During today’s class, we focused on women in the Renaissance. In general, women only had power when the husband died and it would only be that way if the heir was too young and the woman had to fulfill that role, in other words, widows had some power. In addition to widows, nuns also had power in the sense that they were women that removed themselves from a male society and had their own specific hierarchy. It was with these ideas that we started talking about portraits featuring females.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first portrait we discussed was Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of a Woman Inspired by Lucretia<\/em>. This painting depicts Lucretia Vallier holding an image of her namesake, Lucretia to show her as a model for her way of life which is supported by the note on the side. However, ancient Lucretia is often depicted differently than how she was in this painting because often times she is portrayed very sensually and erotically. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Another portrait we discussed was Titian’s Venus of Urbino<\/em>. What was interesting about this artwork is that, like other works during the Renaissance, there was no official title. Venus of Urbino<\/em> was a name given to the work later on in order to be able to reference it. This particular name was also to hide or distract from the fact that it is an erotic image by saying that it is the goddess Venus which shows how prude the times were when they gave this portrait this name. The question then was, if not Venus, who was she? It was believed that the lady depicted was either his mistress or even a courtesan because Venice at the time were known for their amazing courtesans. This portrait was also known to be an erotic image, almost pornographic with some people calling it obscene due to the way the woman is portrayed. It is also because she is naked that details about time have to be found in the background. For example, the structures, the clothes of the girls in the background, and her hair and jewelry all allude to the fact that she is a contemporary lady. The dog that lies next to her also alludes to fidelity but the sleeping of the dog can be interpreted as cheating happening. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" During today’s class, we focused on women in the Renaissance. In general, women only had power when the husband died and it would only be that way if the heir was too young and the woman had to fulfill that role, in other words, widows had some power. In addition to widows, nuns also had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11790,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1840"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11790"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1840"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1841,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1840\/revisions\/1841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar257-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}