Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index


  • Record Number: 5409
  • Author(s)/Creator(s):
  • Contributor(s):
  • Title: Women Under the Gaze: A Renaissance Genealogy
  • Source: Art History 21, 4 (December 1998): Pages 565 - 590.
  • Description:
  • Article Type: Journal Article
  • Subject (See Also): Art History- Painting Eve (Biblical Figure) in Art Fall of Humankind Gaze Women in Art
  • Award Note:
  • Geographic Area: Italy
  • Century: 15
  • Primary Evidence:
  • Illustrations: Twelve figures. Figure One Leonardo da Vinci, "Head of a Girl" (Collection of Her Majesty the Queen). Figure Two West wall of the Brancacci Chapel in S. Maria del Carmine, Florence. Figure Three East wall of the Brancacci Chapel in S. Maria del Carmine, Florence. Figure Four Masaccio, "Expulsion from Paradise" (Brancacci Chapel). Figure Five Masolino da Panicale "Temptation of Adam and Eve" (Brancacci Chapel). Figure Six After Praxiteles, "Capitoline Venus" (Rome, Museo Capitolini). Figure Seven Limbourg Brothers, "Terrestrial Paradise" from the "Tres riches heures du Duc de Berry," fol. 25v (Chantilly, Musée Conde). Figure Eight Hieronymous Bosch, detail from "The Haywain" (Madrid, Prado Museum). Scenes from the Garden of Eden include Eve's creation, the temptation, and the expulsion. Figure Nine Titian, "Reclining Nude with Organist" (Madrid, Prado Museum). Figure Ten Titian, "Venus and Cupid with Man Playing a Lute" (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum). Figure Eleven Artemisia Gentileschi, "Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (Detroit, Detroit Institute of the Arts). Figure Twelve Rembrandt, "Danae" (Leningrad, The Hermitage).
  • Table: One chart. Diagrams of perspective and inverse perspective from Jacques Lacan's "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis" (1973).
  • Abstract: In a preliminary excursus, Michael Baxandall's concept of the 'period eye' is subject to both a positive and a critical assessment as a means of moving beyond the problematics of traditional iconography. Suggesting that the oversight of gender and sexual difference in the ways in which the concept has been put to work is structural rather than incidental, the article considers a series of stages in the representation of the female in Renaissance and post-Renaissance European art as overdetermined by fundamental processes of the theological exegesis of the scriptural figure of a woman. The 'period eye' is thus subjected to a critical assessment over a relatively long term of art historical methodologies. [Reproduced by permission of Blackwell Publishers.]
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  • Year of Publication: 1998.
  • Language: English
  • ISSN/ISBN: 01416790