ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on both the topsy-turvy and the normalized imagery on deschi to examine how they functioned from the point of view of the women who received them as gifts. In Tuscany in the fifteenth century large, round wooden trays, known as deschi da parto, were given between friends and families in anticipation or in celebration of the birth of a child. The desco shows, in the background on the left-hand side, the poet Virgil suspended in a basket from a window while a female figure looks down on him from above. Aristotelian philosophy equated women's physiology with lack of reason and passivity yet the image of Aristotle being ridden demonstrates, to use Judith Butler's term, the performative nature of gender. In the Triumph of Chastity, they saw ladies forever conversing around the victorious figure of Chastity while Love remained bound and impotent.
