Enigmatic Veils: Mythological Imagery and the Female Gaze in Renaissance Marriage Furniture

While one might assume that in the Renaissance, mythological imagery was almost exclusively created with the male gaze in mind, it is nevertheless important to remember that women, too, frequently encountered such visual narratives in their daily lives. Representations of stories from classical mythology proliferated in a wide variety of mediums in Renaissance Italy, but nowhere more so than in the nuptial furnishings that were commissioned to mark the union of newly-wed couples. Narratives depicted on cassone and spalliera panels served didactic and exemplary purposes, but as this paper will show, the messages and virtues to be derived from such tales were anything but straightforward, particularly for women. What, after all, does one make of Apollo and Diana brutally killing the children of Niobe, or of the death of Procris at the hands of her own husband? A leading humanist of his time, Pico della Mirandola, like Petrarch before him, was of the mind that ancient poetry and classical mythology were deliberately constructed to hide their true meanings and would reveal their edifying content only to those who tirelessly toiled to excavate them. With the assumption that women see with two minds as Diane Wolfthal posits in her important study on Renaissance rape imagery, this paper will focus on the complexities, liminalities, and ambiguities inherent in the viewing of mythological imagery by women, drawing upon gender norms and ideals as imparted in early modern texts.