• Career Women: A Review
• Amy Orner (bio)

How does our current conception of what it means to be a woman artist exclude those who do not fit the traditional definition? Though women artists of the early modern period defy easy characterisation, each of the three books highlighted in this review consider women artists from 1450 to 1800, as well as those that do not fit the typical qualifications for professionalisation. Two books, Babette Bohn’s Women Artists, their Patrons, and their Publics in Early Modern Bologna, and By her Hand: Artemisia Gentileschi and Women Artists in Italy, 1500–1800, edited by Eve Straussman-Pflanzer and Oliver Tostmann, focus their study on Italy. The third, Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe c. 1450–1700, edited by Tanja L. Jones, extends its realm of concern to cover continental Europe. All three provide overviews of their chosen temporal and geographic region. The women artists discussed in these books are presented as adhering to one of three archetypes: the nun as artist, the court artist, or the professional artist. What did these characterisations mean? Can any woman artist be securely placed in just one? These three books under review address these questions by highlighting aspects of self-fashioning and female artistic personas that rely on societal influences such as class, marital status, and connections to networks of artistic production and patronage.

A common thread connecting these three works is their debt to the work of Linda Nochlin. Each of these three books express their gratitude for Nochlin and her trailblazing 1971 essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, in which she argues for a methodological approach that investigates the social and institutional obstacles of art production and art history that prevented women [End Page 203] from participating in the art world.¹ Bohn, Jones, and Straussman-Pflanzer and Tostmann all position themselves as a first within the field. Bohn provides the first comprehensive study of Bologna’s women artists, Jones gathers the first volume of essays dedicated to women as producers of visual and material culture in continental European courts, and Straussman-Pflanzer and Tostmann facilitated the first exhibition dedicated to early modern Italian women artists at two of the oldest civic art museums in the United States, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Art. With each of these publications marking ‘firsts’, they offer much-needed contributions to the study of early modern women.

A pleasure to read, Babette Bohn’s book chronicles the proliferation of professional women artists in Bologna in the early modern period. Bohn’s argument is shaped by the information found in the archives. With sixty-eight artists uncovered by her extensive archival work, she provides the first comprehensive study of Bologna’s women artists. Bohn contextualises Bologna’s reputation as a haven for female artists through a chronological examination of the prominent literary, religious, and artistic women in the city. These women were known as pittrici, though they included painters, sculptors, printmakers, embroiderers, and women who created drawings. She privileges painters over other artists, due in part to the archival evidence and the outsized presence of Elisabetta Sirani against which other Bolognese women artists are judged.

Bohn splits her book into two parts. The first traces the historical context, biographies, and the development of the professional woman artist. The second part is thematic, revealing patterns of patronage and collecting, examining signatures and the self-fashioning of women artists, and analysing the drawings and prints created by...

• 职业女性：回顾
• 艾米·奥纳（简介）

我们目前对女性艺术家的定义如何排除那些不符合传统定义的人？尽管现代早期的女性艺术家很难被简单地描述，但这篇评论中重点介绍的三本书都考虑了 1450 年至 1800 年的女性艺术家，以及那些不符合专业化典型资格的女性艺术家。两本书，巴贝特·博恩 (Babette Bohn) 的早期现代博洛尼亚的女性艺术家、她们的赞助人和公众和By her Hand ：《阿尔泰米西娅·真蒂莱斯基和意大利的女性艺术家，1500-1800 年》，由 Eve Straussman-Pflanzer 和 Oliver Tostmann 编辑，重点研究意大利。第三，欧洲早期现代宫廷中的女性艺术家 c． 1450–1700，由 Tanja L. Jones 编辑，将其关注范围扩展到欧洲大陆。这三者都提供了他们所选择的时间和地理区域的概述。这些书中讨论的女性艺术家被描述为遵循三种原型之一：作为艺术家的修女、宫廷艺术家或职业艺术家。这些特征意味着什么？任何一位女艺术家都可以安全地被安置在其中吗？正在审查的这三本书通过强调依赖社会影响的自我塑造和女性艺术形象的各个方面来解决这些问题，例如阶级、婚姻状况以及与艺术生产和赞助网络的联系。

连接这三部作品的一个共同点是它们都得益于琳达·诺克林 (Linda Nochlin) 的作品。这三本书都表达了对诺克林和她 1971 年开创性文章“为什么没有伟大的女性艺术家？”的感激之情，她在文中主张采用一种方法论方法来调查艺术生产和艺术史的社会和制度障碍，这些障碍阻碍了艺术生产和艺术史的发展。女性[第 203 页结束]参与艺术世界。¹博恩、琼斯、施特劳斯曼-普弗兰泽和托斯特曼都将自己定位为该领域的第一人。博恩首次对博洛尼亚的女性艺术家进行了全面的研究，琼斯收集了第一本专门针对欧洲大陆宫廷中作为视觉和物质文化生产者的女性的论文集，施特劳斯曼-普弗兰泽和托斯特曼促成了第一个专门针对早期现代意大利女性艺术家的展览美国最古老的两座民间艺术博物馆：沃兹沃斯雅典娜艺术博物馆和底特律艺术博物馆。这些出版物中的每一篇都标志着“第一”，它们为早期现代女性的研究提供了急需的贡献。

读起来很愉快，巴贝特·博恩 (Babette Bohn) 的书记录了近代早期博洛尼亚职业女性艺术家的激增。博恩的论点是根据档案中发现的信息形成的。她通过大量的档案工作发现了 68 名艺术家，首次对博洛尼亚的女性艺术家进行了全面的研究。博恩通过按时间顺序考察该市著名的文学、宗教和艺术女性，将博洛尼亚作为女性艺术家天堂的声誉置于背景之中。这些女性被称为pittrici，尽管她们包括画家、雕塑家、版画师、刺绣师和创作绘画的女性。她比其他艺术家更重视画家，部分原因是档案证据和伊丽莎白·西拉尼（Elisabetta Sirani）的过大影响力让其他博洛尼亚女性艺术家得以评判。

博恩将她的书分为两部分。第一部分追溯了职业女性艺术家的历史背景、传记和发展。第二部分是主题性的，揭示了赞助和收藏的模式，审视了女性艺术家的签名和自我塑造，并分析了……创作的绘画和版画。