The Bearded Woman of Abruzzi: a 17th-century hero of gender fluidity
Jonathan Jones writes about an amazing 17th century painting by the Neapolitan artist Jusepe de Ribera in The Guardian. The painting depicts Magdalena Ventura, her husband and child.
We don’t know whether she was intersex or suffered from some kind of hormonal disorder. But her masculine features and her beard made her a “great wonder of nature”, according to the inscription.
Jonathan Jones is right when he writes that de Ribera “turned her from a freak into an almost supernaturally powerful assertion of individuality.” He gives her dignity.
Jones is wrong, however, when he indicates that 17th century thinking gave no room for gender variation or “gender revolution”. We have quite a few reports from the period of women who miraculously transformed into men (most likely intersex people), and the dominant “sciences” of the time, humorology and astrology, allowed for diversity as regards gender traits, temperament and abilities.
That didn’t stop people from considering Magdalena a freak, however.
More about Jusepe de Ribera and the painting here.
Here’s de Ribera’s inscription:
Look, a great miracle of nature. Magdalena Ventura from the town of Accumulus in Samnium, in the vulgar tongue Abruzzo in the Kingdom of Naples, aged 52 and what is unusual is when she was in her 37th year she began to go through puberty and thus a full growth of beard appeared such that it seems rather that of a bearded gentleman than a woman who had previously lost three sons whom she had borne to her husband, Felici de Amici, whom you see next to her. Joseph de Ribera, a Spaniard, marked by the cross of Christ, a second Apelles of his own time, by order of Duke Ferdinand II of Alcalá, Viceroy at Naples, depicted in a marvelously lifelike way. 17th February 1631.