Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Did the concept of style have gender? Were the styles of particular Renaissance painters considered to have gendered qualities by contemporary critics? Because gender permeated the rhetorical and philological foundations of art criticism, it can provide a useful interpretive lens to examine the critical arsenal of writers on art, their attitudes toward style and the subterranean bias of their language. Feminist art history has grappled with gender more in terms of iconography, biography, or patronage following a social agenda to analyze a misogynist past and to remedy the marginalization of women in modern art historiography. An exceptional study by Elizabeth Cropper in 1976 broached the question of gender in aesthetics by reconstituting a complex history of love and beauty that converged in treatises on beautiful women.
This article, first given as a lecture at the Institute for Advanced Study, derives from a larger project on definitions of style and stylistic terminology in Italian art criticism 1550-1750 that has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am grateful to Irving Lavin for the invitation to the Institute, where this article was written, and to Norberto Gramaccini, Jack Greenstein, and Alessandro Nova, colleagues at the Institute, who discussed this work and read drafts during that year. Cristelle Baskins, Elizabeth Cropper, Lea Mendelsohn, Giovanna Perini, Mary Pardo, Richard Spear, and Genevieve Warwick gave generously of their scarce time and great knowledge; their attentive readings and often challenging comments have enormously improved this article.