Small Bronze Sirens of Renaissance Venice: A Feminist Critique on the Fetishization of the Mermaid

Written by Courtney Squires

Edited by Rachel Barker

I. Introduction

In the late sixteenth century, Venice sought to claim Rome’s spot as Italy’s centre for literature, music, art, and culture. Surrounded by water, the city of Venice became a balance of dualities; of controlling both land and water and conflating both pagan and Christian religions.¹ Due to its pagan origins, the water-locked city of Venice was rife with myths of aquatic hybrids, and across Italy, decorative sea monsters were granted the term ‘alla veneziana.’² Depictions of sea hybrids could be found on painted pottery, carved gems, coins, wall paintings, floor mosaics, architectural friezes, and especially funerary sculptures.³

Throughout this paper, I will utilize the broad term “mermaid” to refer to the female sea hybrid that has a human upper body paired with the lower body of a fish, unless otherwise specified. The dual nature of mermaids mirrors that of the city, largely contributing to their allure within Venetian culture. The mermaid belongs to “land and sea, beast and human, passions and reason, flesh and spirit” and these dualities imply what she is not: the rational, human, academic man.⁴ The simultaneous fear and desire towards the hybrid reflects Griselda Pollock’s idea of the doctrine of gendered separate spheres.⁵ Though only named in the nineteenth century, the unspoken social constraint of gendered separate spheres endured throughout the Renaissance period, notably exemplified in the gendering of the academic sphere as male.⁶ This paper will start by providing a compendium of the current scholarship and analysis surrounding bronze sculptures of the Venetian Renaissance period, followed by a critical overview of the concept of hybridity and the resulting fetishization. Then, with a feminist lens, I will explore the problematic nature of the small, bronze mermaid sculptures in comparison with both the other traditionally prevalent bronze sculptures of aquatic hybrids, and the overall inextricability of mermaid mythology, focusing particularly on Severo da Ravenna’s Double candlestick with Siren (c. 1510-1530) (fig. 1). In this paper, I argue that the household bronze mermaid, in its placement within the domestic world and overall visual appearance, exemplifies the fetishization of the hybrid that stems from a fear of female sexuality and repression of erotic desire.

Figure 1. Severo da Ravenna, Double candlestick with Siren, c. 1510-1530, bronze, 28.3cm, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

II. Existing Scholarship of the Small Bronze

In the mid-fifteenth century, the major Italian cities of Rome, Florence, and Venice saw a revitalization of new sculptures emphasizing the privatization of ownership and location, and celebrating the individual rather than the collective.⁷ One of the major Venetian sculptors, Andrea Riccio, came from Padua, a city that came under Venetian rule in the early thirteenth century.⁸ Originally trained as a goldsmith, Riccio was known for intricate sculptures boasting many different motifs and allegories that were subsumed into the viewer’s conscious interpretation of the piece.⁹ An emphasis on expression is also characteristic of Riccio’s figures, with detailed affects that rival those in paintings.¹⁰ Riccio’s oeuvre consisted of bronze figurines, mostly secular and literary, that intertwined religious, pagan, and allegorical natures.¹¹ Alas, the small scale and separation of Riccio’s small bronzes from the standard family tree of sculpture led to his neglect from the canon of the great sculptors of the High Renaissance, like Michelangelo and Raphael.¹² Other sculptors like Jacopo Sansovino, Baccio Bandinelli, and even Guglielmo della Porta worked largely—if not exclusively—to produce large-scale marble sculptures to rival Michelangelo for commissions throughout Italy.¹³

Though there are a lot of extant sculptures and scholarship surrounding marble sculpture, there is a lack of academic research on small bronzes. Debra Pincus, in Small Bronzes in the Renaissance (2001), outlines how the classification of these objects was only switched from amateur to academic with the publication of Die italienischen Bronze-statuetten der Renaissance (1907-1912), a modern study by Wilhelm von Bode.¹⁴ Bode attributed the emergence of the Italian post-antique, small-scale bronze sculpture in Italy to the sculptor Donatello, and named Florence as the creative source. Another scholar, Douglas Lewis, draws attention to the Medici family, who largely promoted the initial wave of patronage and production of small-scale bronzes.¹⁵ As the popularity of small bronzes grew during the latter half of the fifteenth century, the art form transformed from “an occasional object of manufacture into an established artistic genre.”¹⁶

In the Renaissance period, small bronzes emerged to fulfill an artistic niche that “establish[ed] a fundamental link between antiquity and the world of contemporary art production.”¹⁷ This niche allowed for the production of small bronzes to serve as decorations and collectibles that could be displayed within the private sphere of the home, in other words, the birth of the “household bronze.”¹⁸ Within a domestic sphere, the production of small bronzes represented the desire of the private collector. Rather than a large-scale, publicly admired piece, “the small bronze was meant to be savoured at close quarters, turned in the hand, [and should have been] beautiful from all sides.”¹⁹ Alison Luchs’ chapter in Small Bronzes analyzes the form, placement, and reception of the statue, Fortuna (c. 1450/75).²⁰ Elaborating on the idea of the household bronze, Luchs questions how “the choice of a female nude for this practical purpose…as a utilitarian object infused with antique context and sensuously naturalistic style, forms a bridge between the worlds of functional medieval bronzes and new inventions,” and became a typically desired object for renaissance collections.²¹ After this introduction to the functional, household bronze sculpture as a collectible and valued art form, I now turn to an analysis of hybridity—particularly in relation to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Liber Monstrorum, and other sea monsters of the ancient and contemporary world.

Figure 2. Attributed to a Florentine or Sienese follower of Donatello (formally attributed to Vecchietta), Fortuna, c. 1450/1475, bronze. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Samuel H. Kress Collection.

III. Aquatic Hybridity and Mermaid Mythology

The publication of Liber Monstrorum introduced the concept of a monstrous hybrid to societal discourse, a catalogue of creatures published anonymously in the late seventh or early eighth century.²² Ovid’s Metamorphoses told stories of sirens who lured men to their deaths with their voices, of seductresses, and of female sea monsters (or she-monsters).²³ However, even before the Liber Monstrorum was written, sea monsters held great symbolic value within decorative imagery, so much so that their widespread prevalence was not dependent on the conviction of their existence. Stories of sea monsters or aquatic hybrids were told fictitiously, explained away as mistaken for marine animals like sea horses, seals, sharks or manatees.²⁴

Alas, real or not, these hybrids became powerful symbols throughout decorative culture. Simona Cohen, in Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art (2008) delves into how the Renaissance period saw an increased trend of grotesque ornamentation, in which “erotic hybrids abounded in uninhibited decorative fantasies.”²⁵ This switch from monstrous to erotic emphasizes the thin line between fear and desire. The sixth thesis from Jeffery Jerome Cohen’s Monster Culture argues the monster represents a kind of desire.²⁶ This desire manifests in tandem with fear, for the monster can seldom be contained within a simple binary dialectic.²⁷ The hybrid is thus an abjected fragment of both animal and human. So the question remains, why are such subversive creatures so prevalent throughout the boastful decoration of society? Cohen argues that the simultaneous repulsion and attraction lying at the core of the monster’s composition—be that visual or metaphorical—accounts greatly for its contained cultural popularity.²⁸ Prevalent in Venetian decor and art, the mermaid, siren or nereid exists in the liminal intersection between the human and inhuman, land and sea, terrifying and beautiful. The fluid body of the hybrid challenges the experiences of human mortality and corporeality in a way that manifests in both attraction and anxiety. This disjointed attitude towards hybridity has consequences for the way it presents itself and is represented in its contemporary society.

Simply defined, the mermaid has the upper body of a woman and the lower body of a fish.²⁹ The dilemma of identification results from the various forms in which the fish-tailed woman is seen. The primary text I will use for the remainder of this paper is Alison Luchs’ The Mermaids of Venice: Fantastic Sea Creatures in Venetian Renaissance Art (2010), a cross-sectional study of hybrid sea creatures, with a particular concentration on mermaids. The mermaid took on many forms: a pre-emptor of the Apocalypse, an embodiment of alluring vices, a protector against evil, or simply a symbol of the sea.³⁰ However, a few mermaids emerge frequently throughout literature and art. In ancient appearances, the double fish-tailed woman represented Skylla, a once-beautiful maiden who was turned into a six-headed monster by the sorceress Circe out of jealousy.³¹ By the fifth century BC, Skylla started to become eroticized in her depictions, described in Virgil’s Aeneid as “a fair-bosomed maiden [above, and] below, a sea dragon.”³² Another mermaid iteration, the siren, was known for her “beautiful form and the sweetness of songs [that] deceived sailors”, and “the scaly tails of fish which they always hide in the sea.”³³ Interestingly, as the figure of the mermaid becomes further eroticized, her animal half becomes more illusory, with her tail seeming to aestheticize her otherness, rather than define it. Her human half, in contrast, becomes hypersexualized, and the mermaid becomes fetishized.

This figure of an eroticized hybrid woman appears throughout mythology leading up to the Renaissance period, and supplemented by Jennifer Stone’s inquiry into psychanalytic bestiality, I will question how the mermaid’s dichotomous identity results in her fetishization.³⁴ Stone employs Freudian psychoanalysis to explain the ambivalent fantasy of bestiality manifested in the prevalence and popularity of mermaid mythology. The hybrid women do not materialize their lack of a phallus but allegorize this loss into their physical characteristics as an amalgamated figure, “exemplifying the doubly perverse positives of neuroses: the false semblances of sirens or of mermaids” that allow for the fulfillment of sexual fantasies too deviant to be projected on human figures of the imagination.³⁵ This explains the mermaid’s inhuman physical features and their alluring effect on humans. However, in being redacted to that which the mermaid lacks sexually (here referring to the absent vagina replaced by a tail) she is reduced to her sexual difference and is effectively castrated.³⁶ Contradicting what one would expect, this castration only supplements her sexual appeal. Instead of becoming undesirable due to her lacking sexual characteristics, “a substitute for the penis [is created for that which is missing] in females, [resulting in] a fetish.”³⁷ This substitute manifests in the form of a tail in mermaids, but yet it is “her tongue which mouths the double song of the false allure of the fetish, [enabling] her seductive charms and of the ecstatic fantasy of bestiality.”³⁸ The mythological, inhuman nature of this fantasy results in the prolific visual imagery of mermaids seen within the context of Venetian Renaissance art. Indeed, the very existence of the mermaid questions the poignant condition of semi-human beings, who are forever divided between their animalistic desires and divine spirit.³⁹ Her identity is split, both dependent on and restricted by her hybrid nature.

IV. The Problematic Nature of Renaissance-Era Small Bronze Mermaid Sculptures

Figure 3. North Italian, c. 1213, Siren, detail of mosaic pavement, Ravenna, San Giovanni Evangelista.

Depictions of mermaids proliferated in the Renaissance era in paintings, woodcuts, and even mosaic tiles (fig. 3), and in the sixteenth century, sea monsters emerged as bronze sculptures. In both Padua and Venice, a clientele for small bronze sculptures with secular subjects emerged, with the style, allegories, and functional adaptability appealing to a diverse patronage.⁴⁰ Andrea Riccio, the Paduan sculptor known for his small bronzes, created a variety of marine sculptures, from crabs to sea monsters to nereids, nymphs and mermaids (fig. 6). The geographic positioning of Venice as reliant on both the land and sea allowed the convergence of scientific interest with fantastical scholarship, generating a specific niche of bronze figures—namely aquatic monsters—for the domestic appeal of the Venetian public.⁴¹ These aquatic monsters took the form of small household bronzes, including statuettes, desk accessories, and candleholders. Alison Luchs, in “Chapter 5: Table” from The Mermaids of Venice, discusses the sculptor Severo Calzetta de Ravenna, who she indicates as the most prolific contributor to the production of sculpted sea hybrids, alongside Pietro, Tullio and Antonio Lombardo.⁴² De Ravenna’s expressive sea monsters were utilized as household items or simply objects for enjoyment, and this series of creative experimentation culminated in the design of a female sea monster.⁴³

Figure 4. Severo da Ravenna, Sea-Monster, ca. 1510, bronze, 4 ½ x 9 ¾ x 6 ¾ in (11.4 x 24.8 x 17.1 cm). The Frick Collection, New York.

Figure 5. Possibly attributed to Severo da Ravenna, Inkwell in the form of a crab, 16th century, bronze, 7 x 18 x 13cm (2¾ by 7⅛ by 5¼ in). Private collection.

Figures 6 & 7. Design attributed to Andrea Riccio, Triton and Nereid, after 1532–before ca. 1550, bronze, 8 5/8 × 4 3/8 × 6 1/8 in. (21.9 × 11.1 × 15.6 cm), The Metropolitan Museum, New York.

Triton and Nereid (after 1532-before c. 1550) (fig. 6 & 7) showcase this progression of hybridity, though in this case , the physical hybrid is the male figure rather than the female.⁴⁴ This sculpture, attributed to Riccio, features a nude sea nymph riding side-saddle on the back of a male Triton. Triton, a creature from similar Greco-Roman mythology, is a hybrid: the torso of a man with horse-like front legs, and the lower body of a snake—or a sea-centaur.⁴⁵ The scholarly interpretation of their positioning argues that the Triton’s “dramatic gestures and turn of the head—presumably toward the viewer—suggests the statuette was designed to be seen principally from the male side, affording a modest view of the Nereid’s graceful back” and indeed when turned to have the female figure face frontward, her splayed legs leave her vulnerable to the hypersexualized voyeuristic gaze that is so often disguised as classically idealized sensuality.⁴⁶ Her breasts are on full display, pushed forward by her arms, and her open legs grant the viewer full access to her pubic area. Riccio’s nereid makes explicit the sexualization that the mermaid sculptures only seek to imply (fig. 7). By contrasting this splay-legged mythological female with the household bronze mermaid, I will explore the fetishization of the mermaid to fulfill an erotic fantasy based on neutralizing and controlling female sexuality.

The household bronze mermaid merged many fantasies of antiquarianism, scientific discovery, and erotic sensuality into a functional object that could be both placed and utilized around the home. Her allure is mostly attributed to her mythological nature: the combination of a “sensuous female upper body with a marvellously monstrous and sexually suggestive lower one.”⁴⁷ Severo da Ravenna’s Double candlestick with Siren (c. 1510-30) (fig. 1) depicts Ravenna's Oxford/Dusseldorf version of the bronze mermaid. With nearly two dozen mermaid candle holders attributed to de Ravenna, two types are established chronologically by Jeremy Warren, the Oxford/Dusseldorf type made at the beginning of the sixteenth century and the Washington/Price type from the 1520s.⁴⁸ The Oxford/Dusseldorf type (fig. 1) presents a more distressing view of femininity. Her hair is pulled back away from her face and shoulders, which sag seemingly from the weight of the candlesticks. This affect carries throughout the rest of her body, with her posture and even physical features mimicking the drooping exhaustion that appears to weigh on her. Her torso is disproportionately elongated and her small breasts lie low on her chest. Most jarringly, though, is her facial expression. Her mouth opens, perhaps to allude to her song, but appears more like a wail, with harsh lines running across her forehead in discomfort. Notably, her tongue is absent. Loosely grasping the two dolphins who bite onto her waist to create her siren tails, her arms barely uphold the double candlestick holders. Instead, if her tails are interpreted to represent her legs, this grip takes on a new meaning: that which pulls apart her legs for the illuminating gaze of her owner. In contrast, the Washington/Price type (fig. 8) is much less formally jarring. This siren is much more proportional, with a serene and pensive expression. The swell of her breasts is more natural and her tails, though still dolphins, curl gently around her arms to help support the light she holds up. Luchs compares the sirens of this second type to early sixteenth-century Venetian paintings by Titian and Veccio, in the sensuous bodily treatment they receive—especially in comparison to their earlier predecessors.⁴⁹

Figure 8. Severo da Ravenna, Candelabra in the Shape of a Siren, c. 1515-1525, bronze, 27.5 × 17 × 16.5 cm (10 7/8 × 6 11/16 × 6 1/2 in.), The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.

This comparison of the two types makes evident the fetishization of the mermaid. Moreover, this fetishization serves to simultaneously imprison and display an embodiment of female sexuality and vice in the domestic masculine sphere. As addressed earlier, as the mermaid becomes more fetishized, she becomes less reliant on her hybridity and rather serves to symbolize the vices of female sexuality that cannot be consumed in their human form. Imprisoning the mermaid in bronze “‘tam[ed]’ the dangerous seductress and the elemental, sensual forces she could represent, [further neutralizing her] by placing her in the service of virtuous study and academic pursuits” of the male sphere.⁵⁰ Therefore, the hybridity of the mermaid serves a dual purpose: as an object to reflect the nuanced taste of the collector and as a possession to physically represent her owner’s erotic desire. Additionally, as a candelabra, the placement of the household bronze mermaid in a public setting allowed her to occupy a traditionally masculine space, giving her accessibility to the interior world of academia through the literal—and metaphorical—light she sheds.⁵¹ The mermaid subverts some of the gendered constraints placed upon her but is simultaneously restricted from the conflicted sphere of corporeal reality. Indeed, the male confrontation with female sexuality reaches its climax in the functionality of the household bronze. Simply put, under the guise of academia or aesthetics, the fetishized mermaid could be literally possessed by her owner. Thus, the problematic nature of the household bronze mermaid is revealed: for the private collector, the mermaid could be visually savoured and physically consumed, becoming utterly objectified.

V. Concluding Remarks

The figure of the mermaid represented more than simply transgressive desire, but because hybrid creatures were inarguably categorized as feminine, bestial, inhuman, and inferior, mermaids became inextricably ingrained in the perception and presentation of gender.⁵² In fact, at the core of the issue of threatening female sexuality lies a threatened man, and thus, the “female hybrid was [reduced; rplc. transformed] to a pseudo-classical image of erotic fantasy, her sinful connotations sublimated under the veil of poetic licence, and her femininity neutralized.⁵³ It is with this concept of transformation that the small bronze mermaid sculpture is problematized: just as Scylla was once a beautiful woman, the image of a domestic female figure transforms into a mythological one (here, a mermaid) that could be physically reduced by its presumably male owner, and thus controlled. As Luchs articulates, no academically driven rationale nor justification “would have lessened the attraction of [possessing/owning] a beautiful, splay-legged young woman in bronze who could be grasped around the waist.”⁵⁴

Endnotes

1. Patricia Fortini Brown, “Venezianità: The Otherness of the Venetians,” in Art and Life in Renaissance Venice (Upper Saddle River, N.J: Prentice  Hall, 2005), 7.  

2. Alison Luchs, “The Mermaids of Venice: Fantastic Sea Creatures in Venetian Renaissance Art,” in The Mermaids of Venice: Fantastic Sea  Creatures in Venetian Renaissance Art (London, England: Harvey Miller, 2010), 3.

3. Luchs, “Introduction,” 4.

4. Alison Luchs, “Concluding Remarks,” in The Mermaids of Venice: Fantastic Sea Creatures in Venetian Renaissance Art (London, England: Harvey  Miller, 2010), 184.

5. Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” in Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art (London:  Routledge, 2003), 50-90.

6. Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” 69.

7. Creighton Gilbert, “Trends in Florentine Sculpture at Mid-Century,” in History of Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture throughout  Europe (Englewood Cliffs, N.J,: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 94.

8. Patricia Fortini Brown, “Venezianità: The Otherness of the Venetians,” in Art and Life in Renaissance Venice (Upper Saddle River, N.J: Prentice  Hall, 2005), 12.

9. Nicholas Penny, “Andrea Riccio. New York,” The Burlington Magazine 151, no. 1270 (2009): 64-65.

10. Penny, “Andrea Riccio,” 64.

11. Creighton Gilbert, “Giulio Campagnola; Riccio,” in History of Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture throughout Europe (Englewood  Cliffs, N.J,: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 186.

12. Gilbert, “Giulio Campagnola; Riccio,” 186.

13. Creighton Gilbert, “Sculptors in Michelangelo's Orbit,” in History of Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture throughout  Europe (Englewood Cliffs, N.J,: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 206.

14. Debra Pincus, “Small Bronzes in the Renaissance,” in Small Bronzes in the Renaissance (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2001), 9.

15. Lewis, from Pincus, “Small Bronzes,” 9.

16.  Pincus, “Introduction,” 10.

17. Pincus, “Introduction,” 9.

18. Pincus, “Introduction,” 9.

19. Pincus, “Introduction,” 12.

20. Debra Pincus and Alison Luchs, “The Winged Woman Holding a Torch: A Donatellesque Bronze from Quattrocento Tuscany,” in Small Bronzes  in the Renaissance (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2001), 15-32, 15-27.; see also Fig. 2.

21. Luchs, “The Winged Woman Holding a Torch,” 25-27.

22. Liber Monstrorum, appx. 700-800 c, ‘I.6 and I.14’ from Book I, 263, 267.

23. Ovid, Metamorphoses (Cambridge (Mass): Harvard University Press, 1984).

24. Luchs, “Introduction,” 7.

25. Simona Cohen, “Chapter Nine: Images of Eroticism and Fertility,” in Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 261-262.

26. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Thesis VI: Fear of the Monster Is Really a Kind of Desire,” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minnesota: University  of Minnesota Press, 1997), 16-20.

27. Cohen, “Thesis VI,” 17.

28. Cohen, “Thesis VI,” 17.

29. Luchs, “Introduction,” 13.

30. Luchs, “Introduction,” 35.

31. Luchs, “Introduction,” 14.

32. Virgil, Aenid, III, 426-28, (ed. 2000), vol. 1, pp. 400-01: ‘prima hominis facies et pulchro pectore virgo pube tenus, postrema immani corpore  pistrix, delphinium caudas utero commissa luporum.’

33. Luchs, “Introduction,” 23; Jacqueline Leclercq-Marx, “De Pavie à Zagósc. La Sirène Comme Motif De Predilection Dans Sculpteurs ‘Lombards’  Au XIIe Siècle,” Arte Lombarda 140, no. 1 (2004): 24-32.

34. Jennifer Stone, “A Psychoanalytic Bestiary: The Wolff Woman, The Leopard, and The Siren,” American Imago 49, no. 1 (1992): 119.

35. Stone, “A Psychoanalytic Bestiary,” 119.

36. Stone, “A Psychoanalytic Bestiary,” 140.

37. Stone, “A Psychoanalytic Bestiary,” 145; Sigmund Freud, “‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence,’” 1938, 277.

38. Stone, “A Psychoanalytic Bestiary,” 147.

39. Luchs, “Introduction,” 31.

40. Alison Luchs, “Chapter 5: Table: Bronze Sea Monsters for Private Homes,” in The Mermaids of Venice: Fantastic Sea Creatures in Venetian  Renaissance Art (London, England: Harvey Miller, 2010), 155.

41. Luchs, “Chapter 5,” 156.

42. Luchs, “Chapter 5,” 156.

43. Luchs, “Chapter 5,” 161-162.

44. Denise Allen et al., “Padua, Ravenna, and Northern Italy, 16th Century,” in Italian Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes in the Metropolitan  Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2022), 97.

45. William J. Travis, “Of Sirens and Onocentaurs: A Romanesque Apocalypse at Montceaux-L'Etoile,” Artibus Et Historiae 23, no. 45 (2002): 29-62.

46. Allen et al., “Padua, Ravenna, and Northern Italy, 16th Century,” 98-99.

47. Luchs, “Chapter 5,” 165.

48. Jeremy Warren, “Severo Calzetta Da Ravenna,” Donatello e Il Suo Tempo, 2001, 130-167.

49. Luchs, “Chapter 5,” 163-164.

50. Luchs, “Chapter 5,” 166.

51. Luchs, “Chapter 5,” 166, 181; Leclercq-Marx, “de Pavie à Zagósc”, 24-32.

52. S. Cohen, “Chapter Nine,” 250.

53. S. Cohen, “Chapter Nine,” 262.

54. Luchs, “Chapter 5,” 167.

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