11 Women in the Making: Early Medieval Signatures and Artists’ Portraits (9th–12th c.)

Abstract

The role of women as patrons of culture during the Middle Ages is recognized and valued without any doubt. Aside from textual evidence, most of what we know about medieval artists, whether they were male or female, is based on the inventory and analysis of signed works and self-portraits. This chapter studies some of these portraits and signatures, in order to suggest ways for analyzing works that we know were made by women. To undertake such an analysis is to transverse the fields of lexicography, art history, history, and theology. Signatures give ambiguous information about the authorship of the work of art, since the artist, the designer and the patron all were engaged in the process of making, and thus all may rightly be characterized as the creators of the work. The chapter looks closely at the implications of the verb facere when it was used to describe art production. Keywords:art history; artist; authorship; facere; lexicography; portraits; signatures; textual evidence; Women