{"id":6240,"date":"2019-01-22T11:07:20","date_gmt":"2019-01-22T11:07:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=6240"},"modified":"2019-01-22T11:07:22","modified_gmt":"2019-01-22T11:07:22","slug":"%ef%bb%bfrenaissance-dames","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=6240","title":{"rendered":"\ufeffRenaissance Dames"},"content":{"rendered":"\n


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Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael are household names today but few have ever heard of Lavinia Fontana or Sofinisba Anguissola, who was highly admired by arguably the greatest artist of the Renaissance, Michelangelo himself. How were these ladies able to make a living in an essentially male-dominated industry, and why have they fallen into obscurity today? How were women depicted in paintings and sculptures of the period and what does this tell us about their place in society? And how independent were women when it came to commissioning works of art? To find out more, Dames Verity and Barbara drove boldly forth to leafy Surrey, to listen and learn from academic Sian Walters giving an excellent talk about women and art from 1400-1650.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paintings that included women tended to focus on religious topics and piety with depictions of women as wives and mothers, frequently referring back to images linking with the Virgin Mary. Such images reinforced the social control of women’s behaviour. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the 1400s drew to a close, the \u2018autonomous woman\u2019 began\nto be depicted in paintings, featuring portraits of individual women.  They were usually naked and featured reclining\nin a languorous or coquettish way. These pictures tended to be commissioned by wealthy\nmen for their collections to be hung in their private apartments, and the\nsubjects were often their mistresses or other women in their circle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Judith Leyster, Self-Portrait<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Women who were able to buy art in their own right tended to be drawn from one of three groups. The Church had significant funds, and abbesses and other senior nuns ordered and paid for religious paintings to adorn their chapels and private rooms.\u00a0 Widows of wealthy men often found themselves inheriting a considerable fortune, and they were able to commission portraits of themselves and their families, or religious-themed paintings that would serve to demonstrate their piety and devotion. There were also women who were wealthy in their own right, and they too built up collections of paintings whose content they were able to manage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what about the women artists themselves? Bearing in mind\nthat less than 0.5% of the paintings in the National Gallery in London are by\nwomen, what were the chances of a female artist\u2019s work being acknowledged\nduring the Renaissance?  The facts make\nuncomfortable reading; most women artists of the period came from artistic\nfamilies.  In some of the more\nenlightened households, fathers or brothers of talented young woman encouraged\nthem to draw and paint. Some fathers engaged external tutors to help them, or\nthey would have their daughters helping in their own studios.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sofonisba Anguissola, Self-portrait at the Easel Painting a Devotional Panel<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

In general, however, the works these women created were nearly always overshadowed by their male counterparts\u2019 oeuvres, or even worse, attributed to them. Lavinia Fontana is one such example; Damesnet has already paid tribute to her in Dame Verity\u2019s blog Three Dames of Bologna<\/a>. Her \u2018Portrait of a Lady with a Dog\u2019 hangs in Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand. When the gallery purchased it in the 1950s, it was attributed to Guido Reni (as other paintings of hers had been) , as it was deemed by the expert carrying out the authentication to be too good to be painted by a woman.\u00a0 Fortunately it has now been correctly attributed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Artemisia Gentileschi survived rape by her \u2018tutor\u2019 Agostino\nTassi and torture by thumbscrew intended to retract her accusations during his trial.\nShe went on to become one of the most accomplished painters in the generation\nfollowing Caravaggio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was common for buyers and dealers to assign paintings by\nwomen to male artists so as to increase their value. Judith Leyster\u2019s entire\noeuvre was attributed to Franz Hals or to her husband until 1893, when a\ndiscovery of a small but distinctive monogram that she left on her pictures\nstarted the process of reassigning her paintings to the correct artist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marietta Robusti was the eldest daughter of Tintoretto; she\nwas highly talented and was invited to come and paint at the Spanish court. Her\nfather refused and kept her in her studio to work alongside him; her artistic achievements\nwere attributed to him, and after her death the decline in Tintoretto\u2019s work was\nascribed to his grief for his daughter, rather than the loss of such an able assistant.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To end on a more optimistic note, Sofinisba Anguissola\u2019s artistic\ntalents were recognised and encouraged by Michelangelo. Unlike Robusti she did\nget to the Spanish court and became an official court painter to Philip II. Her\nsuccess paved the way for larger numbers of women to pursue careers as artists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael are household names today but few have ever heard of Lavinia Fontana or Sofinisba Anguissola, who was highly admired by arguably the greatest artist of the Renaissance, Michelangelo himself. How were these ladies able to make a living in an essentially male-dominated industry, and why have they fallen into obscurity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":6236,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[73,2,69,70,58,59],"tags":[78,104,74,82],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6240"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6240"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6260,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6240\/revisions\/6260"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}