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Botticelli's Madonna del Magnificat : Constructing the Woman Writer in Early Humanist Italy

1994; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 109; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/463116

1938-1530

Susan Schibanoff,

Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

While Botticelli's unusual figuration of the Virgin as writer in his Madonna del Magnificat (c. 1483) testifies to an important event in literary history—the appearance of the woman author in quattrocento northern Italy—it also testifies against her, employing a pictorial equivalent of the humanists' “rhetoric of impossibility,” which construes the female writer as a miraculous, hence ephemeral, phenomenon. At the same time, however, Botticelli's painting reveals the emergence of a competing imperative in the late quattrocento Latin and vernacular defenses of women by Laura Cereta, Bartolomeo Goggio, and others: the construction of the woman writer as ordinary, thus “possible.”