Women as artists: Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque
Richard Stemp romped through art history listing and describing the work of women artists with wonderful illustrations. He began by going through the women artists mentioned by Pliny, how Boccaccio then elaborated on the stories of some of them and how copies of his work were illustrated by illuminators. He argued that their accurate depictions implied that it was not unknow for women to be artists.
He also looked at the barriers to women becoming artists at this time from the fact that women couldn’t go out in public without a chaperone and therefore found it hard to observe the world to the fact they couldn’t go to live in the house of a master and therefore couldn’t study in the traditional way.
Most fun though was his listing of some amazing artis, many of who I knew but there were also lots of new names to loo out for. I hadn’t come across Catherina de Vigri who became a nun and is recorded as having decorated the walls of her cell and illustrated a breviary. She was later made a saint and you can still see her sitting up in the cathedral in Bologna. I use a Judith and Holofernes by Fede Galizia to illustrate this article who is better known for her still-lives.
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