Theresa Thompson on a Christ Church Picture Gallery pair

How do you depict Venus, the goddess of love? What does Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, look like, or Diana, the goddess of the hunt? How do these divine figures relate to the appearance of mortal females? These questions lie behind Goddesses: Designing Female Beauty in the Renaissance and Baroque, the latest thought-provoking exhibition at Oxford’s Christ Church Picture Gallery.

Ideas of female beauty have varied throughout history, differing between eras, countries, genders, and cultures. In the Renaissance and Baroque periods in Europe the same questions led artists to create faultless faces and forms — effectively inventing an ideal beauty that reflected the taste of the time.

The ‘ideal beauty’ realised men as well as women, but Christ Church’s show is about goddesses and female beauty. It begins with class-ical myths, depictions of Venus, Diana, Minerva and the Muses, and so on in various narratives, and ends with more human ideal beauties such as the personification of Justice, and portraits of female figures, including one possibly Saint Veronica, and a self-portrait of the Bolognese artist Elisabetta Sirani where individual and idealised features merge: she has round eyes and face, beautiful lips, fine curls, which she may well have possessed, of course; we are not to know.

Sirani’s self-image is a relatively rare thing as there were fewer female artists, although in 17th-century Bologna several female painters were working.

The exhibition also includes proportion studies from 16th-century Italian artist Il Talpino, but highly unusual because they show female dimensions. His Two Female Nudes is the only one of its kind, said Jacqueline Thalmann, curator of the Picture Gallery. The Lombard artist wanted to write a treatise on proportion, and his notes written on the drawings aim to show how to position bodies to maximise beauty. In terms of beauty and proportion, however, most works from the period show a decidedly male slant as male models were more easily available for study. Two prints show Dürer’s notion of the ideal female form. Like Talpino’s, they are based on detailed proportion studies. His figure of Venus in The Dream of the Idler (or Doctor, one of several titles) is worked with characteristic precision, and his engraving The Four Witches shows the female body from all sides. It is displayed for comparison next to a sketchy but lovely drawing of nude women by Guercino and The Three Graces in red chalk by English artist, Charles Beale the Younger (c1660).

A second display, titled Mounts, Mats & Marks: How collectors took ownership of their drawings is on “the archaeology of the history of a drawing — the hows and whys of collecting,” said Ms Thalmann.

“This small show came out of the thinking that everything you see on a drawing is contemporary to the work. It isn’t.” On a drawing by 16th-century Italian painter Salviati, Ms Thalmann pointed out the Christ Church mark — a stylised cardinal’s hat and tassels (the college’s coat of arms was originally that of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the founder, incorporating his scarlet galero) among all sorts of markings and numbers. Texts on the wall opposite explain the collectors’ marks.

At times attributions were made, sometimes incorrectly, and written onto a work. But nine times out of ten old master drawings were not intended to be seen outside an artist’s workshop, so inscriptions giving an artist’s name have usually been added later by a collector or art dealer. For example, a sheet of anatomical studies is labelled Follower of Mikkelangelo (sic).

In addition to the mount (elaborate, gilded, or simple), and what is on the mat (the backing of a drawing), markings like wine and grease stains or colour splashes (oil spots from Carracci’s studio, for instance) or irrelevant inscriptions (shopping lists, calculations) by unconcerned artists, add scope for unravelling a drawing’s history. These centuries-old clues to a work’s history preoccupy curators and art historians trying to understand a drawing’s provenance, but they also can add a lot of interest — when explained — to a gallery viewer. “The display will give people the tools to become detectives,” Ms Thalmann added.

Goddesses: Designing Female Beauty in the Renaissance and Baroque 
Until December 23
Mounts, Mats and Marks
2 February
Christ Church Picture Gallery, either via Christ Church, or Canterbury Quad, off Oriel Square
Visit chch.ox.ac.uk/gallery