There is something poignant in reviewing the catalogue for a traveling exhibition – By Her Hand: Artemisia Gentileschi and Women Artists in Italy, 1500-1800 – that privileges the name of a seventeenth-century artist who likely died in an epidemic, specifically the Naples Plague of the mid-1650s. As we enter year three of our own global epidemic, and the many reckonings in its wake, the timing feels painfully familiar but fitting.
By Her Hand features the lives and work of eighteen women artists who lived in Italy from the Renaissance until just this side of the nineteenth century. Some, like Artemisia Gentileschi and Rosalba Carriera, are sort of famous today (as famous as any artists, especially women artists, of the past can ever be), while others are likely already known only to specialists. Both sorts of artists are well served by the essays and catalogue entries in By Her Hand, which offer plenty by way of history – including biography, feminist history, and art history – and thorough discussion of the artworks themselves. The book is abundantly illustrated, an aesthetic object in its own right, one much appreciated in a time of too-little travel to experience art.
It’s been some fifteen years since any exhibition along these lines has taken place in the United States, specifically a 2007 show at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), a worthy venue but one that might be considered “niche.” With By Her Hand, for the first time Italian women artists of the early modern period are featured at two of America’s oldest civic art museums, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, where the show opened in late September, 2021, and the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA) in Michigan, where it runs from February 6 to May 29, 2022. According to the catalogue, this is the very first time either the Wadsworth or DIA have “featured an exhibition devoted to European women artists before the twentieth century.”
Why now? Well, there’s been a surge of interest in woman artists, thanks in no small part to NMWA’s own social media campaign, ongoing since 2016, that asks, “Can you name five women artists?” Their hashtag #5WomenArtists has spurred global interest and big response. What’s more, while the exhibition and accompanying catalogue title might seem obscure — “early modern Italian women artists” is a lot of qualifiers – the artists featured are surprisingly in synch with contemporary events. Probably no artists have been so central to #MeToo visual culture of recent years than Artemisia Gentileschi (one version of her “Judith Severing the Head of Holofernes” pops up regularly in social media posts and at protests) and Elisabetta Sirani (for example, my own September, 2018 Facebook post during the Kavanaugh hearings, of Sirani’s “Timoclea Killing the Captain of Alexander the Great, Her Rapist, by Stuffing Him in a Well,” was shared more than 15,000 times). This old art, it seems, is evergreen.
[left: Elisabetta Sirani, “Portia Wounding Her Thigh,” 1664] The book’s essays are also timely, even as they cover some well-worn histories. The title of the introductory essay, by one of the show’s two curators, Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, “Why Have There Been No Exhibitions of Early Modern Italian Women in Hartford or Detroit?” deliberately echoes feminist art historian Linda Nochlin’s groundbreaking (and ground shaking) 1971 essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” The feminist art history accounting here is excellent, while the statistics she gives on current museum collections are distressing if unsurprising: “A study published in 2019 entitled ‘Diversity of Artists in Major U.S. Museum’ found that in eighteen museums – among them the Detroit Institute of Arts – eighty-seven percent of objects in the collection are by men.”
Less persuasive in the same essay is a more general historical statement like, “Recent scholarship on women artists in the West has its roots in the modern feminist movement, which originated in Seneca Falls, New York.” Although the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 lit a fuse for some American women, the modern feminist movement hardly begins there. But one of the great lessons of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, whose six volume History of Woman Suffrage enshrined Seneca Falls as the birthplace of a movement, is that those who write the history also create it. It’s for this very reason why exhibitions and books like By Her Hand are essential in recovering the work of women artists and reinserting them into the so-called canon of European art history. As feminist art historian and Artemisia Gentileschi scholar Mary Garrard has written, “History is created by repetition and magnification — something men have been quite good at — and if a woman artist or writer is not augmented through these tools, her ars will not be longa.”
The title of curator Oliver Tostmann’s essay, “The Advantages of Painting Small: Italian Women Artists and the Matter of Scale,” references feminist art itself, specifically an iconic Guerrilla Girls work from 1989 titled “The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist.” Among the 13 very much tongue-in-cheek “Advantages” is: “Knowing your career might pick up after you’re eighty.” Or, in the case of these Italian women artists, long dead.
[left: Sofonisba Anguissola, “Self-Portrait,” ca. 1556] As Tostmann points out, scale is often significant in reckoning importance, even so-called “greatness,” wherein bigger is almost always better (Sistine Chapel ceiling anyone?) Tostmann writes, “Today small pictures from the Renaissance to Rococo are given scant attention and are often considered merely decorative objects; contemporaries, however, found them significant.” A case in point is Sofonisba Anguissola’s exceptional miniature self-portrait that is the facing plate for Tostmann’s essay. In reviewing the show for the New York Times, Jason Farago called Anguissola “my No. 1 draft pick for canon membership, if we’re playing that game.” And, well, I’m afraid we are, always. Western art is still very much in thrall to the game of greatness. What’s refreshing is to read a critic like Farago esteem work in miniature (though Anguissola also worked large).
It’s important to note that women often had to work small, as they rarely had a studio, space of their own, privacy. Also diminutive size often meant utilizing less problematic (for women) mediums – odorless, less apt to stain – like watercolor or pastel. Which brings us to Venetian artist Rosalba Carriera, known during her lifetime as “The Queen of Pastel,” who pioneered a new form of painting utilizing portable colors made by mixing ground pigment with a binder to create a colored stick. Like many artists in By Her Hand, Carriera was celebrated in her lifetime. Carriera’s studio was a popular stop for eighteenth-century tourists on the Grand Tour, and she was admitted into both the Roman Academy of Saint Luke and the Royal Academy in Paris. To again quote Mary Garrard, “Over and over, women’s voices are heard in their own time, then seem to die away.”
By Her Hand goes a long way in ensuring that the work of important women artists is respected and remembered. And this far into our current pandemic, when it’s still difficult for many of us to travel, a book like this one is more essential than ever for conveying something of a world many of us are missing: the opportunity to encounter, enjoy and celebrate great art.
[Published by Yale University Press on November 30, 20212, 208 pages, $40.00 hardcover. Essays and entries by Babette Bohn, Claude-Douglas Dickerson III, Jamie Gabbarelli, Hilliard Goldfarb, Lara Lea Roney, Joaneath Spicer, Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, and Oliver Tostmann.]
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