PAINTING

Painting Compared To The Greek Philosophers: Socrates, Plato And Aristotle

Painting Compared To the Greek Philosophers: Socrates, Plato And Aristotle

According to our knowledge about Aristotle's study, the image is a desecration of Leonardo's educational space. The implications of the scene are as derogatory for woman as they are humiliating for the scholar. In the circumstances, her role has been reduced to flesh, an intrusion that has no proper place in the domain of the study. A view of woman as "the flesh" was shared widely among writers for the clergy, but this was not the only view. Countering the image of Eve's daughters were visions of the Virgin Mary and virginal saints akin to her.

Prior to the Renaissance, women rarely were depicted in study space. This is not to say there were no women scholars; it is certainly not to say that no women studied. Nuns in certain convents were liable to chastisements, if they failed in their reading duties. Herrad, Abbess of Landsberg, must have lived years of her life in study to complete the encyclopedic Hortus Deliciarum. Marie de France must have had a retreating place to permit uninterrupted thought and reference when she wrote her lais and fables. Yet it is exceptional to find images of women at their intellectual labors in study carrels or chambers during the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. We glimpse them only now and then, as in an illuminated manuscript of the mid-twelfth century by Abbess Hildegarde of Bingen, wherein we see the author receiving spiritual light and preparing to inscribe on a wax tablet what heaven has revealed. But is it study space she occupies? No book, no other object of study, is anywhere in sight. The moment chosen for the image is one of inspiration, not study. Also not to be confused with ...