Italy's Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour

Abstract

Italy's eighteenth century—the Settecento—was for long squeezed (along with the Seicento) between Renaissance and Risorgimento, although we need to beware of exaggerating the neglect, which the late Franco Venturi's multi-volume Settecento Riformatore (1969 onwards) has anyway done much to rectify. Nevertheless, any new attempt to survey eighteenth-century Italy is to be welcomed. The essays reviewed here were originally given as conference papers, which immediately suggests a rather distinctive approach, and rather specialised contributions, in this case focusing on aspects of gender. The essays are divided into four groups under that umbrella. The first, Gender and Public Life, comprises Roberto Bizzocchi, ‘Cicisbei: Italian Morality and European Values in the Eighteenth Century’, a useful summary of his splendid recent book on the ‘institution’ of the cavaliere servente, which foreign visitors commented on as a distinctively Italian (and corrupt) phenomenon but which Bizzocchi argues was by no means unique to the peninsula; Susan Dalton on ‘Giustina Renier Michiel and Conflicting Ideas of Gender in Late Eighteenth Century Venice’; and Maria Pia Donato's ‘The Temple of Female Glory: Female Self-Affirmation in the Roman Salon of the Grand Tour’. The other sections deal with Women and Cultural Institutions (Elisabetta Graziosi, ‘Revisiting Arcadia: Women and Academies in Eighteenth Century Italy’, Catherine M. Sama, ‘“On Canvas and on the Page”: Women Shaping Culture in Eighteenth-Century Venice’, and Wendy Wassyng Roworth, ‘“The Residence of the Arts”: Angelica Kauffman's Place in Rome’); Enlightened Sexualities (Martha S. Feldman, ‘Strange Births and Surprising Kin: The Castrato's Tale’, Roger Freitas, ‘Sex Without Sex: An Erotic Image of the Castrato Singer’, Paula Findlen, ‘Anatomy of a Lesbian: Medicine, Pornography, and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Italy’, and Rebecca Messbarger, ‘As Who Dare Gaze the Sun: Anna Morandi Manzolini's Wax Anatomies of the Male Reproductive System and Genitalia’); and the Spectacle of Gender (Marta Cavazza, ‘Betweeen Modesty and Spectacle: Women and Science in Eighteenth-Century Italy’, Paola Giuli, ‘“Monsters of Talent”: Fame and Reputation of Women Improvisers in Arcadia’, and Christopher Johns, ‘Gender and Genre in the Religious Art of the Catholic Enlightenment’).