New evidence of ‘third gender’ people in art
Story of Accidental Painting Discovery
The most fascinating art discoveries are made when least expected (well, perhaps, it applies to everything in life, would you agree?).
A couple of years ago I bumped into this amazing picture of two young men by the 18th-century Italian Rococo painter Giuseppe Bonito (1707–1789). Its remarkable story was a perfect catch for my Smart Art — Art History Escape app.
It was part of a 2014 auction in New York by Sotheby’s and was sold for quite a modest sum of just $15,000. A ridiculously low amount for a truly historic quality piece of art, which turned out to be one of the earliest instances of gender nonconformity in art.
The picture soon landed in the collection of the Portland Art Museum, where they proudly share the rather dark piece of history this artwork preserves.
The thing is, these are not just two merry guys here. One of them, the weirdo on the left, is the Femminiello.
Femminielli, or, literally, little women-men, cross-dressed males, were brought up dressed as a woman from a young age and were accepted almost as a third gender in the Italian society of the day. Rumour has it, that you can still meet them in the narrow streets of the old city even today…
Intriguing and really curious indeed, right? I was captivated by this subject and did some further research on how this grown-up man on the left got trapped in a female dress against his will.
Who were Femminielli?
Femminielli were usually coming from impoverished families from one of Naples’ poorest neighbourhoods at the time, the Spanish Quarter. There is actually a hint for that in this painting, as the poor guy is clearly missing a tooth and has a goitre, a hereditary condition among the poor of the day.
There were usually several, well, many children in those families and they all used to sleep together in one sort of bed and lead a rather unrestricted and frivolous life up from the child years. Usually, when there were too many sons in such a family, the younger one might be made the Femminiello.
They were often left uneducated and grew up illiterate, yet coddled tenderly by their mothers. Interestingly, they were cross-dressed from an early age, yet their parents did not try to conceal their birth sex completely.
Grown-up femminiello would usually look rather extravagant, openly showing his love to dress up and paint himself like a woman, assuming caricatural movements and vocal tones, amplified by very expressive gestures.
It’s fascinating, yet this type of behaviour wasn’t mocked up in those poor neighbourhoods at all, on the opposite, femminielli were met with good humour rather than derision.
They were thought to confer good luck onto households in which they were raised, so, they say, that Neapolitans would often take them gambling. The painter made a nod to this tradition in this necklace of red coral, which is also thought to bring good fortune.
I made a whole video about them, so, if you’d like to learn more about this phenomenon, welcome to watch it now or later.
It’s curious that owing to social prejudice, cross-dressers were rarely depicted until the modern era.
In spite of Neapolitan acceptance, this painting by Bonito is believed to be the only known representation of a femminiello before photographs made at the end of the nineteenth century.
Well, and here goes the discovery and an important correction — it WAS the only, since, I believe, I’ve bumped into another one here.
The Discovery
In fact, I was struggling with finding quality illustrations (if any at all) for my video. I had to base my story on that only known picture by Bonito and add some 20th-century black-and-white photos of the last representatives of this subculture.
So, an idea came to my mind.
What if there is another painting of a femminiello by Giuseppe Bonito? The subject was colourful and picture-worthy, so, perhaps, he would come up with several variations on the topic.
With this assumption in mind, I began my online search: I looked at what we got in the Smart Art app, double-checked in the Wikimedia Commons and other online image databases, and so on.
Obviously, no other painting, apart from Portland one, had a ‘femminiello’ in the title, nor anything was duly noted in available online registers.
I then studied all the personages of his known pictures — perhaps, someone lurking in the background looks like femminiello? Well, there were a couple of ‘suspects’, yet, frankly speaking, that was quite a stretch already.
And, then, the was this eureka moment.
I stumbled across this genre scene which was listed as “attributed to Giuseppe Bonito” when it was offered at a minor Italian auction sale in Rome in 2019.
Well, well, well, look, whom do we see here? Titled “The Fortune Teller”, the painting represented no one else but the real almost flesh and blood Femminiello next to a young street girl.
Look at that huge goitre, the red coral necklace, the hand of, clearly, a man, especially when pictured to a teeny-tine palm of a girl.
There can’t be a doubt, a Femminiello it is. And, luckily, the image available online, was generously uploaded in good enough definition to give a quite confident assumption, that the work does belong to the very hand of Giuseppe Bonito himself.
All that makes it the second painting representing the femminiello, and, this way, an invaluable piece of historical evidence and a testament to the exceptional social acceptance of the femminielli cross-dressers in the city of Naples.
That time, they failed to sell it despite the modest estimate of $5k-7k. Well, with a new look at its subject matter, it may easily be worth even ten times more.
So, whoever owns the work — congratulations, time to approach museums across the world and see what they’d have to offer.
In my turn, I’ll try to forward this information to the Portland Museum, so they could amend their description of the first painting since it is no longer the “only known representation of a femminiello before photographs”.
And are you convinced? What would you say?
P. S.
Obviously, I’m not the only one who noticed this second painting and believed it to be the pic of a femminiello. After I made my own discovery, I found the blog written in Italian by art and history enthusiast from Naples, doctor-gynaecologist Achille Della Ragione, who is also the author of numerous texts on the history of Naples.
In fact, he is the one who wrote down the detailed story of the life and origin of the femminielli and these are his words that are now cited and interpreted by the Portland Art Museum, Sotheby’s and yours truly in our narrations.
So, in March 2022 Ragione went to an exhibition in Italy where they showed notable artworks of the masters from the so-called “Scuola di Napoli” (Neapolitan school in art). The above-mentioned ‘Fortune-teller’ was also there. In his little note about the show, Ragione also mentioned, that he believes that this is by all means a femminiello here.
So, yeah, this opinion by the known authority on the subject strengthens the case even further.
