Aphrodite's Girdle & Athena's Shawl

or the Search for the Link Between Women and
Draped Fabric in Venetian Art and Culture

Venetian artists from the very beginning made three-dimensional site-specific, installation art whose power is often lost when it is transplanted as a two-dimensional display on a museum wall. In their original sites in confraternities, palaces, and churches, Venetian angels, Madonnas, sibyls, prophets, and saints drip from ceilings, reach out from walls, and engulf viewers as they walk by. In much the same way Venetian housewives have appropriated the skies and open air in order to write their own stories.
Don Paolo	La Madonna della Biancheria
On the working-class island of the Giudecca in Venice, a burly priest in a tee shirt and jeans opens up the iron grillework which shields a wall altar. He reveals a painting of the Virgin Mary who floats over lines of laundry which connect the same apartment buildings which flank the altar. The priest is Don Paolo. Once a year at this altar he conducts a ceremony to honor the Madonna of the Laundry. What is the Venetian connection between women and sacred fabric? There is a language of fabric in Mediterranean and Venetian art and culture. How can we decode its meaning? There are three major conventions involving women and draped fabric which we can trace back to their archaic European roots: the goddess and mantle theme, the dangling string theme, and the omega shawl motif.

La Madonna della        Misericordia

La Madonna dei Carmini

Europa and the Bull

All images on these pages are copyright © 1999 by Holly Smith Pedlosky

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