Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe (c. 1450–1700) ed. by Tanja L. Jones

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe (c. 1450–1700) ed. by Tanja L. Jones Catherine Powell-Warren Tanja L. Jones, ed., Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe (c. 1450–1700) ( Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 213 pp., 33 ills. This is an exciting time to be a scholar of women artists and patrons of the early modern period. Long hindered by the lack of available archival material and surviving artworks (to say nothing of uneven institutional interest and ungenerous funding), art historians have determined that if women are to become part of an inclusive history of art, they must seize upon the "open pathways … to do art history differently," whether this means broadening the definition of art and/or employing updated or new methodologies (Elizabeth Sutton, Introduction to Women Artists and Patrons in the Netherlands, 1500–1700, ed. Elizabeth Sutton [Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019], 23). With the collected essays in Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe (c. 1450–1700), editor Tanja L. Jones has shown how rewarding doing so can be. In much of early modern Europe, the production of art was intimately linked to the courts. From Ferrara to London and Madrid to Dresden, rulers and assorted nobility commissioned and acquired art as a way to express their Aristotelian magnificence (a concept that imports philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions into spending, particularly relevant to the commission of art by the nobility and the ruling classes during the early modern period), their erudition and worldliness, and their wealth and power. To satisfy the needs of these courts, a large number of artists were called upon. The standard text in the study of court artists remains Martin Warnke's The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist (1985; translated into English in 1993). Warnke's book reflects the richness of artistic production at court, as well as the limits that have hindered the study of women as artistic and cultural producers. In the first place, (subject to a few exceptions) women were rarely formally named as painters or sculptors of the court and thus would not appear as such in the archives. In the second place, many of the works produced at the court (for example portraits, often executed in multiples) were unsigned. Importantly, Warnke focused his research on the production of the so-called fine arts, whereas women were often more active in other forms of artistic production. Thus, Warnke only refers to two women artists: Sofonisba Anguissola (1532?–1625) and Angelika Kauffmann (1741–1807). Considering how Warnke frames the court structure, it is hardly surprising that so few women should have warranted inclusion in his discussion: "The court was a structure with many internal tensions, where princes, favourites, ministers, middle-class councillors, aristocratic courtiers, women, upstarts, dwarfs, fools and artisans all interacted" (Martin Warnke, The Court Artist: On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist, trans. David McLintock [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], xvi; emphasis added). The result (not only of Warnke's work but of the scholarship that has followed in its tracks) has been a severe underestimation of the importance of early modern women in European courts with respect to the creation and production, but also the patronage, of art. The seven essays in this volume have turned these limitations into pathways for research, with interesting results. The book is intended as a companion to a large-scale digital humanities project entitled "Global Makers: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts." The project, still in its [End Page 258] infancy, is hosted by the University of Alabama, where Tanja L. Jones, the editor of the volume, is coprincipal investigator together with Doris Sung. The stated objective of the project is to "encourage and support sustained, interdisciplinary consideration of the role Early Modern women played in the hands-on production of visual and material culture in the courts of Europe and Asia (c. 1400–1750)" (https://adhc.lib.ua.edu/makers/s/makers/page/makers). In her introduction to the volume, Jones presents the project as a new direction in research and sets out the objectives of the project, the first phase of which is...