© Ashgate Publishing Ltd www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com © Ashgate Publishing Ltd “Divine cuckolds”: Joseph and Vulcan in Renaissance Art and Literature 1 Francesca Alberti In Renaissance visual culture, which is heavily indebted to both Christian tradition and classical mythology, two igures incarnate the paradigm of husbands. One is Joseph, who took the young Virgin Mary as his spouse to fulill God’s will. 2 The other is Vulcan, who was given Venus as a wife in recognition of his skill as a blacksmith. While both of these couples are frequently referred to in European art and literature with reference to marriage as a social institution (at least as it was understood in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance), the two igures of husbands have rarely been compared. Yet both these husbands have a lot in common: they were usually represented as unatractive and old while their wives were represented as ideals of female beauty and perfection in both Christian and pagan traditions. 3 Both husbands were thus the less fortunate halves of mismatched couples, according to the logic of contemporary sexual culture, and therefore risked the humiliation of conjugal inidelity on the part of their wives: they risked being cuckolded. This essay examines the two igures separately, starting with Joseph and moving on to Vulcan, in order to demonstrate how both husbands were, in fact, oten represented as cuckolds. This comparative analysis will also point out the speciic functions and signiicance of such visual mockery, and will conclude with an examination of Tintoreto’s Vulcan Surprising Venus and Mars from a new perspective. Joseph as a Figure of Ridicule The feast of Saint Joseph irst appeared in the Roman breviary in 1480 under Pope Sixtus IV, although it was only oicially established by Pope Gregory XV in 1621. 4 Since there is not much information about Joseph in the oicial Gospels, for a long time artists were free to ind inspiration in apocryphal sources and in popular traditions, such as Miracle Plays. 5 Art historians 7 From Sara F. Matthews-Grieco (ed.), Cuckoldry, Impotence and Adultery in Europe (15th–17th century), published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472414397 © Francesca Alberti (2014)