Patricia Simons
University of Melbourne, Art History, School of Culture and Communication, Professorial Fellow, University of Melbourne
Patricia Simons is a specialist in the art of Renaissance Europe (primarily Italy, France and the Netherlands) with a special focus on the representation of gender and sexuality and interdisciplinary research on materiality, visuality and material culture. Her books include The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and the co-edited Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy (Clarendon Press, 1987). Her work ranges from fourteenth-century Italian imagery to contemporary Australian art. Essays, published in anthologies and peer-review journals like Art History, Renaissance Quarterly, and Renaissance Studies, have investigated such issues as portraiture as a mode of fictive representation, medical discourse in relation to visual culture, the representation and reception of female and male homoeroticism, the visual dynamics of secrecy and of scandal, and the public and theatrical use of Christ Child figures. It is distinguished for its combination of rigor and innovation, as well as for analyzing the breadth of visual and material culture, from badges to maiolica, anatomical illustration to erotic prints, life size sculpture to canonical oil paintings and frescoes. Her latest project is a large, open access Google Doc, a global bibliography on premodern women artists and patrons (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qciG2ndN2dOfg4KDgL9LwCOl8HUZP5liSKtwRcJ_Ah4/edit). She is currently working on a book-length analysis of the visual and cultural history of beards as core markers of various masculinities in Early Modern Europe, including a consideration of racial and ethnic differences. She holds an honorary Professorial Fellow appointment at the University of Melbourne and is also Professor Emerita, Women’s and Gender Studies/History of Art, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
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Books by Patricia Simons
"Identifying Artemisia: The Archive and the Eye" by Mary D. Garrard;
"Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy and the Madonna of the Svezzamento: Two Masterpieces by Artemisia" by Gianni Papi
"Deciphering Artemisia: Three New Narratives and How They Expand our Understanding" by Judith W. Mann
"Unknown Paintings by Artemisia in Naples, and New Points Regarding Her Daily Life and Bottega" by Riccardo Lattuada
"Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders (1610) in the Context of Counter-Reformation Rome" by Patricia Simons
"Artemisia’s Money: A Woman Artist’s Financial Strategies in Seventeenth-Century Florence" by Sheila Barker
"Artemisia Gentileschi: The Literary Formation of an Unlearned Artist" by Jesse Locker
"Women Artists in Casa Barberini: Plautilla Bricci, Maddalena Corvini, Artemisia Gentileschi, Anna Maria Vaiani, and Virginia da Vezzo" by Consuelo Lollobrigida
"‘Il Pennello Virile’: Elisabetta Sirani and Artemisia Gentileschi as Masculinized Painters?" by Adelina Modesti
"Allegories of Inclination and Imitation at the Casa Buonarroti" by Laura Camille Agoston
"Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy by Artemisia Gentileschi. A Technical Study" by Christina Currie, Livia Depuydt, Valentine Henderiks, Steven Saverwyns, and Ina Vanden Berghe
Co-edited by
Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Art Institute of Chicago
Edward H. Wouk, Art History and Visual Studies, University of Manchester (UK)
Please note that this book is still in print, available in paperback, and I cannot supply copies of it. Please encourage your institutional library to obtain a copy.
Papers by Patricia Simons
"Identifying Artemisia: The Archive and the Eye" by Mary D. Garrard;
"Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy and the Madonna of the Svezzamento: Two Masterpieces by Artemisia" by Gianni Papi
"Deciphering Artemisia: Three New Narratives and How They Expand our Understanding" by Judith W. Mann
"Unknown Paintings by Artemisia in Naples, and New Points Regarding Her Daily Life and Bottega" by Riccardo Lattuada
"Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders (1610) in the Context of Counter-Reformation Rome" by Patricia Simons
"Artemisia’s Money: A Woman Artist’s Financial Strategies in Seventeenth-Century Florence" by Sheila Barker
"Artemisia Gentileschi: The Literary Formation of an Unlearned Artist" by Jesse Locker
"Women Artists in Casa Barberini: Plautilla Bricci, Maddalena Corvini, Artemisia Gentileschi, Anna Maria Vaiani, and Virginia da Vezzo" by Consuelo Lollobrigida
"‘Il Pennello Virile’: Elisabetta Sirani and Artemisia Gentileschi as Masculinized Painters?" by Adelina Modesti
"Allegories of Inclination and Imitation at the Casa Buonarroti" by Laura Camille Agoston
"Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy by Artemisia Gentileschi. A Technical Study" by Christina Currie, Livia Depuydt, Valentine Henderiks, Steven Saverwyns, and Ina Vanden Berghe
Co-edited by
Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Art Institute of Chicago
Edward H. Wouk, Art History and Visual Studies, University of Manchester (UK)
Please note that this book is still in print, available in paperback, and I cannot supply copies of it. Please encourage your institutional library to obtain a copy.
When considering the representation of race, a broad range of visual evidence, types of visibility, and cultural situations need to be acknowledged and analyzed. Above all, as with gender it is crucial to do more than repeatedly identify victimization and objectification, and work toward recognizing agency and subjectivity. Who sees what, and in which circumstances, is not an immutable or timeless process, and new ways of seeing old material demonstrate that history is about subtlety and change, offering hope for a different future.
A link to the YouTube video is supplied.
However, four or five copper busts from Venice and dated c. 1500 depict more dignified African men, clothed in fine brocades. These fire-blowers are related to but distinct from ancient and Renaissance lamps, in which the flame arises from the penis or mouth of a caricatured figure, often marked as African. In part associated with the classical revival, these objects also depend upon the notion that Africans were black due to the “the great heat of the sun,” as Jean de Mandeville put it. The idea was common in ancient literature, especially the geographies of Ptolemy and Strabo, both of which had recently been translated and printed in Venice. Features such as dark skin or male genital arousal were associated with physiological heat and masculine spiritus (spirit or breath), and thus were particularly appropriate for objects that produced or exacerbated fire. Noisily and vigorously blowing, placed close to the fire that the medieval body language indicates is fierce, they act as apotropaic guardians as it were, not only encouraging the embers but also ensuring that they will neither be, nor seem to be, dangerous or frightening. Amusing subordinates in the medieval examples, the Renaissance fire-blowers are instead dignified, fashionable African men whose efficacy rests on key assumptions made about their physiology as well as their sex.
The “preliminary,” safe mood and facile manner of rococo images accorded with what French authors characterized, in memoirs and pornographic tales, as inconsequential, unthreatening female-female intimacies that bore no stigma of cuckoldry. With this in mind, the paper then focuses on images of Diana, goddess of chaste corporeality, adopted often as a persona for the portraits of noblewomen (including royal mistresses), and popular as a subject when coupled with beguiled Callisto. The masquerade of insignificance enabled the true mask, the nonchalant disguise of innocence, which nevertheless luxuriated in sensuality.
The common strategies of word play and visual punning feature on the dish, literally in the case of inscriptions and figuratively by way of jokes about words like “head” and “hood.” In reverse writing that recalls Leonardo’s mirror script, the banderole declares that “every man looks at me as if I were a head of dicks,” a state that is visibly true because the head is indeed a composite of male genitals that attracts the gaze. On the reverse a sentence comments on reversals: “If you want to understand the meaning, you will be able to read the text like the Jews do” (i.e. one must read the text from right to left). Just as jokes occur on both sides of the plate, so too do the vulgar and the erudite combine in the double-sided game of serio ludere that was central to emblem books. Certain features, such as the earring, make anti-semitic references to Jews and the inscription mocks Hebraic and syncretistic scholarship. The artifact suits the occasion of banquets held by academies at Carnival time. It was probably made as a mock gift, of the sort presented by learned members like Annibal Caro to the “king” at a series of feasts celebrated by the “Academy of Virtue” in Rome during the 1530s.
The dish offers a learned insult, one that had to be laughed at by the receiver and all other viewers in order to deflect its attempt at one-upmanship. It is an example of what Caro called a metaphor (metafora), a word for “sticking it out or sticking it in” (metter fuora, o metter dentro). The topsy turvy dish mocks and bonds at the same time, uniting privileged men who enjoy jokes that are double-sided but overt rather than hidden, witty in both their literalness and literary mode.
This paper examines the cultural habit of anthropomorphization, of both vessels and genitals, which enabled such a pun to signify. Plato and Augustine imagined the male genitals as a beast with a mind of its own, an animal that features on late medieval badges. Having usurped the seat of reason with the drive of lust, the phallic region of demons or Lucifer is sometimes depicted as a second face. Pots also assumed humanoid features, including phallic spouts. Ludic word usage amplified the wit of material culture. Testa had a clear sexual connotation, evident in the face at the end of several surviving metal codpieces made for armour, as well as in carnival songs and works by authors such as Boccaccio and Aretino. Another pun concentrated on the “hood” or “cap” of the foreskin (a burlesque poem by Michelangelo and a drawing attributed to him will be examined, as will several cheap badges in which the nose is clearly penile).
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This is a GOOGLE DOC, OPEN ACCESS, and all suggestions and additions are welcome.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aPgPgXUVTWel8aXe1lzUrgmS4t30Xiye/edit
Pat Simons
26 Oct 2020
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qciG2ndN2dOfg4KDgL9LwCOl8HUZP5liSKtwRcJ_Ah4/edit?usp=sharing
The TABLE OF CONTENTS is listed here.
AS OF 29 MAY 2020 THE BIBLIOGRAPHY IS NOW A GOOGLE DOC OF 130+ PAGES. IT IS OPEN ACCESS AND COMMENTS ARE WELCOME.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qciG2ndN2dOfg4KDgL9LwCOl8HUZP5liSKtwRcJ_Ah4/edit?usp=sharing
AS OF 29 MAY 2020 THE BIBLIOGRAPHY IS NOW A GOOGLE DOC OF 130+ PAGES. IT IS OPEN ACCESS AND COMMENTS ARE WELCOME.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qciG2ndN2dOfg4KDgL9LwCOl8HUZP5liSKtwRcJ_Ah4/edit?usp=sharing