![]() ![]() 32 Christine says Cornificia attended school with her brother Cornificiusthrough “deception and trickery,” which to me suggested Cornificia dressing up as a boy. (Christine does call Boccaccio ungrateful for not valuing these contributions, which I will address more in the piece on the goddesses.) Still, his bracing call for women to not waste their abilities is fascinating to read.Ĭhristine’s telling of the story is more positive, but she agrees that that women should have more confidence in their intellectual abilities. In Boccaccio’s usual style of bizarrely backhanded compliments, he says “How glorious it is for a woman to scorn womanish concerns and to turn her mind to the study of the great poets!” 31 This is typical of his attitude throughout Famous Women: he praises women for taking masculine roles, and has little respect for traditionally feminine pursuits like weaving and children. Instead, I could use Christine's lovely imagery of trees and plants to represent the appeal and escape of study.Ī second option would be to give the double panel to Cornificia, who Boccaccio and Christine both use as an example of what women can accomplish if given the same educational opportunities as men. At the start of this project, I worried that this piece would just be three women sitting at desks. Maybe something like Botticelli’s Primavera, with Muses and nymphs dancing. With just three women in this piece, I pictured something like the double panel for Circe: Sappho with her harp in one panel, her lover resting on her shoulder, and florid vegetation unfurling into the other. 7 According to Christine, when women desire jewels and clothing, they are just trying to ensure the financial future for themselves and their families in the only way they can. Christine says it makes sense that women “guard the little they can have, knowing they can recover this only with the greatest pain.” 6 Keep in mind that every part of a medieval outfit would be made by hand, from spinning to weaving to dyeing to sewing, and the expense would be similar to buying a car today. Boccaccio frequently complains about women’s desire for luxurious jewelry and clothing in Famous Women, but Christine notes that this is a natural response when women are financially suppressed. Women in Christine’s time would have had control over their personal property like clothes and jewelry, but little power over anything else. Busa’s inheritance was legally hers, as was Marguerite’s gold chaplet. 1 - Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 251, fol.While Boccaccio sees Busa as an exception, Christine uses Busa and Marguerite to show that women can give generously when given any financial freedom to do so. The palette includes red and white lead, vermilion, lead-tin yellow, brown earths and red dyes, indigo and ultramarine.Ĭat. The image is a fitting frontispiece to an encyclopaedia which devotes an entire book to colour. This imposing volume was made for Amadeus VIII of Savoy. The image opens the popular medieval encyclopaedia On the Properties of Things in its French translation, commissioned by Charles V of France and favoured by princely patrons. The whole of God’s creation, from the sun to the mythical unicorn, witnesses Adam and Eve’s union. ![]() Jean Corbechon, Livre des propriétés des chosesĪrtist: Master of the Mazarine Hours (active c.1400-1415) Others swung in and out of fashion in response to changing tastes, trade and technological developments. Some colour combinations endured throughout the period and into modern times. They reveal an extraordinary range of pigments and sophisticated painting methods. Paintings in manuscripts, protected for centuries in bound volumes, form the largest and best preserved repositories of medieval and Renaissance colours. Most colourful items have perished or lost their original pigments, but we can still appreciate the vibrant hues of the past in medieval and Renaissance manuscripts – books that were copied and painted by hand for over a millennium before the arrival of printing in Europe, and long after. In everyday objects and sumptuous artworks, colours expressed global beliefs, regional fashions and individual tastes. In medieval and early modern Europe, colours represented man’s place in society and the universe.
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