Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture [Hardcover]

Patricia Phillippy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 4, 2005 | ISBN-10: 0801882257 | ISBN-13: 978-0801882258 | Edition: 1

This original analysis of the representation and self-representation of women in literature and visual arts revolves around multiple early modern senses of "painting": the creation of visual art in the form of paint on canvas and the use of cosmetics to paint women's bodies. Situating her study in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, France, and England, Patricia Phillippy brings together three distinct actors: women who paint themselves with cosmetics, women who paint on canvas, and women and men who paint women—either with pigment or with words.

Phillippy asserts that early modern attitudes toward painting, cosmetics, and poetry emerge from and respond to a common cultural history. Materially, she connects those who created images of women with pigment to those who applied cosmetics to their own bodies through similar mediums, tools, techniques, and exposure to toxic materials. Discursively, she illuminates historical and social issues such as gender and morality with the nexus of painting, painted women, and women painters.

Teasing out the intricate relationships between these activities as carried out by women and their visual and literary representation by women and by men, Phillippy aims to reveal the delineation and transgression of women's creative roles, both artistic and biological. In Painting Women, Phillippy provides a cross-disciplinary study of women as objects and agents of painting.

(2006)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Phillippy's focus on the semantic slippage of 'painting' as verb, adjective, and noun yields a brilliantly substantive way of thinking about the individual discourses of painting, cosmetics, and poetry as they arise from a common historical background. Thoughtful, polished, and, best of all, intellectually engaging.

(Marshall Grossman, University of Maryland 2006)

A deeply illuminating work on aspects of material culture... which shaped following ages.

(Henry Berry Midwest Book Review 2007)

Phillippy strikes a delicate interpretive balance between contemporary criticism and specific historical periods, cultures, and genres that will undoubtedly guide future research.

(H-France 2007)

One will undoubtedly be enriched by many of the previously obscured glimpses that she has succeeded in unveiling.

(Yael Even Renaissance Quarterly 2007)

Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture not only offers an enlightening argument, but also a productive direction and excellent model for feminist scholarship.

(Marguerite A. Tassi Shakespeare Yearbook 2008)

This complicated subject leads to a study of early modern culture in England, France and Italy that is revealing.

(Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance )

Painting Women makes a worthwhile contribution to the study of women and gender identity in early modern art and literature, and is likely to be of interest to scholars of early modern art, literature, and history.

(Danae T. Orlins Sixteenth Century Journal )

This ambitious project involves imaginative, if not acrobatic, yokings of the verbal and visual arts.

(Ann A. Huse Clio )

Painting Women makes an important contribution to the study of representation in early modern Europe.

(Kate van Orden Journal of Women's History )

About the Author

Patricia Phillippy is a professor of English at Texas A&M University.

(2006)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press; 1 edition (November 4, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801882257
• ISBN-13: 978-0801882258
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,889,887 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars interrelationship of cosmetics and painting in early modern era, February 22, 2006

By 

Henry Berry "Henry Berry" (Southport, CT) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture (Hardcover)

This work by a professor of English at Texas A&M University "studies the intersection of painting and femininity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe as a site for exploring abstract ideas of gender construction and subjectivity in specific, historically grounded models." For this, Phillippy employs a loose, liberal, definition, or understanding, of painting. Cosmetics is taken as a way women "painted" themselves both to get in touch with their femininity and also to conform with the society's concept of how they should present themselves in public, which had some relationship to how society (i. e., men mainly) believed woman were in the privacy of their desires; while the art of painting, particularly the painting of women, was almost the same as applying cosmetics to a canvas, as women applied cosmetics to their faces and other parts of their bodies. In addition to paintings, Phillippy studies the perfume bottles and makeup boxes of the Renaissance period women in France, Italy, and England, the three early modern nations focused on. In their respective ways, women and art in this early modern period when the faith and sacraments of the Catholic Church were evanescing were searching for "redemption, re-creation, resurrection," as if trying to create new ceremonies for these. A deeply illuminating work on aspects of material culture, including art, social practices, and psychic and spiritual developments which shaped following ages and whose traces and growth can be seen in contemporary culture.