Framing sensibility: the female couple in art and narrative.(Gabrielle d'Estrees and the Duchesse de Villars)

In 1594, the now-famous painting of the bare-breasted female couple, Gabrielle d'Estrees and the Duchesse de Villars (see Figure 1), appeared, painted by an unknown artist from the Second School of Fontainebleau. The two women are framed by a rich velvet curtain, as in a stage set, but they are also sharing a bath. As Edward Lucie-Smith describes it, "[W]ith a bold gesture, one reaches out to squeeze the nipple of the other." (1) The Renaissance painting of d'Estrees and Villars remains difficult to decipher; it is a combination of sapphic eroticism--highlighted by the glimpse of another erotic painting in the background, a pair of open female legs, which completes the missing anatomy of the foreground--and domestic genre painting, with the chaperone figure of the seamstress also in the background, protecting the privacy of the two women. The background fire in the hearth further highlights the tantalizing combination of domesticity and eroticism, while the frank gazes of the female nudes and the mannered quality of their poses produces a deliberate challenge to the viewer. Gabrielle d'Estrees was in fact the mistress of the French king, Henri IV. Some art historians interpret the tweaking of the nipple as a symbol of fertility, alluding to d'Estrees's giving birth to Cesar, Duke of Vendome, the king's illegitimate son. Whatever the symbolism, this painting visually foregrounds the two women as a couple, highlighted by the traditional coding of light and dark hair.

The painting acquires a further layer when we learn that these two women were sisters, as is confirmed by its alternative title, Gabrielle d'Estrees and One of Her Sisters. This essay will examine how portraits of sisters and other female pairings are culturally coded to produce certain types of readings and in particular what shifts have occurred between the Renaissance and the eighteenth century. Elizabeth Susan Wahl has argued that during the Renaissance there was a working through of contested models of sexuality that produced varied expressions of female intimacy. The d'Estrees and Villars painting, for example, echoes the homoerotic playfulness also found in writers such as Shakespeare who, according to Wahl, "could depict homoerotic relations between young women without disrupting patriarchal authority since such desire signaled a necessary stage in a woman's psychosexual development, functioning almost as a rite of puberty that would 'naturally' give way to heterosexual 'maturity' in marriage." (2) As we can see in Twelfth Night (pub. 1623) and As You Like It (pub. 1623), the experiments in cross-dressing, despite their female homoerotic consequences, always result in the legitimation of heterosexual marriage, which helps to explain how a portrait such as that of d'Estrees and Villars could occupy a relatively unproblematic cultural position. By the 1700s, the mixing of domesticity and eroticism present in Gabrielle d'Estrees and the Duchesse de Villars was no longer permissible, yet the appeal of the female couple continued to hold a significant place in European art. Representations of female couples--mostly of sisters, but also of cousins, mistresses, and servants--became a popular form of portraiture and a common theme in genre painting. At the same time, the female couple became ideologically coded to embody what Wahl has described as a "relationship practically devoid of sexual expression and closely linked to the emerging ideology of domesticity." (3) Portraits of sisters, which seem to have been particularly popular in England, tended to embody all that was innocent and pure in the representation of femininity. To an important degree, the new language around sexuality, which included a growing anatomical as well as social nomenclature, worked to censor and circumscribe the kind of ambivalent visual message present in the d'Estrees and Villars painting. This claim is supported by Thomas Laqueur's notion that early modernity witnessed a shift from a one-sex model--which saw the female as a variation of the male body, a difference in degree--to a two-sex model--a more complete and absolute difference in kind between the sexes--which led to more distinct gendered roles and to a greater policing of sexuality. (4) Although there has been some debate, by Valerie Traub and Wahl, among others, as to when and how this shift occurred, by the latter half of the eighteenth century, the two-sex model was firmly in place. (5)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Furthermore, the reading of active sexuality as entirely male allowed an unselfconscious representation of female couples not just as representative of sensibility but of a specifically female virtue, as in the paintings of the famous British portraitists, Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88) and Joshua Reynolds (1723-92). (6) For example, in ...