Text

theses

This dissertation collects and examines thirty-five examples of women’s monumental tombs from fifteenth-century Italy to correct the misconceptions, pervasive in Renaissance studies, that women’s tombs barely existed and that art related to fifteenth-century women—either as patrons or audience—was small, domestic, and private. The first chapter provides an overview of these tombs and establishes the fifteenth-century as a period of experimentation and development for this type of monument across the Italian peninsula. The second chapter organizes tomb patronage into two types, internal and external, with internal divided into three groups, conjugal patronage, familial patronage, and self-patronage. Like monuments for men, women’s tombs were commissioned when financially possible and when the erection of a public sculpture served the needs of the patron. Chapter three addresses the ways women were presented in effigy and proposes a larger role for these figures within the broader discourse of Renaissance portraiture. Effigies, despite their uncommonly secure identifications as actual, specific people, hold only a limited place in that discourse, yet necessarily complicate the relationship between Renaissance portraits of women and female ideals of beauty. As public sculptures, effigy portraits balance ideals of feminine virtue with recognizable, identifiable likenesses, depicting each woman at the age of her death, whether young or old. Chapter four then analyzes inscriptions on women’s tombs and identifies their six component parts that may appear in any combination. The inscriptions are then linked to contemporary notions of ideal women in poetry, such as Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura, to argue that women’s tombs engaged with broader cultural notions of ideal, dead women. Though designating these monuments as “women’s tombs” risks marking them as different and separate, this project definitively proves that these monuments were much the same as men’s tombs. Women’s tombs were neither commissioned nor constructed lightly, and they functioned as integral parts of the memorial fabric of fifteenth century churches. Finally, the nuanced public portrayal of women as presented on these tombs—even though it was posthumous—must change our view of fifteenth-century women’s relationships to the civic sphere and communal art.

ETD_5473

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Brenna C. Graham

doi:10.7282/T37W69HZ

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.