Her patrons included, along with Cosimo, such luminaries as his uncle Leopoldo de’ Medici, the Duchess of Braunschweig, the Duke of Mirandola, and papal legates, senators, and cardinals. Her studio was often filled with visitors it’s a wonder she found time to paint. Unsurprisingly, the young artist-phenomenally gifted, beautiful, vivacious-became something of a celebrity she was even the focus of a cult who believed she was the reincarnation of Reni, whose tomb she was to share. Elisabetta noted in her inventory that the Grand Duke Cosimo III de’ Medici witnessed her finish the commission in one sitting and was so impressed that he commissioned Elisabetta to paint a Madonna. To refute her disbelievers, on May 13, 1664, she invited an audience into her studio to watch her work on a painting commissioned by Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici on the subject of Justice, Prudence, and Charity. But Elisabetta’s accomplishments didn’t stop with art: she was also a gifted musician and regularly played for gatherings of patrons, friends, and family.Įlisabetta was so prolific that rumors abounded that she could not possibly have been the sole author of her work. One of the significant, even radical, aspects of Elisabetta’s school is that it took in women who had artistic ambitions but who weren’t from artistic families-a rare opportunity in the seventeenth century. Of her twelve students, Ginevra Cantofoli, Veronica Fontana, and Veronica Franchi were to become professional artists themselves her sisters Barbara and Anna Maria also joined Elisabetta in the studio and became proficient enough to be commissioned to paint altarpieces. Other women artists had taught female students, but no one had run a school on this scale before. As well as working from dawn to dusk, she also opened a school for women artists, the first in Europe outside a convent. When she was nineteen, her father, crippled with rheumatic gout, could no longer paint, and as her mother, too, was bedridden, the young artist became the family’s main breadwinner. By the age of seventeen she had painted her first altarpiece. Even as a child, Elisabetta’s talent was recognized. Giovanni had no sons and so he taught his daughters two of Elisabetta’s sisters, Barbara and Anna Maria, were also to become artists. Her family was artistic: her father, Giovanni Andrea Sirani, had been a pupil of the renowned painter Guido Reni, one of the most important artists of the seventeenth century. But in her short time on earth she achieved an astonishing amount. It’s a defiant statement at a time when to be a woman artist was to be an object of amazement.Įlisabetta’s life was brief: she died suddenly at the age of twenty-seven. Elisabetta represents herself as both the embodiment of painting and very much herself: full of personality and talent, young and fizzing with life. Our scrutiny of her is obviously an interruption, but she doesn’t seem to mind she looks vital and at ease, despite the heavy gold chain across her breast. Perhaps playfully aware of the power of her physical beauty, she looks out at us with the ghost of a smile, her right hand hovering over the canvas, her left holding the partially obscured palette. Elisabetta looks effortlessly natural: in a wonderfully bold gesture, a laurel wreath-an ancient symbol of victory-graces her tumbling hair and her clothes are loose, low-cut, and lavish. She pictures herself at the easel, with books and a quill close by, and in the background a small figurine, possibly of Minerva, the patron of the arts. Knowing how fleeting their life might be must have given them a terrible and urgent sense of their own mortality.Ī case in point is the gifted Bolognese artist Elisabetta Sirani, who painted her Self-Portrait as an Allegory of Painting in 1658, when she was only twenty. They were trained from an early age in an era of great plagues and limited medical knowledge, even if they survived childhood, many of them died in their twenties and thirties. It is hard for us to grasp, from our twenty-first-century perspective, how very young so many of the Renaissance and Baroque artists were when they painted their masterpieces.
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