If you want a piece of art to condemn misogyny, an Italian man is probably not the best person to commission. Italy could be, after all, a candidate for street harassment capital of the world (I used to live there, and was once loudly solicited by two men driving a hearse – complete with coffin), and Silvio “bunga bunga” Berlusconi did nothing to dispel this image. Now Maestà Sofferente (Suffering Majesty), a sculpture new to Milan’s central square, has been criticised by feminists, showing as it does a supine naked female body, punctured by arrows, chained to a ball, and surrounded by wild animals. Yes, really.
The work, by Gaetano Pesce, is based on one of his corporeal armchair designs of the late 1960s. The woman’s arms are the chair’s arms, the neck support looks like the breasts; – but you don’t need me to point it out when it’s so distastefully obvious. “The artist conceives of women as pieces of interior decoration,” Cristina Donati Meyer told the Times. She had placed stickers on the sculpture reading “from women as an object, to women as a sofa”.
Such fetishisation is strikingly passé, but then Italy can sometimes feel that way, too. In addition to street harassment, it has among the highest femicide rates in Europe, with 149 women murdered in 2016. Until the 1970s, Italian women were often forced to marry their rapists. The criminal code only removed the practice of exonerating rapists who married their victims in 1981. Things are improving, but slowly.
In some ways, the sculpture is hilariously appropriate, occupying the square in front of Milan’s gigantic cathedral. Is it intended as a damning commentary on the Catholic church’s role in the subjugation of women? Probably not, but its juxtaposition exposes the latent hypocrisies at play when it comes to women’s rights in this religious country.
Pleasingly, Italian feminists have been exercising their right to protest against the sculpture, but its existence remains a saddening sign of yet another missed opportunity for a female artist to create something truly powerful. The fact that this has appeared in the middle of the Milan furniture fair just adds insult to injury.
• This article was amended on 11 April 2019 to correct the description of the sculpture’s position from “prone” to “supine”.
