Weasels and pregnancy in renaissance Italy

Renaissance Studies

Volumn 15, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 172-187

  Musacchio, Jacqueline Marie ^a  

^a VASSAR COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149635990     PISSN: 02691213     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1477-4658.2001.tb00115.x     Document Type: Article

References (83)

1. Bibliographic information on this painting can be found in Barbara Fabjan and Pietro C. Marani (eds), Leonardo. La Dama con l'Ermellino (Milan, 1998).
2. On mustelids, see Carolyn King, The Natural History of Weasels and Stoats (Ithaca, 1989);
3. Paddy Sleeman, Stoats and Weasels, Polecats and Martens (London, 1989);
4. Ernst P. Walker et al. Mammals of the World (Baltimore and London, 1975), 1189-97.
5. For information on fur, see Carole Collier Frick, 'Dressing a Renaissance city: society, economics, and gender in the clothing of fifteenth-century Florence', Ph.D dissertation, University of California (Los Angeles, 1995), 382-6.
6. See Jan Bołoz-Antoniewicz, 'Portret Cecylii Gallerani przez Lionarda da Vinci w Muzeum ksia̧ża̧t Czartoryskich w Krakowie', Pamiȩtnik III Zjazdu Historyków Polskich w Krakowie, 4 (1900), 4;
7. Janice Shell and Grazioso Sironi, 'Cecilia Gallerani: Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine', Artibus et historiae, 25 (1992), 47-66;
8. Janice Shell, 'Cecilia Gallerani: una biografia', in Fabjan and Marani, Leonardo, 51-65.
9. For this letter, see Adolfo Venturi, 'Nuovi documenti su Leonardo da Vinci', Archivio Storico dell'Arte, 1 (1888), 45;
10. Alessandro Luzio, 'Ancora Leonardo da Vinci e Isabella d'Este', Archivio Storico dell'Arte, 1 (1888), 181;
11. for a modern transcription, see Shell, 'Cecilia Gallerani', 56.
12. In November 1490, Giacomo Trotti, Ferrara's ambassador to the Sforza court, suggested that Lodovico's reluctance to marry Beatrice d'Este was due to the fact that he already had a beautiful, and pregnant, lover; see Francesco Malaguzzi-Valeri, La Corte di Lodovico il Moro (Milan, 1913), I, 503-04;
13. Shell and Sironi, 'Cecilia Gallerani', 57.
14. However, the playful qualities of the marten as a pet were noted in Edward Topsell, The History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents (London, 1608, repr. New York, 1967), 387.
15. Topsell's compendium was largely an annotated and expanded translation of the influential Konrad Gesner, Historic Animalium (Zurich, 1551).
16. For further information on the relationship between the two texts, see Malcolm South (ed.), Topsell's Histories of Beasts (Chicago, 1981), xi,
17. and the introduction by Willy Ley in Topsell, The History of Four-footed Beasts, unpaginated.
18. Charles J. Holmes in A. E. Hewett, 'A newly discovered portrait by Ambrogio de Predis', Burlington Magazine, 10 (1907), 310.
19. See also Paul Barolsky, 'La Gallerani's Galée', Source, 12 (1992), 13-14.
20. For information on the seasonal coat of weasels, see King, Natural History, 29-42.
21. Emil Möller, 'Leonardos Bildnis der Cecilia Gallerani in der Galerie des Fürsten Czartoryski in Krakau', Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft, 9 (1916), 313-26.
22. Möller, and later authors, cite the description of the ermine in the Fior di Virtù; see The Florentine Fior di Virtù of 1491, trans. Nicholas Fersin [sic] (Philadelphia, 1953), 108-9.
23. For an analysis of this text, and Leonardo's relationship to it, see Barbara Fabjan, 'In margine all'ermellino', in Fabjan and Marani, Leonardo, 73-5.
24. Carlo Pedretti, 'La dama con l'ermellino come allegoria politica', in Studi Politici in Onore di Luigi Firpo, ed. A. Enzo Baldini and Franco Barcia (Milan, 1990), I, 161-81, esp. 167;
25. Henryk Ochenkowski, 'The quatercentenary of Leonardo da Vinci I. The Lady with the Ermine: a composition by Leonardo da Vinci , Burlington Magazine, 24 (1919), 186-94.
26. Information on the investiture can be found in Agata Rona, 'L'investitura di Lodovico il Moro dell'Ordine dell'Armellino', Archivio Storico Lombardo, 103 (1979), 346-58.
27. Ochenkowski, "Quatercentenary of Leonardo da Vinci', 191.
28. Krystyna Moczulska, "The most graceful Gallerani and the most exquisite γαλέη in the portrait of Leonardo da Vinci', Folia Historiae Artium, 1 (1995), 77-86. Moczulska's analysis of the painting, though influential to my own interpretation, does not take into account the larger pro-natalist context of post-plague Italy; instead, she discusses the connections between Leonardo's representation and literary texts.
29. These furs were common enough in Bologna to generate sumptuary laws restricting their usage; see Paola Goretti, 'Le variazioni della moda femminile nella pittura Bolognese del cinquecento', Ph.D dissertation, Università degli Studi di Bologna (Bologna, 1994), esp. 13-14; I am grateful to Caroline Murphy for this reference.
30. Giovanni Antonio Fasolo, Family Portrait (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco);
31. and Cristoforo Solari, Funerary Effigy of Beatrice d'Este (Certosa, Pavia)
32. John Hunt, 'Jewelled neck furs and "Flohpelze"', Pantheon, 21 (1963), 151-57;
33. see also R. H. Randall, Jr, 'A mannerist jewel', Apollo, 87 (1968), 176-8;
34. Francis Weiss, 'Bejewelled fur tippets - and the Palatine fashion', Costume, 4 (1970), 37-41;
35. Günter Schiedlausky, 'Zum sogenannten Flohpelz', Pantheon, 30 (1972), 469-80;
36. Georges Salmann, 'Une bonbonnière qui n'en était pas une', Connaissance des Arts, 21 (1975), 90-1;
37. Günter Schiedlausky, 'Wie man Flöhe fängt', Kunst & Antiquitäten, 4 (1987), 26-38.
38. Although Frick cites this function, she does not include a contemporary term for it in her extensive glossary; see Frick, Dressing, 430-1.
39. Italian paintings and drawings with these accessories include: Lavinia Fontana, The Meeting of Solomon and Sheba (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin)
40. Titian, Eleanora Gonzaga (Uffizi, Florence)
41. Paolo Veronese, Countess Livia da Porto Thiene and her Daughter Porzia (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore);
42. Giovanni Francesco Bezzi, Thyestes and Aerope (art market);
43. Giovanni Battista Moroni, Isotta Brembati (Palazzo Moroni, Bergamo);
44. Sofonisba Anguissola, Portrait of a Lady (Staatliche Museen, Berlin)
45. and Isabel of Valois (known via a copy in Museo del Prado, Madrid);
46. Niclausz Keppel, Lady of Cremona and Lady of Bologna, from a costume book (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore);
47. Examples are in Baltimore (Walters Art Museum), Paris (Musée de Cluny), Nürnberg (Germanisches National Museum), Madrid (Museo Lazaro and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection), and formerly the Rothschild collection. See also Yvonne Hackenbroch, Renaissance Jewellery (New York, 1979), 29-30, for a discussion of several documentary and visual examples.
48. For statistics from the fifteenth century, see David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and their Families: a Study of to Florentine Catasto of 1427 (New Haven, 1985), 270-9.
49. For example, some women deliberately wrote their wills before their due date; see Stanley Chojnacki, 'Dowries and kinsmen in early Renaissance Venice', Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 5 (1975), 587. Such an impulse may have prompted the portraits of the unidentified pregnant woman by Raphael (Palazzo Pitti, Florence) or the newborn by Lavinia Fontana (Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna).
50. For the plague in general, see Jean-Noël Biraben, Les Hommes et la Peste en France et dans les Pays Européens et Méditerranées (Paris, 1975-6),
51. as well as David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, ed. Samuel K. Cohn, Jr (Cambridge, 1997).
52. I discuss this in further detail in my book, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (New Haven, 1999).
53. Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton, 1951).
54. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert et al. (Cambridge, 1988), 299.
55. Benedetto Varchi, Opere di Benedetto Varchi Ora per la Prima volta Raccolte (Trieste, 1859), II, 669,
56. and Ambroise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, trans. Janis L. Pallister (Chicago, 1982), 38-9.
57. Ernst H. Gombrich, 'Apollonio di Giovanni: a Florentine cassone workshop seen through the eyes of a humanist poet', Journal of to Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 18 (1955), 27.
58. Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, "The rape of the Sabine women on Quattrocento marriage panels', in K. J. P. Lowe and Trevor Dean (eds), Marriage in Italy 1300-1650 (Cambridge, 1998), 66-82.
59. For the groundbreaking study of this domestic artist, see Ellen Callmann, Apollonio di Giovanni (Oxford, 1974).
60. On the interchange between Renaissance prints and maiolica as it applies to this story, see Bernard Rackham, The Victoria & Albert Museum. Catalogue of Italian Maiolica (London, 1940), 207-8, 337-8;
61. Maurice L. Shapiro, "A Renaissance birth plate," Art Bulletin, 44 (1967), 236-43;
62. and J. V. G. Mallet, 'The painter of the coal-mine dish', in Timothy Wilson (ed.), Italian Renaissance Pottery (London, 1991), 62-72.
63. Further information on textual sources can be found in Moczulska, 'The Most Graceful Gallerani', 81-5.
64. Ciro Caversazzi, 'Una dama bergamasca di quattrocent'anni fa riconosciuta in un ritratto del Lotto', Bollettino della Biblioteca Civica di Bergamo, 7 (1913), 23-5;
65. more recently, see Augusto Gentili, 'Lorenzo Lotto e il ritratto cittadino: Leoncino e Lucina Brembate', in Augusto Gentili (ed.), Il Ritratto e la Memoria. Materiali 1 (Rome, 1989), esp. 174-7,
66. as well as David Alan Brown, Peter Humfrey, and Mauro Lucco, Lorenzo Lotto. Rediscovered Master of to Renaissance (Washington, DC, 1997), 115-16. However, Gentili's assertion that the weasel in this painting symbolizes disaster is not the case; instead, as we will see, it is a talisman for a safe pregnancy.
67. As Mauro Lucco notes, there is no known information about any pregnancies for Brembati after 1508, and the painting is usually dated between 1518 and 1523; see Brown et al., Lotto, 115. This weasel accessory promoted pregnancy, rather than represented it; perhaps she hoped to become pregnant again.
68. Benvenuto Cellini, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, ed. Charles Hope and Alessandro Nova, trans. John Addington Symonds (Oxford, 1983), 22.
69. Paul F. Watson, 'Virtù and voluptas in cassone painting', Ph.D dissertation, Yale University (New Haven, 1970), 8-14;
70. Carlo Carnesecchi, 'Spese matrimoniali nel 1361', Rivista d'Arte, 5 (1907), 39;
71. and John Goldsmith Phillips, Early Florentine Designers and Engravers (Cambridge, 1955), 6.
72. Giovanni Boccaccio, Decamerone, ed. Mario Marti (Milan, 1990), 724 ('e tutto ciö che a novella sposa si richiedea').
73. On the importance of bridal gifts, and their role in the family, see especially Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, "The Griselda complex: dowry and marriage gifts in the Quattrocento', in Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Chicago, 1985), 213-46.
74. Brendan Cassidy, 'A relic, some pictures and the mothers of Florence in the late fourteenth century', Gesta, 30 (1991), 91-9.
75. Regarding these girdles, see, for example, Walter J. Dilling, 'Girdles: their origin and development, particularly with regard to their use as charms in medicine, marriage and midwifery', Caledonian Medical Journal, 9 (1912-14), 337-57, 403-25;
76. S. A. J. Moorat, Catalogue of Western Manuscripts on Medicine and Science in to Wellcome Historical Medical Library (London, 1962), I, 491-3;
77. Curt F. Bühler, 'Prayers and charms in certain Middle English scrolls', Speculum, 39 (1964), 270-8;
78. Lucille B. Pinto, 'The folk practice of gynecology and obstetrics in the Middle Ages', Bulletin of to History of Medicine, 47 (1973), 513-23.
79. Archivio di Stalo Prato, Archivio Datini, 1103, letter 134071 (23 April 1395).
80. See Hackenbroch, Renaissance Jewellery, 388,
81. citing Giovanni Gozzadini, 'Di alcuni gioielli notati in un libro di ricordi del secolo XVI e di un quadro di Lavinia Fontana', Atti e Memorie della Regia Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Provincie di Romagna, 1 (1883), 1-16.
82. Caroline Murphy, 'Lavinia Fontana and Le dame della città: understanding female artistic Patronage in late sixteenth-century Bologna', Renaissance Studies, 10 (1996), 190-208,
83. as well as her unpublished paper, "Lavinia Fontana: painting the ladies of Bologna," delivered at The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, 9 May 1998.