6 - Architecture of the utopian body: the blasons of Marot and Ronsard

Summary

The Renaissance genre of the blason anatomique constructs an architecture of love derived from the morphology of the female body. This architecture of the body produces a poetics of detail: the construction is composed of fragmentary elements organized in enumerative groups. The image of the woman is represented by a series of part objects whose variety imposes an anatomically fragmented representation. In most cases the poet's encomium, ironic or not, is addressed to those parts of the body that are most noble according to Ficinian doctrine (eyes, ears, eyebrows), or to those considered most sensual within the satiric tradition (breasts, genitals, buttocks, thighs). The blasonneur's work is that of a homo faber, reducing the female body to strokes of the pen through the creation of a textual pointillism invoking precious metals as well as more prosaic objects. The text functions as a descriptive catalogue; it imitates, and indeed becomes, a construction, one that reveals, through its mass of words, the hand of a poet–architect. The blasonneur becomes the virtuoso of a corporeal rhetoric which translates the sublime joy of a writing project, producing a series of verbal monuments dedicated to becoming privileged loci of physical celebration.

In the blason anatomique the female body becomes consubstantial with the body of writing; the representation of the woman depicts that of the poet's imaginary projection of the reality of his desire onto an object that is narcissistically subjectivized.