Renaissance Women Patrons: Wives and Widows in Italy.

Catherine E. King. Renaissance Women Patrons: Wives and Widows in Italy, 1300-1550.

Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998, 272 pp. $79.95 (cl); $29.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-7190-5288-2 (cl); 0-7190-5289-0 (pbk).

The stated goal of Catherine King's Renaissance Women Patrons is an impressive one. She undertakes an examination "of the sorts of things ... lay women were able to commission, and ... the kinds of audiences that they were able to address" (2). Accordingly, women like Isabella d'Este, Alfonsina Orsini de'Medici, and Eleonora di Toledo are not the focus of this book. Instead, King has chosen to consider the patronage patterns of a class of women who, until now, have received scant attention. While the specific identities of these women are not ignored, it is the general concept of what it meant to be the wife or widow of a banker, jurist, or merchant that King explores. Thus, while case studies are an essential and illuminating part of this book, it is the image of "patroness" emerging from the combined stories of Giovanna de'Beccaria, Sibilia Cetto, Anna Contreria, and others, that is most impressive. It is an image that speaks to -- as it maneuvers around -- definitions of femininity devised by men as well as all the attendant problems of decorum, wealth and managerial authority.

King begins at the beginning. She provides the reader with a comprehensive but not overly belabored discussion of the myriad sources that merged to define woman: Savonarola's Book on the Widow's Life (1491), Paolo da Certaldo's Book of Good Customs (1365), Giovanni Nevizzano's Nuptial Forest (ca.1520), and others. The presciptives in these texts provide an all-important backdrop against which King's case studies can be understood. Her consideration of the effects of these advisory texts is comprehensive. For example, consensus held the wife to be subservient to her husband in all things and at all times. The latter included his postmortem image and will. Thus, the commissioning of an effigial tomb for a deceased husband enabled a widow to exercise negotiating powers she could not have assumed while he lived. She could, as was the case with Giovanna de'Beccaria's sepulchral commemoration of her husband Raffaello Fulgosio, select the artist, review designs, choose materials, approve epitaphs, and otherwise see a project through from its inception to its completion. Of course, and as King rightly makes clear, any number of factors, such as the presence of a male heir or the specificity of the deceased's will, could complicate the situation. A subsequent marriage mattered, too. Sometimes it did so in unpredictable ways. Sibilia Cetto's second husband, a lawyer, assisted in legal battles that staved off various land claims, making it possible for her to create the largest and most central hospital/cloister/church complex in Padua.

Throughout her study, King is careful to make distinctions that are too often passed over in a book that attempts to present the reader with a comprehensive view of its subject. As King acknowledges, regional conventions and taste influenced, if not determined, the form and imagery of monuments and altarpieces. She is right to remind us by example that gender is not always the overriding cause of why a thing looks the way it does. The projects sponsored by Neapolitan and Venetian women were not interchangeable. Similarly, myriad factors, which included regional preferences, determined whether a wife's represented presence was to be effigial or merely symbolic. Votive images that incorporated portraits of the donatrix, such as Carlo Crivelli's Madonna and Child with Saints Francis, Sebastain and the donatrix Oradea Becchetti (1491) were also subject to the conventions of time and place, notably those dealing with pictorial scale. But these images also disturbed convention in ways that sculptural monuments hon oring a husband did not. "Where portrayals of women often denoted the quality of the passive feminine as to-be-looked-atness, the portraits of the donatrix drew viewers to observe her watchfulness -- in this case, to look at her looking intently at the holy figures she revered, and they guided the spectator to imitate her devotion. Female spectators were being offered an abnormally privileged viewing position" (137). The issues discussed by the author in the introductory chapter find their greatest resonance here. As King effectively describes how these images guide the viewer to follow the gaze of the donatrix, Francesco Barbaro's admonition against woman's wandering eyes (evagatio oculorum) cannot help but come to mind. As we read Renaissance Women Patrons we are again reminded of the power of images and made mindful of the power of those who control them.