Josephine Yang Dr.

Grzanka 8 December 2010 The Human Event Rebirth of Civilization, Birth of Sexual Scrutiny The Renaissance saw the disciplines of history, moral philosophy, eloquence, poetry, art, and music rise in importance to the point where they were considered necessary for a strong education. In this period of intellectual and artistic growth, another movement began to form: confrontation of gender roles. Several works by prominent artists and writers in Europe would stimulate debate about gender roles, including those by Albrecht Durer of the Northern Renaissance artists and the Venetian-born female writer Christine de Pizan. Though Durer did not make it his goal to alter the accepted idea of gender roles, as evidenced by the content of most of his works, his woodcut illustration Artist Drawing a Nude with a Perspective Device would inevitably encouraged debate with his visualization of an unclothed woman lying for a male artist. De Pizan, on the other hand, was infuriated by misogynist texts and ideals that pervaded her world; she sought change in society regarding womens roles with her book The Book of the City of Ladies. Both Durers and de Pizans works evoke normative ideas about sexuality: Durer utilized visual objectification and illusion and exemplified those ideas, while de Pizan actively challenged them by presenting her points with a distinctively female voice and by arguing against justifications for mens superiority over women using reason and religion.

Yang 2 Gender is a cultural and social classification of the concepts of masculinity and femininity. Therefore gendered representations in art and literature are outcomes of the cultural process of defining sexual and social identity. In pictorial art, these views are expressed sometimes inadvertently by artists. In 1525 Albrecht Durer created a woodcut to illustrate a perspective machine: Artist Drawing a Nude with a Perspective Device (see fig 1). His ambition in this work was to represent the use of perspective in art, but his representation of his two subjects a male artist and his model, a nude woman bring up criticism and analysis of culturally instituted gender roles.

Figure 1. Durer, Albrecht. Artist Drawing a Nude with a Perspective Device. 1525. Uffizi Gallery, Florence. There is an evident division of gender roles displayed in the artwork; gendered messages are conveyed whether or not Durer consciously chose to represent them. The man in the woodcut is the artist. The area that he occupies in the illustration is marked by strong vertical lines created by the window, the artists posture in his chair, his viewing rod, and the tree, which together identify masculinity as a strong, cultured aspect of humanity.

Yang 3 The left side of the woodcut is almost completely filled by the bulbous form of an unclothed woman. The undulating lines of her figure and of the soft pillows and cloth are displayed in stark contrast to the right side of the illustration. Behind her, the window opens to a natural scene of rolling hills. Whereas the mans side of the woodcut is controlled by vertical lines, the womans side is dominated by horizontal lines, and her knees point toward the man. This presentation suggests the womans docility and obedience to the man. The woman is also objectified in the most evident sense: she is the subjects subject, a situation that automatically places her at a lesser status to the male artist. She lies upon the table only to offer her naked body for the artist to draw; she becomes an object on the table just as if he were sketching a still life of a platter of fruit. The illustration has a patriarchal perspective: the man is in control, and he is in command of her body. The mans perspective is taken because the woodcut documents the development of the painters perspective, leading the audience to identify with the man as the subject and the woman as the object. However, a completely different interpretation can be analyzed if the audience adopts the womans perspective. The woman is relaxed; the artist is stiffly held in an upright position. In addition, the womans peculiar pose places her hand in a masturbatory gesture on her upper thigh. She appears to be enjoying herself; it seems as if she has chosen to pose for the drawing by her own free will. She is aware that she is seen exactly how she is, while the artist has created for himself an illusion of objectivity with his viewing apparatus. He has distanced himself from the naked woman in an attempt to contain womens sexuality. With this perspective of the woodcut, it seems that while the

Yang 4 man represents constraint and strict rationality, the woman represents freedom and nature. The man may actually be the one bound by restrictions, and he may not be the master of the womans body at all with this reading of the artwork, the woman possesses complete power over her body and actions and cultural norms about sexuality are thus disrupted. Christine de Pizan, another prominent Renaissance figure, ruminates on the same concept of gender roles in the form of literature rather than visual art. Considered an early feminist (the term feminism was first coined in the 19th century, far beyond de Pizans time), her writings aimed to promote the importance of womens role in society. De Pizan writes with a markedly feminine voice specifically, her own voice and her argument is effective for her time because she argues from a feminine point of view and she acknowledges the directing principles of her society (religion and reason). Because female writers were extremely rare in the 14th and 15th centuries, Christine de Pizan faced the issue of having to establish and authorize her identity as a woman writer. Therefore she had to acknowledge and follow the literary practices and the social conventions of her period; the points that she would make would already be considered radical, and in order to validate them to the public, she was forced to present them in a relatable, familiar manner. Specifically, Christine de Pizan expresses her views by combining the clerkly tradition of scholasticism and the womans traditional role at home. At the time, the established clerkly tradition involved study of moral, religious, philosophical, and political texts. The Book of the City of Ladies opens with a familiar clerkly setting: One day as I was sitting alone in my study surrounded by books on all kinds of subjects,

Yang 5 devoting myself to literary studies, my usual habit, my mind dwelt at length on the weighty opinions of various authors whom I had studied for a long time (de Pizan 4). Her depiction of her lifestyle denotes her as a clerkly scholar she specifically states that she was studying books of many subjects. This type of intensive study was usually reserved for men; most women were not educated because whether cursed by the sin of Eve or presumed to be intellectually as well as physically weaker than men, women generally did not merit education (Freedman 3). However, de Pizan is writing as a woman she is writing as herself, which she makes evident through her use of first person narrative. She further reinforces this point by interrupting her own studies with a seemingly mundane task: I had not been reading for very long when my good mother called me to refresh myself with some supper, for it was evening (de Pizan 4). With this description of her daily domestic routine disrupting her studies, she combines the masculine tradition of scholarly education and the feminine sphere of domestic agenda, demonstrating that a woman can participate in activities that are considered masculine, but still maintain her womanliness. De Pizan further stresses the fact that she is a woman by speaking from a feminine perspective in a way that responds to the current patriarchal society; she acknowledges the opposing side. She reflects on the patriarchal authoritative texts of the time when she speaks of how she could hardly find a book on morals where, even before [she] had read it in its entirety, [she] did not find several chapters or certain sections attacking women, no matter who the author was (de Pizan 5). Additionally, she expresses how some men may react to this prevailing sense of superiority through her own point of view: I detested myself and the entire feminine sex, as though we were

Yang 6 monstrosities in nature (de Pizan 5). By acknowledging this side of society she establishes a connection with the traditional outlook on gender roles, and with this acknowledgment she builds the foundation of her argument. Christine de Pizan also chooses to focus her criticism on the most important aspects of her society: reason and religion. Two of the three Ladies in the text are Reason and Justice, and respectively, de Pizan discusses both rational and religious perspectives with these Ladies. Through Lady Reason, de Pizan reminds her audience that beside authoritative texts, there is another authority that should not be ignored, which is experience. Lady Reason makes the rational argument that women have the capacity to learn just as much as men; they only lack the experience of different things: women know lessbecause they are not involved in many different things, but stay at home, where it is enough for them to run the household, and there is nothing which so instructs a reasonable creature as the exercise and experience of many different things (de Pizan 7). Through Lady Justice, de Pizan assesses the argument with a religious outlook; she evokes biblical authority to make her point: how could any man be so heartless to forget that the door of Paradise was opened to him by a woman? (de Pizan 7). She follows this argument by citing specific example from biblical texts, exemplifying the reasons why women are equal to men. The two Renaissance figures Albrecht Durer and Christine de Pizan produce normative ideas about sexuality, though Durers woodcut Artist Drawing a Nude with a Perspective Device simply presents gendered distinctions while de Pizan both presents and challenges womens inferior place in society. Durers artwork evokes thought about gender roles with his depiction of a man drawing a nude woman. On the surface it

Yang 7 appears to reinstate the accepted patriarchic views that were so prevalent in that period. However, deeper analysis lends to a more profound exploration of the reasons behind womens continuous subordination because women hold more power over men than men would willingly admit or even acknowledge. Christine de Pizan takes a more direct approach to make her argument against patriarchal societies; she challenges the social norms of her time through her work The Book of the City of Ladies. Because she aims to persuade her audience to consider and respond to her words, she understands that she needs to create a sense of familiarity; they need to relate to her perspective in some way. Therefore de Pizan refashions the familiar concepts of the clerkly tradition and the feminine sphere and argues with the valued principles of religion and reason, and then defines a space for her own distinctively female voice using these aspects of her society. Renaissance artists like Durer and de Pizan created works that evoked normative ideas of sexuality, leading to the birth of a deeper and increasingly more accepted acknowledgment of the need for sexual scrutiny and a new confrontation of gender roles in patriarchal society.

Yang 8 Works Cited De Pizan, Christine. "Selections from The Book of the City of Ladies" The Essential Feminist Reader. Ed. E. B. Freedman. New York: Random House, 2007. 3-7. Print. Freedman, E. B. "Introduction." The Essential Feminist Reader. New York: Random House, 2007. xi-xviii. Print.