To introduce to scholarly conversation a significant sixteenth-century text that had little circulation and remained unpublished until 2002 (Finucci, 2002 and 2005; Nissen, 2004) is a daunting challenge. With his book Kissing the Wild Woman: Concepts of Art, Beauty, and the Italian Prose Romance in Giulia Bigolina’s Urania, Christopher Nissen admirably rises to this challenge, identifying and analyzing several important conversations in which Bigolina’s prose romance might have played (and might still play) a central role. Nissen offers to the modern reader of Bigolina’s Urania a comprehensive and erudite perspective on this author’s place in literary history with respect to genre, gender, rhetoric, and issues of visual-literary representation. He shows Bigolina to be deeply learned in the history of ideas and in questions of art and literature from antiquity to her own time. In particular, Nissen brings warranted attention to Bigolina’s critique of objectified female beauty.

In the introduction to her romance, Bigolina’s authorial persona writes that first, she had thought of having her portrait painted by an artist, but then was inspired by her better judgment, “Giudicio,” to represent her self actively and creatively in writing. Bigolina’s critique of portraiture in favor of literary representation is further thematized in the body of the romance, in which we see the adverse effects of objectified female beauty in painting. For example, in an effort to seduce Prince Giufredi, the Duchess of Calabria acquiesces to be painted as Venus in the Judgment of Paris, but this effort fails; her objectified beauty only causes the prince to feel lust for a different woman. In contrast, the character Urania dresses as a man and speaks from a position of male authority about love; eschewing representation in painting, Urania ultimately succeeds in winning her heart’s desire, Fabio.

The fact that Bigolina rejected the passive objectification of female beauty in painting, thereby refuting a norm by which representations of women were circulated, may have been one factor in the subsequent lack of circulation of her creative self-representation. Indeed, Nissen’s book provides ample material to support our understanding of Urania as an important voice in a historical antagonism for control over representation. By virtue of his research, we can imagine Bigolina’s insistence on creative self-representation in writing as part of a struggle over gender relations that informed the construction of a literary tradition, even as her particular voice was excluded. Nissen shows how, in the work of Urania, a sixteenth-century potential for refuting gender norms, fallen silent for centuries, might still be recuperated today and introduced into literary history to produce a different historical outcome.

Nissen astutely points to the paragone or the comparison between painting and literature as one pertinent context for understanding Urania. This topos in the history of ideas, richly mapped by Nissen from the Horatian ut pictura poesis (102) to Aretino’s notion of complementarity as he “revell[ed] in his own ability as a writer to give voice to Titian’s portraits” (75), might be further analyzed to include the work of scholars such as Armando Petrucci, I. J. Gelb, M. T. Clanchy, and John Sparrow, who have studied the practice of handwriting as a part of the history of art. Just as Nissen notes Aretino’s “close association between the power of the pen (penna) and that of the paintbrush (pennello)” (75), we might also see Bigolina’s affirmation of writing over portraiture as an effort to conserve the meaning of writing as an individual figurative practice. As we recuperate texts like Bigolina’s Urania, which have languished for centuries in manuscript form without the benefit of reproduction and circulation, we might investigate how such texts represent not only phonetic sounds and conceptual-historical referents but also the hands of their authors. Perhaps Bigolina’s self-creation in writing also included this intention of representing the work of her hand instead of an image of her body.

There are many more aspects of Nissen’s book that are worthy of praise: his erudite attention to the romance and novella traditions, to the rhetoric of description and ekphrasis, to Renaissance defenses of women, to the dynamic of seeing and being seen, and to the literary sources for Bigolina’s “Wild Woman,” to name just a few. This is a book that will be useful to scholars in all fields whose research depends on historicizing and theorizing genre, gender, and representation.