La matrona bergamasca: Portraits of women in Renaissance Bergamo

It is generally assumed that all portraits of women produced in Renaissance Italy adhered to contemporary ideals of virtue and beauty. The present study challenges this notion by examining twenty-four extant portraits of women painted in the sixteenth-century Venetian province of Bergamo, which deviate from this convention. In this city, a representation of a stout, dignified married woman with a purposeful demeanor, termed here the matrona bergamasca, distinguished female imagery. To explain this difference, the present study addresses portraits of women in Bergamo in terms of women's experiences and needs, both as perceived by women themselves and as defined by men on their behalf. It treats women's daily lives and their roles within society as important determinants in the production and consumption of the visual arts.;Bergamo was the site of important pictorial innovations and unique female representations traditionally neglected in art-historical studies. This comprehensive regional analysis examines the development of portraits of women by Lorenzo Lotto in the first part of the sixteenth century and Giovanni Battista Moroni at the end of the century as the principal and most influential artists in the city. The images they produced both reflect and helped shape Bergamo's transformation from a mercantile to an aristocratic society at a time of civic disruption and political turmoil due to the competing interests of Venice, France, and Spain.;The roles women occupied during these turbulent times differed from those prescribed in humanist treatises on female behavior that valorized chastity, silence, and obedience. Instead, this study shows that their duties often transcended those strictly defined by the domestic sphere---and that the domestic sphere itself encompassed broad social, political, and economic responsibilities. Women in Bergamo were represented as markers of a sophisticated, intellectual circle, as devoted wives, as pious citizens, as stately rulers, and as examples of the city's new nobility. A focused regional study of this sort allows us to question generalizations and categorizations of female portraits, generalizations and categorizations that cannot be universally applied. It also allows us to illustrate the processes by which innovations in pictorial conventions carried out locally in a small town can break the mold of tradition.