Renaissance Porn

David Christopher
Dr. Erin Campbell
HA 545
December 2009

Gentileschi’s Lucretia: Visible and Covert Sexuality in Art for the Domestic Space

The role and pervasive presence of didactic imagery within the domestic space of Renaissance Italy has been well documented. Objects within the domestic space were heavily focused on marital ritual, childbirth and childrearing. But what happens in between? Moving from marriage to childbirth is a definitively sexual activity that ostensibly occurred within the domestic space. Artemisia Gentileschi’s circa 1621 Lucretia is an artwork that provides a clear voice to the silent narrativisation of Renaissance sexuality. Beyond its didactic exterior, the painting is rich with meaning in several of its aspects. The sexualized reputation of the author was widespread. The ontological piety of the myth was saturated with sexual ambiguity. The image itself is visibly sensual. The painting is pregnant with erotic energy! It would have been pivotal in defining a space as erotic, whether it was a bedchamber or a common room, as long as there was a settee handy. A locus of multiple meanings and influences conflate in the painting to give meaning to a space: an holistic ideology of sensuality. In defining the space, it may have acted as both an aphrodisiac and a sensual reminder to both the husband and wife of her sexual duty. In this paper I will argue that Gentileschi’s Lucretia was teeming with sexual meaning that directly prompted a call to perform sexual activity.
William Shakespeare, during the closures of the theatres in the late sixteenth century, took to writing epic poetry. He only wrote a handful of poems and on this short-list was the Rape of Lucrece. Evidently, the myth was powerful enough in romantic energy and mythical status to have commanded the bard’s attention. In her article Virtuous Model / Voluptuous Martyr, Carol Schuler states that Renaissance “texts are nearly unanimous in their admiration of Lucretia’s moral rectitude” (Schuler 7). “By the Renaissance, the name of Lucretia was virtually synonymous with the idea of female chastity” (Schuler 7). The story suggests that Lucretia's suicide brought down the Roman monarchy, circa 508 BCE. Lucretia had proven superior in virtue and beauty. Thus inflamed, the Roman prince Tarquinius stole into her chamber and raped her at knife-point under the threat of murdering her and a servant and falsely reporting their adultery. The next day she committed suicide after telling her story to her father and her husband, Collatine. Accompanied by Junius Brutus and Publius Valerius, they vowed to kill Tarquinius and exile the ruling Tarquin family. Their story was met with acclamation by the people to change from the tyranny of monarchy to rule by consuls.
But Gentileschi's Lucretia has a sexual, power connotation that might not be so ontologically evident in the connotation invoked by the famous story. Ajmar states "awareness of the symbolic meanings associated with the domestic space in the Renaissance is only now beginning to dawn among historians" (Ajmar 75). In this way historians are being invited to explore meanings that may have little extant voice. On the surface the didactic virtue of a woman who takes her life after being raped seems obvious. However, the meaning hidden within the myth is ambiguous. Lucretia was a virtuous wife whose beauty caused the sexual advances of her rapist. Inherent to the story is the suggestion of some causality between her virtue and her rape. Was she too virtuous and is this the lesson intended for the image to invoke? Is it intended to invoke the myth of power-drunk patriarchy that resulted in her assault and act as a warning against tempting the lusty power of the structure with virtue and beauty? If it is a warning that feminine sexuality is dangerous to the welfare of women and the security of the patriarchy, why is the image so provocative? The "awareness of symbolic meanings" that Ajmar is encouraging cannot ignore the blatantly sexualized image presented of Lucretia, nor the power of a woman to bring an empire to its knees with only an ultimate sacrifice.
The piety of the surface myth is openly complicated in the Renaissance period. Schuler states that Augustine cast doubt based on “the Christian view of suicide as sinful rather than heroic, and questions why, if Lucretia remained chaste and blameless, she needed to take her own life” (Schuler 7). Schuler boldly introduces speculation about the myth. “Lucretia’s decision to commit suicide may have resulted from an inadvertent pleasurable physical response at the time of her rape” (Schuler 7). Looking to tangible artworks rather than social sensibility, Schuler notes that “fidelity to the details of the story, as well as the straightforward interpretation of Lucretia as a paragon of virtue, are characteristics notably absent from artworks produced during the early sixteenth century. This period witnessed a virtual explosion of artistic interest in the suicide of Lucretia, concomitant with an increasingly eroticized interpretation of the subject” (Schuler 8). Nevertheless, “most philosophic inquiry debated Lucretia’s response to her rape, not her complicity in causing it” leaving her pious image relatively untainted (Schuler 7). But other renaissance images of Lucretia variously depict her being raped, or committing suicide, or both. So, the myth is filled with sexual ambiguity and the artist’s reputation coincides in her story of rape and ambiguous complicity.
Recent scholarship has tended to shy away from biographical interpretations of art and has relegated the artist nearly to irrelevance. Feminist criticism has made the interpretation of a female artist’s sexual persona virtually criminal to discuss. However, without any need to ascribe artistic motives to Gentileschi herself, it is the public reception of her reputation as it was associated with her artwork that is relevant. In Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art, R. Ward Bissell refreshingly argues that “the reconstruction of an artist’s oeuvre must privilege considerations of style over interpretive strategies, without at all discounting the latter’s potential, when solidly grounded, for informing connoisseurship” (Bissell xxi). In Gentileschi’s Lucretia, it is difficult to overlook a biological read of the artist’s life in the provenance of the painting as it lends itself to a psychoanalytical exploration of the repressed sexuality, lust, and desire for sexual domination inherent to the image and the story it invokes. Echoing the myth within the painting is the substantial meaning of the artist’s own life which informed its reception. Many researchers into the life and times of Artemisia have been heavily preoccupied with the coincidence of the myth and the painter.
Artemisia’s rape trial was highly publicized and the social identity ascribed to her was irrevocably sexualized. Bissell reports that “it is highly unlikely that this case, although conducted in semiprivate, escaped the court of public opinion” (Bissell 14). Bissell quotes George Hersey as stating “personal tragedies of other artists have not conditioned their work but their art is not usually seen as a specific restaging of those tragedies. It seems that Artemisia’s pictures were admired in just this way” (Bissell i). The reception of her pictures discussed by Hersey is not ascribed to an audience of a particular era, but given the public nature of her reputation it is reasonable to include the audience of the period in which the painting emerged. In Mann’s book she includes an article by Elizabeth S. Cohen entitled, What’s in a Name? Artemisia Gentileschi and the Politics of Reputation. Cohen and Mann both reiterate a likely public reputation, if only from her artwork alone. “[T]hese women’s accomplishments were celebrated in their own time” (Mann 123). “The arts became a domain in which some numbers of women began to emerge in the limelight” (Cohen 123). Although Cohen argues that, “after Artemisia left Rome in 1612 after the trial, she was not haunted for the rest of her days with unusual sexual notoriety” (Mann 121), she also points out that “Artemisia’s assertive testimony and judgment against Tassi, sufficiently mended the blemish to her reputation” (Cohen 121). The fact that her reputation needed mending and that it called her to the unusual task of publicly speaking on her own behalf is clear evidence that the knowledge of her sexual transgression was widespread enough to require public defense. “Artemisia testified to resistance [which] in effect succeeded in making Artemisia’s virtue a central issue (Bissell 14). Artemisia complicates the rape dynamic with her own ambiguous complicity. “Artemisia kept hopes alive of marrying Tassi – certainly so that she might reclaim her honor […], but also, it seems, because of positive feelings towards him” (Bissell 15). Bissell paints a highly sexualized public reputation, richly ambiguous with her complicity in the rape. “The very fact that she remained unwed for several years after Roman culture would have deemed her sexually mature, more likely than ever to let her female passions rule, and fully ready for a husband would have set tongues wagging” (Bissell 17).
Whether or not the trial was staged by her father to protect the reputation of her virtue is unclear. What is clear, however, are common themes in Gentileschi's art. She tends towards hyper-sensualized depictions of women, themes of sexual assault by powerful men, violent revenge against tyrannical men, suicide and sacrifice. Cohen dismisses her trend as simply the work of “a woman artist who specialized in strong religious subjects as well as classical narratives and nudes” (Cohen 122). Bissell categorizes Lucretia in a population of early works that followed the success of her Susanna (image 1), which include both of her depictions of Judith (one of them displayed in image 2). The biographical psychology that might be psychoanalytically interpreted from this population would regard sexual conquest and feminine vengeance. The Lucretia myth is laden with both. One might be strongly inclined to think that Artemisia was using her art as a therapeutic outlet for emotional turmoil and guilt. Overtly, the painting depicts a strong, independent woman making the ultimate sacrifice after her rape and is popularly painted by a strong independent rape victim who has boldly chosen to pursue and challenge an entirely male-dominated profession.
“[T]he painter’s identity, like that of all human beings, [was] an amalgam of the social and the individual” (Cohen 122). Whether or not Gentileschi was complicit in her rape is not at stake. All that is relevant is that her public reputation was tainted with the idea. “In the calculus of reputation, rank and sexual propriety certainly mattered” (Cohen 123). In defense of the biographical interpretation, Bissell notes that “as a woman she was singularly able to project herself into the stories” (Bissell 14). The sexual ambiguity which imbued her life’s story was specifically and perfectly reflected in the Lucretia myth.
In her book, Sexuality in Medieval Europe : doing unto others, Ruth Karras states that "Medieval people […] did not see suggestive or explicit images glaring out at them from newsstands, billboards and computer screens" (Karras 150). I do not entirely agree. Although Karras is referring to an earlier medieval period, she describes it as "an era without photography, video and the internet" (Karras 150). This definition is also true of the early modern era but suggestive images were ubiquitous. They were not on billboards and computer screens but they were on cassones and in paintings. Bissell suggests that the Lucretia “painting is not beautiful by orthodox standards […] while not disallowing the erotic and sexually allusive which patrons had been conditioned to find in pictorializations of these themes. Certainly Lucretia’s right hand, for all its poignancy within the story, calls attention to her very full breast, and her bare leg crowds the picture plane. That the bed on which Lucretia was raped becomes now the site of her suicide imparts sensuality by implication” (Bissell 13).
The association of death with sexuality was an old trope, already established by a medieval preoccupation with corporeal needs. "Caroline Bynum suggests "while we may think today of bodies primarily in sexual terms, for medieval people other concerns were paramount [...] food, and the status of the body after death" (151). Jumping forward to the "Late medieval" period, she notes that "The relation between sex and death [...] is even more complex but equally ubiquitous" (153). As such, there is an elusive erotic connection between death and sexuality that is perfectly embedded in the erotic images of Lucretia at the moment of her suicide.
Have a good look at the face of Gentileschi's Lucretia (image 3). It ambiguously invokes as much of a sense of guilt and perhaps even ecstasy, as it does sacrifice. Bissell describes the image as “a figure frozen in the anticipation of guidance from beyond” (Bissell 12). Relegating the image to a strictly religious anguish and/or ecstasy seriously overlooks “the expressive range (from the reflective to the startlingly dramatic) of which Artemisia was capable” (Bissell xxii). “Works of art, speaking across the centuries, hold new meanings for successive generations but it can be hazardous to ascribe these meanings to the artist or period under review” (Bissell 10). However, I argue that some images hold meanings and generate physiological reactions that are more biologically fundamental, and have been present over a vast stretch of human history. Sexual imagery that appeals to the male mind and libido has changed very little. The poses and depictions of Gentileschi’s Lucretia and Cleopatra (images 3 and 4) are identical to those contrived poses of women in such current erotic magazines as Playboy and Penthouse. Furthermore, these paintings by Gentileschi, when compared to other nudes of her genre, and when compared against other depictions of the subjects, are extremely and unnecessarily erotic. There is no specific need to represent Cleopatra or Lucretia so blatantly sexually, nor to have the sexuality supersede the less noticeable accoutrements of suicide.
The sensuality of the image is obvious. “In a gesture clearly reminiscent of nursing, Lucretia proffers her left breast as if to the suspended dagger” (Bissell 11). The connection to breastfeeding may well have prompted a Freudian sexual response in its male viewers. Lucretia sensually elevates and presents her own breast, as if for viewing. Mann’s book also includes an article by Ann Sutherland Harris called Artemisia and Orazio: Drawing Conclusions in which she posits that “Women’s breasts are regularly placed too high in Renaissance and seventeenth-century […] images of nude and dressed women, apparently as a matter of male taste” (Harris 137). Bissell poetically unpacks the image of Lucretia. “No wound yet marring her flesh nor blood tinging her weapon, she teeters on a bed of turbulent drapery, trussed by her shift and gripped by psychic anxiety” (Bissell 11). The undamaged flesh maintains a specifically sexual image not yet marred by the didacticism of her suicide; that her trussed shift is evidence of a dramatic or performative invocation, as is her “psychic anxiety”, which I suggest may also be interpreted as sexual ecstasy. At least the image may have been unconsciously received that way.
Bissell specifically disagrees. “Although not devoid of sexual appeal, [Artemisia’s depictions of Lucretia, Judith] do not explicitly spur fantasies of sexual availability, nor does eroticism prevail over meaning. All of these women have minds” (Bissell 13). Here, I firmly disagree with Bissell. Juan Luis Vives’ works inherently recognize a female intelligence and I posit that, even in Renaissance Italy, it was part of the social dynamic of sexual attraction, even if it was ignored or unknown. The fact that these women have minds actually empowers the already sexualized images of them to spur sexual fantasies with greater potency.
Historians, feminists and aestheticists are unanimous in reporting that the expropriation of sex from women was celebrated in art of patriarchal Renaissance Italy. Geraldine A. Johnson, in Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, outlines the public sensibility held by men towards nude female statuary. “[T]he focus of this chapter will be primarily on the responses of male viewers to female public statuary” (Johnson 223). Although Johnson is exclusive to public and sculpture, from her observations on the male reception of these artworks, we can extrapolate and idea of the general ideology and reception that would have inevitably informed their private reception in the domestic space. “These female figures, which derived from the Bible as well as from allegory and myth, elicited responses from contemporary viewers that ranged from devotion and admiration to suspicion and outright fear. Such a variety of reactions suggests that the meanings of such works could be ambiguous” (Johnson 222). Piety was not singular in its interpreted authority. Johnson describes the dismantling of pagan nude statues of Venus and Judith. “In both situations, public images of women – the one an alluring idol, the other a dangerously triumphant heroine – were believed by at least some male viewers to be the cause of civic misfortune” (Johnson 232). “[T]he Venus’s aesthetic beauty, which had initially caused the Sienese to lavish so much praise on the statue, was apparently not enough to prevent its subsequent talismanic dismemberment and disposal” (Johnson 233). Clearly the sculpted images were perceived as sexual, so much so that they were dangerous!
Johnson quotes the words of “an early seventeenth-century visitor who observed that “in Florence women are more enclosed than in any other part of Italy; they see the world only from the small openings in their windows”” (Johnson 234). If the Lucretia was indeed housed in Florence, and women lived such tyrannically domestic lives, what motive would there be to adorn the domestic space with such a lascivious depiction as the Lucretia? In describing Giambologna’s sculpture, The Rape of Sabine, Johnson states, “Like the figure of Perseus, who proudly presents the head of Medusa, the young Roman man who abducts the Sabine woman demonstrates his power and virility by literally holding up a conquered female body as his trophy (Johnson 240). “According to Borghini, the abduction of the Sabines marked the historic beginnings of the institution of marriage in the Italian peninsula, an institution that was seemingly based from the start on men’s violent oppression of the opposite sex” (Johnson 241/42). As she proceeds to describe the male ideology, Johnson suggests that the entire professional identity of men may have been predicated on their domination of women. “This conclusion is telling, for it clearly links female sexual subjugation not only to the institution of marriage, but also to success in the wider historical political arena” (Johnson 243). Admittedly, there are differences in the reception and perception of a painting in the domestic space as compared against public statuary, but the male ego tied up with a need to sexually conquer women as Johnson describes it and the sensuality and nudity of an image would certainly not have been neutralized in the domestic space.
Moving from broad public male perception to focus more on erotic painting, Linda Wolk-Simon surveys Rapture to the Greedy Eyes: Profane Love in the Renaissance in which she identifies a “base lust […] that the vision of a naked goddess had the power to incite” (Bayer 48). In her article she offers a graphic of Giulio Romano’s Two Lovers (image 5). Both the presence of the voyeur at the door, and their positioning on the bed is very similar to Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia (image 6). Even more striking is Romano’s Olympia is Seduced by Jupiter (image 7). The image of the two lovers is overtly sexual. Audiences could not have been able to overlook the bold similarity in other depictions of Lucretia. Johnson argues that “the seductiveness of the female form [was] implicitly linked in texts and images throughout medieval and early modern Europe” (Johnson 232). In this way, similar images informed the myth, which in turn informed other images, like Gentileschi’s, in a cycle of mythical-sexual reciprocity.
Based on the impossibility of painting from certain postures and the availability of mirrors, Harris argues that “Artemisia must have had a model and the model must have posed for her away from Orazio’s studio with its male comings and goings” (Harris 143). Turner argues that though “the Platonist Ficino taught that lovers should communicate through gazing alone, he recognized that the soul imprints images while men and women are “making babies”, and describes eyesight in quite sexual terms: a stream of “sanguine spirits” penetrates the heart like sperm” (Turner 179). However, the image that exemplifies this sexual gaze provided by Turner is a ca. 1523-24 painting called Diana Transforming Actaeon into a Stag which depicts the naked goddess gazing into the eyes of the naked woman. These three ideas (Artemisia as a female artist imbued with sexuality, the sexualized myth of Lucretia, and the feminine sexual gaze) converge and lend themselves to a lusty image of the male patron of Gentileschi’s Lucretia lasciviously fantasizing about Artemisia gazing steadily at the nudity of her model and further impregnate the image with a sexual narrative.
Conflating Artemisia’s reputation with the sexually ambiguous narrative of the myth and the sensuality of the image itself, we reach a point of intersection that cannot deny the sexuality of the image beyond its mere aesthetics. Bissell even suggests that Artemisia may have taken professional advantage of her compromised reputation and the meaning she knew would be attached to her art. Orazio’s “daughter’s now public vulnerability began to be exploited” (Bissell 18). “[T]he conception of Artemisia Gentileschi as a woman of dubious rectitude […] was to have an effect on the nature of the commissions she was awarded and upon how her pictures were to be received” (Bissell 18). Men surely viewed the Lucretia as sexualized.
But who were these men? Patronage data surrounding the Lucretia is scant. Bissell places the Lucretia in Venice in 1627 and suggests “Gianfrancesco Loredan, famous-surnamed literary man-about-Venice” as “the patron of the Lucretia and the Susanna” (Bissell 42). What Bissell lays down as fact is that “Gentileschi supplied paintings to rulers” (Bissell 42). It is well documented that male members of the ruling elite were substantially bolder in their sexual conquests and rakishness, almost to the point of pride. In light of Johnson’s suggestion of rape and sexuality being a matter of male ego, Tarquinius may well have been their secret hero.
Feminist theory has been preoccupied with the expropriation of sex from women by men. We learn from Juan Luis Vives’ works that the reputation of chastity and piety was paramount for women. His treatise, On the Education of the Christian Woman delineates the role of the woman into stages of her life entirely in relation to the husband: the first anticipating her marriage and remaining chaste, the second describing her marriage and role as a wife, and the third outlining appropriate Christian behaviour for the widow. Vives, quoting the words of Paul, describes the first two of these phases in the following way. "Unmarried women are occupied with things that pertain to the lord, how they may please him; married women are concerned with the things of the world, how to please their spouse". He states that a “married woman ought to be of greater chastity than an unmarried. For if that thou then pollute and defile thy chastity, as God forbid thou shouldest, hark, I pray thee, how many thou shalt offend and displease at once with one wicked deed” (Kaplan 324). His work is an openly didactic piece that is designed to put forth a Christian paradigm of the perfectly educated woman and her exemplary behaviour. Inherent to the text are examples of behaviour that must have been common enough to merit chastisement and remediation. Goldthwaite suggests that the Renaissance domestic space was social and professional to the point of being public. Therefore, there would be a real need for women to be covert in their sexuality.
In her article entitled, Toys for Girls: Objects, Women and Memory in the Renaissance Household, Marta Ajmar states her thesis clearly. "I shall attempt to show that [Renaissance women and domestic objects] informed each other and that they were mutually influenced by their individual changes of status" (Ajmar 76). Ajmar goes on to introduce both theoretical and artefactual evidence to give voice to the often-silenced role, authority, and vested interest women had in domestic art and objects. She points out that the "'ideology' of domesticity has traditionally associated the 'domestic woman' with values imposed by men, with a 'passive feminine conformity'" (Ajmar 80). She immediately challenges the dogma by asking, "Is Margherita's reaction, as depicted by Vasari, just a projection of the male Florentine writer, determined to depict her as a worthy example of civic pride, or should we take at face value her emotional involvement in something in which she does not possess? And if so, why?" (Ajmar 77). Ajmar offers answers in the rhetoric of her following question. "Was it for reasons of family pride, personal virtue or 'professional' identity, as a housewife?" (Ajmar 77). "During the sixteenth century I would like to suggest, domestic memory was constructed along increasingly matriarchal lines" (Ajmar 78). In this way the role in object-display that women may have needed to disguise in their patriarchal abjection is perfectly served in Gentileschi's Lucretia. It represents the style and taste of refined Baroque art and superficially invokes the notion of high virtue in a sensual image of a woman (both of which would appeal to the male mind) while simultaneously, and perhaps covertly, invoking meaning surrounding the strength of women on behalf of the household matriarch.
The didacticism intended by the patriarchal society is ostensibly reflected in treatises that "promoted an image of the mulier economica - the housewife - as someone who was in charge of the moral and material identity of the household" (Ajmar 83). "[T]he house was therefore proactive in creating and fulfilling the demand for a new 'professional' figure: the housewife" (Ajmar 87). When examined against other research into the symbolic meaning and deployment of space and objects within the domestic space, a more complete view of its potential meaning, especially within a potentially domestic space, takes on broader possibilities. Judith Butler argues that women voluntarily participate in the social ritual of their culture. There is no evidence to suggest that women did not wholly concur with Vives’ views and welcome the conquest sexuality of their male counterparts. Beds stood in public areas of the house and sleeping occurred simultaneously with social activities which included individuals outside of the family. Given the notion of women as professionals within the domestic space who informed and had agency in that region, participation in the sexual ritual, and a social need to hide sexuality behind piety, it seems very likely that women would be complicit with men in the sexual interpretation of the image.
So powerfully imbued with sexuality, it is inevitable that the Lucretia defined whatever space in which it was housed. The University of Victoria DIDO database lists the Lucretia painting as having dimensions measuring 137 x 130 cm. Certainly that is sizeable enough to overpower pithy images on spalliere and cassone, and to contend with other larger paintings within a space. In Richard Goldthwaite’s Wealth and Demand for the Art in Italy 1300-1600, he describes how the earlier years of this Renaissance period suggest a domestic decor that included the patriarchal chamber as “the intimate core of the household” around which the entire space was organized (Goldthwaite 225). The space was multi-functional with most furniture and valuables concentrated there while the rest of the house was “sparsely furnished” (Goldthwaite 225). Even more interesting, for a culture stereotypified by its rich and lavish baroque renaissance art, is the fact that the “typology of furniture does not extend beyond basic functions of eating, sitting, sleeping and storage (Goldthwaite 225). Finally, the evolution of these household goods brought about interesting cultural corollaries. “[G]oods evolved into more complicated forms” (Goldthwaite 225). These more complicated forms resulted in the redefinition of the household spaces in which they were housed.
While “commerce was seen to have infected nearly every aspect of modern life, the realm of art was deemed free of its contagion” (Bermingham 5). At least it was free to maintain sexual meaning in the new household of the young married couple. In Hareven’s article The Home and Family in Historical Perspective, the “nuclear household structure has predominated in England and Italy since the twelfth century” (Hareven). Two major social characteristics of these archaic homes were that marriage “meant the establishment of a separate household by the new couple” and that the space served for domestic activities such as eating, sleeping and childrearing, as well as more social functions such as production, welfare agency, correctional institution and religious worship.
In Mary Douglas’ article, The Idea of Home a Kind of Space, she suggests that “home starts by bringing some space under control.” “[T]he home is the realization of ideas.” She focuses on art in the house and how it interacts with the perception of time and space. In Henri Lefebvre’s article The Production of Space, he describes the sociological notion of space as being “produced” rather than merely appropriated and filled with things (Lefebvre). He considers that “If space is a product [...] The ‘object’ of interest must be expected to shift from things in space to the actual production of space” (Lefebvre). He admits that in certain historical era/economic dichotomies, “the active groups did not ‘produce’ space in the sense in which a vase, a piece of furniture, a house, or a fruit tree is produced” but that space is produced in a less tangible and more perception-based way (Lefebvre).
In The Madonna and Child, a host of saints, and domestic devotion in Renaissance Florence, Jacqueline Musacchio states that "Dominici discussed what he considered the only justification for having art in the home: to aid in the education of children" (Musacchio 147). In the passage that follows she lists examples of art for that purpose. What is obviously lacking is the inclusion of pagan icons, or any of the images that might have the suspect sexuality so obvious in the depictions of Lucretia. Dominici did not include Lucretia in what he deemed suitable for children. Furthermore, Musacchio notes, "many of the paintings and sculptures associated with the domestic environment had intimate iconography” (Musacchio). When she notes that "the estate of Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici contained seven Madonna images as well as nine other sacred paintings and sculpture", the reader cannot help but be inclined to ask what these 'others' were (Musacchio 149). Were any of them pagan icons? Might any of them have been Lucretia? If such is the case, and Lucretia was not considered appropriate for children, then what iconographic purpose could such an image have had? The inherent sensuality of Lucretia’s likeness is the only verifiable evidence. "As Kent Lydecker has observed, marriage prompted extensive purchases of all types of domestic art to outfit the personal chamber" (Musacchio 148). Not only does this statement relate to the accoutrements of marriage and marital gifts discussed in Randolph's article, it is reasonable to assume that the "personal chamber" may include some more sexualized images like that of Lucretia: "Marriage [...] focused attention on the continuation of the lineage through the conception [...] of children" (148). Once again, marriage and conception are linked through art for the bedchamber.
In James Grantham Turner’s article entitled Profane Love: The Challenge of Sexuality, he quotes Leonardo da Vinci as saying, “Painting moves the senses more readily than poetry does. . . . Painters have depicted libidinous acts, so lustful that they have incited the spectators to play the same party game” (Bayer 178). In Ian Woodward's The Material as Culture, he provides examples of "how apparently inanimate things within the environment act on people and are acted on by people, for the purposes of carrying out social functions, regulating social relations and giving symbolic meaning to human activity" (Woodward 3). Any room decorated with Gentileschi’s Lucretia would be overpowered by its sexual message and the energy, or at least the purpose of the room would be clear. According to da Vinci, the call to action would be equally clear.
In Bill Brown's article Thing Theory, he introduces the idea of “actants”, objects designed to perform some human function on behalf of humans. Although he is referring specifically to objects such as cellular telephones that conduct some specific action, if we consider that art defines a space, surely it must perform some semiotic function on behalf of the human occupants "They are questions that ask not whether things are but what work they perform" (Brown 142). The work of an image to prompt sexual interaction is globally ubiquitous.
Bissell describes four of Artemisia’s paintings as “marked by a heightened theatricality, of which a new conception of the viewer-painting relationship is the first indisputable sign” (Bissell 69). Although these four postdate the Lucretia and Bissell does not include it amongst them, I suggest that it was an obvious progenitor to this recognizable characteristic. Theatricality is already apparent in Gentileschi’s image of Lucretia and is preceded and proceeded by a theatrical history of the myth’s presentation. “The viewer now becomes the member of an audience, rather than someone who finds him/herself confronted one-on-one with reality” (Bissell 70). Bissell is careful to include both male and female viewers. Where it might seem that the intimacy of one-on-one sexuality is compromised by the perception of a larger audience, it is important to note that the audience perception was not tangible. In Artemisia’s work, “human drama is reduced to the core and presented close up, where idealization is rejected in favour of truth, where frankness counts more than beauty” (Bissell 10). The viewer took part with an absent audience in appreciating the art, but individuals were confronted by its sexual realism within the potentially intimate privacy of the space it defined. The perception of an audience by the viewer inherently suggests a theatricality which would have specifically resulted in a call for acting. The participation of the audience with the performer is a common tenet of theatrical performance.
In terms of the domestic space, Adrian Randolph’s position on the performance of the bridal body might be extended to that of the wife in general. His article follows a Marxist slant in an economic perspective that views marital gift-giving (especially of jewellery to women) as an equation that needs balancing. "[T]he exchange of women is a conversation between men and is the basis of all symbolic exchange". The article suggests that often a woman's only ability to balance the equation was by 'owing' her body to the marriage bed, and indeed how the system may have been biased in its design to require women to unconsciously recognize this debt and to ensure that it was in place. "I would like to question whether equilibrium was returned to this system of presentations or whether, instead, the balance was left skewed". "[T]he extralegal presentations to the bride from the bridegroom (and his family) functioned, unofficially, as a Maussian counter-gift, returning equilibrium to an unbalanced economy of exchange". "A gift results in a debt which must be repaid, repayment returning equilibrium to the system". "The mancia was a traditional payment made to the bride after consummation of the marriage [which] emphasized the conjugal pair and the sexual act". "The jewels functioned, too, in a symbolic sexual economy, one in which --despite the reciprocity of the Pauline notion of mutual corporeal authority of husband and wife -- the bride was sexually subjected". "In this Florentine 'potlatch' the bride loses. She cannot return the gifts; or rather, she pays for them with her body". The sensuality and iconography of Lucretia may have acted as a reminder to the wife of what is 'owed' to the husband: sexuality (in her suggestive posing and nudity), loyalty (in the invocation of her story), and morality (in the invocation of the requirement of death (or suicide) if another man enjoys her sexually, which is a debt of ownership belonging to the husband).
Ajmar outlines “new possibilities for the interpretation and meaning that […] objects may have represented”. In this way, exciting new meaning may be interpolated into Gentileschi’s Lucretia. Theory and fact conflate to present an undeniably sexualized depiction of the Lucretia. The public nature of Artemisia’s trial and the sexual stigma which was attached to her reputation are largely accepted as historical truth. Changing Renaissance perceptions of the Lucretia myth further impregnated the painting with sexual meaning that was amplified by dramatic coincidences with Gentileschi’s life. The sexual sensibilities of men and their inevitable perception of the painting must have been seconded by a complicit female population participating in the sexual culture. The definition of space, call to action of the painting, and motivating nature of sexual images would all have worked in concert to define a space endowed with the Lucretia as highly erotic and called to action the sexuality that a wife owed her husband.


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