What Women Want - The Penis Market in Renaissance Italy MA in Art History, Curatorship and Renaissance Culture Word Count: 15022 Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................................... 3 Sources and Historiography ......................................................................................................................................................... 4 Chapter 1: Penis - The Measure of a Man ............................................................................................. 8 A Cautionary Tale .............................................................................................................................................................................. 8 The Cuckold and the Lascivious Woman ............................................................................................................................. 10 Chapter 2: ‘Come women to the good fruits’ .................................................................................. 166 The Little Animal ............................................................................................................................................................................ 19 The Enormous Fruit .................................................................................................................................................................... 222 The Welcome Wares ................................................................................................................................................................... 233 Chapter 3: The Female Consumer ...................................................................................................... 266 The Loquacious Woman ............................................................................................................................................................ 266 The Erotic Dream ........................................................................................................................................................................... 28 The Glorification of the Penis .................................................................................................................................................. 311 The Cold Consuming Body ....................................................................................................................................................... 322 Feared, Ridiculed and Shamed ................................................................................................................................................. 35 Conclusion....................................................................................................................................................... 39 Appendix ......................................................................................................................................................... 54 Image List ..................................................................................................................................................... 536 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................... 58 2 Introduction The large erect penis has enjoyed a multitude of connotations: fertility, male dominance and sexual desire to name a few. What then is the significance of the large erect penis, separated from the male body, placed in the hands of a woman? Scenes of women watering and cultivating penises (Figure 1), with vessels filled to the brim with penises (Figure 2 and 3), or with phallic shaped vegetables and animals (Figure 4 and 5), can be found in Ancient Greece and continue their presence to the modern day (Figure 7). In The Reign of the Phallus, Eva Keuls accounts for the penis in Classical Athens.1 She defines her ‘reign of the phallus’ as men’s assertion of general dominance, established through the myths of rape, the subjugation of women and the reduction of sex to a game of power and submission. This dissertation will extend her discussion within the context of Renaissance Italy, a period that has seen relatively little scholarship on the large erect penis, and nuance our understanding of the dynamics of gender representation and power. Art of the time generally depicts penises as small, soft and childlike. Yet some rare examples echo the priapic, comic and erotic exaggeration of earlier times (Figure 8 and 9), and deserve serious attention.2 This dissertation will tackle the erect penis within the realm of Renaissance humour, drawing theoretical perspectives from recent feminist and gender analysis of Old French fabliaux.3 A letter dated 14 January 1496 from Floriano Dolfo, a Bolognese priest and university lecturer in canon law, to Francesco II Gonzaga, the Marquis of Mantua and the husband of the famous art collector and patron Isabella d’Este, contains ‘a beautiful large one, big, long and white, gleaming so much that it seemed like the one depicted in the bathroom commissioned by our Monsignor Bentivoglio’ (41-44).4 Dolfo, who was ‘a sort of erudite epistolary entertainer’, tells the story of the fantasy of a bona donna [a ‘good’ 1 Keuls 1993. 2 For a discussion of the ‘funny phallus’ in Ancient Greece see (Simons 2011) 60ff. 3 Works by E. Jane Burns, John Baldwin and Sarah White on the French fabliaux will be greatly influential for this dissertation (Burns 1993; Baldwin 1996; White 1982). 4 The translation of this letter is my own and can be found in the appendix accompanied by the transcription from (Minutelli and Dolfo 2002, 72–78, 372–84). The line numbers referred to within the essay refer to the Italian rather than the English. The epistolary exchange between Dolfo and Francesco is discussed by Molly Bourne in ‘Mail humour and male sociability: sexual innuendo in the epistolary domain of Francesco II Gonzaga’ in Matthews-Grieco 2010, 199–222. 3 woman] who, dissatisfied with her sex life, dreams of attending a penis market.5 Amongst the stalls, the bona donna spies the penis of her dreams. There was a comparable penis on the bathroom wall of Monsignor Bentivoglio, identified as Antongaleazzo Bentivoglio, the protonotary, elected in 1483 at age eleven.6 The mention of visual erotica in a cleric’s bathroom is not necessarily surprising for the time, considering the existence of the famous stufetta of Cardinal Bernado Bibbiena in his papal palace apartments, frescoed by Raphael in 1516 with erotic Ovidian scenes.7 This dissertation will explore the literary and visual construction of these phallic goods and the penis market, drawing on feminist and gender approaches to art history. Many of my observations could apply to cultural contexts from ancient East Asia to modern North America. But given the inevitable limitations of this study, I will confine myself to a critical analysis of what the disembodied penis can tell us about female agency: this will involve analysing the place of the penis market within Renaissance humour and the sexual roles of the penis and female consumer.8 Sources and Historiography Within the conceptual framing of the ‘penis market’, I will discuss depictions of women cultivating, hunting, selling and using penises separated from the male body. Dolfo’s letter is the fullest account of the penis market: it provides a context for the writer and audience and therefore will be central to this discussion. The penis market appears in both public and private domains. Marta Ajmar-Wollheim noted that ‘at various levels of Renaissance society, playful and explicit references to sexuality and genitalia were considered entirely appropriate within the domestic context.’9 Some more public depictions such as the Massa Marittima mural (Figure 6), where twenty-five large phalli hanging from branches are being plucked by women below, pose questions about our understanding of medieval and early modern attitudes towards erotica. 5 Matthews-Grieco 2010, 207; in my translation of bona donna, I have included the quotation marks around good to imply a sense of irony. It is unclear whether Dolfo intends bona donna to be taken literally or ironically, since in Italian bona donna can imply a prostitute or a lascivious woman. 6 Minutelli and Dolfo 2002, 74. 7 Matthews-Grieco 2010, 219, no. 38. 8 Lo and Re’em forthcoming. 9 Marta Ajmar-Wollheim, ‘“The spirit is ready, but the flesh is tired’‘: erotic objects and marriage in early modern Italy’ in Matthews-Grieco 2010, 150. 4 Previous analyses of these Renaissance markets argue for the importance of antique influences. Within the phallocentrism of Graeco-Roman societies, depictions of the phallus abound, possessing talismanic and apotropaic properties as well as connoting eroticism and fertility.10 A perplexing mid fifth-century red-figure vase by the Hasselmann painter depicts a woman watering her phalluses (Figure 1). John Boardman also provides twenty-five different examples of phallus birds from the ancient world (Figure 4).11 The Carmina Priapea, a Latin anthology of 80 poems dedicated to Priapus the god of fertility - attributed to various classical authors including Virgil and Ovid - was greatly influential in the Renaissance tradition of representing genitalia as fruit.12 Catherine Hess uses the apotropaic function of genitalia in the ancient world to assist her interpretation of a woman flashing her genitalia to a winged