One of the most extraordinary features of Romano’s Apollo and Cyparissus must surely be his inclusion of a female voyeur within his composition where the main protagonists are men behaving in accordance within codified gender expectations for masculinity (Fig. 29). However, it is my contention that her role becomes considerably less
148 Talvacchia, 1999, p. 130. 149 Talvacchia, 1999, p. 269.
ambiguous if we return to this study’s main premise that neither of Apollo’s young beloveds transform into botanical forms on a literal level but instead both become procreative beings following their pedagogical and formative post-puberty experiences under Apollo’s tutelage. In Romano’s depiction of Apollo and Cyparissus, it could be suggested that the female figure who observes their libidinous union serves to reiterate the expectation that the juvenile Cyparissus would soon be assuming the active role of lover and husband. Renaissance societies, just as the Greeks beforehand, might have considered themselves an enlightened race but they did not include women in that definition. Similarly, Romano reiterates the notion that if one were seeking a
relationship among equals one must seek another enlightened male by marginalising the female role to that of voyeur rather than protagonist in his composition. Romano
preserves the intimacy of Apollo’s union with his beloved Cyparissus by segregating the female voyeur from the activity. Further to that, the viewer is also excluded by Romano since neither of the lovers offer eye contact with the spectator. Through this absence of engagement with anyone else except themselves, Romano seems to
encourage the viewer to feel that they also have crept up upon their moment of private tenderness and thereby consigns them to the role of voyeur also.150
It is not difficult to envisage that Romano’s Apollo and Cyparissus is very much about looking and the part it plays in sexual desire. Therefore, the presence of the woman voyeur invites further thought in relation to how spectatorship in the context of the gendered ramifications of looking might be embedded within the image. Throughout the history of artistic production, images of women have mostly been presented in a manner that focuses upon their status as sexual beings or maternal figures. The power of
150 For the relationship between vision and sex, see E. Campbell and R. Mills (eds.), Troubled Vision: Gender,
the male gaze and the objectification of women as instruments for visual pleasure have been intertwined with the social roles and sexual stereotypes of men and women.151 In
the Renaissance, the commerce of art was almost the exclusive domain of men since most collectors as well as the primary viewing audience were male. However, I maintain that Romano appears to fracture certain general paradigms of visual
engagement designed to crystallise patriarchal structures of looking where women are transferred into chattel by offering a more sophisticated critical purchase on the sexual politics of viewing in this homoerotic scene.
On the one hand, in Apollo and Cyparissus Romano seemingly underscores these gendered relations of power both compositionally and thematically in a conventional manner where, as John Berger notes, ‘men act, women appear’.152 The boy attracts a male active and homoerotic gaze, thereby becoming a rendition of a passive adolescent object of desire. Meanwhile, Romano’s Apollo carries an expression of a particular mode of power - one that can be associated with sovereignty and this was surely an identity to which contemporary viewers who were mainly men entirely assured of their own dominance would choose to relate. A male spectator’s gaze transports him into the role of Apollo as the active and powerful agent who captures the essence of virile masculine patriarchy. However, in this case it is not the loosely draped formless woman who is the object of the male spectator’s pleasure but the nude precocious Cyparissus with genitals tantalisingly obscured from view that is designed to redirect the active desiring eyes of the viewer. Apollo and Cyparissus elicits a desirous visuality, but it can be argued that the woman who is observed watching the activity stands in for the viewer
151 M. Sturken and L. Cartwright, Practices of Looking: an Introduction to Visual Culture, Oxford, 2001, pp.
71-108. For a perceptive study of the gaze in visual culture see P. Simons, ‘Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture’, History Workshop, No. 25 (Spring, 1988), pp. 4-30.
because he is perhaps consigned to sharing her role as a mere voyeur as if also distanced from the action and disempowered by exclusion. A gendered and paradigmatically masculine gaze with fleshly modes of looking by virtue of its corporeality is unusually absent here because the woman is uninterested in the viewer’s gaze, and her own gaze demonstrates that our looking is the least of her concerns.
The viewer is drawn to the soft vivacious body of the youth which, although not idealised, remains an object of desire. The erotic tangency of Cyparissus’ flesh is all the more alluring because it will soon be the hard, unyielding bark of the cypress. However, the presence of the female figure positions the work within a discourse on the ethical problems of desire because just as the viewer’s gaze is directed at Cyparissus, so too is that of the woman voyeur. Romano situates the epicene boy above the viewer as if taunting him with his passive sexuality. His sexually alert body, so teasingly attractive and carefully positioned, was undoubtedly intended to appeal to contemporary
homoerotic taste. Romano depicts something going on for the viewer, but at the same time Cyparissus is imagined as physically out of reach. It can be suggested that the male viewer is forcibly reminded of his condition reduced to the level of a sensual voyeur and left to reflect on his own erotic responses as Apollo achieves by proxy an act from which he himself is debarred in physical reality. Because he is not cast in the role of participant, the desiring viewer is held at a distance. In fact, it is the female voyeur who will ‘act out’ the viewer’s fantasy in due course. As the narrating agent, this woman is the focaliser in and of the scene. There is a critical economy of looking in which no figure but that of the woman voyeur actually sees. Ultimately, she is the one who will benefit from the moments when the youth was once a companion who learned with and from his older lover how to enjoy, as well as later teach, the pleasures of life in the correct way with the correct moderation. Her gaze materialises what we see and offers
the only model within the scene for the viewer’s own act of looking. Thus, movement of the gaze from practice to representation provides a mode of spectatorship where the impact that looking plays is transferable between the abstract space of Romano’s Apollo
and Cyparissus’s representational structure and the actual space of the viewer through
his desiring gaze. The beholder is made to calibrate his gaze with that of the woman, so that not only does she correspond to both the role of the spectator immersed within the drawing and that of the audience, but she mirrors his voyeuristic sense of fascination with her own eroticised gaze. Moreover, through her scandalous appropriation of masculine privilege, the woman invokes a sense of self-reflection by allowing the viewer to see themselves as others might well have seen them, as mere spectators constrained by impotent desire to the role of voyeur also.
In one sense, the female conforms to expected gender roles by silently observing male interaction without intervention in a manner that would have mirrored expected behavioural comportment from an obedient prospective wife.153 Romano’s female figure could thus be said to be a metaphor alluding to the actual distance of Renaissance women from codes of male behaviour. But in another, her voyeurism brings her some degree of empowerment because she can be identified with the predominantly male audience in a way that threatens the power of gazing. Showing little concern for the fact that she should not be seen looking, the woman seems to have forgotten her modesty as she emerges from behind the foliage. She also does not appear to notice that we are looking at her or them because she has no averted eyes or interaction with viewer. Instead, she usurps the traditions of male spectatorship because she is not the object of visual pleasure nor does her voyeurism engage the attention of Apollo or Cyparissus.
153 For an account of Renaissance womanhood and contemporary expectations for feminine decorum, see G.
Furthermore, it is noteworthy how the motif of a fascinated voyeuristic male onlooker observing a scene of carnality is later repeated in Romano’s fresco of Jupiter and
Olympias, c.1528, for the Camera de Psyche in Mantua’s Palazzo de Te (Fig. 30). In
this rendition of a legend by the Greek chronicler Plutarch (c.46–120 AD) where Jupiter seduces the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great’s mother Olympias, Giulio Romano depicts the moment when her husband Phillip is blinded by the god for witnessing the act: ‘Philip after this portent sent Chairon of Megalopolis to Delphi, to consult the god there, and that he delivered an oracular response bidding him sacrifice to Zeus Ammon, and to pay especial reverence to that god: warning him, moreover, that he would someday lose the sight of that eye with which, through the chink of the half- opened door, he had seen the god consorting with his wife in the form of a serpent’.154 A watching woman is also included in the same artist’s painting of The Lovers (1525), where Zeus’ sexual encounter with Alcmene is observed by a maidservant from behind a half-open door (Fig. 31). The manner in which these works share a common theme with the drawing of Apollo and Cyparissus, where divinities are been observed by a third party as they perform sexual acts with mortals, is perhaps an indication of contemporary taste for the pleasure of looking in a sexual context. Nevertheless, whereas the female voyeur in that drawing is placed within the scene as a prominent protagonist, the partially concealed observers in the background of both Jupiter and
Olympias and The Lovers seem to be posed as intruders and thus display a considerably
lesser level of connection between themselves and the respective pairs of embracing couples.
Giulio’s repertoire of coded visual motifs in the Apollo and Cyparissus drawing includes the manner in which this woman voyeur inserts a finger in her own mouth (Fig.
29). This lewd gesture with the forefinger carries an analogous meaning that expounds on the sexual theme of the narrative. The didactic logic of look and learn leaps out at the viewer here whilst heightening the titillating aspect of the illicit counter she witnesses as the literal, and implied audience. In ancient Greece, the finger in mouth gesture was used in a sexually derogatory manner and called the katapygon referring to ‘a male who submits to anal penetration’.155I would argue that the presence of the female voyeur seems far more nuanced than a gesture of puzzlement or dismay and is more likely to be read as the woman’s anticipation of her forthcoming role as the administrator of
pleasure for her soon to be adult and marriageable suitor.