Maria Maurer
My book project, Gender, Space and Experience at the Renaissance Court: Performance and Practice at the Palazzo Te, was published with Amsterdam University Press in 2019: https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789462985537/gender-space-and-experience-at-the-renaissance-court.
The book investigates the dynamic relationships between gender and architectural space in Renaissance Italy. I use the Palazzo Te (1525-1535), a suburban palace created by artist and architect Giulio Romano for Federico II Gonzaga of Mantua, to analyze and define the relationships between architecture, painting, and gendered interactions in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. Through court festivities and ceremonial encounters the palace served as a stage upon which its visitors and inhabitants performed early modern gender roles and negotiated their individual gendered identities. While the Palazzo Te may have been intended to provoke displays of normative femininity and masculinity, its complex spaces and polyvalent imagery opened upon a space for alternative performances. Rather than viewing early modern buildings as static bearers of meaning, Performing the Palazzo Te argues that buildings were active agents with which visitors interacted in order to produce and enact early modern ideas of gender.
My recent work continues to investigate the use and experience of space and the ways in which works of art and architecture allow beholders to negotiate gendered and sexual identities. My current book project, A Bastard History, investigates the role of mistresses and illegitimate children at the Renaissance court. I examine the ways in which women and their children used art and material culture to craft roles at court, as well as the ways in which the court used them to represent itself and its magnificence.
My second project, In Situ, partakes in the digital humanities. I lead an interdisciplinary group of students and faculty as we digitally reconstruct the scattered panels of Renaissance altarpieces and use altered reality technology to situate the altarpieces in their original church settings.
Supervisors: Giles Knox
The book investigates the dynamic relationships between gender and architectural space in Renaissance Italy. I use the Palazzo Te (1525-1535), a suburban palace created by artist and architect Giulio Romano for Federico II Gonzaga of Mantua, to analyze and define the relationships between architecture, painting, and gendered interactions in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. Through court festivities and ceremonial encounters the palace served as a stage upon which its visitors and inhabitants performed early modern gender roles and negotiated their individual gendered identities. While the Palazzo Te may have been intended to provoke displays of normative femininity and masculinity, its complex spaces and polyvalent imagery opened upon a space for alternative performances. Rather than viewing early modern buildings as static bearers of meaning, Performing the Palazzo Te argues that buildings were active agents with which visitors interacted in order to produce and enact early modern ideas of gender.
My recent work continues to investigate the use and experience of space and the ways in which works of art and architecture allow beholders to negotiate gendered and sexual identities. My current book project, A Bastard History, investigates the role of mistresses and illegitimate children at the Renaissance court. I examine the ways in which women and their children used art and material culture to craft roles at court, as well as the ways in which the court used them to represent itself and its magnificence.
My second project, In Situ, partakes in the digital humanities. I lead an interdisciplinary group of students and faculty as we digitally reconstruct the scattered panels of Renaissance altarpieces and use altered reality technology to situate the altarpieces in their original church settings.
Supervisors: Giles Knox
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Books by Maria Maurer
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female printmaker to sign her work and one of the few female artists mentioned
by Vasari in the second edition of his Lives (1568). Recognizing that printmaking
was an unusual female occupation due to its technique and wide circulation,
I argue that Diana entered into visual dialogue with Mantuan and papal
court artists to promote her work. Focusing on two prints made after the work of
Giulio Romano, this essay reveals that, through her work in a reproductive medium,
Diana commented upon the ability of women and printmaking to both copy
and generate, engaging broader discourses regarding imitation and invention to
market herself as a rare commodity.
This essay examines tensions between images, textual representations, and Renaissance gender roles and viewing practices. In imagining Pasiphaë’s transgressive sexual act, Renaissance artists expected women to interpret the story of Pasiphaë and the bull differently than men. However, actual viewing practices and the multivalent nature of the myth itself troubled such gendered receptions. . This study argues that while Pasiphaë signified the consequences of uncontrolled female sexuality, she also afforded women a certain amount of sexual license and visually exhorted both men and women to trouble gender boundaries. The attempt to establish gender binaries in the iconography of Pasiphaë and the Bull points to the ways in which artists and patrons used classical mythology to generate and disrupt gender and sexual identities.
Book Reviews by Maria Maurer
Talks by Maria Maurer
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female printmaker to sign her work and one of the few female artists mentioned
by Vasari in the second edition of his Lives (1568). Recognizing that printmaking
was an unusual female occupation due to its technique and wide circulation,
I argue that Diana entered into visual dialogue with Mantuan and papal
court artists to promote her work. Focusing on two prints made after the work of
Giulio Romano, this essay reveals that, through her work in a reproductive medium,
Diana commented upon the ability of women and printmaking to both copy
and generate, engaging broader discourses regarding imitation and invention to
market herself as a rare commodity.
This essay examines tensions between images, textual representations, and Renaissance gender roles and viewing practices. In imagining Pasiphaë’s transgressive sexual act, Renaissance artists expected women to interpret the story of Pasiphaë and the bull differently than men. However, actual viewing practices and the multivalent nature of the myth itself troubled such gendered receptions. . This study argues that while Pasiphaë signified the consequences of uncontrolled female sexuality, she also afforded women a certain amount of sexual license and visually exhorted both men and women to trouble gender boundaries. The attempt to establish gender binaries in the iconography of Pasiphaë and the Bull points to the ways in which artists and patrons used classical mythology to generate and disrupt gender and sexual identities.
"
I investigate the ways in which the palace was used to perform gender roles from the Palazzo del Te's inauguration in 1530 until the Sack of Mantua in 1630, and examine the role of the palace in constructing an ideally masculine image of the Gonzaga dynasty during the visits of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1530 and 1532), King Henry III (1574), and a series of newly-wedded brides (1584-1617). While the way in which the palace was employed changed over time, its role as a space wherein the Gonzaga princes performed an active, virile, and witty masculinity remained constant. This study unites archival evidence concerning the palace's ceremonial use with Judith Butler's theory of gender performance and Henri Lefebvre's conception of social space to reveal the intersections between social discourse on gender and personal agency at the Palazzo del Te. Not only did the palace play an instrumental role in the construction and reception of masculinity at the Gonzaga court, it also allowed individuals to negotiate their gender identities. By investigating the ways in which the Gonzaga family and their guests experienced the palace, my dissertation argues that gender was constituted in dynamic relation to space and that the Palazzo del Te was ideally suited to the performance of Renaissance gender roles.
This paper is divided into two chapters, covering the general history of feminine space and then moving on to specific cases of women's patronage of personal spaces. Chapter One argues that while women were active in creating spaces, which could speak publicly about their accomplishments and ambitions, they were also confined within those spaces. Chapter Two discusses the network created by five Renaissance noblewomen: Eleonora d'Aragona, Isabella d'Este, Veronica Gambara, Paola Gonzaga and Silvia Sanvitale, and asserts that the spaces created by and for these women were products of their relationships with each other.