Arte

Episode 10

Although it isn't an entirely fair or accurate thing to say, this feels very much like The Feminist Episode of Arte. While in part this is due to Arte teaching, or at least encouraging, Lady Sofia to stand up for herself and her daughter, it's really more due to the way that the episode points out some of the failings of the way the nobility handled things like child-rearing during the Renaissance. At least some of their methods and attitudes stemmed from the fact that such a thing as “childhood” as we know it – a separate time of life with its attendant cultural norms like playtime and dedicated literature – didn't truly exist until the Victorian period. Prior to that time, children were basically treated like either property or miniature adults with no consideration made for their development or agency. Naturally this last went double for girls; boys could grow up to have a career and head their own household, but girls went from being their father's property to their husband's – and the age at which that shift could happen varied considerably depending on where in the world you were.

What this means is that Katarina's situation really wasn't all that unusual for the time – as the daughter, she had far less value than her brothers because marrying her off would actually cost her father money in the form of her dowry (although she could have brought a meaningful alliance with another noble family, possibly in a different Italian city state), and was basically a burden on her father's household until that happened. That she's also headstrong and stubborn just complicated matters; as Lord Malta remarks, he's going to have include a very hefty dowry if anyone is going to take her off his hands in the next two-to-four years. (I'm assuming she's about ten years old; if her age was actually said I'm afraid I missed it.) Meanwhile in Katarina's mind, she's been ripped away from her “real” family – the servant Buona and her son Gimo – and forced to live with people who apparently couldn't care less about her despite claiming blood ties to her. She's also still hurting from Buona's death (and that she told Katarina that she wasn't family before her death) and Gimo's refusal to have anything to do with her. In a different show, this storyline could have gone in much darker directions.

Fortunately for us, Katarina not only has her uncle Yuri, who genuinely cares even if he's not sure what ought to be done, and Arte, the busybody with a heart of gold. As Arte takes in Katarina's family situation, she suddenly realizes, for all intents and purposes, her own privilege: as the daughter of parents who obviously loved her and wanted what was best for her (even if her mother didn't agree with her father), she's been able to pursue her passion in a time when if your passion wasn't either “wife and mother” or “nun” you didn't really get to have one. Her time with Leo has also helped her to stand up for herself without fear even more than before, as we see when she tells Malta and Sofia that they're not being good, or even real, parents to Katarina. She takes particular exception to Sofia's treatment of Katarina, possibly because she sees some of her own mother's lack of cooperation in the other woman, but joined with the fact that it honestly doesn't look as if Sofia cares whether or not her daughter is with her.

In all fairness, that's not entirely Sofia's fault. Noblewomen rarely, if ever, interacted much with their children in a “raising them” capacity, and she would have been taught that bearing sons for her husband was her potentially unpleasant duty. (Unpleasant referring to everything from conception to birth in some circles.) With her duty discharged, she would immediately hand the babies off to a wet nurse for those icky, plebian bits of child-rearing so that she could maintain her figure and her wifely duties for her husband. That's what Sofia's been using as her point of reference, while Katarina, who spent most of her life before this point with Buona, knows a form of parenting that is much more hands-on, and that's what she wants from Sofia – and at this point, it looks like that's what Sofia is going to try to give her.

Arte herself really feels more like a catalyst for the story rather than its heroine this week, but that's largely just fine. Next week looks like it may cover a bit of a time skip (her hair is finally growing out), so she may be getting ready to head back to Florence for the final two episodes of the series.

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Arte is currently streaming on Funimation.