Feminine Visconti

I was looking through my Visconti yesterday and found that many of the supposedly male characters look feminine. Pages and Knights anyway, but even the Kings. Anyone else found that? And is there a reason for it? I found it contrasted with the Sola Busca, which almost exclusively shows men.

Well, the Sola Busca replaced all of the regular trumps with images of conquerors from classical or mythical history, so whaddya expect?

But Bonifacio Bembo, whose workshop likely made the Visconti deck, had a habit of giving rather childlike faces and large, plump heads to all of his human figures. They all look like girls, but even more so, they tend to look like children to me.

ihcoyc said:

But Bonifacio Bembo, whose workshop likely made the Visconti deck, had a habit of giving rather childlike faces and large, plump heads to all of his human figures. They all look like girls, but even more so, they tend to look like children to me.

Click to expand...

Why do you think he did that?

No real answers to that question. It may have just been a personal style. It may also be because some members of his patron family:



had faces like that.

Now, Caterina Sforza was much better looking:



Love her eyes. Despite being painted in the half-asleep mode typical of Renaissance women's portraits, she still seems like she had a quite lively intelligence, and was capable of all sorts of things. . .

Ahem. But she still had a rather round face. They may be idealized portraits of the Visconti-Sforzas.

The Renaissance had much different standards of beauty than we do, that's all.

Gothic international. This is THE look starting late fourteenth through to say, 1450.

Take a look at some Gentile da Fabriano, or Jacopo Bellini - these sweet round blonde faces are what you see. It's a bit less prevalent towards Florence, because of the Giotto-Masaccio continuum, though even Masolino... too, look at Fra Angelico, though he and Benozzo Gozzoli are kind of the end point of that particular tendency. I personally partially relate it to Medici visual politics towards a style that was never particularly deeply entrenched in Florence anyway, not like it was up in the princely North (and the sweet oltr'alpini faces). It is a "courtly" style.

-sorry, I usually don't come 'round hereabouts but the dissertation possessed me, as it occasionally does, to respond

-saba

I noticed this and also that not only do they look like girls but they all look very much alike. I thought maybe whoever painted the deck had the same person, an adolescent or a child, model for many of the cards. Or they made a sheet of sketches, perhaps of a member of the family, and then used that face over and over.

--Myrrha

Hello Brighteye...
A true Irish here !!!
(I have my Irish blood / Cormack surname )

1-Artist of that time as Boticelli tends to find a pattern of face close to the "Soul",so not male or female looks.
2-They were too much deep involved in Neoplatonism as Marsilio Ficino.

Cheers !

eugim

Botticelli comes after the major shift of 1450, though, and his faces are more the elongated oval that ihoyc posted for Catherina Sforza.- go back a little earlier to, say, Pisanello and Iacbello del Fiore, for instance. I *think* that Fra Angelico is about the end of the line for that round face that we see on Bembo's cards, but everywhere in Northern Italy for the first half of the century. For me Masaccio spelled the end to this.


-saba

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