Women Artists in Early Modern Italy: Careers, Fame, and Collectors ed. by Sheila Barker (review)

A post on ArtsJournal dated October 27, 2016 said it all: "Prado Mounts Its First Show Ever Dedicated to a Female Artist (It only Took 197 Years)"! At long last, the Prado would exhibit fifteen works by Clara Peeters (1594–1657), a pioneer of still-life painting who had a proclivity for including her reflected image on bowls and goblets amid an abundance of foodstuffs. Where had Peeters been during the two centuries since the museum's founding in 1819? The Museo Nacional del Prado's senior curator of northern painting, Alejandro Vergara, answered the question with a recollection. Several years earlier, his wife had visited him at work. Having taken time to stroll through the galleries, she made an astute observation that prompted a probing question: "Where are the women artists?" Initially, Vergara was stumped. "I couldn't find any," he replied. But then a thought stirred him to action: "I went into our storage and we brought [Peeters's] paintings out."¹

Today, Vergara's response raises eyebrows of incredulity. Three decades ago it would not have. Peeters's relegation to the basement was a fate endured by the majority of painters discussed in Women Artists in Early Modern Italy: Careers, Fame, and Collectors—or at least that is where I found many when I went looking for them in the 1990s. Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that works by women were not always banished to the dark depths of subterranean storerooms. In her contribution to this volume, Roberta Piccinelli tracks the zeal with which Cosimo III de' Medici followed the directive of his art advisor, Filippo Baldinucci: "I would recommend, if possible, [that you] not miss the chance to include some celebrated female painters" in your collection. Cosimo acted on Baldinucci's advice, "persistently look[ing] for … women's self-portraits" to add to what eventually became the core collection of the Galleria degli Uffizi. Nicole Escobedo, who wrote the book's concluding essay, "The English Collectors of Italy's Female Old Masters, 1700–1824," extends Piccinelli's succinct observation and her insightful focus both chronologically and geographically. On the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century, England's gentry developed a taste for the Italian Old Masters, female as well as male. Travelogues and manuals on connoisseur-ship make clear that works by women were prized possessions. Paintings by Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532–1625), for example, were notably present in the collections of England's most distinguished houses: Burleigh, Nuneham Park, and Althorp. During the course of the nineteenth century, a "much broader sector of the English public" had a chance to acquire the best of the Italian Masters. Engravings by the skilled hand of Elisabetta Sirani (1638–65) as well as replications of her canvases by myriad engravers fed a healthy print market. If the long overdue recovery of Clara Peeters points to the structural sexism that informed the institutional biases challenged by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock in Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (1981), then the essays by Piccinelli, Escobedo, and other contributors to Women Artists in Early Modern Italy offer another and, one could argue, more even-handed view of "female Italian Old Masters." This observation does not deny the reality of all that the moniker "old mistress" implies. Indeed, at the very moment collectors were eagerly purchasing works by Anguissola and Sirani, readers were devouring the highly romanticized life of Tintoretto's daughter, Marietta Robusti. An accomplished painter in her own right, Robusti was the subject of at least one novel and two plays in the nineteenth century.

This volume brings into sharp focus the turbulent waters that swirled around and sometimes almost submerged the careers and legacies of women artists. Multiple forces, of course, shape the professional lives and historical fortunes of all artists. Gender is but one of these, although it is a very significant one. Julia Vicioso's...