Speaker: Kim S. Sexton, Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, University of Arkansas - Academia.edu, ResearchGate

Abstract: »Two public sculptures celebrating male violence on female bodies—Cellini's Perseus with the Head of Medusa and Giambologna's Rape of the Sabine Women—were added to Florence's civic loggia in 1554 and 1583, respectively. Yael Even and others have deployed political allegory in explaining how these two works supplanted statues of republican heroes, while symbolizing the feminization of newly conquered territories in the Duchy of Tuscany. But the loggia's original sculpted ornament, completed in the 1380s, has garnered little notice, even though it was unprecedented in terms of gender representation. On the façade, female virtues are seated triumphantly over the small heads of male vices depicted upside down under each throne. On the back wall, two console reliefs feature a male female couple—one pair in contemporary dress, the other in togaed drapery—partnering to support the rib vaults. With the late medieval program as backdrop, this paper aims to push beyond parables of colonization to explore other cultural shifts in Tuscany and Italy that may have fostered the violent victimization of women in Florence's mid-sixteenth-century public art. In so doing, it also probes ideologies of subordinate masculinities underwriting the "pageantry" of hegemonic masculinity on view in the city square.« (Source: Online Program)

Wikipedia: History of Europe: History of Italy / History of early modern Italy | Art: Loggia dei Lanzi | Sex and the law: Sexual violence