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Anecdotal Insights: Changing Perceptions Of Italian Women Artists In Eighteenth-Century Life Stories, Julia K. Dabbs
Anecdotal Insights: Changing Perceptions Of Italian Women Artists In Eighteenth-Century Life Stories, Julia K. Dabbs
Art History Publications
“Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” Professor Henry Higgins’s androcentric lament from the musical My Fair Lady would have resounded with male biographers of the eighteenth century who wrote about the perplexing phenomenon of the woman artist. Since the Renaissance, writers of artistic biographical compendia had characterized the few female artists included in their volumes in distinctly different ways from their male counterparts, mainly due to lingering prejudices concerning the intellectual abilities and societal roles of women. Emulating Castiglione’s vision of the ideal Renaissance lady, biographers such as Giorgio Vasari, Carlo Ridolfi, and Carlo Cesare Malvasia emphasized …
Sex, Lies And Anecdotes: Gender Relations In The Life Stories Of Italian Women Artists, 1550-1800, Julia K. Dabbs
Sex, Lies And Anecdotes: Gender Relations In The Life Stories Of Italian Women Artists, 1550-1800, Julia K. Dabbs
Art History Publications
The writer discusses gender relations in life stories of Italian women artists between 1550 and 1800. In early modern life stories, a recurring emphasis on gender relations, typically deflecting or overshadowing discussion of artistic accomplishment, clearly marks the female artist as a breed apart from her male colleagues. In light of the fact that their biographers were frequently artists themselves, or at least were linked to artistic circles, the commonalities of these anecdotal narratives illuminate how these “miracles of nature” were viewed by the male artistic community, and, by association, the broader society of which they were a part. The …