Women, Art, and Architecture in Northern Italy, 1520-1580: Negotiating Power (review)

This book makes a welcome contribution to a growing literature on women's artistic patronage in sixteenth century Italy, particularly the building of palaces, the domestic interior and the domestic consumption of furnishings, textiles and jewellery. McIver demonstrates a thorough and detailed knowledge of this literature and clearly delineates her contribution to the field: a study of three women, who are relatively unknown, from the Pallavicini and Sanvitale families who held extensive feudal holdings in the Parma-Piacenza area of the Emilia-Romagna region. These women – Laura Pallavicina Sanvitale, Giacoma Pallavicina and Camilla Pallavicina – were all widowed, but a number of other women from the Pallavicina and Sanvitale families and their patronage are also discussed. McIver chose these particular women because they did not reside in Italy's artistic centres of Florence, Rome and Venice and because their activities have been ignored by historians, in part because of their location in cities on the periphery. As McIver notes much of the documentation upon which the book is based is unpublished and provides an opportunity to examine the patronage of women who were able to exercise a significant amount of power in a similar way to powerful men in Italy's artistic centres. This is a valid point, but she slightly overstates her case here because recent studies of patronage in these cities have acknowledged the importance of gender and women's patronage in these centres – a fact of which she is well aware since she refers to these studies.

A key theme of the book is how the women under study manipulated their wealth 'as a means of negotiating power' and therefore were empowered to act as individuals. McIver concludes that power and wealth rather than gender enabled the three Pallavicina and Sanvitale women to build palaces, commission works of art, negotiate with artists and influence others, exercising their autonomy as individuals and as independent decision makers (p. 198). Her understanding of individualism and agency is influenced by Thomas Kuehn's anthropological understanding of legal personhood as being grounded in relationships and obligations to families, the church and the broader society. In this context it is easy to see how Laura Pallavicina Sanvitale as well as other women under study could engage in long-term legal battles over property and inheritance in order to preserve their husband's or father's patrimony for their sons and sometimes their daughters rather than for themselves.

McIver provides a detailed account of the historical-political situation of the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza, as well as the broader Emilio-Romagna region, as a backdrop to a discussion of the activities and interests of the Pallavicina and Sanvitale families and their relationships with influential people in the area, particularly the Farnese family of Parma and Piacenza, of which Pope Paul III was a prominent member and a close friend of Laura Pallavicina Sanvitale, as was his grandson Ottavio Farnese and his wife Margaret of Austria. The first chapter deals with the 'cast of characters' that make up the book, which not only includes the aforementioned three women but their female relatives including daughters and other female relatives. A detailed biographical account is provided for each woman and for other relevant female relatives, with Laura described as acting as an effective 'patriarch' of the family would do, striving to protect familial interests. Her cousin Giacoma's actions centred on her support for female religious foundations and her activities as a lay sister while Camilla who was widowed twice and had to contend with male relatives trying to prevent her receiving her father's inheritance, was the least powerful but still able to exercise choice as a patron.

After reviewing the existing literature on women and palace building and noting its rarity, McIver then discusses Laura's...