Right. So lecture's called women patrons of the arts in early modern Europe.
And that's what I will be talking about. Renaissance two for one, the price of one extra.
Because we talk about women or men, we'll think about its gender. And that's something that we may be exploring.
I think next time one of our. But also on a patron, someone that has an edge within the context of women and gender.
I think in a way, you could probably use both of those concepts separately in other sort of situations to try to do two things at once.
I have work. We'll see. OK, good. Let's get going.
I might actually try to do a bit more because a lot of paintings and things, we are quite dark and.
Yes. I mean, you get a better sense of what some of these images look like. Right.
So before I start talking about women patrons, I just wanted to make a few comments about patronage in general.
But to keep your eyes occupied while I'm doing that.
I wanted to show you here on the right, a portrait of a woman patron and on the left, the self portrait of an artist who painted her and who,
unusually, was herself a woman as well, namely the late 16th century Italian artist Lavinia Fontana.
But first, a few words about the painting in general. There are many assumptions that we as 21st century beholders make about art.
Perhaps one of the most persistent ones is that artists always have and always will use the works they produce to express their own personal thoughts,
feelings, interests and concerns. This probably sounds a bit familiar from the tutorials we had earlier this week.
Now we could debate whether this is wholly true even in the present day,
but it was certainly not the case in the period I will be focussing on in this lecture,
namely the early modern period, or what art historians usually refer to as the Renaissance and Baroque.
Although the artist was clearly important, indeed even essential in the production of artworks in this period, nevertheless,
one could argue that for much of this time it was the patron who was the initiator about almost all significant artistic projects,
and that it was the patrons who determined and individual artworks most important features and characteristics,
including what material it was made of,
where it was displayed, what subject it depicted its size, and even to a certain extent, its design, style and composition.
Indeed, simply by selecting one artist rather than another in the first place,
a patron was already making a key decision about what the final work would look like.
Francis Haskell, who was the second professor of history of art here at Oxford,
wrote an important book on painters and their pieces in the early modern period in which he raised a key issue in Pasricha studies.
When you asked, quote,
Should my concern with patrons be determined by the intrinsic interest of their personalities and tastes or by the quality and importance of the art?
The commission with the two do not always coincide.
In other words, what can could in theory? Right. A very interesting history of patrons.
That was illustrated with quite uninteresting works of art.
And conversely, some very interesting artworks may have had rather uninteresting or perhaps now unknown patrons.
So as art historians, we will inevitably have to decide on a case by case basis just how relevant it is to consider the
patronage of a particular work and whether to vote proportionately more attention to the patron,
the artist or the art object itself. In our writings.
Although the role of the patron in the early modern period, one in particular, is clearly crucial.
I must also keep in mind another point made by Housefull,
namely the dangers of assuming that knowing about a patron explains everything about a work of art.
Or better explains exactly why a completed work looks the way it does.
Nevertheless, understanding of patrons circumstances can provide us with important insights
into why particular work was commissioned and in some cases can suggest it.
Never fully explain why it has some qualities and characteristics, but not others.
These issues have particular relevance in the case of women patrons who will be the focus of my talk today.
Although many of their habits and concerns as patrons parallel those of their male contemporaries.
The important differences between being a female rather than a male patron and early modern
Europe serve to highlight important features about the nature of artistic patronage in general.
In other words, by considering women patrons, we gain new insights into the very practise of patronage itself,
since it is only by comparing women patrons to their male contemporaries that
the open gender specific assumptions underlying patrons studies come to life.
This is a point that Linda Knopfler made in an influential article first published
in the early 1970s and entitled Why Had There Been No Great Women Artists?
Although, as their title suggests, her focus was on women artists, not patrons.
Her basic point remains true, namely that the very fact that women, whether as artists or patrons,
were clearly outsiders or exceptions to the rule in the early modern period means that examining the art of this period through the lens of women
can provide us with a new understanding of the insiders of the male patrons and artists who stood at the very centre of early modern culture,
as well as allows us to begin to question some of the central assumptions art historians have made about the nature of our patrons itself.
In this period and throughout history. But now, finally, it's time to start looking at some real women patrons.
So the first question we have to ask is exactly who were the women who commissioned works of art and architecture in the early modern period?
Interesting enough. By far, the largest number of women whose patrons can be documented in this period were widows like the lady whose
portrait we've been looking at on the right or nuns like those depicted kneeling in the image on the left,
who either commissioned works as a group or who acted through the person of the abyss.
The leader of a particular convent or female religious community. This is a well, whether he is a patron saint.
You have various nuns in the work or lay down the ones who are not fully professed
within within the community and some of us and others who are actually our community.
These are the nuns who were the patrons of work. We're looking at here.
And incidentally, this picture of nuns at prayer was like the portrait of the widow on the right.
Also made by a woman artist, although in this case and the one on the left,
it was produced by an unknown 15th century German nun who was herself part of the community community depicted in the image.
The reasons for the prevalence of widows and nuns as patrons of the arts is quite simple.
Only these women had the financial, legal and social independence to pay for works of art themselves.
As a young girl or married lady, a woman was legally and financially under the control of first her father and then her husband.
Indeed,
it was only if a married woman outlived her husband that she could finally decide whether and how to spend more money on commissioning works of art.
Likewise, until joining a convent, a young nun would've been unable to exercise any kind of independent artistic patronage within her family home.
Only upon joining a female religious community could collective decisions about commissioning art and architecture be made,
although in many cases it was the abbot who was in overall charge of any such projects.
But just how truly independent or even nuns and widows and conversely, just how dependent were married women on their husbands?
In the case of widows, especially younger ones,
both their own birth families and those of their deceased husbands could often try to exert influence on a widows.
Our patronage decisions. In the case of nuns,
many converts in religious orders aborted by customs and statutes that meant they were overseen
both legally and financially by the male branch that their order or by secular male advisers.
But this raises a key question about studying female patronage in general, namely, how do we know when and how this actually occurred?
I don't know if you picked up, but I did say that the largest number of documented women patrons in this period will widows or nuns.
But what about the undocumented impact women had on artistic patronage?
And your documents tell us everything about the decisions that were actually made when commissioning works of art.
So, for instance,
even if an abbess had to obtain the approval of a high ranking male priest before commissioning an artist to paint an altarpiece for her convent,
does the signed payment record alone necessarily confirm that the Abbi's and the nuns she oversaw weren't
actively involved in deciding which artist to choose or which subject to depict in the first place?
In other words, we need to question the document that says, Oh, you know, so-and-so paid for this altarpiece.
Well, paying isn't always the same as necessarily deciding and commissioning and thinking
about what's going to be depicted and who might be doing a good job about it.
Similarly, the fact that most of the official contracts and payment records relating to the art patronage of
someone like the 16th century Florence to Rural or Cosmo Domenici were signed or approved by him alone.
So the paperwork's always sort of in his name. But that does not necessarily mean that his wife, Eleanor of Toledo, you see here, was one of her sons,
might not have had quite a lot to say about who was hired and what works for action may, in fact, the art historian, Roger Cromwell.
I think that may be on your own, on your reading list there in the handout budget.
Come has put it this way. If a future scholar who looked only at signed cheques or who paid the bills in many of our own present day families.
One hundred two hundred a thousand years. Now, in our own time,
the records that historian might well assume that all the decisions about how to say decorate the living
room or what pictures to hang on the walls or homes had been made by the male head of the household,
whereas in reality it might be the wife or mother who was the one who had actually chosen the furniture,
pick the colour scheme and selected the artworks. And Roger come in his P says, you know, if anyone who's from his own family said, you know,
he would look like my father had been the one who had made all the decorating vision because if he pays all the bills.
But my dad had nothing to say. You know, what's hung over the sofa or what colour as a result might be.
But it says you look just at the doctor records,
even something very contemporary like Roger Brown's family might well get a very skewed view of who was actually,
in a sense, doing what we might think of as the more interesting side of the patronage making the decisions.
So just the bills and the signed documents don't always tell the whole story.
And in fact, in the case of early modern married women who much more than today were legally and financially dependent on their husbands,
it is thus often too simplistic to say that they had no influence on even major artistic or
architectural commissions just because we don't have a trail of signed documents to follow up.
But if we do stick to documented commissions, it becomes clear that at least in the secular sphere,
the most common types of projects undertaken by women on their own related to the tombs of their deceased husbands,
early modern widows were exhorted to follow the classical model of artemesia,
the ancient widowed queen whose fabulous tomb for her keep her husband, King Marsalis, became one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
And in fact, gives us the word mausoleum like, quote, Mesia early.
Modern widows were also often concerned first, foremost, and often only with commissioning an appropriate funerary monument for their husbands.
Some monuments, like the one on the right, included an effigy of the deceased spouse.
In this case, a prominent hedge. Your lawyer had been seen here, another burning man on the other side of Double-Sided, too.
You would look at either side. I think he says to have. Certainly his law student tackles.
So I expect you all to be gathered around my team in the future. Because he was sort of an academic as well as a lawyer.
So you've got his little assistants and students from there around his two.
The other on the left was for a foreign nobleman, Antonio Strutt seat,
which included sculpted saints, but no image of a husband sculpted effigies of women were very rare.
Although wives did sometimes appear as kneeling donors, together with their husbands and page altar pieces commissioned for funerary chapels.
However, even if a widow did not make a personal appearance in her husband's funeral chapel,
she could remind posterity of her role as a patron through an inscription or the case of
a see tomb on the left by including her own coat of arms as well as that of her spouse.
In the project.
But showing you these two slides of all things considered to fairly uninteresting Toombs raises some rather more interesting general issues,
because, as you can see, they're actually quite different in terms of style, in terms of whether they include an effigy of the deceased.
Even in terms of the kind of stone that has been selected, I'm afraid it's always in colour, I think, which I'm I don't know, because it's easier.
They're different also in terms of their colours, all sorts of other things.
And this raises an important question about women patients in general, namely,
just how significant was the fact that they were women to the final appearance of the works?
That commission, in the case of these two tombs, they look, in fact,
much more like tombs commissioned by male patrons in the same cities at the same time.
They look like one another.
So we need to be careful not to attribute all or even some of the differences we see between tombs or any other artworks commissioned by women,
primarily to the gender of the patron. Indeed, other factors are often much more important.
For instance, differences in regional styles, the availability of certain materials, family traditions, or even when works from May.
In this case, about one hundred years apart. So that may explain more differences than with them.
Any kind of possible similarities of those by being made commissioned by women.
So we must think carefully before claiming that it is only or even mainly because
the paper was a woman had a particular work of art looks the way it does.
Perhaps even more crucial is to keep in mind the fact that for the most part,
the artworks commissioned by early modern female patrons that survived this day are those associated with very wealthy elite women.
Yes, there are a few scattered documentary references to the wives of bakers or stonemasons commissioning commemorative monuments for their husbands,
but almost also twerps have now disappeared and would in any case have been restricted primarily to small commemorative plaques,
not Life-Size effigies or entire decorative chapels, as in the examples we see here.
So it was a secular woman's delete status rather than her gender.
It was probably the single most important factor in determining whether she was
able to commission significant works of art and architecture in the first place,
something that, of course, is true for elite male patrons as well.
So one of the questions to keep in mind when talking about when patrons is the extent to which gender actually is a factor, or in other words,
is there such thing as a typically female style of patronage,
either in terms of what kinds of things were commissioned or in terms of their style and iconography, as we shall see?
The answer is it depends. For the rest of this talk, I like to look at three women from the very top of the social, political and economic hierarchy.
One of Marchioness, the other two queens, in order to try to tease out what differences,
if any, it made that they were female rather than male patrons.
The first case I want to consider is the woman you see in these two portraits.
Isabella Jested, the Marchioness of Mantua, a small but influential town in northern Italy dominated by the ruling Gonzaga family in this period.
Unusually, Isabella was a wife, not a widow, and her very active patronage of artists,
as well as her insatiable collecting habits are extremely well-documented by the more than twelve
thousand letters she wrote and 28000 letters she received between 40 90 and her death in 15th or not.
And we're talking about almost a level of kind of emails bouncing back and forth.
You start to divide 12000 letters by her and twenty eight thousand over to her.
And those are just the ones that have survived. There may well have been even more so.
We know quite a lot. And in fact, we know from these letters that, like her early male contemporaries,
she tried to buy the best antiquities she could afford and tried to hire the foremost artists of the day's work for her.
So, for instance, she sought out artists such as Leonardo, George, Tony, Giovanni Bellini and Rafael.
But never was able to get any of them to Painter, although they did draw her portrait, which you see on the left.
And there's an interesting copy here. Here's what it is.
This is a right very soon after this one. How did that actually hangs?
Now in the front room in the National Museum. So this time you're in the room.
Have a look around and you can see the sort of second version of the Xanatos one.
This one is the one that's in the Louvre.
However, despite mantle of the city where she married into the family and became part of the ruling family, Mantua,
despite Mancillas relative poverty and fairly minor political status in the grand scheme of things,
Isabella did manage to get artists such as Perugino, Antonya and Pareja to work for her.
So she didn't get the pain caused by Leonardo Rafael Jovani immediate journey.
But she did get her genome, Antonya and Correggio,
and she amassed a truly impressive collection of antique works on what other aristocrats would have considered to be a shoestring budget.
And Isabella's desire for big name artists and classical objects in back very similar to those of Rowly male contemporaries,
including her own brother, Alfonzo Dusty, who ruled her hometown of Ferrare.
So there ways that she's quite similar to other male patrons of the period.
But the fact that she was an early woman patient does seem to have had an impact on the iconography she favoured in her artistic commissions,
if not the types of work she tried to commission or the particular artists she tried to hire.
Thus, while the elite male contemporaries commissioned portraits that emphasise their wisdom as well as their
military and political power as seen in Titian's portrait on the left of the Duke of Urbino in Armour,
Isabella's portrait by the same artist that is by Titian on the right makes visual references to typically female ideals of beauty and behaviour.
For instance, unlike the Duke, Izabella doesn't brazenly look us directly in the eye, as befits a virtuous, married woman.
She also has perfect white skin, luminous eyes, an elaborate yet still decorously covered hairdo and expensively elegant clothing.
The fact that she was actually 60 years old when this particular portrait was painted, however, suggests that well before Botox and plastic surgery,
a little bit of strategic airbrushing wasn't a central skill for an artist to commission to depict such a woman.
Although Titian presumably also flattered his male suitors by making them look more wise and powerful than they perhaps actually were.
We are probably safe in assuming that making a SIDOR look like a male or look like a pretty young teenager is something that he aimed for.
Only when painting women. She looks good for 60, I think.
Yeah, not bad at all.
Gender may have also played a role in the kinds of subjects that Isabella chose and how she interacted with the artists she hired.
In fact, some scholars have actually criticises about her being a meddling and overcontrolling patron,
especially in relation to the Shihad, to DenTek, to decorator's to YOLO and Manchus Ducal Palace,
the room you see here on the right who she used to display her collection of art and antiquities and the production of a painting she had around here,
a little over macropod rockhouse. She kept lots of her collectables.
So you get this reverse straight from quite recent, say, a typical woman.
I mean, you say is a woman always meddling, always just leave the man alone and let him get on with the art.
I mean, you sort of get this kind of rhetoric from quite recent writers, which I find a bit surprising.
However, from our letters, we can see that she did, in fact, try very hard to make sure that artists like Perugino,
whose painting for Isabella's studio you see on the left, that they stuck to her very detailed discussion instructions, in this case, Perugino.
She specified to him not only that the subject of the painting should show an allegorical combat between erotic love and chaste love,
but also gave detailed, written instructions along the lines of a quote,
just a tiny bit of this very long letter where she says all the things that are supposed to be happening.
This picture, quote, The Goddesses Palace, Athena and Diana should be depicted fighting vigorously against Venus and Cupid and Palace.
Athena should seem almost to a vanquished Cupid, having broken his golden bow and cast the silver bow under foot with one hand.
She is holding him by the bandage, which the blind boy has before his eyes. And with the other, she is lifting her lands and about to kill him.
And on and on and on and on. With Isabella not only giving the artist a detailed drawing of what the entire composition should look like,
but even at one point sending a piece of string to indicate exactly how tall the largest figure in the painting should be.
She wanted made by the partisans. Ruth is wanted to show that they were fully proportioned rights as well.
As you know, I'm having this piece of proof that the policy here is, you know, this.
So pretty detailed, pretty hands on.
In contrast, scholars have been much more praiseworthy, praising of a more highly similar project by Isabella's brother Ophthalmia for Best Day.
This project was actually inspired by his sister's ambitious studio, which was decorated not just in the case of Alfonso with Pure Genius,
was at the studio by Isabella, was decorated not just pure genius painting, but works by other well-known artists in imitation of this Afonso desk.
They also commissioned famous artist to decorate his own studio in Ferrara.
One of the pieces, the work you see here, Titian's painting of the classical tale of Bacchus and Ariadne.
Now in the National Gallery in London, in comparison, Isabella Alfonz maintained a very hands off policy towards his artists.
Once he gets elected, Titian and had pointed the artist to the classical text that he was illustrated.
Afonso seems to have just let the painter get on with the job as he best saw fit,
thereby confirm his own status as a forward thinking and broad minded patron who valued the artist's own initiative and innate
genius that equips modern scholars with using modern or contemporary notions about art being the expression of an artist's own.
Ideas have thus inevitably prefer Titian's painting, the one produced by Papageno.
Does that nutrition's expressing, you know, his own genius as an artist worth Fujino.
He's got to buckle under this sort of medalling female patron.
But if we look at these works from the point of view of the early modern patron and in light of the patrons gender in particular,
we gain a better understanding of why they look the way they do and why a woman
patron such as Isabella may have wanted to control her artists so closely,
even at the expense of their own self-expression.
As a woman, she simply didn't have the freedom in the context of early modern social expectations to just let the painter get on with the job.
Instead, she had to make sure that the final result wouldn't reflect badly on her own reputation as an educated but also chaste and decorous woman.
So rather than going directly to a classical text, which is what her brother does in his painting that he commissions,
she instead decided that she had to concoct her own subject by using classical figures such as Venus, Cupid, Diana and Athena.
But then setting them into a moralising tale of her own invention in which chastity always triumphs over mere erotic sexual attraction,
a most appropriately ladylike theme,
but one that inevitably had to be carefully explained to the artist in order to avoid any embarrassing misunderstandings.
And the final image, the she has other constraint. She is OK.
She is medalling. But there's a reason. Because as a woman, she doesn't want to have pictures possibly misinterpreted.
And in fact, Isabella's anxieties were not just based on unfounded paranoia,
as demonstrated by one of the other paintings she commissioned for us to YOLO, an image for which she did not provide quite so detailed instructions.
The painting in question is the one you see here. Her work by Montignac showing Venus and Mars ruling over the muses on Mount Parnassus.
Apparently, some viewers misread the image as including a portrait of Isabella herself in the figure of Venus up at the top,
who, although she is clearly supposed to be very beautiful, was also depicted completely in the nude.
Not at all an appropriate association for a high ranking lady very concerned about her public image.
So by considering the paintings by Perugino, Mantegna and Titian in terms of the gender of their respective patrons,
we gain a better understanding of what each looks the way it does and has a
genuine concerns of each patient played at least some role in the final result.
In the case of Isabella, by reflecting her worries about commissioning works that might cost scandal and embarrassment in the case of Alfonzo,
allowing the patient to show off his knowledge of the original classical sources and
his far sightedness in giving a famous artist such as Titian a relatively free hand,
something that was much more difficult for a female patron in Isabel's position to do those without
understanding the cultural constraints and expectations under which both male and female patrons operated in,
the only monitary would have only an incomplete understanding of the works.
They commission. The problems of devising an appropriate iconography for a female patron were even more acute.
A century later, in the case of money, Domenici, the second of our three case studies, who you see in these two portraits,
one as a young mother, the one on the right and on the left, is slightly worse for wear widow.
Unlike Isabel iDesk Day, who quite unusually was married during her most active phase as a collector and art patron.
Maria was a widow by the time of her most prolific period of patronage, as her surname suggests.
Murray admitted she was part of the famous Florentine medad she family, but she had married the king of France.
Henry the fourth in sixteen hundred and moved to Paris.
Henry, however, had become king only by agreeing to convert to Catholicism and then annul, knowing the marriage was first Protestant wife.
So when Maria arrived,
she was particularly concerned with asserting her status as the king's legitimate and very Catholic wife and equally importantly,
as the mother in his legitimate and very Catholic children. Not surprisingly, right from the start.
Maria emphasised both her religion for the patronage of Catholic churches,
incumbents and her legitimacy as seen in images like a project portrait on the right.
Made soon after the birth of her first son. The Future King Louis, the 13th, which an anagram of her name is meant to read,
is made to read Judi's them and Amanda what I call myself the mother of the Kings.
Little first as friends or somebody. This one is about old fashioned princes and queen.
And then she takes the words and kind of changes and says, Know now that what the mother king and somebody here is.
Obviously that's a mistake. And yet they are their horses until I take it off and it works.
Cool.
He gets the point of that was not just the IRA, but it was emphasising her role as the kind of mother of the king, the legitimate mother, the king.
However, a fairly low key use of visual propaganda while living in the shadow of her charismatic husband.
This came to a dramatic end in 16 10. So with Mary Tenure's at that point when just one day after her official crowning as queen of France,
she'd only crown coronated Queen of France a decade after her.
Her marriage, Nicholas Atlas's produce lots of ladies, which is what you're supposed to do if you could queen any case.
One day after official crowning as Queen of France, Henry was murdered by a religious fanatic,
leaving Maria as the Queen Regent since her son Louis was still too young to own zone.
Suddenly, Maria was in charge not just of the country but also of all royal artistic patronage.
And like a good widow. She immediately started planning her husband's, too.
As you can see in this drawing, which includes a question, portrait of the King at the very top of an elaborate monument.
But this project was never completed, something for which she was increasingly criticised by jealous political rivals at the French Quarter.
Instead, Maria began an entirely new project called the Luxembourg Paris, which you see here,
and an early bird's eye view and which still dominates the Luxembourg Gardens in central Paris to this day.
Has anyone seen the Luxembourg Gardens been Glucksberg? That big?
It's the big palace. At one end of it is Vlach reports that Maria commissions significantly.
Murray herself referred to this massive building not at the time as that as Luxembourg Palace,
but as the message she palace in her personal correspondence. And interestingly enough,
she combined a typically French ground plan for a palace in which two wings jutting out from a central core with a pavilion pavilion at the front.
So this is sort of a typical fresh palace plan. But the main building is two wings.
And as I said, yes, there is a food bazaar on this front.
That's combined with detail. It was very much for calling her own Italians and oppressive tiny house that she grew up in the pity palace.
And for many of you, see that. OK. So, three, it's called rusticated, like a rough stone.
And you can see a lot of the exterior of the Elysee Palace has that kind of rough stonework called Russification,
which is something not typically French for quite typically Italian in particular,
sort of her home when she grew up as a little girl and then in a pity palace in Florence.
This thereby visually blended the culture into which she had married with her own native traditions, something that a male patron of Iraq,
of course, would have never wanted or needed to do because he was sort of been in his own tradition and stay there.
He mended and go out to marry and live in other countries or other kingdoms.
Perhaps even more interesting is the discussion some of her artistic advisers had
about her plans to put up statues around the entrance to the house this year.
Maria had apparently wanted to have these statues be figures representing famous wives and mothers from the past.
They're clearly hoping to link herself with these illustrious predecessors.
But her suggestion to include Artemesia, the famous widow who had commissioned a mausoleum for her husband,
was deemed to be a very bad idea by her advisers,
since, unlike the ancient queen, Maria had in fact not yet completed a suitably grand funerary monument for her own deceased husband.
One of her advisers on this matter was the famous Flemish painter, Peter Paul Reubens.
And it was the paintings he produced for Maria that highlight just how complicated it was for a powerful widow in
a delicate political situation to devise a visual iconography that was appropriate for her status and her gender.
The problem can be summarised as follows. How could Rubins adapt the visual rhetoric?
He usually deployed the male patrons, which consisted of nude or semi-nude female allegorical figures.
How could this be adapted to very particular needs of a powerful female patient who,
like Isabella best, they could not afford to be associated with anything scandalous or indecorous.
This was an especially acute problem for Maria, so she had hard Rubins in the early 16 20s to paint a carefully edited version of her own life story.
In response to the recent falling out she had with her now grown up son, Louis, who had by then assumed the throne for himself.
Things have gotten so bad that at one point Maria had had to flee from Paris and had even been skirmishes between her son's troops and her own.
And just imagine it was sort of an army of loyal to the queen, fighting an army loyal to Prince William.
I mean, that would be a sort of hawk or Prince Charles of his room, an odd situation. And if you could think of that.
Imagine how tense the situation must have been in France about time after mother and son sort of kissed and made up, though.
Maria decided to commission Rubins to paint a cycle of 24 paintings for her new palace,
the Luxembourg, illustrating her own life story, including the canvas you see here.
So a kind of authorised you know, this is my side of the story kind of series.
And again, some of you may have seen these in the loop there really massive paintings and significantly more.
And we see there. Ptolemy's and this sort of whole world.
But maybe this I've written for the Luxembourg Paris. But a big project.
The series as a whole takes up a number of themes already encountered in the Queen Mother's artistic patron.
Of course, by this time she's the queen mother because her son is actually king, because he's old enough now.
So takes up themes like her role as wife and mother. The legitimacy of her claims to power.
And the history, the method she family.
At the same time, the difficulties involved in depicting a powerful woman oh well, demonstrated by the psycho paintings.
And despite her wishes to the contrary.
These images were apparently unable to prevent a final rupture of the truce between Louis and the Queen Mother.
Indeed, only seven years after Rubins had finished the paintings, Maria was forced to flee France for good and had to live in exile until her death.
And 16 42, one factor in the cycles apparent lack of success as an actor.
Visual propaganda may lie in the tensions between Rubins as pictorial language and the cycles female subjects.
That is Maria herself.
These problems are well illustrated by examining some of the paintings in the series more closely in the education of Maria Domenici,
which you see here. For example, Rubins uses the nude Gracies as an attribute of the Queen.
I'm. I hope you're out of a drawing of life figures.
Another short notice. That's actually Maria. Now, obviously, the graces were meant to attest to the queen's femininity is significant, however,
that the young Maria is shown turning away from these women in order to divert her attention to the teachings of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom.
And that's the figure whose name she kind of is is leading on.
However, the male about Orpheus seated in the left foreground assumes the role of the implied male
viewer by gazing directly at the seductive new graces rather than the future queen of France.
Orpheus thus demonstrates inadvertently how distracting Rubins is use of their
female bodies as allegorical figures could be contemporary male viewers,
since the palaces most important visitors would have been male courtiers and of course, her son, the king himself.
Such a distraction from the main subject of the cycle that as Maria had serious implications.
The motif of the exposed female body, especially the exposed breast,
occurs in several other paintings in the energy cycle in this painting, for instance, which depicts in highly allegorical terms.
Maria's first meeting with her husband, the queen. And this is the kind of Jubera around the size of this would be very outdrive with portraits,
recognisable portraits of both Maria and her husband, her deceased, of course.
By this point in his painting.
The queen looks humbly downwards wipers while presenting her own bare breasts, her husband as a symbol of her role as wife and future mother.
The composition recalls images of the coronation of the Virgin Mary, Maria's holy namesake,
which suggests that the Queens bare breasts like the Madonnas should be understood
as proof of her virtuous motherhood and of her status as an ideal broad.
Their breasts, however, could also have not just positive but also very negative associations in this period.
By alluding to the dangers of female seduction.
In fact, early modern culture in general seems of how very ambiguous views about the significance of a bare female breast.
So the bare grass was clearly depicted as a palls about tribute in images of the Virgin.
Such as Rubins painting on the left of the Madonna and Child. Madonna's breasts exposed there.
But other text and images stressed the dangers of the exposed female breasts,
evil women such as the Old Testament figure of Delilah seen here, and another painting by Rubens now in the National Gallery in London.
We're often depicted using their bare breasts to seduce unwary men.
In this case, the hero assassin. So I'm going to give you a sense of the law where he gets his hair cut off.
He could lose his powers. And very often she's seen his use of.
Capturing see, the servants just set him off his hair.
But how is she managed to lure this great hero in the streets of Israel, a hero?
You know, they're out there. And that's obviously did the trick.
So, you know, this is a more worrying view of what the dangerous powers of the bare female Ruff's.
By choosing to pair Maria, the symbolically bedrest with attributes normally associated with male power in several paintings in the cycle,
Rubins could thus inadvertently have reminded viewers of the well-known theme of the
dangerous power of women in the portrait of Maria Domenici as queen triumphant.
What you see here, for example, Maria's exposed breasts is juxtaposed with attributes such as helmets,
farmer and Cannon's attributes usually associated with powerful male warriors and rulers.
Although Rubens is painted clearly, wanted such images to act as positive evidence of Maria's ability to govern France and command its troops.
Contemporary fears about women using sexuality to gain power over men meant that these
images could also evoked very negative interpretations of the Queen's real intentions.
Interestingly enough, while Maria's abilities as ruler were alluded to favourably in many texts published during her regency,
she began to be described in increasingly unfavourable terms.
After the first falling out with her son, now, the Queen Mother was called, quote, deceitful, perfidious and evil.
And those are just some of the nicer things that were said about her.
Although Rubins Maria presumably intended the cycle's paintings to put a positive spin on her public image,
the inability to control contemporary viewers actual responses meant that male viewers in particular
particular could have easily misinterpreted some of these images in very negative terms.
Thus, despite her best intentions, Maria manages paintings of these paintings,
highlights how difficult it was to depict a woman as powerful without being threatening.
In the early modern period for problem,
the furrier's male contemporaries would never have faced when they commissioned portraits or allegorical works who affirm their own power and status.
The final woman patron will consider today was equally preoccupied with carefully controlling her image by visual means,
unlike Isabella, that stay and marry Domenici. However, Queen Elizabeth, the first of England, was neither a wife nor a widow,
but rather that most exceptional thing of all, a single woman who is rich and powerful on her own.
But she, too, like Murray, demented. She was worried about confirming her legitimacy in her case as the rightful and in her case again,
crucially promised an heir of her father had mediate,
as well as about striking the right balance between assert asserting her power and avoiding any of the negative gender specific associations.
Early modern culture made about a woman who tried to rule over men.
Not surprisingly, some of the most important images she commissioned in the first part of a reign after succeeding her half sister,
Mary thatching, 58, made very clear references to her father.
For instance, in this painting known as the allegory of the Tudor succession,
Elizabeth is shown being led to the king by goddesses symbolising peace and plenty,
as well as being accompanied by Henries, by then deceased young male heir and with the six best visually confirming Elizabeth as Henry's natural,
legitimate and divinely ordained Hech heir. Significantly, and in contrast, her Catholic half sister, Mary,
is shown on the other side of Henry's throne, a company not only by her Catholic husband,
King Philip of Spain, but also by the dangerous God of war, Mars, rather than by the auspicious goddesses visually linked to Elizabeth.
So it's not a Mars meaning in Mary with.
Of course, this is bring out a whole series of ideas. Well, thank goodness she's not losing.
She's not the queen because she not only ruined some Catholic. You ruined your own right.
She's married. And that's probably problem. The Mary, please and sense. Who is really in charge?
Oh, my goodness. You could be Svay and have this whole world embarking upon.
Whereas here we have good you know, Elizabeth, you know, literally kind of in the right line to the male heir dies, Edward Elizabeth.
And she's coming in with very good lives is not a war, but peace and plenty and so forth.
And of course, as Henry Kissinger is making very visible, there is always the advantages of her not being married,
but certainly, you know, confirming her legitimacy there as the king's Protestant and the better heir.
But, Elizabeth, the imagery changes from the early 15 80s onwards,
when it became clear that the queen by then in her late 40s, would probably never marry.
And more importantly, would probably never produce an heir to the throne where it was at this time that she began to encourage a courtiers to
commission paintings that are portrayed her more and more explicitly as a chaste ever virgin and always youthful queen.
As in this portrait celebrating Elizabeth's almost divine role in the English victory over the Spanish Armada and the JTA.
You see ships going in. And then you.
And there she is right now. All of this happening in her hands.
Nice kind of iconographic images there to show her a role in this.
Like Catholicism's favourite Virgin Saint, the Madonna who's called the provost in Elizabeth.
In some ways tried to replace with her own. The queen is draped in pearls, symbols of chastity.
Likewise, the bow. That remains very firmly tied. Right over her genital area with a large pearl hanging beneath it.
Reminds us of our quasi saintly virtue, an eternal chastity.
But despite such fairly blatant iconography,
the style of this painting is curiously old fashioned and archey ising, especially if one looks at her blank,
expressionless face and the relentless piling up of iconographic attributes
all depicted without any sense of convincing space or three dimensionality. The casing style of Elizabeth's portrait is especially noticeable if one
comparison to those painted of her sister and immediate predecessor on the throne.
The Catholic Queen Mary Mary was the wife of the Spanish king.
And in images like the one on the left uses used a relatively modern and continental,
as well as naturalistic style for her much more three dimensional portraits.
Even allowing a few wrinkles to show on her face. All of you talked about that.
Solemn comparisons of art and Wilson is a solid progression of things.
I don't think you would ever guess that this painting was actually later than Matthew. This was more naturalistic.
It's not as the English artist couldn't paint that well.
It's also partly a very conscious choice of Elizabeth to choose because your whole fashion saw a more non-committal and more English saw.
And you think about the implications of that, why she might want to do that.
Indeed, in contrast, Mary Elizabeth favourite and almost Antine naturalistic in our crazing style.
They were called the iconic portraits painted of her father at the height of his power.
More than half a century earlier, not the more modern and naturalistic style favoured by her half sister and the rival Spanish fort.
Similarly, full length portraits like the one on the right in which Elizabeth literally stands on a map of England.
I think her feet are actually in Oxfordshire. That's serious because that's where the art of the quarter commissioned the painting.
His home is an alternative which stands in Oxfordshire,
so that these kind of porches in which Elizabeth literally stands on the map of England echoing the command,
they echo the commanding presence her father assumed in his own full-length portraits like the one on left.
However, whereas Elizabeth resorts to a voluminous but beautifully decorated dress to
assert her dominance status while at the same time reaffirming her femininity,
her father sports a prominent codpiece and happily shows off his powerful legs, thereby visually confirming his very masculine authority.
Despite such gender based difference, however, the overall aura of iconic power and timeless majesty is remarkably similar.
But as the reign progressed, Elizabeth's portraits appeared to become increasingly frozen in time and in style,
so that when this image was painted in the final years of her rain, she seems to have almost become a two dimensional image in this case.
In this recession, her courtiers, with her spindly and emasculated legs,
seem to be carrying a rectangular painted icon of the queen rather than a real
living being full of his own hearings and picture of her rather than a real figure.
Indeed, if we didn't know that this was an English scene painted by an English painter,
we could almost imagine that what was actually being carried was an iconic painted image of Elizabeth's Catholic opposite number, the Virgin Mary.
And in fact, by the end of her reign,
Elizabeth Enter images had effectively become secular Protestant substitutes for the old Catholic cult of the Madonna.
However, and interestingly, in most cases, the queen herself didn't actually pay for or commissioned such paintings,
instead encouraging her courtiers to sign the cheques, so to speak.
So should we even speak of her as a patron in the first place since she didn't commissioned the paintings that we're talking about?
I would argue yes.
So she was very clearly she very clued the poet a variety of strategies to try to control how she was represented in contemporary imagery.
One method was to it was to approve only a limited number of models that could be used to produce numerous, numerous authorised replicas,
achieved cheap but effective way of having your wealthy subjects project your attendant image at their own expense,
as seen in the various versions that were painted of the so-called Armato Portrait.
And you see here just two of the many examples that survived to this day,
each with minor variations, but all clearly based on a single approved protocol.
Even clear evidence of the queen's control of her own image is seen in the miniature portrait paintings that her subjects
were encouraged to wear around their necks or pin on their clothes like sacred or talismanic charms as seen in this example.
With still in its original case, we know from documents that Elizabeth controlled such images by pre approving only certain portrait designs,
designs that inevitably showed her as eternally young and divinely beautiful.
Indeed, contemporaries referred to this look as Elizabeth's mask of youth.
Just how artificial and carefully controlled Elizabeth's official public image had become.
By the last decade of a reign suggested by the unusually candid drawing on the left of the queen, aged 60.
That is about five or 10 years younger than she was by the time of the officially approved portrait on the right was actually produced.
So this seems to be a kind of sketch from life. It's very broadly drawn.
It's not a finished miniature. And the artist says, we're in Hirsch.
My take the city ever to have more of this into the mind of eternal mask of youth with us,
that that painting is actually done differently after this one. I would say she looks much younger.
That's the point, is that you can authorise things not to rise or fall in love, isn't it, Walthall?
Those kinds of images. This cult of youth and eternal beauty, eternal chastity continues.
Of course, the importance of her internal life, in a sense,
is that there is a don't worry about the fact that there's no air and there's really a lot of problems that.
You know, she's going to live forever. She's the chaste virgin queen.
So even well into his 60s, Elizabeth continued to maintain the fiction that she was still young, beautiful and implicitly fertile,
thereby trying to reassure subjects visually that they shouldn't worry about who would succeed her.
Of course, the fiction of eternal youth and beauty is something that we've already seen as Isabella does.
This portrait also aged 60, but still looking as fresh and young as Elizabeth was in miniatures like the one on the right.
Those once again,
we see how women paceman shared at least some gender specific concerns regarding age and beauty in the kinds of images they commissioned or approved.
However, as I suggested at the start of this lecture, exploring how gender may have affected the words commissioned by women patrons also
forces us to take another look at the art commissioned by men so we can now look
at work such as these two portraits of the Hapsburg Emperor Charles the Fifth by
Titian in terms of how questions of gender may have affected the final result.
For instance, by considering the very prominent symbols of masculinity in the painting on the right,
which is once again a bulging peace and the faithful hunting dog,
or the case of the image on the left,
how earlier male role models such as Roman emperors who were also famously depicted on horseback in equestrian sculptures and also on coins.
How these might influence the composition. And by doing so, we realise that just like work's associated with female patrons,
such paintings can also be fruitfully assessed in terms of the gender of those who commissioned them.
So by exploring apparently marginal topics such as women patrons, marginal, at least in terms of overall numbers,
it's not only interesting in its own right, but also makes us look a new works produced for some of the key male figures of the period as well.
But doing that but looking at that subject would be a topic for another lecture, but one which I'm relieved to say I won't be giving you today.
Thank you very much.