Maya Negri, the thirty-nine-year-old painter and illustrator from Milan, Italy is well known throughout the world as a passionate lover of art and culture. She has won several prestigious awards for her work, which include the prestigious Cartoon War prize in Italy and has been nominated for an E Festival prize in France. Her work focuses on themes related to gender and age, and often involves deep discussions about the relationship between human size and perspective. In her latest book, Partner Height, Negri tackles the issue of women’s and men’s heights, centering on the idea of being too tall or too short.
This book describes the way she examines various cultural and historical images through the lens of her art. She starts out with an essay comparing two ancient paintings, both belonging to the Medieval period. The first shows the king seated on a large horse, with the queen in the background, who holds a sceptre and indicates to the king that he is the rightful ruler of all that is visible. The second shows the king seated on a smaller horse, surrounded by a group of advisors. The difference in scale has led the king to grow to be significantly smaller than the queen – who represents the past and is now firmly established as the national identity.
In Partner Height, Negri again makes use of her larger size to present larger issues related to being male or female, to masculinity or femininity, or to one’s place in the social order. She then combines this with an analysis of how representation has been used through the ages to create these gender and size differences. The book ends with a brief note on how one can examine the relationships between personal growth and how one grows as a person through his or her association with certain national identities. The size difference between the partners in this example also serves as a poignant reminder of how things have changed over the centuries.