The Mirror of the Gods: How Renaissance Artists Rediscovered the Pagan Gods (review)
delle donne, which was published posthumously in 1600 and is considered Fonte’s most important work, seven women have come together to discuss the good and bad qualities of men. Grewe’s analytical focus is on the use of laughter in the text, because, as the author points out, in the Renaissance laughing was a highly regulated form of behavior, whose norms were clearly gendered. In Fonte’s exclusively female discourse, laughter signals release from male observation. It also demonstrates decency and discipline on behalf of the participating women, whose behavior perfectly complies with the male role model. Bettina Uppenkamp’s article relates literature, visual culture, and social history. The very last novella of Boccaccio’s Decamerone tells the story of Griselda, a girl from a poor family background who has to stand a row of cruel tests before being accepted as the proper wife of Count Gualtieri. Uppenkamp compares the literary reception of the novella and its depiction on Italian fifteenth-century cassoni and spalliere. While Petrarca and other late medieval authors conceive the girl Griselda an exemplum of female virtues, the story’s rendering on marriage chests is due to the wedding context, and does not lend itself to identification on the part of the bridal pair. The two excellent contributions by Andreas Toennesmann and Ilaria Hoppe deal with the art patronage of women regents in France and Tuscan Italy, respectively. Both articles study architectural manifestations of female power, and both pay close attention to questions of space and spatial relations. Toennesmann’s analyses of the Paris residences of Catherine of Medici (Tuileries), Mary of Medici (Palais du Luxembourg), and Anne of Austria (Val-de-Grâce) point out how the family traditions of these immigrant queens as well as genuinely French models were fused to bring about highly original architectural statements. These complied with the peculiar sociopolitical position of the woman regent in France and secured her memory. Hoppe’s article deals with the Villa Poggio Imperiale near Florence, which Mary Magdalen of Austria had rebuilt and decorated during her regency of the Grand-Duchy of Tuscany in the 1620s. On the villa’s ground floor the regent and her son, Frederico II of Medici, shared a double apartment, a spatial demonstration of their intertwined power. The rooms, however, were highly gendered by a fresco decoration showing famous women and their heroic deeds, as well as a genealogy of the Habsburg emperors, the dynasty Mary Magdalen came from. Her case is another fine example of how women who ruled in early modern Europe relied on the arts to shape their identity and to make it last. SIGRID RUBY Institut für Kunstgeschichte, University of Giessen