Women Artists, 1400-1750

Catalog description

Once ignored or considered curious rarities, we now know the names and works of many women working as artists in Europe in the early modern period, and their numbers are constantly growing. Major exhibitions of their art and new scholarship have dispelled myths about the quality or supposed limitations of art by women, challenged the traditional boundaries of the objects of art history, and demonstrated a broad public desire to know more about women artists of the past. Through the careers and works of artists including Clara Peeters, Sofonisba Anguissola, Artemisia Gentileschi, Lavinia Fontana, Judith Leyster, Luisa Roldán, and Maria Sibylla Merian we will consider what it took to succeed as a woman artist and how success itself is defined for women, historically and today. Though the focus is on artists active in Europe, we will also consider themes of the global early modern world through topics such as still life painting and natural history, convent networks and nuns’ works, and international collecting and exhibition in the early modern period and today, Focused studies of individual artists will open to broad thematic discussions of topics such as feminist and gender history, the intersection of art and science, and the historiography of art writing.