Femininity In The Renaissance

Female rulers in Renaissance times brought a small revolution for women throughout Europe. However, for all those who were not innovative or radical monarchs, there was no access to the ‘luxury’ of subscribing reasonable standards of behavior. For nearly all Renaissance women, conduct and image where highly regarded as the most important aspect of women, especial those with wealth and nobility. Coming out of the Medieval Ages, the demands that were to be met by women drastically increased and became significantly more intricate and demeaning. Further, this lead to the female population not experiencing the Renaissance in the same way of their male equivalents. Throughout the Renaissance, the standards of femininity not only increased, but also …show more content…
A large amount of the theories in medicine during the Renaissance came from ancient hypotheses, first and foremost Aristotle. Nevertheless, similar to a large portion of Aristotle 's conclusions, nearly all of Aristotle’s findings on women’s medicine were frankly wrong. These conclusions range extremely from asinine like holding the hypothesis that women have less teeth than men being so stubborn that he wouldn’t even examine the mouth of his wife to deeply harmful like his hypothesis that women have nearly no part in reproduction and men were almost entirely responsible for the continuation of the human species. Though there were physicians at the time that believed that women were not to be treated any differently, a large amount of them stood strongly behind Aristotle especially when matters of theology where involved. Theology was surprisingly common in the medical realm. This was primarily due to the biblical interpretations of Eve. Eve gave renaissance doctors the idea that women as a species were deeply negative and flawed. This lead to a large amount of incorrect assertions about women’s health and anatomy. These beliefs resulted in the lesser treatment of women and the difficulty that came from attempting to get medical attention from an educated, professional …show more content…
Art, during the Renaissance era, was one of the most important revolutions at the time. The female form presented in art was a central ideal of the time, however the expectations set by these pieces were deeply harmful. Moreover, portraiture, a critical part of this movement caused significant advancement in the art, however for women, they were more of a setback than anything else. For example, one of Sandro Botticelli’s best-known works, Venus and Mars, shows this quite clearly. For the piece, Botticelli didn’t use any model or actual person as reference, rather he used his personal ideals of what a women is supposed to look like to pose as his subject. This embodies the fabricated ideal of beauty that was prevalent in a lot of Renaissance art and created an ideal for real women of the time and for decades to come. Additionally, one of the most ironic displays of this concept comes in Renaissance portraiture. For an art form that primarily based around exact recreations, portraits were consistently used to change their subjects in what was seen as beautiful at time. For example, the brothers Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo three pieces all entitled Portrait of a Lady (Figures 6, 7, and 8) of three very distinct and different women. Despite this, all three of the paintings changed their subjects appearance to have them possess very