#jutta sperling

[nsfwbible]

Bambino Lactans

Netherlandish artist Jan Gossaert made many paintings on the theme of the “madonna lactans,” or nursing madonna. This one, from around 1525, shows the baby Jesus with swollen breasts — as if he wanted to take over his mother’s role of lactating.

Modern scholars have suggested that Gossaert wanted to represent Christ’s motherly role of loving, feeding and saving humankind. 

But the painting’s “peculiar erotic charge — enhanced by the abundance of folds produced by Mary’s garments and the tactile appeal of the infant’s podgy body — makes the modern viewer wonder, again, whether the image was fit for prayer and worship,” historian Jutta Sperling observes.

Sperling wonders if Gossaert’s  “almost-lactating infant Jesus might have been a satirical response to and adaptation of Erasmus’s biting critique of the worship of the lactating Virgin and her milk relics.”

The image here is a detail from the original oil on oak panel in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

[suzannahnatters]

IT'S TIME YOU ALL HEARD ABOUT MY GIRL ARCANGELA TARABOTTI, SALTIEST NUN IN CHRISTENDOM

So, I first heard about Arcangela Tarabotti while I was doing the study for my novella THE CITY BEYOND THE GLASS, which is set in Renaissance Venice and inspired by a real historical practice: At one point during the sixteenth century, nearly sixty percent of all the noble women in Venice lived in convents. And the vast majority of them were there against their will.

For complex dynastic reasons (or basically…money and prestige), only one son and one daughter in each generation of Venetian noble families were permitted to marry during this period. The remaining sons resorted to the famous Venetian courtesans to find the companionship which was denied them in marriage, while the spare daughters were locked into convents. The system was unsustainably wasteful and had to be abandoned within a few generations, but by that time it was already too late - many of the old patrician families of Venice were already going extinct. (You can read more on this in Jutta Gisela Sperling’s book Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice).

While it lasted, the system had plenty of opponents. In 1619, Patriarch Giovanni Tiepolo said, "More than two thousand patrician women…live in this city locked up in convents as if in a public tomb. …They are noblewomen, raised and nurtured with the highest delicacy and respect so that if they were of the other sex, they would command and govern the world."

Even when they have suffered oppression, women throughout history have challenged the status quo, and the women of Venice were no different. Arcangela Tarabotti is the foremost example.

Arcangela was just 11 years old when her father sent her to the convent of Sant'Anna. He considered her to be unmarriageable because she had a physical disability, which she had in fact inherited from him. She would spend the rest of her life there, taking vows as a nun in 1623…a fact about which she was in a white-hot fury.

"Why, then, do you defy the works of the Most Just One by decreeing that many women should live all together, alike in dress, dwelling place, food, and conduct, when the Lord of Lords makes it a miracle of His infinite wisdom for all things He created to be different? Why do you want to bend to your whim contrasting wills created so by nature? It is nothing less than wanting to change and correct the deeds of a Creator who cannot err."

During her early years in the cloister, Arcangela gained a reputation for rebellion and outspokenness. At one stage, it took a direct command from the Patriarch himself to force her to cut her hair. Despite this, Arcangela was able to access a high standard of education at the convent and became a philosopher and writer, corresponding with an impressive network of the thinkers of her day. She wrote multiple works critiquing the misogyny entrenched in Venetian society - including a scorching expose titled Paternal Tyranny.

“Only hell itself bears a likeness to the suffering of these enforced slaves of Christ," Arcangela wrote concerning the Venetian women imprisoned in nunneries. "Over the gate of Hell, Dante says, are inscribed the words ‘Abandon every hope, who enter here.’ The same could be inscribed over the portals of convents.”

Contrary to the polemicists of her day, Arcangela maintained that women were fully equal to men and even argued that they should be able to become lawyers and judges. "Both male and female were born free, bearing with them, like a precious gift from God, the priceless bounty of free choice. If in God’s eyes woman is not less privileged than you with respect to her physical or spiritual qualities, why do you wish her to seem created with such great inequality, you enemies of the truth, proclaiming her to be subject to your impulsive, mad whims? In short, woman is deserving of less respect than you only when you have reduced her to this state by your scheming."

"When women are seen with pen in hand, they are met immediately with shrieks commanding a return to that life of pain which their writing had interrupted, a life devoted to the women's work of needle and distaff," she argued.

Tarabotti maintained that she did not condemn all men simply for being men: "Stricken by a guilty conscience, some men will say that I speak with excessive temerity about all men in general. They are greatly mistaken. If they behave justly, they will be protected from my attacks and those of others. I separate the just from the wicked (who are the subject of my discourse), since not all men are bad and not all women are good."

As a keen amateur historian, I’m accustomed to wincing when people assume that all women living before about 1920 were ignorant, oppressed, and unable to inherit or control property (as if world history was not long and diverse and filled with creative, bold, and influential women). For a limited time during the Renaissance, however, things really were incredibly bad for Venetian women. To find out more about Arcangela and her times, I highly recommend Letizia Panizza's translation of PATERNAL TYRANNY, published in 2004 by the University of Chicago Press!

[stickydreamsweets]

Jutta Sperling – Frauen-Power Kongress!

Für Frauen, die mehr wollen: Read the full article

[nsfwbible]

Virgin in Front of a Fire Screen

The painting, made around 1440 and attributed to a follower of Robert Campin, defied standards for virgin-and-child iconography: Milk drips from the virgin’s blue-veined breast, which she presents to the viewer instead of her son.

“Such unabashed emphasis on Mary’s nipple is unknown in Italian representations of the same topic,” historian Jutta Sperling notes. “Both before and after their ‘naturalistic’ metamorphosis in the late fifteenth century, Italian versions of the iconography usually portray the Christ Child in the act of suckling rather than the Virgin in the act of baring her breast to the viewer. By contrast, later Flemish artists ... would replicate Campin’s follower’s focus on her nipple and the peculiar address that results from it.”

The Christ child’s genitals are clearly visible under the Virgin’s left hand, perhaps meant to remind viewers that this son of God is human after all.

Shown here is a detail from a public domain photograph of the painting accessed at Wikimedia Commons.