Painting Women Phillippy, Patricia Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Phillippy, Patricia. Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.60336. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/60336 [ Access provided at 2 Oct 2021 05:44 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Painting Women This page intentionally left blank Painting Women Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture Patricia Phillippy The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore © 2006 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2006 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 987654321 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Phillippy, Patricia Berrahou, 1960– Painting women : cosmetics, canvases, and early modern culture / Patricia Phillippy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8018-8225-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Women in art. 2. Gender identity in art. 3. Feminine beauty (Aesthetics)—Europe. 4. Cosmetics—Social aspects—Europe. 5. Arts, European—16th century. 6. Arts, European—17th century. I. Title. nx652.w6p48 2006 700′.4522′09031—dc22 2005005202 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. The first thing that strikes the reader of his careful face is its dazzling craft, but by then it’s already too late. —“the poet downstairs” This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1 Painting Women: Spectacle and Subjectivity 23 2 Public Women: Female Friendship on Trial 61 3 The Mirror of Socrates 98 4 Colors and Essence 133 5 Custom, Conscience, and the Reformation of Painting 162 Conclusion 197 Notes 201 Bibliography 231 Index 251 This page intentionally left blank Illustrations 1 Makeup box (Cassetta) (Italian, c. 1500) 11 2 Catafalque of Elisabetta Sirani from Giovanni Luigi Picinardi, Il Pennello Lagrimato (1665) 28 3 Elisabetta Sirani (?), Self-Portrait (1660), or Barbara Sirani (?), Portrait of Elisabetta Sirani (1665) 30 4 Jacopo Tintoretto (attrib.), Portrait of a Lady (1575?) 33 5 Elisabetta Sirani, Portia Wounding Her Thigh (1664) 50 6 Elisabetta Sirani, Portia Wounding Her Thigh (detail) 54 7 Traveling toilet set (English, 1640–50) 55 8 Prospero Fontana, Portrait of a Lady (1565–70) 65 9 Lavinia Fontana, Self-Portrait with a Spinet (1577) 67 10 Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes (1620) 74 11 Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith and Her Maid Carrying the Head of Holofernes (1618–19) 80 12 Orazio Gentileschi, Judith and Her Maidservant (1608) 81 13 Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith and Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (c. 1625) 83 14 Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders (c. 1610) 85 15 Mirror (Venetian, 1510) 124 16 Title page from Jean Liébault, Trois livres de l’embellissement et ornement du corps humain (1582) 126 17 Lavinia Fontana, Christ and the Samaritan Woman (1607) 128 18 Casting bottle (rock crystal bottle, 900–1000; mounted 1540–50) 134 19 Nicholas Hilliard (attrib.), Phoenix Portrait (1575) 136 20 Title page, A Godly Medytacyon of the christen sowle (1548) 145 21 Giovanni Bellini, Young Woman at Her Toilette (1515) 165 22 Titian, Young Woman at Her Toilette (1512–15) 167 x Illustrations 23 Guido Cagnacci, Martha Rebuking Mary for her Vanity (after 1660) 170 24 Orazio Gentileschi, Conversion of Mary Magdalen (c. 1613–15) 181 25 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Conversion of the Magdalen (1597–98) 182 26 Artemisia Gentileschi, Mary Magdalen (c. 1615–16) 192 Acknowledgments As is always true, this book has been influenced by conversations, events, ideas, and interactions too numerous to name, some of which took place many years— decades—before I began writing, others that punctuated my daily life while the book, in various stages of completion, simmered in the background. The con- tributions of several colleagues have been direct; those of others more subtle. I thank those who have read portions of the book and provided invaluable criti- cism, particularly Babette Bohn, Anthony Colantuano, Randall Dodgen, Susan Egenolf, Marian Eide, Margaret J. M. Ezell, Katherine E. Kelly, Julia Reinhard Lupton, and Howard Marchitello. Marshall Grossman was good enough to identify himself as the initial reader for the Johns Hopkins University Press, and his commentary at a moment early in the project was of great value. Others have contributed in various ways to the development and completion of this book. Among them I must thank Elaine Beilin, Margaret Burri, Liana De Girolamo Cheney, Giovanna Del Negro, Richard J. Golsan, Ruth Larson, Anne Lake Prescott, Mihoko Suzuki, and Abby Zanger. Fouad Berrahou patiently helped with the translation of the more intractable phrases in Marguerite’s Miroirs. Lael Parish offered helpful insight into some Italian passages and inspired me to explore Bologna and its riches, continuing to prove herself to be an infallible source of insight and good company, as she has been for the past twenty-five years. The assistance of my multitalented daughter, Iman Berrahou, was crucial to the completion of the book and is much appreciated. Grant support from the Program to Enhance Scholarly and Creative Activi- ties at Texas A&M University allowed me to conduct research in England, France, and Italy in 2000–2001 and 2001–2. Funding from the Women’s Stud- ies Program and from the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Re- search, both at Texas A&M, provided important and much-needed assistance, as did a Faculty Fellowship from the College of Liberal Arts, Texas A&M Univer- sity, from 2002 to 2004. The Department of English supported my travel to gal- leries and exhibits, which was invaluable in the completion of the book. I thank xii Acknowledgments in particular Larry Mitchell for his encouragement and support in his capacity as head of the Department of English. A Teacher/Scholar Award from the Uni- versity Honors Program, Texas A&M, supported me during the writing phase. Finally, support from the Department of English and College of Liberal Arts covered the expenses associated with rights and reproductions. In undertaking the art historical dimension of this project, I was reminded continually of the value of my interdisciplinary training in the Renaissance Studies program at Yale University. Without that foundation and the desire it instilled in me and in my colleagues to bridge the gaps between the sometimes too-discrete disciplines of history, art history, literary criticism, and religious studies, this project would not have been conceived, let alone realized. I would be remiss if I did not mention my lasting gratitude to Phoebe Stanton, whose remarkable lectures in Art History 101 at the Johns Hopkins University many years ago impressed me and prompted many excursions, both physical and intel- lectual, into the world’s galleries since then. During the composition of this book, my former advisor and friend Thomas M. Greene died. I remain grateful for his guidance and for his model of exact- ing scholarship and sensitive reading. His works and his example continue to be rich and suggestive, and they permeate this project. Finally, throughout the writing of this book, I remembered my father’s char- acteristic response to my teenage forays into the cosmetic culture: “Only old houses need paint.” That phrase launched the discussion in the pages that fol- low, and so the book, like its author, is a (sometimes unruly) child of Gordon Phillippy’s paternal wisdom and wit. Painting Women This page intentionally left blank Introduction In his Treatise Against Painting and Tincturing of Men and Women (1616), Thomas Tuke calls a woman’s painted face “the idoll, she doth so much adore.” “Her love of painting,” he insists, “hath transformed her into a picture.”1 Drawing a strik- ing parallel between Protestant iconoclasm and condemnations of cosmetics, he pleads, “for very shame, let not these heathenish images be brought into the houses of God. They do ill become the bodies of Saints, which are the Temples of the holy Ghost.”2 For Tuke, face painting corrupts the material bodies of Christ- ian women and the collective spiritual body of the church into which these painted images, objectified as idols, intrude. His argument bespeaks a faith in a direct correspondence between internal vices or virtues and their outward man- ifestations and the troubled career of that belief in its applications.3 Thus, he cites Saint Ambrose to show that “the condition of the mind is discerned in the state and behavior of the body. Without a doubt then a deceitfull and effeminate face, is the ensigne of a deceitfull and effeminate heart.”4 Although during this period men as well as women were likely to paint, Tuke (despite the title of his work) and his fellow polemicists overwhelmingly described the practice as a par- ticularly feminine infraction, one product of women’s inborn pride.5 Painting 2 Painting Women women embody the assumed alliance between internal and external states, in- cluding gender, the threat posed by women’s manipulations of that alliance, and the processes by which men’s interpretations of a woman’s cosmetic self- creation translate her from subject to object: “Her love of painting hath trans- formed her into a picture.” Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture studies the in- tersection of painting and femininity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe as a site for exploring abstract ideas of gender construction and subjec- tivity in specific, historically grounded models. The term painting suggests the plural aspects of my approach. First, I address representations of women by men in the early modern period, in works by artists as familiar as Shakespeare and Vasari and in those by lesser-known figures such as Giovanni Luigi Picinardi and Jean Liébault.