As in Ovid So in Renaissance Art Renaissance Quarterly 51 No 2 1998

Quondam between 1471 and 1472, Piero Pollaiuolo put the finishing touches on an allegory of Prudence (fig. 1). Information technology is a remarkable painting, suspended between invitation and withdrawal. Prudence opens her artillery and splays her legs: her body—covered in shimmering fabrics when information technology is non wrapped in gauze—is an object of brandish. And even so, her eyes, pensive, expect abroad, toward the mirror she holds and whose diaphanous reflection brings us back to her head. Her exquisitely intricate coiffure claims scrutiny. From their cardinal departing, her locks become progressively longer and, after a tidal élan along her ears, gather in two braids that bring together in an ample fold behind her neck. Their roots are attached by a transparent veil that, draped over her head, hangs between ii gilded brooches. Non a hair is out of place, and as Pollaiuolo renders each strand with a brushstroke, he couples mastery in composition with painterly exactitude.

Fig. 1.

Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo, Prudence, 1471–72. Oil on wood; 167 cm × 88 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

Just such a caste of bravado was required if Pollaiuolo wanted to keep the commission of the seven panels of the virtues, which were to exist hung, as large as altarpieces, in the Tribunale Della Mercanzia—the commercial court of Florence. Equally Ronald Lightbown and Alison Wright accept reconstructed the story, many painters had set up their sights on the prestigious committee.¹ Verrocchio, then also on the Mercanzia'south pay listing for casting the Orsanmichele Saint Thomas, tried to step in, but it was Botticelli who snapped upward the task afterward Pollaiuolo presented the first panel of Charity and painted Fortitude (fig. 2). Botticelli could count on the help of Tommaso Soderini, ane of the Mercanzia commissioners, and because of his intrusion, the painters' guild amended their statutes to protect its members from other breaches.²

Fig. ii.

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi (Sandro Botticelli), Fortitude, 1470. Tempera on wood; 167 cm × 88 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

With the scandal long forgotten, Fortitude is today regarded as Botticelli'south first masterpiece, the work through which he emancipated himself from his master, Filippo Lippi. Both continuity and rupture are especially evident in Botticelli's treatment of pilus. Fortitude'due south hair gathers in small strands on each side, reminiscent of the crimped veils that Lippi tiered over the temples of his Uffizi Madonna. Botticelli admired that painting. He took it as the paradigm for his Madonnas that are now in Florence's Ospedale degli Innocenti and in Ajaccio's Musée Fesch. Yet, it is Fortitude that reveals how carefully he studied it. Fortitude's braids, sprouting from behind her neck, edge the neckline of her armor similarly to the way Lippi's veil tucks under the rope-like trimming of the Virgin'south mantle.

It is Lippi who taught Botticelli to care for headgear as loci of pictorial prowess. The pearl band that Lippi depicts emerging out of the Uffizi Madonna's creased bonnet abruptly pivots at the middle of her forehead. It is an incommunicable construction, which reveals how piffling consideration Lippi had for realism when he came to coiffures. Following his lead, in this short essay, I too consider the headgear of Botticelli'due south and Pollaiuolo'due south virtues as fields for experimentation. I do and then to make a simple point: that, contrary to old-fashioned, connoisseurial assumptions well-nigh hair as routinely rendered, and parallel to socioeconomic studies that encounter hair equally cooperating in the construction of gendered and grade stereotypes, hair triggered a process of associative thinking quite dissimilar that provoked by any other element in a painting.^three

Of course, Fortitude'south refulgent hairstyle was non completely indifferent to reality. Botticelli'south nesting of iii massive pearls effectually her forehead must have struck Florentines as fabulous, because the pearls deliberately contradicted the current ban on them—both as solitaires and as clusters decorating a headband, so known as a vespaio.⁴ Unlike her classicizing coronet and golden ribbons, Fortitude's pearls were not just markers of aristocratic beauty at a time when authorization was the effect of materially outshining anybody else.⁵ Rather, they were longed for. Botticelli'southward female knight in shining armor, contrary to Pollaiuolo's veiled and Virgin-like Charity, struck Florentines—affluent, law-abiding, male Florentines—because she cut hard through an open wound.

Botticelli's Fortitude, nonetheless, hurt as much every bit she captivated. Her braided, circuitous crew drew directly from the nymphs' hairstyles in Boccaccio's very popular Comedia delle Ninfe Fiorentine: tresses that its protagonist, Ameto, contemplates at length rather than listening to the nymphs' moralistic tales.⁶ When he encounters Lia, he cannot help simply find how "most of her hair is gathered, by a masterful paw, in long coils over each ear, while he notices how the residual falls into broad, regular braids on each side of her neck, which then cross each other over the dorsum and climb to the tiptop of her blond head, only to fall downwardly, once again, and fold under their roots. And he also notices how the ends of each braid remain in place thanks to a shimmering gilded band, rich in pearls, and how non a unmarried hair falls out of that controlled gild."⁷ Boccaccio's descriptions of pilus go on and on, taking the reader on roller coasters around the women'southward heads that exude a pleasure for the capacity of words to conjure up visual intricacies while likewise conveying Ameto's anaesthesia. Those labyrinthine manes, whose twists and folds Ameto sometimes fails to decipher ("non and so come legati"),⁸ found their visual counterparts in the bewildering hairstyles of Botticelli's later nymphs and Venuses, whose hair is both shapeless matter and disciplinary knot.⁹ Nevertheless, despite these harmonies, it is in Fortitude that Botticelli first reveals that he is reading Boccaccio.

But this is non how Botticelli's coiffures have been interpreted. Like Lippi'southward headgears, his depiction of hair has been read equally an effect of the cultural bearing of Ovid, the classical cantor of hairdos.¹⁰ In the Fasti, Ovid applauded women's labors at hairstyling, which he reminded men to praise, and in the Metamorphoses, he infused hair with an animistic forcefulness that fabricated it a prime amanuensis of transformation.¹¹ In Ovid's verse, hair becomes leaves, snakes, and tears; it falls down and curls upwards in the blink of an eye. While dazzlingly intricate, Botticelli's hair is inappreciably Ovidian: it never becomes anything other than itself. If there is a painter of Ovidian coiffures, that is Pollaiuolo.

In Prudence, the veil spiraling around the golden brooches mimics the saggy hammock-like band between the volutes of an Ionic capital, giving the virtue-figure the solidity of a brace. Pollaiuolo must have taken the thought from Vitruvius, whose treatise on architecture describes capitals as carved after women's hairstyles. "On the right and on the left of the capital," he writes, "the Ionians placed volutes that looked like hanging hair curls. They too decorated the forepart with inward-looking volutes and festoons so as to simulate coiffures."¹²

Pollaiuolo thus made a reference to one of the reference books of his time. Or, probably, it was his brother Antonio, more learned and better connected, who made it when coming to his rescue subsequently Botticelli's intrusion in the competition. Antonio probably painted it too, every bit the outlines are more confident (look at that twisting ophidian), the brushwork ranges from evocative to verbal, and the materials are rendered with an opulence that no other console of the series displays, Fortitude included. It is, still, Antonio'south invention for Prudence's headgear that must have met the jury'south favor, equally while ornamentation and virtuoso drawing decrease in the post-obit panels, most of the virtues' heads alluded to architectural elements. In Justice (fig. iii), her hair curls in volutes that back up a turban-shaped abacus, the slab betwixt capital letter and architrave. Piero—as it is Piero who painted it this time—fifty-fifty went as far as using a type of hairpin, known in Florence as brocchetta da testa, to simulate the flos abaci, the flower that marks the center of the upper side of Corinthian capitals. He then repeated the thought for Hope'south headgear.

Fig. 3.

Piero Pollaiuolo, Justice, c. 1471. Oil on forest; 167 cm × 88 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

The Pollaiuolo brothers' use of veils, brooches, and hairpins that Florentine women actually wore brings their efforts close to Leon Battista Alberti'due south De re aedificatoria, which likewise presented compages through the filter of gimmicky hairdressing. "In Tuscany," Alberti wrote, "nosotros phone call 'nastro' a tiny ribbon which young ladies wrap around their heads to fasten their hair. For this reason let me telephone call 'nastro' the band-shaped band which tin can be constitute at the terminate of the column."¹³ In suggesting a term for what we today call the "astragal"—role of his ambitious program to produce a more than precise vocabulary for architecture—Alberti did not translate Vitruvius only reenacted his approach.^fourteen Vitruvius'south technical treatise was, afterwards all, notoriously difficult to understand. Some of the Latin words he employed were, every bit they still are, unique; their meanings puzzled even the most erudite philologists. Only fifty-fifty more than puzzling were long-lost cultural references, such as those to Ionian women'due south hairstyle. A decade before Francesco di Giorgio laid the silhouette of a woman's face over the profile of a majuscule, the Pollaiuolo brothers tried to work out the connectedness with their architectural headgear.¹⁵

Hairstyles—elaborate, distinctive hairstyles—are of crucial importance for thinking through virtues in 1470s Florence. In Prudentius'south Psychomachia, an allegorical poem on the battle between virtues and vices that could be found in several Florentine libraries at the time, all fighters are identified uniquely by their hairdos.¹⁶ Thrift covers her hair with a veil, Faith leaves information technology untrimmed, Discord puts olive branches on her head to disguise herself amidst the virtues, and Pride adds a wig atop her coils of braids and then that "there might be a lofty and more than imposing peak above her haughty brows."¹⁷ The attention that Botticelli and the Pollaiuolo brothers bestowed on the headgear was excited by Prudentius. Even so, while the former looked at Boccaccio and the latter at compages, they both recognized the analogical possibilities of hair to enthrall as well every bit to explore compositional concepts of direction, movement, and class.

Acknowledgments

Inquiry for this article has been made possible thank you to the Intellectual History of Connoisseurship project, funded by the British Academy. I as well thank Pat Rubin for her encouragement on an earlier typhoon of this essay and John Gagné for his tremendously useful insights and observations.

Notes

ane. Ronald Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli, 2 vols. (London: Paul Elek, 1978), ane, 31–33; Alison Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers: The Arts of Florence and Rome (New Haven, CT: Yale Academy Press, 2005), 230–31. On artistic competition, see Michelle O'Malley, "Finding Fame: Painting and the Making of Careers in Renaissance Italia," Renaissance Studies 24, no. 1 (2010): 9–32.

ii. Alessandro Cecchi, "Piero o Antonio? Considerazioni sulle Virtù del Tribunale della Mercanzia e le altre opere degli Uffizi alla luce dei restauri," in La stanza dei Pollaiolo: I restauri, una mostra, un nuovo ordinamento, ed. Antonio Natali and Angelo Tartuferi (Florence: Centro Di, 2007), 41–53.

three. On hair in connoisseurship, run into One thousand. Morelli, Italian Painters: Disquisitional Studies of Their Piece of work (London: Nabu, 1982), 107, 155, 181, 193, 230n. On hair every bit a marker of gendered beauty, see Patricia Simons, "Portraiture, Portrayal, and Idealization: Ambiguous Individualism in Representations of Renaissance Women," in Language and Images of Renaissance Italy, ed. Alison Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 262–311; Jennifer Craven-Madani, "A New Historical View of the Independent Female Portrait in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Painting" (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1997), 87–88; Joanna Woods-Marsden, "Portrait of the Lady, 1430–1520," in Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo's Ginevra de' Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2001), 63–87. The notion of hairstyles every bit fantasie is also reductive, as it is express to drawing. André Chastel, "Les capitaines antiques affrontés dans l'fine art florentine du XVe siècle," Mémoires de la Société nationale des Antiquaires de France three (1954): 279–89; Françoise Viatte, "Verrocchio et Leonardo da Vinci: à propos des 'têtes idéales,'" in Florentine Drawing at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent, ed. Elizabeth Cropper (Bologna: Nuova Alpha, 1992), 45–53.

4. For the sanctions confronting pearls, dated from 1464 to 1472, see C. Mazzi, Due provvisioni suntuarie Fiorentine (Florence: Aldino, 1908), v–7; Ronald Rainey, "Sumptuary Legislation in Renaissance Florence" (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1985), 516–19. See likewise Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, "Reconciling the Privilege of a Few with the Common Good: Sumptuary Laws in Medieval and Early Modernistic Europe," Periodical of Medieval and Early Modernistic Studies 39, no. 3 (2009): 597–617. On the vespaio, see Rainey, "Sumptuary Legislation," 450–53; Elisabetta Gnignera, I soperchi ornamenti: Copricapi e acconciature femminili nell'Italy del Quattrocento (Colle val d'Elsa: Protagon, 2010), 181–200.

5. Timothy McCall, "Brilliant Bodies: Material Culture and the Adornment of Men in North Italy's Quattrocento Courts," I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance sixteen, no. 1/two (2013): 445–90. Fortitude's winged diadem is reminiscent of Roma's helmet in Republican denarii. See R. Ross Holloway, "The Lady of the Denarius," Numismatica east Antichità Classiche 24 (1995): 207–16.

6. On its popularity, run into Jane Tylus, "On the Threshold of Paradise (Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, or Ameto)," in Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 133–45.

7. Giovanni Bocaccio, "Comedia delle Ninfe Fiorentine," in Opere, vol. 8, ed. E. Bianchi, C. Salinari, and N. Sapegno (Milan: Riccardi 1952), 934: "vede i suoi capelli … e di quelli grandissima parte, sopra ciascuna orecchia ravvolti in lunga forma con una maestrevole mano, riguarda; due east degli altri ampissime trecce composte vede sopra l'estremità del collo ricadere; e quindi, 50'una verso la destra parte e fifty'altra verso la sinistra incrocicchiata, risalire al colmo del biondo capo; i quali, ancora avanzati ritornando in giù, in quello medesimo modo nascondere vede le loro estremità sotto le prime salite; due east quelle, con fregio d'oro lucente e caro di margarite [that is, pearls] strette stanno ne' posti luoghi; né d'alcuna parte un sol capello fuori del comandato ordine vede partire."

8. Ibid., 945: "i biondi capelli da velo alcuno non coperti mostrava, de' quali, non and so come up legati, ricadeva sopra ciascuna tempia bionda ciocchetta."

9. That is how Teogapen's coiffure is described. Run into ibid., 931–32: "lunghissimi, parte ravvolti alla testa nella sommità di quella, con nodo piacevole d'essi stessi, vede raccolti."

10. Paul Barolski, "As in Ovid, So in Renaissance Art," Renaissance Quarterly 51, no. 2 (1998): 451–74.

11. Ovid, Amores 1.14; Ars Am. 3.3, three.4; Tr. 1.1, three.1; Met. 1.550, 5.431–34, half-dozen.26 and 141, 12.274–75.

12. Vitruvius 4.1.seven: "Capitulo volutas uti capillamento concrispatos cincinnos praependentes dextra ac sinistra conloceverunt et cumatiis et encarpis pro crinibus dispositis fronte orneverunt."

thirteen. Alberti, De re aedificatoria six.xiii, vol. two, ed. Paolo Portoghesi (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1966), 524–25.

14. Ibid.: "Nosotros must create some words every bit we cannot rely on the customary ones." Even if published in 1485, Alberti's treatise was somewhat completed by the mid-fifteenth century, as argued in Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 266.

15. Turin: Biblioteca Reale, codex Saluzzianus 148, fol. 15r. See Massimo Mussini, "La trattatistica di Francesco di Giorgio: un problema critico aperto," in Francesco di Giorgio architetto, ed. Francesco Paolo Fiore and Manfredo Tafuri (Milan: Electa, 1994), 378–99.

sixteen. These are Florence: Bibl. Ricc. MS 418, Bibl. Med. Laur. MS Pl. 91, and Bibl. Med. Laur. AD 343, which belonged to Francesco Nelli. See Robert Blackness, Humanism and Pedagogy in Medieval and Renaissance Italia: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 225–32. At the time, Prudentius'south poem was read moralistically. See Jennifer O'Reilly, Studies in the Iconography of the Virtues and Vices in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland, 1988), i–59.

17. Prudentius, Psychomachia, 183–85.

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Source: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/695754

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