1

Mythological and Historical Rape in Early Modern Art and Literature

(with an index of classical rapes)

Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
Connecticut College
New London, CT 06320

robert.baldwin@conncoll.edu

(This essay was written in 2003 and revised slightly in 2006 and 2008)

INDEX OF RAPES AND ATTEMPTED RAPES IN CLASSICAL MYTH AND HISTORY

DIVINE RAPISTS, WOMEN, OFFSPRING

Aesacus and Hesperia [Ovid, Metamorphoses, XI]
Alpheus and Arethusa [Ovid, Metamorphoses, V] – river god tries to rape a nymph after she bathes in his
waters
Apollo tries to rape Daphne
Apollo and Cyrene (daughter of a king himself descended from the gods by rape) [Pindar, Pythian Odes 9]
Apollo and the nymph Clymene (Phaeton)
Apollo and the nymph Dryope (Amphissus)
Apollo and Hyacinth
Apollo and Cyparissus
Bacchus rapes the nymph, Nicaia (Nonnos, Dionsiaca, XVI)
Bacchus rapes the nymph, Aura (Nonnos, Dionsiaca, XLVIII.563-665)
Bacchus rapes Erigone
Boreas rapes Oreithyia: Calais and Zetes (heroes who joined the Argonauts) [Ovid, Met. VI]
Centaurs and Lapiths [Ovid, Metamorphoses, XII.210-535]
Faunus tries to rape Omphale [Ovid, Fasti]
Janus and ???
Jupiter rapes Aegina: Aeacus
Jupiter rapes Alcmene: Hercules
Jupiter rapes Leda: Helen and Castor (or his half brother, Pollux). Helen was married to King Menelaus and
abducted by the Trojan prince Paris, setting off the Trojan War. Castor and Pollux were heroes who
raped Phoebe and Hilaira, the daughters of King Leucippus.
Jupiter rapes Europa (daughter of King Agenor): Minos, Sarpedon, Rhadamanthys [Ovid, Achilles Tatius,
Lucian]
Jupiter rapes Danae: Perseus (hero, slays Medusa)
Jupiter rapes Io: Amphion
Jupiter rapes Semele: Bacchus [Nonnos, Dionysiaca, VII.166-367; Ovid, Met. IV]
Jupiter rapes Callisto: Arcas [Ovid, Metamorphoses, II]
Jupiter and Antiope
Jupiter and Proserpina [Nonnos, Dionysiaca, V.600-621]
Mars rapes Silvia: Romulus and Remus [Ovid, Fasti, III.1-40]
Mercury Rapes Herse
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Mercury and Penelope (Pan) (the mother sometimes said to be the unnamed daughter of Dryops)
Neptune rapes Aethra, daughter of King Pittheus: Theseus (also said to be fathered by Aegeus, King of Athens)
Neptune rapes Amphitrite
Neptune rapes Amymone
Neptune rapes Demeter: Despoina. (Demeter tried to escape by turning herself into a mare but Poseidon turned
himself into a horse and mounted her.)
Neptune rapes Medusa: Pegasus, the winged horse, tamed by Bellepheron (another rape child of Poseidon) and
Chrysaor, a monster who fathered another monster, Geryon, slain by Hercules [Ovid, Met. IV]
Neptune rapes Eurynome, wife of Glaucus, king of Corinth: Bellepheron, tamer of Pegasus, born of Poseidon's
rape of Medusa
Neptune rapes the earth goddess, Ge: Antaeus, the Libyan giant killed by Hercules
Neptune rapes the Nereid, Thoosa: Polyphemus (the cyclops who courted Galatea and was later blinded by
Odysseus)
Neptune rapes Europa (daughter of Tityus): Euphemus (fleet-footed Argonaut and hero, founded Greek colony
in North Africa (Cyrene)
Neptune rapes Lysianassa, daughter of Epaphus: Busiris, a brutal Egyptian king later killed by Hercules
[Apollodorus 2.5.11; Hyginus, Fabulae, 31, 51]
Neptune rapes Calyce, daughter of Hecato: Cycnus, king of Colonae. Poseidon made Cycnus invulnerable to
weapons. He fought undefeated with the Trojans until Achilles strangled him with his helmet thongs.
Neptune rapes Euryale: Orion, the hunter giant (according to some sources)
Neptune Rapes Doris
Neptune’s less famous rapes include nine other women
Neptune rapes the young Pelops, later king of Pisa
Nessus tries to rape Deijanaira
Pan tries to rape the nymph, Syrinx, who is turned into a stream, and escapes
Pluto rapes Persephone [Ovid, Met.; Claudian]
Priapus tries to rape the sleeping nymph Lotis, [Ovid, Fasti, I.390-440]
Saturn and Philyra
Satyrs and nymphs [Sanazzaro, Arcadia, ch. 3-4; Ronsard, ]
Tityus and Latona, mother of Apollo. This giant, son of Elare raped by Zeus, was killed by Apollo and Artemis
after he tried to rape Latona. Punished in Hades where his heart or liver was devoured by snakes or
vultures every lunar cycle. [Homer, Odyssey, 7.321-324; 11.576-581; Pindar, Pythian Odes, 4.46;
Apollodorus 1.4.1; Ovid, Met, 4.457-8; Hyginus, Fables, 55; Pausanias 10.4.5-6]
Vulcan rapes Ceres
Vulcan (Hephaestus) tries to rape Minerva (Athena). His semen spilled on the acropolis and produced
Erichtonius, progenitor of the Athenian kings. [Ovid, Met. 2:553-563]
Zephyr rapes Chloris [Ovid, Fasti]

GODDESSES WHO ABDUCT MALES

Eos and Kephalos
Eos and Tithonos

HERO RAPISTS, WOMEN, OFFSPRING

Achilles and Deidamia [Statius, Achilleid]
Ajax and Cassandra (virgin daughter of King Priam) [texts in Reeder, Pandora, p. 89, notes 71-72]
Castor and Pollux rape Phoebe and Hilaira [Ovid, Fasti]
Peleus and Thetis: Achilles (a nuptial rape; Achilles then rapes Deidamia and cites his own origin.) [Ovid, Met.
XI.235-287]
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Paris and Helen [Ovid, Heroides; Ovid, Met. XV; Dio]

Romulus / Romans Rape the Sabine Maidens [Livy, History of Rome; Plutarch, Life of Romulus; Ovid, Art of
Love, I.89-134]
Theseus and Antiope
Theseus and Helen[Plutarch, Theseus]
Theseus and Persephone, Queen of Hades (a failed rape attempt)
Homosexual Rapes (already listed above)
Apollo and Hyacinth
Apollo and Cyparissus
Hercules and Hylas (and a half dozen other youths)
Jupiter and Ganymede
Neptune rapes the young Pelops, later king of Pisa

Bridal Rapes (already listed above)

Pluto and Persephone
Zephyr and Chloris
Boreas and Oreithyia
Peleus and Thetis
Paris and Helen
Castor & Pollux and Hilaire & Phoebe
Romans and Sabine Maidens

Introduction

“Heroic rape” tied to classical mythology and history was a major theme in Western court culture, especially
during classical antiquity and the early modern period. Given the hostility of medieval Christian culture to
classical sexual narratives, “heroic rape” largely disappeared in medieval court culture, only to reemerge with
Renaissance humanism and the revival of antiquity. For three centuries (1475-1775) when court values ruled
within the larger arena of European culture, “heroic rape” was a staple of European literature and art. Even the
highest church officials commissioned grand images of mythological rape for secular spaces. Examples include
Pinturricchio's Pluto Raping Persephone commissioned by Pope Pius II as part of a larger set of Christian
allegories for a library in the Siena Duomo, Cardinal Bentivoglio's cycle of rape frescoes for his villa in Rome, 1
and Cardinal Scipione Borghese's two, life-size, rape sculptures commissioned from Bernini for Villa Borghese.
2
After 1775, “heroic rape” gradually disappeared as courtly elites lost their cultural hegemony and court culture
moved away from the public spectacle of seventeenth-century absolutist mythology (Bernini) to the private
realm of eighteenth-century sensibility (Watteau, Boucher, Rousseau).

The following essay attempts to map out a broad spectrum of meaning for “heroic rape” in early modern
European culture. I have used classical texts alongside early modern sources because the former were

1
Carolyn Wood, "Ruling Passions: The 'Rapes' of Giovanni da San Giovanni," Archaeologia Transatlantica, 1998, 67-78.
Despite building a strong case for rape as absolutist power, this article suddenly backs away from this conclusion. It also
neglects important additional support for rape as absolutist power by ignoring two additional rapes painted by Giovanni as
marginal scenes in the illusionistic borders of his fresco, Perseus and Medusa, in the room adjoining the room with the rape
cycle.
2
When a new pope was elected, Borghese curried favor with his nephew, another cardinal, by giving him the first of these sculptures
- Pluto Raping Proserpina. To replace the lost rape scene, Borghese promptly Bernini to carve another mythological rape, or rather
attempted rape, the Apollo and Daphne.
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rediscovered, edited, and translated by early modern humanists and printed for a book-buying early modern
public.

Classical rape narratives appealed to early modern (and classical) courtly elites for at least nine reasons which I
have loosely grouped under five larger categories, each marked below with an asterisk for easy digital location.
(Find *)

I. Cosmic Empire, Harmony and Rebirth, Good Government, Martial Victory and Valor

II. Princely Genealogy and World History

III. Salvation-Apotheosis, Divine Love and Marriage

IV. Male Fantasy

V. Burgher Tyranny and Bestial Passion

The first four categories were involved in most early modern depictions in so far as mythological rape generally
signaled the divine power, ancestry, passion, and fantasy of princely rulers in early modern Europe. In a
marriage poem written for the emperor Honorius, the fourth century Roman court poet, Claudian, saw the rapes
of Zeus as images of divine love, imperial marriage, and Roman imperial conquest. (See below the section on
rape as marriage.)

In general, mythological rape was a patriarchal metaphor for princely power over all lesser beings. In so far as
these mythic rapes were committed by gods "in love," mythological rape allowed princely elites to show
political power as a benevolent, even sacred force bringing concord and fertility to the universe. The fact that
medieval Christianity had interpreted the rapes of Europa, Ganymede, and Proserpina as allegories of divine
love ravishing the human soul only made it easier for Renaissance elites to use mythological rapes as emblems
of virtuous, god-like power and rule.

If mythological rape was a common image of patriarchal power in early modern court culture, female court
patrons such as Isabella d’Este provided a minority view rejecting the politics of rape. In mythological paintings
commissioned from Mantegna, Isabella saw Daphne placed alongside the triumphant Minerva as a pair of
chaste women who had triumphed, respectively, over the rape attempts of Apollo and Vulcan respectively. To
underscore the defeat of rapacious gods, Mantegna placed Apollo and Vulcan in the lower margins of the
pendant Parnassus where they submitted compositionally to a triumphant Venus ruling with a benevolent
cosmic sexuality tied to love, marriage, restraint, the humanist liberal arts, and a Golden Age civilization. 3
Educated viewers would have also seen Venus’s triumph over Mars in the Parnassus as another victory of
female reason and love over masculine violence, savagery, and rape. (Mars fathered Romulus and Remus by
raping the temple virgin, Silvia.)

3
See Plato’s Symposium, Ovid’s Fasti and Art of Love, and the writings of Renaissance humanists such as Ficino’s On Love. Apollo
and Vulcan are also present, like Mercury, to help intellectualize Venus in accordance with Plato’s notion of two Venuses, one
governing earthly desires, the other ruling over sacred love. Mantegna’s Venus, endowed with the face and the beauty of Isabella
d’Este, represents a more benevolent “feminine” power of the mind seen in Isabella’s humanist cultural achievements and patronage
including the paintings themselves which decorated her humanist studiolo designed between 1495-1505.
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Although feminists have long argued that culturally accepted images of violence against women sanction acts of
real violence, I believe the discussion of rape in art and literature must distinguish sharply between real acts of
rape and cultural representations. The rape of one human being by another has traditionally been outlawed as a
crime and represented as a monstrous act (especially when the victim was of high birth). The images discussed
below are doubly removed from real rape by their mythological status. Belonging to an imaginary classical
world all the more fantastic in Renaissance Christian Europe, images of mythological rapes should not be seen
as contributing factors to sexual violence. Looking at classical sculptures and paintings did not induce Christian
men to commit acts of rape anymore than non-sexual images of violence inspired savage acts. One could even
argue that the world of fantasy in visual and literary representation allowed a safe outlet for human brutality,
channeling and dissipating potential acts of real violence. In any case, there was an official chasm between real
acts of rape – deemed criminal in Renaissance Europe – and classical mythological rape which was celebrated
on many levels in classical and early modern court culture. The following essay attempts to map out basic
traditions for mythological and historical rape in classical and early modern art and literature.

I. RAPE AS COSMIC EMPIRE, HARMONY, AND REBIRTH, GOOD GOVERNMENT, AND

MARTIAL VALOR *

1. Cosmic Empire, Harmony, and Rebirth

The gods and goddesses competed for influence on earth. One way to establish early dominion was to leave
semi-divine offspring in place as kings or, less often, queens. Zeus, Poseidon, and Mars all accomplished this
through rape. Ovid begins his account of Pluto Raping Proserpina by describing how the universal rule of
Venus surpassed the dominions of the three most powerful gods – Zeus, Neptune, and Pluto, who presided,
respectively, over the heavens, the earth, and the underworld. 4 As sons of Saturn, these three gods displayed
their cosmic dominion in multiple acts of rape. When later rulers like Cardinal Bentivoglio commissioned a
rape cycle focusing on this fraternal trio (discussed below), he used rape to signify a universal political and
spiritual dominion.

Among the more famous heroes and early rulers, Hercules came from Zeus' rape of Alcmene, Helen and Castor
(or Pollux) from Zeus' rape of Leda, Perseus from Zeus' rape of Danae; Amphion from Zeus' rape of Io;
Bacchus himself from Zeus' rape of Semele; Romulus and Remus from Mars' rape of Silvia; Theseus from
Poseidon's rape of Aethra, Erectheus, the first king of Athens, from Hephaestus' attempted rape of Athena.
(Erectheus sprang up from the place on the Acropolis where Hephaestus's semen landed.) Finally, Alexander
the Great came from Olympia, raped by Zeus in the guise of a serpent, as described by Plutarch and Giulio
Romano.

Goddesses like Venus used seduction to exert a similar influence over the earth. Venus seduced the Trojan
prince, Anchises, and gave birth to Aeneas who led the defeated Trojans to greater glory in Italy. Since the
descendants of Aeneas included Romulus and Remus, Venus was the mother of Rome. Mars was the father.

In some ancient texts, divine rape was closely with divine conquest, most notably in Nonnos’ epic poem on
Dionysius where glowing accounts of the god’s rapes of mortal women are interspersed with equally passionate
celebrations of his military victories over the Indians and his triumphal processions. No wonder the Triumph of
Bacchus was a favorite theme of imperial conquest in ancient Roman art and literature and in early modern art
as well. The most famous example was Annibale Carracci’s Farnese Ceiling where Bacchus and Ariadne ride
4
This tripartite dominion was occasionally represented, as in Giulio Romano’s print of 1546-50, reproduced in an Italian catalogue of
Romano’s prints.
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in triumphal procession amid additional scenes of divine love and rape, albeit comically handled, with the gods
and heroes appearing foolish in many scenes and in some, reduced to effeminate, passive lovers (Venus and
Anchises, Omphale and Hercules). While the frescoes were tied to a Farnese wedding, they also figured Farnese
Roman imperial pretensions and victories just as Nonnos celebrated the rapes and global conquest of Bacchus.

Many of the most frequently represented mythological rapes involved gods ruling over their dominions, "love"
stories, or marriage stories tied to an orderly cosmos such as Pluto and Proserpina or Zephyr and Chloris. This
explains why mythological rape was often allegorized in late antiquity and in early modern Europe as cosmic
harmony and good government. With its ties to pastoral love, rape as cosmic harmony was especially popular in
early modern princely wedding festivities as a cosmic image of nuptial concord, fertility, prosperity, and peace.
5
As such, it was easily absorbed into the humanist discourse of Golden Age.

The two most important imperial rapes were the Rape of Europa by Jupiter and the Rape of the Sabines
(discussed below under rape as divine love and marriage). In the Augustan poets, the rape of Europa already
signified the divinely-ordained rule of Europe and, by implication, of Rome and the emperor Augustus. Horace
had Venus rebuke a tearful Europa in just these terms.

Cease thy sobs! Learn to bear becomingly thy great destiny! A region of the earth shall take thy name."
(Odes, 3.27) 6

Because her triumphant rape involved crossing the sea, Europa took on special appeal in the sixteenth-century
as an image of European empires projected beyond the great oceans. After 1500, European kings and queens
made the imperial Europa into a commonplace of absolutist geography. Around 1550, Titian painted a Rape of
Europa and a Rape of Danae for Philip II, the most powerful, international ruler of the sixteenth-century. While
the Europa was tied to Philip’s wedding, both paintings had larger political significance. To underscore
imperial values in the Europa, Titian placed the abducted maiden in a vast, cosmic landscape aflame with
divine love, her body carefully framing a large, ocean-going ship set against an endless space. (Already the
Master I.B. had inserted a similar ship in his engraved Rape of Europa.) Europa’s triumphant voyage to Crete
became the divine example for modern Spanish conquests beyond the sea. Here was the humanist imperial
dream of solar empires without end, carried on great ships beyond the rising and setting sun. 7 In 1570,
Veronese painted another imperial Rape of Europa for Jacopo Contarini, legate to the Venetian Republic. At a
time when Sannazaro’s Loggetta at the base of the Campanile made Zeus with Crete and Venus with Cyprus
into coded images of Venetian claims to islands threatened by the Turks, Veronese’s painting of Europa carried
off across the seas to Crete paid implicit tribute to the Venetian sea empire. Its later installation in the Doges
Palace only underscored its imperial message, especially in a room across from a large late sixteenth-century
stucco sculpture of Boreas Raping Orithyia over the fireplace.

French and English monarchs developed similar images of Europa at roughly the same time. To celebrate a
renewal of the universal European empire of Charlemagne promised at the Treaty of Saint-Germain (1570) and
the marriage of Charles IX of France to Elizabeth of Austria (1570), the French court organized separate
triumphal entries into Paris for the king and queen. Charles and his brother were allegorized on one triumphal
arch as Castor and Pollux protecting the French ship of state and the imperial Golden Age promised by the
treaty and the marriage. In the entry held for the pregnant queen a few weeks later, the Dioscuri were replaced
by Europa and the bull. As explained in the handbook published for the occasion, the rape of Europa signified
the successful ravishment of the Queen and the future ravishment of Asia and the rest of the world by the
Dauphin who would reestablish a single, universal monarchy. 8 Europa also represented British empire in the
frontispiece to John Dee’s General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (London,
1577). Here Elizabeth rides the British ship of state, inscribed “Europa” in Greek, escorted by a triumphant
Europa on the bull and guided by divine providence, a radiant sun, and the archangel Michael. 9 In the mid-
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seventeenth century, Claude Lorrain continued the imperial interpretation of Europa in a painting and an etching
setting her rape against a harbor filed with great ocean-going ships.

Mythological rape also signified divine fertility and cosmic rebirth and could appear in depictions of Spring in
cycles of the Four Seasons. In 1562, Cardinal Allesandro Farnese, nephew of Paul III, had Taddeo Zuccaro
decorate four rooms in the sumptuous Villa Farnese in Caprarola with allegories of the seasons. The Sala del
Primavera featured two frescoes of divine rapes: Pluto and Proserpina and Zephyr and Chloris with two
additional scenes of Apollo and Daphne in the entrance salon. 10 The rape of Proserpina was depicted twice at
Villa d’Este in Tivoli (1565-73), once in a fountain sculpture in the garden and again in a pastoral landscape
fresco inside the villa.

2. Good Government

Because Western culture imagined cosmic, political, and social order as hierarchical until the eighteenth-
century Enlightenment, mythological and heroic rape was a "natural" image of good government. To legitimize
his new, absolutist regime, Cosimo de’ Medici and his son, Francesco commissioned a series of mythological
and historical rapes from leading painters and sculptors including the Rape of Europa and the Rape of the
Sabines (discussed below). Among many mythological motifs, five rapes allegorized good government, cosmic
fertility, and the divine origins of courtly elites in Falconetto’s zodiacal fresco cycle painted around 1525-30 in
the Palazzo d’Arco in Mantua. 11

Some early modern rulers even commissioned cycles of rape myths to celebrate their god-like power. Four
examples come to mind. In the early 1520s, Federigo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, decorated his bedroom in the
Palazzo del Te with four stucco scenes of mythological rapes (Europa, Proserpina, Amphitrite, Amymone)with
a painting of the Centaurs Raping the Lapith Women added below for good measure. To celebrate the
coronation of Charles V as the new Holy Roman Emperor in 1530, Federigo commissioned four mythological
rape paintings (Leda, Danae, Io, Ganymede) from his court painter, Correggio, who had already painted a Rape
of Antiope for the duke himself. Numerous mythological rapes appeared in the frescoes at Cardinal Ippolito
d’Este’s Villa at Tivoli, built in the 1560s. In 1627, the Bentivoglio family frescoed a private room in the back
of their new Roman palace, inhabited by Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio, with a cycle of three mythological rapes:
Jupiter and Europa, Pluto and Proserpina, and Neptune and Amphitrite. For good measure, they added a fresco
of Perseus Killing Medusa in the next room with two attempted rapes in the decorative margins: Apollo and
Daphne and Pan and Syrinx. And in 1663, Louis celebrated his military victory over French nobles with a new
garden just to the west of his villa at Versailles, its corners decorated with mythological rapes signifying the
four elements and the universal power of the king. The Rape of Proserpina by Pluto signified Fire. The Rape of
Cybele by Saturn represented Earth. The Rape of Orithyia by Boreas images Air. And the Rape of Coronis by
Neptune represented Water. Two more rapes tied to the elements appeared in sculptures decorating the two of
the corner pools. 12 Serial depictions of rape in prints also appeared in cycles on the “Loves of the Gods”
discussed below under rape as divine love and marriage.

In general, mythological and historical rape figured the decisive, all-powerful, heroic will of early modern rulers
in the most unambiguous terms. Here one thinks of the sexual violence employed metaphorically in
Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513) to represent the heroic triumph of princely will over worldly fortune.

Nevertheless, since our free will must not be denied, I estimate that even if fortune is the arbiter of half
our actions, she still allows us to control the other half, or thereabouts. ... I surely think that it is better
to be impetuous than to be cautious, for fortune is a woman and in order to be mastered she must be
jogged and beaten. And it may be noted that she submits more readily to boldness than to cold
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calculation. Therefore, like a woman, she always favors young men because they are not so much
inclined to caution as to aggressiveness and daring in mastering her. 13

The fact that real rape was a criminal act in early modern Europe only gave mythological and historical rape a
certain legitimacy as a higher, mythic realm of gods, heroes, and decisive actions beyond all earthly laws,
restraints, and fortune. In the world of heroic rape, absolutism showed its fearsome power to a world of lesser
beings.

3. Martial Victory and Valor

On the human level, rape could signify conquest and manly power and was an attribute of the great warrior. In
classical antiquity, women captured as war booty were routinely enslaved and raped; the Iliad begins with
Prince Achilles and King Agamemnon squabbling over their beautiful captives. Agamemnon is willing to give
up his captive to appease the gods only if he can claim the lovely Briseis, already distributed to Achilles.

I myself will call for Briseis at your hut, and take her, flower of young girls that she is, your prize, to
show you here and now who is the stronger and make the next man sick at heart – if any think of
claiming equal place with me.” 14

The fact that Briseis faces a lifetime of rape never enters the consciousness of Homer’s epic. Instead, her sexual
enslavement to a Greek king or hero is treated as an honor conferred from above.

In The Art of Love, Ovid enriched this masculine ethos by developing a playful metaphoric nexus of love and
war in which rape enacted by gods and heroes summed up the delights of amorous combat. The book opened
with the rape of the Sabines, from which all Roman glory and power descended.

The captured women are led off, spoil for the marriage-couch, and to many their very fear had power to
lend grace. If any struggled overmuch and resisted her mate, upborne on his eager breast he carried her
off himself, saying, "Why do you spoil those tender eyes with tears? What your sire was to your mother
that will I be to you." Ah, Romulus, thou only didst know how to bestow bounty on thy warriors; so thou
but bestow such bounty upon me, I will be a warrior. And, mark you, in accord with that tradition our
theaters now too are fraught with danger to the fair. 15

Statius developed the theme in his Achilleid. Dressed as a women and hidden by his mother, the goddess Thetis,
among the handmaidens of Princess Deidamia to prevent him from fighting and dying in the Trojan War,
Achilles laments his emasculation on the battle field before proving his manliness by raping Deidamia. To
justify his action, he cites the his own origins in the nuptial rape of the sea goddess, Thetis, daughter of Ocean,
by the hero Peleus.

...when Achilles, parted in solitude from the virgin train, thus spoke with himself: “How long wilt
thou endure the precepts of thy anxious mother, and waste the first flower of thy manhood in this soft
imprisonment? No weapons of war mayst thou brandish, no beasts mayst thou pursue. Oh! for the plains
and valleys of Haemonia! Lookest thou in vain, Spercheus, for my swimming, and for my promised
tresses? Or hast thou no regard for the foster-child that has deserted thee? Am I already spoken of as
borne to the Stygian shades afar, and does Chiron in solitude bewail my death? Thou, O Patroclus, now
dost aim my darts, dost bend my bow and mount the team that was nourished for me; but I have learnt to
fling wide my arms as I grasp the vinwands, and to spin the distaff-thread--ah! Shame and vexation to
confess it! Nay more, night and day thou dost dissemble the love that holds thee, and thy passion for the
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maid of equal years. How long wilt thou conceal the wound that galls thy heart, nor even in love--for
shame!--prove they own manhood?”
So he speaks; and in the thick darkness of the night, rejoicing that the unstirring silence gives
timely aid to his secret deeds, he gains by force his desire, and with all his vigour strains her in a real
embrace; the whole choir of stars beheld from on high, and the horns of the young moon blushed red.
She indeed filled grove and mountain with her cries, but the train of Bacchus, dispelling slumber’s
cloud, deemed it the signal for the dance; on every side the familiar shout arises, and Achilles once
more brandishes the thyrsus; yet first with friendly speech he solaces the anxious maid: “I am he--why
fearest thou?--whom my cerulean mother bore wellnight to Jove, and sent to find my nurture in the
woods and snows of Thessaly. Nor had I endured this dress and shameful garb, had I not seen thee on
the seashore; ‘twas for thee I did submit, for thee I carry skeins and bear the womanly timbrel. Why dost
thou weep who art made the daughter-in-law of mighty ocean? Why dost thou moan who shalt bear
valian grandsons to Olympus?...16

Male athletic victory could also suggest rape, as in Pindar’s Ninth Pythian Ode hailing a victor in the Pythian
games, held in honor of Apollo, by comparing him to that’s god’s triumphal bridal rape of Cyrene.

I proclaim Telesicrates, the victor in the Pythian contest with the brazen shield, a happy man and the
crowning glory of chariot-wielding Cyrene; whom he of the flowing hair [Apollo], even the son of Leto,
erstwhile carried off from the windswept glens of Pelion, and bore away, a huntress maiden, in his
golden car to the place where he made queen of a land rich in flocks and in fruits. 17

The tradition which intertwined martial and amorous conquest continued in later classical writers such as
Claudian and Nonnos and in medieval and Renaissance romances and chivalric literature. 18 In Wolfram von
Eschenbach’s Parzifal, his mother rejoiced at the birth of a boy whose genitals and physical stature already
promised great feats.

When the Queen had regained her senses and taken her babe to her arms she and the other ladies
studied the little piddler between his legs. And what a fuss they had to make of him, seeing him shaped
like a man! In course of time he grew to be a smith – with swords! – and he struck many sparks from
helmets, since his heart was of manly mettle. 19

Here we also see the analogy between sword and penis which reappeared in later literature and art, even
Christian art. 20 Fulfilling the phallic promise of his birth, Parzifal displays his heroic nature by molesting a
beautiful noblewoman discovered sleeping alone. 21 It was a rare literary voice which objected to this ethos of
victory and rape. Writing against the idea that women want to be raped and the tradition of rape as the reward
for valor, Christine de Pizan assembled three rape narratives in her Book of the City of Ladies (1405) to prove
that rape was a brutal violation. She tells the story of the Sicambrian women who fought a losing battle against
the Roman army. They “resolved that it would be better to die defending their chastity than be dishonored, for
they knew that, following martial custom, they would be raped if they lost to the Romans.” 22

Western literature was also replete with heroic combat for the sake of a sexual prize. Examples include the
mythological story of Perseus and Andromeda and its later chivalric variations, St. George and the Dragon and
Ariosto’s Ruggiero and Angelica. 23 While rape does not appear in these texts, the consent of the woman is
never really an issue for Perseus or the author. It is simply assumed Andromeda is the legitimate prize for her
rescuer and that Perseus’ noble qualities make him worthy as a lover or husband. While St. George remains
chaste in many but not all medieval accounts, the damsel rescued by the knight usually becomes his wife in later
medieval chivalric literature. The theme of women as the sexual trophy of combat also informed the late
medieval theme of the castle of love discussed below.
 10

In Camoens’s humanist epic of Portugese empire, The Lusiads (1572), all late medieval decorum vanishes with
the island of sexual delight created by Venus to reward Portugese explorers for their heroic achievements. 24
Though inflamed with Cupid’s arrows, the many nymphs selected for this island remained sufficiently modest
to flee their Portugese lovers, setting up a chase and mass rape amidst a lush, pastoral utopia. The nymphs set
up the chase by pretending to hunt in the fields when they are first discovered.

… It was thus their expert instructress [Venus] had counseled, that they should scatter over the fields
and begin by awakening desire in the mariners with the fleeting view of an uncertain prize. Some … had
laid aside the enhancement of attire and were bathing naked. … The nymphs fled through the foliage;
but, more cunning than swift, little by little and with many a smile they allowed the hounds [mariners] to
overtake them. … One stumbled, by design, … as she picked herself up again, her pursuer fell over her
and made escape impossible. … that was compensation in full for all their arduous experiences. 25

In Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532), the heroes end up shipwrecked in an all-female country ruled by man-
hating female warriors. Any man discovered in this realm is killed or enslaved unless he can slay ten female
warriors in a single day and satisfy ten more in bed in one night. 26The prize for this supreme test of masculinity
is ten wives and the right to rule, thereby restoring a natural patriarchy. 27

“confident was every cavalier

He would acquit himself as well in bed
As in combat with a lance or spear. [IX.69]

The hero, Guidone, proves himself worthy of this challenge, first dispatching ten female warriors.

And one by one they fall beneath his hand.

Left with ten women, naked and alone,

So valorous he proved (I do not jest)
That pleasure he partook of every one.
The queen by such feat was so impressed
That there and then she named him as her son,
And gave him Alessandra as his bride,
And the other nine by whom he had been tried.

She left him her co-heir to all this land [XIX.56-58]

Though rape doesn’t appear in many of these texts, the identification of martial valor with sexual conquest
fueled the larger willingness to use rape to depict a higher, heroic kind of love worthy of gods, heroes, and
warrior-knights.

The close association between mythological rape, martial valor, and conquest allowed even homoerotic rapes to
represent absolutist victory. In Fulgentius’ influential handbook of mythology, the rapes of Ganymede (and
Europa) were interpreted exclusively as images of Roman military triumph.

For Jove, as the ancient author Anacreon has written, when he had started a war against the Titans…
as a sign of victory he saw close at hand the auspicious flight of an eagle. For so happy an omen,
especially since victory did ensue, he made a golden eagle for his war standards and consecrated it to
the might of his protection, whereby also among the Romans, standards of this kind are carried. He
 11

seized Ganymede in battle as these standards went before him, just as Europa is said to have been
carried off on a bull, that is, onto a ship carrying the picture of a bull. 28

When Duke Cosimo de' Medici seized control of the burgher republic of Florence and installed himself as an
absolutist ruler in what had been the town hall, he decorated one large room with scenes of Jupiter. One
painting depicted Cosimo's military victory over Piombino, inspired by the mythological example of Jupiter
Raping Ganymede. 29 (As a Trojan prince favored by Zeus, Ganymede also connected Trojan and Roman glory
to the triumphs of Cosimo’s regime.) In the late 1570s, Cosimo’s son, Fererico commissioned Bologna to sculpt
a large Rape of the Sabines for the town square as an even more public image of Medici absolutism (alongside
earlier Medici images such as Bologna’s equestrian statue of Cosimo, Cellini’s Perseus Killing Medusa, 30
28
Fulgentius, Mythologies, I.20, trans. Leslie Whitbread, Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1971, pp. 60-61.
5
Roy Strong, Art and Power. Renaissance Festivals 1450-1650, 1984, 40-43, 61-62; Wood, op. cit.
6
The naming of Europe after Europa was well known in medieval mythological writing such as the Second Vatican Mythography and
the Ecloga Theoduli. See Jane Chance, Medieval Mythography from Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres, University Press
of Florida, 1994, p. 362.
7
For an early sixteenth century example, see Giles of Viterbo’s Oration on the Golden Age, delivered in 1502 in St. Peters before
Pope Julius II to celebrate Portugese conquests in the far east. The text is translated in Francis Martin, Friar, Reformer and
Renaissance Scholar, Villanova, 1992. Imperial culture in the court of Philip II is discussed in Marie Tanner, The Last Descendants of
Aeneas, New Haven: Yale University Press.
8
This is the explanation offered in the official book published to explain the entry, Simon Bosquet’s Bref et sommaire recueil …,
Paris, 1572, (reprinted recently by Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Amsterdam) as discussed in Frances Yates, Astraea. The Imperial
Theme in the Sixteenth Century, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, p. 137
9
See Yates, op. cit. pp. 48-50
10
?
Clare Robertson,”Il Gran Cardinale’: Alessandro Farnese. Patron of the Arts, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992, pp.
11
The Rape of Europa appears in the top frieze of Ares and in the background of Taurus, the rape of Leda in Gemini; the rape of
Persephone in Capricorn, and the rape of Ganymede in Aquarius,. See Rodolfo Signorini, La Dimora dei Conti D’Arco in Mantova,
Mantua: Editoriale Sometti, 2000, p. 221, 223, 228, 249, 252.
12
Stéphane Pincas, Versailles, Thames and Hudson, 1995, p. 82.
13
?
Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 25, trans. Daniel Donno, Bantam Books, 1966, pp. 84-86. This treatise, of course, was written to curry
favor with the Medici dukes who had overthrown the Florentine republic, expelled Machiavelli from high office, and sent him into
exile to his country estate.
14
Fitzgerald trans., p. 17
15
Ovid, Art of Love, II.233ff, Loeb ed., pp. 83-85
16
Statius, Achilleid, Loeb,. pp. 555-559
17
Loeb ed., p. 273
18
E. Vance, “Le combat érotique chez Chrétien de Troyes,” Poétiques, 12, 1972
19

20
After bearing eight daughters, Battista Sforza finally bore a son and heir to Federigo da Montefeltro. To thank the Virgin Mary and
various saints for their intercession, the duke commissioned a large votive painting from Piero della Francesca. It shows the duke, in
full armor, kneeling in prayer to the Virgin who displays her own miraculous son on her lap. The duke’s sword handle cross his lower
torso at the crotch, jutting up proudly in an unambiguous display of male valor and fertility. The phallic sword became a stock element
in court portraiture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Hundreds of early modern images make swords, knives, and lances
 12

Ammanati’s Neptune, and Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus. Bologna’s Rape of the Sabines implicitly
compared Cosimo to King Romulus whose great leadership and military exploits led Rome to eternal glory and
Romulus to eternal life among the gods. 31

II. RAPE AS PRINCELY GENEALOGY AND WORLD HISTORY *

Rape was one way the gods interacted with mortals in the early days of human history and the chief way they
left semi-divine heroes to rule the earth and promote their worship and influence. Since European rulers in the
Renaissance and Baroque liked to imagine themselves as descendants of families going back to these demi-

double as phalluses, often in scenes of sexual violence such as the Rape of Lucretia. Notable examples include the violent works of
Urs Graf, Lucas van Leyden’s Worship of the Golden Calf (far right); Heemskerck’s Rape of Helen; and that monument to Medicean
absolutism imaged as a brutal mythological sex murder: Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa. Here the naked hero tramples the nude,
headless yet voluptuous body of Medusa, his sword held exactly at the level of his penis. The same sword-penis, though not the
violence, reappeared in Domenichino’s Perseus and Medusa in the Farnese Gallery.
21
While Parzifal preserves his virtue by molesting but not raping the lady, the narrative glorifies sexual violence within a larger ethos
of knightly conquest and victory.

the boy found lying there beneath it, the exalted Duchess, a lovely sight and all a knight could wish in a mistress! The lady
had fallen asleep. She wore Love’s blazon – a mouth of translucent red, torment to the hearts of amorous knights. She slept
with parted lips that wore the flames of Love’s hot fire. Thus lay the loveliest challenge to adventure imaginable! Her
gleaming close-set teeth lay in neat rows of snow-white ivory. … Her sable coverlet barely reached her hips, for on her
lord’s departure the heat had caused her t push it down. Her figure was neat and trim: no art was lacking there, since God
Himself had fashioned her sweet body. Nor was that all. The adorable woman was slender of arm and white of hand. …
Sweet, modest woman, she sat up with a start to find the boy in her arms. How could she go on sleeping? “Who does me this
dishonor?” the high-bred lady asked in shame and anger. “Young gentleman, you make too free. Address yourself elsewhere,
if you please.” The lady wailed loudly. He paid no attention to what she said but forced her mouth to his. Wasting no time, he
crushed her breast to his, duchess or no duchess, and also took a ring. On her shift he saw a brooch and roughly tore it off.
The lady was armed as women are: but to her his strength was an army’s. Nevertheless there was quite a tussle of it. But now
the boy complained of hunger. “Don’t eat me,” said the dazzling beauty. “If you had any sense you would choose some other
food. …”

After eating some of her food and taking another kiss forcibly, Parzifal rides off, “delighted with his spoils”. See Penguin ed., p. 66

22
Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, Book II, chapters 44-46, trans, Earl Jeffrey Richards,, Persea Books, pp. 160-
164, esp. p. 163. While Pizan’s stories come from Boccaccio’s On Famous Women, they are selected here to support De Pisan’s
attack on the ways rape is legitimized in late medieval culture and society. No such discussion appears in Boccaccio.
23
Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, , X.91-99.

24
“All these heroes and many another like them, winning their titles to fame and admiration in divers regions, will become as so
many Mars among men. And then, their triumphal standards sweeping the seas, they too will come to enjoy the delights of this island,
where these same nymphs and this same entertainment will await them, in token of the glory and honour their arduous enterprises
have won”. See Penguin edition, trans. William Atkinson, Canto IX and X, pp. 202-216, 232p.
25
Ibid, p. 211-212, 216
26
In the century Arab poem, The Perfumed Garden, chapter 19 (?), the hero must satisfy 100 beautiful virgins in a single night
without ejaculating before he can win the hand of the princess. In September, 2000, Palestinian clerics, teachers, and parents urge
boys to join the riots against Israeli troops, promising 82 virgin wives waiting in heaven for each young martyr. (New York Times
story, week of Oct. 22)
 13

gods, classical rape narratives tied to the birth of early heroes and kings created an appealing world history of
great rulers and empires continuing into the present.

By producing the greatest leaders and heroes who defeated monsters threatening civilization, founded cities,
built empires, and ruled kingdoms, mythological rape further justified itself and distracted attention from sexual
violence. Moschus has Zeus soothe Europa this way.

“Be of good sheer, sweet virgin, and never thou fear the billows. ‘Tis Zeus himself that speaketh … And
‘tis love of [441] thee hath brought me to make so far a sea-course in a bull’s likeness; and ere ‘tis long
thou shalt be in Crete … and there shall thy wedding be, whereof shall spring famous children who shall
all be kings among them that are in the earth.” 32

In Book XI of Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus visited the underworld and catalogued a number of such glorious
rapes as high points in the lives of mortal women and in a larger, epic "world history" dominated by the
intertwined lives of gods and heroes. As was often the case, Homer omitted any mention of sexual coercion as if
these rape-unions were consensual. He began with Neptune's union with the princess, Tyro, and even quoted
Neptune's word to Tyro to explain the act in lofty genealogical terms.

"Dear Mortal, go in joy! At the turn of seasons,

winter to summer, you shall bear me sons;
no lovemaking of gods can be in vain.
Nurse our sweet children tenderly, and rear them
Home with you now, and hold your tongue, and tell
no one your lover's name - though I am yours,
Poseidon, lord of surf that makes earth tremble."

He plunged away into the deep sea swell,

and she grew big with Pelias and Neleus,
powerful vassals, in their time, of Zeus.

Odysseus continued by describing other heroic offspring produced by these uplifting "matches" between gods
and mortal women.

Next after her I saw Antiope,

daughter of Asopos. She too could boast
a god for a lover, having lain with Zeus
27 ?
But if,” she said, “among you there’s a man …

Penguin edition, p. 600

29
Vasari explained the mythological rape as an image of Medici victory. See J. L. Draper, "Vasari's Decorations in the Palazzo
Vecchio" PhD, Chapel Hill, 1973, 174-5, cited in Wood, 1998, p. 69, n. 14
30
Since Perseus was the son of Zeus through the rape of Danae, Cellini’s statue celebrated the killing of a women by a hero
whose birth sanctified patriarchal violence.
31
Margaret Carroll, The Erotics of Absolutism," Representations, 25, 1989, 3-30. My discussion is indebted to Carroll’s
seminal article.
32
Loeb, pp. 439-441
 14

and borne two sons to him; Amphion and

Zethos, who founded Thebes, the upper city,
and built the ancient citadel. ...

And next I saw

Amphitrion's true wife, Alkmene, mother,
as all men know, of lionish Herakles,
conceived when she lay in Zeus's arms …

He then mingled these divine rapes with accounts of princely marriages, completing the construction of a single,
unified, heroic genealogy.

Then after Leda to my vision came

the wife of Aloeus, Iphimedeia,
proud that she once had held the flowing sea
and borne him sons, thunderers for a day,
Never were men on such a scale
bred on the plowlands and the grainlands, never
so magnificent any, after Orion,
At nine years old, they towered nine fathoms tall
nine cubits in the shoulders, and they promised
furor upon Olympos, heaven broken by battle cries,
the day they met the gods in arms.

Some of the heroes born from divine rapes carried out important rapes of their own, thereby repeating the god-
like actions of their fathers. The rape of Leda by Zeus produced the great heroes, Castor and Pollux who went
on to rape the daughters of King Leucippus (painted by Rubens). After death, they rose to starry immortality as
the constellation, Gemini. According to Ovid, Mars raped the sleeping temple virgin, Sylvia, that he “might
bestow upon this city a great seed” in the form of Romulus, the "founding father" of Rome. 33 As Rome’s first
king and its greatest early general, Romulus organized the mass rape of the Sabines to secure imperial greatness
for the city he founded and his own apotheosis. In his account of the rape of Semele (described repeatedly in
nuptial terms), Nonnus had Zeus comfort his victim with glorious accounts of her divine son, Bacchus, whose
serial rapes are later celebrated in the epic poem.

And after the bed, he saluted Semele with loving words, consoling his bride with hopes of things to
come.
“My wife, I your bridegroom am Cronides. Lift up your neck in pride at this union with a heavenly
bedfellow; and look not among mankind for any child higher than yours. Danae’s wedding [rape] does
not rival you. You have thrown into the shade even the union [rape] of your father’s sister with her Bull;
for Europa glorified by Zeus’ bed went to Crete, Semele goes to Olympos. What more do you want after
heaven and the starry sky? People will say in the future, Zeus gave honor to Minos in the underworld,
and to Dionysios in the heavens! … you bring forth a son [who shall not die, and you I will call
immortal. Happy woman! You have conceived a son who will make mortals forget their troubles, you
shall bring forth joy for gods and men.”

Even homoereotic rape was easily interpreted as divine providence, royal genealogy, and world history as in
Homer’s account of the Rape of Ganymede. Obscured in the many homoerotic accounts of this myth is
33
Ovid, Fasti, III, 1-42
 15

Ganymede’s status as a Trojan prince, descended from King Dardanos, who was himself the son of Zeus by
rape. Ganymede appears in Aeneas’s speech to Achilles boasting of the divine favor showered on the Trojans
(Iliad XX.231ff)

My own claim is that I was born the son

Of Ankises, the hero, and my mother
Was Aphrodite. …
To know the story of our race, already
Known to many soldiers, Zeus, cloud-master
Fathered Dardanos and built the town
Dardanie, since Ilion’s stronghold
Was not yet walled or peopled on the plain,
And men still made their home on Ida’s hills.
Dardanos begot King Erikhthonios,
Richest of mortals in his time
…
Erikhthonios was the father of Tros,
Lord of the Trojans. Three fine sons he had:
Ilos, Assarakos, and Ganymedes,
Handsomest of mortals, whom the gods
Caught up to pour out drink for Zeus and live
Amid immortals for his beauty’s sake.
…

Virgil expanded this theme by having Aeneas, Ganymede’s cousin, award as a prize for military valor a golden
cloak embroidered with scenes of Ganymede hunting and being carried up to the heavens. 34

Even in a mythological rape featuring brutal lust such as Haephaestus’ attempted rape of Pallas Athena, goddess
of chastity and wisdom, historical glory mingled with moral turpitude and to some extent overshadowed it. Just
as Rome’s glory originated in divine rape, so did that of Athens in Greek myth. As the semen of Haephaestus
spilled on the ground, the first king of Athens, Erechtheus, sprang up miraculously from the spot.

III. RAPE AS SALVATION – APOTHEOSIS / DIVINE LOVE / MARRIAGE *

1. Salvation and Apotheosis

Late antique writers and artists frequently interpreted classical myths of rape as allegories of the soul carried off
into eternal life. Thus, rape myths were common on sarcophagi and tomb monuments, especially the rapes of
Europa, Ganymede, and Proserpina. 35 Carried over the sea to Crete, Europa’s rape was readily assimilated to
the soul’s journey to the Blessed Isles or the Elysian Fields. Immortalized as Zeus’s cupbearer, Ganymede’s
rape became the soul’s Platonic ascent to immortal life or divine truth. Already found in Plato and Xenophon,
this Ganymede continued in Christian medieval allegories such as the Ovid moralisé comparing Ganymede to
St. John the Evangelist whose eagle represented Christ. This tradition continued into the Renaissance in
Sebastiano del Piombo’s suggestion that Michelangelo allegorize salvation on the ceiling of the Medici Chapel
with a fresco representing both Ganymede and St. John the Evangelist. Following Apuleius’ Golden Ass, Giulio
Romano compared the ascent of Ganymede, beloved of Zeus, to that of Psyche, mortal bride of Cupid in his
34
Aeneid V.249-257
 16

frescos of Cupid and Psyche in the Villa Farnesina for Agostino Chigi (1518-20). In the lofty moral world of
Renaissance emblem books such as Alciati’s Emblemata (1531), Bocchi’s Symbolic Questions (1555), and
Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes, (1635), Ganymede continued as a myth of Platonic spiritual ascent. 36 The
couplet beneath the woodcut in Wither glosses, “Take wing, my Soule, and mount up higher, / For, Earth,
fulfills not my Desire”. The verse below elaborates.

“Though this be but a Fable, of their feigning,

The Morall is a Reall truth, pertaining
To evr’y one (which harbors a desire
Above the Starry Circles to aspire
By Ganymede the soul is understood,
That’s washed in the Purifying flood
Of sacred Baptism …

In Giles Fletcher’s poem, Christ’s Victory and Triumph (1610), the resurrected Christ evokes Ganymede whose
ascent astonishes those witnessing below. 37

2. Divine Love

The rapes carried out by the gods were almost always seen as examples of divine love in classical literature.
Ovid explained the rapes carried out the fraternal trio, Zeus, Pluto, and Neptune, as examples of uncontrolled
amorous passion caused by Venus. By transforming male sexual violence into signs of a higher female rule,
Ovid masked the realities of rape with a specious female power while transforming violence into love.

In classical and early modern writing, rape by a god conferred high honors and eternal fame on the woman. The
ancient Roman writer, Gellius, cited Homer approvingly in his Attic Nights.

"Homer wrote that Neptune said to a girl whom he had just violated, 'Rejoice O woman in this act of
love;
A year gone by, fair offspring shall me thine,
For not unfruitful is a god's embrace'". 38

In Pindar’s account of the bridal rape of Cyrene by Apollo, the sun god consults first with Cheiron, asking, “Is it
right to lay an ennobling hand upon her? aye, and by consorting with her, to cull the honey-sweet flower of
love?" 39 The theme of love in classical mythological rape is particularly clear writers reverse the real power
relationship and describe the rapist as “overpowered” or “conquered” by the victim’s beauty and the divine love
it beauty inspires. Thus Ovid began his account of the rape of the sleeping temple virgin, Sylvia, by Mars.

37
Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry, rev. New York: Norton, 1963, pp. 168-169.

38
Aulius Gellius, Attic Nights, Loeb ed, pp. 293-4

39
Pindar, Pythian Odes 9, Loeb ed., p. 275. The rhetorical question is answered in the affirmative and the rape justified with a long
list of the honors and glory which will come to Cyrene as a result of her rape and “marriage” to a god.
 17

Come, warlike Mars, lay down thy shield and spear for a brief space, and from thy helmet loose thy
glittering locks. … put aside the lance. Thou shalt find something to do unarmed. Then, too, wast thou
unarmed when the Roman priestess captivated thee, that thou mightest bestow upon this city a great
seed. 40

Although Christ’s dual nature and incorporation of a wide range of “feminine” qualities offered the potential for
a less patriarchal notion of divinity which eventually developed between 1300 and 1700, medieval Christianity
remained profoundly patriarchal in accord with prevailing social and political values. This is clear in the
Incarnation where God the Father, like the pagan deities, never asked for the consent of the mortal woman he
forcibly impregnated. Instead he simply congratulated Mary on her good fortune. In turn, Mary underscored
her complete submission to his absolute power by calling herself “the handmaid of the Lord”. That this
impregnation was entirely metaphysical and outside the laws of nature may allow it to escape the charge of
rape. But it shares with most mythological rapes the deity’s supreme indifference to mortal consent and the
assumption that forced impregnation is a divine blessing. Imagine for a moment a strong willed Mary who
rejected her impregnation and aborted the resulting fetus.

Already in late antique mythological allegory, rape by the gods was interpreted as divine love, salvation, and
apotheosis. Since classical mythology continued in medieval Christian literature as moral and spiritual allegory
or as astrological-cosmic explanation, medieval writing continued to allegorize mythological rape as Christian
salvation or the ravishing of the soul by divine love. One common example was the rape of Ganymede, a
familiar image of divine love in classical literature (Homer, Plato, Ovid, and Xenophon), medieval texts (Ovid
moralisé; Evarty's Chess of Love) 41 and Renaissance art (Michelangelo’s drawings; the emblems of Alciati and
Bocchi). Even a sober, reform-minded pope such as Paul III Farnese used Zeus and Ganymede to allegorize his
divine love for all humanity in a medal designed by Alessandro Cesati. Under the protective supervision of Zeus
the eagle, the naked Ganymede benevolently waters blooming flowers. Here both Ganymede and the eagle
represent the nurturing pope, at once a Zeus-like deity and a human being favored with divine love, immortality,
and service to mankind. 42

Pluto Raping Persephone was another rape allegorized as apotheosis and salvation as seen in the ceiling fresco
painted in the late fifteenth-century by Pinturrichio for the library of the humanist pope, Pius II (Aeneas Silvius
Piccolomini). Pinturricchio's Pluto Raping Persephone appeared alongside frescoes of two Christian virtues,
Caritas or Divine Love, shown as a nude woman with two children, and Pax or Peace, shown as a woman
trampling armor and holding a green branch. The walls below were covered with frescoes offering a humanist
history of the life of Aeneas Silvius culminating in his election to the papacy and his glorious achievements as
pope. In the center of the ceiling, the pope's coat of arms proclaimed his patronage and tied him to both figures
in the mythological rape. On the one hand, Pluto represented the pope as the god-like ruler of the church and its

35
I have digital pictures of numerous examples on Roman sarcophagi from museums in Pisa, Rome, and Naples.
36
See Leonard Barkan, Transuming Passion. Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism, Stanford University Press, 1991. Peter Sutton
notes that Carel van Mander also continued the allegorical understanding of Ganymede as the soul ascending in divine love. See Peter
Sutton, Pieter de Hooch, Hartford, 1999?, p.
40
Ovid, Fasti, III, 1042
41
"He [Jupiter] also has a flying eagle that carries a young, captured child between its feet up towards the sky. The boy is named
Ganymede. This eagle signifies the angels who capture the innocent, the simple, and the just, and carry them up by contemplation, as
if towards the sky." pp. 117
42
See the illustration in Charles Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985, p. 261.
 18

terrestrial kingdom. Persephone also represented the pope in so far as her abduction into eternal life and
political dominion allegorized the pope's own salvation, eternal life, and humanist apotheosis (fame).

Medieval and Renaissance Christian writers also interpreted the rape of Danae – the virgin confined to a tower –
as an allegory of the virgin birth of Christ. This explains why Danae raped by Zeus could personify female
chastity on the allegorical medallion portrait of Elisabetta Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino, in 1495. 43

Rape as divine love also appeared in Politian’s Stanze Cominciate per la Giostra del Magnifico Giuliano de’
Medici (1475-8). This unfinished epic narrated the struggle of the hero, Julio (Giuliano), inflamed by Venus to
prove his martial valor on the battle field of the joust to win the love of the chaste nymph, Simonetta (Simonetta
Vespucci). Politian described how Venus also inflamed her husband, Vulcan, to achieve his greatest work as an
artist, a bronze door whose reliefs depicted the great loves of the gods. 44

“Vulcan never esteemed any other of his works so highly, truth itself has not more truth than this;
whatever the art does not contain, the mind, imagining, clearly understands.”

There was much for the male imagination to understand in Politian’s text since all but three of these loves were
rapes. This “gallery” of heroic rape included Jove’s rape of Europa, Leda, Danae, Proserpina, Mnemosine, and
Ganymede, Neptune’s rape of Theophane and Canace, Saturn’s rape of Philyra, Apollo’s attempted rape of
Daphne, and Pluto’s Rape of Proserpina. All appear as examples of heroic or divine love. As Apollo cries out,
“why do you flee, o lady of my heart, when love is the only reason for my pursuit?” 45 While Julio entertains no
rapacious desires, his success in pursuing the chaste, cold-hearted Simonetta depends on victory in the
battlefield (the joust). Although separated from rape here, martial valor remains paired with it as a more
terrestrial and virtuous way to amorous triumph.

The celebration of rape as divine love was even more elaborate in Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili (Venice, 1497), in the long, illustrated account of an allegorical triumph of divine love with four
chariots celebrating the rapes of Europa, Leda, Danae, and Semele, each accompanied by half-naked "nymphs
[who] sang with high exaltation in amorous praise of the sacred event [rape of Europa] and the divine mystery,
with harmonious voices and prophetic songs". 46 This excerpt from the triumph of Leda typifies the courtly
rhetoric of material and artistic splendor.

I saw upon this superb and triumphal vehicle a white swan in amorous embrace with Theseus's
daughter, an illustrious nymph of unbelievable beauty. The swan was kissing her with its divine beak; its
wings were down, covering the bare parts of the noble lady, as with divine and voluptuous pleasure the
two of them united in their delectable sport, with the godlike swan positioned between her delicate
snow-white thighs. She was lying comfortably on two cushions of cloth of gold, softly filled with finest
wool and with all the appropriately sumptuous ornaments, and was dressed in a thin virginal dress of
startlingly white silk with a weft of gold, elegantly adorned in suitable places with precious stones.
Nothing was lacking to contribute to the increase of delight. This triumph possessed all the features that
were described in the first one, and gave especial pleasure to the onlookers, who responded with praise
and applause.

45
The Stanze of Angelo Poliziano, trans. David Quint, Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1979, p. 57, with the reliefs described
in verses 105-119, pp. 55-61.
46
trans. Joscelyn Godwin, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999, p. 162.
 19

In Colonna, the language of divine rape is inseparable from the language of male seduction and “conquest” seen
in the final passage where the hero, Polia, overcomes innumerable obstacles to experience a brief moment of
rapture with his beloved, the perfect nymph, Polia.

No sooner had this blazing arrow [of Cupid] wounded and entered her to spread its ferment of love than
this virginal girl became tractable, easy, mild and benevolent. Joyfully she inclined her head and bowed
low, acknowledging herself vanquished and prostrate with nymphal compliance, just like those who,
feeble and unarmed, cannot struggle against the cruelty and ferocity that are used against them. 47

If rape was the primary mode for divine love, Renaissance and Baroque depictions of the “Loves of the Gods”
offered what were, in effect, cycles of divine rape. In addition to the four cycles mentioned above in the section
on “Rape as Good Government,” multiple rapes appeared in at least three other Renaissance mythological
decorations. 1) In 1520, Giulio Romano decorated the Sala di Galatea in Agostino Chigi’s Villa Farnesina with
frescoes on the Loves of the Gods including scenes of Zeus raping Europa, Leda, and Ganymede. 2) In the
1540s, Pope Paul III Farnese had the Room of Apollo in Castel San Angelo decorated with a complex field of
ornamental mythological scenes including scenes of Apollo and Daphne, Apollo and Hyacinth, Zeus and
Europa, and Zeus and Ganymede. 48 3) Around 1594, Jean Soens painted a cycle of Loves of the Gods to
decorate the Garden Palace of the Farnese at Caprarola. Along with a few consensual love affairs such as Mars
and Venus and Hercules and Omphale, the cycle included seven rapes or attempted rapes: Jupiter and Antiope,
Pluto and Proserpina, Neptune and Amphitrite, Mercury and Aglauro, Bacchus and Ariadne, Apollo and
Daphne, and the rare scene, Vulcan and Minerva. 49 Cycles of prints on the Loves of the Gods were also
produced in sixteenth-century Italy including three notorious examples by Romano, Bonasone, and Caraglio,
each offering a catalogue of some ten mythological rapes. 50 [revision May 2006]

Marriage and Love

Because the rapes of the gods were seen as examples of divine love, they were frequently cited in classical
discussions of love, marriage, and the triumphant power of Venus, and in marriage poems and festivities as in
Statius marriage poem for an imperial wedding 51 or Claudian’s marriage poem for the Emperor Honorius.

Hesperus, loved of Venus, rises and shines for the marriage with his Idalian rays. Maiden shame now
overcomes the anxious bride; her veil now shows traces of innocent tears. Hesitate not to be close in
thine attacks, young lover, e'en though she oppose thee savagely with cruel fingernail. None can enjoy
the scents of spring nor steal the honey of Hybla from its fastnesses if he fears that thorns may scratch
his face. Thorns arm the rose and bees find a defense for their honey. The refusals of coyness do but

Statius has Cupid praise the beauty of the bride by comparing her to the beautiful women raped by Paris (Helen), Apollo (Daphne),
51

Bacchus (Ariadne), or Jupiter (Leda, Europa, Danae).

Marveling at this maiden's peerless beauty, that rivalled the glory of her sires and her family's renown, I took her to me at
her birth and cherished her in my bosom ... She has grown up my own sweet image. Behold even from here the lofty beauty
of her brow and high-piled hair. Reckon how far she doth tower above the matrons of Rome: even so far as the Latonian
maid out-tops the nymphs, or I myself stand out above the Nereids. This girl is worthy to rise with me from out the dark-blue
waves; she could sit with me upon my chariot-shell. Nay, could she have climbed to the flaming mansions and entered this
abode, even you, ye Loves, would be deceived. ... for her, Glaucus and Proteus and every Nereid go in search of Indian
necklaces. If thou, Phoebus, hadst seen her on the fields of Thessaly, Daphne had wandered unafraid. If on Naxos' shore she
had been spied by Theseus' couch, Euhan, too, would have fled from the Cretan maid and left her desolate. Nay, had not
Juno appeased me by her endless plaint, heaven's lord would for this maid have taken the disguise of horns or feathers, on
her lap had Jove descended in true gold. “ Loeb, pp, 23-25
 20

increase the joy; the desire for that which flies us is the more inflamed; sweeter is the kiss snatched
through tears. How oft wilt thou say: 'Better this than ten victories over the yellow-haired Sarmatae'! …
[some tender lines skipped here] … Be the purple couch warm with your princely wooing, and a new
stain ennoble coverlets ruddy with Tyrian dye. Then leap victorious from the marriage-bed, scarred with
the night's encounter. 52

The classical ties between mythological rape and marriage were strengthened by the fact that many important
mythological and heroic rapes were also marriage abductions such as Zephyr and Chloris (Botticelli's
Primavera), the Romans abducting the Sabine maidens, Castor and Pollux abducting Phoebe and Hilaire
(Rubens), Pluto and Persephone (Bernini, Rembrandt, etc.), and Boreas and Oreithyia (Rubens). Here rape
could allegorize the god-like or heroic love of the bridegroom for a lesser woman, elevated or honored by her
selection. Since most of these rapes targeted royal women worthy of a god's love, they were easily turned into
heroic nuptial examples for earthly princes as "gods" on earth. No wonder, mythological bridal rapes were
frequently commissioned as marriage gifts and decorations of bridal clothing chests. This was true both for
court culture, where rape was an easy image of divine love, and for burghers, especially those living in
republics looking back to the Sabines in extolling marriage as the bedrock of political stability and strength.

In most court poetry, conjugal language was routinely applied to all rapes, whether they were bridal abductions
or not. For example, the ancient Greek writer, Moschus, interpreted the rape of Europa as a wedding, describing
Europa as the "bride" of Zeus stripped on her "nuptial" bed by her "husband". And the Greek epic poet, Nonnus,
described the many rape victims of Bacchus as brides, even when they were drugged, tied up and raped while
unconscious like Aura.

[Bacchus] inscribed on the spring petals - "Bridegroom, complete your marriage while the maiden is
still asleep; and let us be silent that sleep may not leave the maiden."
Then Iobacchos seeing her on the bare earth, plucking the Lethaean feather of bridal Sleep, he crept
up noiseless, unshod, on tiptoe, and approached Aura where she lay without voice or hearing. With
gentle hand he put away the girl's neat quiver and hid the bow in a hole in the rock, that she might not
shake off Sleep's wings and shoot him. Then he tied the girl's feet together with indissoluble bonds, and
passed a cord round and round her hands that she might not escape him: he laid the maiden down in the
dust, a victim heavy with sleep ready for Aphrodite, and stole the bridal fruit from Aura asleep. The
husband brought no gift; on the ground that helpless girl heavy with wine, unmoving, was wedded to
Dionysos; Sleep embraced the body of Aura with overshadowing wings, and he was marshal of the
wedding for Bacchos … So the wedding was like a dream …
When the bridegroom had consummated his wedding on that silent bed, he lifted a cautious foot and
kissed the bride's lovely lips, loosed the unmoving feet and hands, brought back the quiver and bow from
the rock and laid them beside his bride. He left to the winds the bed of Aura still sleeping, and returned
to his Satyrs with a breath of the bridal still about him. 53

When Aura wakes and discovers the crime, she goes mad with rage, kills one of the twin boys she bears, and
commits suicide. None of this matters since Aura was just another mortal woman raped or seduced and
abandoned by the great Bacchus. If conjugal language could appear repeatedly in this rape, it should not
surprise us that early modern rulers could use any rape myth to celebrate their weddings.

Rape also intersected with notions of female chastity and a chaste absence of desire. In classical, medieval and
Renaissance accounts (or, for that matter, in hundreds of older romance novels written by women for women)

53
Loeb, III, pp. 469-471
 21

the chaste bride resisted her husband and had to be forcibly taken like the Sabine women, the many women
raped by the gods, or the imperial bride described above in Claudian’s wedding poem for Honorius.

As female chastity took on an even greater importance in medieval Christianity, late medieval court poetry
allegorized the virtuous assault on the chaste beloved in allegories of knights besieging castles defended by
virgins wielding symbolic roses, emblems of the vaginal prize. At a time when brides were ritually deflowered
in the semi-public consecration of marriages and when rape was associated with martial valor, the siege of the
beloved was an obvious allegory of marriage and more generally, of courtly seduction. Needless to say, poems
and plays on the siege of love ended happily with the knightly lovers overcoming all feminine resistance. The
most famous of these texts was the Romance of the Rose which climaxed literally and allegorically with the
Lover storming the castle of the Rose. Here the language lost all allegorical subtlety in describing triumphant
phallic thrusts into the castle’s tight, virginal passageways.

Then I perceived a little barricade,

Which though I well could feel I could not see,
Quite near the border of the opening,
Which from the inside fortified the shrine,
Having been placed there when it first was made,
And still remaining fast and quite secure.
More vigorously then I made assault;
But often as I thrust, so oft I failed.
… however, at the last,
My battery availed to this extent
That I perceived a narrow passageway
By which I thought to gain admission there,
Though I must quite destroy the palisade.
Pushing within this little, narrow path
By which I entrance sought, as I have said,
I broke down the obstruction with my staff.
Then through the passageway that I had made,
Though 'twas too narrow and too small for me,
I got inside-or, rather, half inside.
… not for anything would I relax
My efforts till the staff was quite inside.
At last I got it in, but still the scrip
Remained outside, its hammers knocking there
For entrance; and so narrow was the path
That therein I was placed in great distress
the passage would have been by far too small
For me to traverse it, and well I knew
By this that none had ever passed that way.
I was the first of men to tread that road;
The place was not accustomed to receive
The tributes pilgrims well might bring to it.
…
However, at the least, I know that then
It never had been pierced or battered down.
I myself entered there because I ne'er
Without such entrance could have plucked the bud.
 22

Imagine how I acted when I found

That quite at my disposal was my Rose! 54

Given the continued ideology of female chastity among early modern elites, it is not surprising the “siege of
love” continued as a theme in court masques, wedding entertainments, and tapestries well into the sixteenth
century. 55

More generally, late medieval courtly texts frequently used violent martial language to describe amorous
advances made toward women without distinguishing between wives, lovers, and victims of rape. In an age
when virtuous women were supposed to suppress overt sexual desire and say “No,” at least provisionally, when
they meant “Yes”, and when fifteen year old wives in arranged marriages were ritually deflowered by older
husbands, the male lover was expected to “attack,” “besiege,” “batter,” “joust,” and “do battle”. Ejaculation was
known as “breaking a lance”. Dozens of examples abound in the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, a mid-fifteenth-
century French collection of courtly tales written for Philip the Good. It is the use of such language in marriage
stories which is particularly interesting. One passionate husband

made ready to accomplish his gracious feats of battle beneath this tree, desire summoning him to arms
like a marshal. Indeed, he set upon his wife, toppling her to the ground. … he desired to examine her
from both the front and the back. … he lifted the garment up, despite her efforts to resist. But still he was
not satisfied. In order to gaze upon her beauty to his satisfaction, he turned her around, passing his
roughened hand over her, eying her backside, and her front parts. … Once he had battered down her
defenses, this fellow gazed at length at her front parts, and, although this is not an honorable thing to
say, he would not be content until his hands had revealed to his eyes the myriad secrets into which they
ought not to delve. 56

Another story describes a marriage celebration.

After the ceremony and feast the bride was put to bed, and after a while, the groom got into bed as close
to her as possible. Without any further ado, he immediately stormed her fortress, and so vigorously did
he do that in a short time – despite some misadventure – he entered the fortress and captured it. … he
did not manage to capture the citadel without a good many skirmishes … So that he might penetrate as
far as the dungeon of the castle, the fellow had to take over, to capture boulevards and several other
well-equipped fortifications which had never before been taken. The woman was new to these feats of
arms and Nature had put her on the defensive. When the husband had finally mastered that place, he
broke only one lance, after which he ended the skirmish … 57

The same thinking continued into Renaissance humanism, especially with writer who dwelled on female
chastity such as Vives. In his widely read On the Education of a Christian Woman (1524), the Spanish humanist
insisted that the chaste girl, confined to the home until marriage, needed to rely on her parents’ choice of a
husband just as she had to be forced sexually by her husband.

True virginity knows nothing of sexual union nor seeks after it and indeed does not even think of it,
being protected and free of all such feelings through a heavenly gift. Therefore when her parents are
deliberating about her marriage, the young woman will leave all of that concern to those who wish her
well. … It was an ancient Roman custom among those famous matrons, examples of modesty, that on
the day when the bride was escorted to her husband's house, she did not cross the threshold herself but
was carried in as if she unwillingly and forcibly entered that place where she would lose the honor of
 23

her virginity. But how can a young woman pretend to do this when she has sought and asked for the
marriage of her own will? 58

The Renaissance humanist equivalent of courtly tales of “forced” wives was the rape of the Sabines. Since this
myth represented the central importance of marriage in the strong and virtuous state, the Rape of the Sabines
appeared on wedding chests, palace decorations, and public squares, as well as humanist marriage treatises
including Jacopo Barbaro and Vives’ Education of Christian Women. It was particularly important in late
fifteenth-century Florentine cassone at a time when Florentine humanists, both Medicean and republican, made
much of the city’s Roman founding and glorious ancestry. (The image of Florence as a powerful republican
empire, worthy of ancient Rome, goes back to Bruni’s Panegyric written around 1404.) In a Florence still
depopulated from the Black Death of 1348, the Rape of the Sabines may also have served as a civic admonition
to reproduce. By abducting numerous Sabine maidens as brides for the largely unmarried, male citizens of the
newly established Rome, Romulus transformed a small, weak town into what would become a populous and
mighty empire. 59

Despite this tradition of rape as marriage and husbandly love, rape also appeared as the barbaric antithesis of
marriage and civilization as in the Greek myth of the centaurs invited to a Greek wedding where they raped the
bride and certain female guests before they were slaughtered.

IV. RAPE AS MALE FANTASY *

As seen in the eroticized rape myths depicted by Titian, Correggio, Rubens, Bernini, and others, rape was often
used as a heroic, aristocratic image of male desire, love, and power. The feminist argument tying rape solely to
power, not sexual desire, ignores the way sexual desire has often been framed as a theater of power while power
has been gendered. If the fundamental relationship of male to female was one of rule, then sexual desire and
intercourse were invariably mixed with relations of power. The ancient Greek poet, Achilles Tatius, even used
mythological rape to argue the superiority of female beauty to its more terrestrial male counterpart.

"Women's beauty,' said, I, 'seems the more heavenly of the two, because it does not rapidly fade; the
incorruptible is not far from the divine, while that which is ever changing and corruptible (in which it
resembles our poor mortality) is not heavenly but vulgar. Zeus was fired with a Phrygian stripling
[Ganymede]; true, and he took his Phrygian up to heaven; but women's beauty actually brought Zeus
down from heaven. For a woman [Europa] Zeus once lowed as a bull; for a woman [Antiope] he danced
the satyr's dance; for another woman [Danae] he changed himself into gold. Let Ganymede pour out the
wine; but let Hera drink with the gods, so that a woman may have a youth to serve her. I am even sorry
for him [Ganymede] in the manner of his assumption - a savage bird swooped down upon him, and
when he had been seized by it he was placed in an ignominious position, looking like one crucified. Can
you imagine a viler sight than a youth hanging from a beast's talons? But Semele [raped by Apollo and
later burned alive when he revealed himself] was caught up to heaven - not by a savage bird, but by fire.
It is no matter for surprise that any should ascend to heaven through fire: that is how Hercules ascended.
You laugh at Danae's ark, but you say nothing of Perseus. As for Alcmene [raped by Zeus and the
mother of Hercules], this compliment alone is enough for her, that for her sake Zeus stole away three
whole courses of the sun. But it is time to leave mythology and to talk of the delights of reality, though
here I am but a novice; I have only had the society of women to whom love is a profession; perhaps
somebody else who has been more deeply initiated might have more to say, but I will make an
attempt. ... 60
 24

Early modern depictions of rape generally replaced violence with images of male desire. By showing the
nymph, Io, in the throes of a sexual ecstasy, Correggio completely erased the reality of sexual violence and
transformed rape into a sexual fantasy for male viewers.

Judging by the way Renaissance and Baroque artists eagerly took up classical rape themes and stripped the
female victims for the benefit of male viewers, it is fair to say that all classical rape themes appealed, in part, as
high-class, humanist pornography for princely elites, church officials (like Cardinal Borghese who
commissioned two large rape sculptures from Bernini) and cultivated burghers. Here, as with so much classical
mythology, sexual themes could be presented fairly graphically under the cover of idealized, heroic anatomies,
historical and ontological distance, and humanist learning or moral allegory.

In the more private world of prints or smaller paintings, classical rape narratives were free to become even more
explicitly pornographic. Correggio fulfilled the implicit pastoral rape fantasy of the sleeping or drunken nymph
by painting a sleeping Antiope raped by Zeus in the guise of a satyr (as described in Ovid). As usual, Zeus
represented the male viewer and the female body was arranged primarily for the real spectator, not the painted
rapist. In a few cases, some rulers brazenly violated the laws of courtly decorum by commissioning openly
pornographic rape paintings on a large scale. Federigo Gonzaga, duke of Mantua, had Giulio Romano paint
portraits of the duke and his mistress, Isabella Boschetti, in the guise of Zeus raping the sea nymph, Olympia,
mother of Alexander the Great. The painting was part of a large fresco cycle of sexual mythologies decorating
the duke's palace including four mythological rapes in the duke’s bedroom. Here, as in Correggio's Rape of Io,
sacred rape became the supreme masculine sexual feat, the pinnacle of both divine and princely virility. Sexual
violence is mitigated here by the loving relation of Isabella and Federigo. She is his mistress, not a rape victim,
and she caresses him lovingly and smiles even as she defers to his mythological pride and the use of rape to
figure his political and sexual power.

Pastoral Rape and the Freedom of Nature

Pastoral culture provided a favorite setting for classical and early modern narratives of rape. Most mythological
rapes were set into idyllic landscapes to enhance the virginal innocence and sexual ripeness of the young victim
as with Proserpina and Daphne.

Hard by the town of Henna was a lake,

Pergus its name; nor even Cayster's waters
Held in their echoes sweeter songs of swans.
A forest crowned the hills on every side
Where even at sunstruck noonday the cool shores
Were green beneath a canopy of leaves,
The lawns, the purling grasses bright with flowers,
And spring the only season of the year.
This was the place wrere Proserpina played;
She plucked white lily and the violet
Which held her mind as in a childish game]
To outmatch all the girls who played with her,
Filling her basket, then the hollow of small breasts
With new picked flowers. As if at one glance, Death
Had caught her up, delighted at his choice,
Had ravished her so quick was her desire.
 25

Pastoral settings also helped justify male violence by setting unrestrained “passion” within a wild yet beautiful
natural setting appropriate for such action. This was especially true of mythological pastoral landscapes where
primeval woods ran with pretty nymphs and rapacious satyrs, centaurs, followers of Pan, Priapus, and Bacchus,
and the gods themselves. In this early history of the world, rape could appear in wild landscapes, set safely at a
double distance, and finding a legitimate place in the cosmos. In the most celebrated Italian Renaissance
pastoral poem, Tasso’s Aminta (1570), Daphne forgets her own experience at the hands of Apollo and advises
the hero to ignore the chaste resistance of the pure nymph, Aminta.

The timid lover is lost. Counsel him to take to another trade since he is such. He who would learn to
love, let him unlearn timidity. Let him dare, demand, beg, importune, and at least steal; and if this be
not enough, let him even carry off his love. Now dost thou not know how a woman is fashioned? She
flees, and fleeing wishes to be taken; she fights, and fighting wishes to be conquered. 61

Pastoral landscapes also made it easier to represent male “passion” as a more familiar, consenting love set in
idyllic surroundings. The more lush and beautiful the setting, the more rape turned into a grand love set within a
fertile cosmos teeming with unbridled desire. With its sense of early human history or of a remote, mythic
nature, pastoral also helped present mythological rape as heroic and divine while heroicizing and essentializing
"feminine" submission and weakness.

A third layer of sanctioning distance was added in pastoral literature where pastoral characters described
pastoral works of art in which rape appeared. Sannazaro used this device twice in his Arcadia (1504), the most
influential pastoral text in the Renaissance. In a festival honoring the pastoral goddess, Pales, the shepherds
describe the painting decorating the temple of Pales, with its cattle, meadows, and musical shepherds.

But what I was pleased to examine more attentively were certain naked Nymphs who were standing,
half-hidden as it were, behind the trunk of a chestnut tree, laughing at a ram … Therewith four Satyrs
with horns on their heads and goatish feet were stealing very softly through a thicket of mastic trees to
seize them from behind. Becoming aware of this, they hurled themselves into flight through the thick
forest … One of them … had clambered up into a hornbeam tree, and from there was defending herself
with a long branch … the others in their fear had thrown themselves into a river and were swimming it
in their flight, and the crystal waves were hiding little or nothing of their white bodies. 62

By observing the white bodies of the Nymphs as they swam, Sannazaro invited his male readers to join the
pursuit. In a later chapter, Sannazaro’s shepherds propose a singing contest with the prize set as a precious
beech cup,

with two beautiful handles of the same wood, which, worked by a cunning artificer, has painted about its
middle the ruddy Priapus, who is most straightly embracing a Nymph and is trying to kiss her against
her will: kindled with wrath at this, her face twisted away, with all her strength she is bent on freeing
herself from him, and with her left hand she is scratching his nose, with the other she plucks his thickly
curling beard. … The libidinous God … strains the lovely Nymph more tightly to him, wholly intent on
accomplishing his purpose. 63

63
ibid, ch. 4, p. 52
 26

As pastoral became a central cultural mode in sixteenth century France, the printmaker, Master LD, made three
engravings of satyrs raping nymphs. In turn, Ronsard’s Bergerie (1565) recycled Sannazaro’s prize for a singing
contest, now a wooden cup carved with a satyr raping a nymph.

Her headdress falls to the ground and her beautiful flowing hair is blown all about in the wind; in
anger, full of fire and courage, the nymph turns her face away from the satyr, and, trying to escape, she
tears with her right hand at his beard and breast, while with her left hand she pummels his nose. But, all
in vain, the satyr always remains supreme. 64

In Sannazaro and Ronsard’s singing contests, masculine poetic victory found the perfect, gendered equivalent in
a pastoral theme. The best poet won not just a precious work of art worthy of his own powerful mind, but an
imaginary trophy of male sexual power as well. The real, Renaissance writers could claim a double artistic
power as the inventors of literary and artistic works which raised rape to the highest levels of mind.

Early modern pastoral also allowed writers and readers to have it both ways by contrasting the good, chaste
shepherd, who restrains his desire to rape the rustic beloved, with the lascivious shepherd whose attempts to
rape the same nymph are thwarted by his virtuous counterpart. By displacing rape onto a bad shepherd or faun,
early modern writers were free to explore rapes and attempted rapes in detail, and even have their virtuous
heroes flirt with rapacious desires before triumphing over them and winning the love of the cold-hearted nymph
in the end.

An Historical Context for Mythological Rape as Male Fantasy: Myth as Two Forms of Masculinity Reconciled

Since the late Middle Ages, male courtly identity shifted from the warrior knight to the refined, civilized
courtier, conversant with fashion, manners, polite conversation, gardens, court dance, music, and art. By the
fourteenth and fifteenth century, the traditional knight was increasingly redefined as a warrior for love who
undertook heroic combats to win the heart of the lady. Valor on the battlefield was inseparable from amorous
desire. This transformation continued in Renaissance and Baroque Europe with the rise of humanism and the
new ideals of education which placed an even greater stress on male courtly mind and refinement. For example,
European noblemen and princes were often painted in armor until the 1620s while kings were apt to be shown
as Mars. After 1620, noblemen were more commonly shown as beautiful and refined gentlemen dressed in silks
and satins, their traditional armor either banished or relegated to the side as a nostalgic still-life. No artist was
more influential in this regard than Van Dyck.

From the very start of chivalry in the late twelfth-century romances of Chrestien de Troyes, the gradual
transformation of the warrior into the courtier brought anxieties about a loss of traditional masculinity and
nostalgia for manly men and for a wilder, less tamed and feminized masculinity. This explains the new
nostalgia at the end of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance for the wild man, now reinterpreted for the first
time as an exemplary lover rather than a savage brute, and the tamed but still powerfully phallic unicorn, seen
since the thirteenth century as an exemplary lover tamed by feminine courtliness. Although Renaissance
humanism made certain medieval chivalric themes outmoded, it developed new classical imagery to express the
continuing nostalgia for a traditional masculinity. In the story of Venus and Adonis, the hero was both a refined
lover and a man’s man, tearing himself fro/m the safe love nest of Venus to fulfill his fatal, manly destiny on
the battlefield of the hunt. If masculine identity from 1200 to 1770 was torn between the traditional warrior and
the “feminized” world of the polite and refined gentleman, the rise of classical imagery offered educated
noblemen a new way to balance off traditional and modern masculinity. In particular, mythological rape
allowed the modern nobleman to be a “feminized” lover, on the one hand, and an all-conquering god or warrior-
hero, on the other.
 27

Needless to say, Renaissance humanist culture eagerly preserved some medieval chivalric examples of the
knight of love as seen in the many, romanticized images of St. George Slaying the Dragon and rescuing the
beautiful princess. Of course, this was itself a pagan subject - Perseus and Andromeda – which the middle ages
preserved within a new, Christian framework and which Renaissance court patronage eagerly embraced in its
original, pagan form.

The Burgher Adoption of Mythological Rape in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

With the spread of print culture in the sixteenth-century, aristocratic themes of rape as heroic love and romantic
passion reached a much wider urban audience. While burgher culture often represented court values as decadent
and licentious, wealthy, social-climbing burghers also bought eagerly into all aspects of court culture from
grand townhouses, villas, and gardens to art collecting, literary tastes, and fashion. This is particularly clear in
the European sonnet which from the early moment of Petrarch (d. 1374) converted many of the famous rapes of
the classical gods - especially Apollo and Daphne, Jupiter and Europe, and Jupiter and Danae - into examples
of the lover’s god-like passion and heroic quest for the beloved. Here is one typical example from Thomas
Lodge’s Phillis, Honored with Pastoral Sonnets, Elegies, and Amorous Delights (1593, sonnet 34),

I would in rich and golden-coloured rain,

With tempting showers in pleasant sort descend
Into fair Phillis' lap, my lovely friend,
When sleep her sense with slumber doth restrain.
I would be changed to a milk-white bull,
When midst the gladsome field she should appear,
By pleasant fineness to surprise my dear,
Whilst from their stalks, she pleasant flowers did pull.
I were content to weary out my pain,
To be Narcissus so she were a spring,
To drown in her those woes my heart do wring,
And more; I wish transformed to remain,
That whilst I thus in pleasure's lap did lie,
I might refresh desire, which else would die.

At the same time burghers appropriated courtly literary values in printed books, they also invested in the
parallel world of inexpensive engravings and smaller paintings as art collecting became fashionable for all those
whom could afford it. The result was the widespread circulation of mythological rape in European literature and
art. What began as a feature of court art was now available to all those eager to display their inner nobility
through intellectual display and cultural patronage.

V. RAPE IN BURGHER CULTURE AS TYRANNY *

Burgher Attacks on Court Power and the Patriarchy of Republican Marriage

Rape could also represent courtly tyranny, as in the Roman republican story of the rape of Lucretia by the son
of the tyrant, Tarquin, which led to the permanent overthrow of the monarchy in early Roman history.65 Livy
 28

imbeds the rape of Lucretia into a richly narrative of early Rome as a virtuous patriarchy under the wise King
Servius. Inflamed by the lust for power of his sister-in-law-, Tullia, prince Tarquin and Tullia murder their
spouses and marry each other. Tarquin then overthrows and murders his father, King Servius, and Tullia
commits the final outrage by driving her carriage over the mutilated body left in the street. Well before Lucretia
makes an appearance, Livy describes Tarquin's corruption in family terms while blaming some of Tarquin's evil
on the young, adulterous, passionate Tullia. Because Roman royal and republican political traditions were
patriarchal, Livy is able to use Tarquin and Tullia's contempt for the sanctity of marriage and paternal authority
to exemplify their equal contempt for Roman law, morality, and custom.

Lucretia appears as the exemplary republican wife who stays at home and works. Rather than banqueting in
courtly dissipation like the other wives of Tarquin's sons, she works late in the night, spinning with her maids,
like Homer's Penelope. Her beauty arouses the murderous lust of Sextus Tarquinius who replicates the character
of his father. She is raped only when he threatens to murder her along with a male slave and place his body in
her bed. After her rape, Lucretia kills herself lest she become a bad example for later Roman women. Thus the
patriarchal honor of her family is at stake though this emerges explicitly only later when the father laments her
rape as more dreadful than her suicide. The family theme continues as Brutus and the father and husband of
Lucretia use her death to arose the citizenry to overthrow Tarquin and put an end to the monarchy. In this
republican patriarchy, woman stay chastely at home and work while men handle all matters of government and
public life.

Livy's story fused political honor and virtue with republican patriarchal gender values. Insofar as Renaissance
court and burgher humanism made these Roman republican gender values central to early modern marriage and
gender roles among nobles and burghers, the rape of the chaste wife, Lucretia, became a key fable in anchoring
Renaissance domestic politics in larger political and moral orders reserving all political authority for men. For
classical and early modern audiences, the story of Lucretia'a rape and suicide worked to affirm and internalize
into the female psyche the most important instrument of patriarchy, the female virtue of chastity, both before
and after marriage.

In a social and political world where female chastity was all important, honorable women had to be confined to
the private sphere for their own good and kept under masculine supervision and protection. In a world where
chastity was the most important female virtue, death could become the noblest response to the loss of chastity.
Even the imminent loss of chastity could justify the killing of the woman at risk as in Livy's later, more extreme
story of the virtuous Roman father who killed his own daughter, Virginia, rather than allow her rape at the
hands of a corrupt official. Less his reader miss the leitmotiv, Livy introduced the fable of Virginia by
comparing it to the earlier story of Lucretia and drawing the same larger political lessons from a world where
chastity was threatened. As with Lucretia, the death of Virginia, even at the hands of her own father, became a
Roman rallying cry to expel the corrupt official and reform the political sphere.

When we recognize the patriarchy at the core of these classical and early modern fables of female chastity, we
can begin to glimpse the common ground between early modern eroticized mythological rapes as princely
images of god-like power, history, and empire, and images of the barbaric rape of Lucretia or attempted rape of
Virignia. Whle the former typified absolutist court culture in early modern Europe, and the latter, early modern
republican culture in burgher centers such as Florence and Amsterdam, the rape of Leda and the rape of
Lucretia were both, in the end, about the importance of male power to all political order and virtue. Women
could be heroically ravished in a mythical world of divine rapists (where female chastity was conveniently
overlooked), or they could be heroically protected and avenged in a republican world. 66 In either case, they
remained profoundly subordinated within a patriarchal political system. And whether raped by gods or tyrants,
they were defined in these narratives as carnal objects whose dangerous physical beauty incited male passions
to the brink of violence.
 29

Revived extensively by Renaissance burgher humanists, the rape of Lucretia appeared as a theme of good
government in burgher republics such as fifteenth century Florence (Botticelli) and 17th century Amsterdam
(Rembrandt). Court culture was largely indifferent to the theme, except for courtly republics such as Venice,
where Titian, Veronese, and others took up the theme. While Titian's painting and Giulio Romano’s print
already compromised the republican message by eroticizing the rape as male fantasy, other sixteenth-century
court artists went further in this direction, especially Cranach. His half-dozen depictions of a nude or bare-
breasted Lucretia stabbing herself transformed Lucretia’s penetrating dagger into a reenactment of the rape
itself, allowing male viewers to admire her virtue even as they vicariously reenacted her rape. Without for the
dagger, these paintings are largely indistinguishable from Cranach's other female nudes, especially his many
depictions of a standing Venus. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Venetian artist, Ficarelli, (Il Riposo), went
still further in a large canvas of the Rape of Lucretia. Lying on a bed placed in the foreground parallel to the
picture place, Lucretia turns to smile teasingly at the male spectator with a “come hither” look even as she is
being raped. Republican virtue is transformed into a male fantasy of gang rape or ménage a trios. 67 Presumably,
all such eroticized Lucretias allowed the courtly male viewer to restore male aristocratic power of a sort in the
midst of a story about its overthrow.

VI. RAPE AS BESTIAL PASSION *

Rape in literature and art was often seen as the embodiment of a lower, animal-like nature, sordid passion or
brutal violence. It was associated with satyrs and centaurs who tried to rape wood nymphs in classical and
humanist literature (even if most such texts treated rape as love). Rape as animal passion appeared more clearly
43
The medallion, by Adriano Fiorentino, is reproduced and discussed in The Currency of Fame, Washington, DC, 199 , pp.
44
This recalls classical literary catalogues of the loves of the gods such as that found in Book XI of the Odyssey, and on other writers
such as Ovid and Claudian. Politian’s poem also looked forward to Carracci’s Farnese Ceiling, a catalogue of the loves of the gods
including most of the myths found in Politian including the three myths which don’t involve rape: Bacchus and Ariadne, Hercules and
Omphale, and Polyphemus and Galatea.

47
Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili trans. Joscelyn Godwin, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999, pp. 458-459
49
This cycle is illustrated in Il Farnese. Arte e Collezionismo, eds. Lucia Fornari Schianchi and Nicola Spinosa, Milan: Electa, 1995,
pp. 271-276.
50
See The Illustrated Bartsch, New York: Abaris Books, 1985, vol. 28, and Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions, Princeton University
Press, 1999.
52
Loeb, pp. 237-239
54
Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Harry Robbins, New York: E. P. Dutton and Co.,
1962,pp. 460-461
55
See Thomas Greene, Besieging the Castle of Ladies, Binghamton, 1995. This very useful discussion suffers from an old school
decorum passing over the whole question of sexual violence as if it were simply too impolite to discuss. Nor is there any discussion of
the violent sexual metaphor used at the end of Romance of the Rose.
56
The One Hundred New Tales, (Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles), translated by Judith Bruskin Diner, New York: Garland, 1990, no.
12, pp. 55-56.

57
Ibid, no. 29, p. 122. The loud cries of the bride announce to the waiting guests the successful deflowering, after which the couple’s
friends enter the bedroom, bringing a ritual drink in celebration. Another wedding story (no. 86, pp. 297-299) is even more graphic.
 30

in the myth of the centaurs who attacked the women at the wedding of the Lapiths and in the story of the
centaur, Nessus, who tried to rape Dejaneira before meeting death at the hands of Hercules. 68

In classical, medieval, and Renaissance poems, the villain often showed his evil nature by raping or trying to
rape. Rape also characterized the worst evil-doers and tyrants such as Livy’s Tarquinus or the sons of Tamora in
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1594) who rape and then dismember the Roman matron, Lavinia. In medieval
and Renaissance romances and epics, the virtuous knight or shepherd generally treated women honorably in
contrast to the evil knight or satyr whose inner corruption was marked by outwards acts including rape. 69

This tradition reminds us that rape always remained a crime in the West. Thus it makes no sense to take literally
heroic images of rape in Renaissance and Baroque art. These depictions don't endorse real rape. On the other
“… the husband, dressed only in his doublet, threw her down and climbed onto the bed, and joined himself as close to his
lady as possible, his lance in his fist, whereupon he presented himself for battle.
When his lance, as stiff as a horn, approached the barricade where the skirmish was supposed to take place, the lady took
it, and as soon as she felt it – for it was hard and thick – she cried out, saying that her shield was not powerful enough to
withstand the blows of such a thick staff. No matter what method our husband tried, he could not find a way to make her
joust with him, for she would not present her shield. … [after 14 days of this, the mother hears the marriage has not been
consummated and assumes the husband is impotent when the bride conceals the truth. She arranges for an annulment and the
real problem emerges in court when the bride confesses.] … “The girl confessed everything and admitted … that she had not
dared to present her shield to her champion out of fear that his lance, which she considered so thick, would kill her…. [The
judge orders a bed prepared in his house] … “enjoining the bride to take the jousting staff boldly in her hand, and put it in
its rightful place. …”.

For an attempted rape with similar language, see ibid., no. 24, p. 98. Martial language for intercourse also appears in ibid, # 9, p. 48; #
15, p. 68; # 16, p. 69; #22, p. 92; #28, pp.119-120; #30, pp. 125-126; #31, p.130; #35, p. 153; #46, p. 189; #49, p. 197; #59, p. 223;
#62, p. 236; #76, p. 274; #91, p. 310; #90, pp. 308-309; #91, pp. 312-313. With this in mind, it is reasonable to interpret the many
jousting scenes alongside scenes of courtly love in late medieval ivories as allegorical images of masculine men “breaking their
lances” for the appreciative ladies who watch.

58
Juan Luis Vives, De Institutione Feminae Christianae, Selected Works of J. L. Vives, ed. C. Fantazzi and C. Matheeussen, trans. C.
Fantazzi, Brill, 1996, ch. 15, pp. 177-179
59
See Jacqueline Musacchio, “The Rape of the Sabine Women on Quattrocento Marriage-Panels,” in Trevor Dean and K. J. P.
Lowe, eds., Marriage in Italy, 1300-1650, Cambridge University Press, , 66-82. Musacchio argues for the Sabines as an
admonition to fertility. In my view, her thesis could be broadened by seeing the Sabines within a humanist discourse of
Florence as a powerful republican empire.

60
Loeb ed., pp. 127-129
61
Aminta, Act 2, Scene 2
62
Trans Ralph Nash, ch. 3, pp. 42-43
64
cited in McGowan, 191
65
Drawing on the story of Lucretia, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1594) revolves around the gang rape and brutal disfigurement
of the innocent Lavinia, daughter of the great Roman general, Titus, by the debauched sons of an evil Goth princess married to a
tyrannical Roman emperor. As in the Lucretia narrative, the rape in Titus Andronicus leads to the eventual overthrow and death of all
of the tyrants and their rapist sons. .
66
Roman history could even glorify the rape of chaste maidens in the case of the Sabines providing the rape was described as a
bridal abduction and quickly absorbed into a chaste, republican conjugal ethos.
67
The painting hangs in the Martini Collection on the third floor of Ca Rezzonico in Venice.
 31

hand, all such heroic and erotic images and stories contributed to an early modern courtly culture tolerating
sexual violence and to the exclusion of women from social, economic, political and institutional power.

The Relative Absence of Rape in Medieval Art and Literature

Medieval art and literature downplayed mythological and historical rape in part because most stories were part
of a "lascivious" paganism where gods displayed a sinful licentiousness and immorality. Classical poetry itself
suffered a serious loss of prestige, especially the amorous poets such as Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, and Nonnos.
With the collapse of Rome as a major urban and political center, the imperial Roman myth of the Rape of the
Sabines lost much of its appeal. Medieval Rome was hailed more as a Christian center for pilgrimage and an
Augustinian City of God rather than a worldly empire. By the late middle ages, its worldly qualities only
confirmed its immorality as a new Babylon set against the City of God. 70

As an extreme image of patriarchy, divine rape was also incompatible with late medieval courtly love. Between
1100 and 1400, medieval patriarchy was softened by the rhetoric of late medieval courtly love with its male
abasement, surrender, feudal homage, and chivalric service extended by the "coarser" man toward the more
refined, delicate, courtly beloved. The primary exception was the rape of Helen which continued in late
medieval culture within a larger, courtly political and historical discourse on Troy. 71

A more critical examination shows how this medieval courtly rhetoric of male servitude betrayed a concealed
patriarchy by defining women as a weaker sex requiring male assistance, protection, and, in the end, control.
Though explicit control was generally omitted, it continued in a disguised form in the celebration of the perfect
courtly woman and her "celestial," "feminine" virtues of chastity, modesty, and humility. For all its masculine
self-abasement and quasi-religious worship of "divine" women, medieval courtly love quietly worked to
imprison upper class women in a golden cage of traditional "female" virtues and fetishized bodies.

Interestingly, rape continued in one area of late medieval courtly literature, not as a heroic image of divine love
taken from classical mythology but rather as a male fantasy projected onto lower class women. In the rustic
setting of the woods, different standards prevailed. In The Art of Courtly Love, the twelfth-century cleric,
Andreas Capellanus, advised courtiers not to love peasant women at all because they were incapable of
experiencing or comprehending refined, spiritual emotions. Something akin to rape was more appropriate.

And if you should, by some chance, fall in love with some of their women, be careful to puff them up with
lots of praise and then ... do not hesitate to take what you seek and to embrace them by force. For you
can hardly soften their outward inflexibility ... unless first you use a little compulsion as a convenient
cure for their shyness. We do not say these things, however, because we want to persuade you to love
such women, but only so that, if through lack of caution you should be driven to love them, you may
know, in brief compass, what to do". 72

In more than a hundred, late medieval, French pastoral poems, knights encounter pretty shepherdesses in the
woods. In most of these poems, the handsome knights "overpower" the rustic females with their noble qualities
so that courtly love masks power relations of class and gender. But in one fifth of these poems, the knight's
wooing is unsuccessful and he resorts to rape to fulfill his "love". 73 As one of these frustrated knights declared,
"Girl, I'll be courtly no more. I have asked you three times; at the fourth, might will make right." 74 In so far as
these simple shepherdesses all conversed intelligently about matters of courtly love, they also served as images
of the courtly lady put in her place by a society pretending to elevate her. 75
 32

68
In Renaissance pastoral such as Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Ambra or Tasso’s Aminta, the chaste love of the shepherd was often
contrasted to the rapacious lust of another suitor. In the Ambra, the chaste shepherd-lover is Laurel, i.e., Lorenzo de’ Medici himself,
whose virtue is defined against the river god, Ombrone who tries to rape the nymph, Ambra..
69
Rape as lust also appears in Bronzino’s tapestry, Joseph and the Wife of Potiphar, where the headboard of Potiphar’s bed is carved
with the Rape of Europa.
70
J. Kevin Coyle, "Augustine and Apocalyptic: Thoughts on the Fall of Rome, the Book of Revelation, and the End of the
World," Florilegium: 1987, 9, 1-34; Charles T. Davis, "Dante, Machiavelli, and Rome," Dante Studies, 1988, 106, 43-60.
71
Marie Tanner, The Last Descendants of Aeneas, Yale, 1993
72
Capellanus, op. cit., 149-150. The thirteenth-century French translation by Drouart La Vache is cited in Kathyrn Gravdal,
"Camouflaging Rape: The Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in the Medieval Pastourelle," Romanic Review, 76, 1985, 361-373,
366, n. 18. For the satire of shepherdesses and peasants in the medieval pastourelle, see the next note and Doss-Quinby, op.
cit.
73
Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Sexual Violence in Medieval French Literature and Law, Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1991
74
"Touse, n'iere mais cortois! Car proié t'ai par trois fois; a la quarte iert force dois," cited in William Paden, "Rape in the
'Pastourelle," Romanic Review, 80, 3, 1989, 331-349. Paden's discussion is a sexist apology for the fictionality of courtly
literary rape. Pastourelle poems featuring courtly language as a tactic of sexual imposition are listed in Gravdal,
"Camouflaging Rape", op. cit., 369, n. 24. For feminist readings of rape in courtly literature, see Gravdal; D. Owen, "Theme
and Variations: Sexual Aggression in Chrétien de Troyes," Forum for Modern Language Studies, 21, 1985, 376-385;
Kenneth Varty, "The Giving and the Withholding of Consent in Late Twelfth-Century French Literature," Reading Medieval
Studies, 12, 1986, 27-49; Leslie Cahoon, "Raping the Rose: Jean de Meun's Reading of Ovid's Amores," Classical and
Modern Literature, 6, 1986, 261-285; and Dietmar Rieger, "Le Motif du viol dans la littérature de la France médiévale: Entre
norme courtoise et réalité courtoise," Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale, 31, 2, 1988, 241-267. I have not seen Gravdal,
Ravishing Maidens: Sexual Violence in Medieval French Literature and Law, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1991.
75
Gravdal, "Camaflaging Rape," op. cit., 371.