Discourse of Resistance: The Parody of Feminine Beauty in Berni, Doni and Firenzuola

Abstract

During the Renaissance Neoplatonic philosophical doctrine contributed to the affirmation of the concepts of love and beauty. Love was perceived as the effect of beauty on the beholder, and physical beauty the outward manifestation of inner beauty, was rehabilitated and prized as the external visible sign of spiritual perfection and goodness.1 For women, therefore, beauty was the necessary compound of moral virtue. Beautiful women achieved a special status as recipients of Platonic love and were extolled as objects of perfection. In particular, a woman's physical appearance was expected to conform to stylized and conventional images, a cultural construct derived from literary and pictorial representations far removed from the actual appearance of real women of the time.2 In literature, perfect feminine beauty is codified through the model proposed by courtly love poems in Petrarchan style, and by courtesy books and tracts. Around the second half of the sixteenth century, we notice the emergence of a critical discourse which, through the practice of parody, urges a reexamination of the representational models of feminine beauty in literature. Francesco Berni, Anton Francesco Doni and Agnolo Firenzuola, among others, composed paradoxical praises which transgressed the model of representing women's physical perfection as sanctioned by Petrarchan poetry and Neoplatonic treatises.3 In this paper I shall first outline the features of perfect physical beauty as they appeared in Petrarca and in his Renaissance imitators, and then I shall focus on texts by Francesco Berni, Anton Francesco Doni and Agnolo Firenzuola, which parodied the models of feminine perfection canonized in the Petrarchan tradition. By using parody and self-parody these authors carried out a discourse of dissent, which