Violence in the Uffizi

or, In Search of Feminism in Renaissance Portraiture

The #MuseumMarathoner in me is always down for a game of “Find the Negro,” in which contestants search for black figures in pre-20th century artworks. It’s a game, or practice of looking you could call it, that I learned from the brilliant artist Fred Wilson. In his groundbreaking 1992 show, Mining the Museum, Wilson relabeled a particularly twee 19th century oil painting “Frederick Serving Fruit” after the young black boy serving the well-heeled and unbothered white family at their bourgeois picnic. In a deft three words, Wilson alerted viewers to what was always hiding in plain sight: unnamed blackness that gives whiteness its power and meaning. After that, I couldn’t unsee.

So after 4 days at a conference exploring black images and the black imaginary (Black Portraitures [II]: Resignifications of the Black Body in Florence, Italy), I was looking forward to our trip to the renowned Uffizi Gallery and to think about Medici wealth and its relation to Africa. I wanted to think about how and where and when and why black figures appear in Renaissance portraiture. My game had gotten more sophisticated over the years.

There are more black figures than you would think. Blackamoors for example, exoticized African servant-figures, especially male, were very popular especially in Italian art and decoration, and one of the ongoing themes/preoccupations of the conference organizers.

But not all blacks appear as figures of servitude. Take for example, the darkened figures of the damned, when you climb up into Florence’s Duomo and see Giorgio Vasari’s incredible fresco of the three kingdoms, heaven, hell, earth. Hell is the most visible to the eye and also largely populated with brown people (crispy from hellfire I suppose).

But there are also a number of artworks in which black people appear as individuated and somewhat elevated, in versions of Adoration of the Magi, would be one key example. All to say, I was primed and ready to find every last black figure in every last painting in Florence.

How then was I not prepared for the prevalence of violence against women in the Uffizi? And let me be clear, I mean white women. Black women and women of color are rare birds in the Renaissance…even that’s inaccurate because rare birds have a greater presence in the collection than women of color. But this is another post…

This violence appears as both physical cruelty and as the violence of institutional exclusion, the sheer absence of women artists in the collection.

This violence — these violences — aren’t simply about the sexism and patriarchy of visual artists. Like we are fond of saying, artists are also products of their time. But the stories — both biblical and mythological — upon which they’re based are as fucked up as they come: the Massacre of the Innocents (there were at least two that I saw: Marco Benefial, “Massacre of the Innocents” 1730). Or the Boko Haram-scale Rape of the Sabine Women, one of Rome’s founding stories, (at least 3 that I saw). Or the slaying of Medusa, (at least 2 that I saw: Caravaggio’s “Testa di Medusa” 1597 and Pittore Fiannugo del Primo Seicentro, “Head of Medusa” from the first half of the 17th c.). And how many times did Zeus/Jupiter “appear” in some other earthly form and “seduce” and impregnate some woman who then had to bear the weight of Hera’s jealous wrath (Hera was for real the plantation mistress of the mythological world)?

The Uffizi functions as a repository of Medici wealth not simply through the sheer quantity of important Renaissance artworks. But wealth and significance are consolidated in the power of men announced through power’s exercise on and over the bodies of women.

In their most celebrated incarnations, that is, “at best,” women appear in art as allegories, made to stand in for some idea or concept beyond themselves. Take the “Allegory of Fortune” painted by an artist of the Scuola Fiorentina sometime in the 2nd half of the 16th c, which I imagine was the prototype for the Cinzano ads. Our nude and joyful woman is an object among many symbols of the good life, dancing among wine and coins but certainly not in possession of those items herself.

And in those stories above, the women are made to represent female chastity and virtue, and also female bodies as property of other men to be captured, and also female power in its own rite that needs to be chastened and destroyed. As John Berger put it so succinctly in his classic Ways of Seeing, “Men act, women appear.”

In Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi’s remarkable “Annunciation,” — and I do love a good “Annunciation” — the big reveal that Mary will give birth to the Savior, doesn’t appear a gift but an interruption, an invasion, an accusation (a rape?). The Archangel Gabriel practically spits the sacred phrases at Mary. And Mary actively recoils. In so many other Annunciations, Mary is happy for the interruption and welcomes men explaining things to her, suggesting Mary as a vessel. But Martini and Lippi’s Mary is pissed, god’s messenger an intrusion to the book she’s reading, her thumb holding the page to which she’ll likely never return, what with Holy Motherhood and all.

There were two works by women that I saw in the collection: the Dutch painter Rachel Ruysch, whose still lives painted with “Flemish incisiveness” can be found in a room facing her countryman, Rembrandt; and the remarkable Artemesia Gentileschi, a badass of the highest order.

Ruysch, whose father was a professor of anatomy and botany and whose maternal grandfather was a painter, began painting at an early age and became an artist’s apprentice at 15. Like most women painters of her time, she was confined to rendering inanimate and/or non-human subjects because to have painted live (male) models would have been unladylike, as in a gendered power grab of the masculine right to look. But Ruysch could paint the fuck out of some flowers and by the time she died in 1750 at the age of 86, she’d made hundreds of canvases, in her own almost hyperrealist style and was celebrated by royalty and artist guilds.

Gentileschi of course did not stick to flowers. But instead she recast herself in biblical stories of women’s tribulations and triumphs. Testing Caravaggio chiaroscuro, she worked through the trauma of rape by the older male painter to whom she was apprenticed, and the subsequent humiliating trial that ended in a guilty ruling for the rapist but no time served. After which, Gentileschi was married off by her father, Orazio Gentileschi, also a painter, to cover his debts.

The feminist revenge politics of Gentileschi’s stunning Judith Slaying Holofernes (of which she painted multiple versions) are fairly evident, especially in comparison’s to Caravaggio’s also beautiful but decidedly demure and tepid version: the way the strong arms of Gentileschi’s Judith and her maid entangle and overlap making clear the intimacy of their collaboration; their proximity to Holofernes’ struggling body, and the way they lean into this bloody work; Holofernes is no innocent as he reaches for the maid, grabbing her by the bodice arrogantly as if one last grope will change his fate; and Judith’s raised eyebrow is everything as she works her blade further into Holofernes’ jugular. By the time I’d made my way through the museum to Gentileschi, my eyebrow was also raised, and all I could think was yaaasss Judith. This. Motherfucker. Must. Die.

In the Uffizi collections, women wait, they sleep, they lie. Or they cower, submit and succumb. Sometimes they gallivant and often they preen. No matter what, it is exhausting and disempowering. Mostly, the Uffizi felt to me a museum rife with women defending themselves: defending themselves from Nymphs and Satyrs, from the massacre of their innocents. Defending their chastity, their virtue, their time, seeking security and protection. And I left the Uffizi stunned and somewhat alienated, all I desired for these women — both the fictional and historical — was a life uninterrupted.

Addendum: I Scream Daddio

I almost walked out of Sarah Lucas’ I Scream Daddio, the acclaimed British entry at the 2015 Venice Biennale. (Venice and the 21st century were our next stops after Florence). Had I done so, I wouldn’t have been alone. We watched numbers of people — mostly folks with small children and/or, judging from their accents, Americans — walk in to the pavilion, take a quick overwhelmed look at “Maradona Banana Dream” (at once erect and supine and totally not human) and exit the way they came. Like the yellow of the walls which walk an electric line between whimsical and garish, luscious and treacle, I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to giggle or be outraged. I did both.

I Scream Daddio’s sculptures take two general forms, each familiar and discomfiting. Like “Maradona Banana Dream,” many pieces appear like glossy sagging balloon animals, prone or lactating, childhood party playthings past their prime and flaunting their once alluring wares for attention cum survival. The Tit Cats, Lucas calls them, are painted in the festively named “gold cup” yellow, or they are cast in bronze.

Another set of sculptures are rough surfaced alabaster white half women — that is, legs, asses and vaginas cut below the navel — variously posed on mid-twentieth century office furniture and contemporary household appliances (washing machine, chest freezer, and the like). Cast from (and named for) the bodies of Lucas and some of her women friends, Lucas has stuck cigarettes into the orifices of some of the figures. “The cigarettes, in case you’re wondering, are for titillation mostly,” Lucas lets us know in the Pavilion pamphlet and checklist. “That is, gentle stimulation of a sexual kind.” One vagina almost seems to give birth to a Marlboro in front of a peepshow grid of 70s era nudie photos. Or could be the vagina is masturbating itself.

It was all so gross and halfway through I wanted it to end especially as I walked through with my 15 year old daughter (I, too, an American with kids). “If you happen to be one of those people who feel that the sculptures would have been better without the cigarettes, well, I put them there for you too,” says Lucas slyly. But the pavilion is set up as a loop so halfway through is truly the farthest distance from the exit. So as I clutched my pearls, I tried to steer the conversation to what might a feminist politics in art look like, which also admits that I wanted a feminist politics in art. And as we rounded the exit we began to circle again and noted the ways that Lucas wasn’t simply “inserting” cheap porn into the rarefied space of the gallery, a flouting of high-low fuckery that has been a signature of both modern and contemporary art. Rather, Lucas asserted the always already presence of the pornographic and the pervy in the oldest and most celebrated of museum collections. Because what else is sleeping Archimedes but another prone piece of basic ass on a cold slab?