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Blog 5: Gender Symbols and Identities

Women in all early art are seen as beauty symbols. Women are either shown in a conservation or scandalous ways. The focus is more on their slender appearances than their knowledge or power. Women are shown in art as sex symbols. Someone who is weddible, pure, vulnerable. It is to provoke a desire. I plan to look at and analyze the art displaying the two most represented women in art ever: The Virgin Mary and Apherdite, the goddess of love. These two women are icons of everything women were seen as. 
Virgin Mary often is represented in variations of the annunciation where the angel david comes down to tell Mary she is pregnant with the son of God. In all variations, she appears the same way. There was a fresco of this scene in the Santa Maria Novella. Mary is shown fully clothed with a halo over her head. Her body is in a poised but distressed manner as if taken back from the shocking news. Her hands are laid over her stomach as if now aware of what is to happen to her. Mary’s expression is shown calm to signify her acceptance of this new responsibility. Mary was a role model for women everywhere. She was a symbol of good mannerism and fortune. 
Goddess Aphrodite would be displayed in a much more provocative way. She almost always appeared nude in the art stylings of her. This was because she was the goddess of love. She was a symbol of temptation. The statue of Venus (Aphrodite) shown in the Uffizi has her attempting to cover herself. With her hands barely covering anything, this only brings the audience to look toward what she attempted to cover. This was the artist’s goal. All the placement of the hands do is draw your attention by giving us curiousity to what she is doing. It is because of this that the statue is very sexual. Aphrodite became someone that women had to live up to. She had what was considered to be the most perfect physical features.
I believe that these two women both played the same important role in their cultures which was to be the ideal woman. This shows how women were mainly seen as objects that others could judge and compare with. This contrasts with how men were represented in Florence art. Men were represented as power and intelligent. Although some artwork represented male gods, soldiers, and citizens as nude, this stylistic choice was not used with the same intention as female artwork. This was scene as a power move. It was to show off the ideal form to let others know that this man be shown is great and bold. They stood in masculine poses to show their authority. These types of artwork are where gender stereotypes were set in marble. An example of this is with the bronze statue of Donatello’s David. People today consider this statue to be feminine and there for sexual due to the way his body is positioned (Fulton, 36). People assume this because men were always shown in sturdy and strong poses. It wasn’t expected of a man to be shown in what would be considered a “sassy” pose. This is the problem with gender identity in art. We reproduce the same idea over and over again until it becomes uncommon to show something different. 

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