Androgyny
While the Renaissance phrase Every painter paints himself uses the masculine to denote both genders, as the English of my youth did too, the artists themselves were under no delusion that their male minds would be sufficient to become like God (see The Divine Artist). They needed a feminine side too (or a masculine one in the case of female artists) because a mind reflecting the cosmos – whether God’s or a visual poet’s – contains both genders as any reasonable thinker since Plato would have known. This is important to grasp because the patriarchal norms of everyday life in the Renaissance, of particular interest to feminist art historians, were markedly different from the intellectual concepts so important to mystical thought.
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