When Women Painted the Renaissance

They had names like Sofonisba and Lavinia and most of all Artemisia. They were brilliant and gifted and (sometimes)
ferocious—because they had to be, sure, and perhaps also because they wanted to be. They were courtiers and wives and warriors. They were artists at a time when women just didn’t do that.

But they did.

A handful of talented, tenacious, and perhaps rather lucky young women were able to work in what was then the unfeminine medium of paint. Smeary, messy, very physical paint, which required the grinding of stones and beetles and you-just-name-what-else, and mixing with linseed oil, and preparing heavy slabs of wood for the laying on of all that rich, expensive color. We’re talking about lone women working in studios populated by male creatures from first adolescence to well-advanced senescence, women painting some strikingly realistic arms and hands and other body parts into being, newly detailed thanks to a shift in painterly aesthetic. Women who sought to give a good long look to actual flesh, because you couldn’t quite paint it if you didn’t inspect it thoroughly first. And a typically well-brought-up female was never, ever supposed to look, let alone touch.

These women simply had to look. And grind. And mix. And create. They felt thwarted by the norms that limited what they could do … and then they painted circles around those norms. Of all these fiercely talented artists, one name stands out. You probably know it already: Artemisia Gentileschi, at the time called a “prodigy of painting, easier to envy than to imitate.” She came along at the end of the Italian Renaissance, born in 1593 and alive till about 1656; she worked at the height of the dramatic Baroque style—no, she helped define the Baroque, and she was one of its foremost practitioners.

And now I come to a trigger warning. Artemisia was born into a milieu in which femininity meant never being entirely safe. That was especially true in a male-dominated profession, for a lower-class girl, no matter how scrappy she was. In short, Artemisia endured a trauma that no one should ever have to experience, and we have to know about it in order to understand both her life and her oeuvre.”

But her story is not about being a victim. In the next forty years, she became a master of her art, and she is now known for big, bloody pictures of avenging women, heroines, and warrior queens. Given her history, it is natural to see Artemisia as a warrior queen herself … but I think her story and her art are more complicated than that. Painting as she did may have been partly revenge, but great art is never just revenge.

So if you read on, you’ll encounter Renaissance violence and injustice. You’ll also meet other remarkable artists who rose to prominence in the rich 16th and 17th centuries, women who broke with some traditions and created new ones in masterworks we celebrate today. Artemisia stands on their shoulders.

Just look at her 1638 Self-Portrait as Allegory of Painting: She’s glorious in mid-career, prosperous, and wearing a fine gown and gold necklace, all surfaces shimmering, all textures finely rendered … a lady. But she’s contorting in order to get the right sight line on the work and keep her fine-tipped brush headed for a precise spot. This is a beautiful woman whose beauty does not matter to her in the moment, because she’s focused on what she can create. Her pose shows the difficulty—for anyone, not only women—of doing the work. And it caps a new tradition for female painters.

As the centuries rolled on, these artists mostly sank back into perhaps colorful marginal notes as oddities … or else they got no notes at all and dropped into obscurity. But the past thirty or so years have seen a surge of interest in these artists as artists, and not just as female ones. Their work embodies the culture and shifting aesthetics of the era; they also created new modes and genres of paintings, most significantly the self-portrait of the artist as (in fact) an artist. They delved into the problems of flesh, the body, the self, and the nature of art, and their eyes are watching us now.

So let us celebrate, once again, their lives and creations, from birth to success and whatever else came along.

A Rebirth of the Flesh

O those terrifically louche, very physical ancient Greeks and Romans! The heavenward gaze of the Middle Ages had preferred not to look at what prior cultures had done, with their pagan emphasis on the body and their glory in some of the more animal impulses—depictions of lust, anger, and love, for example, in a recognizably three-dimensional space. Most Inset: Miniature Self-Portrait (1556), by Sofonisba Anguissola medieval art centered on the Christian divine, placing what later seemed like flat, idealized forms in an equally flat symbolic space.

Sometime in the 1300s, our focus started to shift back to all the messiness of humanity, where it stayed until the religious resurgence of the 1600s. In 1550, Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (more on that worthy tome later) referred to the change as a rinascita—a rebirth. In English and French, the concept caught on around 1855 as the Renaissance. Physicality was just one aspect of humanism, which was an all-around return to interest in people (rather than divinity) with all their flaws and curiosity and doubts and capacity for growth. In other words, creativity and philosophy now were about real, complicated flesh and emotions.

This is not to take anything away from medieval art, which we love. Women were active painters then too, illuminating manuscripts in convents—where would we be without our perennial girl crush Hildegard von Bingen?—and creating even more pictures with thread in the one medium always approved for women and girls: embroidery. These Renaissance painters emerged as much from these artistic traditions as from the male- dominated studio system.

As more women took up the brush outside of the convent, they participated in a movement by which the idea of beauty itself—both as something a person possessed and as something they could represent in art—was becoming more individualized. So each face and figure had to stand out as unique. For example, in self-portraits, Artemisia’s pointed nose sets her apart from Sofonisba’s rounded cheeks and blue eyes; they are artists, not an icon meaning Artist. Backgrounds and settings also became more distinctive and realistic, with a rediscovered sense of perspective, because bodies now lived inside a network of light, shadow, and depth, a complex sense of space in which other objects loomed or dwindled with distance.

Just look at the work of another superstar, Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614). She was known primarily for portraits, but she was also one of a few women who took on religious subjects and classical mythology. The bodies in her work have a certain jarring beauty not entirely in line with what we think we observe every day. That’s because Lavinia’s aesthetic followed the Mannerist school, which strove to achieve elegance and grace through exaggerated poses and sometimes slightly off-kilter proportions. Maybe it was paradox, maybe genius, but it was all still realistic by standards of the time, under a somewhat heightened reality. Lavinia, let us say, was a leg woman. Her archangel Gabriel, in the Annunciation of 1575, has thighs nearly to his underarms— but they suit him, as if there’s no other way for an angel to be. The same is true for her always-a-bit- larger-than-life Christ figures.

They dominate the space; they force us into a relationship with the body as a body. And her nudes are positively sinuous, as we’ll see below. Therein lay a danger, plus a major obstacle to female painters: Good girls were not supposed to be so familiar with the body.

Apprenticeship and the Forbidden Lesson

There’s no denying that art in the Renaissance was a man’s world. The guilds, the academies, the commissions—all were controlled by men. A girl with a talent and a yearning to accomplish something exceptional had to gain entrée somehow, and that meant learning from (yes) a man. So Catharina van Hemessen took lessons from her painter father, Jan; Lavinia Fontana was trained by her father, Prospero, who bragged about her talent and seems to have needed her to help support him; Nunzio Galizia taught his daughter, Fede (c. 1578–c. 1630); and Artemisia learned from her father, Orazio.

One exception is the Florentine nun Plautilla Nelli (1524– 1588), who is said to have been self-taught. That reputation may be misleading; she resided in a convent originally sponsored by Savonarola (1452–1498), the bossy little zealot who vowed to make Florence great again with bonfires of the vanities and restrictions on citizens’ freedom. He might have been a fanatic, but he did encourage women to draw and paint religious subjects as a way of staying busy. Convents such as Plautilla’s became (in a way Savonarola did not expect, and often after his death) flourishing art colonies. Plautilla would have learned from some of the best. She did quite well with some massive church pieces
and even painted her way into Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists,” the exclusive men’s club of a Who’s Who. Three other women also made the book: sculptor Properzia de’ Rossi and painters Madonna Lucrezia and Sofonisba Anguissola. (We’ll visit with her again in just a moment.)

What girls picked up in their apprenticeships was not always what an artist wants to learn. The most vital lesson was forbidden: drawing from life. It was a somewhat new idea that in order to paint the body realistically, you had to look at it intimately. Some male painters even dissected bodies to gain an understanding of how muscle and sinew and skin work together. That sort of gaze was forbidden to female painters.

Not quite paradoxically, the new understanding of the body was possible only because of women’s work. Western art has long depended on sex workers as models and muses. Just imagine everything we’d have missed if prostitutes and mistresses had refused to spend hours on end posing for those serene paintings of the Annunciation or the torments of the Pietà.

And now we come to the nudes … those enchanting erotic beings who transcend the paint that has made them. In the art world, there’s a difference between someone who’s naked and a nude. Think, for a moment, of what happens when the body undresses. Is it just going about its daily life, or is it trying to prevent you (O presumed-to-be-masculine viewer) from going about yours?

The nude displays itself for the viewer’s gaze in a certain way, hoping to provoke a reaction. Perhaps a wisp of gossamer veil preserves a last inch or two of modesty, but we confront breasts, bottoms, and bellies, bare arms and legs, set up for a certain pleasure that will not be found, say, in a picture of the Virgin breast-feeding Jesus or in a martyr’s tortured flesh.

So nakedness might be natural; the nude was (is) dangerous. And women, of course, could not be trusted to make a smart distinction between them. Who knew what ghastly things might happen if they got themselves near enough any bare flesh at all? A girl should not stare at a naked man, obviously, though there must have been plenty of them around the cities, urinating in the streets, wrestling on the bridges of Venice, and whatnot.

Women were not allowed to look at prostitutes and paint them either. The girls who did manage to train as artists were of a higher social class and had to be protected from those immoral creatures. So instead, a female apprentice spent extra time poring over miniature versions of famous sculptures and plaster casts of hands and feet. A woman would not have the right to paint a nude until Lavinia Fontana, whose Mars and Venus, as we will see, is a masterwork both witty and erotic.

Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532–1625) had no teacher in the family and not that much of a family fortune, but she did have sisters who were also inclined toward the easel. Her parents managed to give their six daughters and one son good educations that included apprenticeships to local artists. Three other sisters stuck with painting and became professionals, but Sofonisba was the most talented of all. On a sketching trip to Rome at age twenty-two, she impressed a painter whose name now is lost—and he introduced her to one whose name is everything: Michelangelo.

Michelangelo was gobsmacked. It is easy to imagine the two of them together: he turning over pages of her portfolio, she explaining about all those plaster hands and feet and the statues she was sketching in Rome, along with some drawings of people in the street. Not being allowed to look at a nude—well, it was crippling her work. Michelangelo probably sympathized; he also knew how hard it was to work without being able to study the body so closely. He had fought to win the right, at around age nineteen, to attend public dissections before reputedly finding a way to conduct a dissection himself.

For such a gifted and otherwise well-educated painter as Sofonisba to miss that opportunity must have been beyond frustrating—but Sofonisba was resourceful. She used her sisters as models. And for at least two years, she enjoyed an honor no doubt envied by just about anybody at work in the art world: She was Michelangelo’s long-distance protégée, sending drawings through the mail for his critique.

Artemisia came along after all these women had served their versions of apprenticeships, but getting an education was no easier for her—in fact, it was even more difficult, as her family was neither noble nor rich. Her mother died when Artemisia was twelve, and she grew up a bit rough-and-tumble, surrounded by violence and general seediness. Her father, Orazio, was an artist, but his connections were considerably less accomplished and gentlemanly than Michelangelo. They posed a constant, if low-level, danger. When the Gentileschis decided to take in a tenant to help make ends meet, Orazio chose a woman, perhaps thinking she would provide some sort of companionship and motherly influence to young Artemisia … which would turn out to be no help at all, as we will see.

All these women artists would outshine their fathers and other teachers. Well, except maybe Michelangelo; he seems to be standing the test of time.