ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on profile portraits of Florentine women attempting to bring theories of the gaze to bear on some of these traditional Master theories, thereby unmasking the apparent inevitability and neutrality of Renaissance art. John Pope-Hennessy's survey of Renaissance portraiture, or Meyer Schapiro's examination of the profile in narrative contexts, fail to make gender distinctions. The chapter reviews profile portraits as constructions of gender conventions, not as natural, neutral images. The age of the women in these profile portraits, along with the lavish presence of jewelry and fine costumes, with multiple rings on her fingers when her hands are shown, and hair bound rather than free-flowing, are all visible signs of her newly married state. The chapter investigates the gaze in the display culture of Quattrocento Florence to explicate further ways in which the profile, presenting an averted eye and a face available to scrutiny, was suited to the representation of an ordered, chaste and decorous piece of property.
