May is monster month, so I thought we’d take a break from the pandemic and look at the relationships between gender, monsters and buildings in the Renaissance. I’ll focus on the Hall of the Giants at the Palazzo Te, the subject of my book, Gender, Space and Experience at the Renaissance Court: Performance and Practice at the Palazzo Te. I highly recommend that you take the virtual tour of the Palazzo Te via the Google Arts & Culture app on your phone – the gyroscope will allow you to look up at the ceiling frescoes, rather than just seeing them on a computer screen in front of you.
Renaissance monsters were both Nature’s creation and its antithesis. Mythical creatures such as giants, strangely birthed and deformed humans or animals, and the monstrous races, so-called for their exotic origins and non-Christian religions, defined the outer limits of what it meant to be incorporated and whole, whether that meant being part of the human race or part of the body of Christ. In their role as boundary markers, monsters appear on the margins at the edges of maps or as inhabitants of some distant or unknown realm. For example, the Carta Marina depicts a variety of sea monsters populating the coast off of Scandinavia.
Monstrosity was used to define what it meant to be human, and could also be used to police the borders of gender. In his book of manners, La civil conversazione (1574), the courtier Stefano Guazzo denounces a girl who has the gestures, speech, and manner of a man as “una cosa mostruosa” -a monstrous thing. The monster is therefore the ultimate Other that seeks to establish clear categories of identity, gender, and place even as it defies them. Guazzo’s monster is neither feminine nor masculine. No longer even a person, but a thing, the gender-bending monster cannot be classified by sex or gender. The monster refuses binary distinctions and stable categories: it is both inside and outside, neither masculine nor feminine, and thus it challenges the idea of a unified subject, whether that subject is a person or a building.
Monsters were creatures of the body, and their bodies mattered. The fear and pleasure inspired by the giant’s ability to swallow the beholder whole was a threat to and an awakening of the beholder’s body, for it recalled both the body’s mortality and its material corporeality. With voracious appetites and grotesque bodies that bled, vomited and defecated, the monster’s body was open and unfinished as well as transgressive and unbounded; it was a body always caught up in the act of becoming. The monster’s flesh points to its problematic, unstable body, a body that is often depicted as male, but which is feminine in its sensuous corporeality, its porousness, and its Otherness.
Similarly, Giulio Romano’s Hall of the Giants (1530-35) at the Palazzo Te in Mantua was a space where identity was constructed even as it was ripped asunder; it revealed the subject to be fragmentary and lacking in clear boundaries and definitions. The palace asked beholders to identify with the monstrous and the disorderly, to become the Other. It was also a place of play, wherein normative performances of masculinity and femininity were called forth only to be toyed with, reassembled, and subverted.
Unlike every other room in the Palazzo Te, the decoration of the Hall of the Giants covers every surface. The walls are painted away. Panoramic scenes stretch into seeming infinity, while figures above are steeply foreshortened so that they appear to tower above us. The frescoes are seamless: corners are not visually indicated and the transition from the square base of the room to the sail vault above is difficult to locate. The Renaissance art critic Giorgio Vasari also tells us that the doors and window shutters were painted and that the floor of the room was composed of river stones that continued the painted illusion of the walls.
In the Hall of the Giants the boundary between the physical space of the room and the fictive spaces of the frescoes disappears; beholders become an integral part of the space, and subject and object coalesce. The inhabitant is no longer simply a disinterested viewer, but is an object to be gazed at and acted upon. The room thus transforms the beholder into the beheld. Visitors experience their own imminent destruction, for, as Giorgio Vasari wrote: “Whoever enters that rooms and sees the windows, doors, and other suchlike things all awry, and as it were, on the point of falling, and the mountains and buildings hurtling down, cannot help by fear that everything will fall down upon him.” In the sixteenth century the disquieting effect of the frescoes would have been completed by the rounded stones of the floor. The stones were a continuation of the rocky environment of the frescoes and, like a cobblestone street, they would also have been physically unsettling, creating an uneven surface on which inhabitants could never find equilibrium.
In addition to the visual and physical sensations produced by room, Giulio Romano also designed it as an echo chamber. Visitors can hold covert discussions by whispering in opposite corners of the room (link to a video of my friends whispering in the corners), an auditory trick which caused sixteenth-century commentators to marvel that they could converse “by means of echoes.” When musicians played, the vault doubled the harmonies of the instruments, to the delight of listeners. In addition to this playful aspect of the room’s auditory impact, the room can also sonically assail the visitor. Whenever visitors speak above a whisper the Hall rings with sound (another video). The effect is disquieting and confusing, for individual voices cannot be separated from the din.
The Hall of the Giants is a monstrous space that lures its inhabitants in and consumes them. From the neighboring Chamber of the Emperors beholders can make out pieces of colossal forms that beckon them forward, and once inside the insistent linear perspective of the sail vault pulls the beholder in from the doorway to the center of the room. The room is relatively dark, and light from the fireplace would have flickered in changing patterns across its surface, illuminating some aspects of the beasts within while obscuring others. With the doors and windows closed, a fire blazing in the fireplace, and cacophonous voices rebounding off the walls, the beholder would have been completely immersed in Giulio’s horrific fantasy realm. Giants were notoriously voracious, yet here we have not images of devouring monsters, but a room that devours. The Hall of the Giants invited its visitors to enter the maw of the giant and to willingly become its victims.
The visitor is not only surrounded by the terrifying events on the walls, but an emotional and physical participant in them. The all-encompassing program of the Sala dei Giganti constructs the visitor as the focus of the room’s action and sets up an uneasy relationship between the beholder and the frescoed figures. Jupiter heaves thunderbolts not at the giants on the walls, but at the beholder-cum-giant. The tumult depicted in the frescoes is re-enacted by beholders, who are also physically unbalanced by the stone floor and assailed from all sides by the thunderous sounds of their compatriots.
Surrounded by images of death and destruction, physically unbalanced, smelling the whiff of ashes and brimstone, and assailed by thunderous sound, the beholder becomes one of the giants. The Hall of the Giants presents the bodies of the giants as forever caught up in the process of being made and unmade. The giant’s flesh points to its problematic, unstable body. In asking beholders to identify with the gigantic bodies that engulfed them, the Hall of the Giants revealed that gender was similarly open and flexible.
This blog is an excerpt from the fourth chapter of my book, Gender, Space and Experience at the Renaissance Court: Performance and Practice at the Palazzo Te (Amsterdam University Press, 2019).
The Renaissance Uncensored 
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