Art in the Time of Pandemic: Elisabetta Sirani, Artistic Agency, and Capitalist Social Reproduction

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Previous articleNext article FreeArt in the Time of Pandemic: Elisabetta Sirani, Artistic Agency, and Capitalist Social ReproductionDana V. HoganDana V. Hogan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThere has been much speculation about how the historical phenomena of the COVID-19 pandemic will change women’s careers in the future. Yet to be considered is how the economic consequences of this event have the potential to affect women’s artistic production through compounding factors of economic recession, travel bans, and shifting cultural needs.1 If we accept that artistic autonomy is dependent on institutional security and that globalization has made international mobility a condition of artistic success, we rightly become concerned about the path ahead for women artists’ work and prospects because they can be disproportionately affected by capitalist pressures.2 As an art historian, I turn to the case of a baroque artist who lived through cycles of plague and market collapse for insights about what could happen to women’s artistic agency during and following a pandemic. As an example, following epidemics in seventeenth-century Italy, economic insecurity and cultural conservatism led to increased market demand for images of protection and salvation reinforcing existing social hierarchies. In this essay I evaluate the trajectory of Elisabetta Sirani (1638–1665) with a focus on the aspects of her artistic choices, career opportunities, and legacy likely affected by epidemics, including historically specific economic and cultural needs, societal demand for specific image types, and artist mobility. I propose reconsideration of Sirani’s contributions within the context of the two plagues that swept the Italian peninsula shortly before her birth and during the early part of her artistic career. Sirani has been praised for her personal agency as well as that of her painted figures; however, we must contextualize this by considering her production value under historically specific conditions.Historical materialism enables a reading of Sirani’s work in the sociohistoric context of the seventeenth-century economic crisis in Italy. Born in the wake of the 1629–1630 plague that devastated the Italian peninsula, she matured as a professional artist, teacher, workshop assistant, and family breadwinner during the second catastrophic wave of 1656–1657. The Sirani family workshop was situated in Bologna, a mercantile capitalist society.3 During Elisabetta’s lifetime, the Italian city-states were experiencing an economic involution caused by two related crises, plague and market collapse. The plague of 1630 decimated Bologna’s industrial base, diminishing the city’s population from 70,000 at the turn of the century to 46,000, compounding economic losses from a decline in student enrollment at the university and from the competition of new global trade centers closer to the Atlantic.4 Decreases in production and export due to exhausted soil and industrial competition from northwest Europe had disastrous effects throughout the region. This necessitated a shift in labor capital from skilled crafts and production to agriculture, reinforcing an already rigid social hierarchy that privileged the landowning noble class. Reacting to unrest caused by the population dip and resulting financial slump, the church stepped in to reassert its power through prescriptive literature, sermons on the family, and discourses on images defining women in relation to their usefulness to men as child bearers and domestic helpers, thus extolling qualities such as modesty, obedience, diligence, and cheerfulness.5 Marriageable girls were viewed as a remedy for demographic collapse, famine, and economic recession, and a woman’s place in the reproductive cycle determined her labor for the benefit of her family.6 Further promoting reproductive virtues were Marian images of protection and salvation; by the year of Sirani’s birth, 1638, there was a widespread resurgence of the cult of the Beata Vergine delle Grazie, recognizing the Virgin Mary’s protection from plague.7 In this pronatalist society, Sirani never married or had children; in lieu of biological reproduction, she provided valuable social reproduction services to her family’s workshop through her talents—eventually becoming the capomaestra responsible for the finances of both her family and its employees.8Through social-historical feminist analyses, art historians Adelina Modesti and Babette Bohn have celebrated Sirani’s depictions of heroic women as evidence of her femme forte model.9 Prominent among them is the Burghley House Judith with the Head of Holofernes (or Judith Triumphant; fig. 1) signed “ELISABta. SIRANI. F. 1658,” two years after the 1656 plague.10 Judith is centrally positioned in the public space of Bethulia, where she is richly garbed in an elaborate headdress and a flowing cape. Staring dispassionately at the viewer, she raises Holofernes’s severed head from the sack held by her kneeling maidservant; two young boys raise torches on either side while the crowd of faces beneath her platform eagerly awaits a glimpse of her triumph. The artist’s selection of this narrative moment supports a reading of Judith as emblematic of reproductive virtues. Rather than depicting the violent moment of beheading, Sirani has focused on the beginning of redomestication; Judith has already performed her heroic deed in defense of her community, protecting the city and its people by preventing inevitable battle. Her stoic expression and central positioning above the reverent masses are reminiscent of Marian images of protection. Further, her static, forward-facing posture and grip on Holofernes’s head at waist height recall images of Judith found on Italian cassoni, Renaissance marriage chests, such as Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s Triumph of Chastity.11 Such didactic images of Judith intended for domestic display frequently downplayed her aggression, instead emphasizing her role as a prefiguration of the Virgin. Here there is no blood or weapon to be seen, and Judith is instead flanked by two children. While other popular paintings of Judith in the mid-seventeenth century did not shy away from the gore of the assassination or the seductive wiles of the heroine, this painting portrays Judith as a community protectress: an image of comfort and a positive example for contemporary women to emulate.Figure 1. Elisabetta Sirani, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, 1658, oil on canvas, 236.5 × 183 cm. Burghley House Gallery, Stamford, England.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointA second painting titled Judith with the Head of Holofernes (fig. 2) at the Walters Art Museum further exemplifies these pronatalistic virtues. In contrast to Sirani’s more imaginative heroines, some art historians have expressed misgivings about the painting’s attribution.12 In this image Judith reverts to humble tranquility rather than being portrayed celebrating her accomplishment in a public space as in the Burghley House Judith. She is preparing to return to the quiet life of widowhood prescribed for her by society, her public service no longer needed now that the crisis has ebbed. The reference to violence is minimal: there is very little blood evident on the rumpled bedsheets and in the slain general’s beard, and the sword alluded to by its hilt appears more as a prop or attribute than a weapon. Absent of violent action or virile celebration, Sirani’s biblical heroine Judith becomes an elegant and static personification of female virtue. Her demure fashioning and detachment from her act evoke earlier narrative depictions on marriage chests, intended to exhort values of obedience, chastity, fidelity, and fertility to the contemporary bride. This comparison places renewed emphasis on her embodiment of gendered virtues valued for domestic reproduction—both biological and social—and minimizes her public agency.Figure 2. Elisabetta Sirani, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, 1638–1665, oil on canvas, 129.5 × 91.7 cm. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointThe positioning of Judith’s maidservant in each painting gives further evidence of the social hierarchies that became part of the lingering aftereffects of plague, famine, and economic insecurity. In the Burghley House painting, Judith fills the center of the frame while her slave crouches in the bottom left corner of the frame, positioned below the two young boys who flank the heroine. Likewise, in the Walters painting Judith dominates the center of the frame while her wizened slave hovers behind her right shoulder, her body partially occluded by the right edge of the frame and the severed head. In both images, in contrast to Judith’s large expanses of smooth skin, the creases of the aged maidservant’s face and neck are thrown into relief. The heroine is cast as a virtuous foil not only to Holofernes but also to her maidservant, who is depicted as a hunched crone. The disparity between the women reflects the stratification between classes, which increased postepidemic. The wealthy widow is prioritized over her slave, whose labor contribution is devalued through the artist’s minimization of her role in the action. Pre-epidemic Judith representations by another Italian artist, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–ca. 1654), present the two women as collaborators, alike in action, age, and beauty. In Sirani’s postepidemic versions, however, the beautiful young woman of childbearing age is idealized while the aging slave—no longer useful to society as a biological reproducer—is disfigured and relegated to a shadowy corner of the canvas.Many feminist scholars have juxtaposed Sirani’s heroines with the famed Judith paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi, whose artistic career and reputation were well established before the plague of 1630 struck.13 In comparison to Gentileschi’s bold depictions of female resistance, Sirani’s stoic heroines often appear restrained. In contrast with Sirani’s bloodless Judith scenes, the graphic moment of violence in Gentileschi’s pre-epidemic paintings was known to have inspired horror in some contemporary viewers.14 Sirani, painting postepidemic, had to adapt her depiction of the same narrative to cater to growing cultural conservatism. Images of beauty, protection, and salvation were in high demand during the plague and the years following. For example, Mary Garrard and Sheila Barker have recently proposed that women artists’ still life paintings of fruit and flowers during this period were believed to have therapeutic or prophylactic functions.15 Sirani’s Judith images can be understood as responding to historically specific postepidemic cultural needs through their displays of salvation, beauty, stoicism, and Marian ideals. These paintings signal the need to redomesticate Judith and her return to her gendered place in society, thus conforming to societal demands driven by economic concerns in seventeenth-century Bologna.While Modesti and Bohn persuasively conceive of Sirani and Judith as femmes fortes, this does not preclude the systemic subjugation of artist and heroine, who contribute to societies affected by crises of epidemic and war. A postepidemic environment not only informed Sirani’s artistic choices but also shaped the trajectory of her career: she remained financially dependent on her father and never left her family’s workshop in Bologna. Her expressed desire to travel apparently remained unrealized.16 Other seventeenth-century women artists traveled regionally, transregionally, and transnationally—it has been argued that for some, like Artemisia Gentileschi, travel is what allowed their solo careers to begin.17 Unlike Sirani, Gentileschi was able to travel broadly within the Italian peninsula and also to England, although it has been suggested that she resisted the invitation from the English court for several years because of the London plague of 1636–1637.18 The plagues of 1630, 1656, and 1657 inhibited the travels of many artists in the Italian peninsula, robbing them of commissions as the patrician classes fled the cities.19 The contribution of travel has also affected artists’ place in the historiography. In the past twenty years, scholars have devoted increased attention to the relationship between an artist’s mobility and style. Travel has been considered so essential to artists’ careers that one early modern scholar has claimed that “immobile artists are only valued insofar as they demonstrate an unflinching allegiance toward a regional style.”20 Judith Mann has argued that one work can change our understanding of an artists’ oeuvre, and in Gentileschi’s case connoisseurs have attempted to match objects with her periods of work in different locations.21 As an “immobile” artist, our record of Sirani’s oeuvre lacks the stylistic flexibility that critics afford to artists whose careers are defined by periods of mobility.Ironically, it was only as a result of economic crisis that Sirani was permitted to enter the public space. She founded a school for women artists around 1652 to supplement the workshop’s income following her father’s diminished ability to paint. She also opened her studio to distinguished clients who were allowed to watch her work, in order to refute the widespread allegation that her prodigious output was actually her father’s (capitalizing on the novelty of a female prodigy). While Sirani eventually established a reputation of her own and distanced herself from her father’s style, she remained in her father’s workshop for the entirety of her career. Although she benefited from her family’s class status, which gave her exposure to an extensive private library and wealthy patrons, Sirani’s initial artistic exploration was limited to patrilineal transmission of style in a domestic setting. This included exposure to the works of Guido Reni, the “standard-bearer” of artistic rebirth following the plague and her father’s mentor who was entrusted by the Senate with the commission of the votive banner entreating the Virgin to save the city from the epidemic.22 Illustrating these close stylistic ties is an etching, Judith with the Head of Holofernes by Gian Andrea Sirani after Guido Reni, which is a variation on the Walters painting; there are at least two other extant copies of the image produced by the Sirani workshop.23 Sirani’s art production was affected not only by her own proximity to waves of plague but also by the plague-time experiences of her teachers.As a professional woman who profited from the personal recommendations of her clients to generate new business, Sirani had to maintain her reputation not only as a talented artist but also as a woman of virtuous character, aligning with societal expectations of women during a period of renewed economic development and social reorganization. As she could not travel to establish her international career in person, she relied on networks of patronage—particularly women patrons connected by birth or marriage—for commissions beyond Bologna.24 Contemporary sources such as Piccinardi’s funeral oration and Malvasia’s Vita hail her as the exemplum of Bologna’s female intellectual and cultural professionals.25 Her legacy significantly affected the education and professional access of subsequent artists; she is believed to have taught the majority of women artists working in Bologna. Beyond Sirani’s school, other young women in Bologna copied Sirani’s paintings with Marian themes through embroidery production in convents and conservatori.26 While her paintings of femmes fortes often receive attention for their inventiveness, sacred works account for the majority of her production and some of her representations of femme fortes such as Judith can be understood as alluding to Holy Family imagery. The subject and messaging of these Judith images would have been appropriate for Sirani’s middle- and upper-class female students to study and copy. Sirani’s position as a single woman within her father’s household and her production value dictated her movements within society and consequently influenced the choices she made in her artistic output. This dilemma is not unique to Sirani: her Bolognese predecessor Lavinia Fontana’s success resulted from careful planning and positioning “designed to make her acceptable without offending social mores.”27 Therefore, although Sirani was a public producer, her labor was ultimately socially reproductive through her role as helpmate to her father and his workshop. We can see the postepidemic paradigm of feminine virtue being promoted through exempla such as Sirani’s idealized, stoic Judiths. Both the depicted heroine and artist have long been considered exceptional among women in their historically specific conditions, as their actions transcended the boundaries of socially prescribed gendered behavior. While their actions within the public sphere as warrior and professional artist were atypical for their time, they may also be understood as participating in a broader pattern of women’s supportive labor during a time of crisis.What can we learn from Sirani’s example? Nearly four hundred years later, we can hope that our current economic instability will not inhibit women artists’ ability to take creative risks. However, as women’s reproductive labor in our capitalist society remains underrecognized and undercompensated, many women artists will likely be forced by their material circumstances to prioritize the needs of their families, forgo travel, and cater to shifting tastes, if not enter into an artistic hiatus altogether. Art historians have increasingly examined the confluence of social and political factors that serve to help or hinder artistic careers, particularly exogenous shocks such as pandemics; such nuanced consideration is especially necessary for women artists, who face different constraints in their careers and historiographic treatment.Notes1. “Women in the Workforce: This Time Is Different,” The Economist, 6 June 2020, 63.2. Angela Dimitrakaki, “Feminism, Art, Contradictions,” E-flux Journal 92 (2018): 1–17; Martha E. Giménez, Marx, Women and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays (Leiden: Brill, 2019).3. Eric Mielants, “Perspectives on the Origins of Merchant Capitalism in Europe,” Review of the Fernand Braudel Center 23 (2000): 229–92.4. Renata Ago, “Bologna,” in Painting for Profit: The Economic Lives of Seventeenth-Century Italian Painters, ed. Richard Spear and Philip Sohm (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 45; Christopher Black, Early Modern Italy: A Social History (New York: Routledge, 2001), 23.5. Margaret King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 25.6. King, Women of the Renaissance, 25–27, 52, 62, 68–69.7. Sheila Barker, “Art, Architecture and the Roman Plague of 1656–1657,” Roma moderna e contemporanea 14 (2006): 249.8. Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Felsina pittrice: Vite de’ pittori bolognesi (1678), ed. Giampietro Zanotti (Bologna: Tipografia Guidi all‘Ancora, 1841), 2:400; Marchese Ferdinando Cospi to Leopoldo de’ Medici, 19 Aug. 1662, Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Carteggio degli Artisti XVI, fol. 34, quoted in Adelina Modesti, “Maestra Elisabetta Sirani: ‘Virtuosa del Pennello,’” Imagines 2 (2018), https://www.uffizi.it/en/magazine/maestra-elisabetta-sirani-virtuosa-del-pennello.9. Adelina Modesti, Elisabetta Sirani ‘Virtuosa’: Women’s Cultural Production in Early Modern Bologna (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014); Babette Bohn, “The Antique Heroines of Elisabetta Sirani,” in Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 81–99.10. Compared to the 1630 plague, the 1656 outbreak was more concentrated in Rome and the South than the North and center of the peninsula. See John Henderson, “Historians and Plagues in Pre-industrial Italy over the ‘longue durée,’” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 25, no. 4 (2003): 491–92.11. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, accession no. 57.PB.2. See also The Master of Marradi, Judith and Holofernes, Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH; and Paolo Schiavo, The Return of Judith to Bethulia, Sotheby’s, New York, 26 Jan. 2007, lot 30.12. Bohn, “Antique Heroines,” 96n50; curator Joaneath Spicer, conversation with author, 7 Oct. 2019. Modesti has shown that Elisabetta worked from her father’s designs and was asked by patrons to make copies of her father’s works; the division of labor within the workshop was not clear, and collaborative student pieces may be attributed to Elisabetta, her father, or sisters. Modesti, Elisabetta Sirani, 122–23. This painting more closely approximates the style of her father, but early modern women artists who stay in their fathers’ workshops are largely invisible (one motivation for Sirani’s frequent signatures). Lisa Heer, “Amateur Artists: Amateur Art as a Social Skill and a Female Preserve,” in Dictionary of Women Artists, ed. Delia Gaze (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997), 66–80.13. Bohn, “Antique Heroines”; Mary Garrard, “Artemisia’s Hand,” in Broude and Garrard, Reclaiming Female Agency, 63–79; Ann Sutherland Harris, “Artemisia Gentileschi and Elisabetta Sirani: Rivals or Strangers?,” Woman’s Art Journal 31 (2010): 3–12; Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, 3rd ed. (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 24–26.14. Filippo Baldinucci, “Vita di Artemisia Gentileschi,” in Notizie de’ professori del disegno, da Cimabue in qua (Milan: Società Tipografica de’ Classici Italiani, 1812), trans. by Julia K. Dabbs in Life Stories of Women Artists, 1550–1800: An Anthology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 149.15. Mary Garrard, “The Not-So-Still Lifes of Giovanna Garzoni,” in “The Immensity of the Universe” in the Art of Giovanna Garzoni, ed. Sheila Barker (Livorno: Sillabe, 2020), 62–77.16. Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Vita de’ pittori bolognesi: Appunti inediti, ed. Adriana Arfelli (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1961), 100–101, quoted in Sutherland Harris, “Artemisia Gentileschi and Elisabetta Sirani,” 4n13.17. Elena Fumagalli, “Florence,” in Painting for Profit: The Economic Lives of Seventeenth-Century Italian Painters, ed. Richard Spear and Philip Sohm (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 186.18. R. Ward Bissell, Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 59.19. Barker, “Art, Architecture and the Roman Plague,” 244.20. David Kim, The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 11.21. Judith Mann, “Deciphering Artemisia: Three New Narratives and How They Expand Our Understanding,” in Artemisia Gentileschi in a Changing Light, ed. Sheila Barker (Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2017), 167–79.22. Ago, “Bologna,” 46.23. Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, accession no. 1988.1.222. See also Elisabetta Sirani, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, Christie’s, New York, 6 June 1984, lot 177; attributed to Giovanni Andrea Sirani, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, accession no. 26.70.4.24. Adelina Modesti, Women’s Patronage and Gendered Cultural Networks in Early Modern Europe (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 168.25. Giovanni Luigi Piccinardi, “Il Pennello lagrimato in morte della Signora Elisabetta Sirani,” republished in Malvasia, Felsina pittrice, 2:386–91. See also Modesti, Elisabetta Sirani, 27.26. Patricia Rocco, The Devout Hand: Women, Virtue, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Italy (Montreal: MQUP, 2017), 92, 100nn27–28.27. Caroline Murphy, Lavinia Fontana: A Painter and Her Patrons in Sixteenth-Century Bologna (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 13. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal Volume 16, Number 1Fall 2021 Published for the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/715784 Views: 288 © 2021 Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.