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Botticelli's Madonna del Magnificat: Constructing the Woman Writer in Early Humanist Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Susan Schibanoff
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Abstract

While Botticelli's unusual figuration of the Virgin as writer in his Madonna del Magnificat (c. 1483) testifies to an important event in literary history—the appearance of the woman author in quattrocento northern Italy—it also testifies against her, employing a pictorial equivalent of the humanists' “rhetoric of impossibility,” which construes the female writer as a miraculous, hence ephemeral, phenomenon. At the same time, however, Botticelli's painting reveals the emergence of a competing imperative in the late quattrocento Latin and vernacular defenses of women by Laura Cereta, Bartolomeo Goggio, and others: the construction of the woman writer as ordinary, thus “possible.”

Type
Cluster on Early Modern Women
Information
PMLA , Volume 109 , Issue 2 , March 1994 , pp. 190 - 206
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1994

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