The Wife of Noble Character

Katharina von Bora was the wife of Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century German Reformer. This life-size bronze statue was made by German sculptor Nina Koch in 1999 for its site outside the Lutherhaus in Wittenberg, Germany.

Koch draws on the likeness of Katharina from the famous double portrait of Luther and his wife painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder in 1529. The smooth bronze casting of her aquiline features and upper body, contrast with the rougher textures of her dress and coat below the waist, where green oxidized patches of bronze create an impression of brocade. Katharina strides forward, giving a modern prominence to the shape of her lower body, which sixteenth-century dresses, layered with petticoats, tended to disguise more than display. Her left hand swings forward, drawing attention to the wedding ring on her index finger.

A highly competent, intelligent woman, Katharina was a pioneer in a ‘new’ kind of Christian marriage in the Western Church. Formerly a Benedictine nun, she had fled her nunnery in the early years of the Reformation, and married Luther in 1525. They lived in the Lutherhaus, which had earlier housed Augustinian monks studying at the University of Wittenberg, including the young Luther himself. The fact that, prior to the Reformation, clergy were required to be celibate (as would remain the case for Roman Catholic clergy after the Reformation) meant that there was no ready-made model of how to be a pastor’s wife. Katharina and Martin were among those who were having to negotiate this for the first time.

In this context, ‘A good wife who can find?’ (Proverbs 31:10) can be read not just as a man’s question. It became a question for a generation of women seeking how best to exemplify ‘goodness’ in their new vocations; ‘finding’—and founding—new models for how to be wives.

References

www.nina-koch.de/Stadraum [accessed 26 April 2018]

Stjerna, Kirsi Irmeli. 2009. Women and the Reformation (Malden: Blackwell), pp. 49–70

Amy Sherald has achieved something distinctive in her painted vision of one of the most photographed women of the twenty-first century.

Michelle Obama chose the Baltimore artist for her official portrait as First Lady of USA, unveiled in 2018. It was important to Obama that her portraitist should be an African-American woman, whose family, like her own, were once slaves. Sherald deploys her signature use of greyscale for Mrs Obama’s skin, an approach that refuses to encode racial difference through the use of colour, and thus establishes what is, in the domain of portraiture, a historically-unprecedented equality between races. As Antwaun Sargent comments (2018), ‘race is central to the narrative of Mrs Obama as an “ideal” wife because she is a pioneer: a black woman who became a first lady’.

Capturing an enigmatic facial expression which is much more than just a smile for the camera, this portrait is a powerful vision of Obama’s unique character and grace, which she used to promote issues such as access to healthy food for the poor in America and education for girls worldwide. In the spirit of Proverbs 31, she spoke up for those who could not speak for themselves, and for the rights of those who are destitute (vv.8–9).

The dress worn by Obama is from the prestigious label ‘Milly’ by Michelle Smith. The wife of Proverbs 31, is also richly clothed (v.22). Sherald plays on conventions of ruler imagery by using the dress, spread in a wide triangle, to create monumentality in the composition. The bold geometric designs of black and grey on white, with red, yellow, and pink, reminded Sherald of paintings by Piet Mondrian, which she emulates by minimizing the folds of drapery. For Sherald, the dress patterns also evoked the long-standing traditions of quilting among black African-American women.

The choice of a sleeveless dress is daring within the traditions of First Lady portraits and highlights Mrs Obama’s much talked-about muscular arms. While alluding to the idea of labour in her family heritage, these are transformed in a message of contemporary beauty and physical fitness. Read together with Proverbs 31, they also speak of her arms extended towards the poor and needy (v.20), and the strength and dignity with which she clothed herself in office (v.25).

References

St Félix, Doreen. 2018. ‘The Mystery of Amy Sherald’s Portrait of Michelle Obama, 13 February 2018’, www.newyorker.com, [accessed 26 April 2018]

Sargent, Antwaun. 2018. ‘Inside the Obama Portraits Unveiling. Witnessing Visions of Black Power Shake Up a Gallery of White History, 13 February 2018’, www.wmagazine.com, [accessed 26 April 2018]

Artwork Institution Details   

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Gift of Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg; Judith Kern and Kent Whealy; Tommie L. Pegues and Donald A. Capoccia; Clarence, DeLoise, and Brenda Gaines; Jonathan and Nancy Lee Kemper; The Stoneridge Fund of Amy and Marc Meadows; Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker; Catherine and Michael Podell; Mark and Cindy Aron; Lyndon J. Barrois and Janine Sherman Barrois; The Honorable John and Louise Bryson; Paul and Rose Carter; Bob and Jane Clark; Lisa R. Davis; Shirley Ross Davis and Family; Alan and Lois Fern; Conrad and Constance Hipkins; Sharon and John Hoffman; Audrey M. Irmas; John Legend and Chrissy Teigen; Eileen Harris Norton; Helen Hilton Raiser; Philip and Elizabeth Ryan; Roselyne Chroman Swig; Josef Vascovitz and Lisa Goodman; Eileen Baird; Dennis and Joyce Black Family Charitable Foundation; Shelley Brazier; Aryn Drake-Lee; Andy and Teri Goodman; Randi Charno Levine and Jeffrey E. Levine; Fred M. Levin and Nancy Livingston, The Shenson Foundation; Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago; Arthur Lewis and Hau Nguyen; Sara and John Schram; Alyssa Taubman and Robert Rothman

Proverbs 31:10–31 is an acrostic, each line beginning with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Like the painting we see here, the ‘perfection’ of this highly crafted poetic form suits its purpose: the construction of a certain ideal.

In 1486, the beautiful Giovanna degli Albizzi, aged 18, married Lorenzo Tornabuoni, the son of a wealthy Florentine merchant banker. A year later, on 11 October 1487, Giovanna gave birth to a son and heir, fulfilling the ‘expected duty’ of a noble wife in Renaissance Florence, both to husband and the ruling elite of the City Republic. Within another year, however, the young Giovanna had died from complications associated with a second pregnancy. She was buried in Santa Maria Novella in October 1488.

Lorenzo was distraught and commissioned many memorials to his wife, including this portrait by Ghirlandaio, the ‘go-to’ portraitist of rich Florentine families at the time. A slip of paper attached to the wall bears an epigram by the ancient Roman poet Martial, ‘Art, if only you were able to portray character and soul, no painting on earth would be more beautiful’. Ghirlandaio accepts the neo-Platonic challenge of the epigram by making a painting that seeks to portray inner beauty through (and in addition to) outward beauty.

Giovanna’s identity as Lorenzo’s wife is prominently displayed in the embroidery of her silk brocade robe, which has ‘L’ motifs, together with other emblems of the Tornabuoni family. The profile format associates her with classical portraiture and accentuates her domed forehead, high hairline, and elongated neck. Giovanna’s moral virtue is conveyed by her upright pose and the prayer book on the shelf behind her, where we also see her virtue as a mother reflected in a string of coral beads, often used as a protective talisman for infants, and a dragon pendant that refers to St Margaret, patron saint of childbirth. This pendant, as well as the necklace worn by Giovanna, both feature large rubies that display the wealth of the Tornabuoni family, and recall the opening line of the acrostic poem in Proverbs 31:10, ‘A good wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels’.

References

Brown, David Alan (ed.). 2001. Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo’s Ginevra De’ Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women (Princeton: Princeton University Press)

Simons, Patricia. 1992. ‘Women in Frames. The Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture’, in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Westview), pp. 38–57

Weppelmann, Stefan. 2011. ‘Some Thoughts on Likeness in Italian Early Renaissance Portraits’, in The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini, ed. by Keith Christiansen and Stefan Weppelmann (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art), pp. 67–69