VETULAE offered a holistic and comparative view of ideas and materializations of the ageing female body in 15th century Florence at the intersection of art, art theory and natural history. In recent decades, studies on the biological, economic, social and cultural aspects of ageing have proliferated as a result of ongoing debates on demographic ageing and its impact on our societies. This project provides historical depth to this important scientific and societal challenge and seeks to enrich the discussion with new perspectives. VETULAE thus aimed to influence the way we think about women's ageing by anchoring present and future experiences in historical precedents. The wealth and historical relevance of pictorial and sculptural works produced in fifteenth-century Florence, and the proliferation of writings on art, medicine and anatomy in the same cultural milieu, provided an exceptionally coherent corpus for the study of cultural constructions of ageing at the threshold between the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period.
The project was designed to achieve the following specific objectives:
O1. To collect a corpus of pictorial and sculptural works depicting different facets of women’s ageing and old age produced in Florence and its environs during the 15th century, analyzing the extent to which older women were present and visible in artworks displayed in both public and private spaces, and assessing whether this varied in different contexts;
O2. To compare cultural constructions of women's ageing with those of men, contrasting the ideas disseminated in scientific and artistic milieus;
O3. To reflect on the presumed gender bias in relation to ageing among fifteenth-century physicians, artists, writers and cultural promoters, and to assess how this may have influenced their beliefs about women's bodies;
O4. To re-write the gendered ageing body in the history of pre-modern Europe, addressing the under-appreciated but crucial role of the intersection between natural history and the visual arts in shaping cultural constructions of gender and age;
O5. To inscribe pre-modern ideas of women’s ageing into the longue durée and assess their impact on contemporary culture. VETULAE’s ultimate aim was to draw the attention of the wider public to how tropes rooted in the pre-modern period are still active today, in order to contribute to a better understanding and denaturalization of culturally constructed beliefs about women's ageing bodies and older women's physical appearance.
