Visual imagery and historical invisibility

Antonia Torelli, married to the signore Pier Maria Rossi, remains historically invisible, generally ignored by scholars and obscured by the frescoed image of Rossi's mistress Bianca Pellegrini decorating Torrechiara castle, south of Parma. In this paper, I investigate the networks and spaces of power, at once personal and multilineal, that Torelli accessed, navigated, and created. Antonia's wealth enabled her to exercise considerable authority and to foster remarkable patronage in and around Parma while living between convent and città. Though her construction of camere at San Paolo, for instance, is significant in the context of interventions by the Rossi and Torelli in Parma's ecclesiastical networks, it is of even greater art historical importance when viewed as originating a series of aristocratic apartments at the convent culminating in Giovanna da Piacenza's camera painted by Correggio. Modern constructions of individual subjectivity, together with bourgeois notions of family and heteronormative love, have defined Antonia and Pier Maria as autonomous subjects acting only according to personal desires (read through an efficacious campaign of chivalric imagery); this study, however, underscores Antonia's agency and power even in the face of her ostensible representational absence and historical invisibility

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Bourgeoisie · Context (archaeology · Humanities · Invisibility · Politics · Power (physics · Statue · Subjectivity · History · Law · Philosophy · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies