Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index

At first glance, this painting appears to depict a great battle happening outside of the walls of Rome. Despite the armed soldiers ready for combat, with several soldiers drawing back bows and others brandishing pikes, the focus of the painting is a group of women holding children in the midst of the opposing forces. This painting is visually stunning, with the women and children dressed in bright colors, contrasting with the darker figures of the Sabine and Roman armies on either side. The graceful and serene nature of the women and children provides a sense of calm, despite the tension between the clashing forces.

This painting is a depiction of a well-known episode in the founding of Rome, recounted by the Roman historian Livy. The story has two main episodes, known commonly as the rape of the Sabine women and the reconciliation of the Romans and the Sabines. In the first episode, Romulus, one of the twin founders of Rome, orchestrated a cunning plan to abduct women from the neighboring Sabine people. Prior to this, Rome had very few women within the city, and neighboring tribes refused to allow marriages with the interlopers. To secure the city’s future, Romulus hosted a festival and invited the Sabines to attend, but during the festival, the Roman men kidnapped the Sabine women and hid them inside of the walls of Rome. The Sabine women eventually married the Roman men and had children. In the second episode, the Sabine men took up arms against Rome to save the Sabine women. The two armies began to fight each other when the Sabine women ran onto the battlefield, pleading for peace. The women brought their children, who were half Sabine and half Roman, to demand peace between their husbands and fathers. Because of the women’s actions, further violence was avoided and the Sabines and Romans became allies.

The Reconciliation of the Romans and the Sabines was painted by Jacopo del Sellaio. In 1441, he was born into a family of saddlemakers, but by 1460 Sellaio was known as an artist. He is credited with three large religious paintings, and numerous small devotional panels have been attributed to him. Art historians see Sellaio’s hand, as well as that of Bartolomeo di Giovanni, in Botticelli’s panels illustrating the story of Nastagio degli Onesti from Boccaccio’s Decameron. In fact, Sellaio’s most famous pieces rely on classical subjects and literary figures. Such images were important subjects, particularly in the fifteenth century, as patrons and artists took moral lessons from antiquity. These themes reflect a larger cultural movement in Italy that focused on a revival of classical texts. Florence was particularly influenced as it was home to a number of humanist thinkers and authors. These individuals had access to new translations of ancient works including those about the founding of Rome and Greek philosophy. For example, Plutarch’s Life of Romulus was translated into Latin from Greek by two different Florentine scholars, Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger in 1436 and Giovanni Tortelli in 1438. These translations made stories like the rape and reconciliation of the Sabines accessible to more individuals, who then paid for pieces of art illustrating these stories from the newly translated works.

Many of Jacopo del Sellaio’s paintings were spalliere panels often made for the bedchambers of newly betrothed couples. These panels could be attached to chests, used as headboards for day beds, or displayed, usually in pairs, on the wall. Sellaio’s spalliere panels often portrayed famous, or infamous, stories from classical writers about love and marriage, including Orpheus and Eurydice, Brutus and Portia, and Scenes from the Story of the Argonauts. He also painted cassoni, decorated marriage chests, made in pairs to hold the new husband’s dowry gifts . Some of Sellaio’s works, including Scenes from the Story of the Argonauts, may very well have been either a spalliera or a cassone, but the original display of the pieces is unknown, as both kinds of panels had similar uses in patrician households. In any case, the pieces were grand displays of wealth given to celebrate the uniting of two families in marriage. These pieces often bore images of Greco-Roman storytelling used to display messages about morality, status, and social expectations both for the new husband and the bride. Around the time that Sellaio created his panel of the Reconciliation, painted cassoni were losing favor among the wealthy, as they were harder to view, more readily damaged, and less able to accommodate new developments in displays of perspective in comparison with spalliere. Both forms, however, were important displays of wealth for patricians because of their substantial cost. One scholar even asserts that a single cassone chest could cost as much as an entire working family’s pay for a year. These pieces were often treasured by descendants and preserved as part of a family’s history.

The rape and reconciliation of the Sabine women were common images for spalliere and cassoni panels. Today there are twelve surviving works of art bearing the images of the story with numerous accounts of other works that have been destroyed. This made the two stories very common images for new brides. For example, a pair of spalliere, each panel representing a half of the Sabines’ story, was commissioned for the wedding of Lucrezia di Lorenzo de ‘ Medici and Jacopo di Piero Salviati. Although this particular set of paintings by Bartolomeo di Giovanni was from 1488 , the meaning behind this commission can be applied to the Sellaio painting. The story of the Sabine women legitimizes violence against women in the name of benefitting the larger community. For the Bartolomeo di Giovanni panels, it is unlikely that the wedding was about love and was, instead, about consolidating Florentine power over the papacy. The images of the rape and the subsequent reconciliation speak to the roles both of a new bride as well as her husband in terms of their community’s expectations.

While Greek and Roman myths would have been familiar to their Florentine viewers, paintings of these stories could include even more veiled meanings and messages. For example, the dress of individuals within the painting often carried numerous meanings. Regulation of clothing was crucial to patrician Florence, with clothing communicating unspoken norms such as social status, respectability, religion, and marital state. For example, wearing gloves and bells was reserved for prostitutes, and Jews in Italy were forced to wear a yellow "O" sign. To the modern eye, the dress of the women in the Reconciliation appears bright and airy, not unlike the dress typically worn in paintings of saints. To audiences of the time, the dress of the Sabine women would have resembled that of Greek and Roman goddesses, called ninfa, which emphasizes both their virtues and their faults. The women’s dress demonstrates that, while the Sabine women were correct in their deference to both their husbands and their fathers, they were not perfect role models for young brides, as the Sabines were not Christian and actively interfered in the male-dominated space of statecraft and warfare. Meanwhile, the men of the painting wear armor consistent with that of contemporary Florentine styles. The dichotomy between the men’s modern dress and the women’s ancient robes underscores how, despite the women’s virtue, the actions of the Sabine women did not fit perfectly into fifteenth century Florence.

Despite the failings of the Sabine women, their story was still a quintessential tale about the woman’s place for new wives in medieval Italy. In the myth, the Sabine women demonstrated perfect deference to their husbands and committed themselves wholeheartedly to their primary task of childbirth. Although the myth of the Sabine women appears to be advocating an active role for women in society, this erroneous statement could not be farther from the original understanding of the myth. In the medieval period, the Sabine women would have been understood as a model of female obedience. Despite the violence done to them in the first part of their story, having been abducted from their families and forced to bear children, the women implore their fathers to spare the Romans. The message being communicated to new wives hearing this story was simple: absolute obedience to their husbands. Obedience was the greatest virtue for Italian women in the patrician class. Although the Sabine women were obedient to the husbands primarily, they still demonstrated obedience to their natal families. Rather than allow their Roman husbands to kill their Sabine fathers, the Sabine women managed to be obedient to both groups of men. While they did not entirely forsake the interests of either group, the women managed to unite the two groups, emphasizing the benefits that marriage could bring for the larger community as well.

Central to the community’s benefits from marriages was the children that came from their unions. Childbirth and creating a growing population was essential to fifteenth century Italy, just as it was to the Romans of the Sabine myth. Italy continued to be ravaged by the plague, and Italian city states needed to repopulate, particularly since infants and young children were especially vulnerable to the plague. For example Florence, where many panels bearing the images of the Sabine women were commissioned, had a population of over 120,000 in 1338 but only 37,000 in 1441 (Musacchio, 1998). The number of paintings bearing the Sabine myth rose exponentially in the latter half of the fifteenth century, corresponding with various outbreaks of plague throughout Italy. Furthermore, many Florentine merchants during this period recorded their wives’ deaths in childbirth, and memorials, like that for Francesca Pitti Tornabuoni, made new mothers’ mortality a tragic public concern. Just as Romulus feared Rome’s destruction without more women to bear children, many Italians feared the end of their cities as a result of the plague and other medical complications. Thus, childbearing became an even more crucial role for women. As is described in the Sabine myth, women were obedient and bore children for Rome despite the violence committed against them. This message would have been imposed on new Italian wives: bear children at any cost in order to reinvigorate cities like Florence after the plague’s devastation.

The popularity of images of the Sabine myth as pieces of a dowry is unsurprising knowing the veiled meanings behind the myth’s retelling. The Sabine women were victims of extreme violence committed by the Romans in the name of preserving Rome. When the Romans and Sabines were going to clash, the Sabine women were role models of obedience to both their fathers and their husbands, using the women’s children to bring peace to the two peoples. Retelling the women’s perfect obedience and devotion to child rearing for Rome made new brides aware of how they were to act as wives and mothers. The emphasis of female roles in service to their husbands and their cities that defined the Sabine women made their myth the perfect story for reminding new brides of their place in Italian society.