Women under the gaze: a Renaissance genealogy

Abstract

In a preliminary excursus, Michael Baxandall’s concept of the ‘period eye’ is subject to both a positive and a critical assessment as a means of moving beyond the problematics of traditional iconography. Suggesting that the oversight of gender and sexual difference in the ways in which the concept has been put to work is structural rather than incidental, the article considers a series of stages in the representation of the female in Renaissance and post‐Renaissance European art as overdetermined by fundamental processes of the theological exegesis of the scriptural figure of woman. The ‘period eye’ is thus subjected to a critical assessment over a relatively long term of art historical methodologies.

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