Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy, ed. Sara F. Matthews-Grieco

Abstract

This collection of essays brings together new research on various aspects of sexuality in Italian Renaissance culture, including some fascinating, unexpected (and sometimes very funny) primary source material. The book is divided into two sections—the first relates particularly to visual material, and the second to sociability and eroticism. After a brief introduction by Guido Ruggiero, an essay by the editor, Sara Matthews-Grieco opens the first section. She considers the culture of erotic prints, and in doing so introduces a theme that is repeated throughout—the problem of finding evidence about erotic cultures, particular those of the non-elites. Matthews-Grieco points out that our opinion about ‘popular’ erotic culture is inevitably skewed, as sexual imagery was often destroyed unless it was associated with a particular cultural (and thus financial) value, such as being by a renowned artist. She argues that early modern prints were deliberately marketed to two audiences—with ‘mythological’ pornography aimed at a higher class of client than those with people in contemporary dress; the lack of surviving prints makes any firm conclusions difficult, however. All the more fortuitous then, is Guido Guerzoni’s chance discovery of the erotic doodlings of a Modenese clerk, which he stumbled upon among the financial ledgers of the Este family and which he discusses in the next essay. Guerzoni places these drawings in a broader context of erotic imagery produced by and for non-elites. Attempting to get to grips with the mentalité of popular eroticism is also a concern of the next essay. Allen Grieco’s fascinating chapter reveals the ubiquity of connecting birds with sexual organs and lusty behaviour in an abundance of ways from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Not only were various types of bird used as a metaphor for penis, words such as ‘nest’ and ‘cage’ referenced the female genitalia. Grieco shows how these metaphors were closely linked to how the eating of birds was understood as potentially leading to lustful behaviour, Bernardino of Siena darkly warning widows that eating fowl could lead to ‘hot blood’. Marta Ajmar-Wollheim closes this section with an essay that convincingly argues that the dichotomy sometimes made by scholars between ‘illicit’ imagery (associated, for example with courtesans) and ‘licit’ imagery (associated with marriage) is a false one. She shows that imagery with sexual themes, if not necessarily ‘erotic’ in itself, was often connected with the marriage process, which could be a long-drawn-out series of events in the period before the Council of Trent.