Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History

Whitney Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781560230540
• eBook ISBN: 9781317991854
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Find original research and interpretive studies of the relations between homosexuality and the visual arts. Evidence for the role of homosexuality in artistic creation has often not survived, in part because the direct expression of homosexuality has often been condemned in Western societies. Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History presents examples of contemporary art historical research on homoeroticism and homosexuality in the visual arts (chiefly painting and sculpture) of the Western tradition from the ancient to the modern periods. Chapters explore the dynamic interrelation of sexuality and visual art and emphasize problems of historical evidence and interpretation and the need to reconstruct social and cultural realities sometimes quite different from our own.Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History addresses contemporary art historians'interest in studying sexuality in the visual arts, examining such questions as: What are some of the present-day reasons for, and problems of, this research? How is it related to other research areas within art history and to wider public debates about the meaning, value, and propriety of works of art? While the book examines a variety of research problems and theoretical perspectives, most chapters focus on the historical interpretation of a particular work of art, artist, or visual convention. Chapters present new documentation of the importance of homosexuality in the production and reception of artworks in the Western tradition, develop models for approaching the question of how sexuality and visual creation are related, and explore researchers'experiences and obligations in working in the area of gay and lesbian studies in art history today.Contributing authors stress problems of historical evidence and reconstruction; the social and cultural construction of homosexuality; and the active role of visual conventions in shaping perceptions of homosexuals, homosexuality, and homosexual desire. They discuss both the biography of artists and the significance of individual works of art and the social reception and circulation of works of art in the context of wider religious, legal, medical, political, and economic relations. The book may revise readers'beliefs about the significance and value of a number of works of art hitherto forgotten, neglected, under-appreciated, or misinterpreted. Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History is an enlightening and informative book for art historians, museum professionals, scholars in the field of lesbian and gay studies, and art history students and professors.

Lesbian (In) Visibility in Italian Renaissance Culture: Diana and Other Cases of donna con donna

Patricia Simons, PhD

University of Michigan

SUMMARY. Current conceptualizations of sexual identity in the West are not necessarily useful to an historian investigating “lesbianism” in the social history and visual representations of different periods. After an overview of Renaissance documents treating donna con donna relations which examines the potentially positive effects of condemnation and silence, the paper focuses on Diana, the goddess of chastity, who bathed with her nymphs as an exemplar of female bodies preserved for heterosexual, reproductive pleasures. Yet the self-sufficiency and bodily contact sometimes represented in images of this secluded all-female gathering might suggest “deviant” responses from their viewers.

An historian working with pre-modern material who wants to investigate lesbianism finds little that satisfies the modern notion of a core, fixed “identity.” A singular, ahistorical “lesbian” does not appear; instead, a range of evidence suggests the parameters of a largely negative, prescriptive world for women and sexuality. What can be done with so thoroughly an outsider’s view, a picture constructed in patriarchal texts, legal and moral condemnations, and other instances of a restricted, uncomprehending culture? My answer in this paper is not only to call on visual records but, more fundamentally, to reconsider how one can use negative documents and re-imagine the effects of cultural silence about certain forms of female sexuality.

Lacking the language for woman-woman relationships, since even heterosexual discourse during the Renaissance gave little voice to a woman’s agency, few documents indicate women addressing each other in terms of desire.¹ Silence does not necessarily indicate that Italian women were not attracted to other women, and cases gathered below suggest that some women did not only feel, but could act on, their desire for other women. Such slim evidence supports the other, negative documentation in legal texts and the mixed response of some medical and religious commentators, to show that lesbian behavior was muted but not absent. Even the punitive texts began to give woman-woman sex a discursive existence. And censorship or conscious silence in arenas like confessionals, law courts, and informal conversations, may have had an unforeseen effect, enabling some very protected, cloistered, or confined women to practice donna con donna (woman with woman) contact in a state of ignorance, not knowing that a thing not named was deemed wrong.² Perhaps sometimes in a state of innocence, or with extreme caution in most cases, or cloaked in an air of playful “apprenticeship” in courtly circles, European women could imagine or act out lesbianism. Their very restriction may have encouraged female bonding. In the late sixteenth century, Pierre Brantôme claimed that “wherever the women are kept secluded, and have not their entire liberty, this practice doth greatly prevail.”³ Enclosed in nunneries or palaces, brothels or prisons, women could form their own networks and establish ties of affection and female sociability.

Women had less access to the pen so literary tales about explicit donna con donna relations do not seem to survive from female writers, who would have risked too much if they moved beyond heterosexual conventions. Women also had different access to the spaces or networks where unobserved or less normative sexuality could operate, so the evidence for lesbianism in the Italian Renaissance remains fragmentary as well as entirely originating from male voices. It may be true that “female deviance, like most aspects of women’s behavior, was of less concern to male authorities.”⁴ But it may be instead that a high level of concern actually wrapped women in an even tighter world of control so that male fears about female sexuality could only rarely dare to recognize or name women’s sexual independence or variance. As Judith Brown noted when commenting on the relative silence in law, theology, and literature, there was “an almost active willingness to dis believe.”⁵ That very activism could be seen as both cause and effect, as a repression of fears by not giving them voice or image which has in turn led to the neglect of woman-woman sex in documents. In Foucauldian terms, the very silence was a discourse in itself, set off against the numerous and frantic insistences on heterosexual, reproductive sex. Heterosexism was complemented by homosociality.⁶ Men focused so much on male bonding that affectionate or social networking between women was often not so much threatening as simply not imaginable and thus not granted visibility. Or the signs of donna con donna contact which we may now find in Renaissance representations are there precisely because they were not consciously recognized as such by their male makers. Unconscious fears or pleasurable fantasies by men about physical relationships between women could lead to some degree of visualization, and women viewers might have made something else of the images. Any woman daring enough to recognize her own sexual orientation outside the norm might also have surreptitiously enjoyed some images of sensual women produced for heterosexual men, “cross-viewing” as it were.

The means by which lesbianism is culturally represented can have as much or even more effect than experiential practice. For example, a survey reported in 1987 that “88 percent of young lesbians said they had learned about lesbianism from the media. By contrast, 96 percent of the young men said they learned about gay sexuality from having sex with other men.”⁷ This indication that cultural representation is formative and that embodied practice alone cannot be naturalized supports the argument that lesbian sexuality has little universality or unchanging history. A “postmodern lesbian politic might make its stand in a textual reconstruction that made no claims about a relation to an ‘authentic’ or ‘original’ or ‘properly lesbian’ essentiality.”⁸ We need to think much more about how media opens up, as well as closes down, options; how cultural representations in words and images re-affirm but also create and change expectations. Positive commentary shapes lesbian identities but so too can their formation be effected by negative statements, relative silence, and apparently tolerant heterosexism. Condemnation can still give a name and thence unforeseen, paradoxical validation to what it rails against. Repressive silence can enable a kind of operative space for what is not specifically named. Images and texts ostensibly catering to heterosexual standards can be subversively re-read by certain consumers to provide alternative pleasures.⁹

The very invisibility or near-inconceivability of lesbianism for patriarchal culture can in some ways actually allow its practice. Certain contradictions in Renaissance phallogocentric culture opened the possibility for an alternative imagination. The negative discourses of law, medicine, political control, and social formation nevertheless opened some spaces for practices between women, both in their imaginations and their experiences, which could be crudely classified today as falling within the category of “lesbian.” The crudeness of current Western identity politics is in turn clarified by a discussion of another historical situation, since “the lesbian” does not appear as either forever present or only constructed during the Italian Renaissance.¹⁰ The evidence mustered here does not treat female-female relations as ones which are only represented in phallogocentric fantasies or discourses. Instead, we can begin to see experiential possibilities and imaginative practices which relate to historically actual women and the physical fabric of their visual surroundings. By trying to re-envisage what a female audience for the male-produced texts and images could imagine and practice, I seek to insert feminist reconsiderations both of an historically particular time and of our current Western agenda for political action around issues of sexuality and power.

Categories for the manifestations of donna con donna relations in the Renaissance form a diverse, overlapping, and complex set of clusters, including the options of silence, innocence, playful apprenticeship, female sociability, enacted sensuality, imaginative fantasy and spectatorship, and autonomy. The levels of possible emotional ties or physical practices were mediated by hostile or distanced language so they are even more difficult to separate into distinct categories. A clear sense of identity might now provide various proponents and opponents with a litmus test but an historian cannot so readily apply such filtration to her materials.

Cultural Discourses on “Donna Con Donna”

Erotic relations between Italian women during the Renaissance, or donna con donna, are particularly difficult to recover from most historical documents except medical and legal texts written by men. The influential medieval Arabic physician Avicenna predicted that women will turn to same-sex relations when unsatisfied by men.¹¹ A fifteenth-century commentary by Jacques Despars on this claim concerned itself more with counselling heterosexual couples for reproductive purposes than with strongly condemning lesbian practices.¹² Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset conclude that such “relative tolerance” of lesbianism and female masturbation in medical texts stemmed from the belief that “the loss of female seed has less importance for the preservation of the species.”¹³ The biological stress on active male seed for reproduction easily flowed over into other discourses, especially economic and political ones where preservation of the patrimony also centered on the strategic retention and expenditure of male seed. As long as a woman fulfilled her reproductive function within marriage, lesbianism “put neither the future of the species nor civilization in peril” according to Jacquart and Thomasset, so it was of little concern to medical commentators.

However, the exercise of a woman’s sexuality was definitely restricted, not only within the institutional confines of marriage, or convents, but also in the discourses of law and morality. Proscriptive writers of penitential manuals and legal statutes focus on male homosexuality but occasionally mention sex between women.¹⁴ Spanning the early fourteenth to early seventeenth centuries, the influential manuals of three Italian jurists, Cino da Pistoia, Bartho-lomaeus of Saliceto, and Prospero Farinacci, included punishment by death for female homosexuality.¹⁵ However, despite “intensive surveillance and control” of male homosexuality in Florence, no evidence of prosecutions for sexual relations between women survives and some of that city’s laws against homosexuality do not mention women.¹⁶ In 1574 Treviso adopted a statute against “any person (leaving the natural use)” of sexual relations and punished woman-woman sex for anyone aged “twelve or more” by displaying them at a stake for 24 hours before they were burned outside the city.¹⁷ Other such statutes doubtless existed, but punishments have not yet been studied and so far no certain cases of execution of women for lesbianism have come to light for Italy in this period. This was probably because their acts were less threatening to the patrimony since reproduction, paternity, and legitimacy were not at issue. The acts were also less visible because they often went unnamed in the statutes and condemnations. When the language for “lesbianism” was at best unclear, and any labelling beyond the vague term “detestable” could b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• About the Editor
• Contents
• Introduction
• Ambiguity and the Image of the King
• Cruising Twelfth-Century Pilgrims
• Queering Boundaries Semen and Visual Representations from the Middle Ages and in the Era of the AIDS Crisis
• Lesbian (In) Visibility in Italian Renaissance Culture Diana and Other Cases of donna con donna
• Lesbian Sightings Scoping for Dykes in Boucher and Cosmo
• Winckelmann Divided Mourning the Death of Art History
• The Abject Gaze and the Homosexual Body Flandrin's Figure d'Etude
• Making History The Bloomsbury Group's Construction of Aesthetic and Sexual Identity
• Urination and Its Discontents
• Lesbian Identity and the Politics of Representation in Betty Parsons's Gallery
• Looking for Love A Reading of Apartment Zero
• Wear Your Hat Representational Resistance in Safer Sex Discourse
• Index