Abstract
Reviewed by: Aria Zan Cabot, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
‘Social amphibology’ is the key term that unites the three short chapters, respectively entitled ‘Words,’ ‘Letters,’ and ‘Images,’ of The Renaissance Courtesan, in which Eugenio Giusti analyzes the ways in which courtesans and prostitutes between the 16th and 18th centuries, both in their own social and literary modes of self-representation as well as in the views espoused by their contemporaries and in contemporary critical approaches, often managed to evade the traditional social boundaries by which they were ostensibly defined and confined. As explained in the Introduction, Giusti’s use of the term ‘amphibology’ is derived foremost from the ‘Capitolo 16’ of Veronica Franco’s Terze rime, in which the Venetian courtesan criticizes the poet Maffio Venier’s play on her name in his reference to ‘Veronica, ver unica puttana’ as an equivocal use of the adjective unica. By starting with a close analysis of Franco’s own use of the term anfibologia and concluding with some reflections on the amphibological representations that have persisted in contemporary literary, visual, and filmic representations of the poet and courtesan, Giusti’s diachronic analysis follows a clear, concise trajectory that will provide literature and art history students and scholars alike with a useful foundation for approaching visual and literary representations of Renaissance women with a heightened awareness of the linguistic and social nuances that are often taken for granted.
In the first two chapters of the monograph, Giusti examines the meanings and uses of the term courtesan in legal, archival, and personal documents, including travel diaries and epistolary exchanges, as well as in literary representations in the writings of Baldassare Castiglione, Pietro Aretino, and Matteo Bandello, and further exposes how the ambiguity of the term has persisted in recent scholarly interpretations of these documents. In the first chapter, ‘Words,’ Giusti traces the lexical and social ambiguity surrounding the notion of the honest courtesan in Renaissance legal and administrative documents starting with the 1517 census in Rome and legal decrees in various Italian cities. He then expands his social analysis to the history of literary and critical reactions to the courtesan, focusing on the ambivalent linguistic collocation between ‘the synonymy of courtesan and whore’ and, on the other hand, the association of the courtesan with the cortigiana or donna di corte. Throughout the monograph, English translations of excerpts from a vast range of primary social and literary documents, some of which have never been published in English translation, make The Renaissance Courtesan especially appealing and accessible to a wide audience. In particular, examples gleaned from works such as Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, Michel de Montaigne’s travel journals, and the letters of Aretino and Titian are of great interest, but could easily be missed by the inattentive reader, as Giusti tends to relegate these passages—as well as relevant excerpts of Venetian sumptuary laws and senatorial decrees—to lengthy footnotes rather than incorporate them in the text.
The focus of the third and final chapter, ‘Images,’ is instead on visual representations of women in prints and paintings from the 16th to 18th centuries, and how such images are framed by the artists themselves as well as in contemporary exhibitions, catalogues, and other media. Specifically, Giusti concentrates his analysis on the catalogues of a 1990 exhibition entitled ‘Il gioco dell’amore. Le cortigiane di Venezia dal Trecento al Settecento’ and a 2009 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York entitled ‘Art and Love in Renaissance Italy.’ Although the almost-exclusive focus on these two catalogues at times seems to limit the scope of Giusti’s investigation, the overall effect of his parallel approach in each of the three chapters, which consists of juxtaposing a limited number of historical documents with a ‘diachronic and framing perspective’ provided by a limited number of contemporary critical views, is largely successful.