 Welcome to the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art. I am Elizabeth Sackler, and it is a pleasure to be here. I hope you all had a wonderful summer. I did. And this autumnal weather, I think we're an Indian summer. This is our first program of the season that I've had an opportunity to come and introduce our speaker. And I'm particularly excited about that today. As many of you know, the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art is an exhibition space, of course, with the permanent house of the dinner party by Judy Chicago. We are an education facility dedicated to feminist art. And our mission for three and a half years now has been to raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions and to the diversity of the community. We host lectures, discussions on feminist art, feminist theory, and feminist activism. And since our inception, we've hosted scores. I think we must be going on hundreds at this point of excellent and wide-ranging programming. Today is the first lecture, as I said, that I've had the pleasure to introduce. My friend, my very good friend, Mary Beckinsale. I met Mary in Florence in Italy, obviously, in 2004. And we were randomly seated as luncheon partners in a room that held more than 40 people. And we immediately discovered our shared passion about the then contemporary political horrors, our rage at unethical behavior, and our tendencies for provocative social activism. And, of course, our love of all things feminist and of art. And our relationship has grown and deepened over the years. And I'm an enormous fan of Mary Beckinsale and of my painting maestro, her husband, Jules Madoff. And their wonderful institution in Florence, the Studio Art Center's International. Mary and I have been discussing what makes, what means feminist art for a couple of years now. And there is no one better equipped than I would call her encyclopedia Beckinsale to reinterpret major works of art throughout history by identifying their feminist content. And this is what she has taken on for this lecture. And she's moving beyond traditional analysis and recasting these works in this new and in this scholarly light. There are only a handful of people with the knowledge and brilliance of mind this requires. And Mary is in the company of our beloved Linda Nocklin and Lucy Lepard. And let me read you a brief bio which does not include a myriad of things. Mary Beckinsale, internationally recognized art educator and art historian, is president of Studio Art Center's International. Since 1993, Saatchi has been affiliated with Bowling Green State University and one of the premier study abroad institutions in Italy and worldwide. Under Dr. Beckinsale's leadership, enrollment has grown to over 100 to 200 students each semester with 80% of Saatchi students coming from American universities. The program draws upon the rich past of Florence plus its resources in museums, architecture, art specialists and wide cultural offerings while concurrently presenting contemporary developments in Italian art and culture. I would like to say also that when I met Mary and Jules it was as if, I don't know, our molecules immediately wed. And since I'm trying to think what year we started it but there is an Elizabeth A. Sackler, Saatchi, what is it? Thank you, scholarship, which provides a young woman student artist to come and supports her at Saatchi and the year in Florence which has been a wonderful thing. I'm delighted to have done that. Mary received a degree in art history from Cambridge University and a master's degree in philosophy from the Warburg Institute in London in 1968 with a thesis on the conquest of Mexico. It was in those years that she had the good fortune to study with some of the greatest intellectuals of the last century including Michael Jaffe, Ernst Gombrich, Michael Brepp. Is it Baxandala? Probably I should know who this is so that's an embarrassment to me and Otto Kutz. Later she received a two year Leavenholm scholarship to continue her research in Spain but those were the years of Franco's dictatorship and that experience changed her life. On returning to England she wanted to help social justice and taught in high schools in the north of England. These were the years of feminism and social change. Oxford and Cambridge colleges opened their doors to women and women began to win greater social rights. I think Mary will tell you, I will ask her to tell you how many men there were when she was there and how many women. So maybe you could just include that little piece of historic information because it tells those who might not be aware of what we have accomplished over the last 40 years, what we have accomplished over the last 40 years. She later moved to Florence where she became Dean at Saatchi working with Jules Madoff, the painter artist who founded Saatchi in 1975 and whom she married. In August 2010, this past August, Mary Beckinsale was awarded an honorary degree from BGSU. So that is a wonderful opportunity. It is a real pleasure for me to welcome Mary to the side of the Atlantic and to thank her for coming to point out how we have been trained to see art and to suggest how we can refresh our personal lenses as we approach art in whatever physical context we see it, whether it's museums, galleries, or other. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Mary Beckinsale. I hope I live up to that extremely enchanting introduction. And obviously, first of all, I want to thank Elizabeth for inviting me to talk at the center, but also to the Brooklyn Museum for giving me this possibility of talking to you. So today, what I really, this lecture grew out of a discussion that I had over two years with Elizabeth, which is what is feminist art? Is it art that is produced by women? Or is it actually the content? Is it actually the content of the work that should be feminist or not feminist? And on that challenge, I thought, well, as an art historian, as a trained art historian, I'm going to look back into the past, into the iconic pieces that we know from the past and say which of these are actually indisputably feminist. And there are a lot of pieces that you know, you can argue one way or the other. A piece like the Judaism of Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi, you know, you can't completely take that with you. But so I decided I would select four and see what happened selecting four. So it's a sort of experiment that I went through. And if any of you are art historians or teachers, it's an experiment you might try for yourselves to actually look back over the work you love and see if any of them are actually feminist in content. Do come and sit down, there's lots of seats. So that's where I started from. But before I actually go through the four pieces that I selected and worked on, and I have to say that in this instance, my definition of feminism is the simplest one, all right? It's the idea that a work of art could portray the power, the independence, equality, dignity, and identity of women. But before actually starting on those four, I want to go through a few other images just to put you into a sort of context. Now, the oldest artworks that have been found anywhere in the world are these artworks that come from the Paleolithic or the Neolithic. And they're so-called venuses, and they actually date from as far back as 35,000 years ago. And the first venus of this kind was found in the Dordoin over a century ago, and it's related to the artwork of the Chromagnon. Now, more than 100 of these pieces have been found, and they're steadily being more and more are being dug up. And they range from very tiny, like little charms that you would wear on a necklace, to actually the Willendorf venus, which this one is, that was found in 2009. Just a moment, let me find it. Let me see if which one we're talking about. This one here, excuse me. This is the one they've just recently found, and when they found it, it was broken into six pieces. It was found in the headwaters of the Danube last year, and they restored it and put it back together. And it must have taken hundreds of hours to carve this piece, which was made out of mammoth tusk. Now, there are venuses like this were usually painted red. We find they were painted red, and they were put in sacred places in the dwellings that people lived in. And they range over time from 35,000 years ago to about 3,500, such as this one from Malta, which is more recent, and comes from 3,600 years ago. Now, these pieces are found all over Europe, and from Siberia to Ilkutsk. Strangely enough, none have been found on the Iberian Peninsula, that's Spain. They may have found one in Morocco, but this is the only area where they are found, is this sort of extended Western Europe. These pieces keep turning up, and they seem to show the appreciation of women as a symbol of fertility and plenty and the source of life, and they represent the idea of women as the Earth goddess or of abundance. Now, since the time that I studied archeology in the late 1960s, in the 1960s, there was this idea that certainly in the Neolithic period, society was matrilineal and matriarchal. It's now been deeply challenged, that's idea, and all sorts of different patriarchal systems have been suggested, but when, if you have ever visited Malta, and Malta, just in case you don't know, it's an island that is 120 miles of Tunisia and 90 miles of Sicily, so it's sort of a key strategic place in the middle of the Mediterranean, and it's the place where the Knights of Malta, when they lost roads, they were put on this barren island to try and defend Christendom from the might of Islam as it was spreading across the Mediterranean, and they have lived there ever since, but what is extraordinary about Malta is it was originally attached to the mainland when the sea was less deep, as was Sicily, and it had an extraordinary flora and fauna, which they're now digging out. For example, it had miniature hippopotamuses and miniature elephants, and then it had giant swans, and what makes it sound even more like Alice in Wonderland is it had giant dormice, so it had this bizarre sort of different type of flora and fauna, and what they found on Malta is these extraordinary temples with these figures, and it seems as though they had a cult of the goddess, or of twin goddesses, and they seem to have been involved in a trance or dreamlike cult of rebirth, with about the ongoing cycle of birth and death. Now the idea of the cult of rebirth on Malta was really first explored by a female scholar called Marija Jimbutas between 1921 and 1994, and it's now being more recognized that her work seems to be correct. Now they recently, well, fairly recently, in 1902, they discovered something called the Hypergeum on Malta, which is a temple that it dates from 4,000 BC, and it has three levels and an oracular chamber, and in it they discovered the sleeping lady on the left, which it is not by Botero, it is actually these large, happy ladies, okay? And these are some of the temples that they have found. Now they estimate that there were over 40 temples of this kind on Malta. Now there are remains of 20 of them, and six of them are in major state of preservation, and Gigantia on the temples on Gozo, which is a tiny island just next to Malta, is thought to be the oldest resounding structure in the world, and it dates from 3,600 BC, and it's built of these massive, I mean, enormous, limestone blocks alternating in gray and pink, and they're often called the mother and the daughter temple, and you have to remember that these temples were built before proper tools, so that the tools that they were shipping in, obsidian tools, were coming in from these tiny islands off Malta called Lippery and Pantelleria, and these temples have walls that are six feet high, and blocks that weigh over 50 tons, and they're in clover form of circular shapes, and they seem to be very female and womb-like, and you can clearly see where the places were, where there were curtains, where there were libations, and there were sanctuaries, and they're decorated with beautiful geometrical decorations, and inside these, you find these extraordinary figures, like these, what we could call fat ladies, basically, and it seems fairly clear that this was a cult, of female cult, about fertility, and so on, and there is another work that I want to include before I start on my four pieces, which I think is another great example of work that is certainly about women, and that is the Villa of the Mysteries, if you know the Villa of the Mysteries, it's a villa that was buried when Vesuvius erupted, it was buried in ash, and it wasn't found until the last century, but because it had been buried in ash, it was preserved in the most beautiful state of preservation, and these frescoes are done by an extraordinary artist, I mean, they're absolutely outstanding, and it is, what it represents is a female cult, a Dionysian Greek cult, which were probably initiating girls into the secrets of marriage and sexuality. Now, it was hidden inside a villa, probably belonging to Julia, the wife of Claudius, but perhaps one of her servants was still all being worked on. It dates from 186 BC, and because it is a secret cult where men were not admitted, it is very possible and probable that these frescoes were painted by women. Now, the best discussion on this work is by this extraordinary scholar, a woman called Bice Benvenuto, and she wrote a book called Concerning the Rights of Psychoanalysis, or The Villa of the Mysteries, and if you look at some of these frescoes, for example, the figure running in, in a state of terror, is the initiate who's terrified by what she's going to find, and it's quite complicated, there she is, and this figure on the left, on the left, is Dominia, the matron of the Dionysian rituals, and they take you through the punishment that is actually delightful, and the unveiling of the phallus, it's a very complicated and deeply profound ritual, and this is what she says about it, because in many ways what she says about it is better than what I can say. The frescoes lead you through the terror of initiation to enjoyment, knowledge of ecstasy and shame, but not of guilt. This is too complicated a subject to really go into depth here, but it needs to be noted as a feminist, major feminist work. It shows a work that deals with reality, representation, reason and experience, being and non-being. It shows that the real is neither rational nor is it truth, and that reality as perceived by our senses deceives us and drives us out of our senses, and basically it shows the female unconscious, and it's really worth looking at this work and seeing what she writes about it, because it's very extraordinary, and she ends up with this wonderful conclusion, which is, Veeche ironically notes that women marry hoping to find a god, but are disappointed to find a man. So after this introduction, I want to go on to the four works that I've chosen today, and I started off, and they're all four are sculpture, and they all four reproduce female figures, and the first is the great freeze of the Pantheon altar in Berlin, and that's the one at the bottom. It's a very complicated piece, so I'm not doing the top, and I'm not doing the top freeze, I'm talking about the bottom freeze, which is extraordinary, and it was cut, it was in Marble between 197 and 156 BC, and it was built on the Greek, it was built in the Greek city of Pergamon. Now it's called Bergama in today's Turkey, in Northwest Anatolia, and it was connected, this temple was connected with the great library of Pergamon, which was second only to that of Alexandria, and it was built to outmatch the temple of the Acropolis, the Athenian temple of the Acropolis in Athens, it was a challenge, they were saying this is better and bigger and larger than Athens, and it's to Athena, and it's mentioned in the Bible, in the book of Revelations, it actually says in Pergamon, where Satan has his throne, and in Ampelius, in the Libor Memorialis, it talks about a large marble altar, 40 feet high, with a great many sculptures, among which is a battle of the giants. The altar is now in Berlin on the museum island, and it was shipped there from Turkey between 1879 to 1904, and it was first displayed in 1910. The Russians took it for war repriations, and it wasn't returned to Berlin until 1956 by Khrushchev, so you couldn't actually see it until 1956. And the Gigantomachia, that's this battle with the giants, which I'm about to speak about, it's 371 feet long, or it's 113 meters. Now, although the Greeks didn't use those measurements, the interesting thing is it doesn't matter how you measure this, the measurements always come out as prime numbers, so that's quite peculiar. Now, the Frieze is composed of a sequence of isolated and tightly knit and self-contained groups and figures, and each group was assigned to one workshop. Now, what happened was that these large blocks of marble were cut and they were sent, one will be sent to Mykonos, one will be sent to another place in Greece, and they would carve their particular figures and then they put them all together. I mean, they're quite extraordinary. So they must have had some way of communicating the shot, perhaps they had a huge drawing or something, but in the different blocks have been done by different parts of the Greek Empire as it was then to show their loyalty, so they went to different studios all over the area. And we know this because the workshop and the signatures and the city names are often carved on the blocks so we know where some of them came from. And we equally know some of the names of the gods and goddesses because they're still legible. And some of the sculptures could have been carved actually by women because there are more and more, they're discovering, the archaeologists, that female sculptors did exist in Greek and were working with male sculptors in these different areas. The blocks come from a marble quarry in Marmora and they consist of 380 tons of high quality marble and the sequences have been read as east, the Olympians. No, I'll go on a bit. West the earth and water gods and goddesses, south the celestial and light deities, north the gods and goddesses of night and constellations. Now, obviously the one on the left are the water gods so you can sort of identify the different groups. But it can also be seen as showing the descendants of the Titans or the Olympians and that the whole altar could be an ancestral record of the Atalid kings, that's the later Greek kings and the temple can be seen as an offering from Eumenes the second to the gods stressing his divine inheritance and giving thanks to the fact that he just survived an assassination attempt when he was in Delphi. Now, the freeze consists of 100 figures, 28 of them are animals, 59 are giants and the giants are being wiped out. You can see they're having a very tough time. They are definitely crumbling. There are 20 gods and there are 34 goddesses and I want to repeat that. There are 20 gods and there are 34 goddesses, that's 14 more female figures than male figures. And the goddesses are warlike and victorious and they're just as strong as their male counterparts. I mean, look at her, she's getting him. They are confident, unruffled and physically competent showing an easy power. They are carefully and with graceful force killing the giants who represent unreason and the unnatural. They are totally equal to the gods and this is a stunning and powerful work. If you've never seen it, it is worth going. You stand in the middle of this freeze which is shown inside, originally it would be on the outside of the building, but you're in the middle of it and if as a woman you're suddenly aware of the fact that you are surrounded by these powerful women, I'm bashing a jar of snakes over a man's head or scurrying him with a, I mean, you have never seen anything like this before and it is quite extraordinary and it really is like nothing else. It's worth going and having a look. Now I'm now going to jump from the Pergamon altar. I'm going to jump 1700 years which is quite a long time and the works I've picked tend to be in Italy because I live in Italy and they tend to be in Florence so I'm fortunately normally for my students and I can say you can go and see this but you're going to have to come to Florence to see these. So I'm jumping ahead to a work that is in the Bodgello Museum and in Florence and it's a work that talks about female identity and it's Benini's great portrait of Costanza Bonarelli and it is one of the, it is perhaps from since Roman times it is perhaps the first great portrait of a woman that shows who she was psychologically, spiritually, intellectually as a woman. I mean, it's the first great portrait and when Benini carved this sculpture and he was perhaps the greatest marble sculptor who has ever lived, I'm just going to show you, look at the carving of that from a piece of marble. Okay, imagine carving that from, and how extraordinary this man is. He was deeply and passionately in love with Costanza and that passion for her whole being, her person, her mind is contained in this work. It is surely one of the great female portraits. Benini lived from 1598 to 1686 and he carved Costanza between 1636 and 7 when he was in his late 30s and when he was, as he put it, fieremente enamorato, I mean desperately in love, okay, with her. And he tried to breathe life into this work so he shows her with her wild hair and her loose clothes and her half-glance and her mouth-soap and talking and it's cut in pink marble and it's completely lifelike. And he even, normally you left the back of a sculpture in those days because it was so much hard work cutting marble that you left the back. He's cut it all the way around, the tiny bits of her hair at the back. And when he first cut it, he painted the irises of her eyes black. They've since been cleaned off because they didn't understand that was actually his intention and he did it and no one's dead put her eyes back in. But he painted her pupils black when he actually first cut her. Now the idea has gone down in art history that Costanza, who was the wife of one of his assistants, was a common slut. And the true story is something quite different but I'll start with the story. And the story is that when Lorenzo discovered that his brother Luigi was coming out of her house and he suspected the worst, he attacked Luigi with an iron bar and broke two of his ribs and Luigi rushed off and hid in a church and slammed the church door and the Reverend mother had to come and drive away Lorenzo who was trying to kill his brother for having had a sexual relationship with his girlfriend. And so Bernini tried to kick the door down, insulted the Reverend mother and then the nastiest thing you can imagine really, he sent his servant round with two bottles of wine as a present to Costanza and when he presented her with the wine, he slashed her face with a razor. So this beautiful woman that he loved so much is actually the person he attacked. At this point, the Pope, Urban VII, for whom Bernini was working, intervened and I have to say Urban VII is not my favorite Pope. He's the one that condemned Galileo. He also condemned sneezing because he said it was too close to the sexual act and he said he banned tobacco. So, you know, he's not my favorite Pope. But anyway, at this point, the Pope intervened and sent Luigi away to Bologna for safety on the urging of Bernini's mother and Costanza was put in prison for adultery. The servant was put in prison for slashing her face but Bernini got off with a small fine and was told by the Pope that if he settled down and married a good woman, all will be forgiven. So Bernini was then married off to the daughter of a rich lawyer, Caterina Tedcio, who the Pope selected for him in 1639 and with whom he went on to have 11 children. And now I want to go back to Costanza. So who actually was Costanza? And the idea is, and it's put out by people like Vikova, I mean very responsible art historians, that Costanza was, you know, a common painter's prostitute but she was not. Costanza was probably from the Piccolomini family which was one of the great papal families from Viterbo. And her mother was probably a great a poetess and a friend of Victoria Colonna and had, who'd actually married a sort of servant, I mean, a courtier at court and so beneath her. But it's almost certain also that Costanza is related to the lady of the, if you've read the Duchess of Malfi by Webster which is a terrible tragedy. She was either her aunt or her grandmother and they were a family that were disinherited because and lost their land and their power because of the deaths of husbands and sons and the women couldn't hold on to the land. So she came from a very interesting family and that still has got to be researched. So if anyone is an archivist and a good researcher, please come and do this. So, Arca Stanza was in her own right, however, a considerable art collector and an art dealer and she'd married this assistant of Benini. He was called Matteo Bonorelli and he came from Luca and he probably came from the lower branch of the De La Rovere family which was another papal family and he was a sculptor and a major bronze caster in his own right now. Let me see where we go from here. This is a work by Matteo Bonorelli, her husband and it's of the visitation. That is the moment where Mary and, I think it's Elizabeth, excuse me, Mary and Elizabeth meet and tell each other that they're both pregnant and it's a moment of friendship between women and if you go into almost any Italian church, you will find there is one altar that either shows you the birth of Christ with the Virgin or the visitation because it's the altar where women will go to pray for safe delivery and childbirth and so it's a very feminist and strong theme and this was cut by Matteo and he actually invited Lorenzo to come and help him cut it in Savona and they became friends there. After that Lorenzo invited Matteo to come to Rome and work with him as an assistant and Matteo Bonorelli was not just a sort of assistant of Bonini, he was a very major figure in his own right and when Velázquez, the great painter who had come to Rome to begin to decorate the great castle of the kings of Spain which was called the Alcathar, now you can't see this anymore because it was burnt down and they rebuilt it with the royal palace, the Palacio Real but originally this was the greatest palace in Christendom, it was the palace of the kings of Spain who were dominating the world and it's the great fortress that was built by Mohammed I of Cordoba and it's a Moorish building from the 800s or the year 1000 that the kings of Spain began to transform into this extraordinary palace and they used Velázquez, he was sent to Rome and he was said, you know, find us artists, copy Roman statues, bring them to us, let us reform this collection. Now Matteo cast it, for example, these two great lions, he cast 12 of those and took them to Spain for the king of Spain, most of them were lost in the fire and that's the best slide I can get of it, I'm sorry, I did my best and the other thing he was asked to do was he was asked to cast the hermaphrodite which is now in the Prado in front of Las Meninas. Now these hermaphrodites in Rome, they actually managed to dig up five of them eventually, it was a very, very common subject because for the Romans believed that it was the height of love, it was the unity of the male with the female and it was perfect consummation and they very frequently had these figures in their garden and you can see one in the Uffizi, they turn it round so you have no idea, it's a hermaphrodite, and this one is in the Louvre and the bed, because the actual figure, as you can see is there, but the bed was cut by Bernini to actually give it so that was taken and is in the Louvre and there are others, there are two in Rome and yes, there are two in the Doria Pamphilium, one in the National Museum of Rome, so Matteo was asked to cast the hermaphrodite and that's his work, now these are major commissions, this is not just any old assistant, all right. So all right, I'll come back to that in a minute. When he was in Spain, he made over a hundred copies of many of the main antiquities of Rome for the emperor and when this palace finally burnt down, unfortunately it caught on fire on Christmas day when everyone was out and what is left of the great collection is in the Prado but in the fire there were at least 500 of the greatest paintings were burnt, the greatest Velasquez, Leonardo's, Raphael's, Van Dyke's, Tintoretto, Veranese, Ruben's, the list goes on and on and one of the things one needs to do as an art historian is actually work out what were the lost paintings of the Alcathar. Anyway, let's go back to Costanza. An interesting scholar called Sarah McFay has recently done remarkable work on Costanza and it was published in 2006 in a book called Costanza Bonarelli, Biography Versus Archive and she shows that Costanza was a wealthy collector and a free living woman. Perhaps we would have called her a courtesan. She was well educated with a very clear identity and she found her will and in the will, the will lists the contents of her extensive house leaving two thirds of her wealth to Olympia Catarina, her daughter and one third was left to a convent. The pope had set up a system by which if you confessed and were deeply sorry and you gave a third of your estate to a particular convent in Rome you were forgiven all your acts and sins of your life so you could go to heaven but it also meant that her daughter could be absolved of her mother's shame in a certain sense. She listed in the will, she also lists a remarkable collection of sculpture and sculptural fragments, some probably from classical pieces from Rome, fragments of legs, arms, feet and hands but also her picture collection which consisted of over 108 paintings, mostly landscape paintings and a copy of the Poussin that she had sold to Richelieu and it's the plague of Ashod now in the Louvre but the list also contains amongst other things three paintings of Bacchanals, they're like orgies, all right? And pictures of St. Mary Magdalene who is this penitent female sinner usually very sexy and St. Mary of Egypt and so there were two women saints who were reformed prostitutes. The top and there was also a portrait of herself. The top floor was designed in blue leather but the main floor was decorated in red leather and with red leather chairs and covered walls and had this portrait of herself hanging in the main position which was probably one of the portraits that Benini had done of her. Perhaps Costanza repented her prior life because she asked for this special pardon by giving her money to the convent of the Convertiti but it may just be that she was maneuvering in a male world and used to doing that. She was clearly wealthy, educated and a real connoisseur. She was anything but a Roman commoner or a slut and there is one clause in the will which scholars have missed amongst the many masses that she paid for her soul to go through purgatory. She also and of course there's a mass that she pays for at the time of her death but she also specifies that at the time the day after she dies that a mass must be said in one of the seven key pilgrimage churches of Rome which is San Lorenzo for Ilele More and it's obvious it's her last mass to Lorenzo you know her great love of her life. And just in passing, this is a Caravaggio which shows Filidae, this is his model this was his model in Rome and they've just discovered Filidae's will and the extraordinary thing is that she describes a room her main sitting room which is in red leather with red chairs, a Spanish style and it has Bacchanals and it has Mary Magdalene and it has Mary of Egypt and it has a portrait by Caravaggio of her. So perhaps these courtesans in Rome actually had their own interior design and they actually had a sort of floating world where they could show to customers or to their friends what their life was but this is a new document that's just been discovered in all the research that's going on on Caravaggio so there's a lot more to do and obviously one of the things that it was very difficult for the church to acknowledge at the particular time of the Counter Reformation was that there was a community of women of this type living in Rome and who seemed to have had their own real identity and way of life which is quite interesting. Now I'm now going to go on to another artist completely and I'm now going to talk about a work that is in Florence in the Pitti Gallery in the Modern Art Gallery and it's a work, this one here it's called The Mother or Maternity and it's done by Adriano Ciaccione and Adriano Ciaccione is he lived from 1836 to 1886 he was the main sculptor of the movement of the Macaiole and he was shocked to the art world when he exhibited as his entry in an exhibition in Paris a defecating dog that was cast in bronze you weren't supposed to cast in bronze things of that kind he was a Macaiole painting the Macaiole painters were these revolutionary painters that you must understand that Italy is a very, very new country it started becoming united from 1848 and it didn't actually pull itself together fully as a nation until 1870 and all these young painters actually fought against the Bourbons in the south against the Hubsbergs in the north for a united Italy and whenever there was a ceasefire and the sort of the lines were redrawn the place they fled to was Tuscany because it was the only republic and a place where they could be safe so they gathered in Florence and they met in a particularly cafe on Via Cavour and they discussed all the liberation of Italy but they also discussed what is the new art that we are going to make in the new country that we are going to make in the new built Italy and this is a picture that Adriano did of them sitting in their cafe in Via Cavour discussing the art of the future and just to mention and aside the guy in an enormously tall hat at the back which is almost as tall as Abraham Lincoln's hat, isn't it? He was actually an artist called Silvestro Lega and he inside his hat kept rolled up posters a pot of glue and a brush and whenever he was in a street where there were no police he whipped out his posters and glued them up on the wall calling for the independence of Italy so in that hat is a glue pot but just to go on though what they were discussing as the new art of Italy and it very much came from the idea of Mazzini and it goes on into Baudelaire and into the French and into the Impressionists it begins in Italy is this idea of a new art that reflects the reality of our times the actual things instead of going back to neoclassicism and the Greeks and the Romans to actually paint the women and the peasantry and the fields and the ordinary things of Italy and to fight against the oppression of women of peasantry, of Jews, of Protestants and this work may not immediately strike you as particularly revolutionary but if you look at it it is a peasant woman it's not just a woman it is a peasant woman and she's in her milking shoes and she's just finished breastfeeding her baby and it is that extraordinary moment in breastfeeding and as mothers you probably know this when the baby's had enough and it reaches back and gives you a smile you know it says thank you and there's this extraordinary smile between the mother and the baby and there's almost, you can almost hear the laughter between these two figures that nothing like this had ever been cut before or shown before a peasant woman breastfeeding showing her humanity and maternity this is something absolutely extraordinary and it won a prize in the Turin exhibition of 1880 and unfortunately no one ever came up with the money to cut it in marble so it's still in gesso so it's pretty fragile now he became from this work he became really quite famous and cut the head I mean he did the portraits of two of the great poets or revolutionary poets one was Kadoochie and the other was Leopardie and those two portrait busts also exist in Florence and Kadoochie was so moved by this work that he actually wrote a poem to it which was called Santa Natura and the unique thing really and it's a seminal work it's a work where all the modern painters and sculptors that have followed this work have done two themes one is mother whether you know Bacchone, Bala and so on have done mothers and the other is they have done the laugh and again you find a whole series of Italian paintings of people painting, people laughing but it's in this work that you have the two together which is really rather extraordinary and the other thing about Adriano Ciaccione which is so interesting is he's one of the first people who he cared very deeply about the family and about women but he also cared about children and he produced these extraordinary pictures which I cannot get copies of I can't get photographs of showing the exploitation of working children in factories and working on benches but he also did these pictures of his own children and they're the first pictures of children that are not sweet little Robin in his suit, you know but actually being children they're a thorough nuisance they're in his studio and they're absolute, you know they're dressing up and being a real nuisance and looking silly and they're hanging out in the kitchen and picking their nose and doing all the things children do, you know I mean they're actual children in real places and these are extraordinary pictures and really sort of cut through in a way that is very remarkable I think Going back to maternity or la madre whichever way you want to call it it is timeless in its femininity and it's down to earth beauty and Ciccione tried to show the beauty of the ordinary or the ugly, you know challenging the bourgeois canons of beauty and aesthetics and despite it and I think he succeeds and it's an extraordinary work okay now we'll come on to another work the last one and it's a work that is about Anita Garibaldi and it's a sculpture that was made to honour her and it's on one of the hills of Rome called the Giannicole Giuseppe Garibaldi is also on a horse in Rome and he's on the pin show so they're on different hills and she's on the Giannicole and it's a work of propaganda that was very much orchestrated by fascist propaganda but despite this it is still has a very great power now Anita Garibaldi whose real name was Anna Maria de Jeso Rivero de Silva de Garibaldi lived from 1821 to 49 and was a great revolutionary heroine of the Risorgimento she was Brazilian from a Portuguese family from the Azores who Garibaldi and Garibaldi was the military arm of the Risorgimento the Risorgimento, the Freeing of Italy was made by three men it was made by Mazzini who is a Republican by Cavour who worked for the kings of Piedmont and eventually brought the whole of Italy into a monarchy and Giuseppe Garibaldi who as a military expert who had worked as a guerrilla fighter in South America came and actually raised the troops and defeated the different military opponents in the south of Italy and moved up Italy, liberating Italy Garibaldi actually met Anita in South America they were to marry and she bore him four children dying pregnant with the fifth on the retreat from Rome in 1849 she died at the Guccioli farm in the marshes trying to reach the coast near Ravenna she had been married very young to an abusive older husband and she ran off with Garibaldi who it is reported to have whispered to her the first time he met her, you must be mine and this is the description that Garibaldi wrote of Anita she was an amalgam of the two elemental forces the strength and courage of a man and the charm and tenderness of a woman manifested by the daring and vigor with which she had brandished her sword and the beautiful oval of her face that framed the softness of her extraordinary eyes they were married in 1842 shortly before returning to Italy they were deeply in love and she never left him going with him on all his campaigns in South America and later returning with him to Italy and following him from Sicily through the southern campaigns and okay, let's find a picture of her this is what I'm talking about, the one on the right now what they are recording in the monument because eventually it was decided that she must be honored as well as Garibaldi and what they selected from her history a moment in Garibaldi's early biography when he did not return from a battle in Uruguay and Anita who had just very recently given birth to a child who was called Miniti took her baby in her arms and got on her horse and took her gun and she searched the battlefield and she founded the wounded Garibaldi and she hauled him onto her horse thereby saving his life and this particular statue that is now on the genicular was made by Mario Ruteli in 1932 and he's a sculptor who you probably have never heard of but he did make a monument for sailors that he's an abarist with in Wales and the monument was inaugurated by Mussolini on June the 1st and it's really an example of how myth and memory and even the family of Garibaldi were manipulated and used for political ends by Mussolini but it is a heroic and powerful monument and if you think of monuments to women how many monuments? I mean this is the only one I know that shows a woman in really in full action now part of it is a bit silly you couldn't possibly have stayed on your horse riding side saddle and you certainly couldn't ride a horse side saddle holding a baby and firing a pistol in the air but it is fairly inspirational however if you go back the original Garibaldi friends of Garibaldi had actually commissioned this work this is the one they wanted which is much closer to the truth in a sense she's got her rifle stuck in the back of her saddle this was commissioned in 1928 by someone called Antonio Sciotino and it's the only thing we have of these photographs of the bots the first clay of the monument and you can see unfortunately why fascists preferred the other more heroic one because I prefer this one because I like the way that Anita is going out purposefully with her hat and her baby and her gun in the back a bit rather like going sort of shopping off to the battlefield to find Garibaldi but it's just part of the constant metamorphosis of monuments that goes on in Italy there's recently been a book published called Italy divided memory and Italy is the only country in Europe where you don't just get two plaques in one place contradicting each other you go to a site and one plaque says this town was bond by the allies and the other one says this town was bond by the Germans okay and they're next to each other and you even get to the point where there is actually one place which is called Piazza Fontana where there are three contradictory versions of what happened on that Piazza and so there is this constant movement of monument and interpretation that is going on even today and it's a completely really political hot potato this thing of monuments so it's not, you know, Anita did quite well to only go through two versions in a sense how, now let me just see and just to sum up really the one of Anita is the one in action and the one of Garibaldi so extraordinarily is the one that is passive and still and he is surveying the town of the city of Rome which he never succeeded in taking they had to add Rome very much later on to the independent Italy and both of them, you know he never succeeded in actually completing the unification of Italy but this is very extraordinary and actually inspirational monument for all its problems now to sum up quickly those are the four works I chose and I found that there were works of art that I had already looked at or that came from the iconic work that you study you know, when you study art history that I truly believe are feminist in content and it's rather strange when you and we know from the work that the National Museum of Women and the Arts has done that there were over 3,000 women artists and you get something like the Frederick Hart textbook that we use in Florence on the Renaissance for example and until 15 years ago there wasn't a mention of a single woman in the book I mean not a single female artist was mentioned yet there are all these female artists and if you really begin to look at the works of art they actually are female in content as well but so why is it we haven't seen that? What is going on that this is not that we don't see these works and actually understand that they are feminist and that led me to another thought because one of the things that my old professor told me when I was in the Warburg was that one of the curious things for example the Greeks did not know how a beehive was structured they thought the bees just buzzed in and out it was only when somebody postulated the idea that there might be a queen that they found the queen bee and they realized that the hive was structured and I think what is happening is we have not got the eyes to see the female artists or the feminist works because we have been so conditioned and that if you yourselves go home and sit down and say okay what are the four feminist works for me? I mean see if you find your own four and see if there are they exist already and yet we are not seeing them with in a way where we can understand it and so I ended by saying it is as though there is a lack of memory or reporting but not a lack of presence it is though the prohibitions of the Villa of the Mysteries still cover the sacred nature of art and in a certain sense I found this a very intriguing journey for as an art historian and I want to actually open it to you and say please you begin to look and reinterpret what you are seeing, okay? Yes, 3,000 is what I, 1515, yes I was checking the editions of Frederick Hart and I found it was 15 years ago he did not have a single female artist in the book which is really quite interesting Yes, Borghese, yes No, the Benini, the Apollo and Daphne is in Villa Borghese and indeed the Pluto which I used to show the fine cutting of the marble is in the Villa Borghese the Anita is on the top of the hill behind the Vatican you have to go up the road behind the Vatican and she's up there it's on the top of the hill and it's called the Gianicula Jay, wait a minute, I'll look it up so that I don't get it wrong I find, it's G-I-A-N-I-C-O-L-O but there are a lot of other works that I, you know was half thinking of talking about like the Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith and Holofernes but some of them you can give more than one interpretation to and what I wanted to do with this was take indisputable examples of what I thought you really could not argue that this was not feminist in real, in its actual content but there are many, many others out there which probably are but you know, you've got to really make certain you really question what is going on I'm afraid I don't think I would I think it's much more a male vision and I think it's much more a work of pleasure for the Medici, you know there's a lot of painting of women that is mild porn it's erotic, a lot of art was built was painted and made for the sexual market and still is and it doesn't mean that it's an evil market because sexuality is part of where we all live in particularly in our private homes and so on there's no reason not to have, you know art that appeals also to different senses so I'm not saying that in a way of putting it down but I'm saying that I believe that work belongs to that category yes I think the closest you get is perhaps Goya's Maya Nuda des Nuda you know, he did these two versions of the closed naked and the naked woman and that extraordinary nature of that is that she is not a beautiful elegant lady of the court she is actually a macha she's a sort of peasant gypsy girl and he treats her with enormous respect and likes her style, okay and it is erotic but it is extremely respectful to her and who she is and the fun of who she is, okay because she's enjoying it it's not something that is imposed on her so I would quote that as showing that you can do it you know, it doesn't have to be oppressive yes that's not after no, she was, he used a very pink marble he picked a piece of pink marble that looks like flesh it's probably a pretty bad slide so a photograph, so excuse me but no, I mean it's we don't know what her face was like afterwards and but we do know that she lived a very prosperous and successful life and left a good inheritance to her daughter and that she appears to remain married to her husband you know, who continued to work as a very notable sculptor but it must have been a huge scandal the whole thing, yes it's in the buggello in Florence and people go around the buggello and they walk straight past Costanza she's usually right next to the box of it I mean, in a place you buy the tickets and everyone walks straight past they take no notice of her whatsoever and she is certainly one of the greatest sculptures of all time I mean, you know, it makes me very sad that she was recently exhibited in an exhibition they had on the Baroque portrait as the central piece but she is really remarkable and you know, the way her dress is opening with the button you can almost see inside and the bits of hair I mean, it is the most extraordinary piece of carving and a portrait I mean, isn't that sad? I mean, you know but he also painted portraits of himself with her and then when they quarreled he cut off her side and ripped it off and we only have his portrait and we don't know where she has gone so he tried to really obliterate her and he got rid of her portrait bust he like gave it away or you know, in complete you know, to sort of, to be further humiliating in a sense, to dismiss it but it is one of the all time pieces yeah, love he created it for himself in total passion it's as though, you know, this was someone that was so important to him that he had to immortalize her forever exactly as close to her being alive as he could make her okay, and you can feel that when you see it it's like a huge statement of love he didn't destroy it, he must you know, he did so much for the Pope that was so public and he must have seen something like the Apollo and Daphne as an absolute quintessessional highest point of marble cutting because you know, you have these transparent olive leaves and so on so probably in his terminology the absolute masterpieces are Apollo and Daphne and Pluto but in terms of psychological containment, spirituality of the piece the real piece is Costanza nothing matches it yes, yes it's Biceh, B-I-C-E, Benvenuto and it's about the villa of the mysteries the rest of the title is, it's the villa of the mysteries Benvenuto yes I mean, perhaps it would be possible well, how a suggestion was that would it be possible to curate an exhibition of pieces that are feminist in content, okay and I think it could be I think it would be quite complicated but it might open a lot of debate but certainly it's time that we went round museums thinking what is being said in this piece is it chauvinist, is it sexist, is it feminist and but women can also paint chauvinist paintings, all right it isn't that a woman automatically paints a feminist picture they may be worse than a male character part I mean, surely what we were looking at in feminism is the content what is being expressed let's see the western hemisphere to do and bring up these women work just to create discussions like this but I do see very few people I'm coming from a room all to a room to listen to you and I just was thinking I would see perhaps like 500 people here and I don't see much support, it's somehow a little bit disappointing I personally, like my audience, welcome but I think one of the interesting things, you know if you look at sculptures that are in public display in Florence and you have these sculptures of the rape of Persephone you'll have the cutting off of the head of Medusa it is very welcome to have a sculpture which is showing women in power without being raped or having their head scuttled I know that's a very simplistic way of saying it but I do think it is worth actually focusing on these ones that really are inspirational for women please ask a question to a man I'd love to have a question from a man as well looking very uncomfortable, yes I wish but I wonder what you thought of those pre-Raphaelite women I think, what do I think of those pre-Raphaelite women? Now I'm going to, okay, I'm really going to take this on because you have to understand that when William Morris and Rosetti married working-class women and they were both from shop girls they could never sit down again at table with their friends from the bourgeoisie so they had to invent a medieval alternative world in which they could be safe and superior and the same with the Machaoli so the great critic of the Machaoli, Diego Materli he married the prostitute that he fell in love with and from that moment on he could never be accepted in any society in Florence so he lived on his estate outside Florence and the only people who would talk to him were artists because artists are very odd people and the same with the pre-Raphaelites they created these worlds against the social barriers so the first thing is the pre-Raphaelites were very brave to marry those two ladies and those two ladies were very extraordinary women and particularly if you take Mrs Morris who lived six months of the year with Rosetti and six months with William Morris because she couldn't work out who she preferred and they accepted this situation so in a sense they were really pushing the boundaries of Victorian marriage so I think both the women and their companions the artist companions who created these alternate worlds are real revolutionists and not only in their production of the work they produce that change tastes but in the way they lived and the way that they dared actually break those conventions and marry shop girls okay now if anyone's looking for a good thesis topic one of the things that somebody needs to study is Teresa who was the wife of Diego Martelli who was an extraordinary woman quite clearly and he met first when he was initiated into sexuality as all men were by going to the bordello and he fell in love with her and married her and she was obviously quite a remarkable woman yes I don't know because one of the problems with art is that very often the subject does not necessarily reflect what actually happens you know what I mean that subjects escape from the artists themselves that what is expressed is for sociological, psychological, whatever reasons you know you can take a work that is supposed to be saying this and it's actually saying the opposite so I don't think that it's conscious necessarily consciously done by male or female I hope I'm answering your question I think that we still have a long way to go to show the power of women and I mean I think that the work that was glorying in sort of the maternity, the fertility the prophecy from dreams these things from those are powers of women and I don't want to go into some sort of you know hippie dream world but there's there are elements to what has been shown in the past that really show a force to the internal power that women should be expressing that I'm not sure that present day work is expressing yes I have a question about hanging in a feminist show if that's an improvement to what I'm trying to say is basically it's sort of strategy I think encourage male people to express their feminist tendencies I have never met a male who would admit to being a feminist and there are plenty of them they show up they're going to be sensitive but I think we need to award a male feminist to be a feminist and they just don't know what to call themselves you have to meet the director of the museum Myrtle Weyman yes I do know that and he doesn't admit to it of course but you know an artist for example who might be tempted to do a feminist piece what we would call a feminist piece might also be insecure about his reception because he might be glued out of the hole so I think if you, other people agree I don't know what they do that males are welcome to express feminist thoughts and just encourage people because the more we have that there should be a compounding of numbers this way we can be limited I agree, I couldn't put it better so all I can say is yes yes Are you a contemporary artist? Which one? I'm thinking specifically of the Cindy Sherman film skills and how you perceive them as feminist or not yes I think that anyone who is exploring gender and I think what she's doing is exploring gender and identity because of the nature of feminism at the moment that is part of the discourse and therefore it is feminist I'm not sure if it's timeless it may be a passing discourse because what she's doing is looking at you know could I be this, could I be that might I be this, might I mean that exploration of who I am and what is my sexuality and what am I that may just be something that you know is a fashion I will have to wait and see but in the context, contemporary context it certainly is feminist it may be nothing in the future I think one of the things I was concerned about one of the four pieces I picked was that they should be timeless and they should be qualities that belong for all women for all time I'm from that part of the world in 1980s a revolution happened and even when really many were showing the face that was cut up and I just remember that is what I saw and so from that point on I actually was working on my pieces which I was doing something else and it completely changed the direction and went to an art of women and what you just mentioned about her question about finding oneself what you are, who you are, where you're going and all of that and just sudden changes in the society or just looking at the history of women what we have gone through and the fact that you mentioned about the conditioning and how we as women are conditioned by men and the establishment of the world and our roles and how to be it's just like we are really given the path by men if we look at our profits for example for leaders and functions for like the society that are drawn by men and they actually designate for us how to think what we feel, what to do, what we have to do it's just like and I see myself for the past period of painting and I can't even bring anything else unless you just see the faces the women that I paint and I happen to just paint faces with all the feelings in it and I know I have been pushed away because you can see through the eyes of these women One of the most extraordinary things as I did this piece as I said to Elizabeth I picked these pieces and then what came out as I did the research was to discover that it reflected so much of the oppression that has been done to women I mean cutting their faces imprisoning them from adultery marrying them young to abusive husbands dying in childbirth I felt as though these pieces that I had picked just by accident you know as art pieces reflected the enormous oppression of women and I thought that was very extraordinary that it came out even in these four well fortunately we have this one so I feel so happy you're all here and we are giving support to this that is so important and so unique Where are you from? I'm sorry to ask you Her vision was put up into a pedestal that women would see as sinners just one was put together by women and there's all western religions Judaism, probably Christianity and Muslim have a patriarchal spirit in them until we can find a new way that this is one of the society we're in as a woman a work that speaks to me as happiness that is in the T-Sport and I don't know the meaning of the meaning because I'm not in art history but it's a woman dancing in a circle of the dances and I always feel as a woman it captures joy of friendship and something that doesn't I mean beautiful beautiful piece and also it again doesn't have guilt it's this sort of pagan innocence of the dance and one of the reasons I think I picked some pieces from antiquity was because in both the Pergamon Altar there is not that sense of sin attached which you'll so often get to nakedness in western art this was a really super wonderful lecture and I'm so proud and pleased that she's here and thank you all for coming it's very exciting for me we're going into our fourth year and the dialogues that have emerged in this room over this period of time have become much richer much stronger and I feel that the center is doing its work and I hope that there will be many more and that each of you in your own ways when you go out into your worlds will bring some of what has happened here with you so thank you very much for coming