"A woman's touch": The significance of hands in Northern Italian portraits of women, 1500-1600

This thesis analyzes the distinctive formal and thematic qualities of depicting active hands in Northern Italian portraits of women, specifically between 1500 and 1600. Such analysis reframes the question of female agency in the Renaissance in key respects, as well as a better understanding of the somaesthetic experience of viewing portraits during that period. It is demonstrated that portraits by artists including Giovanni Battista Moroni and Bernardino Licinio that depict women’s hands as agents of touch provoke a desiring sensorial response in the presumed male viewer, specifically by means of the sitter touching her clothing or jewelry or by holding objects such as fans, books, or handkerchiefs. The viewing dynamic is animated by the beholder’s desire to access the sitter past the picture plane while simultaneously being reminded of her ultimate inaccessibility. The visual rhetoric of a given female sitter’s apparent transferability from picture plane to a real-life person due to her veristic depiction, and the representational emphasis on different aspects of touch, arguably endows her with a degree of agency that challenges previous scholarship on the strictly objectifying tendency in such portraits. By utilizing contemporary philosophical, medical, and poetical texts, as well as an examination of Renaissance material culture, artistic evocation of touch is situated in these portraits in positive rather than traditionally negative, gendered terms. Furthermore, that positive viewpoint of the selected portraits is heightened when situated within Northern Italian pictorial conventions of the period, which stressed individuality and the inclusion of highly specific and materially present attributes. Women also possessed greater financial autonomy in Northern Italy in the sixteenth century, which reveals possible ownership of jewelry and other accessories included in their portraits. The presence of those material goods further supports an interrogation of female agency that destabilizes the patriarchal conventions understood to inform pictures of women painted by male artists in this period.