Old Women and Art in the Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior

Erin J. Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317086048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Renaissance Art

Though portraits of old women mediate cultural preoccupations just as effectively as those of younger women, the scant published research on images of older women belies their significance within early modern Italy. This study examines the remarkable flowering, largely overlooked in portraiture scholarship to date, of portraits of old women in Northern Italy and especially Bologna during the second half of the sixteenth century, when, as a result of religious reform, the lives of women and the family came under increasing scrutiny. Old Women and Art in the Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior draws on a wide range of primary visual sources, including portraits, religious images, architectural views, prints and drawings, as well as extant palazzi and case, furnishings, and domestic objects created by the leading artists in Bologna, including Lavinia Fontana, Bartolomeo Passerotti, Denys Calvaert, and the Carracci. The study also draws on an array of historical sources - including sixteenth-century theories of portraiture, prescriptive writings on women and the family, philosophical and practical treatises on the home economy, sumptuary legislation, books of secrets, prescriptive writings on old age, and household inventories - to provide new historical perspectives on the domestic life of the propertied classes in Bologna during the period. Author Erin Campbell contends that these images of unidentified women are not only crucial to our understanding of the cultural operations of art within the early modern world, but also, by working from the margins to revise the center, provide an opportunity to present new conceptual frameworks and question our assumptions about old age, portraiture, and the domestic interior.

1

Portraits of old women and the domestic meshwork

Over the course of the sixteenth century, the Bolognese domestic sphere developed into one of the most dynamic sites for the exercise of collective family power in Italy, encouraged by governmental reforms after the fall of the Bentivoglio in the early sixteenth century, and the subsequent incorporation of the city into the papal states.¹ The papal reform of the senate afforded patrician families lifetime positions in the governance of the city, and the alliance with Rome meant increased opportunities for well-placed families to secure diplomatic, bureaucratic, and clerical appointments, as well as providing wider networks for members of the professional classes and more business for the merchant classes.² The growth of wealth in the city led to a building boom which renewed and expanded both civic and domestic architecture.³ Characteristically Emilian and distinctly civic as opposed to courtly,⁴ this city was ruled by families, who recognized the cultural currency of home, and who lived in their newly constructed or renovated palaces for the next three centuries.⁵ By the end of the sixteenth century, contemporary to the flowering of portraits of old women, these modern family residences were embellished by furnishings, frescoes, and paintings.⁶ Significantly, the increasing wealth of the domestic sphere was combined with religious reform that further elevated the power of the home. Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti’s spiritual reforms, disseminated in Bologna through legislation, pastoral letters, treatises, and other directives, promoted the Catholic Reformation’s renewed emphasis on the family, which accorded the home and its visual images a key role in the dissemination of religious and ethical instruction.⁷

The portraits of old women examined in this book were created for this late sixteenth- century Bolognese home culture, with its unique combination of wealth, religious reform, and urbanity. Produced by the most prolific artists working in Bologna, including Bartolommeo Passerotti, Lavinia Fontana, Denys Calvaert, and the Carracci and their circle, these images represent a distinctively Bolognese contribution to portraiture, comparable to the more celebrated profile portraits of young women produced in quattrocento Florence.

Paradoxically, although the careers, patrons, and styles of the artists who created the portraits are well understood, and the architectural patronage and styles of the homes of Bologna’s propertied classes have been the focus of research,⁸ the Bolognese domestic interior itself has not received much attention within the burgeoning research on the early modern home despite the rich array of available evidence.⁹ The goal of this chapter is to establish a conceptual framework for the study of the Bolognese home that allows us to engage with portraits of old women within their original context of display. Through an examination of domestic architecture and furnishings, the chapter argues that we must approach portraits of old women through the social processes of the home, in which architecture, space, and furnishings are woven together to constitute an ethical meshwork that actively produces and shapes social life.

The domestic meshwork

Since the foundational study of Lodovico Frati published well over one hundred years ago, there have been no modern studies of Bolognese domestic life that combine architectural studies, patronage studies, object studies, and the social history of the family to the degree witnessed in research on the domestic interiors of Florence, Venice, and Rome. Moreover, recent studies of the Italian domestic interior that contextualize objects within the spaces of the home as part of the social history of the family, domestic consumption, or patronage, typically do so without examining space and materiality themselves as creative forces and powerful social actants, and without asking what we mean by “the social.”¹⁰ Although scholars have demonstrated the importance of attending to the layering of meaning within domestic spaces, such research begs the question of how we perceive domestic space itself. Luke Syson, for example, has argued that within the home, depending on the kind of images displayed therein “the camera interior could declare all sorts of simultaneous, nuanced and overlapping meanings, secular and religious.”¹¹ Similarly, Monika Schmitter’s studies of the Venetian portego have demonstrated the importance to the family of the layering of meaning from various genres of paintings, including family portraits, landscapes, and religious paintings. Schmitter argues that “when a household had a number of paintings in the room, a distinctive set of concerns and values often emerged from the subjects chosen.” To understand how such images would have been perceived by contemporaries, Schmitter maintains that “we need to consider the particularities, physical and anthropological, of the space for which they were originally made.”¹²

The research by Syson, Schmitter, and others attends to how objects, and especially paintings contribute to the layered social meanings of domestic space. However, to move beyond an implicit sense of space as a “container” of meaning, and objects as somehow “adding” meaning, and to extend the inquiry beyond painting to interrogate architectural space and furnishings, this chapter draws upon the work of Bruno Latour, Henri Lefebvre, Tim Ingold, Helen Hills, and others concerned with the social experience of materiality and space, to re-conceptualize the domestic interior in terms of meshwork. Within the home considered as meshwork, the spatial, the material, and the social are woven together. From this perspective, objects and spaces are actors that participate in collective processes, in which an actor is understood not as the source of an action but “as a moving target of a vast array of entities swarming toward it.”¹³ This argument depends on sociologist Bruno Latour’s contention that “the social” itself is an ongoing, mobile, chaotic, and contingent process of binding together what constitutes society.¹⁴ While art and architectural historians have long recognized the value of the visual arts as social communicators, Latour’s theories assign a constitutive value to non-human actants. So, for example, objects do not just reflect the social, they are the social. The goal is not to assign intentionality to things, but to recognize that things without intentions shape societies.¹⁵

The argument that portraits of old women are forms of social association is critical to the subsequent chapters of this book.¹⁶ Typically relegated to the margins of scholarship, such images, this book shows, were actually central to the moral life of the home. These images allowed a certain constellation of ideals, relationships, and practices to coalesce around the aging body of woman. Social practices, from the perspective of Latour’s theories, “are carried forward by things … which hold together and stand in for the common understanding of human actors.”¹⁷ In other words, “non-human actants” bring “intentionalities together.”¹⁸ In the context of portraits of old women, adopting this approach not just to materiality but also to space means asking: how do these artifacts of old age mediate the household, with the household itself to be understood as a “tangled, temporal knot” of family members, apprentices, lodgers, servants, guests, furnishings, supplies, rituals, practices, rules, spaces, etc.¹⁹ In this context, the concept of mediators is to be distinguished from the idea of intermediaries: intermediaries simply transport; by contrast, mediators “transform, translate, distort and modify the meaning of the elements they are supposed to carry.”²⁰ Such a concept attributes an active, transformative agency to portraits of old women. Thus, instead of conceptualizing the home as empty space filled with objects and people in additive fashion, the idea of meshwork evokes the portraits as mediators of an interior comprised of dense and tangled pathways of action—an interior world that is alive with forces human and non-human. Defining the social collective as comprised of “entanglements of humans and non-humans,” Latour, by asking us to think beyond the usual ways we conceptualize the role of the material in our lives, allows us to approach portraits of old women as neither mirrors that reflect social distinctions; nor as “backdrops” or “stages” for human actors; nor as determinants in a Marxist sense of social relations.²¹ Drawing attention to the absurdity of speaking of “material culture” as if a culture could be formed by simply connecting objects together,²² Latour urges us to instead think of how materiality mediates the social, understood as mobile and ever-changing associations made up of the human and non-human.²³

While Latour’s ideas help us analyze how portraits of old women, along with people, spaces, and things create the social world of home, the concept of meshwork locates Latour’s somewhat abstract metaphor of the network within space—within an environment. Significantly, the term “meshwork” appears in Henri Lefebvre’s theories about the nature of architectural space. Lefebvre introduces the idea of meshwork to describe how “mental and social activity impose their own meshwork upon nature’s space.” For Lefebvre, the concept of meshwork embraces texture. Using the terms “network” and “meshwork” interchangeably, he evokes the idea of architectural space as embracing pathways that in their density and texture recall a “spider’s web.” Indeed, Lefebvre tells us to think about “archi-textures” rather than architecture, to allow us to envision buildings as networks that are part of the production of space, in which time and space form part of the texture and the pathways are open-ended.²⁴

Explicitly developing Lefebvre’s concept of texture and meshwork, Tim Ingold adds the el...