How to be a Renaissance Woman by Jill Burke

Author:Jill Burke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2023-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Gambara hailed from the province of Brescia, and came from a family with a long tradition of erudite, powerful women. She benefited from being educated in the same way as her brothers. Veronica had sophisticated parties at her ‘Little House of Delights’, in the countryside near their fiefdom of Correggio, and established a literary academy where poets, historians and painters could meet to discuss and recite poetry. In later life she eschewed the ‘child-like foolishness’, as she saw it, of her youthful poems (‘all the while I was struggling against / My own desires . . . intensely felt / in tingling flesh’) and her poetry became increasingly political and strategic. She used her verses to win over rulers, notably Emperor Charles V, to her cause, successfully steering her small domain through the choppy waters of the Italian wars that raged during her rule.6

Eyes played a special role in Renaissance culture because they were understood to be a particularly porous part of the body, where hazily defined ‘vapours’ could be transferred between people – not metaphorically but actually, corporeally. Eyes were essential in love because they allowed for the exchange of these vapours between lovers, like open windows for the heart and soul of two people to touch each other. Castiglione explains the mechanism:

Eyes often kindle love in the beloved’s heart . . . those quick spirits that issue from the eyes, being generated near the heart, enter again by the eyes (to which they are aimed like an arrow at the mark), and naturally reach the heart as if it were their abode . . . Travelling thus to and fro over the road from eyes to heart . . . little by little these messengers fan with the breath of desire that fire.7

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