Cultural Values on Female Portraiture Paintings: Northern, Italian, & High Renaissance

The Renaissance stamps the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. It is characterized by the effort to revive and surpass the ideological achievements of Classical antiquity. Yet, Renaissance humanists continued to hold conservative and misogynistic attitudes toward women’s nature and role in society (Rigolot 226). One may assume that female portraiture in the Renaissance served the purely aesthetic purpose of visual representation. However, in the male-coded patriarchy of the Renaissance’s religious roots, the intentions behind female portraiture contained a greater cultural significance. In this paper, a comparative analysis of the cultural and ideological values of the Renaissance during the Northern Renaissance, Italian Renaissance, and the High Renaissance from the 14^th to 16^th centuries is carried out through the examination of female portraiture created during those periods. This paper treats paintings as “social agents”—anthropologist Alfred Gell notes that objectification in portraiture artefacts is how social agency and culture manifest and realize themselves within (Beranek and ffolliott 214). The main research questions discussed are how the use of color materials, form of the subject matter, patronage, cultural values, and intentions behind the original artists of female portraiture in the three distinct Renaissance periods shifted and differed from each other, as well as what this information can communicate about each culture. 

The Black Death pandemic in 1346 wiped out a supposed 40–50% of the population of the Eastern Roman Empire (Meier 271). As the old political powers, England and France, were locked in conflict amongst the fear and propaganda of this age of darkness, the flourishment of the pastoral Flanders spurred the emergence of the Northern Renaissance in Europe, north of the Alps. Society began ascribing miraculous power to iconography—cultic religious images—of the Catholic church on the basis that they represent essential images for veneration, wealth, luxury, and hope to overcome the extreme devastations of the Black Plague (Meier 285). 

Fig. 1. Jan van Eyck. Arnolfini Portrait (1434). Oil on oak. National Gallery, London.

From Jan van Eyck’s use of lead white and vibrant colors for luminary surface accents in the Arnolfini Portrait’s fabrics and lighting, it is evident that the Northern Renaissance was interested in transitioning from the stylized plasticization of the Middle Ages to new painterly conventions that explore airiness and the translucency of colors. The woman’s emerald-green gown is complemented by white fur lining, elaborate sleeves, and an embroidered white lace headdress—the abundance of the gown’s folds underscores the opulence of her attire (Toreno 202). Van Eyck’s use of colors in the portrait functions as signifiers of aesthetic, social, and religious sentiments. The woman’s green and white garments symbolize the Catholic church’s theological virtues of hope and purity, while the stark emerald of her overgown echoes the fifteenth-century chambre verte, the confinement room for mothers and newborns of the highest aristocracy (Toreno 208). 

In the Northern Renaissance, commissions for women in portraiture were notably infrequent compared to their male counterparts, revealing a societal imbalance rooted in men’s multifaceted public lives compared to women’s restrictive domestic roles (Toreno 197). Yet, both the material and intangible dimensions of the culture of the feminine sphere remain intertwined with religious, and by extension, civic and social practices. The Northern Renaissance’s fixation on Catholic iconography and liturgification penetrated female portraiture (Meier 288). In the Arnolfini Portrait, Van Eyck presents Giovanni Arnolfini and his unnamed wife at full length, standing far apart, and holding hands. The exact regularity of the painting’s symmetrical composition of the two figures expounds the solemnity of the marriage scene and functions as a representation of a sacramental rite (Panofsky 124). Moreover, the groom’s raised right forearm and the inscription, “Jan van Eyck was here,” conveys the traditional practices of the Canon law and Catholic dogma during the Northern Renaissance. Van Eyck’s signature bestows witness to the couple’s marital vows and consolidates the portrait to be no less than a pictorial marriage certificate that holds equal importance and legal consequences as a modern-day affidavit deposed at a marriage registrar’s office (Panofsky 124). Thus, the Arnolfini Portrait serves as a tangible manifestation of the doctrines surrounding Catholic marriage during the Northern Renaissance and illuminates the ceremonial and socio-political purposes of women in portraiture—the female figure was abstracted as a carrier for biosocial lifecycles. 

Along with the portrait’s religious and social implications, the use of the painterly pentimenti technique on the woman’s nose, eyes, and lips points to the conventions of aesthetics and the role of women in the Northern Renaissance (Toreno 209). The wakeful cautiousness of the man gazing outwards of the frame juxtaposes the calm meditativeness of the woman’s gentle smile and averted eyes from the audience into the frame, and thus elucidates “the creator’s chamber of imagery” (Pointon 17). It is an imagery that reflects the theme of fecundity in the Northern Renaissance and that obliges the spectator to infer the events, pregnancy and motherhood, behind the woman’s facial expression. At the center of the painting, the motif of the concave mirror with an ornate frame in adds to Van Eyck’s establishment of two realities, the visual and the symbolic. It constructs female portraiture not as a celebration of female agency, but rather as a site of procreation and phallocentricity, where visual and ideological values of the Northern Renaissance are attached to the symbolic, reproductive meaning behind the woman’s pregnant body (Pointon 20). All in all, the assemblage of colors, composition, gesture, and iconographies in the Arnolfini Portrait provides information on the quasi-photographic function of nuptial rites within the practice of female portraiture and its ties with Catholic, patriarchal, and commodifying biases on marriage and childbirth during the Northern Renaissance. 

A great transformation in the spirit of Renaissance culture took place in around the 1400s, a generation in which leadership in the humanist movement passed from the despotic religious courts to the more civic-minded citizens of the Tuscan republic (Ferguson 344). Coupled with the failure of the Visconti to achieve an Italian monarchy and its consequences of internal unrest and the birth of autocratic city-states, Florence, an intellectually humanistic and mercantile center, became the new focal site of the Renaissance. 

Fig. 2. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni (1489–1490). Tempera on panel. Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid. 

Fig. 3. Fra Filippo Lippi. Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement (1440). Tempera on wood. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 

In the Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni by Domenico Ghirlandaio, the form and composition of Giovanna’s side profile characterizes the public aesthetic role of the woman as an idealized, virginal bride-to-be and child-bearing mother during the Italian Renaissance. From the portrayal of Giovanna’s elegant, elongated, and vulnerable neck, it can be interpreted that female portraiture functions to separate the face from the insubstantial body and to dehumanize women as objects (Simons 16). Despite the continued aesthetic culture of misogyny and motifs of fertility, the urban movement of the Italian Renaissance sparked changes in the patronage of art due to the different social and ideological agendas of the Catholic church/courts versus liberal civic institutions (Ferguson 345). The new collaborations between patrons and artists gave rise to changes in pictorial conventions that celebrated the luxury and prestige of aristocrats rather than the religious sanctity of marriage—the singular female figure was born, against the traditions of marriage portraiture. The luxuriant outward display of Giovanni’s lavish, embroidered clothing and finery serves as a metaphorical mode for social distinction and regulation and represents the material and ideological values of the marriage dowry—the triangular Tornabuoni emblem and richly brocaded dress advertise her rite of passage and inheritance from one man’s domain to another (Simons 8–9). The still-life, stylized quality of the side-profiled portrait also personifies the Florentine woman as a proper, inactive, and obedient daughter, wife, and mother. The epigram on the right translates to “Art, would that you could represent character and mind! There would be no more beautiful painting on earth” and refers to the virtue of the sitter, a virtue that is defined by her beauty and the purity and fertility of her female ancestors (Simons 12).

The Italian Renaissance reveals a misogynist attitude that transitions from the Northern Renaissance’s preoccupation with marriage portraiture into a category of female portraiture that reflects the de-eroticization of the imprisoned female figure as passionless objects of passion and exemplifies the castration anxieties of the period (Simons 21). Filippo Lippi’s Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement reveals the averted, and by extension disempowered, eyes of the woman in the portrait from the audience towards the man outside of her encasement. By suggesting the role of women as passive reflections of men and their worldly wealth through the composition of mirroring and confinement in the painting, Lippi’s portrait epitomizes Florence’s romanticism of female modesty and obeisance, as well as its prominent civic male gaze (Simons 13).

In both Ghirlandaio’s and Lippi’s portraits, visual assertations of dynasty and power are carefully communicated with a use of color that departs from the Catholic church’s symbolic values in green and white in Fig. 1. In 1325, queen Jeanne d’Evreux wore a gold fleur-de-lis brooch to her coronation and wedding, recalling the monarchy’s armorial colors (Holian 153). It can be deduced that red, black, and gold heraldic accouterments in the Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni and the Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement function as dynastic markers and brand the female wearers as proprietary objects of the Medici lineage (Holian 148). Thus, while the spectacle and material aspects of female portraiture engendered aristocratic nuances and changes from the religious declaration of the familial, marital, and maternal identities of the female figure, the Italian Renaissance still exemplified the ideological commodification of Florentine women through the male-dominated display culture of social prestige, status, and power in civic society. 

Over time, in the Counter-Reformation of the 16^th century, the intentional secular positioning of women in portraiture and contemporary society rendered possibilities for the female figure to step away from misogynist religious restraints into masculine spheres of professionalism, inspiring the rise of the biographies of women artists in literature and paintings (Hopkins 37). Along with the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent and the advancement of members of the nobility, wealthy patrons dominated the High Renaissance and contributed to the changing atmosphere of the commercialization and individualized patronage of art. 

Fig. 4. Sofonisba Anguissola. Self Portrait at an Easel (1556–1565). Oil on canvas. Łańcut Castle Muzeum, Łańcut.

Fig. 5. Sofonisba Anguissola. Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola (1559). Oil on canvas. Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena.

Sofonisba Anguissola constructs her female identity and public persona during the High Renaissance through self-fashioning, a process of simultaneous identification and disidentification of social traditions. As Stephen Greenblatt puts it, the self-fashioning of the Renaissance human was achieved in conjunction with something perceived alien, strange, or hostile: the confinements imposed upon the self “must be discovered or invented in order to be attacked and destroyed” (Greenblatt 9). 

In Self Portrait at an Easel, unlike the female portraiture of the Northern and Italian Renaissance, Anguissola communicates ideas about herself as both a woman and an artist and purposefully avoids presenting herself as a mere symbol of beauty, marriage, or motherhood. She fashions her dress and hairstyle as a dignified, serious, and self-possessed woman—in the painting, she wears a black jacket (corpetti) typically only worn by aristocratic men with a high-necked white lace collar beneath and arranges her hair in tight, plain braids that conform closely to the back of her head (Garrard 583). She also wears no earrings, necklace, rings, or headdress. In the era of flamboyant clothing and distinguishing jewelry and emblems, Anguissola heralded a pictorial deviation from the associations of vanity and luxury conventionally ascribed to women (Garrard 583). Additionally, Anguissola looks directly outwards of the frame at the viewer. As she diverges from the painterly conventions of the averted female eyes in the abovementioned paintings (Fig. 1–3), she further introduces new iconography to femininity. In Self Portrait at an Easel, she establishes herself as a painter for a Madonna and child, a traditional biblical scene that showcases the Virgin Mary and her son Jesus. Anguissola’s explicit demonstration of her religious artwork, a genre of the highest regard, crafts her austere self-image for the High Renaissance that not only emphasizes women’s capacity for intellect, education, and artistic mastery but also marks the revolution of fashioning the female figure beyond her biosocial value. 

In Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola, Anguissola plays with multiple layers of perception and communicates the complex shift from the male gaze to the female gaze. The portrait depicts Campi using a maulstick, a tool used to steady the hand that suggests artistic timidity (Garrard 564). This conveys Anguissola’s confidence that she has outgrown and outsmarted her mentor, Campi, in painting. Although Campi is painting her in the portrait, the image presents Anguissola in a larger size and more elevated position in comparison to him and challenges the patriarchal restrictions on her artistic status (Garrard 562). This starkly contrasts the ideas of ownership and male superiority in Lippi’s Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement (Fig. 3). Thus, Anguissola’s success lies in her concern with the exemplary and universal, rather than with the individual, and in her mission to propose and uplift the homogenous category of the female artist in the High Renaissance (Jacobs, 83). Tracing the primary sources of letters of correspondence between Campi and Anguissola, it is understood that while Campi was painting portraits for modestly eminent North Italian princesses, she was doing commissioned work for the most powerful monarch, Queen Elizabeth I of England, in the world (Garrard 617). She had indeed surpassed her male competition. 

From both Fig. 4 and 5, Anguissola substantiates the changes in status and worth of the female figure and the female artist in the High Renaissance, measured in the grander prominence of her various patrons than that of her male teacher, Campi, and declares an ironizing, condemning critique on Northern and Italian Renaissance’s perception of the woman as a masculine creation. Her works have destabilized and reframed the Renaissance’s male-dominated and misogynist culture by holding up a self-reflexive mirror against the art period’s gender inequities. 

In the Northern Renaissance, Italian Renaissance, and High Renaissance, female portraiture not only contained iconography that functioned as direct conduits between the divine, the civic, and the personal, but it also challenged archaic Classical representations of the female figure and the value she wields. In the Northern Renaissance, female portraiture emerged as a rendition of marriage portraiture and ciphers for the Catholic biosocial lifecycle. This was reflected in Jan van Eyck’s use of color, composition, inscription, and religious artistic motifs. In the Italian Renaissance, although female portraiture did maintain psychosomatic undertones of the patriarchy, its cultural ideologies transformed from the veneration of religion into the glorification of materialism, luxury, and class privileges. This was evident in the use of dynastic symbols, composition, and color in Domenico Ghirlandaio’s and Fra Filippo Lippi’s paintings. In the High Renaissance, not only did female portraiture shift away from the celebration of religion and materialism, but it also signified advances of the female figure away from secluded family life and social kinship networks. From her use of color, choice of fashion, mastery of biblical scenes, and references to her male artist counterparts, Sofonisba Anguissola’s self-representation refuses the stifling male gaze and promotes virtues of female agency and autonomy. The contrast between the values of these three Renaissance periods is clearly shown through the analysis of form, subject matter, patronage, and artists’ intentions behind their works. Thus, through the everchanging spectacle aspect of female portraiture paintings, women’s identity was obliterated, reconstructed, and wholly immersed within the Renaissance period. 

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