of particular interest to artists because it provided a good excuse to paint a nude woman. Artistic representations of Susanna have often reflected artists’ personal attitudes about women. As a case in point, I will focus on Sebastiano Ricci’s rendition of Susanna and the Elders. Through formal, iconographic, and feminist analyses, I will show that Ricci’s representation of Susanna is a reflection of his misogynistic tendencies and his cavalier attitude toward women as benign objects of male desire. I will then discuss the impact of such representations in the larger context of art history and society.
2012
The crucial knot of Lucrezia Tornabuoni’s Story of Devout Susanna (La istoria della casta Susanna) is the narrative insistence on the reifying eff ects of a gaze gendered as male: Susanna is, as in the apocryphal/deuterocanonical account, represented as an object of voyeurism. It is my aim to show the subtle ways in which Tornabuoni’s depiction of Susanna embraces a series of allusions to other female fi gures such as Dante’s Matelda, Beatrice and Proserpina (Pg XXVIII, XXX, XXXI), Petrarch’s Laura and Danae (RVF 126, 23). Carrying the plurivocal traces of other women represented as visual objects, Tornabuoni’s reinterpretation of the biblical heroine suggests how the objectifying eff ects of the male gaze can slide from exaltation to abasement, from love to rape. After having evoked the equally detrimental repercussions of the female gaze when it reproduces the logic of domination (Medusa), the sacred narrative seems to open up, in its fi nal part, to another account of an allegedl...
Picasso’s Susanna: A Modern Way of Looking
The Susanna and the Elders narrative has been discussed by scholars in art, literature, and religion from as far back as the second century CE until contemporary times, however the highest frequency of the story dates from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Of the few contemporary depictions, such as Thomas Hart Benton (1938), Lovis Corinth (1923) and David Donaldson (1978, Pablo Picasso's Susanna and the Elders (1955) is the most curious in regards to the stylistic treatment and the depiction of Susanna's body. One may also question why Picasso painted this subject in his late life and career, transferring the subject matter into the twentieth century ( ). While there is precedent for the voyeur theme in the Renaissance and Baroque depictions of Susanna, Picasso depicted his Susanna as never before, as the classic reclining nude, layering this iconography onto Susanna and adding a new modern meaning.
The study of art history in the West has been undergoing a major meth ical change in recent years. Art historians no longer limit themselves to tradit questions of connoisseurship, pure stylistic analysis, or even strict iconog Instead, the field has been expanded to include wide cultured, social, eco and political issues, which bear directly on the art work and illuminate every aspect possible. The new methodology is especially applicable in the Medieval Jewish art, as this field basically deals with the products of a re minority whose inner Jewish traditions were in constant confrontation with t of life and values of a host society. Hebrew illuminated manuscripts prov in addition, with invaluable information on the patrons who commissioned their social and economic status, their customs and beliefs, their artistic and even their contacts with the gentile society and its culture. Moreover images in the Hebrew codices were not created in traditional scriptoria, t generally less stereotyped than standard representations in Christian manu At the same time, relying excessively on the miniatures without employin ical documents and the rabbinical literature, unavoidably leads to grave m and distorted image of Jewish life in the Middle Ages.
Studia Patristica, 2018
Although there has been an abundance of textual analysis on the Book of Daniel and Susanna's narrative, there has been little attempt in late ancient art history to analyze the iconography of Susanna in connection with the typology of Woman Wisdom and the representation of deceased Christian female figures. The development and conflation of these typological elements on early Christian sarcophagi and memorial art are largely unconsidered, especially in light of their shared iconographic heritage. This article addresses these shortfalls by examining artistic evidence, Sapiential texts and patristic commentaries, including a new translation of a previously unpublished papyrus manuscript by Didymus the Blind (Commentary on the Psalms 26.1-29.1 trans. Lincoln Blumell, forthcoming), to demonstrate the nuanced uses and popularity of the Susanna story during late antiquity. Fourth-century sarcophagi and memorial gold glass, including examples held at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, are examined in this article. This evidence demonstrates that late antique Christians used the type of Susanna, not only as a trope for divine salvific intervention or as an archetype for conjugal fidelity, but also as a model for female literacy and education, exemplary components of Christian piety. Although there has been an abundance of textual analysis on the Book of Daniel and the narrative of Susanna and the Elders, 1 there has been little attempt in late antique art history to analyze the iconography of Susanna in connection with the typology of Woman Wisdom and representations of deceased Christian female figures. The development and conflation of these typological elements on late antique Christian sarcophagi and memorial artifacts are largely unconsidered. This article begins to address these shortfalls by examining artistic evidence, sapiential texts, and patristic sources.
Eve, Mary, and Martha: Paintings for the Humiliati Nuns at Viboldone
Speculum, 2021
The church of San Pietro in Viboldone, near Milan, contains numerous frescoes that date to the later Trecento, when it was under the control of the Humiliati order. Similar to most Humiliati establishments prior to 1400, it was a double monastery, housing both brothers and sisters. Viboldone is the only extant former church of the Humiliati that contains substantial pictorial decoration from the period when religious of both sexes were resident. Drawing upon earlier proposals that the nuns entered the church in the second bay of the right side aisle, I suggest that the sisters would have been able to traverse the right side aisle to at least the fourth bay, and probably had access as well to the fifth bay or choir. Their male counterparts would have occupied a parallel position in the left side aisle. The article discusses how the paintings visible to the divided members of the monastic community conveyed gendered messages seen as appropriate to the brothers and sisters. I support this argument with evidence from the history of the Humiliati, and especially from their distinctive rule.
The so-called letters Ad Virgines, attributed to Clemens of Rome, are a complex text, both with regard to the identification of their historical production environment and because they are short but privileged witnesses of the ascetic literature of early Christianity. Above all, the Ad Virgines have a fairly complex textual tradition: in fact the Greek original is preserved only in scattered quotations in the Pandette of Antioch of Saint Sheba whereas the complete text is known to us only through the Syriac and Coptic translations, both of which are witnessed in fragments or late manuscripts. In the present contribution, we will focus on the Syriac translation and we will analyze some of its most interesting translational features: the division of the text into two «letters»; «anachronistic» elements in the translation, and biblical quotations. The conclusion is that the Ad Virgines are a unique piece of literature, an exhortation, reshaped as «epistiles» in analogy to 1–2 Cl, perhaps already in the Greek original and translated into Syriac in Edessa, within (pre-)monastic circles around 3rd to 4th century.