Female Portraits in Renaissance Art
A Critical Review of Patricia Simons' Essay, "Women in Frames ..."
Feb 14, 2009
Investigating the Gaze
In her essay on the representation of women in Florentine portraits, "Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture," Patricia Simons takes a David versus Goliath stance, suggesting that the exalted position of the Renaissance period in art history has not (or, had not, in 1988) lent itself to much investigation or challenge. She scrutinizes ‘the gaze’ in the display culture of Quattrocento Florence to expose the ways in which the female profile—as an averted and objectified face—lent itself to the representation of women as chaste, submissive and decorous possessions. Instead of accepting the prevailing neutrality in viewing Renaissance portraits of women, she presents them as “constructions of gender conventions”. She would seem to agree with John Berger when she writes: “To be a woman in the world was/is to be an object of the male gaze …” She cites her interest in the eye and the gaze as a product of late twentieth century theories in psychoanalysis and film studies.
Using examples of Quattrocento (15th Century) Florentine art, Simons investigates the gaze, specifically with regard to the painted profile “presenting an averted eye and a face available to scrutiny”. She notes that after about 1440 until 1470, almost all such portraits are of women, while male portraits—shown in three-quarter length—occupy a bigger and more assertive amount of space. There is an implicit misogyny in not only why this is so, but also in why this had never been investigated previously.
Idealization Versus Demonization
Simons observes that, visually, the austere orderliness of the female profile portrait is a sharp contrast to the misogynist literature of the period. Women were often portrayed in Florentine literature as "inconstant," like "irrational animals" without "any set proportion," living "without order or measure.” Yet, in these portraits, women are transformed by their "beauty of mind" and "dowry of virtue" into ordered, stable, symmetrical and consistent images. A woman, who was purportedly superficial and narcissistic, would be depicted as an idealized object in a framed "mirror" when a man's financial and social position was at stake. When it came to a woman’s dowry, she was suddenly on display as an ordered and mannered likeness. Her supposed nature—the one portrayed in literature—was nowhere to be seen. Nor was her true or real nature as a human being ever depicted.
Purposeful Portraits
The explanation Simons offers is that these profile portraits “participate in a language of visual and social conventions” and are not recreations of reality. In real life (‘real life’ being, of course, Florentine patrician society), a woman had only two choices: marriage or the convent. Yet, in the “display culture” of mid-fifteenth century Florence, women could be painted in unrealistic contexts to suit the economic, social, and sexual purposes of its patriarchy.
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