Images of Rape: The 'Heroic' Tradition and its Alternatives

by Diane Wolfthal

Images of Rape: The "Heroic" Tradition and its Alternatives is the first in-depth exploration of rape as it has been portrayed in Western art from the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries. Examining the full range of representations, from those that glorify rape to those that condemn it, Diane Wolfthal illuminates the complex web of attitudes toward sexual violence that existed in the medieval and early modern society. She makes her case using a range of visual documentation, including picture Bibles, law treatises, justice paintings, war prints, and the manuscripts of Christine de Pizan.

Genres: History, Art, Nonfiction

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 1999

About the author

Diane Wolfthal is the David and Caroline Minter Chair in the Humanities at Rice University.

Reviews

[Roman Clodia]

This is a scholarly book which is also accessible to the non art historian. Wolfthal takes a fascinating look at representations of rape from classical Greece and Rome, through the Christianising of late antiquity and the middle ages, and onto the rational early modern period and later. While she focuses mostly on art images, she doesn't ignore the literary representations they are frequently based on, especially Greek and Roman myth.

Like other feminist scholars she deftly exposes the way academia has traditionally sanitised rape, submerging the implicit violence beneath a heroising and idealising of the rape scenario, making us as viewers complicit with the act of sexual aggression.

However this is in no way a reactionary or emotional book: Wolfthal is measured, reasoned and sophisticated in her approach. Without lessening the beauty of the art she is analysing, she yet nuances it and forces us to think about its ideological function.

I'm more used to working with literary texts than artistic images and approached this book with some trepidation, but was very quickly reassured. Both disturbing and oddly exhilarating, this book sent me back to my texts with plenty to think about and explore.

[Ashley the Magnificent™]

Read this book in college as research for an Art History paper on Women's Depictions in Art, or some crap like that. Great book. Real head-turner on the shelf, too :)