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[K]nowledge is not given [to women] as a gift, but [is gained] wilth diligence. The free mind, not shirking effort, always soars zealously toward the good, and the desire to know grows ever more wide and deep. Laura Cereta, circa 1487
Sandro Botticelli's Madonna del Magnificat presents an unusual figuration of the Virgin as a writer, and I wish to explore here the implications of this quattrocento painting for an understanding of an important event in literary history: the sudden appearance--and disappearance--of the first group of women writers in the Renaissance, the female humanist authors of fifteenth-century Italy. On the one hand, even as Botticelli's painting acknowledges, indeed celebrates, the existence of the woman writer, it attempts to persuade the viewer that she is an "impossible" figure. Thus, the Madonna del Magnificat participates in the widespread humanist rhetoric of impossibility that sought control over and eventually silenced most of the women writers the movement had fostered. On the other hand, Botticelli's work exposes a conflict between this dominant ideology of impossibility, which grounded itself on the construction of the writing woman as a miracle, and an emerging discourse of possibility, often expressed in the vernacular and addressed to female audiences, which sought to construct the woman writer as ordinary. In this respect, Botticelli's canvas may best be viewed as an emblem of patriarchal humanism's profound--and prescient--anxiety about its continuing ability to manage the colony of female artists it had created.
The Madonna del Magnificat (c. 1483) depicts an interior scene in which the Virgin, seated on a chair, supports the Christ child on her lap with her left hand, in which she also holds a bitten pomegranate. At the top of this large round painting appears the sun with the dove of the Holy Ghost and a rainbow. The Madonna is surrounded by five wingless male angels (angels took on sex characteristics in Renaissance art), two of whom raise over her head a crown of twelve stars. To her right another angel offers her an inkwell and one supports the open book on the right-hand page of which the Virgin has begun to inscribe the Magnificat, the song of praise and thanks to God that, in Luke's narration (1.46-55), Mary sings during her visit to...