Introduction

This chapter focuses on the large transparent orb resting on the lap of the central female figure in Titian's Allegory of Marriage (Plate 7). I start with a few hypotheses that guide my reading of the painting. First, I follow some earlier claims that the work represents a ritual of divination: to be more precise that the painting is a rendering of the magical art of scrying or crystal gazing. Erwin Panofsky proposed that the Allegory relates to procreation, sex, and the precarious state of the female pregnant body. Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub maintained that the couple in the Allegory was trying to foretell the future, probably to find out the shape, the sex, or fate of their child (or of some other event). Generally, people engaged in such rituals to foretell the future or to discover an unknown past. Yet, as opposed to Panofsky and Hartlaub, my observations suggest a highly ambivalent mode of pictorial representation of such rituals and its ramifications for pregnancy and the shape and character of a future child in a maternal womb. (In particular, I suggest that the orb in the Allegory is a highly aesthetic representation of the creative powers attendant on a maternal womb.)

As evidence for these suggestions, I highlight some of the salient philosophical, magic/theological, medical, political, and gendered aspects that form the backdrop to crystallomancy and its relationship to similar divinatory tools, such as mirrors, reflecting surfaces, and water and the relationship between these rituals and the bodies of pregnant women, who often acted as scryers.