24
Representation

Recycled Jewels

In the decades after Queen Elizabeth’s death, the legacy of the monarch’s body and face, conveyed in material remains of her reign, carried with it the difficult exchange between the secular and sacred that attended her representations and self‐representations during her lifetime. Blanche Parry’s cenotaph, erected according to her design before her death in 1590 and Elizabeth’s in 1603 is one such remain (Figure 24.1). On the tomb, Parry’s alabaster effigy kneels before that of her sovereign, presenting a pomander, a jeweled container filled with fragrant resins and spices. This object and the jeweled book in her left hand memorialize Parry’s role in the royal household as the Keeper of the Queen’s Jewels (Richardson 2007). The jeweled pomander is also a token of the cosmetic arts – the use of makeup, perfumes, bleaches and dyes, wigs, and sartorial extravagances – employed by early modern women to assert sovereignty over their bodies. Parry’s monument to two maidens is a self‐created image of femininity achieved by controlling, in death as in life, one’s appearance, adornment, and effects. The queen’s effigy, with clothing and hair drenched in jewels, was originally painted to the life: the polychrome tomb was literally a painted sepulcher. As Parry (1507/8–1590) took part in creating the aura of majesty surrounding the living queen, she continued that act in her memorial as well, and created her image, too, in that cosmetic performance.

Image described by caption. — **Figure 24.1** John Guldin (attrib.), Blanche Parry Monument (detail) (before 1578). St. Faith Church, Bacton.
Author’s photograph.

Parry’s painted effigy of Elizabeth (1553–1603) reminds us of the continuity between the queen’s skillfully managed person and its visual reproductions; between the artistic and cosmetic arts of “painting.” This chapter moves from Blanche Parry’s exemplary performance of female sovereignty to explore the intersection of painting and femininity first in Elizabethan iconography, then in Aemilia Lanyer’s poem of the Passion of Christ, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, published eight years after Elizabeth’s death, and finally in Christ and the Samaritan Woman (1607), a devotional painting by the Italian artist Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614). Parry’s monument offers an apt starting point by embodying three key concerns that guide this discussion.

First, Parry’s monument displays the confessional nature of identity – particularly of royal identity – in post‐Reformation England by participating in the Elizabethan conversion of sacred objects to symbols of secular power. When she retired from her post in 1587, Parry prepared “A Boke of soche Jewells and other [stuff] … in her charge,” a vast collection of 628 items (BL Royal Addendum 68). The nucleus had been inherited from Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII (1491–1546), “who made vast additions to the jewels left him by his frugal father [by] appropriat[ing] for his own use all gold, silver and gemstones remaining in the church treasuries” following the dissolution of the monasteries (Scarisbrick 2003, 183). Many of Elizabeth’s jewels were literally sacred objects recycled as secular adornments. The “cult of Elizabeth” built upon these appropriations, however, resulted in a secular idolatry that rivaled the Catholic image‐worship it replaced (Strong 1963; 1969; 1977): “the Queens Majesties face in her coyness,” Catholic writer Nicholas Sander complained, “is a kind of graven Image” (1624, 88).

Second, by referring Lanyer’s textual portrayal of Elizabeth to portraits and effigies of the queen, this chapter demonstrates how material objects and practices enable constructions of gendered subjects. Focusing on Elizabethan uses of the cosmetic arts allows one to consider in the more concrete terms of material objects and practices the theoretical relationship between psychological or physiological “interiority” and the body’s physical exterior. Lanyer’s portrait of the queen exploits the early modern conflation of materiality and femininity, and borrows Elizabethan modes of painting and self‐creation to resurrect the queen’s body as a potent object through which female subjects might be self‐defined and created. As she adorns and embellishes the queen’s remains, Lanyer gives shape to the social, sexual, and spiritual ties binding her to the memory of Elizabeth.

Finally, the various media used by Parry and Lanyer (1569–1645) to represent and commemorate Elizabeth invite an interdisciplinary approach to the literary and material remains of early modern England. This chapter takes part in the critical debate surrounding the relationship between literary texts and “material textualities”: systems of signification conveyed by material artifacts and practices (Frye 2010; de Grazia, Quilligan, and Stallybrass 1996; Jones and Stallybrass 2000). Considering texts alongside visual arts, I see literary and artistic activity “as involved in a complex web of cultural relations,” and I focus on the figures and practices of painting to negotiate and describe this network (Koelb and Noakes 1988, 1). Moreover, I contend that moving freely, although not arbitrarily, from literary to visual works and from Protestant England to Catholic Italy can remind critics of the “early modern” of the extensive, dynamic culture of the “Renaissance” (Burckhardt [1860] 1990; Greene 1982): an international cultural movement that produced, among many others, the coherent, sustained conversation on gender in which the works considered here take part. Seeking connections across national and disciplinary borders, this chapter demonstrates that such comparison and interdisciplinarity are fundamental to understanding local instances of the gendering of texts (Bernheimer 1995) and artworks (Cropper 1976; Johnson and Grieco 1997). By reading women’s works in relation to each other and to the cultural and confessional movements surrounding them, this chapter returns the Renaissance to the early modern.

In the past four decades, feminist literary critics and art historians have uncovered and documented formerly neglected works by women artists and writers, augmenting the predominantly masculine literary and visual canons and developing a feminine history of the arts emergent from women’s works themselves (Showalter 1981; Ferguson, Quilligan, and Vickers 1986; Gouma‐Peterson and Matthews 1987; Nochlin 1988; Broude and Garrard 1992; Ezell 1993; Pollock 1999). In their inception, these critical efforts struggled to assert literary or artistic value on the basis of sex, often assuming that early modern women’s works are inherently valuable because they appeared in a period that largely suppressed female public expression. This appeal to biographical and biological fact – that is, to an essential femininity – was troubled on several fronts. Perhaps most urgently, the association of women’s artistic representations with their gendered bodies often negated the aesthetic value of their works: women artists and writers were seen as motivated by a need for direct self‐expression rather than by a desire for artistic mastery (Nochlin 1988, 149).

Recent work in art history and literary studies has moved beyond the essentialism of its critical legacy, to a constructionist emphasis on gender (Gouma‐Peterson and Matthews 1987, 347–348; Butler 1990). This chapter contributes to this project by arguing that early modern women’s works can provide a template for contemporary constructionist approaches to femininity insofar as they self‐consciously engage gender within the historical practices and discourses of painting. Rather than seeing literary and visual works as revealing authors’ essential selves, I examine performances of gender in relation to painting (see also Lichtenstein 1987; Sohm 1995; Dolan 1993; Melchoir‐Bonnet [1994] 2001). Since the gendered subject is a product of his or her uses of available conventions, this chapter explores the early modern “beauty industry,” setting it alongside other cultural and aesthetic concerns. This method takes its cue from early modern women’s works, which establish their authors’ rights to self‐creation and self‐authorship by exposing and challenging the essentialist underpinnings of the conventions governing painting in both of its senses.

Painted Sepulchers

A rock crystal casting bottle, used by a Tudor noblewoman to hold perfume and now exhibited by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, suggests the vicissitudes of pre‐ and post‐Reformation beliefs, particularly as they pertain to the female body. Composed of Egyptian rock crystal, the container predates its mounting by five centuries: “the rock crystal,” according to the gallery label, “may have contained a holy relic and come to England after the Crusades. It was later mounted in silver and given its new use when religious relics were prohibited after the Reformation” (M.781810). As a reliquary, it would have housed a material remnant of a saint, perhaps a fragment of the sanctified body. With the dissolution of the cult of the saints and the iconoclasm precipitated by the Reformation, the object’s function changes, no longer preserving the venerated corpse, but adorning the noblewoman’s flesh.

This suggestive object illustrates points of contact between religious debates on idolatry and the period’s literal and figurative approaches to women’s cosmetic practices. The casting bottle figures the woman’s body and its double function emphasizes the corruption of female flesh against the incorruptible saint’s body. Certainly the fall into secularism in the reliquary’s reuse involves a debasement of the sacred that Catholics would have found abhorrent (Sander 1624, 31–32). The resourceful recycling of the object, however, points toward the growing preoccupation with personal adornment in the reigns of the Tudor monarchs, culminating in the replacement of discarded Catholic icons by royal images in the “cult of Elizabeth” detailed by Roy Strong nearly 50 years ago. Reports of Elizabeth’s physical appearance, although sometimes tainted by religious polemic, often note her generous use of cosmetics: Jesuit Anthony Rivers’ claim that the queen was painted “in some places near half an inch thick” (Foley 1877, 8) may reflect Catholic suspicion of Elizabeth rather than conveying accurate details of her appearance. The aesthetic and material effects of Elizabeth’s painting – her artful imitations of the sacred body’s incorruptibility – are evident in the idealizing masks of majesty and youth displayed in her portraits from the 1570s forward and in accounts of foreign visitors, such as that of the Swiss diarist Thomas Platter, who reported in 1599 that “although she was already seventy four, [Elizabeth] was very youthful still in appearance, seeming no more than a girl of twenty years of age” (Platter [1599] 1937, 192).

If the reliquary‐turned‐casting bottle represents the female body, its transparency complicates this symbolism. Anti‐cosmetic invectives in the period assumed a desirable alliance between a woman’s inner nature and her outward appearance and lamented the rupture of this link wrought by the artificiality of make‐up. Thomas Taylor’s A Glasse for Gentlewomen (1624), for example, insists that, “No outward ornament or habit may be used upon the bodie, which is severed from the inward ornaments of grace upon the soule … [A]ll artificiall colours and covers are but filthinesse, where this [sanctification] is wanting.” He concludes with a paraphrase of Proverbs 11.22: “A jewell of gold in a swines snout, is a beautiful woman without inward comelinesse” (41–44).

While the ideal early modern woman is a “crystall glasse” (Stubbes 1591), the painted surface of her body threatened at once to display and disappear the female subject. As Amy Richlin notes, cosmetics involve a “paradox whereby a cultural practice simultaneously constructs and erases its practitioners” (1995, 200). The female body is dismembered and reassembled in two‐dimension patterns and parts that rob women of subjectivity and agency. The subject of portraits of the queen – Nicholas Hilliard’s two‐dimensional figures, for example – is not a woman, but the accessories that attend and assign femininity and royalty. Hilliard (1547?–1619) and court painters following his lead make no attempt to offer a likeness of the queen: rather their painting displays the “mask of majesty” which was the dominant pattern for Elizabeth’s images. While her face is reduced to a painted effigy, Elizabeth’s clothing and jewels are represented “from life.” The queen is not a woman but a mirror of majesty: thus the Phoenix and Pelican Portraits attributed to Hilliard (both c. 1575) are mirror images of each other. The queen’s virtues are materialized in the two jewels – themselves near copies of each other – that give the portraits their names. Robbed of interiority, Elizabeth is all dazzling surface.

It is a critical commonplace that the iconic, anti‐representational style of Elizabethan portraiture (Strong 1963; Gent 1981) responds to Protestant nervousness about imagery and reflects the iconoclasm initiated with Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, institutionalized under Edward VI (1537–1553), reversed by Mary (1516–1558), and reinstated in a qualified form by Elizabeth I (Aston 1988, 220–342; Phillips 1973; Siemon 1985). What has rarely been noted, however, are the implications of iconoclasm for attitudes toward the female body and its adornment, or the continuity between Protestant condemnations of idols and castigations of women’s painting. This notional continuity rests on similar concerns about the sundering of correspondences between inward essence and outward form in religious images and women’s bodies, and similar views of artistic creation and cosmetic self‐creation as transgressive. As Thomas Tuke (1616) bluntly put it, recycling views first developed by the anti‐Catholic reformers of Edward VI’s reign, “A painted face is not much unlike an Idoll … and they, that make it, are like unto it, and so are all they that doe delight therein, and worship it” (2).

For the female monarch, the legacy of Tudor iconoclasm and its implications for women’s cosmetic self‐creation troubled the construction of her public image. If Hilliard’s mirror of majesty illustrates the dismemberment and dissolution of its female subject, it also scripts the legacy of Elizabeth’s efforts to control the vagaries of the looking glass, and the troubled trajectory of that project in the misogynistic and iconoclastic culture of early modern England. Despite the efforts of Elizabethan apologists to clarify the status of the royal image, confusion between substance and shadow was pervasive (see Bilson 1585, 547–580). The belief that the queen’s real presence was contained within her “naturall representations” accounts for attacks on Elizabeth’s images (Siemon 1985, 55; Strong 1963, 40). Elizabeth’s self‐fashioning, like her images, relied upon the unity of surface and substance that had previously supported Catholic defenses of imagery to create the sacred body of queenship. Yet, a reformed suspicion of the rupture between inner essence and outward shadow rendered Elizabeth, like any painting woman, a dead idol severed from essential grace. Thus, one observer wrote that “all is falsehood and vanity” with the queen, while a description of Elizabeth in her sixty‐fifth year noted the ravages of her cosmetic use in unforgiving terms: “her face oblong, fair but wrinkled … and her teeth black” (Neale 1957, 76; Rye 1865, 103–104).

If Elizabeth’s self‐fashioning constitutes idolatry, its legacy is comprised of equal parts apotheosis and a debasement. She is at once a model of female creative sovereignty, and of diabolical self‐display.

True Eternitie

When Amelia Lanyer begins her poem of the Passion of Christ, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), under the sign of the risen Elizabeth, she constructs an equivocal posthumous portrait of the queen that is both an apotheosis and a debasement:

Sith Cynthia is ascended to that rest

Of endlesse joy and true Eternitie,

That glorious place that cannot be exprest

By any wight clad in mortalitie,

In her almightie love so highly blest,

And crown’d with everlasting Sov’raigntie;

Where Saints and Angels do attend her Throne,

And she gives glorie unto God alone,

To the great Countesse now I will applie

My Pen, to write thy never dying fame …

(Lanyer 1993, 51)

The lines reflect the pragmatic redirection of Lanyer’s bid for patronage with the death of the queen: thus she applies her pen to the praises of Margaret Clifford (1560–1616), Countess of Cumberland, in Elizabeth’s absence. Lanyer’s opening image of Elizabeth also initiates an extended meditation throughout the poem on the troubled relationship between the superficial appearance of things – most prominently, women’s bodies – and their substances. The central terms of this exploration emerge from the legacy of Elizabeth’s cosmetic representions in life and death. The figure of Elizabeth ascendant – no longer clad in the garments of mortality, her beauty therefore ineffable – informs Lanyer’s efforts to script women’s beauty both internal and expressible. Yet this seemingly unqualified praise of Elizabeth in beatitude is implicitly critical. In describing the queen’s attainment of “true Eternitie” only in death, Lanyer suggests the futility of Elizabeth’s attempts to defy death with painted masks of youth and majesty. Elizabeth’s conversion from vainglory to the praise of God’s glory alone, moreover, indicts the idolatry of her cosmetic self‐creation. As Lanyer attempts to redeem feminine flesh through the spiritual painting undertaken in her poem, she criticizes Elizabeth’s personal idolatry with its contradictory condemnation of the dead letter of Catholicism and advancement of the dead mask of the deified monarch.

Inviting “all vertuous Ladies in generall” to “beautifie [their] soules” in “my Glasse” (12), Lanyer imagines her text as a mirror that reflects Christ’s Passion – presenting “even our Lord Jesus himselfe” (34) – and the community of women convened in her extensive series of dedicatory verses. Lanyer is not concerned with depicting her subjects’ superficial beauties, however, but in granting them an interiority to validate and redeem their problematic sex. Her “Invective against outward beuty unaccompanied by virtue” challenges the assumption that women are incapable of spiritual self‐reflection. Disparaging “the matchlesse colours Red and White” as “perfit features in a fading face” (59), Lanyer implicates “the cult of red and white” exploited to praise Elizabeth’s “lily‐and‐rose beauty” (Bowen 1999, 286). Instead she argues that “a mind enrich’d with Virtue, shines more bright,/Addes everlasting Beauty, gives true grace” (59). To delineate a valid connection between women’s colors and essences, Lanyer redirects the conventional anti‐cosmetic invective away from the usual indictment of women’s duplicity toward a critique of men’s responses to feminine beauty: “For greatest perills do attend the faire,” she writes, “When men do seeke, attempt, plot and devise,/How they may overthrow the chastest Dame,/Whose Beautie is the White whereat they aime” (59–60). Lanyer’s purpose is to explore how the objectifying male gaze, which reduces women to mere surface, may be replaced by the self‐reflective vision of the female subject.

If women’s superficial beauty is the “White” at which men aim, Lanyer suggests that authentic feminine beauty may be firmly rooted in, and redeemed as, the image of God. In her feminist retelling of the Passion, Lanyer demonstrates that women enjoy a special intimacy with God, culminating in the moment of Christ’s empathetic speech to the mourning Daughters of Jerusalem (93–95). Lanyer’s “Mirrour of a worthy Mind” (5) redeems the female flesh not by affirming women’s essential virtues, but by constructing the female subject based upon her identity with Christ (c. 4 BCE–c. 33 CE). The failure of a sure alliance between women’s inner and outer natures, rather than constituting a form of idolatry, instead offers an opportunity for the woman writer to describe the construction and reconstruction of the female self as a productive act of self‐creation. “Painting,” for Lanyer, involves the repair of the severed link between color and essence, but one which proceeds by constructing feminine interiority as women’s incorporation of the image of Christ.

To do so, she places women at the foot of the cross, before the mirror of Christ: “No Dove, no Swan, nor Iv’rie could compare/With his fair corps, when ’twas by death imbrac’d;/No rose, nor no vermillion halfe so faire/As was that precious blood that interlac’d/His body” (39). Lanyer recasts the reds and whites of the cosmetic culture as the body and blood of Christ, offering first a blazon of the crucified Christ (101) followed by an anatomy of his resurrected form. Laid in the tomb, Christ’s body is “Imbalmed and deckt with Lillies and with Roses” (106), while his resurrected flesh embodies true reds and whites: “unto Snowe we may his face compare,/His cheekes like skarlet” (107). Imagining the Incarnation as Christ’s exchange of “his snow‐white Weed” for “Our mortall garment in skarlet Die” (99), Lanyer redeems Elizabethan coloring as a garment of flesh clothing an immaculate interior. The poem’s closing gesture extends this sacramental imagery to establish fellowship between the female subject and Christ:

Deckt in those colours which our Saviour chose;

The purest colours both of White and Red.

Their freshest beauties I would faine disclose,

By which our Savior most was honoured:

But my weake Muse desireth now to rest,

Folding up all their Beauties in your breast. (128–129)

The sanctified reds and whites are the colors of Lanyer’s poetic speech and the imago Christi, both enfolded in the female breast.

This passage summarizes Lanyer’s revisionist approach to Elizabethan painting: the internalized image of the sacred is evidence of a woman’s inner beauty to corroborate her appearance. Exploiting the validating intimacy between women and Christ, Lanyer traces the movement from vision to internalization which redeems the female subject and her troublesome flesh. She scripts women’s redemptive self‐creation through their correct interpretation and adoption of the colors of Christ. As such, Lanyer’s blazon of the resurrected Christ ends with a gesture toward her own representation of the parceled corpus Christi, and offers a portrait of exemplary feminine reading:

Ah! give me leave (good Lady) now to leave

This taske of Beauty which I tooke in hand,

I cannot wade so deepe, I may deceave

My selfe, before I can attaine the land;

Therefore (good Madame) in your heart I leave

His perfect picture, where it still shall stand,

Deeply engraved in that holy shrine,

Environed with Love and Thoughts divine. (108)

The redemptive internalization of the image of Christ within the female reader provides corroborating evidence of her inner beauty to validate her appearance. Importantly, though, Lanyer foregrounds feminine agency – that of the poet and the reader – in constructing this virtue. Rather than rendering women as passive objects of observation, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum exploits the perceived separation of colors and essences to empower the woman reader and writer to self‐create.

The Fountain and the Mirror

Lavinia Fontana’s Christ and the Samaritan Woman (Figure 24.2), like Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judeaorum, illustrates intimacy between the Savior and – in this case – the Samaritan woman while foregrounding the question of color. As Fontana explores the Samaritan’s ability to interpret the visible evidence of Christ’s body, she offers a visual representation of Lanyer’s redemptive poetics. Her defense of painting joins Fontana’s and Lanyer’s feminist projects across the divide of Reformation and Counter‐Reformation approaches to the image.

Image described by caption and surrounding text. — **Figure 24.2** Lavinia Fontana. *Christ and the Samaritan Woman*. (1607).
Source: Photo Library of the Superintendent for the PSAE and the Museum of Naples. Reproduced with permission.

In representing the episode from the Book of John (c. 90–110), Fontana stresses Christ’s humanity, giving visual form to the biblical detail that “Jesus therefore, being wearied with his journey, sat thus on the well” (John 4:6). His head resting on his hand, he glances up into the face of the Samaritan woman in a gesture that underscores the vulnerabilities of the flesh (hunger, thirst, and fatigue), Christ’s willingness to assume these frailties, and his dependence upon women during his lifetime for comfort and relief. Fontana further illustrates the episode’s preoccupation with Christ’s incarnation in a background vignette depicting the apostles returning with food for the Savior. In the foreground, she concentrates on the moment of Christ’s initial request for water from the Samaritan woman and her surprise at being addressed by him. The Samaritan’s promiscuity (which Christ discerns prophetically) as well as her idolatry (Christ tells the Samaritan woman that her people “worship ye know not what,” John 4:22) are both suggested by her richly colored wardrobe and jeweled headdress.

Fontana’s Christ and the Samaritan Woman participates in the Reformation debate on painting and idolatry, aligning women’s painting – Fontana’s and the Samaritan’s – with the redemption of material surfaces guaranteed, according to Catholic theorists of the image, by Christ’s Incarnation. Her choice of subject foregrounds the distinction between letter and spirit, colors and essence, which attends both Protestant and post‐Tridentine (1545–1563) approaches to images (Mâle 1949, 167–199; Jones and Worcester 2002), and the use of imagery in personal devotion (Miles 1985, 95–125). For both Protestant reformers and Counter‐Reformation advocates of personal devotion, Christ’s exchange with the Samaritan woman is a polemical crux (Calvin [1550] 1958). It is here that Christ insists that God must be worshiped in spirit and truth; here that he distinguishes between Old Testament and New Testament spirituality, associating the former with the dead letter, the latter with the living spirit; and it is here that the figure of Christ as the fountain of living waters displaces the literal well of Jacob, and the spiritual sustenance of salvation displaces the material sustenance of the flesh. When the disciples return with food, Christ responds, “I have meat to eat that ye know not of … My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work” (John 4:31–34). The Samaritan woman’s role in assisting this spiritual feeding is central to Fontana’s treatment of the subject. In the background, the medieval city walls represent the Old Testament law, replaced by the spiritual community established between Christ and his female disciple. As Fontana performs a conversion from dead objects to living faith in the move from the background to foreground, she predicts the Samaritan’s missionary career, when she will leave behind the material icon of salvation to avow the living water: “The woman then left her waterpot, and went her way into the city, and saith to the men, ‘Come and see the man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?’” (John 4:28–29 and 39).

Fontana’s image, like Lanyer’s poem, argues that women’s exemplary reading – the Samaritan woman’s ability to recognize Christ’s divinity through the veil of mortality – enables a shift from the material to the spiritual, from letter to spirit. At issue in the story, and crucial in Fontana’s rendering of it, is the connection between surface and substance, particularly as they attend painting and femininity. According to Gabriele Paleotti’s Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane ([1582] 1990), a post‐Tridentine treatise on images that influenced Fontana’s art (Murphy 2003, 2–4, 31–36), the painter appeals to the senses of her viewers with superficial techniques, such as the variety of colors, shadow, figures, and ornaments (“per la varietà de’ colori, per l’ombre, per la figure, per gli ornamenti”), and thereby enables the viewer to see through the surface to the eternal truth it contains (“far è scala a gli huomini per penetrare le eterne”) (fol. 69–69v). Through the artistry of the painter, Paleotti’s Christian viewers (gli huomini) exercise spiritual insight to comprehend religious truth. In her exemplary feminine insight, Fontana’s Samaritan woman is the ideal post‐Tridentine viewer.

This insight, moreover, guarantees the shifting surfaces of painting. Fontana may have had the tale’s explicit engagement with idolatry in mind as she created her image, but in her portrait of the female idolater, she embodies the redemptive link between body and spirit. The colors in which Fontana clothes her twin protagonists suggest this bond: the Savior’s red gown and blue robe are echoed in the red bodice and blue shawl of the Samaritan woman. Dressed in the robes of salvation (which, from another point of view, indict her licentiousness), her face blushed (with modesty or with art), Fontana’s Samaritan advances toward her Savior. Her mind moving adroitly from surface to substance, she is fully aware of his identity and of her own. Engaged in an art of self‐creation guaranteed by the internalized image of Christ, the Samaritan is an icon of women’s painting that converts idolatry to redemption, dead image to living faith. Fontana’s signature on the canvas, “Lavinia Font. Za. Fa. MDCVII” (Fortunati 1998, 106) reminds us of her surname, fontana – a fountain or well – and invites us to imagine that the Samaritan may also be a portrait of her creator, the daughter and wife of painters and the disciple and practitioner of a reformed art of painting. Engaged in depicting the story of a woman’s interpretive skill and her fellowship with the most illustrious of male companions, Fontana erects a mirror for women, reflecting their skills in insightful viewing and their creative and recreative art.

Coda

“Femininity,” Melchoir‐Bonnet ([1994] 2001) writes, “is the creation of the mirror” (214). “The authority of the reflection is imposed primarily upon women who … construct themselves under the gaze of the other” (272). The cosmetic culture of early modern England placed women before literal, visual, and textual mirrors that reflected masculine standards of feminine beauty, virtue, and vice. This “disciplinary practice produce[d] a body which in gesture and appearance [was] recognizably feminine.” Through a gradual process of internalization, twenty‐first‐century women and their early modern ancestors are complicit in creating “a ‘practiced and subjected’ body … on which an inferior status has been inscribed” (Bartky 1988, 64, 71). The beauty industry insists that a woman “connive,” as John Berger (1972) puts it, “in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight” (51). As “self‐policing subjects,” women engage in a “self‐surveillance [that] is a form of obedience to patriarchy” (Bartky 1988, 79).

Viewing the practice of making up as “self‐deconstructing, since this focus on the surface calls into question the existence of any underlying self” (Richlin 1995, 186), a number of contemporary feminist critics have compared cosmetics to decapitation; an “eroticization” of the female head which silences women and robs them of identity. As Howard Eilberg‐Schwartz (Eilberg‐Schwartz and Doniger 1995) writes, “it is precisely the desire to be looked at rather than the desire to look which is signaled by cosmetics” (2). Policed and self‐policed, early modern women’s “right to paint” may seem to amount merely to their complicity in a system in which they could only please or displease male governors, rather than pleasing or governing themselves.

Yet the project of constructing female subjectivity outlined in this chapter challenges the essentialist assumptions of the disciplinary practice that is the early modern cosmetic culture: a regulatory fiction that understood women’s nature as simultaneously decorative and debased. To grant women the power of self‐determination by insisting upon their interpretive ability and intellectual capacity for discrimination does not simply replace one essentialist view with another. Rather, Parry, Lanyer and Fontana imagine femininity as performative, as constructed by one’s engagements with cultural and discursive genres and material practices. These performances redefine “masculine” traits (self‐reflection, for example) as equally available to women. Deploying a fiction of essence, these women envision a new femininity as a product of women’s acts rather than their natures. Through their redemptive painting, as it moves from the body’s surface inward, they create and describe the “essence” of woman.

What to Read Next

Frye (1997); Gent and Llewelyn (1990); Riehl (2010); Snook (2011); Starkey and Doran (2003)

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