Curatorial Statement
Explore the impact of women’s images in Renaissance art in this exhibition of the NGA’s works Ginevra de’ Benci, Ginevra Bentivoglio, Lucrezia Tornabouni, and Bianca Maria Sforza, as well as the Louvre’s Anne of Cleves.
The Renaissance classifies itself as a significant age of rebirth. Spanning across the 14th-17th centuries, the Renaissance promoted a new era of “classical antiquity” stemming from the traditional roots of ancient Greek and Roman cultures. It is believed that the general boom of trade and commerce at this time allowed wealthy and influential nobles to contribute funding to the arts, thus allowing the Renaissance to flourish. This period sought to expand upon the knowledge, wisdom, artistic endeavors, philosophies, and literary traditions set forth by its ancient predecessors. Additionally, notable academics of the Renaissance promoted the ideology of humanism and what it meant to be as a man outside of a religious sphere.
Frequently during this time period, if women wanted to be involved in the production of academic work, they would have to operate in the religious realm of knowledge. Furthermore, women were not often given an educational voice outside of the church due to the patriarchal nature of the time. Outside of the home, a woman’s voice belonged to her father or husband, and therefore, women had little to no proper representation in art and literature. Consequently, these mediums often existed for and from men, portraying and equating women to a certain ideal to assign a value and create a hierarchy of desirability for women.
The Italian Renaissance Collection, housed at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) located in Washington, D.C., primarily explores the artistic response in regards to the cultural ideals developed amidst the Italian Renaissance. This collection provides access to works produced by notable artists such as da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, etc. The collection highlights themes of religious subjects in relation to the Christian faith, as well as secular matter, works commissioned for honorable nobles, and scenes that call back to the classical antiquity of Greco-Roman ideologies. In addition to these works, it is worthy to note that most secular subjects were often portrayed by distinguishable men. There is a noticeable difference in the amount of pieces displayed that portray salient men versus women.
The exhibition aims to diversify the NGA’s extensive collection of Renaissance works by bringing in works from outside of the Italian peninsula and expanding the collection of works of specific women, bringing in works that depict real women, not just using them as symbols or as allegories. In using images of real women, the exhibition aims to focus on the individualism of women and how they were portrayed through art, as well as looking at the purpose for the work to be created.
The exhibition begins with four Italian Renaissance works that are housed at the NGA: da Vinci’s Ginevra de’ Benci, de’ Roberti’s Ginevra Bentivoglio, Ghirlandaio’s Lucrazia Tornabuoni, and de Predis’s Bianca Maria Sforza. The four works are displayed chronologically and feature real women who lived in Italy, the very place where the Renaissance began. All of the women featured have descriptions of their lives and interactive elements on the paintings to facilitate viewer’s learning about the intricate lives of the often overlooked women of the Renaissance. Viewers then move on to the webpage about the work that the curators are choosing to deaccession from the NGA, Titian’s Woman Holding an Apple, along with an explanation as to why they feel it does not fit into the exhibition, and therefore feel justified in selling it. The last work that viewers see is Holbein’s Anne of Cleves, the work that the NGA has chosen to acquire, along with an explanation as to why the curators would like to buy it as well as how it fits into the exhibition's goal of displaying women of the Renaissance and their individual characteristics.