Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2010, vol. 5

“Lady without Equal”: Lucrezia Paolina, , and Feminist Art History Linda C. Hults

It is we women, said Leonora, who lighten men’s burden of worries. When we take charge of household affairs. . . . , we take over a part of their work, overseeing the whole household. And it’s certainly true that a man can never really find true domestic contentment and harmony without the fond companionship of a woman, . . . without someone to look after him and take care of all his needs, and to share all the good times and the bad times with him. —Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women, c. 1592

Keeping House, Making Art

Even when they did not make art, early modern women contributed to its production, whether as models, female kin, mistresses, or wives. Marriage itself was often a sign of professional status for the early modern male artist, although its legal and social benefits for men varied.1 Artists’ wives might keep accounts, prepare materials, sell works, or run large households (like Rubens’s in Antwerp), sustaining master, pupils, and assistants and offering hospitality to visitors and patrons.2 Margaret Lemon, van Dyck’s cultivated mistress, ran his residence at Blackfriars between 1632 and 1639, also modeling for portraits and mythological and religious images in which her personality and relationship with the artist became part of the artistic content.3 Similarly, Rembrandt’s relationship with Hendrickje Stoffels

11

EMW_2010.indb 11 7/15/10 7:57 AM 12 EMWJ 2010, vol. 5 Linda C. Hults

complicated the iconography of some of his works. She probably posed for the Bathsheba of 1654, and the two Lucretias in the , Washington (1666), and the Minneapolis Institute of Art (1668) have been read, in part, as posthumous tributes to her.4 Vermeer’s models may have included his wife Catharina and his daughters, and art historians have begun to address the impact of his domestic life on his art.5 In con- trast, Salvator Rosa’s (1615–1673) life-companion and occasional model, Lucrezia Paolina (c. 1620–1696), has remained a mere ornament for his colorful biography, with no substantive connection to his art. What approach should feminist art historians take toward women like Paolina, whose lives are filtered through the gendered attitudes of male artists and their later interpreters? In the face of scant evidence, scholars have traditionally refrained from integrating these women into interpretations of male artists’ works and lives, leaving vacuums to be filled by historical novelists and filmmakers. H. Perry Chapman notes that this “art fiction” forms a parallel history of art, embracing the socioeconomic content of much current scholarship in the discipline, but countering this content by appealing to the ideal of the male creative genius and the affec- tive aura of the work of art. As Chapman demonstrates for Vermeer’s wife and mother-in-law, women close to male artists tend to fare poorly in art fiction.6 Scholarly reticence, then, not only colludes with the erasure of women in traditional art history, but also fails to rebut women’s misrepre- sentation in both fictional and academic discourse.7 On the other hand, as Irit Rogoff points out in an essay on Gabriele Münter, Wassily Kandinsky’s colleague and lover, our feminist empathy for women of the past who have suffered erasure can provide inspiration, but not an “analytical model for historical understanding or revision.”8 Developing such a model has long been a concern for feminist art historians. In 1984, in a foundational article on the artistic and liter- ary representations of Elizabeth Siddall—model for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of artists and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s lover and eventual wife—Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock asserted the impossibility of recovering Elizabeth Siddall from her function as a sign of Victorian femi- ninity and masculine creativity. Documents and representations of Siddall, they acknowledged, are discourses rooted in specific contexts with their

EMW_2010.indb 12 7/15/10 7:57 AM “Lady without Equal” 13

own ideologies of art and gender. However, they also suggested that we reclaim the particularity of women’s lives “by insisting upon the formation of the individual subject in the historically specific material practices of the social relations of class and gender difference.”9 This approach addresses the frequent absence of women in art-historical discourse, yet recognizes, in Rogoff ’s words, “that the missing voices and erased identities cannot, should not, be robustly reconstituted.”10 Instead, feminist art historians might compensate for evidentiary gaps with a multitude of fragments: partly audible voices, incomplete and mediated texts, and assorted his- torical narratives that function together to reconstitute, albeit partially, the lives of women who were close to male artists.11 This is what I hope to accomplish for Paolina. She and Rosa could not marry legally for most of their life together, because her first husband had abandoned her and disappeared. To the Church, currently strengthening its control over sexual relationships, she was still incontrovertibly married, mak- ing the couple vulnerable to Inquisitorial reprisal, especially after their move to in 1649.12 It was not until 1672 that Rosa, gravely ill, obtained a special license to marry her, in a poignant deathbed scene that reinforces the Romantic view of Rosa as an unconventional, suffering rebel.13 Paolina’s life is filtered through Rosa’s words and images. We cannot recover her voice, and she will remain to some extent the nurturing presence in Rosa’s letters; the Muse bearing his satirist’s pen; or the personification of human frailty, wearing the roses that mark her as his wife (see figs. 2 and 6). If not for Rosa’s art-historical importance, she would be consigned to the anonymous ranks of non-elite early modern women. However, I see a middle course between viewing her either as a sign of Rosa, or of the biological and cultural constraints affecting seventeenth-century Italian women. In Joan Wallach Scott’s words, a feminist historian must “acknowledge the partiality of one’s story (indeed, of all stories) and still tell it with authority and conviction.”14 By retrieving as much particularity as possible from Paolina’s experience, I offer a microhistory illustrating gender’s relationality and attendant power discrepancies, suggesting the emotional texture of a relationship, and lend- ing shape and agency to a male artist’s “silent” partner.15 This microhistory expands to illuminate many facets of early modern society: the impact of the Church’s marriage reforms; women’s experience of multiple pregnancies;

EMW_2010.indb 13 7/15/10 7:57 AM Figure 1. Salvator Rosa, Self-Portrait (?) as a Philosopher, 1640s. Photo: National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

EMW_2010.indb 14 7/15/10 7:57 AM Figure 2. Salvator Rosa, Lucrezia as the Muse of Satiric Poetry, 1640s. Photo: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut/ Art Resource, NY.

EMW_2010.indb 15 7/15/10 7:57 AM Figure 3. Salvator Rosa, Poetry, c. 1640, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

EMW_2010.indb 16 7/15/10 7:57 AM Figure 4. Salvator Rosa, Music, c. 1640, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

EMW_2010.indb 17 7/15/10 7:57 AM Figure 5. Salvator Rosa, Portrait of Lucrezia, c. 1656, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

EMW_2010.indb 18 7/15/10 7:57 AM Figure 6. Salvator Rosa, Human Frailty, c. 1657. Photo: Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK.

EMW_2010.indb 19 7/15/10 7:57 AM 20 EMWJ 2010, vol. 5 Linda C. Hults

the circumstances surrounding infant abandonment; the gendered nature of honor and grief; and attitudes toward menopause, illness, and aging. By reading key works by Rosa through this lens, we reshape western art history’s master narrative, in which he holds a privileged place: the movement toward artistic autonomy.16 Like other accounts of artists’ mistresses, wives, and models, mine brings a decidedly material, domestic, and gendered dimen- sion to this traditional narrative, in which the transcendent male artist rises above history and social relations.17 As April Masten argues for the lives of artists’ models, Paolina’s story resists the presumed ”narrative closure” and autonomy of the male artist’s life, making biography a “potential site of pro- ductive resistance.”18 Chafing at limitations on artistic freedom, Rosa fashioned a highly individualistic masculinity. He exhibited and marketed his works to main- tain authority over subjects and prices. As a comic actor and satirical poet, he cultivated a notorious public image woven from personal charisma and seventeenth-century culture, particularly its renewed interest in Stoicism, Cynicism, and other ancient philosophies, and in the satires of Horace and Juvenal.19 Rosa’s Cynic disdain for convention, as well as his quest for the Neo-Stoic moderation that eluded him, dovetailed with early modern notions of masculinity. Indeed, the conflict between Cynic and Stoic ideals mirrors the tensions, gaps, and fractures in early modern masculinity. Rosa’s braggadocio and anxieties, copiously documented in his letters, exemplify masculinity (to borrow Diane Purkiss’s term) as a “hysterical” construction that had to be remade constantly to avoid collapse.20 Through his personal and professional choices, Rosa ensured his honor within the competitive contexts of art and poetry. Male honor in early modern Italy was also richly articulated and sustained corporately, through homosocial networks.21 Avoiding powerful patrons, Rosa cultivated a circle of humanist and mercan- tile friends and admirers. His relationship to Giovanni Battista Ricciardi, a philosophy professor, illustrates the instrumentality of male friendship: Rosa plumbed Ricciardi’s knowledge for unusual subjects, repaying his friend with affection, drawings, pictures, and dedications.22 Moreover, through his deft manipulation of the art market, Rosa enjoyed success, despite his notoriety. Good prices and loyal clients established his honor within the masculine, corporate context of art.23

EMW_2010.indb 20 7/15/10 7:57 AM “Lady without Equal” 21

For women, honor was more circumscribed by sexual status, although there was room for agency.24 Rosa’s letters confirm Paolina’s honor within their supportive circle and convey the affectionate tenor of his family life. Moreover, he was evidently faithful, cherishing his “lady without equal in the world” as his wife.25 The couple’s irregular status—unmarried yet cohabiting in the kind of informal domestic partnership that had long been common—enabled Rosa, who did not have pupils, run a workshop, or support members of his natal family, to be head of a household while defying convention.26 Paolina’s presence in his letters often echoed his Fortune-persecuted persona, strengthened his social bonds, and confirmed his authority as husband and father, although he came by those roles unconventionally. In key images from his oeuvre her image enhanced his role of satirical poet (figs. 2 and 3) and expressed his grief at the death of their first son (figs. 5 and 6).

Satire’s Muse (Florence, 1640–1649)

Rosa met Paolina when she was about twenty, just after he arrived in Florence from Rome in 1640 to work for Gian Carlo de’ Medici, the younger brother of Duke Ferdinand II. Rosa’s biographer, Giovanni Battista Passeri, tells us only that she was beautiful, of good quality, and working as a model, and that her husband had left Florence sud- denly, “either in disgust or because he was a fellow of low repute.”27 Whatever his reasons, Paolina found herself among the malmaritate, abandoned or abused women who turned to religious institutions or their natal families for help.28 She may have been living with her wid- owed mother and two younger sisters, who needed her income, judging from the concerns over dowries expressed in Rosa’s letters (48, 50, 60, 90, and 113).29 Soon after they met, Paolina sent a brief letter to Rosa, then on a visit to Rome, to persuade him to come home soon. She asked, “send news of your wellbeing to quiet my spirit,” and “just console me with a single line.”30 She gave birth to their first child, Rosalvo, in June 1641. On July 10, 1646, Rosa noted a miscarriage (17), but Rosalvo’s is the only documented birth during the period when the young couple would have

EMW_2010.indb 21 7/15/10 7:57 AM 22 EMWJ 2010, vol. 5 Linda C. Hults

been most fertile. In contrast, as we shall see below, Rosa’s Roman letters after 1649 confirm three unnamed births, strongly imply a fourth, and Augusto was born in 1657 after Rosalvo died, for a total of six live births. This inconsistency is best explained by lacunae in Rosa’s letters in the 1640s: none remain from 1643, 1644, and most of 1645, and there are large gaps in 1647 and 1648. If there were one or two more undocument- ed births during the 1640s, Paolina’s parity (number of live births) would be slightly higher than the early modern average of five to six.31 Although couples used condoms, coitus interruptus, or abortifacients, all were highly unreliable methods.32 Breast-feeding for at least a year would have had some contraceptive effect, helping to space births about two years apart.33 However, Rosa regularly sent newborns to foundling homes, claiming they were too expensive (112), but also, probably, because they drew attention to the couple’s illicit relationship.34 Artists’ incomes were rarely secure, and the banquets and performances for Rosa’s Florentine academy, the Percossi (the “stricken ones”) were costly.35 Gian Carlo had dismissed Rosa by mid 1646, but the generosity of merchant Giulio Maffei’s family in Volterra sustained him.36 Rosa’s grandiose intellectual ambitions in the 1640s are evident in the Philosopher and the Muse of Satiric Poetry (National Gallery, London, and Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; figs. 1 and 2), stylisti- cally similar with the same early provenance, often interpreted as paired portraits of Rosa and Paolina.37 Although likeness is difficult to ascertain in allegorized images like these, I believe we can reasonably inter- pret the pictures in terms of Rosa’s construction of himself as a satiric poet, grounded in moral philosophy, with Paolina as his Muse, and that these depicted roles speak to his vision of their life together.38 The philosopher appears in a plain brown coat with black stripe and scholar’s cap and evokes Rosa’s two main philosophical interests: Stoicism and Cynicism. Certainly he valued the autonomy important to each school but absolutely central for Cynicism, and his social and cultural critique demanded the Cynical tactics of well-aimed satirical barbs or outrageous acts to shock society. Without resorting to scatological actions like or Crates, Rosa performed the Cynic role of social critic in his poetry and challenged existing expecta- tions for artists.39

EMW_2010.indb 22 7/15/10 7:57 AM “Lady without Equal” 23

In self-portraits from the Florentine period in which his likeness is more demonstrable, Rosa performed his satirist’s role as a sword-wielding soldier, possibly a commedia dell’ arte character (Palazzo Chigi Saraceni, Siena), and a painter holding a dart along with his paintbrush (Uffizi, Florence).40 In the London , the philosopher’s facial expression and the inscription communicate this sharp disdain. A trip to Venice, Padua, and Mantua with Ricciardi in 1648 perhaps explains why the paint- ing echoes self-portraits by Mantegna and Giorgione.41 The philosopher’s monumental form against the sky conveys a formidable self-sufficiency. His dark face, scowling mouth, and furrowed brow suggest artist’s melan- choly, a watchful, choleric nature, courage, audacity, and anger at envy and calumny. With his right hand, he supports a tablet with a Latin inscription: “Be silent, or say something better than silence,” a common exhortation to brief speech, attributed first to .42 The Muse modeled by Paolina extends the philosopher’s mute, Cynic stance into the practice of satiric poetry. The artist had used her earlier (c. 1640) for pendants of Poetry and Music (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome; figs. 3 and 4), in which she appears with the long nose, small, pert mouth, and loose, wavy hair evident in the Hartford picture, the mourning portrait, and Human Frailty (figs. 5 and 6). Rosa gave Music an upward gaze (like St. Cecilia’s), and Poetry an introspective expression and an ivy wreath—symbol of the poet’s diligent study and Bacchic creative furor.43 The images are linked by the idea of inspired creativity, in contrast to Rosa’s contemporary poetic satires on Music and Poetry that vilified the debasement of these arts.44 The Hartford picture shows a more complex, aggressive Muse, now wreathed in laurel—a more elevated crown suggesting triumph and divine poetic gifts. In Rosa’s etched allegory, the Genius of Salvator Rosa (ca. 1662), Apollonian laurel graces the inscription: “Ingenuus, Liber, Pictor Succensor, et Aequus,/Spretor Opum, Mortisque. hic Meus est Genius./ Salvator Rosa” (Sincere, free, fiery Painter [or Painter-Satirist], and equable, despiser of wealth and death, this is my genius), while both Rosa’s genius and the fig- ure of a dignified female satyr wear ivy wreaths.45 Apollonian laurel tempers the Bacchic connotations of ivy, just as it tempers the scowling dishevelment of Poetry in the Hartford canvas. As Wendy Wassyng Roworth empha-

EMW_2010.indb 23 7/15/10 7:57 AM 24 EMWJ 2010, vol. 5 Linda C. Hults

sizes, Rosa’s satyress in Genius, in consort with the personifications of Stoic Equanimity, Sincerity, Liberty, and Painting, embodied his elevated notion of satire, eschewing its burlesque connotations to convey the noble, moralizing invective of Horace and Juvenal.46 This elevated interpretation begins, though, in the Hartford canvas. The Muse’s gaze is neither seductive nor submissive. She holds writing implements recalling the Muse of epic poetry, Calliope, to aggrandize Rosa’s chosen poetic genre. He emphasized her sharp pen through lighting and by aligning its direction with the diagonals of her shoulder and scarf. Her disheveled hair and ragged headdress lend her a Cynic simplicity and disdain for wealth and social convention. Rosa perhaps alluded to the famous Cynic wife, Hipparchia, whose commitment to the philosopher- poet Crates’s mission both justified human attachment for the Cynic and echoed Paolina’s devotion to Rosa.47 Kristine Patz, drawing on the mean- ing of the rose as a sign of silence and of Rosa himself, also suggests that the works could have been read in terms of silence between lovers, and Roworth points out how “SILENTIO” is isolated within the inscription.48 This potential legibility in personal terms, however, is combined with the allegorical analogy between painting and poetry. The London and Hartford paintings are symbols of the reciprocally ennobling relationship between these arts: painting is mute poetry; poetry is speaking art.49 When Rosa left for Rome in early 1649 with eight-year-old Rosalvo and Paolina, now about thirty and five months pregnant, it was as an ambitious painter and poet no longer satisfied with the opportunities Florence could provide.

Art and Abandoned Babies (Rome, 1649–1655)

Aspiring to be like , Rosa sought a niche in Rome as a history painter with a circle of sympathetic, intellectual patrons.50 He must have had apprehensions about moving to the papal city with a preg- nant mistress and illegitimate child. An earlier stay (c. 1635–1639) had ended when he insulted Bernini as a character in an improvised comedy. Having cast satirical barbs at a papal favorite, Rosa left for a more tolerant Florence.51 Now, his irregular “marriage,” his distaste for powerful patrons who could protect him, and his satires would make him vulnerable.

EMW_2010.indb 24 7/15/10 7:57 AM “Lady without Equal” 25

Even though he left Florence with only 300 scudi (to put that in perspective, his yearly rent in Rome was 80 scudi), Rosa announced his arrival with a sartorial display complete with silver-hilted sword and liver- ied servant.52 He knew that the market for artists in the city was dynamic and demanded a bold, sustained attention to self-presentation.53 Paolina, for her part, was focused on hiring a domestic servant: “She reproaches me daily” about it, Rosa wrote to Maffei in May (29).54 Her reproaches probably reflected anxiety about managing the home and Rosalvo with an impending childbirth far from her mother, a crucial source of support and advice.55 On June 18, 1649, she gave birth to a baby girl, quickly and secret- ly sent to the foundling home, and on July 3, Rosa remarked to Maffei that she “is in good health, although suffering from some sadness”(32).56 Like other early modern parents, Paolina was not reconciled to the loss of her children, even when so many died or were abandoned.57 At her next birth, she would express intense anger at Rosa’s decision. After an episode of prolonged menstrual bleeding in 1650, for which Rosa sought the advice of a Florentine doctor (77, 78), she conceived again early the next year, for Rosa wrote to Maffei on April 1, 1651 mentioning this new problem (88). On October 7, 1651, he noted her “packed-up” state in late pregnancy, quipping that this month she will be “beyond pleasing the Mister” (111).58 On October 28, he informed Maffei about an easier-than-usual birth: a boy, the “spitting image” of his father, was sent to the foundling home, and “Fortune, who, of necessity, wills it so, must take the blame”(112). In this same letter, he described Paolina’s “extreme indignation,” which necessitated calming her “with coolness [flemma, a humoral term]” so as “not to aggravate matters and make [his] destiny stormy.” Rosa blamed his finances, noting ironically that he couldn’t afford children, but people who wanted them couldn’t have them.59 On October 26,1652 (151), Rosa told Ricciardi about another pregnancy, and on May 20, 1653, he wrote to Maffei that another infant girl had been sent “you know where” (171).60 Rosa’s callous tone to male friends may disguise his true feelings: clearly he took pride in his fertility and the boy’s close resemblance to himself, an important sign of masculinity.61 Whatever his emotions, his decision was not uncommon, following a longstanding precedent for infant abandonment in

EMW_2010.indb 25 7/15/10 7:57 AM 26 EMWJ 2010, vol. 5 Linda C. Hults

Italy that escalated from the sixteenth century through the early industrial era. Although David Kertzer has argued that the Church’s campaign against bastardy in the pre-industrial period, after Trent, was primarily responsible for this escalation, others stress that the Church was part of a larger social context preoccupied with women’s sexual honor and prone to economic disasters, such as famine, that caused married parents to abandon their babies in great numbers as well.62 In Rosa’s case, however, illegitimacy does seem to have played a role in his decisions to abandon offspring. He must have been concerned that more children would increase the chances of being noticed by Church authorities, particularly in papal dominions, and he was undoubtedly grateful for the anonymity provided by the wheels (rotating receptacles for infants) in the walls of foundling homes that spread, along with the homes themselves, throughout Catholic Europe.63 What did Rosa and Paolina think would happen to their abandoned babies? The attitudes of early modern parents toward this practice are diffi- cult to pin down. High infant and child mortality rates probably convinced some parents that their children had little chance of surviving no matter where they were raised. Some believed that the Virgin protected found- lings, and some hoped to get offspring back by attaching identifying notes or talismans, but few children were actually reclaimed, especially if illegiti- mate.64 Foundling homes and their patrons, such as the Medici dukes who financed the Innocenti hospital in Florence, used various means, including images, to promote confidence that the homes nurtured and raised chil- dren well, but skepticism grew in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the ranks of foundlings increased.65 Although the wheels protected infants from dogs and exposure, many died from malnutrition and neglect inside the overcrowded homes, where wet nurses struggled to feed their multiple charges, and babies sent to wet nurses in the countryside might face abuse and neglect as well.66 So, perhaps Paolina’s resistance emerged not simply from sorrow at the child’s loss but from an understanding of what abandonment really meant. As for Rosa, any concern and remorse he may have felt seem to have been displaced, in his letters at least, onto a malevolent Fortune. As if in recompense for personal woes, though, Fortune favored Rosa’s professional success in the early 1650s with well-received pictures

EMW_2010.indb 26 7/15/10 7:57 AM “Lady without Equal” 27

and prestigious offers of work, some of which he refused to maintain his autonomy.67 Rosa’s impulsiveness, however, was only briefly tempered. 1654 began with the recitation of his notorious satire Invidia (Envy), which scurrilously described a powerful cleric, Agostino Favoriti, as Envy’s hideous follower. Subsequently, old rumors that Rosa had not written his own poems resurfaced along with more dangerous accusations of atheism and cohabitation with a married woman.68 Although the turmoil had died down, Rosa became nervous after Fabio Chigi became Pope Alexander VII in 1655 because Favoriti was a Chigi protégé.69 Paolina was too pregnant to travel during the summer and fall of 1655, when Rosa wanted desperately to visit Ricciardi; on June 5, he wrote his friend that this birth would be over in October (189). There is neither a description of this birth, nor of the child’s death or subsequent presence; I believe it likely that this baby was abandoned as usual, and Rosa, becoming more cautious, kept quiet. This birth may have affected the tragic events that followed: perhaps the Envy affair was not their sole cause.

Mourning and Melancholy ( and Rome, 1656–1657)

On November 6, 1655, Rosa attempted again to regularize his relation- ship with Paolina by asking Ricciardi to solicit news of her husband from Florence (192). But nothing came of it. In January 1656, a fearful Rosa sent Paolina and Rosalvo to his brother Giuseppe, a priest in Naples. In a long letter to Ricciardi written in February, Rosa poured out his self- recriminations, loneliness, and fear of being imprisoned by the Holy Office (194). He would like to be “the Grand Turk in his seraglio,” not because of lust, but for “the dear company of women like Lucrezia (if there are any others like her in the world—which I don’t believe).”70 Loneliness was the least of Rosa’s problems, though, for he had unwittingly sent his family to a city where the last major pandemic of plague in Italy was brewing, to peak in June and July.71 Although Rosa’s sister Giovanna and Paolina survived, his brother, like most clergy in Naples, perished, as did Rosa’s brother-in-law and early teacher, Francesco Francanzano, and all but one of the latter’s children.72 The worst blow for the artist was the death of his beloved fifteen-year-old Rosalvo. Rosa’s

EMW_2010.indb 27 7/15/10 7:57 AM 28 EMWJ 2010, vol. 5 Linda C. Hults

despairing letters to Ricciardi in August and September of 1656 recount the tragedy. In a particularly bitter mood, he even chided the ancient Stoics for the useless consolations in their “scribble books” (201).73 By mid August, the plague subsided, having killed between 240,000 and 270,000 people in Naples.74 As an occupant of a house with plague victim(s), Paolina would have been subject to quarantine and perhaps spared the horror of piled corpses in the streets and piazze, but not the alienation that came to victims’ families, cut off from help by quarantine.75 When it lifted, she went back to Rome, suffering its own, less devastating plague.76 The couple was still fearful of the Inquisition: on October 21, 1656, Rosa conveyed Paolina’s request to Ricciardi to seek news of her husband in Florence (204). Probably during this time, Rosa painted her in mourning (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome; fig. 5). Like Rembrandt’s paintings that depict Hendrickje or evoke their relationship, this image has many layers. It echoes Rosa’s words to Ricciardi on August 19, 1656: “If you have any emotions, imagine how my heart will feel when I find myself alone, face to face with Signora Lucrezia, who is suffering the same bitter grief in her soul” (200).77 Encountering Paolina’s gaze, we experience the parents’ mutual grief. The portrait’s intimacy and domestic setting may also reflect the early modern construction of mater- nal mourning as disruptive and appropriately kept private, in contrast to public rituals of parental grief: more moderate, distanced, and focused on the socio-cultural meanings of the child’s death rather than on specific, somatic loss.78 Women, however, cared for the sick, dying, and deceased bodies of family members, so probably Paolina would have tended Rosalvo while he was ill, and perhaps she shrouded his body before it was taken to the mass graves beyond the city walls or dumped in the Bay of Naples.79 Her visceral loss is conveyed by the portrait’s directness, but Rosa evoked the depth rather than the spectacle of maternal grief. Perhaps the paint- ing represents Paolina’s own internalization of her grief, Rosa’s pictorial discipline, or both.80 With Rosa as its primary audience, it may also have provided self-reproof. Moreover, Paolina appears much like a widow, recalling the “pre- emptive” mourning, embodied in widow portraits pre-dating the husband’s demise, that Allison Levy has discussed.81 Like the anxious men who com-

EMW_2010.indb 28 7/15/10 7:57 AM “Lady without Equal” 29

missioned these, Rosa—despondent over the loss of his line and the dream of Rosalvo succeeding him as a painter—may have needed to confirm that his own death would be mourned.82 After hearing of the deaths in his sister’s family in August, he wrote to Ricciardi on September 9: “If you’re not made of marble, consider whether the words and curses of Job are appropriate here, seeing that my own line [seme, seed or sperm] is extin- guished and my relations, so that, of all the family I have in the world, not one is left to bear witness to my race” (201).83 Rosa’s bitterness—irrational, given his abandonment of children—was assuaged by another son’s birth in 1657 (Augusto). Considering the parents’ different experiences of Rosalvo’s death, Human Frailty in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge—an elaborate allegory painted in the wake of the Naples tragedy, in late 1657 or early 1658—appears to be the masculine, public counterpart to the private mourning portrait (fig. 6). In this work, Rosa set out to express parental grief in philosophical terms and embed personal loss in cultural context through the tropes of vanitas and melancholy. Its style and iconography deliberately recall Democritus in Meditation, an authoritative statement of Rosa’s pictorial inventiveness (1650–51; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen). The cypress-crowned Terminus herm, the skeleton, owl, and obelisk from Democritus are repeated in Human Frailty. Rosa added a fallen rocket, butterflies, a thistle, two putti in and beside a cradle, blow- ing bubbles and lighting tow (the latter occurred in papal coronations, symbolizing the evanescence of worldly accomplishments), and his (self- reproving?) signature on the Fates’ knife. As a mother, seated on Fortune’s bubble-like sphere, watches, a winged skeleton guides a child’s hand to write on a scroll, “Conceptio Culpa, Nasci Pena, Labor Vita, Necesse Mori” (Conception is Sin; Birth a Pain; Life Toil; Death a Necessity)—a phrase from a twelfth-century poem that Ricciardi had incorporated into his con- solatory verses to Rosa.84 Through their compositional resemblance to Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514) and other precedents, both Democritus and Human Frailty appro- priate melancholy as a debilitating but ultimately enabling masculine condition associated with inspired intellectual and artistic achievement; women’s melancholy, frequently described in terms of lovesickness and

EMW_2010.indb 29 7/15/10 7:57 AM 30 EMWJ 2010, vol. 5 Linda C. Hults

hysteria, lacked the same cachet.85 Although Human Frailty centers on a mother who contemplates the material loss of a child, it articulates this privileged condition of loss along with Rosa’s inventive prowess. Cardinal Flavio Chigi surely recognized the painting’s impressive complexity as an allegory when he purchased it.86 Despite its iconographic richness, though, Human Frailty seems open to biographical readings as well.87 Just as bereavement could exacerbate the melancholic humor,88 Rosa destabilized his allegory with personal references, and the materiality of maternal grief in the painting resists allegorical abstraction. The mother’s rose-crown identifies her as Rosa’s wife, and by extension, the child evokes Augusto, vulnerable to death, as well as a memory of Rosalvo. Maternal fulfillment and loss coincide; plump putti in and beside the cradle magnify this paradox. Recognizable by her straggling curls and long nose, Paolina holds her robust child firmly on her lap to express a tactile bond between mother and child, viewed by the artist-father from a distance.89 In the mourning portrait and Human Frailty, Rosa reshaped both allegory and portraiture in personal terms. Together, the pictures testify to the shift toward increasingly individualized expressions of grief in lit- erature and art of the seventeenth century.90 In the portrait, he contained and perhaps disciplined maternal grief within a private, domestic context. Through the resemblance of the portrait’s subject to a widow, Rosa appro- priated maternal grief to assuage his anxiety over his own mortality. Yet, by painting the portrait, he also shared Paolina’s grief and even, perhaps, acknowledged responsibility. Human Frailty, with its insistence on the per- sonal, somatic realm, is as much about Rosa and his family as the allegorical conventions of vanitas and melancholy.

Col Tempo—With Time (Rome, 1660–1673)

Scholars have noted the paradoxical combination of artistic renewal and accomplishment in Rosa’s last years and his increasing bitterness, misan- thropy, sense of isolation, and preoccupation with his health.91 The fifties were widely considered the decade of decline for men in the early modern period.92 Rosa’s bodily anxieties were related to his professional capacity,

EMW_2010.indb 30 7/15/10 7:57 AM “Lady without Equal” 31

but amid his complaints, he made it clear that he was still a successful art- ist.93 He also changed his style, moving to larger formats with fewer figures and simpler settings, and refused physically demanding commissions.94 Rosa responded to attitudes toward aging artists that emerged in the six- teenth century. The spectacle of the old painter who no longer could paint well drew attention to the manual aspects of art just when its intellectual basis was being touted. The potential embarrassment of the aged artist, though, was countered by his judgment, knowledge, and withdrawal from tasks he could no longer accomplish well.95 Paolina did not become pregnant again after Augusto’s birth. Then in her late thirties, she was almost in menopause, which began for most early modern women in their forties.96 Although men’s aging was thought of as more gradual and subtle, menopause was a clearer—and earlier—benchmark of female senescence, and images of old women often stood for aging itself.97 In his late letters to Ricciardi, Rosa appropriated Paolina’s experiences as signs of Fortune’s persecution, his own aging, and melancholy. He was concerned about her, but her illnesses functioned in letters passionately declaring his need for his male friend in the face of age and misfortune. Descriptions of her as “aging and not in very good health,” or variants of that phrase, reinforced Fortune’s ill-treatment and bound Ricciardi more firmly to Rosa (280, 305, 315, 340, 371).98 And, despite growing older, Paolina still cared for her family energeti- cally. During the near lethal bout of malaria suffered by four-year-old Augusto in November 1661, for instance, Rosa wrote about her tireless nursing vigil that left her no time to change clothes, likening her to Ariosto’s frenzied hero, Orlando (253).99 Reading between the lines, we can sense how memories of Rosalvo’s death must have weighed on her. The couple separated again in 1664 to fend off recurring gossip about their relationship (306). This time, Rosa sent his family for over a year to live in a house in Rome offered by Girolamo Mercuri, a liberal priest and loyal friend who had known Rosa in Naples, helped him procure lodging when he first went to Florence, and witnessed Rosa and Paolina’s eventual marriage in 1672.100 Rosa lamented his loneliness to Ricciardi in a letter of July 31, 1666 (325), saying that Paolina visited him frequently because of his “extraordi- nary need of her activity.” He continued, “If you would like to see the idea of impatience, you should be with me on the days I am without her.”101

EMW_2010.indb 31 7/15/10 7:57 AM 32 EMWJ 2010, vol. 5 Linda C. Hults

Perhaps this period was even harder on Paolina. On July 11, 1665, Rosa reported to Ricciardi that all her hair had fallen out, along with an unexplained “travail that continues to torment her” (311). He urged his friend not to spread this news and, quoting Petrarch’s Sonnet 170, joked: “he who can declare he burns [with love] is in a little fire.”102 Her sudden hair loss could have been caused by hormonal changes, high fever, anemia from pregnancy or prolonged menstrual bleeding, or stress, which the separation surely generated.103 Even though this seems to have been a tem- porary condition, it must have shaken her. Paolina’s most serious illness, though, was a leg wound that fre- quently kept her bedridden and sometimes crying out in pain from 1666 to mid 1669, and recurred in 1671 (339–40, 350, 352–53, 354–57, 360–63, 368, 386). Rosa used the imprecise term flussione, imply- ing bleeding or discharge, but her painful, chronic symptoms and her relatively high parity (five or more pregnancies brought to term) sug- gest leg ulcers from venous insufficiency.104 Treatments mentioned by Rosa—baths, medicinal decoctions, and purgation—were intended to cleanse her body, a common early modern approach to many illnesses.105 It would have been assumed that her menopause had allowed poison- ous substances, normally released through menstruation, to accumulate. Even if some physicians considered stored menstrual fluid merely exces- sive, the inability to expel it could lead to bloated vessels, with a host of resulting symptoms, from hot flashes to painful, heavy loins and legs, nosebleeds, piles, ulcers, tumors, and dropsy. Indeed, early modern physi- cians directly connected leg ulcers with menopause.106

Rosa’s Death, Paolina’s Life, and Art History

In 1671, when her wound reappeared, Paolina again took purgatives and went to bed, but this time she suffered kidney stones as well (384, 386). In late 1672, Rosa himself came down with the probable congestive heart failure (dropsy) that killed him on March 15, 1673, at the age of fifty-nine. Paolina would have cared for Rosa during his illness, and welcomed the physicians and friends who visited.107 Before dying, he finally married her, with Mercuri as a witness. She and Augusto continued to reside in their

EMW_2010.indb 32 7/15/10 7:57 AM “Lady without Equal” 33

family home, and despite Rosa’s persistent descriptions of her in the 1660s as “old and not in very good health,” she lived until 1696 (2, n. 4). Rosa’s letters furnish evidence of Paolina’s life but do not permit recovery of her subjectivity: like her image, her experiences functioned as signs of Rosa’s elaborate visual and verbal self-representation. As a sign, she has bolstered the received art-historical narrative about Rosa—the innovative, outrageous, rebellious forerunner of modern who worked toward artistic autonomy. However, when she is viewed through the lens of gender and in the context of women’s history in early modern Italy, she qualifies this narrative in important ways. Her reconstructed biography continually raises awareness of bodily and material existence, yet it would be wrong to see her as unchanging “nature” to Rosa’s progres- sive “culture.” As Silvia Mantini states, “creating women’s history involves overcoming the assumption that nature and culture are fundamentally dis- tinct and irreconcilable as scientific areas.”108 Paolina’s biological, maternal, and domestic life was shaped by specific historical conditions: from the Council of Trent’s reforms, to the ready availability of foundling homes, to the Naples plague, to the number of children she bore, affected by her inability to breast-feed and probably affecting her postmenopausal health in turn by increasing her vulnerability to venous insufficiency in her legs. Conversely, Rosa’s cultural accomplishments did not transcend his domes- tic, material, and bodily life; rather, that life was implicated in his art, poetry, and self-presentation. The couple’s history makes clear the inseparability of nature and culture, public and private, and the relationality of gender. Rosa achieved his individually shaped masculine identity in the competitive contexts of seventeenth-century art and poetry, but Paolina’s domestic support, and their loving relationship, helped him do this. Through her relation- ship with Rosa, she constructed an identity that both conformed to and countered norms for women. She exercised agency by devoting herself energetically to the roles of wife and mother, gaining a home and honor within Rosa’s social circle, despite their unmarried status. However, while the couple’s roles were reciprocal and interdependent, they were not equal: Rosa largely determined the course of their life together, and Paolina paid a cost, most tragically in the loss of their children, for his decisions. As Joan

EMW_2010.indb 33 7/15/10 7:57 AM 34 EMWJ 2010, vol. 5 Linda C. Hults

Wallach Scott has argued, the study of gender in history (or art history, I would add) is ultimately political in that it illuminates the inequities of power relations.109

Notes

1. See Sandra Cavallo, “Bachelorhood and Masculinity in Renaissance and Early Modern Italy,” European History Quarterly 38 (2008): 378–81. The epigraph is from Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein it is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, ed. and trans. Virginia Cox, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe Series (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 99–100. I am very grateful to the Feminist Research Roundtable at the College of Wooster, and to Babette Bohn, Alexandra Hoare, Carmen Lord, Judith Mann, Diana Bullen Presciutti, Martin Rosenberg, and Judith Testa, for sharing their thoughts on this essay with me at various stages of its development. 2. See Corine Schleif, “The Many Wives of Adam Kraft: Early Modern Workshop Wives in Legal Documents, Art-historical Scholarship, and Historical Fiction,” in Saints, Sinners, and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Jane Carroll and Alison Stewart (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 202–22; and Kristin Belkin, Rubens (London: Phaidon, 1998), 140–44. 3. Susan James, “Margaret Lemon: Model, Mistress, Muse,” Jaarboek Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten (1999): 90–109. 4. Svetlana Alpers and Margaret D. Carroll, “Not Bathsheba,” in Rembrandt’s Bathsheba Reading King David’s Letter, ed. Ann Jensen Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 147–75; and Linda Hults, “Dürer’s Lucretia: Speaking the Silence of Women,” Signs 16 (1991): 232–33. 5. John Michael Montias pioneered the exploration of Vermeer’s familial and social milieu in Vermeer and His Milieu: a Web of Social History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). For an overview of scholarship on Vermeer and women, and a call for further analysis, see Lisa Vergara, “Perspectives on Women in the Art of Vermeer,” in The Cambridge Companion to Vermeer, ed. Wayne Franits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 54–72. Most recently, Benjamin Binstock, Vermeer’s Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice (London: Routledge, 2009), interprets Vermeer’s art in terms of the artist’s familial relations and arrives at highly speculative conclusions. 6. H. Perry Chapman, “Art Fiction,” Art History 32 (2009): 788–92. Nor have women artists been served well by fictional representations: see Griselda Pollock, “Feminist Dilemmas with the Art/Life Problem,” in The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and Other Thinking People, ed. Mieke Bal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 169–206. 7. On the misogynistic misrepresentations of Agnes Frey in Dürer scholarship,

EMW_2010.indb 34 7/15/10 7:57 AM “Lady without Equal” 35

see Corine Schleif, “Albrecht Dürer between Agnes Frey and Willibald Pirckheimer,” in The Essential Dürer, ed. Larry Silver and Jeffrey Chipps Smith (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 185–205. See, also, Binstock’s treatment of Vermeer’s mother-in-law, Maria Thins, in Vermeer’s Family Secrets, chap. 6, “The Fat Lady Sings,” which also exemplifies this scholarly misogyny. 8. Irit Rogoff, “Tiny Anguishes: Reflections on Nagging, Scholastic Embarrassment, and Feminist Art History,” Differences 4 (1992): 38–65, quotation at 39. For a fascinating example of art-historical empathy—part autobiography, part imagina- tive reconstruction of the life and subjectivity of Manet’s model, Victorine Meurent—see Eunice Lipton, Alias Olympia: A Woman’s Search for Manet’s Notorious Model and Her Own Desire (New York: Scribner’s, 1992). 9. Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock, “Woman as Sign in Pre-Raphaelite Literature: A Study of the Representation of Elizabeth Siddall,” Art History 7 (1984): 206–27, quotation at 211. 10. Rogoff, “Tiny Anguishes,” 40. 11. For an example of such reconstitution, see Ruth Butler, Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet, and Rodin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 12. Joanne Ferraro, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4–5. 13. Jonathan Scott, Salvator Rosa: His Life and Times (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1995), 197–98. 14. Joan Wallach Scott, “Women’s History,” in American Feminist Thought at Century’s End: A Reader, ed. Linda Kaufman (Cambridge, MA.: Blackwell, 1993), 251. 15. On the relationality of gender, see Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: a Useful Category of Analysis,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1053–75. On the slippage of emotionality, subjectivity, and private relationships from her analytical model and the importance of these as counterpoints to “the imperialistic reach of gender,” see Michael Roper, “Slipping Out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History,” History Workshop Journal 59 (2005): 57–72, quotation at 67. 16. See, for example, Scott, Rosa, 232: Rosa’s “most abiding legacy . . . is his bold attitude to the ‘genius’ of the artist and his refusal to paint except when he was ‘carried away by the power of his raptures.’ It is a proud title to be the first painter to insist on the need for complete artistic independence. ‘ 17. Cherry and Pollock, “Woman as Sign,” 210. 18. April Masten, “Model into Artist: The Changing Face of Art-Historical Biography,” Women’s Studies 21 (1992): 17–41, quotations at 21. 19. On Rosa and contemporary ideas, see Scott, Rosa; Wendy Wassyng Roworth, “Pictor Succensor”: A Study of Salvator Rosa as Satirist, Cynic, and Painter (New York: Garland, 1978); Richard Wallace, The Etchings of Salvator Rosa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); Helen Langdon, “A Theater of Marvels: The Poetics of Salvator Rosa,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 73 (2004): 179–92; and Langdon, “Gli Ultimi

EMW_2010.indb 35 7/15/10 7:57 AM 36 EMWJ 2010, vol. 5 Linda C. Hults

Anni (1660–73),” in Museo del Capodimonte, Naples, Salvator Rosa: Tra Mito e Magia (Naples: Electo Napoli, 2008), 47–57. 20. Diane Purkiss, Literature, Gender, and Politics during the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 10. See also Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1–17. 21. Sharon Strocchia, “Gender and the Rites of Honor in Italian Renaissance Cities,” in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. Judith Brown and Robert Davis (London: Longman, 1998), 47–52. 22. On male friendship, see Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and for Rosa and Ricciardi, see Scott, Rosa, 67–73; and Alexandra Hoare, “Salvator Rosa as ‘Amico vero’: The Role of Friendship in the Making of a Free Artist” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2010). 23. On competition over prices, see Richard Spear, “Scrambling for Scudi: Notes on Painters’ Earnings in Early Baroque Rome,” Art Bulletin 85 (2003): 310–20. 24. See Strocchia, “Gender and Honor,” 42; Sandra Cavallo and Simona Cerutti, “Female Honor and Social Control of Reproduction in Piedmont between 1600 and 1800, in Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 73–109, esp. 87–88; and Elizabeth Cohen, “No Longer Virgins: Self-Presentation by Young Women in Late Renaissance Rome,” in Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, ed. Marilyn Miguel and Juliana Schiesari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 169–91. 25. “donna senza pari nel mondo,” cited in Salvator Rosa: Lettere, comp. Lucio Festa, ed. Gian Giotto Borrelli (Bologna: Società Editrice il Mulino, 2003), letter no. 385, Nov. 21, 1671. Subsequently in this essay, I cite Rosa’s letters by number from the Festa/ Borrelli edition. Where passages have been wholly or partially translated in Scott, Rosa, I’ve used Scott’s translation in my text and cited it along with the original Italian from Festa/Borrelli in notes. Otherwise, translations are mine. 26. Cavallo, “Bachelorhood and Masculinity,” found that many kinds of house- holds with employees or family members qualified men as head. For Rosa’s dislike of pupils, see Scott, Rosa, 220. 27. Giovanni Battista Passeri, Die Künstlerbiographien von Giovanni Battista Passeri, ed. Jacob Hess (Leipzig and Vienna: H. Keller, 1934), 391, n. 2: “Il marito di lei, o per lo disgusto, o perche fusse uomo di poca riputazione, s’allontanò all’improviso di Fiorenza, in guisa tale, che non lasciò mai più pervenire alcuna nuova di lui.” 28. See Ferraro, Marriage Wars, 8; and Sherrill Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums Since 1500: From Refuges for Ex-Prostitutes to Shelters for Battered Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 29. Modeling may have been just one of her jobs, because women often pieced together incomes from multiple tasks; see Monica Chojnacka, Working Women of Early

EMW_2010.indb 36 7/15/10 7:57 AM “Lady without Equal” 37

Modern Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 55. 30. Cited in Leandro Ozzola, Vite e opere di Salvator Rosa (Strasbourg: Heitz and Mündel, 1908), 62, n. 1: “Risposta del suo bene stare se vuole che io mi quieti di animo; . . . No saro più lunga; solamente prego a conslami con uno verso solo.” Paolina could have dictated this to someone, but possibly she learned to read and to write a little at home, or in the religious schools that developed in the wake of the Counter- Reformation: see Domenico Sella, Italy in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Longman, 1997), 133–35. 31. On family size, see Pier Paolo Viazzo, “Mortality, Fertility, and Family,” trans. Caroline Beamish, in Family Life in Early Modern Times 1500–1789, vol. 1 of The History of the European Family, ed. David Kerzer and Marzio Barbagli (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 169. 32. Christopher Black, Early Modern Italy: A Social History (London: Routledge, 2001), 119–20; and Nicholas Davidson, “Sexual Sin and Sexual Crime,” in Crime, Society, and the Law in Renaissance Italy, ed. Trevor Dean and K. J. P. Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 84–85. 33. Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 3rd rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 89–90. On the implications of lactation patterns for women artists, see Frima Fox Hofrichter, “An Intimate Look at Baroque Women Artists: Births, Babies, and Biography,” in Framing the Family: Narrative and Representation in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. Rosalynn Voaden and Diane Wolfthal (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 139–58, esp. 143–45. 34. Scott, Rosa, 65. 35. On the Percossi, see ibid., 55–59. 36. Ibid., 43. 37. The paintings were acquired by the Niccolini family in Florence and exhibit- ed in 1767 as a self-portrait with a pendant representing Poetry. A later inscription on the back of the Hartford work identifies the woman as Ricciardi’s mistress dressed as a Sibyl, which may suggest that the writer knew she was a mistress but confused her identity. Paolina was certainly Rosa’s most logical model. For a recent discussion of these works, see Brigitte Daprà, “I Ritratti di Salvator Rosa,” in Museo del Capodimonte, Naples, Salvator Rosa, 60–61. Doubts about their status as portraits have been raised by Wendy Wassyng Roworth, “The Consolations of Friendship: Salvator Rosa’s Self-Portrait for Giovanni Battista Ricciardi,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 23 (1988): 106–9; and “Salvator Rosa’s Self-Portraits: Some Problems of Identity and Meaning,” The Seventeenth Century 4 (1989): 138–39. She argues that the paintings are allegories rather than por- traits, although Rosa may well have used himself and Paolina as models. 38. I base my view on the ambiguity of likeness and the flexibility of image categories in the early modern period, as theorized by Patricia Simons, “Portraiture, Portrayal, and Idealization: Ambiguous Individualism in Representations of Renaissance Women,” in Languages and Images of Renaissance Italy, ed. Alison Brown (Oxford:

EMW_2010.indb 37 7/15/10 7:57 AM 38 EMWJ 2010, vol. 5 Linda C. Hults

Clarendon Press, 1995), 263–311; see also Allison Levy, Re-Membering Masculinity in Early Modern Florence (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 15–16; and Cristelle Baskins and Lisa Rosenthal, eds., Early Modern Visual Allegory (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007). 39. On the conflict between Cynicism and Stoicism for Rosa, see Roworth, “Pictor Succensor,” 242–72; and Wallace, Etchings, 56–59, 84–91. On Cynic shock and critiques of it, see Daniel Kinney, “Heirs of the Dog: Cynic Selfhood in Medieval and Renaissance Culture,” and Sylvain Matton, “Cynicism and Christianity from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance,” in The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy, ed. R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 295–328, 240–64. 40. Daprà, “I Ritratti,” 58–59, emphasizes the personal and allegorical signifi- cance of Rosa’s portraits and self-portraits. 41. Adrienne Mattyasovszky-Lates, “Stoics and Libertines: Philosophical Themes in the Art of Caravaggio, Poussin, and Their Contemporaries” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1988), 228. On self-portraits by Mantegna and Giorgione, see Wendy Stedman Sheard, “Giorgione’s Portrait Inventions, c. 1500: Transfixing the Viewer,” in Reconsidering the Renaissance: Papers from the Twenty-First Annual Conference, ed. Mario Di Cesare (Binghamton, N.Y: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1992), 149–60; and Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 93. 42. Eckhard Leuschner, “The Pythagorean Inscription on Rosa’s London ‘Self- Portrait,’” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 57 (1994): 278–83. Roworth, “Rosa’s Self-Portraits,” 140, discusses other philosophers with whom Rosa’s inscription might be associated. 43. Joseph Burney Trapp, “The Owl’s Ivy and the Poet’s Bays,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21 (1958): 227–55. 44. Scott, Rosa, 64, 78–91. 45. Roworth, “Consolations,” 106, identifies the wreath in the Hartford painting as laurel. On the iconography of Rosa’s Genius etching, including the translation of the inscription and the nuanced combination of laurel and ivy, see Roworth, “Pictor Succensor,” 69–110; and Wallace, Etchings, 79–92. 46. Roworth, “Pictor Succensor,” 25, 76–81. 47. On Crates and Hipparchia, see Luis Navia, Classical Cynicism: A Critical Study (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 119–43, esp. 135–36. 48. Kristine Patz, “Sub Rosa: Verschwiegene Beredsamkeit im Londoner Selbstportrait von Salvator Rosa,” in Diletto e Maraviglia: Ausdruck und Wirkung in der Kunst von der Renaissance bis zum Barock, ed. Christine Götter, Ulrike Müller, et al. (Emsdetten, Ger.: Edition Imorde, 1998), 60–73, esp. 64; and Roworth, “Rosa’s Self-Portraits,” 141. Mattyasovszky-Lates, 228, also suggests that Rosa may have had Giorgione and his mistress in mind. 49. Patz, “Sub Rosa,” 62; and Roworth, “Rosa’s Self-Portraits,” 141–43.

EMW_2010.indb 38 7/15/10 7:57 AM “Lady without Equal” 39

50. Scott, Rosa, 92–93. 51. Ibid., 21–22. 52. Ibid., 94, 221. 53. Jill Burke and Michael Bury, “Introduction,” in Art and Identity in Early Modern Rome, ed. Jill Burke and Michael Bury (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 5. 54. “La Signora Lucretia sempre più si pente di non haver menata una serva di costà e giornalmente me ne rimprovera.” 55. On women’s fears of childbirth, see Linda Pollock, “Embarking on a Rough Passage: the Experience of Pregnancy in Early Modern Society,” in Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England, ed. Valerie Fildes (London: Routledge, 1990), 46–48; and, for Italy, Jacqueline Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 24–27. For a mother’s support dur- ing pregnancy, see Marina d’Amelia, “Becoming a Mother in the Seventeenth Century: The Experience of a Roman Noblewoman, “ in Time, Space and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anne Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, and Silvana Seidel Menchi (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001), 223–44. 56. “La Signora Lucrezia è stata alquanto travagliata da’ dolori, ma nel presente si trova con buona salute. ” 57. Black, Early Modern Italy, 20–21, estimates that between 150–250 per thousand and 450–500 per thousand Italian infants died in their first year, and children’s mortality rates remained high because of disease, malnutrition, and poor hygiene. On the parental indifference hypothesis, see Steven Ozment, Ancestors: the Loving Family in Old Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Valerie Fildes, “Maternal Feelings Reassessed: Child Abandonment and Neglect in London and Westminster, 1550–1800,” in Women as Mothers in Pre-industrial England, 139–78, esp. 152–58. 58. “[Lucrezia] si ritrova bestialissimamente in valigia, e questo mese ne dovreb- be esser fuori piacendo al Signore.” 59. Trans., Scott, Rosa, 64–65; “La Signora Lucretia oggi son otto giorni che mandò alla luce un figliolo maschio, copia spiccicata di Salvator Rosa a hore 5 di notte, con più facilità di quello ch’ha sin hora fatto, per la Dio gratia. Il parto il giorno doppo con disgusto straordinario della madre fu portato ad accrescere il numero degli Innocenti per colpa di quella fortuna che forzatamente vuol così. . . . Oh Christo, è pure vero che cento, chi li desiderano e se ci studiano per haverli, non li possono havere, et io che non li vorrei perché non ho il modo d’acomodarli a questo mondo, mi nascono.” [It is now eight days since Signora Lucrezia gave birth to a son, the split (spitting) image of Salvre. Rosa, at five o’clock in the evening, with greater ease than previously. Thank God for that. The next day, to his mother’s extreme indignation, he was taken away to increase the number of the innocents and Fortune, who wills it so, must take the blame. . . . Christ, it’s true that hundreds of people want them and, if they try to have them, can’t, while they’re born to me, who don’t want them because I haven’t the means to bring them up in this world.] The following is a portion of this letter not translated in Scott with my translation: “Credemi, Giulio mio, che questa volta ho fatto quanto in grande a quietare la Signora Lucretia,

EMW_2010.indb 39 7/15/10 7:57 AM 40 EMWJ 2010, vol. 5 Linda C. Hults

la quale è stato necessitata ad acomodarsici con flemma per non accrescere materie ad imperversare il mio Destino. . . .[Believe me, my Giulio, that this time I did a quite a lot to quiet Signora Lucretia, who had to be reconciled to it (the situation)with coolness (or calm) so as not to aggravate matters and make my destiny stormy.] 60. “La quale [the baby girl] è dove [voi] sapete.” 61. Valeria Finucci, The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 28. 62. David Kertzer, Sacrificed for Honor: Italian Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Control (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), esp. 8–37. For critiques of Kertzer’s thesis, see reviews of Sacrificed for Honor by Nicolas Terpstra, Sixteenth Century Journal 25 (1994): 409–10; and Pier Paolo Viazzo, Population Studies 48 (1994): 541–42. 63. Kertzer, Sacrificed for Honor, 103–22, esp. 104. 64. Ibid., 113–19. 65. See Diana Bullen Presciutti, “The Visual Culture of the Foundling Hospital in Central Italy (1400–1600)” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2008); and Diana Bullen Presciutti, “Carità et Potere: Representing the Medici Grand Dukes as ‘Fathers of the Innocenti, ’ ” Renaissance Studies 24 (2010): 235–59. 66. Kertzer, Sacrificed for Honor, 144–53. Nicholas Terpstra, Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance: Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 19–20, points out that children had better chances of survival in orphanages than in foundling homes. 67. Scott, Rosa, 92–102. 68. Ibid., 102–7. 69. Ibid., 245, n. 2. Rosa’s fear of the Chigi seems exaggerated: for instance, the Pope’s brother Mario helped him during the scandal over his satire of papal patronage, Allegory of Fortune (1658–59; Getty Museum, Los Angeles); see Scott, Rosa, 125. 70. Trans. Scott, Rosa, 108–10, “Che per altro vi giuro che vorrei far peggio ch’el Gran Turco col serraglio. Non già perché mi tormenti la lussuria, ma godere del comodo, e della cordial compagnia di donne come la Signora Lucretia (se come la Signora Lucretia se ne hanno per il mondo) la qual cosa non credo.” 71. On the Naples plague, see James Clifton, “Art and Plague at Naples,” in Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500–1800, ed. Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Pamela Jones, et al. (Worcester, MA: Clark University, College of the Holy Cross, and Worcester Art Museum, 2005), 97–117. 72. Rosa initially believed that his sister and all her children had died, but this information proved false. See Scott, Rosa, 245, n. 6. 73. Trans. Scott, Rosa, 109; “Le consolationi degli stoici non passano la [pena] e gli inventori di coteste metafisiche chi [l’havesse] potuti pratticare l’haveria trovati forse differ[enti] assai da quello che predicheno ne’ loro scart [afacci].” 74. Black, Early Modern Italy, 23. 75. On this alienation, see Lucinda McCray Beier, “The Good Death in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Death, Ritual, and Bereavement, ed. Ralph Houlbrooke

EMW_2010.indb 40 7/15/10 7:57 AM “Lady without Equal” 41

(London: Routledge, 1989), 56–57. 76. Black, Early Modern Italy, 23, states that Rome lost approximately twenty thousand people. 77. Trans. Scott, Rosa, 110; “Lascio considerare a chi ha viscere come possa stare il mio core nel trovarmi solo in faccia alla Signora Lucretia con una amaritudine simile nell’anima.” 78. See Levy, Re-membering Masculinity, 37–41, on the domestication of female lament. Patricia Phillippy, “’I Might Againe Have Been the Sepulchre’: Paternal and Maternal Mourning in Early Modern England,” in Grief and Gender: 700–1700, ed. Jennifer Vaught (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 197–214, argues that women writers expressing grief over the loss of children used this bodily loss consciously to resist the imperative to moderate mourning. 79. On disposal of the dead in Naples, see Clifton, “Art and Plague,” 106–9, and 116, n. 19. Attending to the dead was part of a range of early modern women’s caretaking duties; see Naomi Miller, “Mothering Others: Caregiving as Spectrum and Spectacle in the Early Modern Period,” in Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period, ed. Naomi Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), 1–25; and Mary Fissell, “Introduction: Women, Health, and Healing in Early Modern Europe,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine of Medicine 82 (2008): 13–14. 80. On Philippe de Mornay’s literary turning of his wife’s sorrow toward mas- culine moderation in his Tears on the Death of His Sonne (1591), see Patricia Phillippy, “Paternal and Maternal Mourning,” 203–5. 81. Levy, Re-membering Masculinity, 10–17. 82. Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 235–37, notes that parental grief for adolescent or adult children was especially deep when they were expected to carry on a parent’s pro- fession; in letter 194 (February 1656), Rosa noted that Rosalvo had great promise as a painter, among his other sterling qualities. 83. Trans. Scott, Rosa, 110; “Se qui ci vanno le parole e bestemie di Giobbe lo lascio considerare à chi non è di marmo essendosi affatto spento il mio seme, e la mia parentela, a segno tale che di quanti parenti ho hauti nel mondo non ve n’è restato per uno da testimoniar la mia schiatta.” 84. On the iconography, see Richard Wallace, “Rosa’s Democritus and L’Umana Fragilità,” The Art Bulletin 1 (1968): 21–32. Ricciardi’s poem dates from 1656, not 1652, as Wallace states; see Roworth, “Consolations,” 117. 85. On male melancholy as enabling, see Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); and Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity, 35–68. For a contrast between male and female melancholy, see Laurinda Dixon, Perilous Chastity: Women and Illness in Pre-Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), chap. 6. 86. Again, the Chigi did not seem to be implacable enemies of Rosa. Scott, Rosa,

EMW_2010.indb 41 7/15/10 7:57 AM 42 EMWJ 2010, vol. 5 Linda C. Hults

117, notes that Alexander VII Chigi also visited Rosa’s studio in September 1659 and gave him a silver cup and basin two months later. 87. Ibid., 124; Wallace, “Rosa’s Democritus,” 30–31, allows that Rosa’s signature on the knife may refer to the loss of Rosalvo and Rosa’s brother. 88. Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family, 226–27. 89. See Lisa Rosenthal, Gender, Politics and Allegory in the Art of Rubens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 47, for a discussion of fatherly distance in Rubens’s portraits of Hélène Fourment and her children. Rosenthal’s discussion of embodiment in Rubens’s allegories has informed my understanding of Human Frailty. 90. Jennifer Vaught, “Introduction,” in Grief and Gender, 4–6. I would add that, during the time of the Naples tragedy, Rosa etched the highly imaginative Figurines, dedi- cated to patron Carlo de’ Rossi. See Wallace, Etchings, 12–36. 91. Scott, Rosa, 171; and Langdon, “Gli Ultimi Anni.” 92. Pat Thane, “Social Histories of Old Age and Aging,” Journal of Social History 37 (2003): 93–111, esp. 98. 93. Scott, Rosa, 190. 94. Ibid., 173, 191. 95. Erin Campbell, “The Art of Aging Gracefully: The Elderly Artist as Courtier in Early Modern Art Theory and Criticism,” Sixteenth Century Journal 33 (2002): 321–23. 96. Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender, 95. 97. Lynn Botelho, “Old Age and Menopause in Rural Women of Early Modern Suffolk,” in Women and Ageing in British Society since 1500, ed. Lynn Botelho and Pat Thane (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education, 2001), 43–65, esp. 51. Giorgione’s La Vecchia (1508, Accademia, Venice)—inscribed with “Col Tempo”—covered a male portrait as a symbol of the ravages of time: see Sylvia Ferino-Pagden and Giovanna Nepo Sciré, Giorgione: Myth and Enigma (Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, 2004), 219–22. 98. “invecchiata et di non troppa buona salute” appears in letter no. 305; the remaining citations are variants. 99. “Siamo stati due volte col confessore, et in tutto questo tempo non mi son spogliato che cinque or sei volte. Ma la povera Lucretia, mai. . . . La Signora Lucretia, se non s’amala, farà più che Orlando.” (We have been with the confessor two times and in this whole time I have not changed clothes more than five or six times, but poor Lucrezia, never. . . . Signora Lucrezia, if she is not sick, will do more than Orlando). Following early modern theories, Rosa blamed Augusto’s double tertian fever on Rome’s pestilential air (Nov. 16, 1661, no. 252). See the Cambridge Historical Dictionary of Disease, ed. Kenneth F. Kiple (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), s.v. “malaria” on fever patterns. 100. Scott, Rosa, 7. 101. “La maggior parte del tempo [Paolina] si trattiene da me che in quella [Mercuri’s house], per lo straordinario bisogno ch’ho della sua attività, e se voi havessivo curiosità di vedere l’idea dell’impazienza [dovreste] pratticar me quei giorni che vivo senza lei.”

EMW_2010.indb 42 7/15/10 7:57 AM “Lady without Equal” 43

102. “Alla povera Signora Lucrezia, per il travaglio che di continuo la tormento, li sono cascati tutti i capelli. Non discorro d’altri guai, che: chi può dir com’egli arde, è in picciol fuoco.” 103. Encyclopedia of Women’s Health, ed. Christine Ammer (New York: Facts on File, 2005), s.v. “hair loss.” 104. Rosa also used flussione for his ailing teeth and eyes (305, 357). On parity and venous disease, see Jennifer Beebe-Dimmer et al., “The Epidemiology of Chronic Venous Insufficiency and Varicose Veins,” Annals of Epidemiology 15 (2005): 180. 105. Fissell, “Women, Health, and Healing,” 13. 106. Michael Stolberg, “A Woman’s Hell? Medical Perceptions of Menopause in Preindustrial Europe,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 73 (1999): 404–28. 107. Lucinda M. Becker, Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 31, emphasizes that death was a semi-public event presided over by the woman of the house. 108. Silvia Mantini, “Women’s History in Italy: Cultural Itineraries and New Proposals in Current Historiographical Trends,” Journal of Women’s History 12 (2000): 177. 109. Scott, “Women’s History,” 252.

EMW_2010.indb 43 7/15/10 7:57 AM