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 A sizeable percentage of these women superseded the usual constraints that inhibited professional success for most women artists in early modern Italy.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.