İtalya’da kadın sorunu üzerine yazan öncü bir isim olan Giulia Bigolina, yakın zamanda

The pioneering figure to write on the woman question in Italy, Giulia Bigolina is the recently unearthed author of a prose romance Urania, the Story of a Young Woman’s Love (1552). She is a pivotal author regarding the protofeminist literature in the early modern Italy. In the proem to the work, Bigolina depicts a scene in which her authorial persona is visited by a homunculus to urge her to produce a literary work contrary to her initial decision to passively pose for a painting in front of an artist. Likewise, the romance section focuses on the protagonist Urania who turns out to be a virtuous intellectual dealing with literature. Contrariwise, the Duchess of Calabria, who serves as a foil to Urania, has herself painted semi-nude. It is highly possible that Bigolina identifies Urania and the Duchess with the goddess Venus because the famous artist Titian employs Venus in many of his paintings such as “Venus of Urbino” and “Sacred and Profane Love” and it is known that they were contemporaries, exchanged letters, and Bigolina was familiar with his paintings. The dual representation of Aphrodite Urania and Aphrodite Pandemos refers to her double nature in the classical mythology and in the texts such as Plato’s Symposium. Within this framework, this study argues that Bigolina employs the myth of twin Venuses as a medium to construct the protofeminist concern of her work through her identification of Urania and the Duchess with them in that their juxtaposing positioning enables her to criticise objectification of women then-current in the art of painting, to encourage them to prioritise intellectual cultivation over physical beauty and to be producers of literature.