Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque (review)

Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque is the catalogue accompanying the recent exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, curated by Vera Fortunati, Jordana Pomeroy and Claudio Strinati. The sizeable and well-illustrated text offers a comprehensive overview of the major female artists working in Italy during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the wake of recent scholarship which has concentrated on monographs, exhibitions, journal articles and collections of essays on individual artists, the catalogue offers a significant opportunity for comparative analysis, and discussion of the broader patterns and circumstances that underlie the achievements of female artists in the Early Modern era. Though more discrete in terms of the historical period it attempts to cover, the text is ambitious in scope, and bears a relationship to Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin's seminal exhibition and catalogue, Women Artists, 1550-1950, produced some thirty years earlier.

The catalogue is comprised of eight essays followed by detailed entries on art works. The essays seek to set the activities of women artists within convincing cultural formations, with particular emphasis upon those factors which allowed women to negotiate their positions within the patriarchal order. Pomeroy notes that the exhibition 're-creates the world that not only embraced women artists but also enabled their names and reputations to survive – a remarkable occurrence given that women had virtually no independence, either socially or legally' (p. 20). Caroline P. Murphy deftly investigates the central issue of economics, often in the context of what men sought to gain from the activities of women artists. She studies the significant monetary contribution made by Plautilla Nelli and fellow nuns to their convent of Santa Caterina da Siena in Florence and the financial status of artists Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, Elisabetta Sirani and Artemisia Gentileschi.

Female artistic agency and the particularity of the female viewing position in the patronage and creation of works of art is also dealt with in a variety of ways. Sheila Ffolliott examines women as patrons and connoisseurs in public, domestic and convent environs, emphasising the social circumstances that allowed women to act as consumers and arbiters of taste. Carole Collier Frick contributes fascinating information regarding the female artist's use of costume to convey ideas of status, decorum, and allegiance to imperial power. She considers the way in which female artists employed classicising and fantastical dress in the depiction of biblical and ancient heroines to provide empowering alternatives to conventional depictions of women. Fortunati brings to light important new scholarship on Caterina Vigri, Lavinia Fontana and Elisabetta Sirani. In regard to Vigri she discusses the cult of Christ's face and the veil of Saint Veronica, a relic which relied specifically on female witness. Vigri's images of Christ in the illuminated miniatures of her Breviary (1452) are understood in relation to the Veronica cult, the paintings of Jan Van Eyck and descriptions of Christ's physical appearance in religious literature of the time. Fortunati discusses Fontana's little-studied erotic portraiture and the artist's knowledge of the most up-to-date conventions of the genre. Rather than isolating female achievements, Fontana's art is seen to be the product of a set of influences not completely removed from those experienced by her male colleagues. In another essay, Strinati records Giovanni Baglione's 1642 description of female artist Ippolita Parmigiano, wife of sixteenth-century landscape painter Fabrizio. Baglione notes that Ippolita's work was of such high quality that it was impossible to tell between the works of husband and wife. Such examples alert the reader to a certain flexibility in relation to the framing of the female artist in art historical writing during this period. Ann Sutherland Harris offers a very useful overview of scholarship since her groundbreaking exhibition of 1976 and Alexandra Lapierre considers the phenomena of female artists as subject matter for novels, biographies, plays and...