Buffoons, rustics, and courtesans: Low painting and entertainment culture in Renaissance Venice

This dissertation maps out a new vision of the relationship between painting and entertainment culture in sixteenth-century Venice, focusing in particular on the performers, subjects, and themes of comic dialect theater and their depiction in visual sources. The taste among Venetian elites for comedy, poetry, and music centered on marginal social groups and the urban and rural underclasses, famously epitomized by Ruzante's plays and Aretino's satires, has not been adequately examined in relation to the visual arts. While Renaissance scholars study the low genres of "alla bulesca" literature, macaronic poetry, and bawdy song forms like the villotta and barzelletta, this dissertation is the first to offer an in-depth analysis of an analogous "low" genre of painting.;One fundamental task of the dissertation is thus to identify and recover low painting as a significant category of Venetian Renaissance art through the fresh interpretation of extant works and the archival recovery of lost examples. In performing this reconstruction I dedicate attention to the patronage and ownership of these works and their display and function within the Venetian home. Another aim of the project is to examine low painting as a mode of counter-figuration that manipulates and subverts the standards of Renaissance idealism: beauty, order, harmony, and control. As might be expected it is primarily non-canonical artists -- Bartolomeo Veneto, Bernardino Licinio, Paris Bordon, and in particular Giovanni Cariani -- who emerge as the principal painters of this imagery, although Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgione, and Titian all play crucial roles in its development.;To these purposes I examine the figures that populate this painting -- notably popular performers, peasants, and prostitutes -- across four chapters where they are treated as both active participants in the production of Venetian entertainment culture and as its performed and painted subjects. In all cases my readings of the visual and textual sources are conditioned by the social and political climate in which they were produced. My chronological focus on the period between 1500 and 1550 covers the crucial years of gestation and development for the characters and subjects later codified in the Commedia dell.Arte. This dissertation connects paintings, prints, and drawings from an early period to the better-studied imagery of the Commedia for the first time.;The first two chapters focus on imagery of celebrity buffoons, actors, and musicians and the tropes of madness, rusticity, and "natural" performance promulgated through their literary and visual personae. Here I am particularly interested in interpreting visual language in light of performance practices and literary style and in contrasting it to purportedly normative Renaissance ideals of appearance and behavior. Chapters Three and Four turn to paintings that treat a major subject of contemporary comic theater, music, and poetry: the courtesan and her retinue of suitors, pimps, and servants. My interpretation seeks not only to identify and interpret the major themes of this imagery through recourse to its literary equivalents, but also to resolve the paradoxical portrayal of the courtesan as an embodiment of refined luxury and youthful beauty in painting and as a vulgar, even grotesque figure of hyperbolic greed in satiric literature.