VERONICA FRANCO: THE LIFE OF A COURTESAN IN RENAISSANCE

VENICE AND HER INFLUENCE ON THE ANALYSIS OF FEMALE

PORTRAITURE

Many famous artists depicted the lives and beauty of the courtesans including Carpaccio, Giacomo Franco, Titian, Giorgione, Bordone, and Parrhasio. However, because of

what we know about Franco’s life, it is possible that scholars are merely assuming that the unknown sitters in

the works of the above artists are courtesans. I will discuss what it is that was written about Franco and why that has

led scholars to label most of the Venetian female portraiture as depicting courtesans.

THESIS

TWO VENETIAN LADIES BY: CARPACCIO

• Junkerman, Anne Christine. Bellissima Donna: An Interdisciplinary Study of Venetian Sensuous Half-Length Images of the Early

Sixteenth Century. Ann Arbor: UMI Dissertation Services, 1988• Lawner, Lynne. Lives of the Courtesans: Portraits of the Renaissance.

New York: Rizzoli International Publications Inc., 1987. • Rogers, Mary. “Sonnets on female portraits from Renaissance North

Italy.” Word and Image 2, no. 4 (October- November 1986): 291-305. • Romano, Dennis. "Gender and the Urban Geography of Renaissance

Venice.” Journal of Social History 23, no. 2 (Winter 1989): 339-348. http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=187e6a7f-f94f-448d-b8d8-

baeb110f471e (accessed October 2, 2011).• Rosenthal, Margaret F. The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco,

Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth- Century Venice. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992

BIBLIOGRAPHIES