In the pictorial work of the Renaissance and the Baroque, old women were represented as procuresses and full of vices, whereas elderly men were assigned the highest wisdom, according to a work prepared by Professors Mª Elena Díez Jorge and Esther Galera Mendoza and published in the Cuadernos de Arte of the University of Granada, under the title “Venerable elderly men and old procuresses: pictorial images in the Modern Age.”
These Professors of the University of Granada elaborate on the roles socially assigned to women an, particularly, expressed in the pictorial work of Renaissance and Baroque.
According to the authors, “the election of these two moments (Renaissance and Baroque) responds to changes which can be appreciated through painting around the predilection of images of young women in the Renaissance before a higher presence of elderly women in Baroque painting. “However, the reflections we offer involve a first approach broadly speaking, in which we must bear in mind the differences according to schools and pictorial genres, in such a way that Italian painting shows a cool indifference to elderly women whereas they are often represented in a Dutch and Spanish paintings”.
Vice and evil
According to Professors Díez and Galera, “many elderly women represented in Renaissance paintings are associated with vice and evil, maintaining the Christian connection between physic decrepitude and sin, evil and death. In fact, the iconography of the old age has been represented from antiquity as an old woman covered with a black cloak, leaned on a stick with a glass in her hand and, next to her, an almost exhausted water clock”.
“This representation is similar to that used to symbolize death, associating death with the old age through women. The picture “The three ages and death” by Hans Baldung Grien, a pupil of Durer, is a good example: an skeleton with a scythe and the clock (the Grim Reaper), symbolizing death, appears holding the arm of the old woman.”
However, before the big number of vices represented in old women, old men are reduced to mere allegories of Personal interest, Idleness and Hatred.
In general, according to the authors, “the old age, interpreted according to gender, can be attributed to the creation of certain stereotypes in which, generally, elderly men symbolize icons of wisdom and experience, whereas elderly women, marginalized more frequently and more harshly than men, symbolize vices and procuring when the end of their youth deprived them of playing their main social role: motherhood”.
Reference:
Prof Mª Elena Díez Jorge.
Dpt. of Art History. University of Granada
Phone number: 958 243010. E-mail: mdiez@ugr.es
Prof Esther Galera Mendoza.
Dpt. of Art History. University of Granada.
Phone number: 958 243010. E-mail: egalera@platon.ugr.es
