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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Although some historians believe that Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine mystic and translator of Plato's writings, rediscovered the subject of androgyny in the late fifteenth century,¹ it had always been present in one form or another, including among the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages. Caroline Walker Bynum has shown, for example, how large numbers of devout people described and thought of Jesus as Mother. Indeed, even more surprisingly, “authors [in the medieval period] found it far easier than we seem to find it to apply characteristics stereotyped as male or female to the opposite sex.”²

Although artists from the Enlightenment onwards may not have been as religious as their earlier colleagues, many remained spiritually-inclined, even mystically-inclined, and continued to present their psychic life as androgynous. In the nineteenth century artists like Edouard Manet, a man not easily linked to mysticism or esotericism, demonstrated with startling clarity that their minds (or at least the mind they imagined) was androgynous, a position which by the twentieth century was receiving outside support from discoveries in analytical psychology.

1. Janusz. Walek, “The Czartoryski Portrait of a Youth by Raphael”, Artibus et Historiae 12, 1991, p. 219

2. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press) 1982, p. 162

All Articles (Alphabetical by Artist, then Title)

How God's hand becomes the artist's

Titian’s Assunta (1516-18)

How looking out for unusual features helps unlock meaning

Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1520-22)

Learn what to look for in a Christ: the artist himself

Titian’s Christ Flagellated (c.1560)

Learn how to see what has never been seen

Titian’s Danae (all versions)

Baudelaire's linking of Painting with cosmetics in the nineteenth century was not a novel idea, as long believed, but one with a very long history indeed

Titian’s Mary Magdalene(s) (c.1530-60)

Train your visual memory to recall similar poses in quite different situations; they usually have some meaning in common

Titian’s Pieta (c.1575)

A much-loved painting contains a marvelous self-portrait in the clouds

Titian’s Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple (1534-38)

Get to know what painters and sculptors look like at work - and their various processes - and your brain will penetrate the surface of a painting in no time. A painting like this one...

Titian’s Shepherd and Nymph (c.1575-6)

Find out what touching, hands and pointing fingers mean for Titian

Titian’s Touch: Noli Me Tangere (1511-12), Assunta (1520) and Self-portrait (c1560-62)

See how Titian tricks us into thinking there is one reality in art when there are, at least, two

Titian’s Woman with a Mirror (1512-15)

A Van Dyck portrait at the Frick reveals some of its secrets easily

Van Dyck’s Marchesa Cattaneo (c.1622-7) at The Frick

See why knowledge of a painter's practice can lead to a different, and more accurate, interpretation of a scene.

Van Gogh’s Weavers (1884)

The Velazquez that the Louvre doesn't show anymore is not what curators think. Ask Millet, Manet, Degas, Matisse or Picasso....

Velazquez’s Infanta Margarita (1653)

See how the major mystery of Las Meninas can be resolved

Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1656)

How to interpret a painting "with no particular meaning."

Velazquez’s Old Woman Frying Eggs (1618)

The magic of visual illusion was not an invention of the Surrealists; it has been an integral part of art for centuries.

Velazquez’s Portrait of Luis de Góngora (1622)...and Picasso’s.

See how Velazquez portrays the artist and his art and then apply the lesson learned elsewhere

Velazquez’s Prince Baltasar Carlos with a Dwarf (1632)

Though never noted Vermeer's musical metaphors are fairly obvious

Vermeer’s Musical Metaphors

This picture uses so many of the themes and methods explained on EPPH that I can note only a few. Try exercising your own perception on the rest.

Veronese’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt (c.1572)

Artists often identify with other artists, using them as an alter ego. Here is an exceptionally clever one.

Whistler’s J. Becquet, Sculptor (1859)

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