I judge her to be one of the most beautiful women in these parts of town.41
On the Beauty of Women illustrates the value placed on fleshy feminine forms in Rome, an artistic and intellectual hub of the Renaissance. Its professed preference for plump and proportionate figures echoed the sentiments expressed in The Book of the Courtier. Yet, unlike Castiglione’s masterwork, On the Beauty of Women included a declared preference for fat over thin women. This declaration simultaneously harkened back to Dürer and presaged the growing praise for voluptuous figures that was to come in the world of art and feminine aesthetics.
Though Firenzuola himself mingled with many of the important figures of his time, he never attained the recognition for his work that Castiglione or Raphael had. Still, many twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars have returned to his work for its insights into sixteenth-century aesthetics.42
Firenzuola shared much with the literati of Rome. While there, he contracted syphilis, the same illness many contemporary scholars believed felled Raphael. His contraction of syphilis had the seeming effect of restoring his devotion to God. He returned to the monastery in 1538, becoming an abbot at the San Salvatore monastery in Prato, where he remained until his death in 1543.
Firenzuola did not make any mention of dark-skinned women in his book. In contrast to the Low Countries (where Dürer had encountered Katharina), African slaves were a minimal presence in Rome and many other major Italian centers. This was not the case, however, in Venice. Dark-skinned captives had been brought to the region since the Crusades.43 The slave-trading enterprise in this way expanded, rather than introduced, the population of forced black laborers in the region.
By 1490, when the trade in captured Africans became a bona fide industry, there was already a visible population of Africans in Italy. Venice, a vital center of the Italian Renaissance, was also a key trading destination. By the late fifteenth century, ships bearing African captives were a common sight in this seaport. And whereas many earlier waves of Africans arriving in the region were largely male, by 1490 a sizeable number of black women could be seen among the newly imported vassals.44
The introduction of a significant population of black women and girls in the city made them in many respects a hot commodity. Their presence signaled both the exotic lands beyond the sea and the European conquest of said lands. For these reasons, black women and girls retained as maidservants became a fashionable accessory for aristocratic Italian women.45 This much was evident in a letter composed by Isabella d’Este in 1491. Isabella, the new Marquise of Mantua, was a respected cultural and political figure. She was also a patron of the arts and a lady of fashion. In her letter, written in May of that year, she badgered her agent in Venice to acquire “una moreta,” a young black girl to serve as her maidservant, emphasizing that the girl should be “as black as possible.”46 A month later, Isabella wrote to her sister-in-law Anna Sforza, revealing that this was to be her second black maidservant. Of her original, slightly older maidservant, she writes, “We couldn’t be more pleased with our black girl, even if she were blacker, because from being at first a little disdainful she has now become pleasing in words and acts, and we think she’ll make the best buffoon in the world.”47
With the growing presence of black girls and women in Italy came a new interest in their artistic portrayal. Black men had been represented in frescoes exalting biblical scenes since the thirteenth century, a black man having been venerated as one of the Three Kings in the Black Magus tradition.48 But representations of black women in religious images had been far fewer. The rise of the slave trade in Venice led to the rapid incorporation of black women into a variety of religious, domestic, and mythological scenes. They were typically rendered as the physically alluring social inferiors to white women, a representation that reified social distinctions.
This was the artistic and cultural milieu into which Titian landed as an adolescent in the early sixteenth century. The actual date of Titian’s birth is unknown. However, scholars believe that he was nearly twelve when he was sent from his hometown in Cadore to the city of Venice to apprentice as a painter.49 From then until 1510, Titian apprenticed with the Bellini family, the city’s best-known painters. Some critics argued that his talent outstripped that of the Bellinis even upon his arrival. But by the time the two most acclaimed painters of the Bellini family, Giorgione and Giovanni, had died, Titian had become the undisputed master of the Venetian school, a title he took with him to his death sixty years later.50
Titian was not to remain untouched by the conspicuous presence of Africans as servants in the region. One of his earliest representations of an African was found in his 1523 portrait Laura Dianti and Her Page. Laura Dianti was known by many as the mistress of Alfonso d’Este, Isabella’s brother.51 Her humble origins and uncertain status in the court made the painting controversial. Yet the work also suggests her evolving social status, as she is shown next to her small black pageboy, who looks up at her admiringly.52 (Even as the growing fashion in the region was to procure black female servants, black male servants were still commonly used to represent black servitude in art.) Laura Dianti and Her Page was one of the earliest paintings to exemplify the domestic intimacy and social distance between Africans and Europeans.
Black women also appeared in Titian’s vast portfolio. Titian pulled these women into the iconography of proportionate and fleshy feminine beauties, making them the aesthetic equals of European women. This was the case in what is considered one of the artist’s greatest works, Diana and Actaeon. In this 1559 painting, Titian reimagines a tale from the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the myth, Actaeon, a young hunter fresh from the day’s kill, wanders aimlessly through the woods with his hunting dogs. He happens upon the sacred cave of the goddess and virgin huntress Diana while she is bathing. His presence sparks a flurry of activity as nymphs beat their breasts, warning Diana of Actaeon’s violent entry into their hallowed dwelling. Suspicious of his intent and believing that he has penetrated the cave for the express purpose of seeing her undressed, Diana curses him by turning him into a deer. Later, his own dogs devour him, ensuring that he will tell no one what he saw.53
While the tale itself was a well-rehearsed ancient myth, Titian adds a bit of colonial-era titillation by introducing a black female attendant into the story. The attendant is at Diana’s back, helping the goddess lift the cloth that would cover her nude body. The attendant is the only woman who is clothed, her inelegant striped frock an artistic device signaling not her modesty but her status as Other.
Figure 1.9. Titian, Diana and Actaeon, 1556–1559. Image courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
Yet, along with his depiction of the servant’s social status as inferior, Titian depicted her physique as no less alluring than that of the goddess. The attendant’s plain smock slides off one shoulder as she reaches to assist Diana, revealing her own shapely form. The attendant’s toned arm matches those of the nymphs bathing nearby. Indeed, there is a similarity in the silhouettes of the many women present. The forms of the many women drawn—reminiscent of Dürer’s plump, proportionate women, as well as the fleshy Venus of the late Florentine Republic—reveal a congruity in their voluptuousness. Each serves as a representation of the beauty of the female body that apparently transcended both color and social status.54
Titian may have been in a class by himself as an artist. But he had many peers among the Italian Renaissance notables when it came to the convention of reimagining tales from antiquity, and inserting a black woman as the social subordinate and yet physical analog to voluptuous and comely white women. Andrea Mantegna, court artist of Isabella d’Este, reimagined Judith in what many believe to be the first biblical allegory to incorporate a black woman. Judith was a widow depicted in the Old Testament as beautiful and chaste. She uses her considerable womanly charms to gain entrée into the tent of Holofernes, the enemy Assyrian general. When he falls asleep drunk, she beheads him with the aid of her handmaiden.
Betraying the tension over the
