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 lions 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, Dantes 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 Dantes 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 Boccaccios 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 Zolas Nana, the most horrific feature was the older womans 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 Bruegels 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 Donatellos 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 Berninis 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.