Images of Rape: The "Heroic" Tradition and its Alternatives.

Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The "Heroic" Tradition and its Alternatives

Cambridge and New York Cambridge University Press, 1999. xv + 118 figs. + 286 pp. n.p. ISBN: 0-521-58311-X.

Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. xiv + 6 pls. + 82 figs. + 302 pp. $35. ISBN: 0-691-02632-7.

These two books are primarily concerned with visual representations of heterosexual intercourse in the Renaissance, painful and traumatic on the one hand, pleasurable and invigorating on the other. Together they paint a fascinating and complex picture of the conflicted sexual premises, ideals, and solutions that lie behind and around such images. The visual works these authors present have never before been systematically studied.

Both books are avowedly propagandistic. Diane Wolfthal wants to recover the anguished late-medieval and Renaissance voices of the female victims of rape. She also wants to supplement the canonical works of art that glorify rape with some more critical, less idealized images and ideas about "real rape." Bette Talvacchia wants to retrieve the erotic and the obscene from the margins of Italian Renaissance studies, and she hopes we will consider this material in relation to our own contemporary debates about censorship. Both authors proceed on this path with care, sensitivity, and great diligence. These books should form a fundamental starting point for any future research on Renaissance sexual imagery. They make a strong and convincing case -- which ideally other scholars will accept as a challenge -- for integrating this material into the usually more restricted treatment of traditionally sanctioned cultural documents (the canon).

Wolfthal focuses on material from France, Germany, and the Netherlands from the twelfth to the seventeenth century. She also gives an initial introduction to the "heroic" tradition of rape imagery, images that glorify forced sexual relations in a number of ways. If she had used works from Northern Europe (she illustrates mostly Italian examples), her discussion here would have been more directly relevant and could have been more forcefully integrated with the rest of the book. The body of the book is divided into five chapters that treat selected "critical issues" which the author states constitute "fragments of a history of rape" (5). These include images of rape in late-medieval picture Bibles, in representations of war or soldiers' lives, in the context of law (legal treatises and justice paintings), in Christine de Pizan's writings, and in magical devices and Biblical stories where the woman is seen as the aggressor (Joseph and Potiphar's wife). It is understandable that the author did not adopt a single unitary approach, such as a chronological treatment of examples from all discourses (law, war, religion, magic, etc.). Still, the topics chosen are not always logically related or of the same order, so that a feeling of fragmentation is exaggerated.

Wolfthal finds that there is no general cultural shift during the Renaissance toward a more enlightened, modern view of rape; she believes that a study of rape imagery supports the thesis that there was "a worsening in the position of women during the Renaissance" (180). She does uncover interesting variations or complexities in this picture. For instance, justice images may be increasingly critical of the female victim, while war images progressively emphasize the evil of rape and its necessary, harsh punishment. Wolfthal, and some of the sources she quotes, grant images an animistic power: they are thought both to represent behavior truthfully and to prescribe actions effectively. But was Lucretia's suicide, painted by many Renaissance artists, truly and often meant as a guide for living (and dying)? Where did reality end and fantasy or propaganda begin? Lucretia's suicide was, incidentally, used as a powerful political image in early sixteenth-century Lutheran writings; at the same time it clearly served a s erotic stimulation for Protestant nobility. Future scholars can find many fruitful avenues for further work, such as this, within Wolfthal's text.

The eroticism of some rape imagery brings us to the theme of Bette Talvacchia's book -- which is also very much concerned with the presumed ability of art to stimulate more than aesthetic passion. Talvacchia's subject is also fragmentary, somewhat by choice, somewhat not. She is trying to understand the status of the erotic in Renaissance culture by a detailed analysis of what she presents as the "establishing case study" (xii) -- sixteen drawings of explicit sexual positions created by Giulio Romano in the early 1520s, engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi and shortly thereafter turned into a kind of sexual handbook with woodcut illustrations derived from Marcantonio's engravings and the addition of sixteen sonnets by Pietro Aretino. The sonnets, completely transcribed and translated by Talvacchia, use a male/female dialogue form to present a racy commentary on the joys and difficulties of the acrobatic positions that Giulio Romano initially imagined. Talvacchia treats these images and texts in six chapters, focu ssing successively on the historical situation, Giulio's style and related works, ancient sources, the issue of prints, Aretino's sonnets, and the general terms of Renaissance erotic discourse. There are also two final chapters concerning the transformation of erotic images first into classical mythological scenes and then into anatomical illustrations. In comparison to the carefully laid out body of the book focussing on Giulio's designs, these last two chapters are either somewhat obvious (chapter 7 on mythology) or not well or fully argued (chapter 8 on anatomy illustrations).

The erotic fantasy and imagination of Giulio Romano is important to study in part because it had quite dramatic consequences when it was published in Rome in the form of Marcantonio's prints: the pope had Marcantonio jailed and the prints were apparently confiscated and destroyed in great numbers. Only one single impression of one scene survives today along with expurgated fragments of others. Giulio's original drawings have also been lost, and in addition only one, mostly complete copy of Aretino's little book called I Modi, or the positions, is known today (it is fully illustrated here).

Talvacchia treats many of the intriguing questions surrounding these images in detailed and compelling, if also somewhat rambling, fashion (for instance, one has to wait until page 59 to learn why the positions might have been limited to sixteen -- an ancient idea). In terms of the artistic sources and inspiration for Giulio's work, one might say that Talvacchia successfully domesticates the images. She believes that Giulio's talent as a virtuoso figure designer was here simply applied to sexually explicit subject matter. In general she finds a number of convincing models for the whole project in ancient Roman sex manuals and erotic medals; so that she can conclude that I Modi "fits well within our understanding of the Italian Renaissance as a period of studied effort to make contact with, to explore, to appropriate and to rival another culture's production" (69).

But why then did Giulio's work, when reproduced by Marcantonio, cause such a stir? Talvacchia shows that the emphasis of I Modi on purely sensual pleasure and on sexual positions (like the woman on top) that were felt to impede conception was diametrically opposed to Church teaching, increasingly enforced through confession manuals. These images were sinful, and could in turn cause further sin -- but sin by whom?

Here I found Talvacchia's explanation unsatisfying and self-contradictory. She tries hard to understand Giorgio Vasari's comment that "since these designs were found in places where you would least imagine" they were deemed particularly offensive. What are the places where one would least expect to find them? Because Talvacchia believes that such Italian prints were in general intended, like drawings, for an elite audience, she proposes that they must have been found primarily among the Roman nobility, of which the papal court was a major component (72). But as Talvacchia herself states that is just where we traditionally imagine and know that erotic imagery had circulated and would continue to circulate. I suspect that what upset Vasari, and the pope before him, was the idea of such prints being sold in plain view to the masses in the piazzas of Italy -- as was in fact recorded later in the century (10). It was like pornography on the internet in the sixteenth century. Talvacchia does not want to apply what to her would be the misleading modern term pornography to the sixteenth-century material. She provides instead an interesting and thoughtful discussion of the crucial period concepts of onesto / disonesto, virtuous versus shameless men or behavior -- examined in carefully nuanced terms. Still some of the modern discourse around pornography -- pornography as capable of undermining social norms of gender, sex, sin, high and low -- might have been considered more fully here. In this sense, I wish she had said more about the mix of Aretino's intentionally crude language and the classical elegance of Giulio Romano's figural designs.

As these two books amply illustrate, verbal and visual depictions of explicit sexual behavior are challenging, even disruptive. Certainly, these books are both.