1 Some exceptions to this generality are indicated here, with full citations in the bibliography. Two recent volumes on the Medici, who are probably the most-discussed Renaissance family, represent significant art historical contributions to the mini-industry of Medici studies. Karla Langedijk has brought together a vast body of material about the family and their likenesses in Portraits of the Medici. In Dynasty and Destiny, Janet Cox-Rearick has examined the ruler imagery developed by and for Duke Cosimo and Leo X, who sought to express in art their family's dynastic legitimacy. The interrelationships of branches of the Pesaro family who were patrons of two chapels and several funerary monuments in S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari were considered in my own volume, Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice. In Spirituality in Conflict, I discuss the family lives of saints Francis and Louis of Toulouse and their treatment in art. A recent volume by the historian Alan Macfarlane deals with Marriage and Love in England. Goldthwaite has seen in palace architecture a reflection of changing patterns of family life; see his Building of Renaissance Florence. For Renaissance art historians, “family” often means neither the subject nor the patron of art, but the artist himself, and how his family life may be related to his art. See, inter alia, Beck, “Ser Piero da Vinci”; Kristeva, “Bellini”; and Schneider, “Raphael's Personality.”

Marriage as a subject has been given even shorter shrift by art historians, even in the consideration of works of art expressly commissioned for marriages, namely portraits and cassoni. See above at nn. 30-32. As for marriage portraits, and indeed portraits in general, the bibliography is also sparse. (Two exceptions are Hall, “Messer Marsiglio and His Bride”; and Hinz, “Studien zur Geschichte des Ehepaarbildnisses.”) This scarcity may be due in part to uncertainty about the meaning of some double portraits, e.g., that ascribed to Fillippo Lippi in the Metropolitan Museum, the Woman at a Casement, for which see most recently Pope-Hennessy and Christiansen, who argue that the composition is not a wedding or betrothal picture; Secular Painting pp. 56-57. Regarding the depictions of family portraits, see Hughes, “Representing the Family.” It is noteworthy that Hughes, like many of the authors cited in the present article, is not an art historian but an historian by training. The issues of family and marriage in art have received far more attention from historians than from art historians, although there are some indications that this may be changing. For their helpfulness in discussing these issues with me, I wish to thank the following scholars without necessarily implicating them in the results: Michael Hirst, William Hood, David Rosand, Sarah Blake McHam, and especially Stanley Chojnacki.

2 It is no accident that the history of marriage and the family has become a major scholarly interest in recent years, when those ancient institutions have seemed to be suffering new, threatening kinds of stress: current affairs and the concerns of historians are perforce related to recent trends in history as we perceive it.

3 Translated by Creighton Gilbert, quoted and discussed by James Saslow, Ganymede, p. 50. For transcriptions of the Italian texts, see Milanesi, , Le lettere di Michelangelo Buonarroti, pp. 462-64.Google Scholar Saslow's volume is a noteworthy contribution to a remarkable wave of studies of homosexual subjects in recent years. N.b. also the new journal, The European Gay Review, which began publication in late 1986. The first volume includes an essay by John Hale, “Homosexuality in Renaissance Venice.” For a consideration of social attitudes regarding sodomy and legal measures taken against it, see Labalme, “Sodomy and Venetian Justice,” pp. 217-54, and n.b. p. 254 for St. Bernardino of Siena's condemnation of the act and the Florentine “officials of the Curfew.”

4 See below at n. 12.

5 This sheet, in the Fogg Art Museum, seems to be Michelangelo's replica or variant of the one sent to Cavalieri, which has been lost, as argued by Michael Hirst. He notes that the Fogg drawing, which Hirst accepts as autograph, is of the wrong proportions to have been the pendant of Cavalieri's Tityos (our Figs. 2 and 3). See Hirst, “A Drawing of the Rape of Ganymede by Michelangelo.”

6 The object of Tityos’ desire was Latona, the mother of Diana and Apollo. For a summary of various views regarding the Tityos, see Saslow, , Ganymede, pp. 33–39.Google Scholar Saslow, p. 35, sees the nudes in the two drawings as similar not only in pose but in type, but to my eye the Tityos represents a more muscular and masculine figure. The musculature of the arms, for example, is much more powerful in the Tityos than in the Ganymede, not only because of their different situations but because of different anatomies, and the face seems older (as well as expressive of pain rather than pleasure).

7 Caroline Walker Bynum, speaking of trends that increase “steadily from the twelfth century on”; “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother: Some Themes in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Writing,” in idem, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, p. 138 and passim.

8 See Noonan, , Contraception, pp. 224-26, 238-41Google Scholar; and also Schutte, “Trionfo delle donne,” p. 477. For theories about menstruation, child-bearing, and embryology in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, see Bullough, “Medieval Medical and Scientific Views of Women,” and Thomasset, “Quelques principes de l'embryologie medievale.”

9 Hibbard, , Michelangelo, p. 225, and 223-26Google Scholar on the painting, begun by January 1530, and originally intended for Alfonso I d'Este. In 1531, Michelangelo gave the painting to his assistant Antonio Mini to provide dowry money for his sisters. Mini brought the Leda to France in December of 1531. See also Rigolot, “Leda and the Swan: Rabelais's Parody of Michelangelo,” especially pp. 689-92 on the painting.

10 Because Michelangelo provided so much evidence about himself, and because his contemporaries likewise recorded much about him, he has become the subject of historical psychoanalysis, including consideration of the relationship of his sexuality to his art, most recently by the psychiatrist Robert S. Liebert, Michelangelo: A Psychoanalytic Study. N.b. also the reviews by Oremland, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and by Steinberg, The New York Review of Books. With much less biographical evidence to guide her than is available for Michelangelo, Laurie Schneider has proposed a suggestive Freudian analysis of Donatello's David as a homoerotic image in which the severed head of Goliath becomes the castrated phallus of the hated then loved father-rival. See Schneider, “Donatello and Caravaggio,” and the comments by Hans J. Kleinschmidt, a psychiatrist, pp. 92-97.

11 Quoted and translated by Hope, , Titian, p. 125.Google Scholar

12 Painting, so the paragone argument went, is superior to sculpture because several views of a figure or object can be represented at once. In sculpture, however, the viewer must move around the statue in order to behold its various aspects. Vasari made this point in his story of a lost painting by Giorgione in which the artist exploited reflections in metal and water to reveal different views of a figure simultaneously. Le opere di Giorgio Vasari, ed. Milanesi, IV, 98 (hereafter abbreviated Vasari-Milanesi).

13 “La Venere è volta di schena, non per mancamento d'arte, … ma per dimostrar doppia arte. Perché nel girar del viso verso Adone, sforzandosi con amendue le braccia di ritenerlo, e mezza sedendo sopra un drappo sollo di pavonazzo, mostra da per tutto alcuni sentimenti dolci e vivi, e tali, che non si vedono fuori che in lei; dove è ancora mirabile accortezza di questo spirito divino, che nell'ultime parti ci si conosce l'ammaccatura della carne causata dal sedere. Ma che? puossi con verità dire, che ogni colpo di pennello sia di que’ colpi, che suol far di sua mano la Natura… . Vi giuro, signor mio, che non si truova uomo tanto acuto di vista e di giudicio, che veggendola non la creda viva; niuno così raffreddato dagli anni, o si duro di complessione, che non si senta riscaldare, intenerire, e commuoversi nelle vene tutto il sangue. Né è meravigliosa; che se una statua di marmo poté in modo con gli stimoli della sua bellezza penetrare nelle middle d'un giovane, chi'egli vi lasciò la macchia, or, che dee far questa, ch'è di carne, ch'è la beltà stessa, che par che spiri?” Quoted and discussed by Ginzburg, “Tiziano, Ovidio,” p. 8.

14 For the vandalism by attempted copulation with the Cnidian Venus by Praxiteles, see the anecdote told by Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis, bk. 36, chap. 21. See also Overbeck, J. A., Die antiken Schriftquellen (Leipzig, 1868), nos. 1227-45.Google Scholar When I remembered the story but not the source, Professor C. John Herington very kindly gave me the reference.

15 On these changing attitudes, see Chojnacki, “Wives and Husbands in Late-Medieval Venice.”

16 Devoti sermoni della solennità de Santi del Beato Lorenzo Giustiniano … prima Patriarca di Venezia, transl. by Andrea Picolini (Venice, 1565), fol. 1441. Giustinian died in 1456 and was venerated as a saint in Venice from then onward, long before his can onization in 1690. Cf. Leonardo da Vinci on the superiority of visual over verbal or written expression; Treatise on Painting, ed. and transl. by A. Philip McMahon (Princeton, 1956), II, 37.

17 Ginzburg, “Tiziano, Ovidio”; Hope, , Titian, p. 82 Google Scholar, and idem, “Problems of Interpretation”; and Ost, “Tizians sogenannte Venus.” Plus ça change…: Hans Tietze had already noted in 1954 that there was “no hint of any mythological connotation” in sixteenth-century mentions of the Venus; “An Early Version of Titian's Danae,” pp. 206-207.

18 Panofsky, , Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic, pp. 109-71Google Scholar, dealing with “Reflections on Love and Beauty” and “Titian and Ovid.” The title of Ginzburg's article alludes to this chapter in Panofsky's posthumously published volume.

19 Vasari-Milanesi, VII, 429. Titian's painting has been lost; but there cannot be, by definition, a “Flight into Egypt” that depicts Mary alone.

20 Rosand, “Ermeneutica amorosa.”

21 Although the woman depicted in the Venus appears in other works by Titian, notably La Bellà (Florence, Pitti), she is not represented with the idiosyncracies of portraiture but rather as an idealization—i.e., this is not a portrait likeness. For portraits of women (including Titian's Flora) who may be more securely identified as courtesans, who, in Renaissance Venice, were often women of considerable culture and wealth, see the classic article by Held, “Flora, Goddess and Courtesan.” More recently, Cozzi has dealt with related matters; see his “La donna, l'amore e Tiziano.” On related issues, see also Olivieri, “Eroticism and Social Groups in Sixteenth-Century Venice: The Courtesan.”

22 The action was invented by Praxiteles for the Aphrodite of Cnidos. Supposedly surprised by a worshiper (or admirer) as she steps from her bath—the statue was set in a pool of water—the goddess conceals herself as best she can, placing one arm across her breast and the other over her pudenda: she is literally modest or ashamed (pudica) but provocative at the same time. See also above at n. 14.

23 Marcantonio Michiel described Giorgione's “sleeping Venus with Cupid” in the house of Girolamo Marcello. See Notizie d'opere di disegno nella prima meta del XVI, ed. by Jacopo Morelli (Bologna, 1800), p. 66. For a reconstruction of the painting and a consideration of its imagery, see Jaynie Anderson, “Giorgione, Titian and the Sleeping Venus.”

24 As conception (or its possibility) was the only justification for sexual intercourse, and as the woman's emission was believed necessary to achieve conception, even masturbation may be warranted under these circumstances, according to Medieval and Renaissance theologians. See Flandrin, “Sex in Married Life in the Early Middle Ages,” especially p. 119.

25 Quoted and translated in Lemay, “Anthonius Guainerius and Medieval Gynecology,” pp. 331-32. For the literary image of sleeping Venus in Latin epithalamia, see Anderson, “Giorgione, Titian,” p. 338.

26 Anderson, “Giorgione, Titian,” p. 341; Marcello married Morosina Pisani on 9 October 1507. For nuptial bliss in Renaissance Venice, see Chojnacki's forthcoming essay, “Wives and Husbands.”

27 The pose was adapted by Botticelli for the figure of Truth in the Calumny of Apelles (Florence, Uffizi) because that character was described in the ekphrasis on which he based his composition as “modest or ashamed,” hence “pudica.” Leon Battista Alberti reported Lucian's ekphrasis of the Calumny in On Painting, bk. 3; On Painting and On Sculpture, The Latin Texts of De Pictura and De Statua, ed. and transl. by Cecil Grayson (London, 1972), pp. 94-97.

28 Not only were women believed to be the more sinful sex, but they incited men to concupiscence. This view was (and in some quarters, alas, still is) concomitant with the assertion of the inherent inferiority of women. See Maclean, , The Renaissance Notion of Woman, p. 15 Google Scholar and passim. For a more enlightened and accurate Renaissance view of sixteenth-century women, subjugated to men by education and custom, see Fahy, “Three Early Renaissance Treatises on Women.”

29 Cassoni evidently always came in pairs and were always made for married couples at the time of their wedding. Commissioned by the future husband or by his (male) relatives, they became part of the bedroom furnishing after his marriage. See also n. 30 below.

30 Cassoni would seem to invite or require consideration of marriage and the family, but only recently have art historians (and at least one historian) begun to respond to that invitation. In her monograph on the leading cassone painter of fifteenth-century Florence, Apollonio di Giovanni, Ellen Callman did not deal with marriage or with family history; but in a more recent article she has begun to do so, suggesting that a change in subject-matter in mid-fifteenth-century cassoni may be related to changing feelings about marriage between young brides and older husbands. See Callman, “The Growing Threat to Marital Bliss.” The historian Anne Jacobson Schutte has considered the role of women as reflected in cassoni and deschi da parto, painted trays presented to new mothers (discussed also by Callman in her book and article) in “ ‘Trionfo delle donne.’ “ Brucia Witthoft has also presented useful information about Renaissance weddings in “Marriage Rituals and Marriage Chests.”

31 For the desco in New York, the New York Historical Society, see Watson, “A Desco da Parto.” According to Callman, deschi were not commissioned for weddings but only for births; they were gifts to new mothers, not to brides. See her “Growing Threat.”

32 Watson, “A Desco da Parto” p. 4 and n. 1 for the text of the inscription.

33 For the statue, see Arnason, The Sculpture of Houdon. If there are earlier biologically correct women in art, at least on a large scale, neither Arnason nor I know them. Regarding the sex of putti, n.b. Titian's homoerotic Venus Worship (Madrid, Prado), populated by demonstrative male putti, who became male and female in Rubens’ copy (Stockholm, National Museum).

34 Steinberg identifies his paintings as his primary source on p. 23 and passim.

35 Bynum, “The Body of Christ.”

36 And discussed at length with reference to other images in Steinberg, , Sexuality of Christ, pp. 48–65 Google Scholar. The Franciscan dictum “nudus sequi nudum Christum,” quoted by Steinberg on p. 34, alludes in fact to Francis’ identification with Christ naked on the Cross. Hence the Christ's nudity is once again associated with his suffering. See my volume, Spirituality in Conflict, Chap. 2.

37 Bynum's emphasis on the imagery of Christ as food is depicted quite explicitly in images of the Child emerging from the chalice: he is literally the Eucharist, whose body and blood the faithful are invited to drink.

38 “HolyDouV” p. 319.

39 Quoted and discussed by Klapisch-Zuber. See also Goffen, “Icon and Vision,” p. 503n.84, and for the display of such images in bedrooms, p. 512.

40 Klapisch-Zuber, “Holy Dolls,” p. 326.

41 Ibid., p. 327.

42 Vauchez, , La Sainteté en Occident, pp. 102–103 and 526-29.Google Scholar

43 See Schutte, “Trionfo delle donne”; and Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top.”