Abstract
In her seminal book The Obstacle Race: the Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work (2001), Germaine Greer writes of the ridicule faced by eighteenth-century painters Anna Dorothea Lisiewska-Therbusch and Giulia Lama as they reached middle age‚ due to their purported lack of physical attractiveness. This chapter follows up on Greer’s work and further examines verbal and visual characterisations of older women artists of the early modern period (i.e. 1400−1800) to consider whether this discourse of humiliation was the norm, as well as to see how such characterisations compare to those of elder male artists.
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Notes
- 1.
See Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 1528‚ trans. George Bull (New York: Penguin, 1967) 211, for the association of women with virtue and beauty; and for the youthful stereotype, it is only necessary to glance through a catalogue on Renaissance portraiture, such as David Alan Brown, Virtue & Beauty (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2001). The “formula” for female artists was largely set by Vasari, who writes of sculptor Properzia de’ Rossi that she was “a young woman” who not only was a talented homemaker and musician, but also “very beautiful,” even though the portrait of de’ Rossi that accompanies her life story suggests otherwise (in Dabbs 2009, 56).
- 2.
50 years of age, according to Botelho (2013, 301), is an approximate number used to mark “cultural old age” in the early modern period, so it is being used here.
- 3.
Rubin (1990), 36. Here Rubin discusses the “oratory of praise” or epideictic approach used in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, but this rhetorical manner was certainly followed by other biographers of the early modern period.
- 4.
Another example of “heroic old age” can be found in Vasari’s vita of the early Renaissance master Luca Signorelli, in which he assists with a fresco project at the age of 82, even though hindered by paralysis (1996, I: 613−614).
- 5.
See for example Castiglione’s The Courtier, in which old men are advised to “make use of the prudence and knowledge they will have acquired through their long experience, act like oracles to whom everyone will turn for advice” (Castiglione 1967, 123). On this point, see also Campbell (2002), 321 and 330.
- 6.
- 7.
Carriera herself made the initial connection between this self-portrait and the concept of tragedy, as one biographer states that a few years before her blindness she “made her own portrait with a garland of leaves, and having been asked what she meant to signify with that, she responded, that it was Tragedy, and that Rosalba must end tragically, as it was in real life.” Antonio Maria Zanetti, Della pittura veneziana, 1771 (Venice: Filippi Editore, 1972) 449.
- 8.
In James Hall’s The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History (London: Thames & Hudson, 2014)‚ of the approximately 100 self-portraits of men, 19 (or roughly 20%) are of male artists over 50 years of age, while only one out of nine self-portraits of women depict a female over 50. An even greater disparity is found in Laura Cumming’s A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits (London: Harper Press, 2009): of the 71 self-portraits by male artists, some 24 are of men over 50, yet of the 11 self-portraits by women, none are over 50 years of age.
- 9.
In another case, Whitney Chadwick’s Women, Art, and Society (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012) includes three images of women artists past the age of 50, out of a total of 29 portraits. In compiling these statistics, we continued to use the early modern “threshold” of 50 years of age to identify which portrayals‚ whether of a male or female artist‚ might be considered “old.” I would like to thank research assistant Sophia Chadbourne for her work on collecting this data.
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Dabbs, J.K. (2017). Making the Invisible Visible: The Presence of Older Women Artists in Early Modern Artistic Biography. In: McGlynn, C., O'Neill, M., Schrage-Früh, M. (eds) Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63609-2_2
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