Notes on the Case of Caterina Sforza

Lorenzo di Credi: Portrait of Caterina Sforza 

 (c. 1481-83)

 
Se io potessi scrivere tutto, farei stupire il mondo!

 

 

I. 

 

Nietzsche's critique of nineteenth-century feminism is a simple one: it marks a loss of style and a surrender of intelligence:

 

"There is stupidity in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, of which a real woman - who is always a clever woman - would have to be ashamed from the very heart." [1]  

 

Often mistakenly thought of as a misogynist, Nietzsche seemed to have a thing for strong, smart, stylish, women who do not aspire to become more like men or demand equality, but affirm themselves as singular beings in their own right. 

 

Women, for example, like Lou Andreas-Salomé, who not only charmed Nietzsche to the extent that he asked for her hand in marriage, but also captivated Rilke and Freud. And women like Caterina Sforza, about whom I wish to speak here, with particular reference to an astonishing incident mentioned by commentators including Machiavelli and Valentine de Saint-Point ...

 

 

II. 

 

Caterina Sforza (1463-1509) was an Italian noblewoman, raised in the refined Milanese court who, from an early age, was noted for her bold and impetuous nature. For whilst, like her siblings, she received a classical education from her tutors, her grandmother encouraged Caterina to also take inspiration from the notorious condottierri from whom she was descended. 

 

A skilled huntress, Caterina also loved to dance, conduct experiments in alchemy, and involve herself in the complicated - and violent - politics of her day. Invariably, this brought the independent-minded and free-spirited woman into conflict with some powerful men, including Cesare Borgia, who at one time had her imprisoned.     

 

Following her marriage to Girolamo Riario, Catarina went to live in Rome with her husband, who served his uncle, the Pope. Upon her arrival, in May 1477, the fourteen-year-old Caterina found the city buzzing with cultural fervour and political intrigue; a city in which material interests and the desire for power far exceeeded spiritual matters.

 

Although Caterina's husband told her not meddle in affairs of state, thanks to her extroverted and sociable character she quickly integrated into aristocratic Roman society, becoming much admired for her beauty and highly respected for her intelligence. Before long, this young woman became an influential intermediary between Rome and other Italian courts, particularly Milan.   

 

Unfortunately, following the death of Sixtus IV, in 1484, the lives of Caterina and her husband were thrown into turmoil ... Riots and rebellions spread throughout Rome and their home, the Palazzo Orsini, was looted and almost destroyed. 

 

Then, worse, in 1488, Girolamo was killed and Caterina found herself at the mercy of her enemies, which leads us to the incident that I wanted to discuss in particular ...

III.

 

According to legend, Caterina was besieged inside a fortress and when her enemies threatened the lives of her children whom they held captive, she stood on the walls, exposed her lower body and, pointing to her cunt, cried: Do it! Kill them in front of me if you want to! I have what's needed to make more! 

 

Now, true or not, this is an astonishing act not only of defiance, but of what Baudrillard terms seduction. 

 

For the effect of this genital display was to render her enemies uncertain of how to respond. Not knowing how to reply, or what to do, they backed down and backed away, sparing her children. Caterina had effectively stripped them of their power and agency, reducing them to impotence. Baudrillard also describes this as the revenge of the object. 

 

Caterina was one of the few women discussed at length by Machiavelli in his writings: if he only briefly mentioned this act of genital defiance in The Prince, he recounted the story at some length and with a certain vulgar relish, in both his Discourses on Livy and Florentine Histories.   

 

And, four centuries later, Valentine de Saint-Point also recalls the story in her Manifesto della Donna futurista (1912) [2]. 

Arguably, what this demonstrates is that prior to our epilated culture of feminism, digital pornography, and labiaplasty, when a woman lifted up her skirt and displayed her cunt, it invoked profound horror in male onlookers. Indeed, even gods, demons and insects were disconcerted by this apotropaic act of magical indecency.

      

Sadly, however, the cunt has now been rendered null and void having lost much of its monstrous beauty and magical capacity. Women have been fatally exposed in the name of sexual emancipation and and close-up images of their exposure are today endlessly circulated via the media; an act of violent and systematic exorcism [3]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), Pt. VII, §239.       

      Nietzsche continues in this important section for an understnding of his sexual politics: "That in woman which inspires respect and fundamentally fear is her nature, which is more 'natural' than that of the man, her genuine cunning, her beast-of-prey suppleness, the tiger's claws beneath the glove [...]." I don't know if Nietzsche was thinking of any woman in particular here, but it's interesting to note that Caterina Sforza was nicknamed La Tigre.   

 

[2] See the recent post on Valentine de Saint-Point and her two Futurist manifestos: click here.

 

[3] I'm self-plagiarising here from an earlier post on Torpedo the Ark, entitled Anasyrma: Upskirt Politics and Vulva Activism (15 Nov 2013): click here. 

 

Readers interested in knowing more about the heroic women of the Renaissance - rulers, philosophers, artists, saints, consorts, courtesans, etc. - might like the following site on Tumblr: Fuck Yeah, Renaissance Women! Several posts on Caterina Sforza can be found here.

 

For a (kind of) follow up post re: vulva activism and the case of Yulia Tsvetkova, click here. 

 

Every Woman Adores a Futurist: On the Manifestos of Valentine de Saint-Point

Valentine de Saint-Point by Rossana Borzelli (2016)

Acrylic and oil on metal (250 x 125 cm)

singulart.com

 

 

When one thinks of Futurism, one automatically thinks of machines and machismo. For Futurism is the technophallic art movement par excellence; an Italian boy's club obsessed with speed, dynamism, virility, and violence; one which prides itself on its anti-feminism and proto-fascism. 

 

Indeed, Marinetti even made contempt for women - along with worship of war - one of Futurism's founding principles in his Manifesto of 1909, describing them as a form of inert matter (i.e., passive lumps of flesh).  

 

Despite this, there were women attracted to and associated with Futurism; one of whom - Valentine de Saint-Point - even wrote two manifestos of her own ...

 

 

Manifesto della Donna futurista (1912) [1]

Responding directly to Marinetti's misogyny, Saint-Point published her Manifesto della Donna futurista in which she amusingly insists, amongst other things, that men and women are equal - but equally mediocre and thus equally deserving of contempt:

 

"Humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority of men. They are all equal. They all merit the same scorn." 

 

Later in the text, she challenges the binary idea of two separate sexes; there are, rather, just exceptional individuals, born from within strong cultures, who possess both masculine and feminine traits:

 

"It is absurd to divide humanity into men and women. It is composed only of femininity and masculinity. Every superman, every hero, no matter how epic, how much of a genius, or how powerful, is the prodigious expression of a race and an epoch only because he is composed at once of feminine and masculine elements, of femininity and masculinity: that is, a complete being." 

  

Unfortunately, Saint-Point doesn't show fidelity with her own argument; she repeatedly falls back into the language of men and women and it's pretty clear that what she values most are traits and values traditionally associated with the fomer, such as virility, for example, perhaps the key term of her manifesto: 

 

"What is most lacking in women as in men is virility. That is why Futurism, even with all its exaggerations, is right. To restore some virility to our races so benumbed in femininity, we have to train them in virility even to the point of brute animality."

 

Every woman, she insists, "ought to possess not only feminine virtues but virile ones, without which she is just a female". Once they've been made to man-up as it were - and perhaps even grow a pair - then woman are capable of waging war even more ferociously than men - remember the Amazons! 

 

Saint-Point wants warrior women; not wise or virtuous women, or women who value peace and dream of healing the world. She also wants women who surrender to lust - the second great term of her Futuristic vocabulary - and rediscover their instinctive cruelty. We should stop preaching spiritual justice to women in the name of a mistaken feminism; the latter is an error that undermines their instincts and fertility, falsifying their primordial fatality.

 

The new woman - the Futurist woman - the woman who recognises sentiment as a weakness, will be a sensual woman who understands that lust is the basis of her strength; a bit like the prostitute who incites her illicit lovers to express their darkest desires. 

 

Saint-Point ends her manifesto with the following rallying cry:

 

"Woman [...] go back to your sublime instinct, to violence, to cruelty [...] incite your sons and your men to surpass themselves. You are the ones who make them. You have all power over them. You owe humanity its heroes. Make them!" 

 

Saint-Point would develop her (cod-Nietzschean) philosophy in a second manifesto - the Futurist Manifesto of Lust - published a year later ...

 

 

Manifesto futurista della Lussuria (1913) [2]

 

Conceived as a reply to those critics who had laughed at her earlier manifesto, Saint-Point here expands upon her erotic theory of lust as an "essential part of life's dynamism" and, indeed, as a virtue that drives individuals towards self-overcoming. 

 

For lust is not just a desire for pleasure or to know the body of another. Lust, says Saint-Point, is also the "expression of a being projected beyond itself [...] the joyous pain of a flowering". And fucking - or the union of flesh, as she calls it - is the "sensory and sensual synthesis that leads to the greatest liberation of spirit". 

 

This being the case, if a strong man is to realise his full spiritual potential, then he must realise also his full carnal potential and deny himself nothing when it comes to the pleasures of the flesh: the warrior is fully justified in enjoying the spoils of war and to show moral restraint is a sign of weakness. In other words, rape is both a normal and natural part of warfare; the recreation of life after the slaughter of the battlefield.     

 

And what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Or, in this case, the (male) artist, who has the same desires and same need for pleasure as the warrior; artists should feel no shame in raping their models once the latter have finished sitting for them. As Saint-Point writes - in capitals, just so we hear loud and clear what she's saying:

 

"ART AND WAR ARE THE GREAT MANIFESTATIONS OF SENSUALITY; LUST IS THEIR FLOWER [and] LUST EXCITES ENERGY AND RELEASES STRENGTH."

Lust, also, it seems, makes the world go round; including the world of business, finance, and media; "it drives the great men of business who run the banks, the press, and international trade to increase their wealth". 

 

Essentially, lust is Saint-Point's term for what Nietzsche calls the will to power and desires of all kinds - "whether they are considered normal or abnormal" - are always the supreme spur to action and the most magnificent expressions of our wellbeing.   

Again echoing Nietzsche, Saint-Point calls for the destruction of Christian morality, which considers lust a sin or vice; something shameful to be denied: "We must stop despising desire, disguising it in the pitiful clothes of old and sterile sentimentality" and we must, she says, reject everything associated with romantic love: "counting daisy petals, moonlight duets, heavy endearments, false hypocritical modesty". 

 

Whenever beings - of whatever sex - are drawn together by physical attraction, we should let them "dare to express their desires, the inclinations of their bodies" and transform lust into an erotic (albeit sometimes brutal) art form that allows us to bring sex to full conscious realisation. 

 

In other words, lust must be guided by will, not just instinct and intuition, so that in this way the joys of fucking will result in guaranteed orgasm for both parties. 

 

One can't help wondering if Saint-Point isn't directing her remarks here to a lover who has sadly failed to excite her in the way she hoped ...? And one also can't help wondering quite how seriously she expects us to take what she writes, either here or in her earlier manifesto; for just twelve months later she would declare: 

 

'I am not a Futurist and never have been. I do not belong to any school.'       

 

Notes

 

[1] Valentine de Saint Point, The Manifesto of [the] Futurist Woman (Response to F. T. Marinetti), trans. Bruce Sterling (2008): click here. 

      All quotes are taken from this translation available on italianfuturism.org (an excellent website established by Jessica Palmieri, in 2007, in order to encourage the exchange of ideas and disseinate information about Italian Futurism).

 

[2] Valentine de Saint-Point, Futurist Manifesto of Lust, trans. J. H. Higgit (1973): click here.

      Again, all quotes are taken from this translation available on italianfuturism.com

 

 

Readers interested in this topic might like to see a short essay by Adrien Sina and Sarah Wilson, 'Action féminine: Valentine de Saint-Point', in Tate Etc., issue 16 (Summer 2009): click here to read online.