The Oldest Way to His Heart--and Cash

History professor Kathryn Norberg set the tone for the conference to follow at UCLA: “Why, you might ask, are we inviting you to spend a day with the Renaissance courtesan? Does a whore deserve so much attention?

“I would argue that she does,” both as a distinctive product of early modern Europe and as a “child of the Renaissance.”

The conference, “The World of the Renaissance Courtesan,” was the second collaboration between the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, which Norberg directs, and the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Both groups were astonished at the success of last year’s “Dressing the Renaissance Woman,” Norberg said, and this year’s event also proved to be a winner, attracting an eclectic academic and community mix--among them Renaissance buffs, Italy buffs, early music buffs.

Following Norberg’s introduction, actresses Sharon King and Marla Lee appeared in a swish of low-cut green velvet and burgundy silk, Renaissance femme fatales with womanly wiles for sale in “The Courtesan’s Apprentice,” a skit (1523) by Pietro Aretino, who may have been the West’s first porn writer.

King, playing “Antonia,” showing novice courtesan “Pippa” the way to a man’s heart--and, presumably, his fortune--instructs that a courtesan’s esteem rises “if she can boast of having driven a man to despair, ruin or insanity.”

“A fox could not equal you at cunning,” says an admiring Pippa.

Aretino’s courtesan is greedy, wrathful, deceitful, razor-tongued and proof that “a pair of bouncy bosoms” can change the course of history.

She is also a bit of a courtesan sendup, as speakers to follow would show.

A courtesan was neither ribald nor vulgar. But just what was she, a sort of early-day “Pretty Woman”?

And why was she singled out for attention by the Center for the Study of Women? Is there a paradox here? Well, Norberg said later, “The courtesan is really a window onto the way in which gender is constructed. She helped define the boundaries of appropriate female behavior.

“She also provides us with insight into how female and male sexualities are organized in this period. She’s the most visible part of women’s history, the less visible being the average married woman.”

The courtesan was no common prostitute, serving to protect the virginity of maidens and to help sustain the patriarchal marital order. Rather, Norberg said, “she could undermine it.”

In Venice, she perfected her art. Margaret Rosenthal, who teaches Italian at USC, pictured the Venetian courtesan as a participant in civic and literary life, a woman of modest birth who, by mimicking noblewomen’s dress and manners, succeeded in “blurring the boundaries.”

She was, Rosenthal said, “a refined, yet sexualized” version of her well-born, neck-ruffed sisters. Heavy on the makeup and high on the heels.

Rosenthal is author of a biography of the most celebrated Italian courtesan, Veronica Franco, who was visited by royalty, painted by Tintoretto and was a published poet.

One poem was to Henry III of France, who spent four days in Venice, making quite an impression on Franco--and, we gather, vice versa. She wrote of Henry coming to her “humble dwelling” and so captivating her that her “inborn strength was overcome.”

A film of Rosenthal’s book, “The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in 16th-Century Venice,” is in the talking stage. And it’s Uma Thurman, not Julia Roberts, that Rosenthal pictures as Veronica. A bit tall, but, “She has the look.”

Norberg’s subject was Ninon de Lenclos. Born in 1623, she was “the first French prostitute worthy of the label ‘courtesan.’ ”

Ninon, whose mother arranged for her to be maintained by a well-to-do man when she was 17, was no beauty, but her charm and wit were legendary. And she knew when to quit, retiring at 38 to live modestly but well until the age of 82. She’s said to have known everyone who was anyone in Paris.

A young Voltaire, taken to visit when he was 13, wrote of Ninon years later, “The best minds of the country and the most elegant society frequented her. . . . No one ever abandoned her but she abandoned lovers quickly and still remained their friend.”

Ninon, Norberg said, “had become the perfect Enlightenment woman.”