Parergon

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...