Laura Ragg's The Women Artists of Bologna (1905) first examined “the Bolognese phenomenon,” via Caterina dei Vigri, Properzia de’ Rossi, Lavinia Fontana, and Elisabetta Sirani. In her deeply researched new book on this important topic, Bohn brings to light sixty-eight women who were active as painters, sculptors, printmakers, and embroiderers between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. There is necessarily a reconsideration of those four illustrious figures, about whom we know significantly more, but, eschewing biography, the author considers the political, cultural, and social circumstances that permitted them to succeed in larger numbers in this city. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they benefitted from a system of decentralized political and economic interests. Yet we also learn about the power of precedent, increased access to training, and strong community support.
Bohn is professor of art history at Texas Christian University, where she also teaches women's and gender studies. As a specialist on the art of early modern Bologna, she has authored numerous articles on Elisabetta Sirani as well as previous books on Guido Reni and Ludovico Carracci. This much-anticipated culmination of years of research is illustrated with 141 images (81 color plates), 4 charts, and 8 tables. Content is divided into two parts, the first of which offers context and explores the roles of key individuals in establishing and celebrating a model of the female intellectual in Bologna (chapters 1–4). The second part delves into issues of patronage, self-fashioning, and the importance of drawings and prints in assessing women's capabilities (chapters 5–7). Three useful appendixes list all sixty-eight women artists active in Bologna from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, including primary sources (appendix 1), and provide inventories with work by Lavinia Fontana (appendix 2) and Elisabetta Sirani (appendix 3).
Bohn opens with Bolognese writers Paolo Masini, Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Luigi Crespi, and Marcello Oretti, who wrote a combined one hundred biographies of women artists, a vast number when compared to their Roman or Florentine counterparts. She then considers a lineage of figures who established the city's reputation for outstanding women. An entire chapter is devoted to the importance of Elisabetta Sirani, to whom Malvasia attributed honorary virility and placed at the apex of Bolognese painting. She specialized in history painting and created thirty-five public pictures that helped transform Bolognese attitudes about women artists and opened doors to subsequent women. The chapter that follows explores a flowering of women artists that took place after Sirani's death, seen as a “a response to her example rather than the direct product of her artistic training” (96). The second part of the book begins with an assessment of how “patronal heterogeneity” (125) in Bologna benefitted women artists.
It is here that Bohn elaborates on the limitations of traditional approaches to researching women artists, who could not legally sign contracts. She turned to private inventories (where Sirani's work appears most frequently), legal documents, letters, and unpublished biographies to discover important patronage networks. A chapter exploring signatures and self-portraits indicates that these strategies represented “a struggle for recognition” (146) and an attempt to claim “legitimacy and dignity” (170). Bohn also puts women's works on paper into broader contexts. Once again, Sirani stands out for the nature of the praise she received and her numerous extant drawings. Women's draftsmanship was rarely celebrated by early modern critics, and women's drawings from this period are mostly lost. Is this scarcity connected to limited professional training, asks Bohn, or is it linked to limited interest from collectors and consequent attrition? In the realm of printmaking, no single figure dominates, and it is argued that while the growing publishing industry expanded opportunities for women, it often failed to credit them.
Vasari's model of artistic genius required the exceptional woman artist, a marvel of nature, to establish the general rule that creativity was an attribute of maleness. Feminist art history still struggles at times with a paradoxical desire to celebrate women of genius while interrogating this concept. To a gratifying degree, Bohn balances these concerns by celebrating Sirani's remarkable achievements in context and conversation with male and female peers. Bohn not only creates solid foundations for future study but also carefully facilitates the next generation of scholarship here, lifting as she climbs.
