DEPICTIONS of CHASTITY: VIRTUE MADE VISIBLE Susan L'engle In
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DEPICTIONS OF CHASTITY: VIRTUE MADE VISIBLE Susan L’Engle In 1969 a daughter was born to Cher and Sonny Bono. They named her Chastity, an uncommon and burdensome name for a child to bear in this time and place. The negative resonance of this name still prevails, clearly articulated in a 1996 interview with Chastity Bono, where the reporter commented: “When she was born in 1969, Chastity Bono got stuck with that name forever. ‘Not that many people call me Chastity anyway,’ she says. She prefers Chas. Hell, wouldn’t you?”1 Today in the twenty-fi rst century we all have personal takes on the meaning of the word chastity and its relevance to our individual lives, shaped by our upbringing and education and supplemented by input from various media. In the Middle Ages, however, chastity was an all- pervading and multivalent concept that regulated the lives of lay men and women, and clergy alike. The ideals of chastity were expressed verbally by churchmen, theologians, philosophers, poets, and heads of family—and recorded in sermons, Saints’ Lives, advice manuals for rulers, courtesy books, and poems of courtly romance. For many of these texts, artists created images and compositions to illustrate and reinforce the verbal discourse, and it is these visual manifestations that will be analyzed and discussed in this project. As a medievalist I am interested in the various ramifi cations of chas- tity within the strata of medieval society; as an art historian, I want to explore how the notion of chastity can be represented visually, and what circumstances provoke its illustration. My main source has been the manuscript illuminations to various texts, and these will be supple- mented by comparable examples of art in monumental format. These images, besides their role as illustration or decoration, served also to moralize, support religious ideas, instruct or frighten the viewer, and sometimes even amuse. Function notwithstanding, as constructs of their time they must be seen as “loaded,” refl ecting the ideas and interests consciously or unconsciously upheld by the social environments in which 1 Published in OutSmart Magazine, November, 1996. VAN DEUSEN_F7-87-126.indd 87 2/15/2008 8:22:38 PM 88 susan l’engle they were created, and projecting messages that we may no longer be able to fully interpret.2 While examining them we should bear in mind how they have most often been understood, and also how they may often have been misconstrued. It is rarely possible to isolate the precise intention behind the creation of a particular image, or to decipher how it affected the cultural seg- ments in which it was viewed. And as the same motif is repeated along the centuries, its resonance necessarily adjusts to the contemporary audience. Nanette Salomon brilliantly demonstrates this point as she charts the evolution of the pictorial composition known as the Venus Pudica, a depiction of a female nude who covers her genitals with one hand.3 The pose, generally construed as “modest” or “chaste” has its earliest representation in Praxiteles’s Knidian Aphrodite, created around 350 BC and known today in a Roman copy of the original.4 In ancient Greek art it is regarded as the fi rst monumental cult statue of a god- dess to be represented entirely nude—and the fi rst monumental female nude sculpture to be positioned with her hand over her pubic area. For Salomon, “Praxiteles’s Aphrodite is in the condition of both complete nudity and self-conscious nakedness . that sexually defi nes the repre- sented woman by her pubis, and . keeps her in a perpetual state of vulnerability.5 This motif quickly became popular for representations of Venus and Aphrodite and generated a large number of imitations, with the additional gesture of covering the breasts.6 An analysis of this pose must take into account how ancient Greeks differentiated male and female capacities for controlling physical desires: Men resisted physical and psychological attacks by their intelligence, while women were seen to be ruled by their emotions and were more inclined to indulge them. The poets envisioned women as sexually insatiable, feeling no need to 2 On art and ideology, see especially Jonathan J. G. Alexander, “Iconography and Ideology: Uncovering Social Meanings in Western Medieval Christian Art,” Studies in Iconography 15 (1993), 1–44, and “Labeur and Paresse: Ideological Representations of Medieval Peasant Labor,” Art Bulletin 72 (1990), 436–452. 3 See Nanette Salomon, “The Venus Pudica: Uncovering Art History’s ‘Hidden Agendas’ and ‘Pernicious Pedigrees,’” in Generations & Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollock (London/New York, 1996), pp. 69–87. 4 Vatican City, Vatican Museum, Museo Pio Clementino; reproduced in Salomon, “The Venus Pudica,” Figure 5.1. 5 Salomon, pp. 70–72. 6 See the Capitoline Aphrodite, reproduced in Salomon, cited above, n. 3, Figure 5.4 and the Medici Aphrodite, reproduced in R. R. R. Smith, Hellenistic Sculpture (London, 1991), fi g. 100. VAN DEUSEN_F7-87-126.indd 88 2/15/2008 8:22:39 PM.