Love and Marriage in the Italian Renaissance

For my HIS-347 Midterm, I wrote about love, marriage, and gender in the Italian Renaissance. I feel like I really proved my argument using primary sources of letters, paintings, and books from the period. The paper was well-received by my professor, and I received an A.

Love and Marriage in the Italian Renaissance: An Analysis

In the Italian Renaissance, there was a gendered view of love within marriage not explored before. Previously, in the middle ages, notions of love were thought of as ridiculous: marriage was a survival tactic, a means of reproduction and producing stability in unstable times. However, there is a change in that thinking, as evident in primary sources written by both men and women. Within the context of marriage, women saw love as a mutual agreement of passion and equity as evidenced in Laura Cereta’s letters to her husband in The Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist while men viewed love within marriage as a familial, educational, honor-bound duty, void of romantic love, as evidenced in Alberti’s The Family in Renaissance Florence: Book III.

In the Italian Renaissance, women viewed love within the context of marriage as an agreement of romance and equity, as evidenced by Laura Cereta’s letters to her husband. Cereta saw marriage as an equal partnership. She loved her husband, Pietro Serina, and expected Serina to love her back. This romance is exemplified in letter 21, as Cereta’s language is flirtatious, encouraging her husband to return from his business. In the letter, Cereta playfully apologizes for neglecting to write Serina, but states that “[her] innocence alone will be the tinder for your forgiveness of me.” By referencing her innocence in such a flirtatious manner, it is clear that to Cereta, their sexual relationship is one of pleasure, to both herself and Serina. In this period, the concept of women’s sexuality was sinful and immoral, forbidden outside of consummated marriages. For women, sex was for reproduction. By flirting with her husband, and requesting that he come home, insinuating sex for her pleasure as well as his, Cereta demonstrates a love for her husband, one of passion and romance.

In letter 25, Cereta addresses Pietro Stella, a nickname for her husband, in dreamlike prose. While the second paragraph of the letter attests to Serina’s violent nature towards Cereta’s letters and writing, the first paragraph is intimate and romantic. Cereta’s nickname for her husband indicates that she views him as the center of her universe or her stars. By writing in the middle of the night, Cereta allows herself to be vulnerable and tender. While it seems that Cereta and Serina wrote letters to each other constantly, with Serina even berating Cereta for not responding to him fast enough, no other letters we see are written in the middle of the night, and certainly not in the middle of a dream. Cereta clearly loved her husband and loved him so much that she would sacrifice her intelligent, braggadocious vocabulary as seen in letter 21, to write to Serina with “blemishes” in her writing. Even in later letters, such as letter 31, when Cereta apologizes for her unimpressive writing, the letters were long, well thought-out, and full of beautiful, intelligent prose. They were not short, sweet letters written to a husband far away. That is romance.

In addition to Cereta’s romantic view of love, she also believed that her love should create equity within her marriage. This is evident in two letters to Serina, letters 23 and 24. In letter 23 Cereta offers to finance the rebuilding of Serina’s business after fire destroys it. As the translator states, “[Cereta] sees her role as both her husband’s financial and moral supporter.” In response to accusations from Serina that she does not love him, Cereta effusively states her loyalty to him, using her confidence and virtue as evidence to the fact. Furthermore, she states that she “[doesn’t want to] buy [Serina] at any price,” and that “[Cereta] is not a person who lays more stock in words than duty.” Cereta demands equity in return for her unrelenting love for her husband. In other marriages, women may express a lesser type of love, one of inequity, because they have no confidence in themselves, their love, or their virtue. On the contrary, Cereta loves her husband because of her confidence and virtue, and this allows her to support him morally, and eventually, financially, as she presumingly pays for repairs to his business.

In letter 24, Cereta claims that her husband has spent too much time mourning his brother, and he has not spent enough time or energy on their relationship and, in turn, their love. This letter proves Cereta’s expectation of equity in her marriage. As she states, “[Serina] has a greater duty towards [Cereta] than you do towards the dead.” She expects Serina to perform his duty to her even in the aftermath of his brother’s death, as she is alive and not dead. To Cereta, their marriage and their love is more important than any familial relationship. As she further states, “[…] a man and his wife must so mutually love one another that they will not turn aside from that love at any time.” Cereta’s emphasis on mutual love further evidences her demand for equity within her marriage. Finally, and perhaps most evidently, Cereta summarizes her entire view of love within her marriage within one final sentence to her husband. Cereta writes, two weeks before Serina’s death, “[…] we are now, and we always will be, two souls belonging to a single being.” There is nothing more romantic, more passionate, or more equal, than two souls merging as one. Not in the Catholic faith, where traditional marriage vows still place ownership over wife by man. Not in conventional marriages during the Renaissance. Cereta’s view of love is a unique perspective on the way women view their husbands, their lives, and their marriages.

However, according to Alberti’s The Family in Renaissance Florence, love within marriage was a familial, educational, honor-bound duty, devoid of the romantic love seen in Cereta’s letters to Pietro Serina. This is evident in Book III, as Giannozzo and Lionardo converse about Giannozzo’s family and, within that family, his wife. Within Giannozzo’s marriage, he assumes the role of patriarch and teacher to his wife. He must teach her how to manage a household, how to raise a family, and, in essence, how to be a wife. It is unlikely that Giannozzo’s marriage was devoid of romantic love. However, Giannozzo’s love for his wife was less sexy and more fatherly. Not only did Giannozzo have full authority over his wife’s education of the management of the household, where records, books, and valuables were kept, but also full authority over their relationship as husband and wife. As Giannozzo states, “I made it a rule never to speak with her of anything but household matters or questions of conduct, or of the children.” He further states that he did this as to “make it impossible for her to enter into discussions with me concerning my more important and private affairs.” This view of Giannozzo’s wife was didactic and pedantic, and certainly not the sweet, passionate writing of Cereta.

Furthermore, it seems as if Giannozzo actively objects to the romantic and passionate love of Cereta’s marriage. Giannozzo states that he would prefer modesty, chastity, and discipline from his wife. It seems as though Giannozzo does not care if his wife loves him, but only that she respects him, and does not bring embarrassment to the family and the family’s affairs. It is hard to find specific evidence to prove Giannozzo’s feelings of honor, duty, and patriarchal love towards his wife, not for lack of resource, but for the sheer amount of it. From pages 80-99 of The Family in Renaissance Florence, Giannozzo goes on and on about his duty to educate his wife on how to be a proper woman, a proper mother, and proper head of the household. At many points, he embarrasses his wife and treats her like a father scolding a daughter. He compares the education he has given her to the education in obedience she received from her parents in adolescence. Additionally, it is clear that this idea of love within marriage is the status quo during the Renaissance, as Lionardo continuously agrees with Giannozzo and compliments his achievements on educating his wife. Alberti’s writing couldn’t be further from the intimacy of Cereta’s letters, proving just how different a man’s view of love was from a woman.

However, the question must be asked: which view of love existed within marriage? It is hard to stipulate fact from the two texts examined. Both are innately personal stories, and both are biased by the writer’s point of view. Was Cereta’s view of love and marriage clouded by the fact that she was young and infatuated with her husband? Or was Alberti’s view of love in marriage conflated with children and status as head of the household?

By looking at two of Lorenzo Lotto’s paintings, Portrait of a Married Couple and Marsilio Cassotti and His Bride, Faustina. there is evidence of both the man’s view of love within marriage: the familial, educational, honor-bound duty; and the woman’s view of love within marriage: the passionate equity. The familial, educational, honor-bound duty can be seen in Portrait of a Married Couple. The man holds his marriage certificate in front of his wife, as evidence of his duty towards her. Additionally, there is a squirrel on the table, which represents the man’s duty to provide for his wife. Furthermore, the wife’s hand rests on the husband’s arm, perhaps showing her reliance on him.

Contrastingly, Marsilio Cassotti and His Bride, Faustina, demonstrates the passion and equity that permeated the woman’s view of love within marriage. The couple are seated evenly, bound by a yoke by Cupid. As Cereta wrote in her letters to her husband, “[…] we are now, and we always will be, two souls belonging to a single being.” This idea of love is also evidenced by the ring being placed on the left ring finger, a tradition that started in the Italian Renaissance. This tradition states that the left ring finger connects directly to the heart by an artery– a romantic notion perhaps shared by Ceretea.

While it is important to explore the understandings of love in the context of marriage in relation to gender within the Italian Renaissance, the question posed in this essay will never be truly answered, simply due to the masculine culture that permeated the time period, and the lack of primary sources written by women. It is entirely possible that Cereta’s writings are an outlier, and women thought of love and marriage in a similar way to men. It is also possible that some men, maybe even Cereta’s husband, Pietro Serina, saw their wives as equals, and loved them passionately and immensely. However, due to the lack of letters from Serina, and due to the toxic masculinity of the time period, the question will never be answered. That is why it is important to look at paintings, like the two Lotto paintings referenced in this essay. They provide a non-biased glimpse into the complex world of love and marriage in the Italian Renaissance, one that is not always easily derived by reading and questioning texts.