Almost 500 years ago, in 1518 or 1519, the Flemish artist Bernard van Orley sat down to paint a portrait of Margaret of Austria, one of the most powerful women in Renaissance Europe. At age 3, she was queen of France. At 27, she became regent of the Netherlands, and Van Orley painted Margaret as a sturdy, composed politician in a portrait that would be copied across Europe.
In the portrait, her lips are pursed, her hands are poised, a rosary between two fingers. She squints, as if analyzing something. On her head is a supple white wimple. It arches from the crown of her head and encloses her ears and neck; it expresses her fidelity to her late husband and, what's more, her claim to his political authority. All the validity of her rule lies in that veil. It is piety, and it is power, the New York Times reported.
Today, the Bourg-en-Bresse region, where Margaret is buried in a palatial mausoleum, hosts an exhibition themed "Veiled and Unveiled" that steps back from France's contemporary obsession with Muslim women's dress to consider the many uses of head coverings in public and private life.
The exhibition features more than 100 works of art, from classical antiquity to the present. It reveals how the veil can serve contrasting and sometimes contradictory purposes, whether to mourn or to seduce, to protect one's body or to signify one's allegiances.
The veil can be religious or secular, a marker of patriarchal dominance or individual distinction. Above all, the show insists that the veil is not at all a foreign incursion into Europe, a mistake made by both serious writers like Michel Houellebecq and by a motley collection of populists, extremists and racists.
The exhibition also highlights that the veil is omnipresent in the art and literature of Europe and the Mediterranean and rediscovering its place in antiquity and in all three major Western religions might take a bit of the sulfur out of this country's fixation on head scarves.
Since 1905, France has been an officially secular country, and it forbids all public employees from wearing outward signs of religiosity. But the veil in particular has especially exercised France since 1989, when three children were barred from attending middle school after refusing to take off their hijabs, setting off months of anguished, often hysterical public debate.
Successive French governments passed two laws: one from 2004 that forbids the veil, and another in 2010 banning full-face coverings such as the niqab in all public spaces.
And the freak outs keep coming, most recently during a heat wave in France this week.
After a group of women defied the city's ban on the hooded "burkini" bathing suit at a community pool, a government minister for equality said the burkini sends a political message that says, "Cover yourself up."
