Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The best of women were virgins, as "the construction of the female chaste body as a sign of fallen humanity's alienation from its own properly angelic nature" only furthered the gap between pure virgins and women of a lower tier who were virgins no longer. [11] In The Romaunt of the Rose, "women are synonymous with sensual desire." The ...
[17] In the medieval period, fur symbolized female sexuality and was commonly associated with the Magdalene. Medieval historian Philip Crispin explains that artists such as Memling and Matsys often portrayed the Magdalen in furs and notes that she "is noticeably dressed in fur-lined garments in The Magdalen Reading by Rogier van der Weyden". [18]
Weir and Jerman also argue their location on churches and the grotesque features of the figures, by medieval standards, suggests they represented female lust as hideous and sinfully corrupting. [ 2 ] Another theory, espoused by Joanne McMahon and Jack Roberts, is the carvings are remnants of a pre-Christian fertility or mother goddess religion ...
The subsequent evolution of the female nude was sporadic, with hardly any full nude figures, but partial or with the technique of draperie mouillée ("wet cloths"), light dresses and attached to the body, such as the Aphrodite of the Ludovisi Throne, the Niké of Paeonius (425 BC), or the Venus Genetrix of the Museo delle Terme in Rome.
In spite of the patriarchal medieval European culture, [44] which posited female inferiority, opposed female independence, [36] so that female workers could not contract out their labour services without their husband's' approval, [45] widows have been recorded to act as independent economic agents; meanwhile, a married woman—mostly from ...
The intersection of their identities, as Nelson asserts, creates a "doubly fetishized black female body". Women of color are not represented to the degree that white women are in nude art from the Renaissance to the 1990s, and when they are represented it is in a different way than white women.
In Christian Europe, the parts of the body that were required to be covered in public did not always include the female breasts. In depictions of the Madonna from the 14th century, Mary is shown with one bared breast, symbolic of nourishment and loving care. [ 93 ]
The models from which medieval Northern Europe in particular formed its idea of "Roman" style were nearly all portable Late Antique works, and the Late Antique carved sarcophagi found all over the former Roman Empire; [11] the determination to find earlier "purer" classical models, was a key element in the art all'antica of the Renaissance. [12]