Female self‐portraiture in early modern Bologna

Abstract

This essay examines female self-portraiture in Bologna during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing in particular on the seventeenth century, and considering these works in relation to self-portraits by male contemporaries. Bologna became a centre for women artists, culminating during the seventeenth century, when at least twenty-two female artists were active in the city. It is also the only Italian city with extant self-portraits by five different women artists during 1577-1678, although a forty-year gap, between 1614 and the 1650s, interrupts an otherwise continuous tradition. The richest and most concentrated group of self-portraits by Bolognese women dates from 1658 to 1678, a period that yielded nine painted and drawn self-portraits by Elisabetta Sirani and two of her female pupils. This uniquely substantial and diverse body of material provides an anomalous opportunity for reflection on issues of gender in artistic self-fashioning, testifying to the professional achievements of Bolognese women and to some key aspects of Bolognese culture that promoted their accomplishments.Both male and female self-portraiture will be considered and related to the context of early modern Bologna. The increased incidence of self-portraiture by men and women in Bologna may be related to several factors, including the new emphasis on the executive power of the will; the emergence of art collectors interested in self-portraiture; changes in the social status of the artist; and the increased secularism of painting for private patrons, who were influenced by Bologna's humanistic culture.For women artists, several other factors were influential in promoting the incidence and variety of female self-portraiture. One key phenomenon was the patriotic pride of many Bolognese citizens in the city's women and their exceptional accomplishments. For Malvasia, the biographer of the Bolognese artists writing in 1678, Bologna's exceptional group of female artists constituted one of the city's most notable accomplishments. 1 This view co-existed, paradoxically, with the early modern notion of female artists as oxymoronic exceptions to the natural female incapacity for creativity, making them curiosities that might be possessed by enterprising collectors in the form of 1 Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice, Vite de' pittori bolognesi , ed. G. P. Zanotti (Bologna, 1678 and 1841),ii , 385.

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