Alina Cohen
The name Sandro Botticelli conjures visions of beautiful women: The
goddess of love emerging from the sea on a giant clam shell in The Birth of
Venus (ca. 1485) or the Three Graces sheathed in filmy dresses, dancing in a
circle in La Primavera (1477). Botticelli was best known for such idealized
depictions of women, yet the Renaissance
Renaissance
European art created between the 14th and 16th centuries that drew
inspiration from ancient Greek and Roman …
painter’s practice was hardly limited to these lush, erotic
visions. In fact, his oeuvre prominently features rape, gruesome murders, and
warmongering.
In Nastagio Witnesses the Punishment of Guido degli Anastagi and
His Beloved (ca. 1483), the second of four panels that comprise what is perhaps
Botticelli’s most visceral, violent series of paintings, a knight in a pink
cape digs his dagger into the bare back of a woman lying prostrate on the
forest floor. His left fingers plunge into her deep, brown wound as an
onlooker, Nastagio, watches in horror.
Scholar Gabriel Montua goes so far as to call this panel “one of
the most violent depiction [sic] of torture against women in classical
painting.” The work, however, is hardly an outmoded admonition against
rejecting men’s advances (an issue still faced by 21st-century women, who
continue to fear abusive repercussions from spurned would-be lovers). Such
renderings of brutality against women allowed Botticelli to incite shock with
visual spectacles that ultimately spout social and political aims.
Sandro Botticelli, The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti III, ca. 1483.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.
The Nastagio scene derives from a tale in Boccaccio’s Decameron
(ca. 1349–53). In the story, Nastagio, a nobleman, has been spurned by the
woman he wants to marry, Messer Paolo Traversari’s daughter. One day, he
wanders into a pine forest where he witnesses the violent scene Botticelli
depicted. Nastagio discovers that the pair have a story parallel to his own.
During her lifetime, the gutted woman rejected the knight, named Guido, who
subsequently committed suicide. As a kind of divine punishment, they are bound
to each other in a traumatic cycle: Every Friday, Guido chases after her, rips
out her heart, and throws it to his dogs.
After witnessing this violence, Nastagio invites Traversari’s
family to the next show. Botticelli’s third Nastagio panel depicts this as an
uncomfortable brunch. Behind tables laid with white cloths, a stunned group of
Traversaris watch as the knight once again raises a sword against the woman who
rejected him. Such a terrifying scene convinces Traversari’s daughter that she
should marry Nastagio out of fear that the same horror will otherwise befall
her. The fourth panel depicts the couple’s wedding feast.
This progression from violence to feast reveals a “thematic
development” from brutality to “the civilizing activities of an urban culture
in which peace and harmony were contracted through marriage,” scholar Scott
Nethersole writes in his catalogue essay for “Botticelli: Heroines + Heroes,”
an exhibition recently on view at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
Nethersole neglects to mention that a marriage made from a woman’s fear is
hardly likely to result in peace and harmony—at least for her. More likely—and
more importantly—for wealthy Italians in Renaissance society, marriage could
result in economic and political accord between two families.
“Botticelli was extremely sensitive to the representation of
violence and its effect on the viewer,” Nethersole explains. The artist knew,
in other words, that his brutal paintings could lead women into marital
submission. Nethersole contrasts the Nastagio panels with another violent Botticelli
work, The Story of Lucretia (ca. 1500). Both are examples of spalliere, or
painted wall panels, intended to grace the homes of wealthy families, who would
see them as daily reminders of morality. With their long, light hair, the women
featured in each painting seem strikingly similar to the beauties in
Botticelli’s most famous works. In both of these spalliere works, they’re
depicted as exemplary every-women rather than individuals.
Sandro Botticelli
La Primavera (Spring), 1477
Ufizzi, Florence
Unlike the Nastagio cycle, The Story of Lucretia presents the
narrative in a single horizontal scene. The symmetry of the composition
exemplifies another Renaissance ideal of order and balance. A Classical
triumphal arch stands at the center of the painting and is flanked by two
angular, columned buildings. In the foreground, a crowd of armored men
brandishes their swords as they lament the lifeless figure at the center:
Lucretia, in a green robe lying atop a black bier, a dagger emerging from her
chest.
In Lucretia’s tale (one of uncertain origins, although the ancient
Roman historian Livy is its most famous documenter), the Roman prince Tarquin
rapes the eponymous noblewoman. She kills herself out of shame despite the fact
that neither her father nor husband fault her or believe she’s been dishonored.
In retaliation, her uncle, Brutus, goes to war with Tarquin. Brutus’s troops prevail,
and he establishes a republic in Rome in place of the monarchy.
In The Story of Lucretia, it’s not violence that incites action but
its aftermath. In Botticelli’s painting, only when the soldiers see Lucretia’s
dead body are they moved to action. If Lucretia’s death is a tragedy, it also
becomes a political tool. Despite the centrality of female purity and fidelity,
The Story of Lucretia is unapologetically hawkish. The soldiers’ long, straight
swords and the tall column at the painting’s center serve as symbols of phallic
strength that connect their fight to the structures that literally uphold the
urban architecture of modern Florence. The patrons who lived with this
spalliera thus received a daily reminder of Republican ideals.
Botticelli captures a moment of aggression in the Nastagio panel
while The Story of Lucretia features the instances just before and just
following the violence: her suicide and the battle it incites. This difference
signifies the alternate moral lessons in each painting. Witnessing violence is
crucial to the Nastagio tale because it serves as a precautionary tale for
women, while witnessing its ruinous potential is integral to the nationalistic
fervor of the Lucretia story.
“Boccaccio was clear that violence has several effects,” writes
Nethersole. “It provokes fear and stimulates compassion. It can also catalyze a
change in heart and behavior.” As Machiavelli would later assert in his 1532
treatise The Prince, “it is better to be feared than loved.” Botticelli’s
brutal imagery similarly suggests an emphasis on frightening his audience over
seducing them. Today, his messages seem downright oppressive—and unfortunately
still relevant. In Botticelli’s time, as in ours, the safety of women’s bodies
was often secondary to the order of state politics.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario