Renaissance Art Renaissance Art of Women Holding a Water Cup

Plautilla Nelli, Bust of a Young Woman, 16th century, black chalk (Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, inv 6863F)

Recovering forgotten "masters"

When Renaissance painter Plautilla Nelli got her first solo exhibit at Florence'southward Uffizi Gallery in 2017, some art historians asked . . . Plautilla who??

Despite being a celebrated artist in sixteenth-century Florence, Nelli had been forgotten past fine art history to the point that even scholars of Renaissance art knew zippo of her. How was this possible?

In a give-and-take, gender.

Nelli'south obscurity was the cumulative outcome of historical gender imbalances that limited women in the Renaissance and modern art worlds. While the by cannot exist changed, gender balance in contemporary scholarship and curatorial practice is bringing women Renaissance artists to light.

The Renaissance drinking glass ceiling: so and at present

As the Guerrilla Girls have highlighted, the fine art earth has been male dominated. Notwithstanding, women have e'er been artists, fifty-fifty famed artists. Then why were many forgotten?

Plautilla Nelli, detail of The Concluding Supper, c.1570s, 6.7 m long, made for her Convent of Santa Caterina, Florence (Museo di Santa Maria Novella, Florence)

The cursory answer is: many reasons. For instance, the academic written report of fine art history evolved through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the men who wrote it developed a canon of cracking artists and narratives that connected great fine art and masculinity. Male artists were the subjects of most books and enquiry, and museums highlighted these well-known male person artists. Art by women was often overlooked or considered as exceptions, and thus was more than probable to fall into obscurity, busted, or museum storage. In some cases, art by an under-appreciated female artist was attributed to a improve-known male creative person.

Scholars are now pulling Renaissance women artists from obscurity, discovering how they succeeded in the gendered societies in which they worked.

Education was a key point. Much of Renaissance art revolves effectually learning – virtually classical antiquity, philosophy, anatomy, or mathematics, not to mention the skills learned equally an amateur in a professional art studio. But gender norms of the time meant women's education rarely exceeded what was needed to be wives and mothers. With most no opportunities for apprenticeships with principal/male person artists, women were at a disadvantage.

Still, talented women did become artists under certain circumstances, such every bit:

1. nuns in learned monasteries (e.g., Sis Plautilla Nelli is unusually well-documented. Though nuns were manuscript illuminators and painters since the middle ages, only a few names (due east.g. Herard of Landsburg, St. Catherina of Bologna, Guda) are recorded.
2. noble women with exceptional educations (e.1000., Sofonisba Anguissola, Lucia Anguissola, just besides most of the nuns above); or
3. nigh commonly, women born into a family of artists (eastward.chiliad., Levina Teerlinc, Catarina van Hemessen, Artemisia Gentileschi, Elisabetta Sirani, Lavinia Fontana)

In all cases, the public personae of women artists were closely tied to gendered ideas that expected a respectable woman to be virtuous, pious, and obedient to God and her father/husband. If an artist failed to meet these standards, it could mean the terminate of her career (such as the brief career of sculptor Properzia de'Rossi ).

The nun artist: Plautilla Nelli (1524–1588)

"Nun Fine art" was considered to be exceptionally spiritual and the holy images of Sister Plautilla Nelli'southward studio, such as this image of "St. Catherine with Lily," were especially sought afterward by the Florentine aristocracy. Nelli'southward contemporary Giorgio Vasari notes that, "in the houses of gentlemen throughout Florence, at that place are so many [of Nelli's] pictures, that it would exist tedious to attempt to speak of them all."

Plautilla Nelli (and workshop?), St. Catherine with Lily, c.1550s–1560s, oil on canvas. 38 x 37.five cm (Uffizi Gallery, Florence) 1 of several known copies from Nelli'due south workshop.

So how did this nun larn to paint like an angel? Like many daughters of wealthy families, 14-year-former Plautilla Nelli was placed in a convent. This was a toll-saving choice, as a convent dowry was less than a wedlock dowry. Luckily for Nelli, her convent, Santa Caterina da Siena in Florence, encouraged its nuns non only to pray but as well to larn and depict.

It is unclear how she learned to pigment but Nelli became a prolific creative person, overseeing a convent studio with perhaps as many as viii female person nun followers. Her success was such that Vasari included Nelli every bit one of only four women amongst over 100 artists in his 1550 Lives of the Artists . Vasari notes that she is a "nun and now Prioress" who is "showtime little by little to depict and imitate in colour pictures and painting past fantabulous masters." Vasari also notes that she could take been i of the greatest painters in the world if simply she could take studied mathematics and anatomy equally male artists did (something forbidden to women and especially a nun). [1]

Despite these gendered limitations, Nelli produced big-scale devotional paintings and manuscript illuminations for church and private commissions. Today, about 20 extant paintings by Nelli are known, including the largest and earliest known painting of the Last Supper past a woman.

Plautilla Nelli, The Last Supper, c.1570s, 6.vii m long, fabricated for her Convent of Santa Caterina, Florence. (Museo di Santa Maria Novella, Florence). This is the simply signed artwork of Nelli'due south to survive.

Forgotten in storage for much of the twentieth century, Nelli's Final Supper was restored with the help of the Advancing Women in the Arts Foundation (AWA) and in 2019 became function of the permanent display in the Museo di Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

Educated lady: Sofonisba Anguissola (1532–1625)

Sofonisba Anguissola'southward self-portraits display the often contradictory virtues expected of a immature noblewoman and of an artist. She presents herself equally both pocket-sized maiden and virtuoso creative person, as in this miniature portrait, probably made for a prospective patron. The medallion is inscribed in Latin: "The maiden Sofonisba Anguissola, depicted by her ain hand, from a mirror, at Cremona."

Sofonisba Anguissola, Self-Portrait, c. 1556, varnished watercolor on parchment, 8.3 10 half-dozen.4 cm (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Information technology was this talent, along with a spotless reputation and an exceptional instruction (facilitated by her impoverished merely frontward-thinking, nobleman begetter), that would help Anguissola become a painter at the courtroom of Rex Philip II of Espana. Yet as men were court painters and Anguissola was a adult female, she was given a title more than appropriate to her gender: lady-in-waiting to Philip'southward queen, Elizabeth of Valois.

Sofonisba Anguissola, Philip Two, 1565, oil on canvass 72 x 88 cm (Prado Museum, Madrid)

These types of gendered adjustments immune the Cremona-born artist to work at the highest level in the male person world of court fine art. But these same adjustments may also have contributed to misattributions of Anguissola'southward works. For instance, Anguissola's 1565 Portrait of Philip II was mistakenly attributed to "court artist" Juan Pantoja de la Cruz from at least the seventeenth century, despite the fact that information technology strongly resembled her other known works. Simply after scientific examinations in the 1990s was the work reattributed to Anguissola. Today the number of known works by Anguissola continues to rise, helped in role by a major showroom at the Museo del Prado in 2019.

Artist's daughter: Levina Teerlinc (1510?–1576)

Bruges-built-in artist Levina Teerlinc was amongst the highest paid and nearly prolific artists at the Tudor courtroom in England for most thirty years but today only v or half dozen works can tentatively be attributed to her hand. These all mensurate under a few centimeters.

Levina Teerlinc, Portrait Miniature of Lady Katherine Gray, Countess of Herford, c. 1555–1560, almost 36mm broad (Victoria & Albert Museum, London)

Miniatures, or tiny detailed portraits, were a popular format made and given every bit keepsakes and gifts that could be viewed privately or worn equally a pendant or brooch. In a pre-photography world, miniature portraits allowed individuals to distribute their ain image to other people in an intimate format. And few wanted more portraits than the nobles of the Tudor courtroom, in part because portraits offered highly curated images reflecting contemporary styles and status. The Portrait Miniature of Lady Katherine Grey is typical of Teerlinc's work. With meticulous and flattering detail, she paints the fashionable cousin of, and once a possible successor to, Queen Elizabeth I.

Teerlinc was a main miniaturist and manuscript illuminator. She was trained in the studio of her father, historic Flemish painter Simon Bening. When she arrived in England with her husband around 1546, Levina Teerlinc took up the role of "regal paintrix," beginning at the court of Henry 8 and successively for Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. Role of the imperial household, she painted not only aristocratic portraits just numerous other works today only known from court inventories. Her loftier condition at court is reflected in her almanac salary: a remarkable forty pounds a yr, which was four times the average almanac earnings for a skilled tradesman and x pounds more than the salary of her male person predecessor equally court artist, Hans Holbein .

A 21st-century renaissance

Michelangelo, Leonardo, and the famed male person artists of the Renaissance deservedly remain cardinal figures in art history. But they are simply half the story. Despite obstacles, women were exceptional artists in the Renaissance. Today'south task is to go on to recover them from the dusty dorsum shelves, storage rooms, and the past indifference of art history.

Notes:

1. Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (London: Oxford Academy Press, 1991), 342.

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Additional resource:

Read more virtually Plautilla Nelli on Advancing Women Artists

Sentry a video nigh the restoration of Nelli'sTerminal Supper

Learn more than almost Sofonisba Anguissola'due southBoy at the Castilian Court at the San Diego Museum of Fine art

Fausta Navarro, Plautilla Nelli: arte e devozione sulle orme di Savonarola = Plautilla Nelli: Art and Devotion in Savonarola's Footsteps (Livorno : Sillabe, 2017)

Sheila Barker, Women Artists in Early Modern Italy: Careers, Fame, and Collectors (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, an imprint of Brepols Publishers, 2016)

Leticia Ruiz Gómez, A Tale of Two Women Painters: Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana (Madrid: Museo del Prado exhibit catalogue, 2019)

The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC. north.d. "Creative person profiles."

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Source: https://smarthistory.org/female-artists-renaissance/

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