Invitation to "Out of the Shadows. Women Artists from the 16th to the 18th Century
12 April 2023Out of the Shadows. Women Artists from the 16th to the 18th Century
This year, the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister is celebrating the 350th anniversary of the birth of the Venetian painter and pastel portraitist Rosalba Carriera, with a special exhibition devoted to her work. Accompanying it is a small exhibition which takes a look at other female artists of the 16th to 18th century, who today, with a few exceptions, are still overshadowed by their more famous male counterparts in the history of art.
This compact show brings together around 20 works by nine female artists from the collections of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister and the Kupferstich-Kabinett. Along with paintings by Lavinia Fontana, Marietta Robusti, Barbara Longhi, Rachel Ruysch, Maria van Oosterwijck, and Theresa Concordia Mengs, the presentation also features etchings by Elisabetta Sirani and Angelika Kauffmann and engravings by Diana Scultori.
Female artists are very much underrepresented at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister. Their names, unlike those of their male colleagues, are still hardly known today. Very few women had the good fortune to grow up in an artistic environment where their talent was nurtured, allowing them to sidestep institutional and social barriers that would have otherwise hindered their success. Many were the daughters of famous artists, who received an apprenticeship in their fathers’ workshops.
Marietta Robusti (c. 1551–1590), for example, was the daughter of Tintoretto and was taught by her father, yet we still know little about her life and oeuvre. One of the few works attributed to her is a double portrait in which one of the sitters is the imperial antiquary Jacopo Strada, and the other is thought to be the artist herself. In preparation for the exhibition, the painting was examined by conservation scientists and their initial results are presented in the context of the show.
Angelika Kauffmann (1741–1807), by contrast, enjoyed a cosmopolitan career and contemporary fame, and is represented in the exhibition by five works. Faced with a market in which only men were seen as true artists and women were credited, at most, with talent but never genius, she nevertheless rose to the top through a combination of networking and clever strategy. Supported by her father, she enjoyed a remarkable career and achieved international recognition. In her history paintings on antique themes, she had no hesitation in placing female figures at the centre of the composition and the action.
Lavinia Fontana (1552‒1614) was one of the first female artists of the modern period to carve out an independent career for herself. She painted numerous portraits and history pictures with mythological and biblical themes, some of them in large format. The devotional painting in the Dresden collection, The Holy Family, is an early work by the Bolognese artist, which was only recently technically examined and restored by experts at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister’s conservation studio. Their analyses revealed important information about Fontana’s painting materials and techniques and the results are due to be presented in the context of a large solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. For this reason, the painting will only be on show in Dresden from mid-August.
To accompany the exhibition, a German-language catalogue is due to be published by the Sandstein Verlag: Aus dem Schatten. Künstlerinnen vom 16. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 144 pages, provisional publication date: 12 May 2023, ISBN 978-3-95498-755-9.
