Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Bologna and Rome: Francesco Albani’s Correspondence and his Reflections on Art (1637–59)
- 3 Collezionismo in Early Modern Bologna: The Fantuzzi’s Acquisition and Display of Drawings and Paintings by Local Masters
- 4 Collecting Women’s Art in Early Modern Bologna: Myth and Reality
- 5 Bolognese Artists and Paintings in Mantua during the Gonzaga Nevers Period
- 6 Bolognese Painters in the Private Collections of Romagna: The Albicini Marchis Collection in Forlì
- 7 Bolognese Paintings in Seventeenth-Century Medici Collections Reconsidered (1600–75)
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Collecting Women’s Art in Early Modern Bologna: Myth and Reality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Bologna and Rome: Francesco Albani’s Correspondence and his Reflections on Art (1637–59)
- 3 Collezionismo in Early Modern Bologna: The Fantuzzi’s Acquisition and Display of Drawings and Paintings by Local Masters
- 4 Collecting Women’s Art in Early Modern Bologna: Myth and Reality
- 5 Bolognese Artists and Paintings in Mantua during the Gonzaga Nevers Period
- 6 Bolognese Painters in the Private Collections of Romagna: The Albicini Marchis Collection in Forlì
- 7 Bolognese Paintings in Seventeenth-Century Medici Collections Reconsidered (1600–75)
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter examines the collecting of Bolognese women's art in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Bologna, a city that, uniquely in Italy, recorded at least forty-four women artists during the Seicento. Extrapolating from hundreds of Bolognese inventories and other manuscripts, Bohn argues that Bolognese women's works attracted local collectors to a disproportionately high degree for a group constituting only 12 percent of all Bolognese painters. The ninety-one known inventories with women's artworks frequently feature works by Lavinia Fontana and Elisabetta Sirani, but the works of their followers appear only rarely. Although these other women were celebrated by local biographers and produced works for public locations in the city, their absence from private collections raises questions about their production and critical reception.
Keywords: women artists, Fontana, Sirani, Cantofoli, Scarfaglia
Many early Bolognese writers express pride in their city's women artists. And no wonder: At the peak of their accomplishments during the seventeenth century, forty-four women artists are recorded by documents or early writers in Bologna, the largest number in any Italian city by a considerable margin. Also unusual was their diversity of specializations; although there were no recorded women sculptors in Bologna during the seventeenth century, as there were during the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the seicento group included thirty-five painters, five printmakers, and four embroiderers. These unprecedentedly high numbers and diverse specializations indicate an urban environment that was unusually receptive to women artists. A sizeable percentage of these women superseded the usual constraints that inhibited professional success for most women artists in early modern Italy. Many, including almost half of the recorded painters, produced works for public commissions; most of the painters specialized in history painting rather than portraiture, the traditional (and less lucrative and prestigious) specialization for women's painted production; some made original etchings; and others created woodcuts for illustrated books. For such Bolognese writers as Count Carlo Cesare Malvasia and Antonio di Paolo Masini in the seventeenth century and Luigi Crespi and Marcello Oretti in the eighteenth, the city's talented women artists were a fundamental and even inspirational component of local cultural identity that distinguished Bologna from all other artistic capitals in the Italian peninsula. Indeed, in the introduction to his lengthy biography of Elisabetta Sirani in 1678, Malvasia cites the accomplishments of Bolognese women artists as one of the three principal arguments for the city's claims to uniqueness in the visual arts.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Reframing Seventeenth-Century Bolognese ArtArchival Discoveries, pp. 73 - 94Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019