The role of women in the visual arts during the Renaissance period can roughly be divided into five categories:

1. Women as producers of art (artists)
2. Women as subjects in art
3. Women as patrons who commissioned art
4. Women who supported the production of art
5. Women as non-commissioning consumers of art

For this handout I will be focusing on points 1 and 4. The rest of the subjects are treated in the PowerPoint uploaded by Costanza.

WOMEN ARTISTS

“It is an extraordinary thing that in all those arts and all those exercises wherein at any time women have thought fit to play a part in real earnest, they have always become most excellent and famous in no common way, as one might easily demonstrate by an endless number of examples.”[1]

Vasari, Life of Madonna Properzia de’Rossi, Sculptor of Bologna

Italian Renaissance women artists emerged in the second half of the Cinquecento or later. Most came from artists’ or craftsmen’s families. An exception is the Bolognese sculptor, Properzia de’Rossi who was the daughter of a notary. Born in around 1490 de’Rossi is the earliest recorded female artist in Italy, and is the only woman to be given a biography in Vasari’s Vite. Very little is known about de’Rossi’s career, in part because so few objects of confirmable authorship survive, and in part because much more attention has been paid to her life than her oeuvre. Vasari describes de’Rossi as a woman given over to extreme passions, and suggests that much of her artistic output was a reflection of her tumultuous life.  One of de’Rossi’s best known works is a stone relief depicting the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife. According to her Life, the sculpture represented, and helped her recover from, her own unrequited love. We know little beyond that which is written by Vasari, save for two recorded incidents of violence from the Bolognese archives, including one in which she is accused of throwing paint in the face of a certain Vicenzo Miola.  

In addition to de’Rossi, there were around twenty-five women active in the arts throughout the Cinquecento – as noted by Vasari – working in cities from Venice to Naples. Most of these were painters. The remainder were two engravers and four embroideresses. The vast majority of these female artists were working in the second half of the sixteenth century, save for de’Rossi and an embroideress from Milan by the name of Veronica Sala, on whom I have been able to find very little information.

It was not only in Italy at this time that women artists started to emerge. Levina Teerlinc, the daughter of a renowned Flemish miniaturist, Simon Bening, was a miniaturist herself, who served as a painter to the English court of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. Catharina van Hemessen was another, slightly later, female Flemish artist, for whom, unusually for this time, there exists a decent body of work. Van Hemessen is known for her small-scale female portraits made in the late 1540s and 1550s.

AMATEUR FEMALE ARTISTS

Embroidery was well practiced in the Renaissance home, in particular among noble women. Numerous embroidery books from this period survive, although the nature of such objects often led to their destruction. Little books of patterns first began to be published in the 1520s and 30s particualry in Italy, many of which included patterns for lettering and writing, lace, embroidery, weaving, bookbinding, tailoring, ironwork, and furniture. Most pattern books were intended for professionals, except for lace and embroidery books. Noble ladies were expected to excel at needlework, but not necessarily to make their own designs. The earliest known lace pattern book was published in Venice in 1527 by Giovanni Antonio Tagliente, titled, Opera Nuova. Some of the best-known pattern books for embroidery were made by middling print and book publishers, such as Nicolo Zoppino and Giovanni Andrea Vavassore. Dürer also made highly finished lace designs from engravings after drawings by Leonardo.

Images of women spinning, sewing, or doing needlework were popular in the Renaissance, and were the subjects of many prints, paintings, and frescos, including the Sistine ceiling. Spinning was also central to the Woman on Top trope, in which violent female protagonists are depicted physically attacking men. Most such works were prints from Germany and the Netherlands, although they were known to have been widely circulated in Italy by the middle of the Cinquecento.

THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN THE PRODUCTION OF ART

Women provided different types of support to artists, most of whom where their husbands, sons, or fathers. Many remain nameless and unknown, since their labour was unrecorded. What little information we do have from this period can be divided into three categories.

1. Through marriage women often linked different families of artists and craftsmen. The most famous example is the marriage between Giovanni and Gentile Bellini’s sister, Nicolosia, to Mantegna, probably sometime in the 1540s.
2. Women were also known to have worked in the workshops of artists. Surviving archival records confirm one such instance to be the wife and daughter of the late Quattrocento and early Cinquecento Modenese painter and sculptor, Guido Mazzoni. Since most female painters and engravers of the Italian Renaissance were daughters of artists, it is likely that their training began in their fathers’ workshops.
3. Lastly, on the few occasions where a woman modelled for a drawing or painting, she was likely to have been the artist’s family member.

[1] Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects vol. I, 2 vols., translated by Gaston du C. de Vere (London: Everyman Library, 1996), p. 856