Titian's portrait of Laura Eustochia: The decorum of female beauty and the motif of the black page

Renaissance Studies

Volumn 17, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 628-673

  Bestor, Jane Fair ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 61149719744     PISSN: 02691213     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1477-4658.2003.00040.x     Document Type: Article

References (205)

1. The events that precipitated Francesco's unsuccessful effort to regain Ferrara for his house are described in Giovanni de Castro, Fulvio Testi e le corti italiane (Milan, 1875), chapters 24-5.
2. My thanks to Alice Grier Jarrard for this reference. The Estense position, the papal lawyers' response, and the Estense rebuttal were compiled in a work entitled Ristretto delle ragioni che la Serenissima Casa d'Este ha colla Camera Apostolica compilatto con occasione di replicare alla Risposta di Roma, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ms. Chigiani O.I.5, Notizie Politiche, vol. 5.
3. The compilation is dated to 1643, but no author is named. Jarrard graciously informs me that a copy in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris is catalogued under the name of Fulvio Testi, Francesco's secretary and counsellor of state. For her consideration of the text, see Alice Grier Jarrard, Architecture as Performance in Seventeenth-century Europe: Court Ritual in Modena, Rome, and Paris (Cambridge, 2003), 135-6.
4. L. A. Muratori affirms the official character of the work but without naming an author: L. A. Muratori, Delle antichità estensi (2 vols, Modena, 1717-40), II, 418.
5. Girolamo Tiraboschi, Biblioteca Modenese (6 vols, Modena, 1781-6), v, 245-63, does not include the Ristretto among Testi's works, de Castro, Fulvio Testi, 165-6, attributes it to Testi, but acknowledges that the extensive legal discussion must have been the work of a jurist. The Apostolic Camera was a court of law as well as the papal treasury, and was heavily involved in the administration of the papal state.
6. This argument suggests that paintings of wives in dynastic galleries ratified and celebrated their incorporation into the family and its collective memory. Such galleries were apparently common in Italy by the end of the sixteenth century: Linda Klinger Aleci, 'Images of identity: Italian portrait collections of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries', in Nicholas Mann and Luke Syson (eds), The Image of the Individual: Portraits in the Renaissance (London, 1998), 71.
7. Mary Rogers, 'The decorum of women's beauty: Trissino, Firenzuola, Luigini and the representation of women in sixteenth-century painting', Renaissance Studies, 2/1 (1988), 49.
8. Charles Hope, 'Problems of interpretation in Titian's erotic paintings', in Tiziano e Venezia: Convegno internazionale di studi, Venezia, 1976 (Vicenza, 1980), 111.
9. 'Whence he deserved to be liberally recognized and rewarded by that lord, whom he portrayed admirably with his arm above a large piece of artillery. Similarly, he depicted the Lady Laura, who was later wife of that duke, which is a work admirable in its beauty': Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori (6 vols, Florence, 1966-97), VI, 159.
10. Since 1957, when the painting now recognized as Laura's portrait, in the Heinz Kisters collection in Kreuzlingen, was restored, art historians have agreed with Vasari's assessment: Rodolfo Pallucchini, Tiziano (Florence, 1969), I, 62;
11. Harold E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, II.
12. The Portraits (London, 1971), 92-4,
13. Vittoria Romani, 'Portrait de Laura Dianti', in Siècle de Titien (Paris, 1993), 376.
14. The evidence for this assertion and everything that follows appears in my book manuscript: Jane Fair Bestor, Succession and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy: The Este of Ferrara (1264-1598), chapter 6,
15. and partially in Bestor, 'Marriage and succession in the house of Este: a literary perspective', in Dennis Looney and Deanna Shemek (eds), Phaethon's Children: The Este Court and its Culture in Early Modern Ferrara (Tucson, forthcoming).
16. Since neither Ercole II or Alfonso II recognized the marriage, Vasari could not have got this information from them or their intimates. According to Charles Hope, Vasari did not draw on Aretino's letters, which do not mention Laura's portrait, in writing the Lives, nor does the work show much evidence that Vasari discussed Titian's paintings for patrons outside of Venice (other than the Habsburgs) with the artist. We know from Vasari himself that he was in Ferrara briefly in 1566 on his way home from Venice, so the question arises whether he saw Titian's paintings then or relied on information provided by others: Charles Hope, 'The early biographies of Titian', in Joseph Manca (ed.), Titian 500 (Washington, 1993), 170, 175-7.
17. Karl Justi, 'Laura de' Dianti', Jahrbuch der Königlich Preußischen Kunstsammlungen, 20 (1899);
18. republished in Miscellaneen aus drei Jahrhunderten Spanischen Kunstlebens (2 vols, Berlin, 1908), II, 171, 177-8.
19. Jarrard agrees: Jarrard, Architecture as Performance, 135-6.
20. 'The duke wanted likewise to be depicted with Madame the duchess, whom Titian made with very unusual ornaments on her head of veils and gems, in a dress of black velvet with half-length sleeves ornamented with many ties, [and] who with majestic carriage rested her left hand on the shoulder of a little Ethiopian page, as one sees in the copper print by Egidio Sadeler, very exceptional in such work': Carlo Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie dell'Arte (2 vols, Berlin, 1914-24), I, 161.
21. Wethey, The Portraits, 93, contains a good summary of the history of scholarly work on the portrait. The main candidate was Lucrezia Borgia, but there are compelling arguments against identifying Borgia with the subject of Titian's painting.
22. It is not clear why Alfonso would have memorialized her after her death, she is not known to have been painted by Titian, and the portrait resembles no known image of her: Justi, 'Laura de' Dianti', 175.
23. Rulers often used the allegorical reverses of coins bearing their portraits to proclaim their virtues or to make other assertions: Luke Syson, 'Circulating a likeness? Coin portraits in late fifteenth-century Italy', in Nicholas Mann and Luke Syson (eds), The Image of the Individual: Portraits in the Renaissance (London, 1998), 113-25.
24. But the coin in question, representing Mary Magdalen anointing Christ's feet and worth ten soldi, or about half a lira, was first issued in 1522, before Alfonso was even acquainted with Laura: Vincenzo Bellini, Delle monete di Ferrara Trattato (Ferrara, 1761), 190.
25. Rogers, 'Decorum of women's beauty', 49, 73.
26. For Ridolfi's use of both sources, see Hope, 'Early biographies', 169-70.
27. Neither of the two biographies of Titian that appeared between Vasari and Ridolfi's works, Il Riposo by Raffaelo Borghini (Florence, 1584;
28. This would explain Ridolfi's remarks on the transmission history of the painting, not available from his written sources: Carlo Ridolfi, Maraviglie deff'Arte, I, 195-6.
29. The biography of Titian from the Maraviglie, which emphasizes his close connection to Ariosto and Alfonso's high regard, is now available in translation: Carlo Ridolfi, The Life of Titian, eds Julia Conaway Bondanella, Peter Bondanella, Bruce Cole, and Jody Shiffman (University Park, PA, 1996), esp. 71, 142.
30. My thanks to the anonymous referee for this reference. On Francesco as a patron of art, see Janet Southorn, Power and display in the seventeenth century: The arts and their patrons in Modena and Ferrara (Cambridge, 1988), chapter 2;
31. Compare Rogers, 'Decorum of women's beauty', 51.
32. This assessment leads Justi to conclude that the Este must have hidden the sitter's identity when they sent the painting to the imperial court in Prague. Only this hypothesis, he argues, can account for the otherwise inexplicable fact that Laura was confused with a Turkish woman in the imperial inventories: Justi, 'Laura de' Dianti', 175, 177-9. But his belief that the Este sought to repudiate the connection of the work with their house cannot be easily reconciled with Titian's fame as a portraitist, the existence of a copy in the Estense collection, and the dukes' continuing love of the arts.
33. Rona Goffen, Titian's Women (New Haven, 1997), 63.
34. Mary D. Garrard, 'Leonardo da Vinci: female portraits, female nature', in Broude and Garrard, Expanding Discourse, 65-6.
35. See also Rogers, 'Decorum of women's beauty', 52-3.
36. Rogers, 'Decorum of women's beauty', 49, 73.
37. Ronald Lightbrown notes that girdles 'were indispensable articles of costume for both men and women, so much so for women that fine girdles were one of the three sorts of jewel customarily given to brides': Ronald W. Lightbrown, Mediaeval European Jewellery (London, 1992), 306. The custom of giving jewellery to brides and the institution of dowry fostered a standard repertoire that came to symbolize the married state.
38. Sally Falk Moore, 'Descent and legal position', in Sally Falk Moore, Law as Process (Boston, 1978), 152.
39. Patricia Emison, 'Grazia', Renaissance Studies, 5 (1991), 427, describes grazia as 'a norm which carried the potential to undermine the very idea of norm'.
40. Some examples can be found in Jane Fair Bestor, 'Gli illegittimi e beneficiati della Casa estense', in Adriano Prosperi (ed.), Storia di Ferrara, VI. Il Rinascimento, Situazioni e Personaggi (Ferrara, 2000), 82-3.
41. Paolo Giovio, La vita di Alfonso da Este duca di Ferrara, trans. Giovambattista Gelli (Venice, n.d.), 146-7.
42. There is a considerable literature on the importance of conventions of lyric poetry and courtly love in shaping non-narrative images of women'; see, for example, Elizabeth Cropper, 'The beauty of woman: problems in the rhetoric of Renaissance portraiture', in M. W. Ferguson, M. Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (eds), Rewriting the Renaissance (Chicago, 1986), 181;
43. Elizabeth Cropper, 'On beautiful women, Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the vernacular style', Art Bulletin, 58 (1976), 390 and sources cited.
44. Mary Rogers, 'Fashioning identities for the Renaissance courtesan', in Mary Rogers (ed.), Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art (Brookfield, VT, 2000), 91.
45. Rogers describes the Renaissance courtesan as 'on many levels, a professional self-fashioner, able to cater to every sort of aesthetic and sexual preference': Rogers, 'Fashioning identities', 92. By the 1530s, the Petrarchan canon had become such a literary commonplace that even a Ferrarese prostitute suffering from venereal disease could bewail her lost beauty in its terms: Elizabeth Cropper, 'On beautiful women', 384, citing El vanto della cortigiana ferrarese quai narra la bellezza sua, published in Venice in 1532.
46. Even when the name Dianti begins to appear, as in Marc'Antonio Guarini's history of the churches of Ferrara, Laura is referred to as Laura Eustochia Dianti: Marc'Antonio Guarini, Compendio historico dell'origine, accrescimento, e prerogative delle chiese, e luoghi pii della città, e diocesi di Ferrara (Ferrara, 1621), book 5, 323.
47. It is even possible that the name Laura was not originally hers; courtesans in Venice often changed their baptismal names to more poetic ones such as Laura: Anderson, 'The Giorgionesque portrait: from likeness to allegory', in Giorgione, Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studio per il 50 Centenario della Nascita (Castelfranco Veneto, 1979), 156 and sources cited.
48. T. Lawler, 'Eustochium, St.', New Catholic Encyclopedia (17 vols, New York, 1967), 639;
49. Otto Wimmer and Hartmann Melzer, Lexikon der Namen und Heiligen (Innsbruck, 1982), 466;
50. Eugene Rice, Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (Baltimore, 1985), chapter 1.
51. Peter Humfrey and Mauro Lucco assert that Eustochium was never canonized, but people in the Middle Ages and Renaissance seem to have assumed that she was, and as T. Lawler's entry in the New Catholic Encyclopedia suggests, some modern scholars follow them: Peter Humfrey and Mauro Lucco, 'Catalogue', in Andrea Bayer (ed.), Dosso Dossi, Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara (New York, 1998), 191.
52. Wimmer and Melzer, Lexikon, 466.
53. For Titian's visits to Ferrara, see Francesco Valcanover, 'Comparative chronology', in Titian Prince of Painters (Munich, 1990), 401-16.
54. A review of the archival evidence leads Charles Hope to conclude that Titian either did not visit Ferrara in the winter of 1527-8, as previously thought, or spent only a few days there. He thus concludes that the three things supposedly done then, including, he had conjectured, the portraits of Alfonso and Laura, must now be dated to the winter of 1524-5: Charles Hope, 'The Camerino d'Alabastro: a reconsideration of the evidence', in Görel Cavalli-Björkman (ed.), Baccanals by Titian and Rubens (Stockholm, 1987), 26-7,
55. which is a revision of the view presented in Charles Hope, Titian (New York, 1980), 66-8 and 72, note 14.
56. For other views, see Pallucchini, Tiziano, 62;
57. Pedrocco, Tiziano, 136,
58. and Goffen, Titian's Women, 57, follow Wethey.
59. An account of the Estense succession can be found in Jane Fair Bestor, 'Bastardy and legitimacy in the formation of a regional state in Italy: the Estense succession', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 38 (1996), 549-85.
60. On Alfonso as a patron, see Charles Hope, 'Titian and his patrons', in Titian Prince of Painters, 80
61. and William Wallace, 'Michelangelo's Leda: the diplomatic context', Renaissance Studies, 15 (2001), 480-5.
62. Lucrezia arrived in Ferrara on her marriage to Alfonso with a terrible, though unjust, reputation. Historians have given somewhat different accounts of her relation to Alfonso. Michael Mallett asserts that although Alfonso 'gradually warmed to her to some extent, . . . [he] remained always suspicious of her and solicitous only when she was pregnant': Michael Mallett, The Borgias (Chicago, 1987), 273.
63. 2), 213, 295, 527-8, 558-9.
64. Ferdinand Gregorovius asserts that the relationship was not grounded in love or passion, but that Alfonso achieved a just appreciation of his wife's virtues: Ferdinand Gregorovius, Lucrezia Borgia (Munich, 1982), 279.
65. Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, 61 and 62, fig. 71, and 234,
66. and Joanna Woodall, 'An exemplary consort: Antonis Mor's portrait of Mary Tudor', Art History, 14/1-2 (1991), 207-8.
67. The earliest references to the Giulio Romano/Raphael portrait describe the sitter as the vice-reine of Naples, but only recently have these sources been taken seriously. Michael P. Fritz, Giulio Romano et Raphaël: La vice-reine de Naples ou la renaissance d'une beauté mythique (Paris, 1997), reconsiders the evidence and offers a new analysis of the portrait.
68. Hope, Titian, 168;
69. Woodall, 'Exemplary consort', 204-7.
70. Fritz, Vice-reine de Naples, 21.
71. Battaglia, Grande dizionario, XVIII, 431-4, s.v. 'sedere'. Drawings and miniatures of book dedications and illustrations of ceremonial texts suggest that the seated pose was reserved for ecclesiastical and temporal rulers and the wives of temporal rulers. When the principals are seated, occasionally their attendants are as well.
72. Romani, 'Portrait', 376 and sources cited.
73. The measurements come from Wethey, who also gives the measurements for the copy of Alfonso's portrait in the Metropolitan Museum as 1.27 x 0.984 m: Wethey, Portraits, 93-4. Hope thinks that the portraits were conceived together, but the need to keep the dating of Laura's portrait after 1526 challenges the evidence on which he bases this suggestion, as discussed in note 37 above.
74. Drawing on the accomplishments of Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgione 'transformed the portrait from an advertisement of class, status, wealth, power, or holiness into a complex image . . . [that] attempted to render the sitter's ongoing mood or other interior experience': Wendy Stedman Sheard, 'Giorgione's portrait inventions c. 1500: transfixing the viewer', in Mario A. Di Cesare (ed.), Reconsidering the Renaissance (Binghamton, NY, 1992), 142. For a consideration of Giorgione and double portraits, see notes 80-1 below.
75. Titian observes Vitruvius's rule that the nose should take up one-third the length of the face, the distance from the hairline to the space between the eyebrows taking up another third, and the distance from the base of the nose to the bottom of the chin completing the division into equal thirds. For this rule and its application in the sixteenth century, see Cropper, 'On beautiful women', 383, note 55.
76. Ippolita Sforza wears a similar style of dress in Bernardino Luini's painting of her with St Scolastica, St Agnes, and St Catherine of Alexandria in Milan, San Maurizio al Monasterio Maggiore: Jane Bridgeman, 'Dates, dress, and Dosso: some problems of chronology', in Luisa Ciammitti, Steven F. Ostow, and Salvatore Settis (eds), Dosso's Fate: Painting and Court Culture in Renaissance Italy (Los Angeles, 1998), 190-1.
77. For a good discussion of the portrait, see Peter Humfrey, Lorenzo Lotto (New Haven, 1997), 110 and plates 93 and 118.
78. Diane Owen Hughes, 'Distinguishing signs: ear-rings, Jews and Franciscan rhetoric in the Italian City', Past and Present, 112 (1986), 39.
79. The development of styles of headdress that covered the ears apparently discouraged their use, at least in the north: Lightbrown, Mediaeval Jewellery, 104, 293.
80. Hughes, 'Distinguishing signs', 3-6, 10, 40, 42-3.
81. Maineri was a painter and a citizen of Ferrara who hailed from Parma: Adriano Franceschini, Artisti a Ferrara in età umanistica e rinascimentale (3 vols, Ferrara, 1997), III, 541.
82. He shows up in the Estense cameral records during the 1490s, but only twice for payments for work, once in 1493 for a 'little painting' (quadretto) and once in 1502 for a painting with the head of John the Baptist that he had given to the holy nun Suor Lucia: Franceschini, Artisti, 35, 479.
83. The pilasters beside the altar are adorned with the Estense eagle, a feature that links the painting to the house of Este. A later variant of the same painting shows the figures in a rural setting, but Mary retains her earring: Silla Zamboni, Pittori di Ercole d'Este (Milan, 1975), 45-6, 50-1, and figs 16 and 18;
84. See Raymond Van Marie, The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting (19 vols, The Hague, 1923-8), XVII, 170;
85. Patricia Fortini Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (New Haven, 1988), 227 and plate 136.
86. The first of these paintings, The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, was painted around 1505-6, within a short time of Bellini's paintings of Catherine Cornaro: Jacques Bonnet, Lorenzo Lotto (Paris, 1996), 193.
87. Humfrey, Lorenzo Lotto, 139-41.
88. Yvonne Hackenbroch, Enseignes: Renaissance Hat Jewels (Florence, 1996), 91-140.
89. My findings support Hackenbroch's conclusions on this matter. Another instance besides Laura's portrait occurs in Parmigianino's A Young Woman, in the Galleria Nazionale in Parma, which dates to around 1530-1: Cecil Gould, Parmigianino (New York, 1994), 107 and plate 85;
90. Paola Rossi, L'opera completa di Parmigianino (Milan, 1980), 99 and plate 38.
91. Marriage was the typical destiny of women in the world, and the characteristic female head ornament was the brooch, or fermaglio, that was a frequent wedding gift. For some examples, see David Alan Brown, 'Catalogue of the exhibit', in David Alan Brown (ed.), Virtue and Beauty, Leonardo's Ginevra de' Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women (Washington, 2001), 113, 116, 183 (nos 5, 6, and 28);
92. also Roberta Orsi Landini and Mary Westerman Bulgarella, 'Costume in fifteenth-century Florentine portraits of women', 94 in the same volume.
93. Hackenbroch, Hat Jewels, 91.
94. Laura's medallion would not qualify as an emblem according to Paolo Giovio's criteria because it depicted at least one human form and also lacked a motto: Paolo Giovio, Dialogo dell'imprese militari et amorose (Lyons, 1574), 12.
95. Paul H. D. Kaplan, 'Titian's "Laura Dianti" and the origins of the motif of the black page in portraiture', Antichità viva, 21/1 (1982), 11-18 and 21/4, 10-18,
96. here Kaplan, 'Titian's "Laura Dianti" (1)', 17, note 31.
97. Noting 'an old idea' that as 'creatures of light inhabiting the sky' angels and stars were symbolically interchangeable, Gertrud Schiller identifies medieval instances in which the center of the Star of Bethlehem contains the face of an angel: Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, trans. Janet Seligman (2 vols, New York, 1971), 101-02. Whether or not Titian could have known this, there seems no reason to connect the figure in red to an angel.
98. Ladislas Bugner (ed.), The Image of the Black in Western Art (3 vols in 4 parts, Lausanne, 1976), II,
99. Jean Devisse, From the Early Christian Era to the 'Age of Discovery' 1. From the Demonic Threat to the Incarnation of Sainthood, trans. William Granger Ryan, fig. 153, three companions of St Maurice, all with earrings and lavish attire, in an altarpiece from a church in Halle (1511); fig. 157, St Maurice and companions in a triptich from the chapel of Gross-Wittfeitzen (c. 1520); fig. 160, St Maurice, church in Limbach (c. 1518);
100. Bugner, Image of the Black, II,
101. Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat, From the Early Christian Era to the Age of Discovery' 2. Africans in the Christian Ordinance of the World (Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Centuries), trans. William Granger Ryan; fig. 138,
102. Friedrich Herlin the Elder, Adoration of the Magi (1462); fig. 145,
103. Hans Memling, Adoration of the Magi (c. 1464); fig. 159,
104. Hans Memling, Adoration of the Magi (1479); fig. 175,
105. Albrecht Dürer, Adoration of the Magi (1504); fig. 181,
106. Hieronymous Bosch, Adoration of the Magi (1490-1510).
107. Devisse and Mollat, Africans in the Christian Ordinance, fig. 166, reliquary bust of Fidis, imaginary sister of St Maurice;
108. Devisse, From the Demonic Threat, fig. 64, Byzantine Octateuch showing Sarah and Abraham before a seated Pharoah with turban and earring; fig. 103, Nicholas of Verdun, Klosterneuburg ambo showing Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, who has a blackened face, blond hair, and earrings (1181).
109. Peter Humfrey, La pittura veneta del Rinascimento a Brera (Florence, 1990), 159.
110. For the association between lack of symmetry and lack of reason, see D. J. Gifford, 'Iconographical notes towards a definition of the medieval fool', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 37 (1974), 336-7.
111. Kaplan, 'Titian's "Laura Dianti" (1)', 14-15 and fig. 3 of Sadeler's print.
112. Kaplan, 'Titian's "Laura Dianti" (2)', 12-15.
113. Jaynie Anderson, Giorgione, The Painter of Poetic Brevity' (New York, 1997), 304 and plate 13.
114. Giorgione. Portrait of a Young Soldier with his Retainer (Portrait of Girolamo Marcello), Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.
115. Christian Hornig attributes the Portrait of a Man in Armour with his Page (The Gattamelata Portrait) in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence to Cavazzola, and dates the painting to between 1518 and 1522: Christian Hornig, Cavazzola (Munich, 1976), 75-8 and 113-6.
116. The same painting is attributed by Alessandro Ballarin to Giorgione and dated to 1501: Alessandro Ballarin, 'Une nouvelle perspective sur Giorgione: les portraits des annés 1500-1503', in Siècle de Titien, 34 (plate 22), 286-7, 294,
117. but this attribution is rejected by Jaynie Anderson, Giorgione, 326.
118. Jean K. Cadogan (ed.), Wadsworth Atheneum Paintings II, Italy and Spain, Fourteenth Through Nineteenth Centuries (Hartford, 1991), 198;
119. Steele de Titten, 53 (plate 39) and 303-4. Sheard asserts that the head is of a black page and Cadogan follows her; however, thanks to Eric Zafran and Cindy Roman of the Wadsworth Athenaeum, I was able to inspect the portrait closely and think that her firm conclusion on the matter of race is premature, especially when the features are compared with those of the page in the Uffizi portrait.
120. 'neat soft fingers, the color of five oriental pearls': Robert M. Durling (ed. and trans.), Petrarch's Lyric Poems, The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, MA, 1976), no. 199, 344-5;
121. quoted in James V. Mirollo, Mannerism and Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, 1984), 128.
122. Paul H. D. Kaplan, The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art (Ann Arbor, 1983), 9-10 and figs 6-8.
123. André Chastel, 'La rencontre de Salomon et de la Reine de Saba dans l'iconographie médiévale', Gazette des Beaux-Arts, vi series, 35 (1949), 99-114, esp. 109 (fig. 4) and 111 (fig. 8);
124. Kim F. Hall, 'Object into object? Some thoughts on the presence of black women in early modern culture', in Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse (eds), Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, 2000), 359-66.
125. Kaplan asserts that 'the combination of a black child with a white lady of regal bearing is reminiscent of images of the Queen of Sheba', but he does not pursue this point, for good reason: Kaplan, 'Titian's "Laura Dianti" (1)', 13.
126. St Jérôme, Lettres (7 vols, Paris, 1949-61), v, no. 108, 199.
127. Rice, Saint Jerome, 12-20.
128. Rice, Saint Jerome, 96-7, 99-100, and fig. 27.
129. Jacopo da Varazze includes biographies of St Paula and St Jerome, in which references to Eustochium are found, in his famous collection of lives of the saints, popularly known as the Legenda Aurea (c. 1260). Pierpaolo Vergerio the Elder mentions Eustochium four times in his sermons on St Jerome, always in the context of Jerome's letter on virginity: John M. McManamon (ed. and trans.), Pierpaolo Vergerio the Elder and Saint Jerome (Tempe, 1999), 165, 202, 243, and 253.
130. For the importance of Jerome's letters and of the example of Paola and Eustochium to Roman matrons in the later sixteenth century, see Carolyn Valone, 'Roman matrons as patrons: various views of the cloister wall', in Craig A. Monson, The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion, and the Arts in Early Modern Europe (Ann Arbor, 1992), 59-69.
131. 'Hear, Daughter, and see, and incline your ear, and forget your people and your father's house; and the king shall greatly desire your beauty': St Jérôme, Lettres, I, no. 22, 110.
132. 'Being born of such a parent we are first black, and after repentance, having not yet ascended to the pinnacle of virtue, we say: "I am black and beautiful, a daughter of Jerusalem"': Stjérôme, Lettres, I, no. 22, 111.
133. Thomas Lawler explains that the source of this quoted line is Canticles 8.5, 'which, however, in the Vulgate lacks the dealbata, "being made white"': St Jerome, Letters (London, 1963), 234, note 18.
134. David Rosand, Titian (New York, 1978), 24.
135. Jerome seems to have had a special appeal to Titian. Rosand notes that 'a series of penitent Jeromes appears in his work, starting with a woodcut dated to between 1525-26 and ending with the Pietà he painted to hang above the altar where he wished to be buried': David Rosand, Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice, revised edn (Cambridge, 1997), 60 and note 83.
136. For Guarino's interest in Jerome and the saint's importance in discussions of exemplary portraits, see Michael Baxandall, 'Guarino, Pisanello and Manuel Chrysoloras', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 28 (1965), 196;
137. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators (Oxford, 1971), 91-2.
138. Women, to whom Leonardo Bruni particularly recommended the study of Christian writers such as Lactantius, Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, and Cyprian, could have been as familiar with Jerome's letter on virginity as men: Woodward, Humanist Educators, 124-5.
139. David Rosand and Michelangelo Muraro, Titian and the Venetian Woodcut (Washington, 1976), 146-7. Since the iconographic tradition was well established, Titian himself need not have been familiar with the letter, but the portrait suggests a sufficient knowledge of Jerome's colour imagery, easily supplied by the Ferrarese, to resonate with familiar depictions of blacks in painting, recent portrait inventions, and widely known Petrarchan conventions and conceits.
140. This use of Alfonso's coin seems to rest on the postulate of a spiritual union between Christ and Mary Magdalen that was both enabled by and expressed in the purity of her love. In fact, a number of virgin martyrs described themselves as the bride of Christ, a representation that was grounded in such patristic writings as Jerome's letter to Eustochium. But Catherine of Alexandria alone was held to have experienced an actual wedding with Christ: Katherine J. Lewis, The Cult of St. Katherine of Alexandria in Late Medieval England (Rochester, NY, 2000), 107.
141. The analogy to the Magdalen validated Laura's inner purity and shifted the argument away from indices of the way Alfonso treated her to his integrity, representing his decision to marry as an act of bestowing grace. Laura's 'saviour', of course, was also responsible for her 'fall', but this irony was buried in the general conviction that where voluntary sex crimes were concerned, women were more at fault: James Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago, 1987), 305-7, 396.
142. Kaplan, 'Titian's "Laura Dianti" (2)', 12.
143. On the great popularity of the Adoration of the Magi in painting in the last quarter of the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth century, see Kaplan, Rise of the Black Magus, 164.
144. With respect to this painting, Marcia Hall notes that 'the flesh of the two women is as sharply counter-pointed as their ages and stations': Marcia B. Hall, Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting (Cambridge, 1992), 228-9.
145. The contrast with Laura's portrait, where the difference in skin colours is subordinated to a strong formal unity, is striking. The child's beauty exemplifies the way visual sources can complicate values associated with the colours black and white derived from medieval dictionaries, discussed in Steven A. Epstein, Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy (Ithaca, 2001), 22-3.
146. Although the Venetian slave trade certainly increased the numbers of black-skinned people in Ferrara and the Veneto, it would be anachronistic to attribute derogatory meanings of blackness associated with their slave status to Titian's portrait, which draws heavily on an iconographic tradition of representing blacks in positive ways. The scheme of the portrait situates it squarely within what Carolyn Prager terms the 'ecumenical' approach to skin colour in the Song of Songs, in patristic texts that develop this biblical imagery, and in Renaissance texts that invoke them: Carolyn Prager, 'If I be Devil: English Renaissance response to the proverbial and ecumenical Ethiopian', Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 17 (1987), 260-3.
147. The danger of anachronism is apparent in Kim F. Hall's interesting study Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, 1995). The coding of skin colour in A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, surely owes at least as much to Ovid as to the slave trade.
148. 'Imagine to yourself the blessed Mary, who was of so great purity that she was counted worthy to be the mother of the lord. . . . You too can be the mother of the Lord': St Jerôme, Lettres, I, 154-5.
149. I am indebted in this discussion to Lawler's notes: St Jerome, Letters, 246, note 337.
150. On the star as a symbol of the Virgin, see Yrjö Hirn, The Sacred Shrine (London, 1912), 465.
151. 'Behold star of the sea, restoring mother of God and always virgin, fruitful door of heaven.' For the full text and melodies of this hymn, sung at second vespers, see Benedictines of Solmes (eds), The Liber Usualis (Tournai, 1956), 1259-63.
152. The different melodies became the basis for polyphonic settings of the text during the Renaissance: 'Ave maris Stella', New Harvard Dictionary of Music, ed. Don Michael Randel (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 63.
153. My thanks to Lewis Lockwood for this reference and for suggesting the relevance of the hymn. Hirn, Sacred Shrine, 465, discusses the origin and meaning of Mary as 'Star of the Sea'.
154. 'Beautiful Virgin, who, clothed with the sun and crowned with stars, so pleased the highest Sun that in you He hid His light: love drives me to speak words of you, but I do not know how to begin without your help and His who in loving placed Himself in you': Francesco Petrarch, Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The 'Rime sparse' and Other Lyrics, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA, 1976), 574-5.
155. Light imagery is central to the meaning of the poem, as it is to Titian's painting: Edward Williamson, 'A Consideration of "Vergine Bella"', Italica, 29/4, 217-18.
156. James V. Mirollo, '"Where'er you walk": My Lady's Beautiful Foot and Generative Footsteps: The Literary Context of Parmigianino's Madonna del Bel Piede', in Mario A. Di Cesare (ed.), Reconsidering the Renaissance (Binghamton, NY, 1992), 185.
157. Battaglia, Grande dizionario, XXII, 123.
158. They contrasted in this respect with the Roman rite: James H. Moore, Vespers at St. Mark's (2 vols, Ann Arbor, 1981), I, 144.
159. On the Virgin Hodegetria and the popularity in Italy of this type, which depicts the Virgin full length and holding the infant on her left side, see Christine Angelidi and Titos Papamastorakis, 'The veneration of the Virgin Hodegetria and the Hodegon Monastery', in Maria Vassilaki (ed.), Mother of God: Representations of the Virgin in Byzantine Art (Milan, 2000), 402, 409, 411, 414 (here the authors note that the stellar motif is 'standard'), 415, 417, 419 (nos 61, 63-6A);
160. and Valentino Pace, 'Between East and West', in the same volume, 424, 427-8, 447, 449 (nos 72-3, 214, 216, 218).
161. On star pins and other star forms associated with the Madonna from Italy in the fifteenth century, especially Florence, and the general significance of the motif, see Patrizia Castelli, 'Le virtù delle gemme. Il loro significato simbolico e astrologico nella cultura umanistica e nelle credenze popolari del quattrocento. Il recupero delle gemme antiche', in Patrizia Castelli (ed.), L'oreficeria nella Firenze del quattrocento (Florence 1977), 338-9, 347-8, 360-1 (entries 216, 229, 244).
162. For this example, executed by Byzantine craftsmen toward the end of the twelfth century, and other instances of Madonnas in the Byzantine style with quatrefoil or star in the Basilica of San Marco, see Bruno Bertoli, 'Il Nuovo Testamento nei mosaici di San Marco', in Bruno Bertoli (ed.), I mosaici di San Marco: Iconografia dell'Antico e del Nuovo Testamento (Milan, 1986), 199.
163. (An Epiphany scene in mosaics also depicts an eight-pointed star shining before the wisemen: Bertoli, 'Il Nuovo Testamento', 170-1 and fig. 80).
164. An occurrence of the star on the Madonna's head in the Madonna and Child of the Carpaneda Parish Church suggests that the motif was widely known, even if not frequently used, in the Renaissance. This painting is often given to Jacopo Bellini, an attribution that Colin Eisler rejects on the grounds that it is 'a late pastiche, combining Trecento and Quattrocento conventions': Colin Eisler, The Genius of Jacopo Bellini: The Complete Paintings and Drawings (New York, 1989), 528;
165. for an attribution to Bellini, see Mauro Lucco (ed.), La pittura nel Veneto (Milan, 1989), I, 59, plate 68.
166. On pearls as a symbol of the Virgin and of brides, see Castelli, 'Le virtù delle gemme', 311, 314, 336-9 (figs 213-16a).
167. In her discussion of Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, completed for Alfonso d'Este in 1523, Marcia Hall emphasizes Titian's 'dependence on color and light for compositional movement' and his avoidance of 'lines and edges unless he wants to focus on a form': Hall, Color and Meaning, 224. Both techniques are central to the creation of meaning in his portrait of Laura.
168. Charles Barber, 'Early representations of the mother of God', in Vassilaki, Mother of God, 253, 262-3 and fig. 1.
169. Ovid, Ars Amatoria, I, 555-8.
170. Ovid, Fasti, III, 513-14.
171. r.
172. Charles Hope, 'Camerino d'Alabastro', and Beverly Louise Brown, 'On the Camerino', in Görel CavalliBjörkman, Bacchanals by Titian and Rubens, discuss the arrangement of rooms in the suite. Brown notes that with the exception of Titian's Tribute Money, the inventories do not list paintings: Brown, 'On the Camerino', 45.
173. Walther Ludwig (ed.), Die Borsias des Tito Strozzi (Munich, 1977), 11-59.
174. Charles M. Rosenberg, The Este Monuments and Urban Development in Renaissance Ferrara (Cambridge, 1997), 72-4.
175. Wallace, 'Michelangelo's Leda', fig. 5, is a recent illustration of (a copy of) Alfonso's portrait in Renaissance Studies.
176. Ludwig, Die Borsias, I, 360-8 (86).
177. Ludwig, Die Borsias, II, 52-75 (93-4).
178. The use of 'socialis' assimilates the couple's irregular union to marriage: according to C. T. Lewis and C. Short, A New Latin Dictionary, 1715, 'socialis' is used 'in Ovid several times like conjugialis, of marriage, conjugal, nuptial . . .'
179. Ludwig, Die Borsias, 251.
180. For an instance of a conceit of Titian's on a portrait cover that became a personal impresa, see Angelica Dülberg, Privatporträts: Geschichte und Ikonologie einer Gattung im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1990), 105.
181. Angelo Spaggiari and Giuseppe Trenti, Gli stemma Estensi ed Austro-Estensi, profilo storico (Modena, 1985), 94 and sources cited.
182. 'My soul magnifies the Lord:/ And my spirit rejoices in God my Savior./ For he has regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden:/ For behold from now on all generations will call me blessed./ Because he who is powerful has done great things for me:/ And holy is his name': Alberto Colunga and Lorenzo Turrado (eds), Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Clementinam, Nova Editio (Madrid, 1977), 1012. I am grateful to Charles Donahue Jr for noticing the source.
183. Rosand, Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice, revised edn (Cambridge, 1997), 110.
184. Levi-Pisetzky, Storia del costume, III, plate 42, comments on the rarity of female portraits with gloves in the Cinquecento, despite their common use in practice. This seems to be the case at least through the 1520s. It is striking, for example, that many of the men Titian painted hold or wear gloves, but only two of the women.
185. Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones, 'Fetishizing the glove in Renaissance Europe', Critical Inquiry, 28 (2001), 121-3, discuss Titian's male portraits with gloves.
186. Battaglia, Grande dizionario, VII, 105, sv. guanto, meaning 3.
187. Dülberg, Privatporträts, 152 (see also sources cited), notes their many uses, including in marital contexts.
188. David Rosand, 'Venereal hermeneutics: reading Titian's Venus of Urbino', in John Monfasano and Ronald G. Musto (eds), Renaissance Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Eugene F. Rice, Jr. (New York, 1991), 270-1;
189. Rona Goffen, 'Titian's Sacred and Profane Love and marriage', in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (eds), The Expanding Discourse (New York, 1992), 111-13
190. (both essays reappear in Joseph Manca, Titian 500 [Washington, 1993] in slightly modified form);
191. Anderson, Giorgione, 231.
192. Durling, Petrarch's Lyric Poems, no. 77, 176-7;
193. Mirollo, Mannerism, 103.
194. For a discussion of this form of marriage in the history of the house of Este, see Bestor, 'Bastardy and legitimacy', 563-5.
195. Antonio Persio, Trattato dell'ingegno dell'huomo (Venice, 1576), 97-8.
196. Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, 1985), 119-20.
197. James V. Mirollo, Parmigianino's Madonna del Bel Piede', 188.
198. Mary Vaccaro, 'Parmigianino and Andrea Baiardi: figuring Petrarchan beauty in Renaissance Parma', Word and Image, 17 (2001), 256, note 24 quotes the inscription memorializing the patron, Elena Baiardi, and her praise.
199. Mirollo, 'Parmigianino's Madonna del Bel Piede', 189.
200. Building on Cropper and others, Mary Vaccaro investigates Parmigianino's fusion of the cult of the Virgin with Petrarch's ideal type of beauty: Vaccaro, 'Figuring Petrarchan beauty', 243, 245-51.
201. The expression 'dramatic realism' comes from Rosand, Painting in Sixteenth-century Venice, 53.
202. The transparent garments revealing the Virgin's belly and breast in The Madonna of the Long Neck are consistent with the theological celebration of her fertile womb and nurturing breast, and would seem to redeem aspects of the female form that were highly problematic from the standpoint of social decorum. Margaret R. Miles, 'The Virgin's one bare breast: female nudity and religious meaning in Tuscan early Renaissance culture', in Susan Rubin Suleiman (ed.), The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 200-7, discusses the long-standing artistic interest in the Virgin's breasts. For the Virgin as 'fruitful door of heaven', see 659 above.
203. Titian's approach has something in common with the way Ferrarese and other epic poets construct their female characters as composites of heroines from the epic tradition. I am indebted on this point to David Quint's remarks on this technique in discussion at the conference on 'L'arme e gli amori: Ariosto, Tasso, and Guarini in Late Renaissance Florence', held on 27-29 June 2001 at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies, Florence.
204. 'It is the common opinion of the wisest people in the world, very illustrious lady, that a contrast placed near to another is recognized more clearly than if it is considered by itself. And in truth, experience shows that this is indeed the case, because white beside black is revealed much lighter, and dark, which carries with it vice, makes the very bright rays of virtue appear much more than they would appear without a comparison constructed in this way': Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinzio, De gli hectommithi (2 vols, Monte Regale, 1565), I, first unnumbered page after 488.
205. The dedication, not coincidently, marks the first time that Giraldi acknowledges Laura's claim to have married Alfonso: Bestor, Succession and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy, chapter 7.