Dr. Paolo Alei

Portraits of Women in Renaissance Venice are evasive to interpretation. Most of them are women with no specific identities. This hermeneutic indeterminacy has led art historians to speculate whether they are courtesans, brides, or demonstration pieces of “la bella pittura” (beautiful painting). This lecture will take in consideration a series of representations of women and try to analyze iconographic details (from the way they have arranged their hair to a jewel they might wear), corporeal movement (from a specific gesture of the hand to that pivotal torsion of the body called contrapposto) and finally the interaction between painted subject and the beholder (an exchange of gaze which is much imbued with the poetic trends of the time involving the legendary poetic relationship between Petrarch and Laura). In some cases, recent scholarship, based on the discovery of new treatises and dialogues of the early modern period, has broken the veil of mystery and this lecture will try to dig a bit further in the discussion of women identities in the Renaissance.