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In my Renaissance art history class, the professor has trained us to play Council of Trent, extrapolating from existing records of the Council’s condemnation of certain artworks to make our own Trentian statements about other works. Not surprisingly, I am very good at being strictly doctrinaire and judgmental.
I spent a happy few days thinking this was was probably the least popular children’s game ever… until I found in one of my research texts a Renaissance account of a little Florentine girl and her friends, whose adorable form of play was to imagine themselves members of a flagellant confraternity.
They’re so cute when they’re that age.
I’ve finally created a thesis statement. It is, like everything else, temporary.
I’m positing that the staggering popularity of Luca della Robbia’s terracotta Madonna reliefs arose as an indirect result of the increase in foundling homes, which fostered (no pun intended) a change in the cultural vocabulary regarding women, motherhood, and infants, as well as a growing devotion to Mary.
And, yes, I did choose this in part because the stuff’s so pretty.
Despite the extra day off (thank you, imperialist swines of history!), I am exhausted and badly disorganized. I haven’t unpacked my winter coats and gloves, ordered my new computer, or written a formal thesis statement for my art history class.
In fact, I am very much afraid that my art history paper has taken a turn for the interesting. I anticipate so much trouble sticking to the professor’s strict page limit that I’m considering new but related topics:
> The Innocenta: The dowry as an index of honor for Renaissance Florence’s foundling girls
> Nekkid, nekkid, nekkid: Sexual license, adolescent confraternities, and Donatello’s David
My thesis statement is due in just a few days, so I plan to research all three simultaneously and see which argument emerges from the historical record fastest. Also this week, I need to start the heavy lifting on my anthropology thesis, for which I am (tentatively) researching the Westermarck effect in maritime societies. Zowie — college is fun!
Heaven help me, I mean it.
I’m supposed to be working on a paper right now. I would dearly love to blame my procrastination on the blog (and therefore on you, gentle reader), but that dog won’t hunt. I have only myself to blame.
I’m finding evidence to support the argument that the Renaissance shift in representation of the Christ Child was an indirect result of the establishment of foundling homes. With alternatives to infanticide and a concentration of infant morbidity and mortality in institutional, not domestic, settings, mainstream society could have experienced a dramatic increase in transfer of affect to the infants remaining at home, increasing adult identification of infants as human and encouraging Renaissance artists to adopt the Greco-Roman image of God-as-baby, complete with chubby cheeks and gentle demeanor.
This being my field of study, it is really impossible to claim that watching “Fight Club” this morning (instead of getting to the library by 8 a.m. as planned) was research.
Now you know I’m me and not Elli; she couldn’t make up this nonsense.
Elli
Elsa
