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Women Who Ruled:
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Women Who Ruled is strongest in its insights pertaining to female heads of state and their deliberate use of imagery to promote their rule. An image, whether in a painting or a printable woodcut or engraving, might be the only means by which a ruler's public or subjects could 'see' and thus form opinions and impressions about their queen, and the book highlights female rulers' use of "visual strategies" in overcoming prejudices toward the ability of women to rule. Queen Elizabeth is the most accessible example, a figure of whom most readers will have at least some prior awareness and interest. The book provides a new understanding that it was not just chance, but intention, behind the ways in which she depicted herself. Contributing essayist Merry Weisner-Hanks describes her as
...Elizabeth, the early modern monarch who most astutely used both feminine and masculine gender stereotypes to her own advantage. Elizabeth often chose to wear clothing that emphasized her breasts, hips and narrow shoulders (pl. 18); carried objects associated with women such as fans (pl. 63); and, as she grew older, dressed in white, a symbol of purity and virginity. At the same time, she spoke excellent Latin when the situation warranted it, occasionally wore a small armor breastplate, and approved of portraits showing her with symbols of authority, such as a scepter (pls. 19, 20).
Intention also sparked the choice of female rulers in depicting themselves as warriors or goddesses:
It was important for a woman ruler and her supporters to justify her movement outside the typical areas of perceived female authority. One method was to link her with extraordinary, even divine qualities (pl. 2), or to depict her succeeding in male pursuits -- as a warrior (pl. 3), for example. There are fascinating examples of such heroic associations, which are all the more remarkable for their ability to undercut hundreds of years of doctrine and popular culture suggesting that women's actions outside a circumscribed sphere represented a perversion of nature.
Even Eleanora of Toledo, pictured on the book's cover, is shown to be an example of purposeful portrayal that brings a new awareness to this portrait of a woman and her son. Hers is not only the "first state portrait to show a wife along with her son, establishing an important trend in the official portraiture of female rulers" but also represents an iconography of fruitfulness, a reflection of "the chief functions of these rulers' wives: to produce male progeny in order to carry the dynastic line forward."
Though clear where it touches on historic fact, Women Who Ruled is, conversly, far less satisfying as an exploration of Renaissance and Baroque attitudes toward female power. Its smorgasbord of individual statements never coalesce into a guiding viewpoint, nor do they commit to taking a stance for the reader. In extreme cases, analyses dwindle into generalized statements such as
Women's authority in the state and household in early modern Europe was thus simultaneously accepted and questioned, necessary and problematic.
(Weisner-Hanks) or
While we cannot attempt to adduce from the material in this exhibition every sort of visual strategem that was used in female imagery of this period, those that tend to recur relate to broad concerns of expectation about gender.
(Dixon). Such statements fail to deliver hard fact, and represent an academic mealyness that frustrates the reader attempting to assemble a clear idea of "women's identities" of the time.
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Vague writing is only the first of several layers of impediment between the book's premise and its delivery of content to the reader. The book's triple-overlay of material can also be a challenge to navigate. Dixon divides the exhibition works into six categories based on patterns of recurrence in the images themselves: Wives and Mothers, The Virgin, The Seductress, The Heroine, The Warrior Woman, and The Goddess. (The book's plates only half-follow this format: for the first three-quarters the illustrations are presented in what appears to be a random sprinkling of Judiths, Amazons, queens, Salomes, etc., while for Dixon's "Thematic Overview" they are grouped into the theme being discussed.) The study of real-life rulers and their use of imagery must thus be cross-referenced across the thematic categories. At the same time, the fictional subjects of the recurring images must also be cross-referenced against these categories, and sometimes fall into more than one category. Judith, for example, can be both Seductress and Heroine depending on the depiction. At times, these ladies seem to hover outside any of the categories. To which does Susannah, much put-upon by the lascivious Elders, belong? Where does one fit in Rembrandt's Lucretia, lost in sorrowful reflection, knife poised to take her own life? Assembling it all is like three-dimensional chess: it depends on which board one starts on.
And which board, exactly, might that be? The question Women Who Ruled posits changes with the angle of viewing. Dixon's "A Curator's View," featured on the web site for the exhibition, http://www.umich.edu/%7Eumma/women/, expresses what the book seems to be about:
Women Who Ruled examines ways in which female rulers projected their own power and authority. Some imagery reflects and promotes traditional roles and characterizations of women in myth and in society - wives, mothers, virgins, widows - often interpreting them in novel ways. Other imagery seeks to justify a woman ruler's movement outside typical areas of perceived female authority by showing her with extraordinary, even divine, powers or linked to male pursuits, such as war.
...and indeed, four of the categories (Wives and Mothers, The Virgin, The Warrior Woman, and The Goddess) directly invoke examples of real-life, historic women. The fifth category, the Heroine, involves an artistic genre which does not directly depict, but was directly inspired by, "a plethora of women in power." In this case, "galleries of strong women" were produced as sets of book illustrations, the figures themselves drawn not from contemporary times, but from the distant past.
But, to return to "A Curator's View":
Still other imagery features assertive, even threatening, women who stepped out of subjugated roles into the roles of seductresses and murderers.
Those who have been proceeding on the idea that the book is about "ways in which female rulers projected their own power and authority" suddenly find themselves flip-flopped into quite another viewpoint. To add to the confusion this theme, The Seductress, despite clearly being a cat of another stripe, is plunked down in the "Thematic Overview" between The Virgin and The Heroine (both directly related to female rulers). The Seductress is a social threat. No ruler chose to have herself depicted as one. Why, then, is she here?
A vague question cannot produce a precise answer, and Women Who Ruled could have been more concise with a more well-honed, precisely-stated premise. As it is, its premise misleads. The answer to the question of The Seductress is that the book is not just about "women who ruled" but about a much broader topic: the visual vocabulary to be found in "images of powerful women." Women Who Ruled deals with the active, conscious use of imagery by female rulers; is about real-life, ruling women, the ways in which they chose to have themselves portrayed, and the concrete hows and whys of this representation; discusses female rulers constructing an identity that would survive, and serve, the pressures of regency -- and all of this is what it purports to be about. It also discusses the reactive use of imagery reflecting artists' (or patrons') conscious or unconscious responses to "the troublesome sight of a plethora of women in power"; attitudes in general toward "powerful women"; and works portraying figures from myth, history and Bible lore. The shift between active and passive portrayals is something never quite resolved in the text.
A well-written conclusion would have gone far to remedy the problems noted above. Bringing together as much material as it does, Women Who Ruled cries out for a drawing-together of sense and content, something to assemble the visual vocabulary across its entire range of images, real and mythical, queens and goddesses. The three contributory essays are placed between Dixon's "Introduction" and her "Thematic Overview," and with each, as with the contrasts or flashbacks of a complex fiction work, the mind reads, retains, and sets it aside to weave the next offering into the pattern of sense, waiting for the point at which the threads of topic will be drawn into a whole. One is left, unfortunately, still waiting for that to happen: the "Thematic Overview" itself (the final section) closes with a single short paragraph appended to its last discussion of iconographic theme ("The Goddess"), a paragraph that seems an abrupt closure to the "Thematic Overview" itself, let alone the entire book. Such lack of closure is, perhaps, one of the most frustrating aspects of Women Who Ruled.
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Throughout Women Who Ruled, "power" as a term is employed as a stereotype. Stereotypes can provide useful shorthand, but used to excess, diminish meaning through generalization of thought and idea. "Power" can be many things, including dominion, force or influence, sovereign power, ability to act, strength. When the book speaks of "reactions to female power," "images of powerful women," it does so in a way that implies an assumption that we -- you, I, the author -- are all speaking of the same thing, when in fact, we may have wholly different ideas. Such may seem a finicky criticism; but in a book where a word so varied in definition, so loaded in connotation, is part of the central concept, subtlety and nuance can greatly affect what is really being said. Women Who Ruled's depictions of "power" even include diametrically opposed ideas. The moral power of virtuous Artemisa, who drank her husband's ashes in connubial dedication, is not the physical strength, violence, and vengeance of a Judith or Jael, and so-called "reactions to female power" would vary correspondingly. To add to this, the generalized term "power" is spoken of in a way that assumes "power" is positive, desirable, though the "power" being described encompasses many things, and though the six thematic groupings include one whose "power" is distinctly not -- the Seductress.
This is, perhaps, an influence of the book's theme of gender studies. Dealing with a woman-focused topic, Women Who Ruled does, as might be expected, ring with a more or less feminist note. Phrases such as "the male gaze," the identification of "subjugated roles" in a "patriarchal society," and certain assumptions made in the text represent a particular underlying viewpoint. So perhaps it is only natural for the book's linguistic environment to make the idea of a "powerful female" an automatically desirable one. (The criticism here is not about female power itself, but rather, the undifferentiated expression of same in the text.) Even the Seductress archetype gets good press, referred as "a sexually assertive woman" -- though there is a world of difference between sexual assertiveness, which may be benign, even exuberant, and seduction, which in female or male implies negative power, a deception, a leading astray.
Women Who Ruled's feminist roots are most apparent in Mieke Bal's essay, "Women as the Topic." Bal deconstructs the exhibition in a feminist prose that is extreme, even violent, battering the senses with anti-male referrals such as "the fear-within-the-desire that characterizes the male terror of their own bodies," or her statement that
The object of the allegedly male gaze -- perversely made over-visible, because only staring at her can neutralize the horror of her invisibility -- must be turned into, precisely, a still image, as dead as a stillborn baby.
Bal concludes her essay with the brutal statement, "The hypervisibility of women in power is only another way of killing them." The bushwhacked reader may well wonder what just happened in this book of otherwise conservatively-written academic offerings. Yet her essay is a paradox. In her words one also finds observations on the juxtaposition of real and mythical women in the exhibition; comments on the surprising presence of "triply victimized" Lucretia among an exhibition whose theme is "women of power"; lively commentary on the myths and stories, as well as the observation that as we view these images of art and decorative objects we are seeing them wholly out of context, or rather, in the artificial context of a museum. Past her vitriol, her burning anti-male commentary, Bal's observations are some of more likely to provoke interested thought.
As visual imagery, Women Who Ruled's collection of works provides an excellent opportunity to see and compare similar themes across a range of depictions. This is a rich vein for the art lover or historian: the book draws together eighteen Judiths, thirteen images of Queen Elizabeth, seventeen of Marie de' Medici, eight Lucretias, and multiples of others including Venus, Delilah, Eve, Jael, Salome, Susannah, Catherine de' Medici, and many, many more. To see the contrast between a Queen Elizabeth stiff with brocade and pearls and one in simple, almost Puritan black, or an erotically charged Judith versus one who saws away with workmanlike dispatch, is to develop an awareness of the wide variety of depictive style and content of such subjects -- far more than is available in books that may illustrate only one or two such works at a time. The works themselves include a diverse assembly of Old Master paintings, book illustrations, and the inclusion of everyday objects such as painted enamels, tankards, decorated salt cellars. Many of the works are from private collections, unavailable for general viewing, thus seen here for the first and perhaps only time. Over half are engravings, representative of that technology -- so recently appeared on the scene -- which was to powerfully change the world, religiously and politically, through its ability to disseminate information: the printing press. The prints alone, less commonly seen than works such as Old Masters, are a delightful collection of imagery, swirling with the visual power of the engraver's art. (Aegidius Sadler's The Triumph of Wisdom over Ignorance and Cornelius Galle the Elder's Judith Beheading Holofernes are superb examples.)
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As a resource, Women Who Ruled examines its collected works almost strictly in the sense of depiction of power. Its exploration of the female content of each image would have been rounded out with more general history and art history. The book does note the Renaissance and Baroque eras as the emergence of the modern nation-state, but only barely hints at the pervasive religious struggles of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and the effects of such activity on the art of Western Europe's North and South. Sister Wendy Beckett notes in The Story of Painting
...a difference of outlook between the two cultures. In Italy, change was inspired by Humanism, with its emphasis on the revival of the values of classical antiquity. In the North, change was driven by another set of preoccupations: religious reform, the return to ancient Christian values, and the revolt against the authority of the Church.
Biblical imagery, for example -- much-represented in Women Who Ruled (Judith, Jael, Susannah) -- would have been influenced not only by attitudes toward women in authority, but by religious concerns, and the stylistic developments inherent in the art of the two periods under discussion. Sister Wendy points out the confluence of these two pressures:
As Catholics, artists in Italy were required to endorse the authority of the Church and to make the scriptures a palpable reality to its people. The heightened emotional content and the persuasive realism of Baroque painting provided the means.
This type of commentary, as well as a note on individual artists' motivations where known (Artemisia Gentilischi's Judith as opposed to Caravaggio's, for example) is missing from Women Who Ruled. These too were forces shaping the images of women presented here. Their inclusion would have lent an extra dimension to the understanding of the artistic images and their revelations of attitudes toward "female power."
Women Who Ruled: Queens, Goddesses, Amazons in Renaissance and Baroque Art casts its gaze backwards to imagery of, by, and about powerful women to seek new interpretation of these works as expressions of gender relations. It is an offering of varied clarity. On the one hand, its gathering of nearly one hundred Renaissance and Baroque artworks depicting female power permits a unique opportunity to examine and understand these diverse images as grouped by both period and content; and many of the observations made about these images are enlightening. On the other hand, the book's writing and organization do not fully express the possibilities of its premise, nor do they deliver the content in a way wholly accessible to the reader. In particular, without a concise summation, one single, strong note to guide the reader through its pages, the book remains a scattering of bright threads of information. Just how were ruling females, and female power, regarded in Renaissance society? In Women Who Ruled we find springboards, stepping-stones, and little side roads that lead off into what look like interesting answers to that question, without ever getting the feeling that we have truly arrived at a destination.
The exhibition, "Women Who Ruled: Queens, Goddesses, Amazons 1500-1650," of which this book is the catalogue, was on view at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, Michigan from February 17 - May 5, 2002, and will tour other venues in the United States in 2002. Details about the exhibition can be found on the University of Michigan Museum of Art's web site at http://www.umich.edu/%7Eumma/women/.
--Katherine Rook LieberKatherine Rook Lieber has edited ArtScope.net's Visual and Performing Arts reviews since 1998. Ms. Lieber is Editor and Associate Producer for ArtScope.net.
Editorial Note: All quotes, unless otherwise identified, are from the reviewed book itself. Sister Wendy Beckett is quoted from The Story of Painting: The Essential Guide to the History of Western Art (Little, Brown and Company:1994).
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