The frescoed room that Giovanna Piacenza commissioned remains as a Renaissance time capsule tucked at the end of a tree-lined path in the center of Parma. When the room was rediscovered officially and admitted to exist in the late eighteenth century, the psychological and artistic treasure pertaining to women’s lives still glittered with a future that had not arrived. Ten years after I had walked its path a good many times, I discovered that Margaret Fuller, the American feminist who married Marchese Ossoli, one of Mazzini’s men, paid a visit to this room. Because of the cloistering, Correggio’s painting became a mystery for nearly three hundred years. Its individualistic and pagan subject matter was walled off, forgotten, and denied. The story of his painting is really part of Giovanna’s story and not the other way around.
The convent, San Paolo, occupied a special place in church history. Two centuries into its existence, in 1187, the women acquired a valuable dispensation. Since the Benedictine order received largely educated women from wealthy families, the most powerful ones worked out a concession that allowed the unmarried women the chance to live apart from their families and still do good works in the community, while often also furthering family interests. The privilege for the women of San Paolo signed by Pope Gregory VII is an example of the church’s fluctuating vision: an enlightened or interested papacy occupies a cultural or intellectual vanguard often corrected by repression or contrasting political aims of a later pope. Pope Gregory’s charter guaranteed the women a great measure of freedom and mondanità. Mondanità means worldliness, lay life without a complete redirection of self. The concession admitted that women were sturdy enough to survive temptation and sin, that they were fit for studying, as well as for putting their material resources at the church’s service. The latter gave many abbesses a managerial profession.
In Parma, by Giovanna’s lifetime, women worked in some guilds, not as members but certainly washing and carding wool, twisting the indistinguishable matted hair into sturdy yarns. They were weavers, but after having loomed some fine unending strips, women were largely excluded from dyeing and printing their products. In agriculture, they labored, winnowing grain, picking knobby bunches of grapes, preparing milk curd for cheese. They were part of a growing paper-making industry—crushing and sorting rags. As nobility, they performed charitable works, as well as managed property once the males were dead. There was some cramped space, as it was understood, for autonomy in many areas of work. Life was inheritance, social definition, work, and fertility. Women were recognized as an integral part of it. This feeling today can be seen in simple figures: 60 percent of the students graduating from the University of Parma are women. The region of Reggio Emilia is known for its strong and realistic females. The myth is played with and believed. Clare’s demography professor announced on the first day of class, “As we all know, women will succeed at everything, including burying the rest of us.”
Like other noblewomen in this region’s history, Giovanna as an abbess had political power, and as far as we can see, it often overrode religious concerns. Her first acts were to discharge her incumbent advisers and to install men more favorable to her family’s agricultural holdings and interests.
It is staggering to stop some mornings on the cobblestone streets of the medieval center and imagine for a brief moment women’s sophistication and power in earlier times. In 1077, Matilda di Canossa, in the Apennine Mountains thirty miles to the south, kept the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, kneeling in the snow for three days until he humbled himself and repledged allegiance to the pope. That moment is recorded in all books that call themselves world histories. Matilda forced troops into Parma and returned the city to papal allies. By the end of the thirteenth century, St. Chiara (not by St. Francis’s hand, but by a common growing perception of women) had been written into an active and complementary part of his myth. In Parma, by that time, a second hospital had been built. The first was for lepers; the second, for the poor, the infirm, and pilgrims, was run by lay women and men who pledged faith and chastity, but “to the limits of human frailty.”
Rodiana Alberini and Argentina Pallavicino Rangone were women scholars and poets who were born in Parma slightly before Giovanna’s time. Rodiana studied Dante, and Argentina, who lived much of her life in Venice, was included in a work entitled Illustrious Women in 1545. Lucrezia Agujari was a soprano whose voice was heard and celebrated by the young Mozart, who was her guest in Parma.
Once Parma ceased being a de facto colony of the Visconti of Milan and the Sforzas and became a court and sometime capital for the long-ruling Farnese and Bourbon dynasties, women, often through marriage lines, left their marks on the government and architecture of the city as it came under European influence. Elisabetta Farnese, a granddaughter of Duke Ranuccio II, was given in marriage to the Bourbon King of Spain, Philip V. She left Parma at age twenty-two in 1714. Educated and also able, she was compared to a Richelieu. She set up one son, Carlo, first as a duke in Parma, then as King of Naples, and finally on the Spanish throne as Charles III. Another son, Filippo, became the Duke of Parma. Luisa Elisabetta, daughter of Louis XV of France, married this son and, taking her role seriously, sought advice for the city. She was active with her French adviser, Du Tillot, in pursuing “new rights, new blood, new men, in short new laws.” Their son Ferdinando married Maria Amalia of Austria. She was a free spirit who lived apart from her husband and disliked and succeeded in getting rid of Du Tillot. Maria Luigia, Napoleon’s second wife and the daughter of the Hapsburg Emperor Francis I, ruled the city in her own name. Having been given the Duchy of Parma by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to rule without the possibility of passing it on to her heirs, she rewrote its laws and further renewed the city’s physical design.
Some considerations of female power, although not widely construed in political terms, extend to all classes across time. Although there was great poverty, and in every century periods of famine and battles, Parma continued to have various roads open for education, and some small amount was for women. Parma’s paper industry, starting in the fourteenth century, aided the production of books. Rosa Orsi, born in the early 1700s, was raised as a servant and decided to found a school for educating poor women. She wanted to teach them manual skills that would enable them to escape from their poverty. This city on the floodplain was vital and often renewed itself through combinations of economic progress and ideas incorporated into favorable laws. Inheritance laws often put women in the position of overseeing money. Wars and widowhood allowed women to take over property and run various operations. If women had a central place in existence, it was not necessarily because they were given it, but often because they played real roles. Like the torrente called Parma that runs through the city, even when it is only a hard-baked gravel bed and we see no water, their presence is always there. The space for the torrente is a wide path through the city center which, as a flood or a trickle or a normal flow, defines a reality. The image of the torrente—as earth as well as water—dry, hard, as well as full, seems a good image for women’s lives on this plain.
In Parma dialect, the term rez’dora refers to the head of the agricultural household: a term derived from reggitore (governor). The ruling decision maker, practical and in touch with an agricultural world, is often a woman with common sense and a hard-driving will. The determination in Giovanna’s voice carries this confidence down to us from her high office nearly five hundred years ago. Unable to inherit land by the laws of primogeniture, Giovanna, following two relatives as abbesses, brought her own money and power to the convent, just a kilometer from our home.
We don’t know how often Giovanna, Correggio, and the consulting advisers met to discuss the project of the sumptuous fresco that today is called the Camera di San Paolo. The stunning green boughs, whose leafy details have dimmed, and the energetic putti painted on the ceiling represent an arcadia. The goddess Diana, depicted as a free and bare-shouldered huntress on the flue surface above the open fireplace, carries the abbess’s coat of arms. Dia
na, whose myth is of an autonomous, fierce, pure, justice-seeking goddess, unable to submit to men, might be a portrait of the abbess on several levels. Or it might not.
In years that were fraught with internecine struggle between the bishops belonging to the pope and those working with the tenacious remnants of the Holy Roman Empire, prosperity and promise were never assured. But the Dark Ages, during Giovanna’s term, seemed intellectually and materially in retreat.
We have no source for the rams’ heads that compose the imaginary capitals around the upper part of the salotto walls. The capricious rams’ eyes live, are fully conscious. Complicit and merry, severed from any sign of their woolly bodies, they may well stand for some real men. Their spiraling horns are draped in light strings of pearls and blue cloth. Above the capitals, classical figures appear as statues, painted in perspective in deep nonexistent niches. One or two of the festoons underneath sag so perfectly that the bronze pitcher and brass plates inside them seem in danger of crashing to the floor. The putti playing on the ceiling are rascals, lascivious, and out in the open.
The mother superior’s room is only five minutes on foot from the cathedral of Parma and the church of San Giovanni directly behind it. All three were decorated by Correggio. Only her room’s iconography represents a distinctly non-Christian world. Tucked into a women’s convent, its contravening message is narcotic and hypnotizing.
Giovanna expected to leave something as an artistic patron in an order where self-consciousness was evolved. She furthered the work of her predecessor by commissioning a ceiling painted by a local artist named Araldi, who had painted the choir loft. Purposely tied to conventions, except that women’s lives from Judith to Athena were the often nonbiblical subjects portrayed in the scenes reproduced on the walls, it is a radical departure and shows women as active in culture. Nevertheless, the jump of artistic genius that takes place in a room painted perhaps only five years later by Correggio has the effect of an airplane flight to another century.
Unlike the two domes that Correggio paints in the main churches, the abbess’s room has no religious meaning. Mary is nowhere to be seen. The sky has no eschatological focus. Beauty and learning are rising from heaps of human history. She is centuries ahead of Madame de Staël. There is liberty, even license, and the gods, rather than God, are invoked in a green world that trembles with double meanings.
Contiguities are fascinating to me. While Giovanna’s room is not the mesa flats giving space to the atom’s secrets, it was a test site, nevertheless. Trying out ideas and attitudes that were threatening to religion, it concentrated these currents in a woman’s place, thus minimizing the challenge of the paths that secular learning led to. Within this world opening toward the world we live in today, the question of sacred preparation is separate. Nothing in the room—the cloud heights and the unruly putti—says that Giovanna aspired to the equality of priesthood. Freedom had to do with knowledge and earthly power—more than strictly spiritual issues. The main cathedral in Parma is dedicated to the assumption of Mary. Her body is swathed in beautiful robes of rose. A few streets away, the abbess is promoting secular learning and protesting her conditions. As with Eve, this turning point is the dangerous one, when authority is threatened. In both depictions in Parma, women are central conceptions, even though they are subordinate to men in the hierarchical realities. Northern Italy in this sense was advanced. The vision seemingly arose both from concrete realities and from evolved abstract principles.
Correggio’s two magnificent church domes depict death defied through the infinite energies of God. The glorious physical assumptions of Mary in one and St. John in the other are palpable, twisting, turning air shows. In the cathedral, Santa Maria della Assunzione, the subject of the painting is Mary’s physical assumption into heaven. She waits, not easily visible, in a pulsing, crammed spiral of clouds filled with people. She is reaching up, surrounded by other women such as Eve, Mary of Bethany waiting to be taken. A figure is coming to get her. He is flying, legs akimbo, down from a physical vortex of light. We feel the upward pull and the downward journey. The dome bursts with contrasting energies, flagrant figures and holy ones.
Focusing my binoculars to get a closer look at the figure coming to take Mary further up, I was startled to see a full set of male genitals in perfect perspective from underneath, directly above what is considered Christ’s or an archangel’s head. Correggio often pushed the life in flesh to its limits. The message inside the painting, too, twists and turns nearly at the dawn of a new world. Mary, at last, will have a place alongside God. In the other dome, a gigantic, radiant, airborne Christ is landing. He’s come down to the earth to physically lift St. John back into heaven. Correggio was a reason for a pilgrimage for Stendhal, Valéry, Rembrandt Peale, James Fenimore Cooper. By then a local priest and historian, Padre Ireneo Affò, had made the case for Giovanna and her commission.
In a gesture of public goodwill, citizens and tourists were recently allowed to get up close to the fresco in San Giovanni for a month after the fresco had been cleaned. Although the sign warned that the scaffolding could not bear more than twenty people at a time, we found ourselves swept to the top by an impatient stampede of more than forty. The staggering size of the figures, the achievement of the technically perfect perspective on the curved surface, and the vibrant shadings within colors were wonderful experiences. They were cut short by the chaotic effort to shoo people down using walkie-talkies and imprecations. Everything and nothing was out of hand. The feeling of stress on the trembling boards was like trampolining. What with the crowd, the pushing, and the luminous colors we reluctantly returned to the ground, wishing we’d had a few more minutes up close to Correggio and his ability to wonderfully stretch three-dimensional figures across a dome.
Giovanna’s room, made to suggest secular freedom, has a far lower ceiling. Its concerns are enlightenment and the rebirth of learning. Its message, without religious transcendence, plays with a classical dawn and is announced in a woman’s space. Remember this contradiction.
In Giovanna’s private chamber—about which the contemporary Bishop of Parma made accusations concerning the licentious behavior of the women visited by the monks, the ones who were not “engaging in homosexual practices”—the subject matter displays women’s conquests by placing them in an existence counter to the spiritual realm. It’s a mix of science, myth, interpretations of authority, justice, and fate. Heaven has been brought back to a garden and a woman wanting to learn about a troublesome freedom, where the problem of sin officially began.
In the other dome, a gigantic, radiant, airborne Christ is landing
The small room, only a few hundred meters from the public and mysterious religious messages, expresses the rational and transgressive counterweight to them. The abbess is defining her own life in life.
The ceiling, six and a half by seven meters, painted with the woven texture of basket and leaf, pulled in a sixteen-sided apse, sectioned by thirty-two ribbons, is permanent, sensuous summer. It has been hypothesized that the white scenes painted below, referring to classical myths that depart from orthodoxy, might have been composed using figures from Roman coins. It would be fascinating to know if coins, a symbol of earthly power, exchange and commerce, were seen as an appropriate and real allusion to the city’s life at the time. Whether through ignorance or intent, the mixed vision of fate and the elements in the niches re-creates a very personal understanding of cosmology. Correggio, the consultants, and Giovanna peering at learning from this small awakening city suggested a worldview signed in some new way by their persons. Death’s only dominion is time. It favors reason and the revival of the classical world.
The abbess’s ceiling, freshly restored, is darkly luscious: greens, yellows, the dusty blue of the sky, the sinuous pinks of the putti hunting among the clouds. Diana’s pointing finger is an interesting measure of those times. Its confidence—coming from a world where agriculture reinforced vocabulary—shows us something strong about courtly wo
men in the years that preceded the Counter-Reformation. Diana’s secure and graceful finger belongs to a lady. It points to her stallions, visible only in their hind portions. One stands still. The other horse has switched his tail and his anus is in clear view. Giovanna, in challenging Rome and its pope, is shown to use men’s language without visible shame. In the first series of major drawings to be made of the room once it was rediscovered in the late eighteenth century, Diana’s chariot was enlarged to cover up the horses’ offending parts. Diana’s challenging finger curls into a coquettish pose. Her determination disappears.
Correggio’s painted marble statues in the niches on the walls strain to override any objections the eye might have to their illusions of being physically real. Renaissance painting has reached a peak. Look at what Rome and trips to the nearby court at Mantua and Mantegna’s chapel have taught: new ways to represent the mind and life. In Correggio’s work, you feel both breaking out. In the sensuous bodies twisting out of straitjackets we see a strong set of time-stopped images of a culture, a place, a world on the verge of discovery that, instead, gets pushed back.
Giovanna’s choice of Correggio reveals her confidence in incarnating this view. Her room is one of at least eight major spaces in Parma that justify a pilgrimage. Aside from its physical beauty, the room allows you to plant your feet on ground where women in this order were sometimes dynamic equals of men, in an exploding inner sanctum of learning, less than thirty years after Christopher Columbus reached the West Indies. But Giovanna was in an institution that was coming under fire, in spite of its centuries of autonomy, not just because of the rise of the classical world or because of the new church formed by Martin Luther demanding a direct relationship to God. For some time the privilege of the nuns had appeared as feeding into “superficiality and too much freedom.” The priests were not put under pressure: women were called into line when sex got out of hand. But perhaps the cross fire was another. There were larger political schemes, and getting control of the local churches, their properties, bringing the nobles to heel, was a political issue. The popes wanted control over the convents and the women quieted down.
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