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Beauty Without Pity, Ambition Without Remorse: Lucrezia Borgia and Ideals of Respectable Femininity

Rusconi, Gloria
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9636-5407
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1619440010113221

Abstract Details

2021, MA, Kent State University, College of the Arts / School of Art.
Ever since the 16th century, the character of Lucrezia Borgia has captivated and titillated the imagination of countless artists, novelists, and playwriters. Daughter of Pope Alexander VI and later Duchess of Ferrara, she is known in popular culture for being a personification of beauty, seductiveness, and unlimited ambition. This thesis journeys through literary and painted representations of Lucrezia Borgia from the 16th to the 21st century, exploring each portrait as means to exert control over Lucrezia’s femininity. If the portraits dating from within her lifetime are examined as the means to idealize her figure and present it as an exemplary model of female propriety and respectability, nineteenth-century productions turn her into an ambiguous character. As her body becomes the site of a conflagration between beauty and vice, love and ambition, Lucrezia is turned into a mythological character employed as a moral cautionary tale. Victor Hugo’s play Lucrece Borgia, Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and 20th-century cinematic examples are then used to discuss the appropriation and exploitation of Lucrezia for political and economic objectives first, and consumeristic purposes later. Lastly, the commission of a glass case to display a relic of her hair is analyzed for the first time as the ultimate step in this transformation of Lucrezia from a historical figure to a secular saint of femininity and sexuality. Employing theoretical frameworks drawn from contemporary feminist theory, this thesis ultimately proposes a reading of Lucrezia as a case-study to access to gain access to a wider range of issues concerning female representation.
Gustav Medicus (Advisor)
Shana Klein (Committee Co-Chair)
135 p.
Art History
Lucrezia Borgia; Borgia family; art history; Italian Renaissance; Pinacoteca Ambrosiana; hair relic; nineteenth-century; feminism; ideal beauty; feminine sublime; Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Victor Hugo

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Rusconi, G. (2021). Beauty Without Pity, Ambition Without Remorse: Lucrezia Borgia and Ideals of Respectable Femininity [Master's thesis, Kent State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1619440010113221

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Rusconi, Gloria. Beauty Without Pity, Ambition Without Remorse: Lucrezia Borgia and Ideals of Respectable Femininity . 2021. Kent State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1619440010113221.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Rusconi, Gloria. "Beauty Without Pity, Ambition Without Remorse: Lucrezia Borgia and Ideals of Respectable Femininity ." Master's thesis, Kent State University, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1619440010113221

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

kent1619440010113221
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This open access ETD is published by Kent State University and OhioLINK.