Maiolica Plate

Public Access Description:

This plate was one of 13 objects investigated in 2019 as part of ‘Gendering Interpretations’: a collaborative project between the V&A, University of Plymouth, Vasa Museum (Stockholm), Lund University, Leiden University and the University of Western Australia.

Maiolica (tin-glazed ceramics) was collected by all genders in the early modern period. Female collectors focused on ceramics with images that suggested learning, chastity and virtue: this plate, depicting Minerva (goddess of wisdom) and the Muses (representatives of art and literature), would be a good example. It is an example of istoriato maiolica, which depicted images from classical texts in order to stimulate witty, learned conversation at dinner between men and women. The design is copied from an image in Bernard Salomon’s La Métamorphose d'Ovide figurée (Lyon, 1557). In this Ovid episode, Minerva tells the Muses they are lucky to live in such a beautiful place; the Muses reply that they live in fear following a recent narrow escape from sexual violence. Other artists used maiolica designs for quite complex political gendered narratives: some ceramics, for example, depicted defeated kings in submissive postures copied from erotic texts.

Early modern women such as Martha Moulsworth and Bathsua Makin used the gender of Minerva and the Muses as arguments in favour of women’s education. However, some men drew a distinction between allegorical gender and real-life gender roles, indicating that this strategy was not always successful. For example, Abraham Cowley asserted his right to call the discipline of Philosophy ‘he’: ‘For whatsoe’re the Painters Fancy be, / It a Male Virtu seems to me.’

Other male writers described their relationship with the Muses who inspired them as sexual. This meant female writers were described as sexually transgressive: Ben Jonson referred to the poet Cecily Bulstrode as a ‘tribade’, meaning a woman who has sex with women.

Curatorial comment:

This plate was one of 13 objects investigated in 2019 as part of ‘Gendering Interpretations’: a collaborative project between the V&A, University of Plymouth, Vasa Museum (Stockholm), Lund University, Leiden University and the University of Western Australia. This project aimed to recover the complex gender dynamics that made objects meaningful to early modern people, and to increase the visibility of women and LGBTQ people in museum collections. Research on the V&A objects was carried out by Dr Kit Heyam (University of Plymouth).

In addition to the findings noted in the Public Access Description, research on this object revealed the following:

Maiolica production was male-dominated, though women did commission designs and gave/received them as gifts. Interestingly, however, the same materials used to make tin-glazed ceramics were also used in make-up, and this seems to have led them to be associated with women in the early modern Italian imagination. Vannoccio Biringuccio’s 1540 book on metallurgy, Pirotechnia, digresses from a description of tin and lead to note that, ‘Women in particular are greatly indebted to it’.

For non-aristocratic Italians, the acquisition and display of maiolica was part of a shift in the gendered dynamics of space in the home. Prior to the sixteenth century, the sala (reception room) was primarily a female space: a private space in which domestic activities were carried out by women. In the first half of the sixteenth century, however, it was shifting to become a more public, social space, and therefore a more mixed-gender space. As part of this gender diversification of the sala, collections of maiolica were moved into this room for public display. This display of maiolica also enabled men to fashion their own masculinity, particularly since many featured the owner’s coat of arms: given that Italian artisans in this period largely did not have surnames, heraldic maiolica formed an alternative index of masculinity and identity. Similarly, by signalling social status, maiolica also influenced negotiation of marriages.

As noted elsewhere, this plate shows Minerva and the Muses engaged in conversation. Early modern artists and writers often depict the Muses with Apollo, indicating that he is the source of their power; by depicting the Muses alone with Minerva, this image avoids neutralising their female agency. Minerva, who was born from Jupiter’s head, was also sometimes used to express gender nonconformity or trans experience. For example, the Chevalier d’Éon – a French aristocrat who was assigned male at birth but lived as female for many years – was pictured during their lifetime as Minerva on the battlefield, a comparison that was ostensibly flattering but also signalled d’Éon’s disruption of gender binaries. Elsewhere, both Minerva and the Muses were celebrated for their chastity: laudatory comparisons between learned women and Minerva were chosen for this connotation as well as to indicate wisdom. Juan Luis Vives, in De institutione feminae christianae (The Instruction of a Christian Woman, first published 1523), used this comparison to suggest that women’s education is primarily valuable insofar as it can teach examples of chastity.

(Dr Kit Heyam, August 2019)

References:

Key references

• Elaine Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)
• Lisa Boutin (2010), ‘Isabella d'Este and the Gender Neutrality of Renaissance Ceramics’, Women's Studies, 40:1, 23-47, DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2011.527801
• Robert C. Evans and Anne C. Little (eds.), ‘The Muses Females Are’: Martha Moulsworth and Other Women Writers of the English Renaissance (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 1995)
• Patricia Fara, ‘Minerva/Athene’, Endeavour, 34:1 (2010), 4-5
• Paula Hohti, ‘Domestic space and identity: artisans, shopkeepers and traders in sixteenth-century Siena’, Urban History, 37:3 (2010), 372-84
• Ovid, The. xv. bookes of P. Ouidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, trans. by Arthur Golding (London: Willyam Seres, 1567)

Further reading

• Kathleen W. Christian, Clare E. L. Guest, and Claudia Wedepohl, eds., The Muses and Their Afterlife in Post-Classical Europe (London: The Warburg Institute, 2014)
• Lisa Forman Cody, ‘Sex, Civility, and the Self: Du Coudray, d’Eon, and Eighteenth-Century Conceptions of Gendered, National, and Psychological Identity’, French Historical Studies, 24:3 (summer 2001), 379-407
• Bette Talvacchia, ‘Professional Advancement and the Use of the Erotic in the Art of Francesco Xanto’ The Sixteenth Century Journal, 25:1 (Spring, 1994), 121-153
• Steve Wharton, ‘What you see is what you get: colour in Italian Renaissance istoriato ware’, in Roberta J. M. Olson, Patricia L. Reilly and Rupert Shepherd (eds.), The Biography of the Object in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 12-23