Imagining women working stone: the ancient sculptor Marcia in Boccaccio’s De mulieribus and responses in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century art literature

Abstract

This article confronts the widespread stereotype of the supposedly natural inability of women to work stone through an analysis of the iconographic tradition of the ancient sculptor Marcia. A small corpus of fifteenth-century manuscript illuminations shows the ancient artist at work. This case study allows us to trace the memory of a woman artist working in stone that was already circulating at that time. The textual basis for the iconography under discussion was introduced by Giovanni Boccaccio in his biography of Marcia, part of his De mulieribus claris. Boccaccio’s text was received by subsequent generations of authors and reprinted in an Italian version four years before Giorgio Vasari published his account of the life of Properzia de Rossi in his Lives. The article introduces a fresh perspective on the relationship between Boccaccio’s Marcia and Vasari’s Properzia and provides new evidence for connections between the querelles des femmes and sixteenth-century art literature.