Here is an interesting perspective on the complexities of transforming a virtuous maiden into a chaste but sexually productive matron. "How does a maiden shift from bride to matron and" pay the marital debt?" Cristelle Baskins asks in her article "Il Trionfo della Pudicizia" (The Triumph of Modesty), a fascinating study of the economic exchanges negotiated before and after marriage. Baskins also examines the type of goods provided in the exchange that sought to educate the couple on their marital proper roles and reinforce the marriage bond through art.
"In those negotiations concerning marital chastity, Elizabeth Cohen reminds us, the language of debt, payment, and exchange makes virginity a commodity. Fifteenth and sixteenth wedding furniture, including elaborately painted and historiated lettucci (beds), cassoni (dowry chests), and spalliere (wains-coating), is a domestic commodity employed in conspicuous consumption; it also offers an opportunity to examine Renaissance marriage ideology through the visual imagery geared for the primary spectatorship of brides and grooms." (118)
Among the upper classes, it was expected that husbands would demonstrate their status and wealth by purchasing elaborately painted wedding furniture, commissioning religious paintings and sculptures, and deshi da parto (birthing trays), which were also painted and given as a gift for a new mother. It would also launch the future husband as a cultured man, purchasing expensive art. The subject matter of the art would have been carefully selected to reflect both the couples' status and "aimed to elucidate using example and perhaps even more concretely to inspire the conception of children and thus the expansion of the patriline. The most popular choice of art, it seems, was a reproduction of the Triumph of Modesty, a poem cycle written by Francesco Petrarca in the 1340s -- describing Cupid/Love being vanquished by Laura/Chastity and often appeared in horizontal panels on a cassoni.
"A fifteenth-century Florentine bride would have viewed Petrachan Trionfi on painted wedding furniture with a particular set of expectations and associations; her temporary triumph in the form of a bridal procession prefaced the conquest of her virginity and her transformation into a sexually active spouse...the Petrachan Trionfi trace a development from physical, sexual love to the renunciation of Cupid...For them (the brides), the state of innocence must be overcome but only by a chastened, disciplined conjugal love, not by the irresponsible, unpredictable passion inspired by Cupid." The art on the furniture was meant to "conceal the lack of fit between occasion and subject and thus, to blur the distinction between compliment and coercion...the pictures must simultaneously encourage the bride to abandon her fiercely maintained chastity to the needs of the patriline and yet, renounce illicit, physical passion."
But, to make sure the bride could be gently enticed, there was also an abundance of cassoni which, while it showed marriage events on the outside (and sometimes martial battles,) under the lid were erotic paintings of men and women nude doing the things married couples generally do when trying to create the next generation. More on the cassoni coming up with the next post (along with more on the art of the battle between Cupid and Chastity, cassoni, and birthing trays.
"Il Trionfo della Pudicizia: Menacing Virgins in the Italian Renaissance Domestic Painting" by Christelle L. Baskins in Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, by