Context Podcast Digital Collection

Doug Exton: Thank you so much for joining us for tonight's Connected Conversation. A program conducted by the Idaho Humanities Council. If you're not familiar with our organization, I encourage you to check out our website, Idaho Humanities . org. I would like to remind you all that you may submit any questions using the Q&A feature located at the bottom of the screen.

With me tonight is Lisa McClain from Boise State University. It's an honor to have you with us tonight, and if you are also attending this as extra credit, please just message your name. To the panelists. I turn it over to you, Lisa.

Dr. Lisa McClain: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Doug, and thank you to the Idaho Humanities Council for making this possible. And to everyone who's taking the time to, attend tonight, I hope it will be educational as well as entertaining. I want to start out with just asking you to consider some really broad, general questions. How do we see ourselves?

How do we see the world? And how does the world see us? These are questions in the 21st century that the exposure of the selfie, for example, really gets to, how do we want the world to see us and how do we massage our social media presence, in essence, as one aspect of this issue? We are hardly the first people to do this.

As a matter of fact, it seems to be, I think, part of our human condition to really take an interest in our self-presentation. And we really see this in the time period we're going to talk about tonight, the Renaissance and Reformation era, which I am defining for tonight as starting about 1350 and lasting all the way until the 18th century, depending on where you happen to live in Europe at the time.

And we really see these questions of self-presentation occurring in the art of this time period. I'm going to share screen real quick and we're going to have lots of pictures tonight. So I encourage you to make them big on your own screen. I wanted to remind you that during the Renaissance era, the entire purpose of art changed, and we're really going to see that reflected tonight.

Both of these images that I'm showing you are of the exact same person, the Virgin Mary. And yet I'm willing to bet most of you would not have guessed. The image on the left. Which is known as the Carolingian Madonna, would have been readily identifiable to you as the Virgin Mary. But the reason for this is this is really, an elite piece of art for the era of the Carolingian Madonna from the ninth century.

But it presents the Virgin Mary symbolically, and the people of the time would have understood how to read the symbolism. Things such as if you follow my cursor. She has the nimbus above her head, indicating her saintliness. She is clearly identified as a woman because she's holding spindle, a woman's instrument. She's sitting on a carefully, ornately wrought chair or throne as Queen of heaven and holding a scepter in the form of a cross.

People would have understood that. I'm guessing, however, that most of you probably would have had an easier time recognizing Filippo Lippi's Madonna from the Renaissance era. And that's because art has changed from being symbolic representation of reality to being a more realistic presentation of the subject. Thanks to the Renaissance, the goal was to reproduce a sense of reality through the art, and there's a new value on the individual that really highlights individual men and women, rather than just groups or generic representations like this.

This face could have probably been just about any woman. But for all Filippo Lippi's , this presentation shows us a very specific individual woman. And we really see this, with, deluge of women in portraiture at the time. So this is about self-representation. And you have contracted with an artist like Leonardo da Vinci in order to present you in a certain way.

And I presumed most of you would be familiar with the Mona Lisa. So I wanted to show you what I consider to be a less well known portrait of da Vinci. This is a portrait of Never Dependency, who was the Florentine noblewoman in the late 15th century. She was about 16 years old when her family commissioned this portrait.

Most art historians conjecture that this is an engagement portrait, and it's not just meant to show what da Vinci looked like. It's also meant to communicate some clear messages about da Vinci as an about to be married woman. One symbolic message, for example, is you might notice this greenery around Davinci's head. That's juniper. And in Renaissance Italy, juniper was considered to be associated with female virtue and chastity.

And this was a very important quality to convey for a woman about to be married and for her family to have publicly displayed and hopefully recognized. Chastity is huge in the representation of women in this era. In addition to the greenery, Davinci's positioning is really important to emphasize female chastity. You may notice she is not facing full on to the viewer as I am in this presentation.

She is positioned, just maybe about three of three quarters toward the viewer, and her eyes never look directly at us. This is because it would be a form of, chastity for this woman to stare out of a canvas at an unknown viewer. Chastity is about so much more than sexual chastity at this time. It extends to even the act of being known publicly.

So both these two portraits that I've started with, we see some clear concerns with how male artists are presenting women, usually concerning chastity and reputation. But what happens then, if we start to look at portraits of women that they created themselves? There are not a whole lot of well known women artists during the Renaissance, but most of them painted themselves some sort of self-portrait.

This next one is by Italian artist from the northern Italian city of Ravenna named Barbara Longhi. And most people agree that this is her self-portrait, and she has chosen to portray herself as an early Christian martyr named Saint Catherine of Alexandria.

The Dutch artist Judith Leyster again presents us with a self-portrait. I always think of her as looking very pleased with herself in this. And finally, an artist will see a lot of works from today. The Italian artist from Rome, Artemisia Gentileschi, a self-portrait as the allegory of painting. Now, I run you through these very quickly. But don't worry, because we'll be looking at them again later in in tonight's presentation.

But I present you with a question to consider and keep in mind throughout the rest of tonight, which is how do these women see themselves differently than the male artists who are painting the Moorish woman? And when she saw them, how do these women who are able to present themselves, present themselves differently with different concerns? How do they what others to perceive them?

This is just one of the tantalizing questions I'll be raising and giving you a chance to weigh in on at the end, but that is a big part of our question for tonight. How do the Renaissance and Reformation era look different when viewed through the lens of gender? Looking at women as both the subjects and as the creators of art.

Now a little background is probably necessary before we plunge right in. You may wonder, what in the world is this man doing here? When I say women are patrons of the Renaissance arts? We have to understand that people don't just up and paint themselves as a self-portrait or paint a picture of da Vinci or a moorish woman. Someone is paying for this.

Okay. Artists receive very specific commissions from people known as patrons or clients, and the artists would then typically work under very intensely detailed contracts that would spell out things such as the amount of materials the artists could use and the cost of those materials. Some of these pigments are made with crushed up precious metals or stones, expensive dyes, things like that.

The client, the patron doesn't want the artist to go crazy. So you specify. Here's what I want and here's how much you can use. And then the client or patron might also specify the size of the work, the timetable in which it is meant to be produced. And when you usually look at the Renaissance and Reformation era, you see men like the one I've got here, Lorenzo the Magnificent magnifico of the famous Medici family.

Florence, known for patronizing a lot of great artists. But what we often forget is that women two were playing important roles as patrons of Renaissance Reformation era artists, queens, certainly, but also noble women like this woman, Isabella d'Eesti, the Duchess of Ferrara in the Italian peninsula. Now she was related to just about every one of the noble families in Italy, either through birth or through marriage.

And we happen to have a great amount of her voluminous correspondence surviving so we can see what she was doing, who she was patronizing, what her artistic priorities were. She was so influential that she is known as the First Lady of the Renaissance, and she was a passionate art collector and patron of the arts. Some people have even characterized her as as greedy.

She would buy up a bunch of ancient Roman classical sculpt shares at the same time that she would patronize a contemporary artist to produce perhaps a painting, a sculpture, or even textiles, usually in the classical style that was so popular. During this time she was painted twice. This portrait of her is by the Renaissance artist Titian, and imagine her what her role as a patron would be would she would be negotiating contracts with the master artisans of the workshop, like a Titian, to get what she wanted.

One of her favorite things to do, for example, when she contracts for a work, is she wanted it to be a certain size because it was likely going to be in her home. So she would send links. She would send lengths of thread to the artist to show them the exact size of what she wanted made. And an influence like this from a woman makes sense when you think about it, because women are, in most practical senses, responsible for the home.

Caravaggio, for example, in this penitent Magdalene, which we will be talking about in more detail in just a few moments, is representative one type of woman that was often included, those of women who figure somewhere in Judeo-Christian biblical stories. Mary Magdalene here, you saw the Virgin Mary earlier and even long. A self-portrait as a Christian martyr.

This is the coronation portrait of the Elizabeth of Elizabeth, the First of England. This is a copy of the original coronation portrait, which was, destroyed at some point. We don't know who made this one, but pictures of powerful women like Elizabeth and Isabella are very, very common. But then we also see these patrons, the wealthy patrons, paying for pictures of ordinary women as the Medici family did with this picture from the Flemish portrait as used to servants.

This particular portrait shows three individuals, two old white women and a black African man. And in this 1634 work, the two women here, Domenica delle Cascine, was a duck and chicken seller to the Medici family. Then there's the second woman is a peasant woman, named Francesca or Cecca, as she is known here from the town of Chileno.

To amusing the Lord and his family with jokes and pleasantries and what's called playing the fool at this time. So she's in there, Cecca is in there, too. And also in the accounting books is the third person you see here, Pietro Moro, which means, for the Italian. He's a more. He is of black African descent named Peter, and he's mentioned in the inventories and was likely a service to the Medici clan.

So seeing a black African male in the portraiture, you may ask, well, what about black African women at this time? Because, yes, there are plenty of black Africans in Europe during the Renaissance and Reformation era, not just in ancient times or on the African continent. As you might recall from European history, that Moors settled in the Iberian Peninsula in around the year 700, and they were there for about seven centuries before Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain kicked them out during the Reconquista.

So where did the Moors go after getting kicked out of Spain? Not necessarily back to the continent of Africa. Many black Africans from the Iberian Peninsula were traders. They were travelers and they became residents of many European countries. As a matter of fact, Black Africans were so numerous in Elizabethan England that Queen Elizabeth the First issued a proclamation and warrant expelling all of what she called Black Amours from England in 1596, and here's what she said about them, basically, that she's upset because there are so many black Africans in England, and evidently the white people were getting greatly annoyed, so she kicked them out.

Now I will tell you that after Elizabeth's reign, the Stuart dynasty once again welcomed them back into the British Isles, where they were active and present in England as they were elsewhere in Europe. And so, even though this shows a level of anti-black African prejudice, there were still going to be many black Africans in Europe. And we can see this in the art now.

It's much more frequent for black African men to be represented in the art, such as here, the German artist Alberta's Adoration of the Magi, commemorating the biblical event, known as the Three Kings coming to the Christ Child or the Three Wise Men. And the African Magus is here shown as male. And we also see portraits of rulers, just as like we saw with Elizabeth the first, such as, Cristofano dell'Altissimo.

Alchitrof, the Emperor of Ethiopia. But if you look, you can't find you do see, Moorish, black African women portrayed in the art. The portrait of the Moorish woman that I showed you earlier is certainly one example of this. And she is presented, I remind you, as a woman of some status, as you could see by her dress, by her accessories at this time, and by the concern for her chastity, by her gaze being averted.

But Durer also did another portrait, of a woman dressed not in European style clothing, but in what was called, at the time, Moorish clothing of high regard. This is a woman, named Catharina, and she is known to have been a resident of Antwerp in what today would be Belgium. And she is shown as well, again with the eyes downcast.

Respect for chastity. For reasons of time, I'm going to go to this last one, because it's not just women of higher social rank who are portrayed in this particular type of art, but even black African servant and slave women. This is by the Italian artist and the Annibale Carracci. And this is a fragment of what once was a much larger piece of art.

This is the servant, but you can see here the color and the dress much more elaborate. Oh, whoever the woman was that this woman served, and she's holding a golden clock at the time. And notice how she, a servant, stares directly at us, the viewer. This is very different from the upper class ladies we have seen so far.

Here we have a woman staring directly at us in a very no nonsense gauge. And to my way of thinking, she engages us as viewers in a way that the rulers or the biblical figures you know, simply don't, with their averted or somewhat uninvolved type of gauged, gazes. And yet, as I'm looking at her as a black African woman, what Carracci intended the viewer to look at in this picture was not the woman herself, because for those like him, there were plenty of black African women in Renaissance Reformation Europe.

We were supposed to instead look at the cloth in her hands. It was the clock that was uncommon, not the black African woman, but the fact that the patrons that I've mentioned before are commissioning works featuring black African and particularly Black African women's shows, that there is very much a consciousness of the presence of black Africans and that these folks matter to these wealthy patrons of the arts.

This really speaks to the cultural exchanges that are going on between Europe, the continent of Africa, and also we can expand this out into Asia and eventually into the Americas. We have to remember that the Renaissance didn't happen in a vacuum. It was a product of encounters and exchanges between Europe and people from all around the world. These were exchanges of which are artistic patrons were aware and thought important.

Okay, so this is patronage in women and subjects, but we also want to get to those women as producers of art as well, and to understand what women were doing as artists and the limited number of them that there were. We have to understand that art was a trade and a business at the time. It wasn't like today the idea of the starving artist living in poverty up in their garret with a north facing exposure, suffering for art.

And then there's another issue to consider, too. With the concern of art as representing reality. Remember that change I mentioned from art a symbol to art as representing reality? Beginning on the 15th century, artists begin to take a real close look at the human body in order to represent it as realistically as possible. As we can see here in a sketchbook from the famous artist Michelangelo in his studies for a work called the Libyan Sibyl, which he creates later the finished product.

And look at this. There are proportions to the to the human body. And how does an artist learn about such things? It's usually by naked bodies. And how do you get access to naked bodies in this era? You could have nude models. You could have corpses brought to you. Could women artists just do this? Even if they're painting pictures of clothed people?

And in that process learn how the Renaissance and even the world looks different when seen through the eyes of women artists. Why treat women separately, you ask? Isn't that just saying you're going to put them in a box, a sidebar on the side of the page and say, hey, women, we're doing it too, in the Renaissance Reformation era?

No, that's not enough. What we want to be looking for is, on one hand, how men represent women in art, but also the extent to how women could participate in the in the Renaissance, in Reformation era, how indeed, major themes and issues look different when seen through the eyes of a women of a woman artist? That's not to say either a male artist or a woman artist is correct and the other is incorrect.

They're just different ways of seeing a situation that, taken in conversation with each other, taken together, maybe give us a fuller view of how Renaissance and Reformation era people understood an event or an idea. To give you an example of what I'm talking about, Barbara Long, who was one of those people who did the self-portraits, painted a picture of a Madonna and child that I'd like you to see, in contrast with the Friar Filippo Lippi Madonna and Child that I showed you earlier.

Now, Longy was, the daughter of a very well-known artist, and both Barbara and her brother were trained in his studio. I asked a moment ago, how can a woman navigate the system that seems to be inimical to her chastity and reputation? Well, family concerns were often a big part of it. You would see a woman training alongside her father, maybe with brothers and other male relatives, and then they could supervise and protect the reputation of a daughter or sister like Lonni.

Now, most of his portraits were never specifically attributed to her, possibly because of chastity issues. You can't have people going around talking about Barbara Longy because that makes her known. And if she has a reputation of any sort, that is antithetical to her modesty. But compare this Madonna and Child to fulfill both of these. Okay, now, Livy's representation is very representative of what most male painters did at the time.

The Madonna and Child are both shown, is rather remote from the concerns of this world. Notice how the Christ child is worldly wise belong his beyond his years. You know, obviously having a book there, the Madonna isn't even looking at her child. But here, on the other hand, we see Longhi portraying a mother and child of this world with a lot of intimacy and care and love.

Something that I honestly have not found in a Madonna child work by any other male artist during this time period. And yet I do see it from other female artists like this, from the Italian artist Elisabetta Serrano, another Virgin and Child. These are two different ways of viewing Madonna and Child. Both are correct and send messages, but both are different at the same time.

She's from Rome, and her mother died just a short while after she was born. And Artemisia grew up and trade in her father oratorios workshop alongside her brothers. And she made a name for herself very early, when she was only 17. With this picture I'm showing you now, which is from a biblical story of Susanna and the elders.

So they go up to her and they threaten her and tell her that unless she agrees to have sex with them, they're going to accuse her publicly of adultery with another man. And adultery, according to ancient Jewish law, is a capital crime for women. But being a modest woman, Susanna refuses their offer. She's not going to have sex with them.

And sure enough, the elders go and they falsely accuse her. And then another male member of the community saves her. Daniel, the same one as Daniel who gets thrown into the lion's den, proves that these two old men here are liars. He gets each of the men alone for questioning, and they each said that they saw Susanna committing adultery under a tree, and Daniel asks them which tree, and they each name a different tree, and so he proves that they were lying.

She's looking at herself in a mirror. She already has her ointments and perfumes, she has a little bit of jewelry on things like that. So it's her vanity. It's also her voluptuous, curvy body that is represented, and the emphasis and then the ingenuity of the two elders as they find a way to have a look at that body.

Whereas Gentileschi, on the other hand, focuses upon the female nude but in a different way, emphasizing the violation of Susanna's modesty that occurred with this event. So it's about how the same event can be understood in different ways through the gendered lens of the artist, whether male or female. The priorities, the concerns, the representations look very different, and both contribute to a fuller understanding of the scriptural event that most people in the Renaissance and Reformation would have been familiar with.

But then Artemisia Gentileschi, whose life takes a turn when she was 18 years old, the year after she made this painting, her father hired a tutor to train her, a man named Agostino Tassi. Tassi raped her, and amazingly for this era, Orazio took him to court for it. A sensational trial followed, and we still have the transfer script of that trial.

Artemisia Gentileschi, his reputation was basically dragged in the dirt. She was even tortured with Thumbscrews to verify that she was telling the truth, that she was raped. Tassi eventually gets found guilty and he's exiled, but his reputation really doesn't suffer much in punishment. And then Artemisia is immediately married off to try to save. The two tried to repair the damage done to her chastity.

But after this event, what's very interesting is her painting career takes off. My personal view on this is that if other female artists are concerned about a reputation for chastity, her reputation is already lost. She's got nothing to lose, and so she can put her name out there as an artist. And many of her paintings. She became, the recipient of lots of commissions from very wealthy people.

It was important to have a da Vinci. It was important to have a little less sky. And many of her paintings, unlike many other female artists, survive. So we have a lot of good stuff to look at and compare with how men were represented, representing the same themes at the time. So let's look at a few other works.

And the basics of the story are this, there's a Jewish widow. Her name is Judith, and she's living in the town of Bethlehem during a time of war and never her. The king of the Assyrians, based out of Nineveh, sends a very powerful general named Holofernes to besiege her city. The city contemplates surrendering, but Judith has a different idea.

She carries the head away back to her people in Bethlehem. She shows her people she's hailed as a hero. The army, the Assyrian army is leaderless and they withdraw. Now here is Gentileschi's version of events Judith slaying Holofernes.

And then a related picture that she put out of Judith and her maidservant, and notice they're carrying the head out in the basket. Okay, so Judith and Holofernes. An associate of Artemisia Gentileschi, whose father Erato, was the painter Caravaggio. And so our piece of Gentileschi would likely have been very familiar with his depiction of the same event, which he did earlier.

Here's Caravaggio's version. Judith Beheading Holofernes. Let's look at them in conversation with one another here real quick. Artemisia is here, and Caravaggio is this over here? Similarities. Both employ similar artistic techniques, such as what is known as chiaroscuro, which is the play of light and shadow. Both are clearly concerned with realism, detecting these as real human beings, but the tone is very different.

Caravaggio's version down here is very gory in its own right, but it casts the widow Judith as sort of squeamish, maybe a little bit stilted as opposed to Artemisia is rendering of Judith, a more mature, strong, determined Judith. I always try to remember if I have never personally wielded a sword, but I try to imagine the force needed for Judith to exert with his sword to chop off the head.

And when you're reaching with a straight arm going, I really don't want to be doing this. I doubt she could have done the job, but in Artemisia version it takes two women and they certainly get the job done. Caravaggio depicts the maidservant Aubra as an old hag, rather is more of an able accomplice able to do this work, whereas Aubra is shown here very capable, almost as an important part of the action.

Think about the specifics of the story I related. Judith acts independently without a male protector. She's a widow, and she makes a plan herself to go and save the folia. Furthermore, she's deceptive in how she does it. She pretends to be all obedient and submissive before Holofernes, you know, accepting his hospitality in in the tent. And then she's duplicitous and uses her sexuality to do it.

She gets all tarted up. She displays herself without shame, discarding her widow's weeds, transforming her appearance because she wants to entice Holofernes. She wants him to let her in the tent and then she's violent. She goes in and she cuts off an important man's head. And then in the book of Judith, when she returns, she speaks boldly before the men of her city, even telling them what they should do next.

And they listen, and they're totally cool with her going off and doing what she did. And they laud her return as the hero that she is. She saved the city. What example would Judith set for women of the Renaissance in Reformation era, if she was publicly portrayed in that fashion, what might she incite contemporary women to do and be capable of?

This is by a cheap. And then the famous. The Donatello shows this very ascetic Magdalene. Once she was penitent. She practice ascetic practice self-denial, in order to show how repentant she was. You see another Caravaggio showing the penitent Magdalene, as sort of a teaching tool for penitence, she's shown, is a vain woman here with a symbols of vanity.

She wanted to show Mary Magdalene at the moment of convert and itself. We don't see the jar. We don't see the downcast eyes. And she's very concerned with the penitent aspect. But she represented, represented in a bit of a different way. And we know what she was thinking, because we have a surviving letter that she wrote to Galileo.

Yes, she's that big. She's in correspondence with Galileo, and she's telling him about what she wanted to convey about the Magdalene that she didn't see in the other works of art that had already been produced. So she has a different agenda in her work than other artists, and she's trying to show us an additional side of the Magdalene that goes beyond how the majority of artists, predominantly male, have already portrayed her.

So it's a new way to consider how Renaissance Reformation viewers would have seen and understood Mary Magdalene. Now, unfortunately, we are running out of time, so I do not have time to go into some of the last works of art that I have, here. So I'll go through this. I'll just give you sort of the highlights of what I'm trying to convey here, because I've shown you a lot of portraitists, and artists who specialize in painting.

But one thing that's very cool about women's participation in art in the Renaissance is it could also be done as part of women being scientists of the era. We are right in the middle. In addition to the Renaissance and the reformation of the scientific Revolution. And women got attracted to this movement and they were often self-taught, not formally educated.

And women like Maria Sibylla Marianne, who was a Dutch botanist and biologist, decided to investigate plants, insects and use art as a way to represent what mattered to them. Here, for example, the parrot tulip, that Maria Sybil Mary Marian did, she first got interested because her stepfather was a still life artist. She went out with him into the marshes in the Netherlands, and her interest grew.

And she eventually published six collections of engravings of European plants. And the members of the Amsterdam Botanical Society were so impressed that when Marian came to them with an idea, she was 52, she was married, she had daughters. One of her daughters husbands got a job in the Americas in Dutch Suriname, and was about to move away.

And the mother in law, Maria Sibylla Marian said, hey, maybe I can go along to. She talks the biological society into funding a two year exploration in which she would document the plant and insect and even animal life. And her art was a little bit different from how many other scientific artists were recording this. She would take specimens such as, caterpillars, and she herself would nourish them through all the life cycle and then portray them at all the different aspects of the life cycle.

Spiders, larger, specimens, such as caimans. The only thing that eventually stopped her down in Suriname is she got yellow fever, and she had to eventually return home. And when she did, she decided that, to publish her art of all the things she had seen to the greater edification of the European Renaissance, Reformation era community. So that was that was a little quicker than I had hoped for that.

But in conclusion, I just want you to think about all the many instances I've shown you of women as patrons, women as subjects, and even women as artists. Being a part of the Renaissance and in conversation with the other males that were there, there's no one correct way to view any of this. There are just alternative ways to look at it that help create a fuller picture of, women and gender in the Renaissance.

And so it's a way to just, sort of introduce our discussion time Q&A. I want us to go back and just at least have a look at Anguissola and longish self-portraits.

And list her and Gentileschi. And I'm curious about what all of you think. These women through their selfies, of course. How do they want them? How do they want the viewer to understand them through their self-presentation? So that's one possible thing we could begin talking about. Or I'm ready. Doug, if you're ready to sort of curate any questions that have come in, I'm ready to go.

Doug Exton: Yeah. Thank you for that wonderful talk and all the different ways that you, delved into how women play a role within the world of art. So the first question that I have is, you touched on how the female nude was kind of a controversial, image to portray, given the ways you would have to study the body.

So was it seen more appropriate for a female artist to paint the female nude compared to a man, or was it just kind of equally like scandalous in the sense of the study?

Dr. Lisa McClain: It was incredibly scandalous. For, nudity was not something a woman ever, showed out in public. Sometimes not even within the family life with her husband. People got dressed and undressed out of sight of each other, underneath covers, behind screens, things like that. Women were thought to be in this era, the more sexual of the two sexes.

And so anything such as a nude, for example, and God forbid, it was a male nude model or something like that, was seen to entice women to inflame them. So you wanted to protect them from such enticements. So you kept women away from that. And if the public understood that a woman artist had been, around nudes, whether male or female, that would have contributed, it would have been a mark on her reputation.

So to say, I think one way Gentileschi gets around it with her nude with Susanna is simply, the fact a she's really young, she's protected by her father at that point. And then it's produced so soon before the rape and then the trial and then the total public trashing of her reputation. Then. Then it's okay to circulate it because there's not much left to protect at that point in terms of chastity.

Doug Exton: And then, I mean, obviously, it's not like Gentileschi sought out to tarnish her reputation by any means. But did other women or other female artists kind of say, you know, screw it. I don't care about my reputation and publish paintings anyway. Now, obviously, like I said, journalist, it wasn't her choice. But did other women make that active choice to break that norm?

It's only later that art historians have started to recover the attributions, being able to show by things like brushstrokes and composition that, hey, this really is a Judith Leyster. All the way up until the past several decades, paintings that women did were mistakenly attributed to men in the workshop. Often from a desire to protect the reputation of the woman involved.

She still wanted her painting out there, even if it didn't come out under her name, but she couldn't necessarily do it herself.

Doug Exton: And then circling back to the nude figures, if, it was so scandalous to have a nude.

Dr. Lisa McClain: Everybody likes the nudes.

Doug Exton: Why are Michelangelo's paintings in the various religious buildings that he has paintings in? Why do they depict the nude figure? If it was such a scandalous thing for the time?

Dr. Lisa McClain: What? Remember, what is scandalous is not men representing the nude figure. It's more women painting the nude figure or modeling for it. So only women from, who were not concerned with their reputation for chastity would model for the nudes in this case. Or even better. It's it is not unheard of that some of the artists would dig up female corpses in order to find out what the female body looked like.

Now, this is a time in the Renaissance. It's called humanism, and it's sort of the educational foundation of the Renaissance that values this world and the human body and human accomplishments and the natural world in ways that previous artists never have. And so you want to represent it as realistically as possible. Now, a lot of the reason that somebody like, I mean, obviously, a lot of artists are known for their nudes, but even people such as Michelangelo, for example, can represent nudes because they're associated with the classical past, the ancient Greco-Roman past, where the nude was glorified and the Renaissance is reclaiming.

It's the rebirth of the classical past. So a lot of these themes and representations, including nudes like a Greek statue, Roman statue, become part of the artistic expression of these Renaissance artists, and they're glorifying them. But for a woman to do it, her model for it, that's the scandal.

Doug Exton: And then totally unrelated, but still very important, is that Whitby Abbey behind you?

Dr. Lisa McClain: That is actually Iona. Oh, okay. Scotland. So this is Saint Columba. So, the great Scottish saint. Yeah. Celtic monasticism. Yeah. What about would be, though?

Doug Exton: Oh. Our, chair was asking if it was. Would be.

Dr. Lisa McClain: Oh, no. No. Sorry, Iona.

Doug Exton: Sorry, Mary. Then how is the relationship between Artemisia and her father? When they met again in London after so many years apart?

Dr. Lisa McClain: I do. I actually do not know.

Doug Exton: I guess we'll have something to research later. That. Yes.

Dr. Lisa McClain: Yes. But but that does sort of speak to the fact, I can't speak to their personal relationship with one another. But the fact that, wealthy patrons as far away as the British Isles wanted an Artemisia really speaks to the extent of her popularity and reputation for quality art at this time. No other woman had that.

Doug Exton: And then I know throughout this whole presentation you've talked about how, women were represented differently within art. Where did women represent men differently as well? Within the art, besides just representing women different in the stories?

Dr. Lisa McClain: Oh, that would be really interesting to look at. Because this was about women, representing, this is a broader topic. Alas, I have not gone into that, but let's actually take a look at,

One person who does this, a lot is Judith Leyster, the Dutch artist from the 17th century that you see here. Something that's really different about what she does, as opposed to the Italian artist is almost all of her subjects are secular, and she shows a lot of people partying, carnivalesque sort of atmosphere. And you can see that here with the musician, for example.

She portrays a lot of intoxicated people. In all honesty, it would be, sort of an interesting. Compare and contrast, to look at the corpus of her male figures against what a lot of the other Dutch artists were doing at the time. When you take a look at a corpus like Gentileschi's, for example, almost all of her subjects happen to be men.

Pardon me? Women. Women. And she's even worked herself into her self-portraiture in a lot of interesting ways. For example, I actually have, here, this is another self-portrait. Gentle. She did of herself as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, the martyr again. Saint Catherine, we'll she did herself again as a different female martyr. And she did herself again as a flute player.

We hardly have any of her surviving works, even though she was a very, well, much sought after portraitist during her lifetime. So the body of evidence isn't as big, but it's really good question.

Doug Exton: Yeah. And then, was there any kind of our question. Right. Was there any kind of financial discrepancy between the compensation that a female artist like Artemisia would receive compared to a male artist?

Dr. Lisa McClain: Artemisia is in a class by herself. Okay, for her portraits, commanded top dollar. And, for other women, however, they would have been like woman, like Judith Leyster or a woman like, Sofonisba Anguissola would have been part of a workshop, so they wouldn't have negotiated their contracts themselves. It would have been the master of the workshop who would have negotiated for the entire concert, the entire business concert.

Because these are businesses, remember? Businesses and trades.

So are the exceptional.

Doug Exton: Yeah. Yeah. And do you think part of the reason why Artemisia really did, grow in popularity was due to the fact that she didn't have to worry about her modesty so she could publish her paintings under her own name.

Dr. Lisa McClain: Yeah, I think, I think that's exactly it. And the sheer quality.

Of what she was producing, I mean you can see that she has her painting and her styles of the highest quality. And then she offers that extra special cachet of she's presenting her themes in a very different way than the male artists have presented the same ones. So imagine if you are a passionate collector of these types of art, you know, you might want to have on your walls, you know, if you can afford it, a Caravaggio next to a gentle whiskey, two paintings on the same thing.

And imagine walking your guests through there and talking them through the compare and contrast of the two. So, yeah, I think that's a really big issue. One thing I do take issue with, in a lot of discussions about Artemisia is sometimes all people can see is the rape, and they presume that Artemisia presents her female figures only through the lens of having been sexually violated herself.

But that's one of the reasons I included that portrait of Susanna and the elders that was done before the rape, and she still has a very distinctly female view of the violation of a woman's modesty that existed even before that. Like some people will look at Judith beheading Holofernes and say, hey, maybe that's her taking revenge on Tassi.

I think that's that's really disrespecting, the artists to see it only through that lens.

Doug Exton: Well, I think you also bring up a really good point with, that first painting she did, the I know you just said it, but it's escaping me, with the two men like her portrayal of those.

Dr. Lisa McClain: Know Susanna and.

Doug Exton: Her portrayal of those two men, you can definitely see, like, they're older and creepy. Whereas the other painting of Susanna and the two men you showed, like they're kind of more in the background, like the focus is truly on Susanna and the vanity of her work. The two men are kind of like Vermeer now.

Dr. Lisa McClain: I still, the.

Doug Exton: Way I interpret it.

Dr. Lisa McClain: I think Tintoretto version.

Those two guys are still old and creepy.

Doug Exton: So yeah, I definitely think they aren't. But like the focus to me at least when I look at this definitely seems to be more on Susanna and less on how creepy the men are, whereas the journalist is. My eyes instantly drawn more towards the creepy old man like right up next to her. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa McClain: Well, and I agree with you on that. And Susanna is represented by Tintoretto. I mean, she's vain. I would think she could see those men. They're not that hard to to spot. And yet she doesn't seem to care. She's preening in front of her mirror, that sort of thing. You can see why. That's why a lot of art historians say that this particular subject of the scriptural story is legitimate voyeurism of the time.

But Artemisia showed us that that voyeurism really comes at a price to the object. Yeah. Susanna.

Doug Exton: Yeah, yeah. And unfortunately, we are out of time. So I wanted to say thank you to everyone who attended. And thank you again, Lisa, for having this conversation tonight.

Dr. Lisa McClain: It was my pleasure. And thank you to everyone. Thanks for coming out for this. And thank you to the Humanities Council again. Stay safe and.

Doug Exton: Have a good night, everyone.

Dr. Lisa McClain: Good night.