Receptions of Antiquity, Constructions of Gender in European Art, 1300-1600

Marice Rose, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Art History at Fairfield University. She publishes on the topics of classical reception, images of women and slaves in the late Roman empire, and art history pedagogy.Alison C. Poe, Ph.D., is an Adjunct Instructor of Art History at Fairfield University specializing in Roman imperial-era and late antique funerary art and architecture as well as in classical reception.Contributors to this volume are Katherine M. Bentz, Mary Edwards, Genevieve S. Gessert, Hetty Joyce, Claudia Lazzaro, Stephanie C. Leone, Maria F. Maurer, K. Sarah-Jane Murray (with Ashley A. Simone), April Oettinger, Patricia Simons, Timothy Smith and Ian Verstegen.

"Overall, this collection of essays explores new, gendered ground in the firmly rooted classical tradition in Renaissance art, and scholars from art history, literature, and gender studies will all find this book to be informative. The volume sheds much light on an important subject that has not received the attention it deserves from scholars; (...) I have no doubt that future explorations of gendered receptions of antiquity in Renaissance visual culture will draw on the many insights of these essays." Allison Fisher, Renaissance Quarterly, Volume 70, Number 1"As is often found with such books, there is variability among the essays, but the overall quality is excellent.There are numerous figures included within the essays demonstrating the care with which each scholar considered the evidence for their claims.(...) The variety of approaches to the topic of gender in the reception of classical art highlights how fruitful this topic is. The overall effect is the demolition of static, prescriptive notions of gender over the period in question and to demonstrate the multivalence of many classical motifs." Natasha Amendola, The Medieval Review 16.12.12"Ultimately, the collection of essays is perhaps the ideal format for poststructuralist approaches to art history. A clear principle—the relative “horizon of expectations”—underpins the otherwise sui generis data of a multitude of case studies, each with her own nuanced stories that might be overshadowed by a broader narrative, and art history is richer as a result."Rebecca Shields, Rutgers University, Woman's Art Journal 38, 1, summer 2017."A strength of the essays is the way in which scholars note that the interpretation of the classical figures was not static; repeatedly the reader is shown that interpretations change over time and are based on the circumstances of the viewer, differentiated by gender or by social and economic status. This book is a valuable and welcome addition to the study of late medieval and early modern receptions of gender and classical antiquity in visual culture. (...) The editors and most contributors are art historians, but the methodological perspectives and conclusions offered here will be of broad interest to scholars across the humanities."Rita Keane, Drew University, Speculum, 94/4 (October 2019).

• TABLE OF CONTENTS Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: Classical Reception, Gender Studies, and Art History (Marice Rose and Alison C. Poe) 1. Cross-Dressing in the Arena Chapel: Giotto's Virtue Fortitude Re-examined (Mary D. Edwards) 2. The Liminal Feminine: Illuminating Europa in the Ovide Moralise (K. Sarah-Jane Murray with Ashley A. Simone) 3. A Giant Corrupt Body: The Gendering of Renaissance Roma (Genevieve S. Gessert) 4. Luca Signorelli's Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome and Viewers in the Palazzo Petrucci, Siena (Stephanie C. Leone) 5. Queer Fragments: Sodoma, the Belvedere Torso, and Saint Catherine's Head (Timothy B. Smith) 6. The Trouble with Pasiphae: Engendering a Myth at the Gonzaga Court (Maria F. Maurer) 7. Vision, Voluptas, and the Poetics of Water in Lorenzo Lotto's Venus and Cupid (April Oettinger) 8. The Crone, the Witch, and the Library: The Intersection of Classical Fantasy with Christian Vice during the Italian Renaissance (Patricia Simons) 9. Picturing Rape and Revenge in Ovid's Myth of Philomela (Hetty E. Joyce) 10. Figuring Florence: Gendered Bodies in Sixteenth-Century Personifications and Their Antique Models (Claudia Lazzaro) 11. Conjugal Piety: Creusa in Barocci's Aeneas' Flight from Troy (Ian Verstegen) 12. Ancient Idols, Lascivious Statues, and Sixteenth-Century Viewers in Roman Gardens (Katherine M. Bentz) Index