From
Patronage, Gender and the Arts in Early Modern Italy •
Essays in Honor of Carolyn Valone •
Edited by Katherine A. McIver and Cynthia Stollhans
italica press new york
2015
Copyright © 2015 by Italica Press ITALICA PRESS, INC. 595 Main Street New York, New York 10044
[email protected] Italica Press Studies in Art & History All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of Italica Press. For permission to reproduce selected portions for courses, please contact the Press at
[email protected]. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Patronage, gender & the arts in early modern Italy : essays in honor of Carolyn Valone / Katherine A. McIver and Cynthia Stollhans, Editors. pages cm. -- (Studies in art & history) Summary:“Sixteen essays by an international group of scholars that examine the role of noble women as patrons of architecture and music in early modern Italy and that explore the behavior of woman art patrons and artists involved in the creation of art and architecture”-- Provided by publisher. ISBN 978-1-59910-306-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-59910307-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-59910-308-2 (e-book) 1. Art patronage--Italy. 2. Women art patrons--Italy. 3. Arts, Italian. 4. Arts and society--Italy. I. Valone, Carolyn, honouree. II. McIver, Katherine A., editor. III. Stollhans, Cynthia, editor. IV. Title: Patronage, gender and the arts in early modern Italy. NX705.5.I8P38 2015 707.9’45--dc23 2015023843 Cover image:The Tomb of Mausoleus, Halicarnassus. Engraving by Philips Galle after Maerten van Heemskerck, Seven Wonders of the World, 1572.
For a Complete List of Italica Press Titles Visit our Web Site at: www.ItalicaPress.com
Suis manibus fecerat: Queen Dido as a Producer of Ceremonial Textiles Gretchen E. Meyers In the essay “Matrons and Motives: Why Women Built in Early Modern Rome,” Carolyn Valone argues that early modern women constructed public personae through the selective patronage of architecture, challenging the traditional notion that female identity arose from the domestically focused roles conscribed by the patriarchal society in which they lived. Through her documentation of the patronage records of architectural constructions in fifteenth and sixteenth century Rome, Valone has proposed numerous examples of early modern women who financed building projects for personal reasons such as commemoration of family, religious and social values. As a result of her important work a whole generation of subsequent scholars has been emboldened to challenge traditional views and liberate the public personae of these early modern women from obscurity.
Fig. 1. Giovanni Francesco Romanelli, Dido Showing Aeneas Her Plan for Carthage, c.163035. Photo: The Norton Simon Foundation.
. Carolyn Valone, “Matrons and Motives: Why Women Built in Early Modern Rome,” in Beyond Isabella: Secular Woman Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy, ed. Sheryl E. Reiss and David G. Wilkins (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press), 317–35.
Patronage, Gender and the Arts
In framing the motives for the architectural patronage of early modern women Valone argues that famous ancient women most likely served as inspirational humanist models. For example Queen Artemisia of Halicarnassus, who built a tomb for her husband Mausolus in the mid-fourth century BCE, survived in both the written and visual tradition as an example of a wife, “who wished to build a sepulcher to her husband’s memory to serve forever as his memorial.” While Artemisia epitomized a wife commemorating her husband, the mythical Queen Dido of Carthage remained the female builder, par excellence. The heroine of the Roman poet Virgil’s epic Aeneid composed between 29 and 19 BCE, Dido is pictured in one Giovanni Francesco Romanelli’s tapestry cartoons of 1630–35 (Fig. 1). In it the widowed Dido orchestrates and manages the building of her own city in northern Africa, showing off architectural plans to an enamored Aeneas. Although a legendary figure rather than a historical personage, Dido was likely the pinnacle in a long line of early Christian and ancient role models for female architectural patrons in early modern Rome, anchoring their own public beneficence among the noble pursuits of ancient ancestors. This essay builds on Valone’s observations of Dido’s famed public persona as a builder by turning to another aspect of her behavior in the Aeneid that is rarely discussed, and certainly never in terms of public life or impact, namely her role as a producer of ceremonial textiles linked specifically to family-oriented ceremonies such as weddings and funerals. At several points in his text Virgil intentionally describes textiles made by women that impact well beyond the domestic sphere, and in fact even influence the very public world of politics. From a grieving mother’s garment for her Italic soldier son to Queen Dido’s gold-spun gifts to Aeneas, Virgil’s language directs our attention to the handwork of women. Even in one of the most patriarchal of ancient Roman literary works, the ceremonial textiles of the Aeneid serve as tangible markers of female involvement in the public realm. . See Carolyn Valone,“Women on the Quirinal Hill: Patronage in Rome, 1560– 1630,” The Art Bulletin 76.1 (1994): 129–46, at 145. Her discussion is continued in Valone,“Matrons and Motives,” 318–21. . Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl J. Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1982), 123.
Gretchen E. Meyers • Queen Dido
In general the search for female public personae in the ancient world is limited by the small number of surviving textual sources, particularly as the vast majority belong to male authors. Moses Finley argued that the women of ancient Rome remain utterly “silent,” lacking a true voice in documentary sources. Other scholars, such as Beryl Rawson, have looked to the words of ancient (male) historians in combination with inscriptions and laws to reconstruct aspects of the public and private lives of Roman women. Still other scholars have examined the remains of ancient art and architecture to resurrect the impact of mostly elite females in the public realm. Indeed scholars of ancient Rome are able to repopulate the past with female Romans, but to a much lesser extent than their male counterparts. Within these constraints the tradition of Queen Dido is similarly difficult to recapture. As a literary creation, Dido of Virgil’s Aeneid is a mystery. Although vestiges of her exist in the literary and legendary tradition prior to Virgil, it is well known that he embellished the love story between her and Aeneas. More importantly Virgil imbued Dido’s character with culpa (blame) when he attributes her tragic suicide to her typically female emotional dismay at Aeneas’ abandonment of her and her own violation of the oath of chastity she swore to her deceased husband. On the one hand, her character is deeply sympathetic, resonating with readers across time beginning with St. Augustine who claimed he wept at her death. On the other hand, the literary creation of Dido is inextricably tied to Virgil’s times — “a model of the interaction of woman and empire . Moses Finley,“The Silent Women of Ancient Rome,” in Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World: Reading and Sources, ed. Laura MacClure (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 147–56. . See Beryl Rawson, “Finding Roman Women,” in A Companion to the Roman Republic, ed. Nathan Rosenstein and Robert Morstein-Marx (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 324–42. . For example, Margaret Woodhull, “Matronly Patrons in the Early Roman Empire:The Case of Salvia Postuma,” in Women’s Influence on Classical Civilization, ed. Fiona McHardy and Eireann Marshall (London: Routledge, 2004), 75–91; or I Claudia:Women in Ancient Rome, ed. Diana E.E. Kleiner and Susan B. Matheson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996). . R.D. Williams, The Aeneid of Virgil. Books 1–6 (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1972), 332–34. . St. Augustine, Confessions, 1.13.20–21.
Patronage, Gender and the Arts
in Roman thought.” To ancient Romans, Dido’s city building was no doubt far from inspirational. In fact, many ancient scholars would be in agreement that the lessons Dido was intended to teach were more about the dangers of women participating in the male world. She was certainly a timely reminder of the very real dangers posed by a foreign queen, so immediately associated in the Augustan age with Cleopatra. Thus, it is unlikely that in the male-dominated world of Augustan poetry Dido was intended as anything other than a portrait of the perils in a world inverted by females in power. As I have noted above, a less familiar aspect of Dido’s literary persona is her proficiency in textile production. Although female characters in the Homeric epics, such as Penelope and Helen, are well-known for their spinning and weaving skills, Dido’s participation in this most typical of ancient female behaviors has been relatively ignored by scholars. Naturally, as an epic creation it is expected that Virgil’s Dido would engage in textile production, but it is worth noting that the textiles produced by women in the Iliad and the Odyssey operate within the particular confines of Homeric epic. For example, Melissa Mueller has examined the instances of weaving in the Odyssey, and she argues persuasively that weaving and textiles are principally used as tools in the navigation of guest-host hospitality and friendship and that the textiles themselves are a source of kleos (fame) among females. She points specifically to instances in the Odyssey, such as Queen Arete’s recognition of her own daughter’s weaving on the clothes worn by the shipwrecked Odysseus or Helen’s gift of a peplos to Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, which she claims is “a monument to the hands of Helen, . Sharon L. James,“Vergil’s Dido,” in A Companion toWomen in the AncientWorld, ed. Sheila L. James and Sheila Dillon (Chichester:Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 369–71, at 369. . Alison Keith, Engendering Rome:Women in Latin Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 115–19. . See Maria Pantelia, “Spinning and Weaving: Ideas of Domestic Order in Homer,” American Journal of Philology 114.4 (1993): 493–501. . There are a few exceptions. See Nicholas P. Gross,“Mantles Woven with Gold: Pallas’ Shroud and the End of the “Aeneid,” Classical Journal 99 (2004): 135–56; and Susan F. Wiltshire, Public and Private in Vergil’s Aeneid (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 52–55. . Melissa Mueller, “Helen’s Hands: Weaving for Kleos in the Odyssey,” Helios 37 (2010): 1–21. . Homer, Odyssey, 7.234.
Gretchen E. Meyers • Queen Dido
for your wife to wear, on the day of her wedding, but until then it must lie by your mother’s side.” According to Mueller, in these examples the textiles operate almost as a “woven communication” system between women, as tokens not only of the maker, but also of the fame accorded the maker because of her skills. Textiles allow Homeric women a means to communicate with one another, in a manner akin to the heroic world of men, but still separate from it. A closer look at the text of the Aeneid indicates that Dido was indeed as accomplished as her Homeric counterparts in textile arts. Garments made for and gifted to Aeneas by her appear at striking moments of ceremony, namely Dido and Aeneas’ “marriage” in Book 4 and the funeral of Pallas in Book 11. While some elements of the poem do resonate with the Greek epic tradition,Virgil’s particular language makes clear that Dido’s textiles, as well as several others in the poem, communicate not only among females, but also among the male domains of epic. As with her role as city builder and ruler, Dido’s actions in the realm of textile production exceed the norms of her gender, while simultaneously placing her, a foreign queen, within a recognizable Roman context. It is commonplace among ancient scholars to associate the skills of spinning and weaving with female domestic virtue — a connection that surely extends back to antiquity, when numerous inscriptions (written by men) espouse a deceased wife’s or daughter’s excellence in textile production with the phrase lanam fecit (“she made wool”). In addition, when the Roman historian Livy introduces the most virtuous woman in all of Roman legend, Lucretia, who took her own life after her rape, rather than live as an example of a woman who disgraced her husband, she is presented as burning the midnight oil and weaving. While shorthand between textile production and . Homer, Odyssey, 15.125–28. See Mueller,“Helen’s Hands,” 11 for the translation. . Mueller,“Helen’s Hands,” 4. . For a summary see the work of Lena Larsson Lovén, including “Lanam Fecit: Wool-Working and Female Virtue,” in Aspects of Women in Antiquity: Proceedings of the First Nordic Symposium on Women’s Lives in Antiquity, ed. Lena Larsson Lovén and Agneta Strömberg (Jonsered: Paul Aström Förlag, 1998), 85–95; and idem, “Textile Production, Female Work and Social Values in Athenian Vase Painting,” in Perspectives on Ancient Greece: Papers in Celebration of the 60th Anniversary of the Swedish Institute at Athens, ed. Ann-Louise Schallin (Stockholm: Svenska Institutet i Athen, 2013), 135–51. . Livy, ab Urbe Condita, 1.57–58.
Patronage, Gender and the Arts
ancient female virtue is familiar and often taken for granted in scholarship, I would note that the view of generic wool-working as a symbol of domestic virtue does not always acknowledge the skill or labor of the craft itself. In fact, the types of textiles produced and the function of those textiles as completed products has meaning beyond the simple fact that an ideal matron spins and weaves. Production of ceremonial textiles allowed Roman women a certain degree of social agency in which they participated in and impacted family rituals deeply connected to lineage and status. Sources suggest that Roman women (undoubtedly elite women) wove their own wedding garments — by some accounts on an upright loom the night before their wedding. Interestingly Pliny links this practice to an Etruscan queen,Tanaquil, who he says is responsible for Roman brides carrying a decorated distaff and spindle with thread at the wedding ceremony because Tanaquil herself “first wove the tunica recta of the kind worn by novices and newly married brides.” Tanaquil is similarly attested in other sources with the production of a range of significant garments, a royal tunic woven for and worn by her adopted son, Servius Tullius. She also may have been first the weave with gold, as her husband, King Tarquinius Priscus, may have been the first to wear golden garments in ceremonies. These references, which derive from an antiquarian tradition originating in the late Republic or Augustan age point to a relationship between the Etruscan Tanaquil and wool-working skills: not generic textile production but specifically the production of garments for weddings, political ceremony or other key moments of familial transition and public display. I have suggested elsewhere that the Roman association between women and textile production in the end of the Republic was not limited to quotidian production of garments, but in fact may very well preserve Etruscan practices, where elite women took an active role in social and even political . Karen K. Hersch, “The Woolworker Bride,” in Ancient Marriage in Myth and Reality, ed. Lena Larssen Lovén and Agneta Strömberg (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 122–35. . Pliny, Natural History, 8.194. See Pliny: Natural History, vol. 3, Books 8–11, Loeb Classical Library 353, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940). . Pliny, Natural History, 8.194–97. . Pliny, Natural History, 33.63; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, 3.61.
Gretchen E. Meyers • Queen Dido
behavior through the production of specific ceremonial garments that marked transitions, especially familial, and thus ensured and protected the continuation of elite lineage through emblematic display. Within this context of the social significance ascribed to elite ceremonial textile production near the end of the Roman Republic, Virgil’s particularly pointed references to textiles in the Aeneid seem to operate beyond simple epic convention and may also point to a long-standing tradition of female participation in ceremonies through their production of elaborate garments. Several textiles appear in the Aeneid in contexts associated with both marriage and death.Two instances in particular deserve our attention. The first occurs shortly after Dido and Aeneas’ supposed wedding in Book 4. Although Dido has sworn a vow of chastity to her dead husband, thanks to the arrows of Cupid she falls in love with Aeneas to the point of madness. Shortly afterwards Dido invites Aeneas to accompany her on a hunting trip in Carthage. A storm arises and they shelter together in a cave. Although the text is unclear about the actuality of events, Virgil states that later Dido “refers to [the event in the cave] as a marriage (4.171).” At this point Aeneas is complicit (or oblivious) in Dido’s understanding of their relationship. For when we next see Aeneas he is literally building her city walls, bedecked in a garment she has made for him.The Latin line is: …Atque illi stellatus iaspide fulva ensis erat Tyrioque ardebat murice laena demissa ex umeris, dives quae munera Dido fecerat, et tenui telas discreverat auro. His sword was enstarred with yellow jasper, and from his shoulders hung a cloak blazing with Tyrian purple, a rich gift which Dido had made embroidered finely with gold.
Here although she herself is not present, Dido makes an appearance through her handwork.The textile itself adds to the impression of the couple as city co-builders, as Aeneas literally builds her walls in the . Gretchen E. Meyers, “Tanaquil: The Conception and Construction of an Etruscan Matron,” in A Companion to the Etruscans, ed. Sinclair Bell and Alexandra Carpino (Chichester:Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming). . Virgil, Aeneid, 4.171. See Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2005), 82 for translation. . Virgil, Aeneid, 4.261–4. See Lombardo, Aeneid, 85 for translation.
Patronage, Gender and the Arts
wool cloak she has made for him. It is possible that the cloak itself is more than just a simple gift, but may in fact be a wedding garment. In the very next line the god Mercury sent by Jupiter confronts Aeneas about his apparent forgetfulness of his own mission to found his own city (Rome) and begins by deriding Aeneas as uxorius. This word, which is translated “of or belonging to a wife,” is rare in Latin. Its appearance here — in such proximity to Dido’s handwoven cloak — may indicate Mercury’s recognition of the cloak’s significance as a wedding garment and reinforce the textile’s role as a marker of ceremony and more significantly of the couple’s political union. The reciprocity of the exchange may also be inferred from a textile gift that Aeneas had already given to Dido in Book 1. At their first meeting Aeneas allows his son Ascanius to present Dido with textiles taken from the ruins of Troy and made by Helen: pallam signis auroque rigentem et circumtextum croceo velamen acantho (a mantle stiff with gold-stitched figures and a veil fringed with saffron acanthus). While Aeneas’ initial gift to Dido functions more like a textile gift from the Homeric world, even perhaps allowing Dido to appreciate it as a “monument to Helen’s hands,” her later gift to him operates differently by the very fact that it is intended for male eyes and male usage. The pairing of the two garments is further emphasized by the usage of the ablative auro in the description of the textiles’ golden weave. Rather than adopt the familiar Homeric meaning of textile gift exchange, Dido’s handwork takes on far greater significance as a marker of ceremony and union. A second occurrence of Dido as a producer of ceremonial garments evokes not the wedding ceremony but the funeral. At the end of Book 4, Dido takes her own life, but she reappears in the Aeneid in Book 11, again thanks to her textile production prowess. . Virgil, Aeneid, 4.266. . Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. uxorius. . Virgil, Aeneid, 1.648–9. See Lombardo, Aeneid, 23 for translation. . See also the scene at Aeneid, 3.482–91 where Aeneas reunites briefly with Helenus and Andromache, the widow of the Trojan hero Ascanius. At their parting Andromache gives Ascanius garments woven in gold that she had made for her deceased husband and son. She tells Ascanius that the textiles are “monuments of my hands (manuum tibi monimenta),” utilizing the language of Homeric women. It is fitting that Andromache should continue to use this terminology and that the scene occurs in Virgil’s epic in Book 3, which is entirely narrated by Aeneas himself.
Gretchen E. Meyers • Queen Dido
At this moment, Aeneas is officiating at the funeral of young Pallas, killed in battle by Aeneas’ rival Turnus. Because Pallas’s life had been entrusted to Aeneas by the young man’s father, Pallas had assumed a pseudo-filial role for Aeneas. At lines 11.72–5 Virgil describes the scene at Pallas’ funeral where Aeneas provides a funeral shroud for his pseudo-son made by his pseudo-wife: Tum geminas vestis auroque ostroque rigentis Extulit Aeneas, quas illi laeta laborum Ipsa suis quondam manibus Sidonia Dido Fecerat et tenui telas discreverat auro. Then Aeneas brought forth two cloaks heavy with purple and gold, which Dido once, long ago, made for him joyfully with her own hands, embroidered finely with gold.
The use of verbal echo here cannot be other than a blatant reinforcement of the relationship between these textiles and the previous one Aeneas wore in Book 4. Not only is it possible that the garments are the same, clearly we are yet again encouraged by Virgil to envision Dido’s role in ceremony, in this case Pallas’ funeral — a role that we would not otherwise have expected from her because she essentially serves as a mother. Elsewhere in the Aeneid Virgil provides examples of mothers whose garments drape the bodies of their deceased soldier sons: the grieving mother of the soldier Euryalus in Book 9, who hears of her son’s death before she can give him the robe she has made for his funeral or the Etruscan soldier Lausus, who is pierced through the “tunic his mother had woven of soft gold threads.” As she had clothed the wifeless Aeneas in Book 4, now Dido helps adorn the motherless Pallas in Book 11. Although not a Roman herself, Dido’s garments serve to unite the faux family of Aeneas, Dido and Pallas. Despite her physical absence from the narrative in Book 11, Dido’s active participation in funeral of Pallas is emphatically noted through the use of the descriptive phrase, “laeta laborum” (happy in her endeavors) and the ablative phrase “suis manibus” (with her own hands). The reference to the weaver’s hands is particularly interesting, given its common appearance among Homeric women as a means of . See Lombardo, Aeneid, 279 for translation. . Vergil, Aeneid, 9.481–92. . Vergil, Aeneid, 10.817–18. See Lombardo, Aeneid, 272 for translation.
Patronage, Gender and the Arts
immortalizing their work. Here however, Dido’s hands do much more than enshrine her own abilities for other women to appreciate. In both this instance and the scene in Book 4, Dido’s work is associated with the ceremonies of marriage and death, and the garments she produces literally cover males as they engage in the tasks of city building and war. Dido’s partnership in this way is even more significant when we recall that Pallas’ death plays a crucial role in the founding of Rome. In the Aeneid’s final scene, while in a single combat battle with Turnus, Aeneas contemplates sparing Turnus’ life, but becomes enraged at the sight of Turnus wearing Pallas’ sword belt as a spoil of his victory over the young man. As a result Aeneas kills Turnus and paves the way for the ultimate founding of Rome. Virgil’s intentional language and imagery in these scenes allow textiles to communicate well beyond the female realm and to impact the world of men. As Susan Wiltshire points out in reference to the weaving of the grieving mothers in the Aeneid: “in each of these cases the private world of family affection — of women’s work — intrudes into the events of history.” But perhaps for Dido it is more than an accidental intrusion. Dido’s textiles serve as a component of her persona in a public arena in a way that would have been easily recognizable to ancient Roman women, and possibly men, and also much less threatening to the established social order than the Cleopatra-laden image of her building and ruling her city. In the Aeneid, while Dido’s competence as a ruler slowly unravels, as she is more and more enslaved by her womanly desire and irrationality, her textiles live on beyond her demise and permit her a role in the events leading up to the founding of Rome. It seems no accident that as a foreigner Virgil’s Dido would naturally possess a close resonance with the Etruscan queen Tanaquil, who at this same time period was linked by antiquarians with the origin of certain elements of ceremonial textile production by Roman brides. At the end of the Roman Republic Virgil’s Dido and the elaborate textiles she produced surely embody a familiar and perhaps traditional method by which ancient Roman women were able to navigate and participate in a male-dominated culture. Through his language, imagery and placement in the text,Virgil suggests these textiles of Dido’s hand are worthy of attention. . Wiltshire, Public and Private, 54.
Gretchen E. Meyers • Queen Dido
Carolyn Valone’s “matrons as patrons” used their own money to contribute to their society’s male-dominated public discourse; so too does Virgil’s Dido use her hands to simultaneously communicate about topics important to wives and mothers, and also to shape the destiny of Rome. Valone was the first to excavate the evidence of women’s patronage in early modern Rome; in my field it is the task of ancient scholars to similarly liberate women’s work in textile arts from stereotypes and place it firmly among the attributes of ancient female public identity. •
