Women and War in the Visual Arts of the Renaissance

Abstract

Throughout the early modern period, few pictorial themes — even when they were not directly linked to a text as in illuminated manuscripts or captioned wood-cuts — did not develop from a written base. It was words, whether those of the Bible, or an Ovid or a Petrarch, or those of chronicles, moralising satires or lives of famous men, that prompted an artist’s sense of what was admis-sable within his medium and what would appeal to a patron or a public. Art was a transferral into visual terms of what had survived an ocular or emotional rite of passage from experience into words.