I canoni della bellezza maschile nell'arte italiana

Speranza

Bibliografia

Plato, Phaedrus -- Plato’s Erotic Dialogues, trans. William S. Cobb (Albany:State University of New York Press).

Mary Vaccaro, “Parmigianino and Andrea Baiardi: Figuring Petrarchan Beauty in Renais-sance Parma,” Word and Image .


For an investiga-tion of the portrayal of the beloved in classical literature, which is highly relevant tothe images discussed later in this essay, see Maurizio Bettini, Il ritratto dell’amante
(Torino: Einaudi).

Elizabeth Cropper, “The Place of Beauty in the High Renaissance and Its Displacement in the History of Art,” in
Place and Displacement in the Renaissance, ed. AlvinVos (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies).

Eve Kosofsky,
Male Homosocial Desire
(New York: Columbia University Press).

For a relatedseries of arguments grounded in a reading of Italian Renaissance texts, see Valeria Finucci,
The Manly Masquerade. Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the ItalianRenaissance
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press).

Patricia Simons,
“Alert and Erect: Masculinity in Some Italian Renaissance Portraits of Fathers and Sons,” in
Postures of Dominance and Submission in History.

 Patricia Simons, “Homosociality and Erotics in Ital-ian Renaissance Portraiture,” in
Portraiture: Facing the Subject
, ed. Joanna Woodall(Manchester: Manchester University Press).

More recently, the erotics of male portraiture have been considered by Elizabeth Cropper,
Pontormo: Portrait of a Halbardier
(Los Angeles: Getty Museum, ); and in the contributions by David Alan Brown, “The Portrait of Bindo Altoviti from the Hand of Raphael,” and Jody Cranston, “Desire and Gravitas in Bindo’s Portraits,” in
Raphael, Cellini, and aRenaissance Banker: The Patronage of Bindo Altoviti
, exh. cat., ed. Alan Chong, Dona-tella Pegazzano, and Dimitrios Zikos (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum),  Maurice Brock,
Bronzino
(Paris: Flammarion), ascribes a homo-erotic character to the artist’s portrait of Pierino da Vinci, which, inthe absence of evidence, he accounts for by fantasizing about the private life of the sitter.

Although amateur histories abound, there is no sustained and systematic scholarly treatment of
HOMO-EROTIC IMAGERY
in Italian Renaissance art.

Notwithstanding its self-imposed iconographic limits and its universalizing conception of homosexual identity, James H. Saslow,
Ganimede nel rinascimento italiano: Homosexuality in Art and Society
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press), remains useful.

See also Janet Cox-Rearick, “A
St. Sebastian
by Bronzino,”
Burlington Magazine

Leonard Barkan,
Transuming Passion: Ganimede and the Erotics of Humanism
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press);

Alessandro Nova, “Erotismo e spiritualità nella pittura romana del Cinquecento,” in
Francesco Salviati e la Bella Maniera
, ed. Catherine Monbeig Goguel, Philippe Costamagna, and Michel Hoch-mann (Roma: École française de Rome).

Adrian Randolph,
Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence
(New Haven,Conn.: Yale University Press).

 Love poetry written by men to men is considerably more abundant in Renaissance Latin literature.

In the vernacular tradition, love poetry written by male poets to male addressees is unusual but not unheard of.

It is sometimes distinguishable from the more equivocal poetry of homosocial friendship and rivalry by its focus on the physical beauty of the addressee.

The massive compendium of vernacular poetry, Antonio Lanza,
Lirici Toscani contains severalexamples, among them verses by Giovanni da Prato, better known as the author of Il Paradiso degli Alberti, and Filippo Scarlatti: see especially his sonnet beginning

o pulcro adolescente, o giovinetto
cupido ha gli occhi mia inver te aperto
ch’io solt’appello, ben ched io nol merto
per mio signore e son tuo servo eletto.

Some of this material in Lanza has been identified and translated in
Gay and Lesbian Poetry: An Anthology from Sappho to Michelangelo
, ed. James Wilhelm(New York: Garland).

Homosexual themes abound in the obscene or defamatory verse in the tradition of Burchiello, which includes the painter Bronzino and the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini.

On the writings of these two artists, see Deborah Parker,
Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poet
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); and

Margaret A. Gallucci,
Benvenuto Cellini: Sexuality, Masculinity, and
Artistic Identity in Renaissance Italy
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan).

For an account of Latin and vernacular love poems written in honor of a deceasedyouth in the household of Girolamo Riario, published in Rome see FedericoPatetta, “Di una raccolta di componimenti e di una medaglia in memoria di Alessandro Cinuzzi senese, paggio del conte Gerolamo Riario,”
Bullettino senese di storia patria
The Leonardesque stylistic quality, the androgyny, and a calculated ambiguity of identity are the principal means of distinguishing these “poetic” portraits from more conventional portraits of young men, such as those by Botticelli and Filippino Lippi.

On the half-length images of boys by Giorgione and his imitators, which begin toappear around , see Jaynie Anderson,
Giorgione: The Painter of Poetic Brev-ity
(Paris: Flammarion).

Giovanni Boltraffi o’s idealized images of youths, such as the
Narcissus
in the National Gallery, London, and the portraits of the poet and jewel merchant Girolamo Casio (Chatsworth, Devonshire Collection; Moscow, Pushkin Museum; San Diego, Timken Museum), are an important sub-category, and will be discussed in a dissertation by Jill Pederson currently in process.

The male portraiture of the next generations—of Titian and Rosso Fiorentino,then of Bronzino—preserves something of the same erotic coding in the presentationof adolescent male subjects.

 Cranston, “Desire and Gravitas,” in
Raphael, Cellini, and a Renaissance Banker
, ed.Chong et al.,

 On the visual tradition of the
Triumphs
, see Alexandra Ortner,
Petrarcas “Trionfi” in Malerei, Dichtung und Festkultur
(Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswis-senschaften).

On the Florentine vernacular tradition deriving from the
Triumphs
showing the binding and chastizing of a nude adolescent Cupid, see Randolph,
Engaging Symbols
, –.

Stephen J. Campbell,
The Studiolo of Isabella d’Este: Reading, Collecting, and the Invention of Mythological Painting
, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press).

James Hutton,
"The Greek Anthology in Italy"
(Ithaca, N.Y.: CornellUniversity Press).

Francesco Petrarca,
The Triumphs of Petrarch
, trans. Ernest Hatch Wilkins (Chicago:University of Chicago Press).

For an exploration of the iconography of Chastity in
spalliera
painting, and the argu-ment that the virtue of chastity in these paintings presents an ambivalent and threat-ening aspect by undermining relations of kinship and reproduction, see CristelleBaskins, “
Il Trionfo della Pudicizia
: Menacing Virgins in Italian Renaissance Domestic Painting,” in
Menacing Virgins
, ed. M. Leslie (Newark: University of DelawarePress).

For the text of the instructions, dated Jan. , , see Fiorenzo Canuti,
Il Perugino
, vols. (Siena: Editrice d’arte “La Diana,”).

For analysis and accuratetranslation, see Charles Hope, “Artists, Patrons, and Advisers in the Italian Renais-sance,” in
Patronage in the Renaissance
, ed. F. Lytle and S. Orgel (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, ), –, esp. –.

“Immeritum veluti sentiat ille crucem. / Horrida cui terreti Pallas supereminet hasta /658
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 35.3 / 2005
Et galea et saeva gorgone terribilis. / Multi multa ferunt, eadem sententia nulla est:/ Pulchrius est pictus istud imaginibus.” Ida Maïer,
Ange Politien: La Formationd’un poète humaniste (–)
(Genève: Droz, ), .

For a discussion of thepoem and its relation to the image on Giuliano’s standard at the
giostra
, see CharlesDempsey (whose translation of the passage I have used),

Inventing the Renaissance Putto
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), ; and Randolph,
Engaging Symbols
, –. Egon Verheyen,
The Paintings in the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este at Mantua
(New York:New York University Press, ), –. Battista Fregoso (Baptista C. Fulgosi),
Anteros
(Milan, ), sig. Av:

“Heros idest Amor appellata est. Per laqualcosa pare Amor essere un desiderio hovero sfrenatoappetito con luxuria congionto: incitato dal ocio e lascivia: come il Petrarcha neglitriumphi suoi . . . scrive”

This kind of love is called heros
. In this way love appearsto be a desire or unrestrained appetite joined to lustfulness, incited by idleness andlicentiousness, as Petrarch writes in his
Triumphs
]. For an account of Fregoso and histext, see Carolina Gasparini, “Appunti sulla vita di Battista Fregoso,”
Giornale storicodella letteratura italiana
 (): –; and Gasparini,
“L’Anteros
di BattistaFregoso,”
Giornale storico della letteratura italiana
 (): –.
Pietro Hedo,
Anterotica, sive De amoribus generibus
(Treviso, ).

For Donald Beecher,
“Quattrocento Views of the Eroticization of the Imagination,” in
Eros and Anteros: The Medical Traditions of Love in the Renaissance
, ed. Donald A. Beecher andMassimo Ciavolella (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, ), , “there can be littledoubt that these works passed as counter-statements to Ficino’s
Commentary
.”

Beech-er’s account of the complex genealogy of these antierotic treatises sees them less as theproduct of religious puritanism than as rationalist confrontations, grounded in the Aristotelean medical tradition, of a dangerous tendency to mystify and spiritualizethe passion of love:There were those who understood from the outset that the praises of a spiritu-alized Eros were nevertheless an invitation to dangerous and counterproductivebehaviour. Love was to be cautioned against, not merely as a sinful enticement,but as a threat to health. Those were, in fact, the only ready-to-hand terms forpreaching against the personal and social risks of this cult of self-induced phan-tasms.See also Massimo Ciavolella, “Trois traités du XVe siècle italien sur
anteros
:
Con-tra amores
de Bartolomeo Sacchi,
Anterotica
de Pietro Edo, et
Anteros
de BattistaFregoso,” in
Anteros: actes du colloque de Madison (Wisconsin) mars 
, ed. UllrichLanger and Jan Miernowski (Orléans: Paradigme, ), –. See Giorgio Agamben,
Stanzas. Word and Phantasm in Western Culture
, trans. RonaldL. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).

See Baptista Mantuanus, Eclogue II,
Fortunatus
–, –, –, in

Adule-scentia: The Eclogues of Mantuan
, ed. and trans. Lee Piepho (New York: Garland,), .

While Mario Equicola defended the concept of
anteros
as reciprocal love in his
Librode natura de amore
, the Ferrarese Celio Calcagnini did the same in a Latin trea-tise,
Anteros, sive de mutuo amore
, and was followed by Lelio Gregorio Giraldi in theCampbell
twelfth syntagma of his
De deis gentium
. For an account of these responses to Fregosoand Hedo, see Robert V. Merrill,
“Eros and Anteros,”
Speculum
 (): –. Mario Equicola,
La redazione manoscritta del “Libro de natura de amore” di MarioEquicola
, ed. Laura Ricci (Roma: Bulzoni, ),  (sigs. v–r): “Seneca Venerechiama matre di doi Cupidine, et in vero doi sono li Cupidini: uno dicto Heros,l’altro, Anteros. La opinione di quelli che credeno Antheros volere denotare ‘oppositoet non correspondente amore’ noi la reputamo totalmente falsa, et lo significato suoessere ‘mutuo, equale et reciproco amore.’ ” Celio Calcagnini,
Opera aliquot
(Basel, ), : (Venus, worried that her sonEros is not growing beyond infancy, consults the goddess Themis, who responds)

“Ex ijs puto facile colligas, nulla praeclara ingenia posse ingentes profectus facere,nisi habeant antagonistem (ut Graeci dicunt) qui cum decertent, qui cum collecten-tur. Neque solum oportet, ut cum aequalibus, viventibusque contendamus; sed cumijs etiam, qui olim scripserunt, quos mutos magistros appellamus: alioqui futuri sem-per infantes” [From these (two characters Eros and Anteros) I think you will easily understand that no famous talents can enlarge themselves unless they have an antago-nist, as the Greeks call it, with whom they can strive and with whom they can unitethemselves. Nor is it only appropriate that we should strive only with our equals whoare still alive, but also with those who wrote in the past, whom we call the silent mas-ters, and to whom in other respects we will always be schoolboys]. See the brief dis-cussion in Merrill, “Eros and Anteros,” . Beecher, “Quattrocento Views,” . For documentation and bibliography on the
Sleeping Cupids
, see Clifford M. Brown,
Per dare qualche splendore a la gloriosa cità di Mantua: Documents for the AntiquarianCollection of Isabella d’Este
(Roma: Bulzoni, ). Leonard Barkan,
Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ), .
Greek Anthology
XVI, , ed. and trans. W. R. Paton,  vols. (Cambridge, Mass.,Harvard University Press, –; repr. ) :.
Greek Anthology
, XVI, , ed. Paton, :.

The original text is in Massimo Castoldi, “Il Tebaldeo e Cesare Borgia: Due sonettiinediti sul dono ad Isabella d’Este del Cupido marmoreo di Michelangelo,”
Anuariode estudios medievales
 (): –:Tu me dimandi Amor. Ahi lasso, in quantolabirinto m’hai posto, e in che aspro scoglio!Dur m’è se’l nego a te, duro s’io voglio,cara Isabella mia, presumer tanto.So quanto pò, ché per lui spesso ho pianto,né mi spaventa tanto il fier suo orgoglio,quanto che il cielo de quïete spoglio,et in terra et in mar commovo pianto.Dorme et è inerme Amor, onde è gran pace.Sentendo il parlar tuo farasse destoe harà da gli occhi toi strali, arco e face.660
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 35.3 / 2005
Pur te’l do, che non é ben manifestosenza gran segni un cor. Qual piú veracesegno, che per te farme ogniuno infesto? Pliny,
Natural History
XXXVI, , trans. D. E. Eicholtz, in vol.  of the Loeb edition(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), . Equicola,
La redazione manoscritta
,  (sig. r bis). Baptista Mantuanus,
Opera Omnia
,  vols. (Antwerp, ), :–:

“De Cupid-ine dormiente silvula ad Elisabellam Mantue Marchionissam” (also in Konrad VonLange,
Der schlafende Amor des Michelangelo
[Leipzig, ], –):Progenies Veneris tanta puer inclyte famaQui vehis in celebram divos hominesque triumphumQuis tibi tam similes potuit de marmore vultusDucere? Praxiteles laudem non audeat istamUsurpare: Myron tantum non speret honorem.Mentor abi: Polyclete sile, si Mulciber istudFortassis dicatur opus cudisse, fatendum est.Nam divinum opus est. Aliam tamen auguror artemEsse sub his membris: aliud portendit imago haec.Sicut in Ascanium prolemque Aeneida quondam.Transiit, ut sanctae fraudes inferret Elisae:Sic modo se marmor, caste mihi credite Nymphae,Transformavit in hoc, fraus heic: lapis iste Cupido est:Heic latet, atque dolos iterum meditatur Elisae:Sed frustra conatur, habet praecordia curisIrretita aliis: habitat sub pectore sacroIllius ingenium faciens Tritonia Pallas,Vestaque et aeternum custoditura pudoremCynthia cum Musis, ad quas intrare CupidoNec noctu nec luce potest, vigilatque cubatque.Frustra igitur somnos fingis, puer improbe, frustraHos insane dolos haec in penetralia portas. . . . . . . . . . . . . .Dedecus hoc auferte viri, prohibite puellaeHoc immane scelus: neu vos ea rosida fallantOra: faces, arcus, pinnas, levibusque pharetramHorrentem iaculis, hostilia signa videte.Esto puer talis semper, teneatque sepultumTe sopor aeternus, iaceasque in marmore semper. As noted by Saslow,
Ganymede in the Renaissance
, –.
Psiche
, canto , in Niccolò da Correggio,
Opere
, ed. Antonia Tissoni-Benvenuti(Bari: Laterza, ), . Compare Apuleius,
Metamorphoses
V., in
The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses)
, trans. W. Adlington, rev. S. Gaselee (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ),. Correggio,
Psiche
, canto ,
Opere
, ed. Tissoni-Benvenuti, .Campbell / Petrarchan Desire and Male Beauty
661
 Venice, Biblioteca Marciana, MS Italiani cl. # () (Zeno Apostolo )
paris caesareus junior
, sig. r:Trovai un giorno Amor chera si lassoChe dormendo parea che fossi mortoEt io col stral pian pian timido e smortoLarcho gli furo: e il spezzo i’ cima a un sassoCol pianto, e coi suspiri, poi che nel bassoDil cuor e igliocchi amaramente I portoGli spengo il foco e per piu mio conforto A spenachiar costui chino mabassoMa dal dolor svegliossi e ritrovandoLarmi sue rotte, atanta offesa, e perseSi volse al ciel di rabbia lachrymandoE da sue luce rigide e perverseSi trasse il velo, et e me corse e quandoCon quel mi strinse, alhor lui gliocchi aperse.Compare with Alpheus, in
Greek Anthology
XVI, , ed. and trans. Paton, ::

“Ishall snatch the fiery pine-brand from thy hand, O Love, and strip thee of the quiverthat hangs across thy shoulders, if in truth thou sleepest, thou child of fire, and wemortals have peace for a little season from thy arrows. But even so I fear thee, thou weaver of wiles, lest thou have one hidden for me and see a cruel dream in thy sleep.” The image thus constitutes a significant transformation of Apuleius,
Metamorphoses
VI., where Jupiter kisses Cupid on the hand (“Tunc Iuppiter, prehensa Cupidinisbuccula manuque ad os suum relata consaviat”) and then complains about the god’slack of respect toward himself.
Greek Anthology
XVI, , ed. and trans. Paton, :. Matteo Maria Boiardo,
Amorum libri
III.; see
Amorum libri tres
, ed. Tiziano Zanato(Roma: Edizioni di storia e di letteratura, ), . On Parmigianino’s painting,see Mary Vaccaro,
Parmigianino: The Paintings
(Torino: Umberto Allemandi, ),–, with reference to Pliny’s tale of the
Cupid
of Praxiteles; and the entry by Rob-ert Wald in
Parmigianino e il manierismo europeo
, exh. cat., ed. Lucia Fornari Schi-anchi and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (Milano: Silvana, ), . The homoeroticism of the
Cupid
is addressed in Saslow,
Ganymede in the Renaissance
, –. Cranston, “Desire and Gravitas,” . For the design after Raphael, now in Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlungen,see
Roma e lo stile classico di Raffaello, –
, exh. cat., ed. Konrad Oberhuber(Milano: Electa, ), .
Philostratus,
Imagines
I.vi, trans. Arthur Fairbanks (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-versity Press, ), . On the portrait, see the entry by Janet Cox-Rearick, in
The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence
, exh. cat. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ), –. Brock,
Bronzino
, –, reads the work as a simultaneous por-trayal of the public or Herculean and private or Orphic body of the prince. See Stephen J. Campbell, “Counter Reformation Polemic and Mannerist Counter Aesthetics: Bronzino’s
Martyrdom of St. Lawrence
in San Lorenzo,”
RES
, “Polemi-cal Objects,” (): –.662
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 35.3 / 2005
 The dynamic of Eros and Anteros is explored in many of Bronzino’s altarpieces anddevotional works from the s and s, where one figure’s devout and adoringattention to another is also manifestly an attempt to solicit the return of the belovedobject’s gaze. This can be identified as an “implied narrative” in Bronzino’s varioustreatments of the Virgin and Child with St. John, where the infant Christ is oblivi-ous to or unconscious of the beseeching look and proffered gifts of the other child, orof the Santissima Annunziata
Resurrection of Christ
, where an angel modeled on theVenus Pudica seeks a reciprocal look from another nearly nude angel, his near mirror-image, instead of directing his attention to the resurrected Christ.