Life Stories of Women Artists, 1550-1800

An Anthology

JuliaK. Dabbs, Julia K. Dabbs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780754654315
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351560221
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

The struggles and achievements of forty-six notable women artists of the early modern period, as documented by their contemporaries, are uniquely brought together in this anthology. The life stories presented here are foundational texts for the history of art, but since most are found only in rare volumes and few have been translated into English, until now they have been generally inaccessible to many scholars. Originally published in biographical compendia such as Vasari's Lives of the Artists, the writings included here document not only the lives of relatively well known women artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi and Sofonisba Anguissola, but also those who have languished in obscurity, like Anna Waser and Li Yin. Each life story is preceded by a brief introduction to the artist as well as to her biographer, and the texts themselves are annotated to provide necessary clarification. Beyond their documentary value, these stories provide fascinating insight as to how men commonly characterized women artists as exceptions to their sex, and attempted to explain their presence in the male-dominated realm of art. The introductory chapter to the book explores this intriguing gender dynamic and elucidates some of the strategies and historical context that factored into the composition of these lives. The volume includes an appended index to women artists' life stories in biographical compendia of the period

II. The Life Stories of Early
Modern Women Artists (1550–1800)

4

Giorgio Vasari (1511 Arezzo – 1574 Florence) and Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori et architettori italiani (1550; rev. ed. 1568)

Collective artistic biography, not to mention the field of art history in general, had its inception thanks to Giorgio Vasari’s literary masterpiece, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori et architettori italiani (The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects). Vasari was not the first to document the achievements of artists, as is evident from the texts preceding this entry; however, he was the first to publish the collected lives of artists as a genre of its own. The idea for compiling a bio-history of art in Italy spanning from the thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries was apparently formulated by Vasari in the 1540s with encouragement and input from Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, Paolo Giovio (who had himself begun to write artists’ lives), and other intellectuals. A vast amount of research was conducted, which included the consultation of archival records, chronicles, and letters; conversations with artists or those who knew them; and Vasari’s own astute observations recorded in the course of his extensive travels as an artist and architect. Although not error-free, the Lives still serves as an invaluable source of information on Renaissance artists, patrons, techniques, and works of art. However, as Paul Barolsky and Patricia Rubin have noted, the Lives is more than just a compilation of facts, or a chronology of stylistic development.¹ One of the publication’s primary intentions, like its exemplary classical and hagiographic models, was to commemorate significant individuals and their achievements as a source of inspiration and edification for the reader. Thus, various rhetorical techniques, such as the use of hyperbole and anecdote, are employed by the biographer in his portrayals of artists’ deeds and character traits to better engage the reader’s attention and memory. As Rubin notes, “The reading of the Lives was not conceived of as passive. The relation of past to present was interactive: one was meant to influence the other.”² For Vasari’s main audience of artists, collectors, and friends of art, there was thus much to be gleaned, which the writer himself recognized by publishing a significantly expanded edition in 1568.

Much more might be said about Vasari’s Lives in general, and fortunately there is an abundance of excellent scholarship to which the interested reader might turn.³ For the purposes of this anthology, this introduction will focus on Vasari’s inclusion of women artists and general comments regarding them, with more specific remarks to follow in the introductions to the life stories of Properzia de’ Rossi and Sister Plautilla Nelli. Of the 142 artists with distinct entries in the original edition of the Lives, the only female so honored is the sculptor, Properzia de’ Rossi; in fact, no other women artists are even mentioned. One mitigating factor is that the 1550 edition did not include any currently living artists other than Vasari’s hero, Michelangelo; with the relaxation of this restriction in the 1568 revised edition, the number of women artists mentioned dramatically increased to fifteen. However, the operative word is “mentioned,” for in most cases the women are merely identified as artists, with little to no discussion of their careers. Brief accounts of Sister Plautilla Nelli (1523–88), Lucrezia Quistelli dalla Mirandola (active c. 1560), and Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532–1625) were appended to the life of de’ Rossi, which remained the sole entry devoted to a female artist in the second edition. Additional discussion of Anguissola and her sisters Minerva, Lucia, Europa, and Anna is found within the vita of Giulio Campi, while Irene di Spilembergo (1538–59), Barbara Longhi (1552–c. 1638), Diana Mantuana (or Scultori, c. 1530–c. 1590) are named within the entries of other male artists. In Vasari’s discussion of Flemish miniaturists, Susanna Horenbout (c. 1503–45), Clara Skeysers (or Keysere, c. 1470–1545), Anna Segher (? – d. before 1566), Levina Bening (or Teerling, c. 1515–76), and Catharina van Hemessen (1528– after 1587) are also named, but similarly with no critical discussion of their works.⁴ To some degree, Vasari’s incorporation of women artists may seem like an afterthought, given that they are generally grouped together and thus treated as a corporate entity rather than particular individuals. Nor is the life of even the “headline” female artist, Properzia de’ Rossi, described with the same systematic thoroughness as is found in the vite of most male artists.⁵

So why did Vasari include women artists at all, especially in an era when they were excluded from other forms of the artistic establishment, such as the Florentine Academy of Art?⁶ One likely factor was the influential example of Pliny the Elder, who similarly had lumped together the achievements of women artists in a brief passage within his Natural History.⁷ The presence of women also added literary variety, a prime rhetorical device that Vasari is known to have endorsed in his painted compositions.⁸ Yet they also evoked wonder and marvel, as the biographer repeatedly notes in the life stories of de’ Rossi and Nelli, thus further stimulating the reader’s interest and imagination.⁹

Even with these plausible reasons for the inclusion of women, Vasari’s text nevertheless conveys a certain insecurity concerning the phenomenon of women artists. His viewpoint is unsurprising since in the mid-sixteenth century male artists were seeking to raise their social status through recognition as intellectual creators rather than craftsmen, and given that women were then considered intellectually inferior, their presence might hinder such efforts. On a more practical level, professional women artists could also result in more competition for commissions. Thus, prior to even mentioning de’ Rossi, Vasari calls upon noted authorities to legitimize his efforts in the introduction to her life story. First he includes a variation on the poet Ariosto’s famous couplet when he states that “wherein at any time women have wanted to interject themselves with some effort, they have always become most excellent and uncommonly famous …”.¹⁰ There follows an impressive if not downright mind-numbing enumeration of thirty-four “worthy women,” primarily from ancient history and literature, beginning with the warrior Camilla and concluding with the contemporary Renaissance poet Laura Battiferra, to prove the validity of this premise. This “catalog” of famous women was by Vasari’s time a standard rhetorical technique designed to assert historical credibility, thus assisting in making “new or even startling ideas seem acceptable,” according to Glenda McLeod.¹¹ Yet while justifying the inclusion of women artists, the “worthy women” topos also intensifies their perceived singularity and difference since no such catalog is found at the introduction to male artists’ life stories. Rather curiously, Vasari doesn’t mention the female artists found in Pliny within this list.¹² I would suggest that this omission was intentional, for the absence of ancient women artists heightened the novelty and achievements of Renaissance women artists about which he writes, thus demonstrating the superiority of the art of “modern” times, a major thrust of the Lives.

Other introductory comments, too, reveal how Vasari, and likely his colleagues, viewed the woman artist as a potential challenge to the hegemony of the male art world. Leading into his discussion of women artists, the biographer notes that women have not been ashamed to become artists, “as if to take away from us the palm of supremacy,” yet he immediately puts them in their secondary place by deprecatingly referring to the delicate hands of women, “so tender and so white.” He more subtly acknowledges that the playing field was not equal in the opening statement of the vita by commenting that where women have “interjected themselves with some effort” they have become famous. In the 1568 revised edition of the vita, Vasari’s acknowledgement of discrimination towards women artists becomes more transparent, with his telling comment that Sister Plautilla Nelli “would have done marvelous things if she had enjoyed, as men do, opportunities for studying, and devoting herself to drawing and representing living and natural objects.”

When evaluating Vasari’s stance regarding women artists, or reading other scholars’ interpretations of his viewpoint, it is most important to consider who we are actually evaluating—Vasari in his own terms, or Vasari as filtered by one of his translators. The Florentine historian has been taken to task by some scholars for his pernicious marginalization of women and his use of “demeaning terms to explain their art and its oddity.”¹³ Such interpretations are certainly justified if based on the readily available translation by Gaston de Vere, but Vasari in the original Italian is not nearly so harsh, as we have tried to convey in our revised version. Although De Vere’s translation has been praised for its reliability,¹⁴ it is also a product of an early twentieth-century mentality, exhibiting a consistent negativity towards the characterization of women artists that is simply not always evident in the original Italian text. The reader is thus encouraged to carefully consider the revisions we have made to de Vere’s text, as cited in the annotations. Vasari’s influence on subsequent biographers, writers, and historians is much too great to be considered through a distorted lens.

Properzia de’ Rossi (c. 1490–1530 Bologna)

Introduction

Properzia de’ Rossi was truly exceptional for her time, being one of the first securely documented women artists to work in sculpture, a medium that due to its physicality was considered inimical to the female gender. Her rarity was recognized and reinforced by her contemporaries, as she is the only woman artist to be given a separate vita in Giorgio Vasari’s 1550 edition of Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori et architettori italiani (The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects).¹ Vasari indicates that Properzia rather innocently began carving figures on small peach-pits, but emboldened by her success, sought a larger-scale challenge: to carve marble narrative relief scenes for the façade of S. Petronio in Bologna. This seems like a giant leap for the budding artist to have made, particularly since the biographer fails to mention with whom de’ Rossi might have trained.² His omission of this information is surprising since such background was invariably included in the life stories of male artists in order to demonstrate their artistic “genealogy” and thus legitimize their inclusion in the Vasarian canon. Given that de’ Rossi was from Bologna and thus of somewhat peripheral interest for the Florentine biographer, he simply may not have had obtained (or bothered to obtain) such information. Whether intentional or not, the omission of any information concerning de’ Rossi’s training is one of the ways in which she is significantly separated from the standard biographical track of artistic greatness.

For Vasari, it is de’ Rossi’s public sculptural work at the Bolognese church of S. Petronio that defines her career and reveals her character; thus, this rather brief period in her life dominates the narrative.³ We learn that de’ Rossi was married (although her husband is unnamed), and that his intervention was necessary to petition the wardens of the cathedral for work. Yet Vasari suggests that de’ Rossi apparently was not happily married, for he interprets her relief panel of Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife as expressing the artist’s unrequited passion for another man. In response, art historian Nanette Salomon has stated that Vasari’s psychoanalytical approach is not only sexist, but without parallel in the vite of male artists.⁴ Although this particular passage ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• I The Forerunners: Life Stories of Ancient and Medieval Women Artists
• II The Life Stories of Early Modern Women Artists (1550–1800)
• Appendix: Index to Women Artists in Early Modern Biographical Sources
• Bibliography
• Index