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Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture

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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.