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MITTEILUNGEN
DES KUNSTHISTORISCHEN
INSTITUTES
IN FLORENZ

LX. BAND — 2018

HEFT 3

MITTEILUNGEN
DES KUNSTHISTORISCHEN
INSTITUTES
IN FLORENZ

_ Aufsätze _ Saggi

_ 339_ Dieter Blume
Amor – Bild und Poesie in Italien um 1300

_ 381 _ Mary Vaccaro
Correggio, Francesco Maria Rondani, and the Nave Frieze
in San Giovanni Evangelista

_ 405 _

Sheila Barker

The First Biography of Artemisia Gentileschi: Self-Fashioning and Proto-
Feminist Art History in Cristofano Bronzini’s Notes on Women Artists

_ 437 _ Avinoam Shalem
Objects in Captivity: Preliminary Remarks on the Exhibiting and Making
of Images of the Art of War

_ Miszellen _ Appunti

_ 467 _ Ingeborg Bähr
Bronzefirnis- und Brokatpapiere in der Bibliothek des Kunsthistorischen
Instituts in Florenz

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LX. BAND — 2018

HEFT 3

Inhalt | Contenuto

____

1 Simon Vouet, Portrait of Artemisia Gentileschi,
about 1625. Private collection

| 405

Haveva Orazio una figlia chiamata Artemisia, che nella

pittura si rese gloriosa, e sarebbe stata degna d’ogni sti-

ma se fusse stata di qualità più onesta e onorata.1

(Giovanni Battista Passeri, Vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti
che hanno lavorato in Roma, e che son morti dal 1641 al 1673)

Born in Ancona around 1580, Cristofano di Otta-
viano Bronzini (Fig. 2) moved to Rome sometime before
1591 in order to pursue his career at the papal court.2
While in Rome, Bronzini composed sonnets for Duch-
ess Flavia Peretti Orsini and researched women worthies

in the library of Angelo Rocca and the Vatican. In 1615,
he assumed the position of train-bearer to Cardinal Car-
lo de’ Medici and followed his patron to Florence, where
he died in 1633.3 Bronzini’s most noteworthy literary
accomplishment is his dialogue Della dignità et della nobiltà
delle donne, a thirty-two-tome manuscript at the Bibliote-
ca Nazionale di Firenze that he composed in Florence
largely between 1615 and 1622 and to which he added
corrections and marginal notations in subsequent years.4

Portions of this mammoth tribute to female vir-
tue were published during his lifetime in the form of

1 Die Künstlerbiographien von Giovanni Battista Passeri, ed. by Jacob Hess,
Leipzig/Vienna 1934 (Rome 11772), p. 122.
2 On Bronzini’s career, see Martino Capucci, s.v. Bronzini, Cristoforo,
in: Dizionario biografico degli italiani, XIV, Rome 1972, pp. 463f.; Xenia von
Tippelskirch, “Die Indexkongregation und die Würde der Frauen: Cristo-
fano Bronzini, ‘Della dignità e nobiltà delle donne’ ”, in: Frauen in der Frühen
Neuzeit: Lebensentwürfe in Kunst und Literatur, ed. by Anne-Marie Bonnet/Bar-
bara Schellewald, Cologne/Weimar/Vienna 2004, pp. 235–262: 239f.;
eadem, “Letture e conversazioni a corte durante la reggenza di Maria Mad-
dalena d’Austria e di Cristina di Lorena”, in: Le donne Medici nel sistema europeo

delle corti, XVI–XVIII secolo, ed. by Giulia Calvi/Riccardo Spinelli, Florence
2008, I, pp. 131–143: 140; Suzanne G. Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici
Court: Music and the Circulation of Power, Chicago/London 2009, pp. xx and
340, note 10; Xenia von Tippelskirch, Sotto controllo: letture femminili in Italia
nella prima età moderna, Rome 2011, pp. 139f. and notes.
3 Bronzini’s unpublished death date of 13 December 1633 is docu-
mented in a register of Florentine burials; see ASF, Ufficiali poi Magistra-
to della Grascia, 195 (1626–1669), fol. 90r.
4 Cristofano Bronzini, Della dignità et della nobiltà delle donne, BNCF, mss.
Magl. Cl. VIII, 1513–1538 (comprising twenty-two volumes bound in

THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY
OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI

SELF-FASHIONING AND
PROTO-FEMINIST ART HISTORY

IN CRISTOFANO BRONZINI’S
NOTES ON WOMEN ARTISTS

Sheila Barker

406 | SHEILA BARKER |

four books dedicated to the most powerful women of
the Medici grand ducal court. The first book, pub-
lished in 1622 (but reissued in an expurgated edition
in 1624), as well as the second one, published in 1625
(Fig.  3), were both dedicated to Archduchess Maria
Magdalena of Austria (1589–1631), the widow of
Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici and the mother of
Ferdinando II de’ Medici, the heir to the grand ducal
throne for whom she served as co-regent between 1621
and 1628.5 The third book, published in 1628, was
dedicated to the archduchess along with her daugh-
ter Margherita de’ Medici, who was wedded that same
year to Odoardo Farnese, duke of Parma.6 The fourth
and final book, published in 1632, was dedicated to
Christine of Lorraine, dowager grand duchess of Tus-
cany and former co-regent for her grandson Ferdinan-
do II.7 Despite the author’s dying wish for the rest of
his manuscript to go to press, the majority of his text
remains unpublished even today.8

Among the many unpublished reams of Bron-
zini’s manuscript are some fifty pages that furnish
biographical profiles for dozens of female painters,
sculptors, and embroiderers. Most of the women
artists described here are Italian. The exceptions in-
clude three Spanish artists (María de Jesús Torres,
Isabel Sánchez Coello [1564–1612], and Francisca de
Jesús),9 one French artist (described only as the wife
of monsieur Bonelli and so far untraceable), and col-
lectively the women artists of China. Since several of

thirty-two tomes and supplemented by four additional tomes of indices).
See Maura Scarlino Rolih, “Code magliabechiane”: un gruppo di manoscritti della
Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze fuori inventario, Scandicci 1985, p.  35.
It appears that Bronzini began the manuscript in Rome around 1614
and continued at least through 1625, returning at even later moments to
amend some of his earlier passages; for other attempts to date the manu-
script, see Tippelskirch 2011 (note 2), p. 142, and Capucci (note 2).
5 Cristofano Bronzini, Della dignità, et nobiltà delle donne: Dialogo […] diviso in
Quattro Settimane; E ciascheduna di esse in Sei Giornate […]. Settimana Prima, e Gior-
nata Prima, Florence 1622; idem, Della dignità, et nobiltà delle donne: Dialogo […].
Settimana Prima, e Giornata Prima. Di nuovo Ristampata, e corretta dall’Autore, Flo-
rence 1624; and idem, Della dignità, et nobiltà delle donne: Dialogo […]. Settimana
Prima, e Giornata Quarta, Florence 1625.

6 Idem, Della dignità, e nobiltà delle donne: Dialogo […]. Settimana Seconda, e Gior-
nata Ottava. Alle SS. spose novelle, Florence 1628 .
7 Idem, Della virtù, e valore delle donne illustri. Dialogo […]. Settimana Seconda,
Giornata Settima, Florence 1632.
8 According to Bronzini’s will, Baccio Bandolini was entrusted with
the posthumous publication of the remainder of the manuscript, but this
never occurred; see ASF, Notarile moderno, Protocolli, 14115 (notary
Virgilio Boncristiani), fols. 63v–64r.
9 On Spanish women painters in the Renaissance, see Mindy Nancar-
row, “The Artistic Activity of Spanish Nuns During the Golden Age”,
in: Essays on Women Artists: “The Most Excellent”, ed. by Liana De Girolami
Cheney, Lewiston 2003, pp. 41–51. On María de Jesús and Isabel Sánchez
(also known as “Isabel Collo”), see Julia K. Dabbs, Life Stories of Women

____

2 Anonymous, Portrait of Cristofano Bronzini,
in: Cristofano Bronzini, Della dignità et nobiltà
delle donne: Dialogo […]. Settimana Prima,
e Giornata Quarta, Florence 1625,
frontispiece. Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale
Centrale, Magl. 3.2.288

| THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI | 407

Giornata Quarta, pp.  82, 89, 94, 112, Giornata Sesta, pp.  4f.; idem
(note 6), Giornata Ottava, p. 196. Bronzini corresponded with Marinella
in the 1620s and strongly promoted her writings at the Medici court; see
Tippelskirch 2008 (note 2), pp. 140f.; Sarah Gwyneth Ross, The Birth of
Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England, Cambridge/Lon-
don 2009, pp. 292–294; Christina Strunck, Christiane von Lothringen am Hof
der Medici: Geschlechterdiskurs und Kulturtransfer zwischen Florenz, Frankreich und Lo-
thringen (1589–1636), Petersberg 2017, pp. 118–123.
14 Bronzini named over fifty male authors who defended women in their
writings, including Cardinal Pompeo Colonna (whose apology was then
kept in the Vatican Library’s “armaro segreto 3370”) and Cardinal Giro-
lamo della Rovere (whose treatise was kept in “armaro segreto 1586”); see
Bronzini (note 4), 1520, II, fols. 48r–49r. On proto-feminist writings in

Artists, 1550–1800, Farnham 2009, pp. 460, 464, as well as her source:
Damiaõ de Froes Perym, Theatro heroino, abcedario historico, e catalogo das mulheres
illustres em armas, letras, acçoens heroicas, e artes liberaes, Lisbon 1736–1740, I,
pp. 549f., II, pp. 269f.
10 Bronzini (note  4), 1520, II, fol.  49r. According to Bronzini, pro-
woman writings were also carried out by women from the following Flo-
rentine families: the Soderini, Malespini, Acciaioli, Strozzi, Cavalcanti,
Martelli, Bandini, Zanchini, Capponi, Minerbetti, Niccolini, Compagni,
Adimari, and the Selvaggi Ridolfi; see ibidem.
11 Idem 1624 (note 5), Giornata Prima, p. 30, Giornata Seconda, p. 37;
and idem 1625 (note 5), Giornata Quarta, p. 115.
12 Ibidem, p. 119.
13 Bronzini 1624 (note 5), Giornata Prima, p. 30; idem 1625 (note 5),

these notices on early modern women artists deserve
scholarly attention due to their historiographic signif-
icance, all of them are published here in the Appendix.
This article, however, will focus on just one of these:
Bronzini’s fascinating yet problematic profile of Arte-
misia Gentileschi (Rome 1593–Naples 1654?), which
should now be regarded as her earliest biography.

Bronzini’s Treatise: Background
As a whole, the treatise Della dignità et della nobiltà

delle donne is firmly inscribed within the genre known
as the querelle des femmes. Bronzini evinced his profound
knowledge of this literary tradition with the histo-
riographic overview that he inserted into the tenth
giornata, or division, of his treatise. Here he identified
Christine de Pizan (1364–1430) as the forerunner of
the women writers of his own age who had come to
the defense of their gender.10 Several of the latter fig-
ure prominently in Bronzini’s text: Moderata Fonte
(the penname of Modesta da Pozzo, 1555–1592),11
Maddalena Salvetti Acciaioli (a Florentine poet-
ess who enjoyed Christine of Lorraine’s patronage,
ca.  1553–1610),12 and Lucrezia Marinella (1571–
1653), to whom Bronzini had lent his professional
support on several occasions.13

In the course of his historiographic overview,
Bronzini also unfurled a long list of the male writ-
ers who, throughout history, had taken up the cause
of women.14 Among the treatises that he cited most

____

3 Cristofano Bronzini, Della dignità
et nobiltà delle donne: Dialogo […].
Settimana Prima, e Giornata Quarta,
Florence 1625, titlepage with hand-
colored engraving. Florence, Biblioteca
Nazionale Centrale, Magl. 3.2.288

408 | SHEILA BARKER |

frequently are Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (written in
1355–1359), Giuseppe Betussi’s translation of the for-
mer as Delle donne illustri (first published in 1545 with
further editions in 1547, 1558, and 1596), Lodovico
Dolce’s Dialogo della institution delle donne (also published in
1545, with further editions in 1547, 1553, 1559, and
1560), and Cornelio Lanci’s Esempi della virtù delle donne
(published in Florence in 1590), mostly focused on
ancient women but also featuring modern ones such as
Maddalena Acciaioli and Isabella Andreini. Bronzini
also drew upon two writers with special connections
to the women of the House of Medici, namely Don
Silvano Razzi, who had dedicated the first volume of
his six-volume treatise Vite delle donne illustri per santità to
Virginia de’ Medici in 1595 and the second one to
Christine of Lorraine in 1597, and Fra Niccolò Lori-
ni, O.P., Cosimo II de’ Medici’s confessor and the au-
thor of Elogii delle più principali sante donne del sagro calendario
e del martirologio romano, which was dedicated to Maria
Magdalena of Austria in 1617.

Bronzini designed his treatise to appeal above all
to Maria Magdalena of Austria and Christine of Lor-
raine, the two women who had reigned over Tusca-
ny first as consorts of Medici grand dukes and then
as co-regents.15 In addition to praising his powerful

female patrons throughout the text, Bronzini sought
to serve their interests by proclaiming that women
have a natural aptitude for rulership and that they are
morally superior to men. These controversial claims
provoked a backlash. Immediately after the first divi-
sion of the treatise was published in 1622, the Con-
gregation of the Index determined that several of the
arguments for the superiority of women had departed
from orthodox belief. Bronzini was thus compelled to
correct his text and, after approval by the Congrega-
tion, republish it in the revised edition of 1624.16

Women Artists in Della dignità et della nobiltà
delle donne
Within the twenty-four giornate into which Bronzi-

ni’s Della dignità et della nobiltà delle donne is divided, Arte-
misia’s biography is located in the fifteenth giornata, well
ensconced in the unpublished latter half of the manu-
script. In contrast to the published sections of Bronzi-
ni’s manuscript, the fifteenth giornata for the most part
takes the form of a minimally structured selva.17 The
collective aim of this medley of erudite quotations and
anecdotes is to lionize both ancient and modern wom-
en who had demonstrated exceptional bravery, musical
talent, or artistic skills. The pages brim with the names

Italy, see Giovanni Battista Marchesi, “Le polemiche sul sesso femminile ne’
secoli XVI e XVII”, in: Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, XXV (1895),
pp. 362–369; Beatrice Collina, “L’esemplarità delle donne illustri fra Uma-
nesimo e Controriforma”, in: Donna, disciplina, creanza cristiana dal XV al XVII
secolo: studi e testi a stampa, ed. by Gabriella Zarri, Rome 1996, pp. 103–119;
Paola Malpezzi Price/Christine Ristaino, Lucrezia Marinella and the ‘Querelle des
Femmes’ in Seventeenth-Century Italy, Madison 2008; Androniki Dialeti, “De-
fending Women, Negotiating Masculinity in Early Modern Italy”, in: The
Historical Journal, LIV (2011), 1, pp. 1–23; Christina Strunck, “Die femme fa-
tale im Kirchenstaat: Positionen der Querelle des Femmes in Rom (1622–1678)”,
in: Frauen und Päpste: Zur Konstruktion von Weiblichkeit in Kunst und Urbanistik des
römischen Seicento, ed. by Eckhard Leuschner/Iris Wenderholm, Berlin 2016,
pp. 3–20: 5–8; eadem (note 13), pp. 60–66. For a broader examination of the
theme, see Julie D. Campbell, “The Querelle des femmes”, in: The Ashgate Research
Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Allyson M. Poska/
Jane Couchman/Katherine A. McIver, Abingdon 2013, pp. 361–379.
15 See Kelley Harness, “La Flora and the End of Female Rule in Tusca-
ny”, in: Journal of the American Musicological Society, V (1998), pp. 437–476:
449f.; Cusick (note 2), pp. 105, 194f.; Strunck (note 13), pp. 118–123.

On Maria Magdalena’s pro-woman visual propaganda, see Kelley Har-
ness, Echoes of Women’s Voices: Music, Art, and Female Patronage in Early Modern
Florence, Chicago 2006, pp. 42–55, 125f., 137–140, and Riccardo Spinel-
li, “Simbologia dinastica e legittimazione del potere: Maria Maddalena
d’Austria e gli affreschi del Poggio Imperiale”, in: Le donne Medici (note 2),
II, pp. 645–679. Cosimo II was still alive when Bronzini was composing
his work, but his health was so delicate that the court was already plan-
ning for the future regency (Cusick [note 2], pp. 194f.).
16 Tippelskirch 2011 (note 2), pp. 145–147, argues that the censure was
mainly due to Bronzini’s interpretations of sacred scripture regarding the
superiority of women, which became highly seditious when directed to
women with power. See also eadem 2004 (note 2), pp. 235–262, and Cu-
sick (note 2), pp. 194f.
17 This was the same genre employed by a detractor of womanhood,
Giuseppe Passi, for his I donneschi difetti of 1599, as noted by Suzanne
Magnanini/David Lamari, “Giuseppe Passi’s Attacks on Women in The
Defects of Women”, in: In Dialogue with the Other Voice in Sixteenth-Century Italy:
Literary and Social Contexts for Women’s Writing, ed. by Julie D. Campbell/Ma-
ria Galli Stampino, Toronto 2011, pp. 143–194: 146.

| THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI | 409

18 See Cusick (note 2), p. xix.
19 By comparison, in the 1568 Giunti edition of Vasari’s Lives there are a
total of four women artists mentioned together in the life of Properzia de’
Rossi. Passing references to additional women artists in Vasari’s text are
scattered pell-mell throughout the work. The references to women artists
in the treatises of Lodovico Guicciardini, Raffaello Borghini, and Francis-
co de Holanda are few in number and brief. On Vasari’s attitudes towards
women’s practice of art, see e.g. Fredrika H. Jacobs, Defining the Renaissance
Virtuosa: Women Artists and the Language of Art History and Criticism, Cambridge
1997; and Katherine McIver, “Vasari’s Women”, in: Reading Vasari, ed. by
Anne B. Barriault et al., London 2005, pp. 179–188. The present article
does not take into consideration Bronzini’s profiles of ancient women art-
ists, since this material is entirely derivative from such sources as Antonio
Billi, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, and Lucio Faberio, not to mention Boc-
caccio, Pliny, and many others as well. For the Renaissance historiography
on ancient female artists, see Jacobs (note 19), pp. 24f.
20 See Tippelskirch 2004 (note 2), p. 238 and notes; and eadem 2008
(note 2), p. 139. For some of Bronzini’s more prominent sources, see eadem
2004 (note 2), pp. 236–238.
21 For these profiles, see Appendix, nos. 1, 2, 11, and 12. Cf. Giorgio
Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e
1568, ed. by Rosanna Bettarini/Paola Barocchi, Florence 1966–1997, IV,
pp. 399–405, V, pp. 427–428, 588. With regard to Sofonisba, Bronzini
made some original observations in the section (found in the same tome)

of some sixty-four early modern female musicians.18
They also muster thirty-three names of early modern
female artists, qualifying Bronzini’s manuscript as the
first work of European literature to have ever taken up
the topic of women artists in extenso.19

Bronzini stated openly that very little in his work
is original.20 Indeed, following a medieval composition
technique known as compilatio, it is the case that he made
liberal use of Vasari’s 1568 edition of the Lives of the
Artists for his profiles of Properzia de’ Rossi, Plautilla
Nelli, Lucrezia Quistelli, and Sofonisba Anguissola,
copying large passages almost unaltered into his own
text.21 Bronzini also mined several additional sources
for this purpose. He reused verbatim the information
on Marietta Robusti, known as “la Tintoretta”, that
had been published in Raffaello Borghini’s Il Riposo of
1584,22 the same book that provided Bronzini with the
epitaph composed by Vincenzo di Bonaccorso Pitti for
Properzia de’ Rossi; for the latter, Bronzini found an-
other epitaph in Giulio Cesare Croce’s La gloria delle donne
of 1590.23 For his account of Irene di Spilimbergo’s

early death, Bronzini indicated his source as the vol-
ume of eulogistic poetry edited by Dionisio Atanagi in
1561.24 Muzio Manfredi’s Madrigali […] sopra molti soggetti
stravaganti composti of 1606 was his source for the poems
about Fede Galizia and Barbara Longhi, whereas Paolo
Mini’s Discorso della nobiltà di Firenze e de’ fiorentini of 1593
supplied information about Alessandra del Milanese.25
Bronzini’s enterprising search for material even led him
to Italian translations of Juan González de Mendoza’s
Historia de las cosas más notables, ritos y costumbres del gran reyno
de la China from 1585, which furnished the basis for his
remarks on Chinese women artists:

[…] we know that in China there are the women of great

genius and expertise in painting and sculpture, and they

demonstrate excellence in drawing as well as in painting;

in relief and in intaglio; and especially in making paint-

ings of plants, birds, and every sort of wilderness, as is

well demonstrated by the paintings that are sent from

there to our lands; one of these, reports Father Giovanni

Gonzalez di Mendozza in his Storia della China, book one,

that is dedicated to female musicians (see Appendix, no. 12). On the use
of compilatio in writings about women, see Campbell (note 14), p. 362.
22 See Appendix, no. 24; cf. Raffaello Borghini, Il Riposo, Florence 1584,
pp. 558f.
23 See Appendix, no.  1 with notes 97 and 98. Croce’s book was also
Bronzini’s source for a poem about Lavinia Fontana; see Appendix, no. 22
and note 102. On Borghini’s description of Robusti see Catherine King,
“Looking a Sight: Sixteenth-Century Portraits of Woman Artists”, in:
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, LVIII (1995), pp.  381–406: 393. Notably,
Bronzini calls the sculptor by the name “Properzia de’ Rossi Felicini”;
I have not been able to determine his source for the surname ‘Felicini’, a
noble family of Bologna; see Pompeo Scipione Dolfi, Cronologia delle famiglie
nobili di Bologna, Bologna 1670.
24 See Appendix, no. 20. Cf. Dionisio Atanagi, Rime di diversi nobilissimi
et eccellentissimi autori in morte della signora Irene delle signore di Spilimbergo, Ven-
ice 1561, on which see Anne Jacobson Schutte, “Irene di Spilimbergo:
The Image of a Creative Woman in Late Renaissance Italy”, in: Renaissance
Quarterly, XLIV (1991), pp. 42–61, and Julia K. Dabbs, “Sex, Lies and
Anecdotes: Gender Relations in the Life Stories of Italian Women Artists,
1500–1800”, in: Aurora, VI (2005), pp. 17–37: 24–26.
25 See Appendix, nos. 6–8 and notes 100, 101. For Manfredi’s poems
on Longhi and Galizia, see Jacobs (note 19), pp. 128–132, 143f., 172–
175. For another poem in honor of Fede Galizia by Cesare Rinaldi of
Bologna, published in 1609, see Paola Tinagli/Mary Rogers, Women and

410 | SHEILA BARKER |

27 On Ma Shouzhen, see Views from the Jade Terrace: Chinese Women Art-
ists, 1300–1912, exh. cat. Indianapolis et al. 1988/ 89, ed. by Marsh Smith
Weidner, Indianapolis 1988, pp.  72–81, cat. nos.  4–9; Ellen Johnston
Laing, “Wives, Daughters, and Lovers: Three Ming Dynasty Women
Painters”, ibidem, pp. 31–39: 37; Monica Merlin, The Late Ming Courtesan Ma
Shouzhen (1548–1604): Visual Culture, Gender and Self-Fashioning in the Nanjing
Pleasure Quarter, Ph.D. Diss., The Queen’s College, The University of Ox-
ford 2013. On Xue Susu (Wu), see Views from the Jade Terrace, pp. 82–87, cat.

page 16, was seen by him, having been carried to Lisbon

in the year 1582 by Captain Ribera, [and it was] of such

excellence and beauty that not only did it astound all

those who saw it, but also what is very rare indeed, that

is, it was regarded as a wonderful work by His Majesty

the King [of Spain] himself, and even by the most famous

and excellent men in that profession [of painting].26

The description of the types of subject matter pre-
ferred by the women artists of China accords remark-
ably with the examples of art that have come down to
us, as in the case of works by Ma Shouzhen (1548–
1604) (Fig. 4) and Xue Susu (1564–1637) (Fig. 5).27
Bronzini’s text makes it clear that Chinese women art-
ists were known and appreciated at the court of Ma-
drid already in the sixteenth century and at the court
of Florence by the early seventeenth century. No doubt,
this knowledge – much like the awareness that there
had been celebrated women artists in ancient Greece
and Rome – led some of Bronzini’s contemporaries to
see women artists less as anomalies and more as em-
blems of a civilization at the peak of its glory.

____

4 Ma Shouzhen (attributed),
Orchid and rock, 1572. New York,
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
inv. 1982.1.7

____

5 Xue Susu, Flowers,
detail, 1615. Asian Art
Museum of San Francisco,
inv. B66D22

the Visual Arts in Italy, c. 1400–1650: Luxury and Leisure, Duty and Devotion. A
Sourcebook, Manchester 2012, pp. 283f., no. 4.
26 Appendix, no. 21. It is not clear which edition of the work Bronzini
would have consulted. In the first Italian edition of González de Mendo-
za’s book, Dell’historia della China, Rome 1586, the passage referred to is on
p. 22. In the two later Italian editions, published in Venice in 1588 and
1590, it is on pp. 26f. Perhaps he looked at one of these later editions and
accidentally wrote “16” instead of “26”.

| THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI | 411

29 See Appendix, no. 22. By comparison, only five lines are dedicated to
Fontana in Borghini (note 22), p. 568.
30 See Appendix, no. 14. Scultori made at least three engravings of an-
cient architectural decorations, which are now very rare. It is very likely
that Bronzini owned no. 29 in Paolo Bellini, L’opera incisa di Adamo e Diana
Scultori, Vicenza 1991, p. 214, dated 1576, since he repeats the references in
its inscription to “numidici lapidis” and Saint Peter’s Basilica. As for his
second engraving, he perhaps may have owned no. 33, ibidem, p. 219, which
is dated 1577 and bears the name of Battista di Pietrasanta. In his notes on
Scultori, Bronzini erroneously claimed that Battista di Pietrasanta was her
husband, but in fact Battista was a carpenter who frequently collaborated
with Scultori’s first husband, Francesco da Volterra, an architect.
31 See Appendix, nos. 2 and 26. For his knowledge of Nelli’s paintings

nos. 10–13, and Daria Berg, “Cultural Discourse on Xue Susu, a Courte-
san in Late Ming China”, in: International Journal of Asian Studies, VI (2009),
pp. 171–200.
28 For Varotari, see Appendix, no. 17. Bronzini’s is the earliest literary
record of Chiara Varotari, written two decades before Carlo Ridolfi’s Le
Maraviglie dell’arte […], Venice 1648, II, p. 83. On Ridolfi’s description of
Varotari, see Maria H. Loh, Titian Remade: Repetition and the Transformation of
Early Modern Italian Art, Los Angeles 2007, pp. 166f. The only other blatant
errors that I have detected are Bronzini’s passing mention of a female
artist named Antonia Grandina of Brescia (see the beginning of the life of
Lavinia Fontana, Appendix, no. 22), apparently the result of his confusion
about the male artist Antonio Gandino (1565–1630), and his misidenti-
fication of Diana Scultori’s husband, explained below in note 30.

In his eagerness to include contemporary women
artists, Bronzini sometimes relied on hearsay, a prac-
tice that led to occasional errors such when he referred
to Chiara Varotari as “Santa” Varotari.28 By contrast,
whenever the manuscript furnishes descriptions of
the women artists that Bronzini knew personally or
the artworks that he had examined with his own eyes,
it is an invaluable historiographic resource. The most
striking instance of this regards Lavinia Fontana,
whom Bronzini knew in Rome and whose altarpiece
in Saint Paul’s Outside the Walls he visited in compa-
ny of the painter. His admiration for Fontana is made
clear not only by his encomiastic excesses (directed as
much to her character as to her artistic talent) but also
by the sheer length of this profile: covering six pages,
it is the longest of all the artists’ biographies.29

The list of women whose artistic production Bron-
zini had some direct knowledge of is impressive. In his
profile of Diana Scultori (called “Diana Mantovana”),
Bronzini stated that he had purchased two engravings
she had made of a paleo-Christian-era capital, perhaps
identifiable with existing prints by the artist.30 In Flor-
ence, Bronzini spoke of having seen Plautilla Nelli’s
paintings on display in private Florentine homes, and
when the adolescent Giovanna Garzoni visited the
Medici court there, he took account of her musical
skills as well as the talent she displayed in both her
painted miniature for Maria Magdalena of Austria
and her calligraphy samples (Fig. 6).31 Of particular

____

6 Giovanna Garzoni, Galleon at sail, about 1617–1621,
in: eadem, Libro de’ caratteri, Rome, Biblioteca
Accademica di San Luca, Ms. inv. 1117, fol. 42r

historiographic value is Bronzini’s account of Arcange-
la Paladini. Not only is it the earliest biography of Pa-
ladini, but it also adds many important details to what
is currently known about this scantily documented
artist, such as the trills that marked her vocal perfor-

412 | SHEILA BARKER |

mances; her specialization in embroidering portraits,
flowers, foliage, birds, mammals, and fish; Maria Mag-
dalena’s dispersal of Paladini’s art throughout Europe;
and descriptions of Paladini’s portraits of Cosimo II
that are confirmed by Medici inventories.32

One striking fact that emerges from Bronzini’s
survey of the women artists in his midst is that the
majority of Florence’s active women artists were nuns.
Bearing witness to the artistic ferment in Florentine
convents are his accounts of individual nuns such as
Alessandra Martelli, Angela Cherubina Angelelli, and
Ortensia Fedeli,33 as well as his precious testimony
about the workshop at the Florentine monastery of
Santa Caterina da Siena, where he saw “wonderful pic-
tures and [sculpted] figures of angels, virgin saints, and
martyr saints, some painted and others done in minia-
ture with such excellence and with such skill and sweet-
ness, that they truly seem to be heavenly creatures”.34
Several of the artists Bronzini described as being cur-
rently active at Santa Caterina are not included in the
preceding account of that workshop, written in 1596
by Fra Serafino Razzi (1531–1613).35 One of the artists
that Bronzini was the first to have associated with this
workshop is Felice Lupicini (Fig. 7), the niece of Cri-
stofano Allori. According to Bronzini, she was active in
her convent both as a painter and as an illuminator.36
Other female artists that Bronzini was the first to have
associated with this Dominican convent include Lucre-
zia Capponi, Lucrezia Torrigiani, Giovanna Monsalvi,
Maria Vincenza Brandolini, Suor Caterina Eletta Ros-
selli (baptized as “Fiametta”), and Reparata del Bono.
All of them received Bronzini’s praises not only for
their skills as painters and sculptors but also for their
commanding knowledge of Biblical scripture.37

within the convent of Santa Caterina da Siena, Bronzini relied on the ac-
count given to him by the archbishop of Florence in addition to Vasari’s
text. Nevertheless, Bronzini seems to have seen for himself the convent’s
workshop, as discussed below. For Bronzini’s remarks on Garzoni, see Shei-
la Barker, “ ‘Marvellously Gifted’: Giovanna Garzoni’s First Visit to the
Medici Court”, in: The Burlington Magazine, CLX (2018), pp. 654–659: 659.
32 See Appendix, no. 18. The pen-and-ink and embroidered portraits
of Cosimo II by Paladini that Bronzini describes have been located in the
Medici inventories; see Lisa Goldenberg Stoppato, “Arcangela Paladini
and the Medici”, in: Women Artists in Early Modern Italy: Careers, Fame, and
Collectors, ed. by Sheila Barker, London/Turnhout [2016], pp. 81–97: 88f.
33 See Appendix, nos. 5 and 13. On Ortensia Fedeli, see Sheila Barker,
“Painting and Humanism in Early Modern Florentine Convents”, in: Ar-

tiste nel chiostro: produzione artistica nei monasteri femminili in età moderna, conference
proceedings Florence 2013, ed. by eadem/Luciano Cinelli, Florence 2015,
pp. 105–139: 105, 128.
34 Appendix, no. 4.
35 Serafino Razzi, Istoria degli Huomini illustri, così nelle prelature, come nelle
dottrine, del sacro ordine de gli predicatori, Lucca 1596, pp.  371f. On Razzi’s
portrayal of the artistic practice at Santa Caterina da Siena in Florence, see
Catherine Turrill, “Compagnie and Discepole: The Presence of Other Women
Artists at Santa Caterina da Siena”, in: Suor Plautilla Nelli (1532–1588):
The First Woman Painter of Florence, conference proceedings Florence/Fiesole
1998, ed. by Jonathan Nelson, Florence 2000, pp. 83–102: 96–100.
36 See Appendix, no. 3. Felice Lupicini’s artistic activity was mentioned
much later by Padre Giuseppe Richa, Notizie istoriche delle chiese fiorentine,

____

7 Giovanni Battista Lupicini, The muse of painting
(Portrait of Felice Lupicini), around 1606–1625.
Columbia Museum of Art, Samuel H. Kress Collection

| THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI | 413

nerbetti” and Maria Vincenza Brandolini is called “Suor Vincenzia
Brandolini” (Richa, VIII, p. 283). Richa’s historiographic references to
these nuns are mentioned in Turrill (note 35) and eadem, “Reviewing the
Life and Literature of Plautilla Nelli”, in: Plautilla Nelli: arte e devozione
sulle orme di Savonarola = Art and Devotion in Savonarola’s Footsteps, exh. cat.
Florence 2017, ed. by Fausta Navarro, Livorno 2017, pp. 19–33: 25 and
32, note 19.
37 See Appendix, nos. 4 and 25.
38 Ibidem, no. 23.

Artemisia Gentileschi’s Biography
Among the female artists’ biographies in Bronzi-

ni’s treatise, Artemisia Gentileschi’s merits particular
attention because of its length, its unique content, and
its coincidence with the early blossoming of her career
in Florence.38 Most likely written in 1618 or 1619 and
thus dating from the same period as her Penitent Magda-
lene (Fig. 8) and her Judith and her maidservant (Fig. 9), both

Florence 1754–1762, VIII, p.  283, as indicated in Jacobs (note  19),
pp. 111, 166, and it would appear that Bronzini’s manuscript was Ri-
cha’s source. Lupicini’s brothers Giovanni Battista (1575–1648) and
Francesco (1590–post 1656) were professional painters who also ap-
prenticed under Allori; biographical notes on the family are in BNCF,
Poligrafo Gargani, 1159, fols. 7, 27, 97. Again, it seems that Richa
relied on Bronzini’s manuscript for his discussion of the women artists
at Santa Caterina da Siena, although he altered some of the names:
Maddalena Angelica Minerbetti is called by Richa “Suor Angiola Mi-

____

8 Artemisia Gentileschi, The penitent
Magdalene, about 1615–1617.
Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Galleria Palatina

____

9 Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith and her maidservant,
about 1612–1614 or 1618/19.
Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Galleria Palatina

in Palazzo Pitti, it stands as the very first literary notice
of this painter, then in her mid-twenties. The narrative
spans her adolescence in Rome and ends with the rec-
ognition of her professional establishment in Florence.
Distinguishing the biography of Artemisia from Bron-
zini’s other vignettes of women artists is the undeniable
fact that hers is largely fictitious. Yet, as will be shown
below, this early biography of Artemisia remains of

414 | SHEILA BARKER |

singular utility to the reconstruction of her early years
despite its inaccuracies. This is because it sheds light
on the way she was perceived by those contemporaries
of hers who read this account and because it reveals,
as I will argue, how the artist wished to be perceived,
having been astutely crafted to accord with her society’s
notions of female virtue and artistic genius.

Spanning three pages, Artemisia’s biography
(Fig. 10) is one of Bronzini’s longer profiles of a wom-
an artist. By comparison, the majority of contempo-
rary artists are only accorded a sentence. Bronzini does
not insinuate anywhere in Artemisia’s biography that
he had met her, nor does he claim to have seen her
artworks, but it can be reasonably presumed that they
knew each other since they both enjoyed Medici pa-
tronage and because Bronzini clearly had a keen in-
terest in the visual arts.39 An absolute post quem for the
dating of the account is established by Bronzini’s ar-
rival in Florence in 1615; the probable ante quem stems
from Artemisia’s departure from the city in March
of 1620, in light of the fact that the account speaks
of Artemisia’s ongoing presence in Florence. Bron-
zini must therefore have obtained an account of her
life sometime between those two dates, with 1618/19
being the most likely period since the immediately
sequential biographical notice in his text regards the
visit of Giovanna Garzoni to the Medici court that
arguably took place in 1620.40

Although Bronzini’s biography of Artemisia is al-
most entirely devoted to recounting her youth in Rome,
it mentions neither Agostino Tassi nor the legal case
that Orazio Gentileschi brought against him in 1612
upon discovering that Tassi had raped his daughter.41
This omission is surprising in light of the presump-

39 Artemisia had enjoyed the patronage of the grand duke since 1614;
see Sheila Barker, “Artemisia’s Money: The Entrepreneurship of a Woman
Artist in Seventeenth-Century Florence”, in: Artemisia Gentileschi in a Chang-
ing Light, ed. by eadem, Turnhout 2018, pp. 59–88: 62.
40 For the date of Garzoni’s visit, see Barker (note 31), pp. 656 and 657,
note 16.
41 First published in part in Artemisia Gentileschi/Agostino Tassi: atti di un

processo per stupro, ed. by Eva Menzio, Milan 1981; in English translation by
Mary D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Ba-
roque Art, Princeton 1989, pp. 409–487; and in a new, partial transcription
by Patrizia Cavazzini, “Documenti relativi al processo contro Agostino
Tassi”, in: Orazio e Artemisia Gentileschi, exh. cat. Rome/New York/Saint
Louis 2001/02, ed. by Keith Christiansen/Judith W. Mann, Milan 2001,
pp. 432–445.

____

10 Cristofano Bronzini, Della dignità,
et della nobiltà delle donne, Florence,
Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale,
Magl. Cl. VIII, 1525, I, fol. 125v

| THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI | 415

leschi”, in: Orazio e Artemisia Gentileschi (note 41), pp. 263–281: 264, has
hypothesized that Christine of Lorraine responded to Orazio’s letter by
intervening in the trial to obtain Tassi’s condemnation and arranging Ar-
temisia’s marriage to a Florentine subject, following up later on with pa-
tronage of the young artist. For accounts of those years that do not assume
the dowager grand duchess’s behind-the-scenes support for the artist, see
Sheila Barker, “A New Document Concerning Artemisia Gentileschi’s
Marriage”, in: The Burlington Magazine, CLVI (2014), pp. 803f., and France-
sca Baldassari, “Artemisia nel milieu del Seicento fiorentino”, in: Artemisia
Gentileschi e il suo tempo, exh. cat., ed. by eadem, Milan 2016, pp. 23–33: 25,
where Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger is supposed to have offered
Artemisia the protection she required upon arriving in Florence.
45 Here in the text, the words “Artimitia Lomi Romana” have been
crossed out and replaced with the moniker “Mizia”. This nickname may
have been in wide use even in Rome, since in his rape trial testimony
Antonio Mazzantino recalled her name as “Solpizia or Artemisia”, with
the meaningless “Solpizia” surely being a mistranscription of “sol Mizia”
(just Mizia). For Mazzantino’s testimony see Artemisia Gentileschi/Agostino
Tassi (note 41), pp. 55–57, and Garrard (note 41), p. 457.

42 George Hersey, “Female and Male Art: Postille to Mary Garrard’s Ar-
temisia Gentileschi”, in: Parthenope’s Splendor: Art in the Golden Age in Naples, ed.
by Jeanne Chenault Porter/Susan Scott Munshower, University Park, Pa.,
1993, pp.  322–335: 329, has been the most strident proponent of this
theory, labeling Artemisia “a famous rape victim” and arguing that she
addressed this scandal head-on, using her identity as a wronged woman
as a kind of titillating brand-identity for her artworks, a “dashing enter-
prise […] to play the beautiful defamed rape-victim”. More measured the-
ories of the probable public knowledge of the rape trial are put forth by
Elizabeth S. Cohen, “The Trials of Artemisia Gentileschi: A Rape as His-
tory”, in: The Sixteenth Century Journal, XXXI (2000), pp. 47–75: 51; Mary D.
Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi around 1622: The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic
Identity, Berkeley 2001, pp. 22, 109–113; and Dabbs (note 24), p. 28.
43 Orazio’s letter was first published in Leopoldo Tanfani Centofanti,
Notizie di artisti tratte da documenti pisani, Pisa 1897, pp. 221–224. The sum-
mary of testimonies from Tassi’s trial dated 17 February 1612 is bound
immediately after Orazio’s letter; see ASF, Mediceo del Principato, 6003,
unnumbered folios (approximately fols. 71r–72v).
44 Elizabeth Cropper, “Vivere sul filo del rasoio: Artemisia Genti-

tion on the part of most scholars that at least some
shadow of scandal would have accompanied Artemi-
sia when she moved to Florence with her husband in
1613.42 Such views are based on the existence of a letter
that Orazio Gentileschi wrote from Rome on 3 July
1612 to Christine of Lorraine to request her help in
bringing Agostino Tassi to justice for the rape of his
daughter; sent along with his letter were several legal
depositions witnessing Tassi’s wickedness under the
title “Summarium romana [sic] stupri in virginem.”43
Notably, however, no evidence has yet been found to
indicate that Orazio’s plea elicited a response from the
Medici court, so perhaps his supplication garnered
only fleeting attention and was quickly forgotten.44
If not prompted simply by reasons of decorum, the
silence of Bronzini’s text with regard to Artemisia’s
adolescent trauma may indicate that Bronzini as well
as the majority of the Florentine court were unfamiliar
with the contents of Orazio’s letter.

The biography of Artemisia in Bronzini’s manu-
script provokes suspicion less because of the omission
of the rape and its legal ramifications than because of
the blatant fabrications that replace those two trou-
bled years in her timeline. Here is the complete text,
translated into English:

There lives today (and may she live many centuries!)

Mizia,45 of Florentine ancestry but born in Rome,

who, one day, when she was about twelve years old,

wanted to wear a skirt that her mother had made for

her a few years earlier. Finding the skirt now to be by

far too short, she decided to lengthen it by herself,

and when she did this, she added a little something

of her own imagination, adding an embroidery design

that she had invented. It happened that this skirt was

seen by experts in the realms of design and painting,

and they were convinced by what they saw the young

girl had a potential for great achievement in these arts.

They spoke with her father and strongly encouraged

him to let his daughter study painting, but he would

have none of it. Not only did he refuse to teach her,

but he also tried to prevent her from becoming an art-

ist by sending her to the convent of Sant’Apollonia

in Trastevere for her education. Here in the convent,

however, she felt more strongly inclined than ever to

become a professional painter, and she begged the

abbess to let her study in secret the good painting

of a worthy master. The abbess brought her several

paintings, including a Susanna by Caravaggio, an art-
ist once judged to be the greatest painter alive. The

copies that Artemisia made of these paintings came

416 | SHEILA BARKER |

out so well (especially one of the Susanna) that every-
one was amazed, and none more so than her own fa-

ther. When Orazio saw the copies and was assured

that they were done by his daughter, he was stunned

with disbelief and exceedingly impressed. Still not

convinced, he sent his daughter additional paintings

to copy, this time quite large ones, all by Caravaggio

(whose style she always tred to imitate as the one that

pleased her most). After she completed the copies with

a masterful finish, some were sold, attaining prices of

300, 500, and even 600 and more, even though these

were among her very first paintings. She then married

and was brought by her husband to Florence, his na-

tive city. The paintings and portraits she made here

were as admired no less than the ones made by the

above-mentioned Lalla Cizicena,46 and they adorned

and still adorn the rooms of the most prominent and

respected gentlemen, and the halls of the most illus-

trious and exalted princes living in Florence today.47

Although the known facts regarding Artemisia’s
youth and her artistic formation in her father’s home
are scanty,48 enough is known to expose the preced-
ing narrative as a predominantly fictional tale. The
most patently spurious elements include the asser-
tions that her father contributed in no way whatso-
ever to her artistic training; that he had placed her
in a Roman convent in the years leading up to her
marriage; and that during her time in the convent she
made (otherwise undocumented) copies of Caravag-

gio’s paintings that sold for many hundreds of scudi.
Because of the biography’s unreliability, the histori-
an’s first impulse might very well be to disregard it
entirely. However, by probing into the motivations
behind its falsehoods, it is possible to perceive aspi-
rations and anxieties that align precisely with what
is known about Artemisia’s preoccupations in these
years, affording precious insight into the artist’s life
and her deepest concerns.

Separating Fact from Fiction
This was not the first time that the account of a

woman artist’s life had been fictionalized in order to
make the female subject more appealing to historical
audiences. As shown by Fredrika H. Jacobs, Giorgio
Vasari fabricated key aspects of his vita of Properzia
de’ Rossi in order to bring it into accord with the ste-
reotypical ideals of women as characterized by con-
temporary treatises.49 However, while much of the
Artemisia biography is patently untrue, it does not
appear that Bronzini was the one who invented these
stories about her youth. Based on the internal charac-
teristics of Artemisia’s biography, it will be argued here
that she is most likely the person who masterminded
it and that Bronzini merely transcribed what was con-
veyed to him, either by Artemisia or by her associates.

An inquiry into the authorship of this biogra-
phy ought to begin by acknowledging the apparent
purposefulness underlying all of its discrepancies
with the reality of Artemisia’s youth. These apocry-

46 On the Roman painter Iaia of Cyzicus, described in Pliny as being highly
paid, quick, and renowned for her portraits of women (including one of an old
woman and a self-portrait made with the help of a mirror) see Ann Sutherland
Harris/Linda Nochlin, Women Artists: 1550–1950, New York 1976, p. 23, and
Dabbs (note 9), pp. 24, 27f. and 33, note 24. The artist is also described by
Bronzini (note 4), 1520, II, fol. 101v, thus: “vergine tutto il tempo di sua vita,
dipinse in Roma con il pennello, et col cestio in avorio, le figure delle donne.
Pinse anco un napolitano in una tavola grande, et nel specchio ritrasse se stessa
tanto del naturale, che chiunque vide tal pittura ne stupì. Hebbe costei (come
pur hora fu detto della dianzi nominata Marzia Romana) la mano nel dipin-
ger tanto veloce che veruno a suo tempo l’arrivò mai; et quel che più importa,
pinse con tant’arte, che avanzò di gran lunga i più illustri nell’arte del suo

tempo, le cui tavole, quadri, e ritratti furono poi tanto pregiati che adornarono
le camere et sale più illustri e più pregiate persone di quello et altri secoli.”
47 See Appendix, no. 23.
48 The early years of Artemisia’s life have been laid out in numerous studies,
including Garrard (note 41), pp. 13–34; R. Ward Bissell, Artemisia Gentileschi
and the Authority of Art, University Park, Pa., 1999, pp. 1–21; Patrizia Cavaz-
zini, “Artemisia nella casa paterna”, in: Orazio e Artemisia Gentileschi (note 41),
pp. 283–295; and Julia Vicioso, “Costanza Francini: A Painter in the Shad-
ow of Artemisia Gentileschi”, in: Women Artists (note 32), pp. 99–120.
49 Fredrika H. Jacobs, “The Construction of a Life: Madonna Properzia
De’ Rossi ‘Schultrice’ Bolognese”, in: Word and Image, IX (1993), pp. 122–
132: 126.

| THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI | 417

phal elements, rather than resembling the bumbling
conflations of a confused author or even the fanciful
diversions of an overly imaginative author, appear in-
stead to be the components of a strategic design, one
whose aim was to whitewash Artemisia’s scandalous
past and reshape it in conformity with the literary ste-
reotypes of women worthies and idealized feminine
characteristics. It is difficult to imagine that Bronzini
would have deliberately confabulated a biography for
Artemisia without her complicity, for as a contem-
porary living in the same city she could have easily
denounced his distortion of the truth, thereby call-
ing into question the veracity of his whole enterprise.
With everything to lose and very little to gain from
this one false biography, it is difficult to believe that
Bronzini, characterized as a “perfect courtier” by one
historian,50 would have risked losing face at the Medi-
ci court with a baseless fabrication about his famous
female contemporary. By contrast, Artemisia stood to
benefit greatly from the chance to rewrite her life sto-
ry and to have a respected author place this sanitized
version before the eyes of the Medici grand duchesses.
Given her female patrons’ insistent hallowing of fe-
male virtue in their efforts to create a “court of the
saints”, it is understandable that Artemisia might have
wished to retroactively fashion herself as a product of
natural artistic inclination and a wholesome educa-
tion in a convent.51

Finally, in assessing the authorship of Artemisia’s
apocryphal biography, it should be recalled that Bron-

zini earnestly aspired to obtain accurate accounts. He
noted whenever his source was his own direct knowl-
edge or a reliable contemporary, and otherwise he
mined from authoritative publications such as Vasa-
ri’s Lives. Indeed, Bronzini’s reliability as a biographer
was recently endorsed by historian Susanne Cusick in
her meticulously documented study of the compos-
er Francesca Caccini, a close contemporary of Arte-
misia’s who also lived in Florence and who likewise
enjoyed Medici patronage.52 Since Bronzini’s other
biographies of women artists all adhere closely to the
information that was available to him, we can infer
that, acting in good faith, he unwittingly put his trust
in a misleading source in the case of Artemisia.53

The Truth Below the Surface
Despite its fictional elements, Artemisia’s earliest

biography cannot simply be dismissed from historio-
graphic consideration. This is due to the fact that sev-
eral of its incidental details align with the true course
of her childhood years in mesmerizing ways. These
highly specific yet gratuitous biographical details – a
stylistic element with no parallel in Bronzini’s other
biographies  – frequently touch on intimate aspects
of Artemisia’s experience that only her family would
have known. For instance, when the story opens, it
is either late 1605 or early 1606 since Artemisia,
born in 1593, is said to be twelve years old. It can be
gleaned from the narrative at this point that she has
no mother to help her with the care of her person

50 Tippelskirch 2011 (note 2), p. 140.
51 On the emphasis on morality and decorum during the regency of
Christine of Lorraine and Maria Magdalena, see eadem 2008 (note  2),
pp. 138f., in which the Medici court under their influence is described
as a “corte dei santi”. When he did not observe these imperatives, Mi-
chelangelo Buonarroti the Younger was shunned by the grand duchesses
after his play La Fiera satirized female virtue in 1619; see Janie Cole, Mu-
sic, Spectacle and Cultural Brokerage in Early Modern Italy: Michelangelo Buonarroti
il Giovane, Florence 2011, I, pp. 292–295. Patrizia Cavazzini, “Artemisia
and the Other Women in Agostino Tassi’s Life: Attitudes to Women’s
Improper Sexual Behaviour in Seventeenth-Century Rome”, in: Artemisia
Gentileschi: Taking Stock, ed. by Judith W. Mann, Turnhout 2005, pp. 39–49:

42f., suggests that women’s honor was not as closely dependent on the
observance of chastity as has been supposed. However, Cavazzini’s study
regards Rome, whereas in Florence it seems that feminine behavior was
held up to stricter standards. In her attempts to attain Medici patronage,
Artemisia would presumably have been expected to observe the decorum
for upper-class women.
52 Cusick (note 2), p. xx: “Because Bronzini had known Francesca for at
least fifteen years when he wrote it, and because his ideal audience – the
elite women of the Medici court – knew her person and her story better
than he, the sketch is an invaluable biographical source.”
53 For Bronzini’s accidental errors in his notes on artists, see above,
note 28.

418 | SHEILA BARKER |

or the mending of her clothing. Archival documents
confirm that Artemisia’s mother, Prudenzia Mon-
tone, died in childbirth at age thirty on 26 December
1605,54 and thus the opening of this anecdote rever-
berates with a daughter’s genuine memories of the loss
of a parent.

Another point of contact with reality concerns the
convent that is invoked in this account, Sant’Apollo-
nia in Trastevere. A religious house of Franciscan ter-
tiaries with this name did in fact once exist; moreover,
it was not far from Santo Spirito in Sassia, where Ar-
temisia’s family had resided since mid-July of 1611.55
Artemisia may have even visited the convent’s church
at some point, and she would have gone right past
it on her documented excursion to the Basilica of
Saint Paul’s Outside the Walls in the late summer of
1611.56 Although Orazio did not send her to this or
any other convent (despite what is written in Bron-
zini’s text), the rape trial records indicate that it had
been his intention to do so. Tuzia Medaglia, who lived
with the Gentileschi family, was under oath when she
reported how Orazio would have preferred for Arte-
misia to become a nun rather than to marry: “Even
when I moved into [Orazio’s] house, he warned me
not to speak to his daughter about husbands, rather,
that I should persuade her to become a nun, which
I tried to do several times.”57 Artemisia, however,
showed no interest in heeding this advice. According
to Tuzia, “[Artemisia] always told me that her father

did not need to waste his time because every time he
spoke of her becoming a nun he alienated her”.58

Another revealing detail of the account, and one
that perhaps only Artemisia would have thought to
include, is the gratuitous reference to her admiration
for Caravaggio above all other painters. The penetrat-
ing truth of the reference is born out by the Cara-
vaggesque influences in her oeuvre, and it underlines
what will be argued below about Artemisia’s desire
to be seen as a direct disciple of Caravaggio, rather
than as her father’s understudy.59 Finally, it is a strik-
ing coincidence that Artemisia is said to have copied
Caravaggio’s Susanna and the Elders – a painting whose
existence is not attested to by any other source – with
great skill. This artistic subject is the only one to
be specified in Artemisia’s biographical account and
it also happens to be the subject of Artemisia’s first
signed work from her youth, the Pommersfelden Su-
sanna and the Elders (Fig. 11), which she completed in
Rome in 1610.60 In light of this last coincidence and
other factual correlations, it is hard to imagine who
else but Artemisia could have invented the fictions of
her earliest biography.

Once it is recognized that the story in Bronzi-
ni’s text originated with Artemisia herself, its fictions
become as significant as its facts. This is because the
stories she invented to cloak her past are inevitably
imprinted with her own mental constructs, including
her ambitions, her anxieties, and her personal inter-

54 See R. Ward Bissell, “Artemisia Gentileschi: A New Documented
Chronology”, in: Art Bulletin, L (1968), pp. 153–168: 154, note 9.
55 On the church of Sant’Apollonia in Trastevere, founded in 1582
and demolished in the nineteenth century, see Giuseppe Vasi, Tesoro sagro
e venerabile; cioè le basiliche, le chiese, i cimiteri e i santuari di Roma con le opere di pietà
e di religione, Rome 1771, p. 39, and Mariano Armellini, Le chiese di Roma:
dal secolo IV al XIX, Rome 1942, II, pp. 852f. For the Gentileschi fam-
ily’s transfer here in mid-July of 1611 from their previous residence on
Via della Croce (where the rape had taken place), see Garrard (note 41),
p. 21. The specific location of this house in Santo Spirito is in Vicioso
(note 48), pp. 105f.
56 Her visit to Saint Paul’s, where she surely would have taken note of
Lavinia Fontana’s altarpiece (mentioned in Appendix, no.  22), is re-

corded in the testimony of Antonio Mazzantino, on which see Artemi-
sia Gentileschi/Agostino Tassi (note 41), pp. 55–57, and Garrard (note 41),
p. 457.
57 From the English translation ibidem, p. 422.
58 Ibidem, p. 421.
59 On the role of Caravaggio’s art in Artemisia’s formation of a personal
style as well as an independent professional identity, see Mary D. Garrard,
“Identifying Artemisia: The Archive and the Eye”, in: Artemisia Gentileschi in
a Changing Light (note 39), pp. 11–40: 16–19.
60 On this work and its significance in Artemisia’s early career in Rome,
see Garrard (note 41), pp. 183–209, and Patricia Simons, “Artemisia Gen-
tileschi’s Susanna and the Elders (1610)”, in: Artemisia Gentileschi in a Changing
Light (note 39), pp. 41–57.

| THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI | 419

home: Luca Penti and Antonio Bertucci, for whose testimonies see ibidem,
pp. 434, 438, as well as Antonio Mazzantino, for whose testimony see
Garrard (note 41), p. 457. On the moral codes that Artemisia broke by be-
ing seen at a window, see Thomas V. Cohen/Elizabeth S. Cohen, Words and
Deeds in the Renaissance Rome: Trials Before the Papal Magistrates, Toronto 1993,
pp. 159–187, and Cavazzini (note 48), pp. 286 and 292, note 41.
65 See for instance Anna Esposito, “Donna e fama tra normativa sta-
tutaria e realtà sociale”, in: Fama e publica vox nel medioevo, conference pro-
ceedings Ascoli Piceno 2009, ed. by Isa Lori Sanfilippo/Antonio Rigon,
Rome 2011, pp. 87–102.

in the face and in all one’s gestures […]. Nor should

you believe that just because one is married, that it is

acceptable to listen to all that is said, to say anything

at all, and to converse with just anyone. If you should

be invited to banquets and celebrations, keep company

pretation of the virtuosa ideal.61 To begin with, Arte-
misia’s claim that she was placed in a convent in the
period between her mother’s death and her marriage
to Pierantonio Stiattesi reveals that she was anxious to
counter any gossip about the rape that had occurred
precisely in that time-frame, a conclusion that dispels
the recent claim that Artemisia willfully brandished
her identity as a rape victim (in a sort of branding
tactic) for the sake of expanding the market for her
art.62 Besides furnishing her with an alibi, the story
of her enclosure in a convent may have also served
to alleviate any lingering dishonor due to various al-
legations made during the rape trial, including the
claims that Artemisia had been the subject of men’s
conversations63 and that she sometimes looked out at
the world from her window “molto sfacciatamente”
(“very impudently”).64

The exposure in male spheres that Artemisia had
been charged with could stain a woman’s honor.65 As
Bronzini’s own text reminds us, it was not enough
to act with probity; a woman was also expected to
avoid the mere appearance of impropriety, as well as
to avoid witnessing the sinful acts of others, which
was not easy to do while walking around in a city or
taking part in secular society:

But as for going outside on occasion, as we’ve said, this

too should be done only very rarely (especially in the

case of ordinary days), and on festival days with good

and virtuous companions, always observing in the

places where one might go the true manner of a chaste

and conscientious woman, not only in speech but also

61 On the virtuosa, referring to the historical ideal of the creative and
talented female, see Jacobs (note 19).
62 Here I refer specifically to the theory articulated by Hersey, summa-
rized in note 42 above.
63 Such accusations were made in the testimonies of Giovanni Battista
Stiattesi and Agostino Tassi, for which see Garrard (note 41), pp. 426,
445, 451; and in the testimony of Marcantonio Coppino, for which see
Cavazzini (note 41), p. 435.
64 Cited from the testimony of Mario Trotta in Cavazzini (note 41),
p.  434. Other witnesses recalled her appearance at the window of her

____

11 Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, 1610.
Pommersfelden, Collection Graf von Schönborn

420 | SHEILA BARKER |

Fedeli. It was additionally recognized that laywomen
could also benefit from the flourishing artistic culture
of monasteries, since Maria Magdalena of Austria’s
favorite, Arcangela Paladini, had formerly stayed at
the Florentine convent of Sant’Agata, where she was
trained to paint and embroider thanks to the patron-
age of Christine of Lorraine.68 Artemisia’s claim to
have been sent by her father to a religious house was
thus a credible explanation of how she could have
learned to paint if not at the hands of her father.

A second invented element in Artemisia’s bi-
ography, the anecdote of her precocious prowess in
embroidery, may hold deeper implications. It is im-
portant to note, for instance, that the story abides by
the conventional plotline found in several of Vasari’s
biographies, according to which some of the great
artists first manifested their talent far outside the
workshop (an obvious example being the story of how
Giotto’s talent was first recognized when he drew pic-
tures in the mud while watching over his flock).69 In
Artemisia’s case, however, the story of her early signs
of artistic talent also serves to strengthen the impres-
sion that Artemisia received no help whatsoever from
her father in either the discovery, or the development,
of her talent for painting (which was certainly one of
her more contentious claims).70 The anecdote traces

66 Bronzini (note 4), 1525, II, fols. 119v–120r: “Questa donna marita-
ta […] deve ella rimaner sempre rinchiusa dentro le porte della sua casa?
Non già, ma uscire alle volte, come si è detto, et queste anche di rado, et
particolarmenti nei giorni che non sono festivi et nei festivi con buona et
honesta compagnia: osservando sempre in tutti i luoghi dove ella va, quella
vera maniera di donna honesta et grave, così nelle parole, come nel volto, et
in tutti i gesti nella guisa, che fu accenata di sopra: né pensi che per essere
maritata, le stia bene udire ogni cosa, parlar d’ogni cosa, et haver prattica con
ogni persona: ma trovandosi a conviti, et feste, solamente con donne hone-
stissime, et di buona fama s’accompagni, et sieno i suoi ragionamenti gravi
et prudenti: quei motti lascivi, non ascolti; né vegga, né rivolga mai gli occhi
a gli atti disonesti che in diversi luoghi alle volte si fanno: anzi disponga se
stessa in modo che ivi il corpo, come forestiere et peregrino, ma l’animo col
marito et con la sua famiglia si ritrovi nella propria casa, come in suo regno.
Fugga la virtuosa donna tutti i luoghi ne quali può soprastar pericolo alla
sua honestà et suo honore; né curi di fare esperienza della sua fortezza.”
67 On the moral and religious climate of the early seventeenth-century

Florentine court, see Harness 2006 (note 15), pp. 40–55; Tippelskirch
2008 (note 2); Cusick (note 2), pp. 39–60, 194f.; Cole (note 51), pp. 299–
316. Artemisia’s “preoccupation with the social virtue of honor” is argued
in Elizabeth S. Cohen, “What’s in a Name: Artemisia Gentileschi and
the Politics of Reputation”, in: Artemisia Gentileschi: Taking Stock (note 51),
pp. 121–130: 128.
68 See Goldenberg Stoppato (note 32), pp. 87–89. On the training of
young women in artistic skills upon their placement in monasteries by the
Medici grand duchesses, see Barker (note 33), pp. 124–134.
69 On the discovery of talent as an archetypal characteristic of the myth
of the artist, see Ernst Kris/Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of
the Artist: A Historical Experiment, New Haven 1979 (first German ed. Vienna
1934), pp. 26–37; and with particular reference to the legendary discovery
of Giotto’s talent, see Paul Barolsky, Giotto’s Father and the Family of Vasari’s
Lives, University Park, Pa., 1992, pp. 20f.
70 Neither in the rape trial testimony nor in Orazio’s letter to Christine
of Lorraine is it ever explicitly stated that Orazio trained Artemisia in her

only with the most blameless and respectable women

and let your conversation be serious and wise. Don’t

listen to lascivious talk; don’t look and don’t even veer

your eyes towards the wicked acts that are sometimes

done in various places. Instead, carry yourself in such

a way so that in those places the body [is] as a stranger

and a pilgrim, while your soul remains in its proper

home, its kingdom as it were, with your husband and

your family. The virtuous woman flees from all places

where her purity and her honor could be put at risk; nor

should you decide to put your fortitude to the test.66

This passage from Della dignità et nobiltà delle donne
suggests that a woman’s chastity and virtuous behav-
ior were indispensable passkeys to the pro-woman
enclave at the Medici court, thereby indicating a po-
tential motivation for Artemisia’s false claim to have
spent her adolescent years in a convent.67

In Florence and elsewhere in Italy, convents did in
fact sometimes present women with the opportunity
to obtain artistic training. As we have seen, Bronzini
acknowledged this fact by treating monastic women
artists as a special subcategory, lavishing praise on
exemplars such as Suor Plautilla Nelli, Nelli’s stu-
dents in the Florentine convent of Santa Caterina
da Siena, Angela Cherubina Angelelli, and Ortensia

| THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI | 421

court because of her embroidery skills, a claim confirmed by recent his-
torical research; see Goldenberg Stoppato (note 32), p. 89. On the pres-
tige of needle painting at the Florentine court and beyond, see Sharon T.
Strocchia, “Knowing Hands: Nuns and the Needle Arts in Renaissance
Tuscany”, in: Artiste nel chiostro (note  33), pp.  29–50; Adelina Modesti,
“Nun Artisans, Needlecraft, and Material Culture in the Early Modern
Florentine Convent”, ibidem, pp. 51–69; Sheila ffolliott, “ ‘Più che famose’:
Some Thoughts on Women Artists in Early Modern Europe”, in: Women
Artists (note 32), pp. 15–27: 20f.
73 See Appendix, no. 15.
74 Ibidem, no. 16.
75 Paolo Lomazzo celebrated a female embroiderer, Caterina Leuca
Cantona, in a poem dedicated to women artists; see Jacobs (note  19),
pp. 23f. Paolo Morigia’s Nobiltà di Milano, Milan 1595, I, pp. 299f., contains
a chapter on embroiderers in which two women, Cantona and Lodovica
Pellegrini, are named.

profession. Nevertheless, it is universally presumed in the historiography
that she learned her art from her father, beginning with Giovanni Baglio-
ne’s statement in 1642 that Orazio taught his daughter how to paint and
specifically how to carry out “ritratti dal vero” (Giovanni Baglione, Le vite
de’ pittori scultori et architetti dal pontificato di Gregorio XIII. del 1572 in fino a’ tempi di
Papa Urbano Ottavo nel 1642, ed. by Valerio Mariani, Rome 1935 [facsimile
of the ed. Rome 1642], p. 360). In Orazio’s letter to Christine from 1612,
he states that Artemisia had been studying painting for three years at that
point. On this letter and what it indicates about the probable chronology
of Artemisia’s apprenticeship in painting, see Cavazzini (note 48), p. 288,
and R. Ward Bissell, “Re-thinking Early Artemisia”, in: Artemisia Gentile-
schi: Taking Stock (note 51), pp. 19–38: 20.
71 Many thanks to Mary D. Garrard for drawing my attention to the
significance of this issue.
72 Bronzini noted that Arcangela Paladini, although held in high regard
for her painting, attained the favor of the highborn dame of the Medici

her artistic genesis to a textile art that her father did
not practice, and one that was seen as a particular-
ly feminine art form, thereby excluding Orazio from
any pretension to being the source of her artistic gifts
and talents. Perhaps even more to the point, Artemi-
sia’s story situates her artistic talent within a matri-
lineal line of descent, rather than a patrilineal one.71

Artemisia’s story of her debut in needlepoint was
a particularly astute narrative strategy at the Medici
court, where embroidery was held in high esteem fol-
lowing the cultural interests of Grand Duchess Maria
Magdalena and her mother-in-law Christine of Lor-
raine.72 Bronzini’s own text implies that embroidery
and painting shared a certain equivalency, as is indi-
cated by his placement of the descriptions of talent-
ed embroiderers such as the “three sisters of Ferrara”
among the profiles of painters.73 At one point Bron-
zini even asserted that the designs of a famous female
needleworker in Toledo were a fair match for any pen-
and-ink drawing or painted design:

I don’t wish, however, to fail to mention the Spanish

woman from Toledo Francesca di Giesù [Francisca de

Jesús], for if she had lived instead in ancient times, she

would have been an even better match for Athena [than

Arachne], because the most sharp and subtle genius-

es of the present age admire in her talent for weaving

damasks and brocades her stupendous works, creating

in cloth that which a worthy painter could only barely

express with a pen or with a paintbrush and panel.74

In light of such passages, the anecdote about Ar-
temisia’s accomplishments in embroidery effectively
contextualizes her artistic impulses within the sphere
of a feminine skill that many of Bronzini’s contem-
poraries believed to have no less claim on disegno than
those arts favored by Vasari.75

Much in the same way that it situates Artemi-
sia’s artistic origins within a feminine, even matri-
archal, matrix, the fictitious biography emphatically
demonstrates that the Caravaggesque impulse in her
art was the result of a woman’s intervention, not her
father’s. Credit for introducing Artemisia to Cara-
vaggio’s paintings is explicitly withheld from Ora-
zio Gentileschi and assigned instead to the abbess of
Sant’Apollonia. While there would not seem to be
any substance to the implausible story of the abbess
who brought Caravaggio’s paintings into the convent,
there may nonetheless be a kernel of truth at its core.
With regard to Artemisia’s earliest firmly attributed
work, the Susanna of 1610, Gianni Papi has argued
convincingly that the young artist possessed a direct
and autonomous knowledge of Caravaggio’s oeuvre as
opposed to one that was filtered through her father’s

422 | SHEILA BARKER |

Anguissola and the Problem of the Female Artist”, in: Renaissance Quarterly,
XLVII (1994), pp. 556–622: 556–566. Francesca Caccini’s worry that
“the simple-minded” would credit her father with the music she pub-
lished herself is discussed in Cusick (note 2), pp. 109f. Elisabetta Sira-
ni’s “struggle to achieve recognition for her accomplishments” is noted
in Babette Bohn, “The Construction of Artistic Reputation in Seicento
Bologna: Guido Reni and the Sirani”, in: Renaissance Studies, XXV (2011),
pp. 511–537: 533f. For Artemisia’s heated conflicts with her father upon
returning to Rome, see the letters she and her husband wrote to Francesco
Maria Maringhi in Francesco Solinas/Michele Nicolaci/Yuri Primarosa,
Lettere di Artemisia: edizione critica e annotata con quarantre documenti inediti, Rome
2011, nos. 12–14, pp. 38–45; for the theory that a dispute over her dowry
payment was at the base of this fighting, see Barker (note 39), pp. 68–71.
80 Appendix, no. 1.
81 Vasari (note 21), II, p. 35 (Cimabue), p. 96 (Giotto), p. 191 (Simone

76 Gianni Papi, “Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1626): gli anni romani, il
soggiorno fiorentino”, in Artemisia Gentileschi, exh. cat. Florence 1991, ed. by
Roberto Contini/Gianni Papi, Rome 1991, pp. 31–62: 34–37. Dissenting
opinions that stress varying degrees of Orazio’s conceptual and manu-
al intervention in the Pommersfelden Susanna are summarized in Bissell
(note 70), pp. 19 and 22f.
77 See Papi (note 76), and idem, “Mary Magdalen in Ecstasy and the Madonna
of the Svezzamento: Two Masterpieces by Artemisia”, in: Artemisia Gentileschi in
a Changing Light (note 39), pp. 147–166.
78 Appendix, no. 9.
79 Not infrequently, talented women of this era feared that credit for
their own achievements would be given to their fathers or their male
teachers. As if anticipating that this would occur, the trope in Sofonisba
Anguissola’s Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola topples the Pygma-
lion stereotype; see Mary D. Garrard, “Here’s Looking at Me: Sofonisba

production.76 Moreover, Papi’s research suggests that
Orazio’s complete conversion to Caravaggism may
have taken place after his daughter had already fully
embraced this new style.77 If Artemisia indeed em-
braced Caravaggio’s manner well before her father
did, this would explain why her invented biography
repeatedly asserts that her artistic formation occurred
independently of her father’s influence.

Artemisia’s biography is not the only one in Bron-
zini’s manuscript to hail a woman artist’s autodi-
dactic formation. The adolescent Spanish portraitist
María de Jesús Torres, for example, is said to have
had great skill in painting despite not receiving any
training whatsoever.78 However, whereas the stories of
Artemisia and Torres both inspire marvel, Artemisia’s
biography stands apart from the latter as well as all
the other profiles of women artists in this manuscript
because of the inclusion of an antagonist, that is to
say, a figure who opposes the woman’s efforts to pur-
sue her vocation. Portrayed as being at once irrelevant
to Artemisia’s aesthetic education and at the same
time Draconian in his efforts to crush her nascent
artistic career, Orazio Gentileschi emerges as Artemi-
sia’s nemesis in this account. The prominence of this
antagonistic father-figure in Artemisia’s biography
can perhaps be best explained by Artemisia’s fear that
her father would be wrongly credited for her own ac-
complishments, a sentiment that was surely fueled by

the disputes that arose between father and daughter
in these years.79

At the same time that Artemisia’s biography dimin-
ishes her father’s contribution, it identifies an alterna-
tive source for her talents in nature itself. It states that,
within the convent, Artemisia became “più che mai in-
clinata a questa professione” (more inclined than ever
to become a painter). The term employed here, inclina-
ta, referred to an inborn vocation preordained by the
heavens. It is used in Bronzini’s text in the context of
only one other female artist: Properzia de’ Rossi, de-
fined by Bronzini as “da Natura inclinata al dissegno”
(“inclined by nature to the art of design”).80 A survey of
the use of this term in the 1568 edition of Vasari’s Lives
clearly shows the aggrandizing implications of ascrib-
ing Artemisia’s talent to natural inclination. The notion
of natural inclination features as the prime mover be-
hind the careers of Cimabue (“inclinazione di natura”),
Giotto (“inclinazione della natura”), Simone Martini
(“uomini che sono dalla natura inclinati”), Spinello
Aretino (“tanto inclinato da natura”), Alesso Baldovi-
netti (“inclinazione della natura”), Lorenzo Costa (“da
natura inclinato”), Giovanni and Gentile Bellini (“in-
clinatissimi”), Andrea del Sarto (“spinto da naturale
inclinazzione”), Garofalo (“nacque […] di maniera in-
clinato”), Michelangelo (“molto inclinato”), Primatic-
cio (“da natura inclinato”), Titian (“molto inclinato”),
and even Vasari himself (“molto inclinato”).81 Of the

| THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI | 423

handful of women artists mentioned in this edition of
the Lives, only the four Anguissola sisters are accorded
assistance from natural inclination, having “da natura
inclinazione alla virtù” (“an inclination to virtuosity
given to them by nature”).82

It is not known whether Artemisia ever read Vasa-
ri’s Lives. However, by the time Bronzini had included
her biography in his text, Artemisia had already paint-
ed the Allegory of inclination (Fig. 12) for the ceiling of the
Galleria in Casa Buonarroti in the summer of 1615.83
Within the context of the Galleria’s iconographic pro-
gram, the Allegory of inclination refers to the irresistible
divine force behind Michelangelo’s undertaking of an
artistic career. It is therefore unquestionable that she
was familiar with Vasari’s concept of natural inclina-
tion and with its role in the historiographic construc-
tion of artistic genius. Moreover, as Mary D. Garrard
has noted, Artemisia fused her own likeness with this
imagery representing Michelangelo’s predestination for
artistic glory, thereby assimilating herself to the ideal of
artistic genius as defined in Buonarroti the Younger’s
early seventeenth-century iconographic program.84

Conclusion: Artemisia, Art Historiography,
and Biographical Exceptionalism
Despite its apocryphal nature, Artemisia’s ear-

liest biography contains several particularities that
correlate precisely with what is known about her

Martini), p. 277 (Spinello Aretino), III, p. 314 (Baldovinetti), p. 415 (Lo-
renzo Costa), p. 422 (Giovanni and Gentile Bellini), IV, p. 343 (Andrea
del Sarto), V, p. 409 (Garofalo), VI, pp. 108, 109 (Michelangelo Buo-
narroti), p. 143 (Primaticcio), p. 155 (Titian), p. 369 (Vasari), and many
other examples besides.
82 Ibidem, V, p. 428.
83 The iconographic program of the ceiling and walls of the Galleria
had been determined by its patron, Michelangelo Buonarroti the Young-
er (1568–1646), a librettist and member of the Accademia della Crusca;
see Ugo Procacci, La Casa Buonarroti a Firenze, Milan 1968, and Adriaan W.
Vliegenthart, La Galleria Buonarroti: Michelangelo e Michelangelo il Giovane, Florence
1976, pp. 22f., 49–51, 77, 170–173, 174–176. Buonarroti the Younger was
also the godfather to Artemisia’s stillborn daughter, Agnola, on which see
Barker (note 39), pp. 59–88: 74, doc. 3, p. 81, note 8, p. 83, note 55.
84 See Garrard (note 59), pp. 14f.

____

12 Artemisia Gentileschi,
Allegory of inclination,
1615. Florence,
Casa Buonarroti

424 | SHEILA BARKER |

notes her virginity and purity, while the story that
she learned to paint in the convent by copying after
Caravaggio testifies to her inborn talent, her indepen-
dence from her father, and her self-possession. This
pair of concepts, virginity and autonomous capabili-
ty, has precedents in the ‘biographical’ signatures of
women artists featuring the designation virgo (virgin)
and in their references to themselves as the sole cre-
ators of their own images.86 Well-known examples in-
clude Sofonisba Anguissola’s signature on her earliest
dated self-portrait at the Kunsthistorisches Museum
in Vienna, “Sophonisba Angussola virgo se ipsam fe-
cit 1554” and her declaration sophonisba angvssola
virg(o) ipsivs manv ex specvlo depicta cremonae
on her miniature at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts
(Fig.  13).87 Similarly, in Lavinia Fontana’s formula
Lavinia Virgo Prosperi Fontanae / filia ex specv-
lo imaginem / oris svi expresit anno / mdlxxvii
on the Self-portrait at the virginal (Rome, Accademia di
San Luca), the artist acknowledged herself as the
daughter of a painter but made it clear that only her
mirror helped her make the painting on which this
inscription appears.88

Just as she was preceded by other women artists in
using self-representation to assert her purity and her
independence, Artemisia was also preceded by them
in making recourse to fictions and embellishments.89
As suggested by Jacobs, the imagery of Lavinia Fon-
tana’s painted self-portraits was, above all, a device for
presenting the artist in conformity with the Renais-

Gaze, London et al. 1997, pp. 21–28, with preceding bibliography; Artiste
nel chiostro (note 33); and Plautilla Nelli: arte e devozione (note 36).
87 On these two paintings, see Sofonisba Anguissola e le sue sorelle, exh. cat. Cre-
mona/Vienna/Washington, D.C., Rome 1994, pp. 196f., no. 6, 188f., no. 2.
88 On this painting, see Maria Teresa Cantaro, Lavinia Fontana bolognese:
“pittora singolare” 1552–1614, Milan 1989, pp. 72–74, no. 4a.12; Garrard
(note 79), pp. 589–595; Lavinia Fontana of Bologna, 1552–1614, exh. cat. Wa-
shington, D.C., 1998, ed. by Vera Pierantonio Fortunati, Washington,
D.C./Milan 1998, pp. 52f., no. 2.
89 See, for instance, Catherine King, “Italian Artists in Search of Virtue,
Fame, and Honour c. 1450–c. 1650”, in: The Changing Status of the Artist, ed. by
Emma Barker/Nick Webb/Kim Woods, London 1999, pp. 56–87: 72–74.

childhood from documentary sources. Moreover, its
fictional elements conveniently dissemble the scandal-
ous episodes that could have tarnished her reputation
and hindered her career at the Florentine court. Giv-
en these findings, it can be reasonably assumed that
the account originated with the artist herself and that
through a kind of ventriloquism (not so unlike Mi-
chelangelo’s instrumentalization of Condivi to assert
his own claims of autodidacticism), Artemisia con-
cealed her role in fashioning the account that issued
from Bronzini’s pen. A parallel situation has been
recognized in regard to Simon Vouet’s Portrait of Ar-
temisia Gentileschi (Fig. 1). Even though this likeness of
Artemisia was painted by the hand of another artist,
Garrard has argued that it would be more appropriate
to consider the image to be the result of a synthesis
of ideas mutually agreed upon by the painter and the
sitter. Indeed, it is very likely that Artemisia would
have wanted to exercise control over such design as-
pects as her association with the tools of both drawing
and painting, as well as the pose and facial expression
that convey her character. Noting that no other fe-
male portrait by Vouet manages to conjure such verve
and such spirited awareness of her audience, Garrard
suggests “we may reasonably conclude that Artemisia
collaborated in creating the portrait’s expression”.85

By means of her idealized biography, Artemi-
sia succeeded in assimilating herself to the socially
constructed ideals of both female virtue and artistic
genius. The story of her enclosure in a convent con-

85 Ibidem, p. 11. See also the discussion of the playful implications of Ar-
temisia’s outstretched pinkie finger as shown in Vouet’s portrait in Mary
D. Garrard, “Artemisia’s Hand”, in: Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art His-
tory After Postmodernism, ed. by Norma Broude/Mary D. Garrard, Berkeley/
Los Angeles/London 2005, pp. 63–79 (reprinted in Artemisia Gentileschi:
Taking Stock [note 51], pp. 99–120).
86 On the implications of the term ‘virgo’ in women artists’ signatures,
see Garrard (note  79), pp.  582f. Convent artists perhaps did not need
to make recourse to these topoi in the same way: their moral purity was
implied in the title ‘suor’ and their artworks in some cases may have been
collaborative workshop productions; regarding nun artists, see Ann Rob-
erts/Marilyn Dunn, “Convents”, in: Dictionary of Women Artists, ed. by Delia

| THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI | 425

sance ideal of the virtuosa.90 However, by comparison
with Fontana’s visual topoi, Artemisia’s biographical
fabrications are highly idiosyncratic and consequently
more revealing of her personal experiences and inner
mind.

Perhaps no biography of an early modern art-
ist completely escapes questions about truthfulness.
Historians have shown clearly that the literature on
artists’ lives is fundamentally epideictic, and that as a
consequence it occupies a “terrain in which fact and
fiction co-exist”.91 Biographers from Vasari to Freud
and beyond have treated artists as a natural category
marked by exceptionalism, adapting the life stories
of male artists to fit rhetorical models and mytho-
heroic constructs. Women artists, by comparison, were
doubly impacted by this biographical exceptionalism,
since their rupture with gender stereotypes led to an
additional qualification as marvels among their sex
and thus as miracles of nature.92 This seems to hold
true whether the women were passive objects of bi-
ography or active collaborators, autobiographers, and
self-portraitists.93 Beginning with her autobiography
for Bronzini and continuing with her copious self-
references in paintings, the posturing in her corre-
spondence, and even the encomia authored by her
friends, Artemisia Gentileschi was one of the more
active, shrewd, and resourceful figures in this regard.
Liberally cloaking herself in myth, she was one of
many women artists who negotiated a viable profes-

90 Jacobs (note 19), pp. 149–153. In a similar vein, Katherine McIver,
“Lavinia Fontana’s Self-Portrait Making Music”, in: Women’s Art Journal, XIX
(1998), pp. 3–8: 5, observes that Fontana cannot be presumed to have
had musical talents just because she portrayed herself with her fingers on
the keyboard of a virginal, an instrument that alludes to the artist’s purity
and her learning; cf. Garrard (note  79), p.  589, note  71. On Fontana’s
tendency to depict herself at a younger age, see Babette Bohn, “Female
Self-Portraiture in Early Modern Bologna”, in: Renaissance Studies, XVIII
(2004), pp. 239–286: 255f.
91 Quotation from Claire Farago, “The Absolute Leonardo” (review of
Thomas Frangenberg/Rodney Palmer, The Lives of Leonardo, London/Tu-
rin 2013), in: Journal of Art Historiography, 13 (2015), https://arthistoriogra-
phy.wordpress.com/13-dec15/, p. 3. See also Patricia Rubin, “What Men

Saw: Vasari’s Life of Leonardo da Vinci and the Image of the Renaissance
Artist”, in: Art History, XIII (1990), pp. 36–46. For the epideictic nature
of artists’ biographies see Carl Goldstein, “The Image of the Artist Re-
viewed”, in: Word and Image, IX (1993), pp. 9–18: 12, and Dabbs (note 24),
p.  28, in which see also p.  22 for an anecdote in Baldinucci regarding
Artemisia whose veracity is disputed by some and accepted by others.
92 Harris/Nochlin (note 46), pp. 26–35; Fredrika H. Jacobs, “Wom-
an’s Capacity to Create: The Unusual Case of Sofonisba Anguissola”,
in: Renaissance Quarterly, XLVII (1994), pp.  74–101; Garrard (note  79),
pp.  573f., 588f. On the impact that women artists’ gender has had on
their biographies, see Dabbs (note 24), pp. 20–22.
93 On women artists as active shapers and fashioners of their identities,
see above all King (note 23); also Bohn (note 90), pp. 239–286.

____

13 Sofonisba Anguissola,
Self-portrait, about 1556.
Boston, Museum of Fine Arts,
Emma F. Monroe Fund,
inv. 60.155

426 | SHEILA BARKER |

94 According to Cohen (note 42), pp. 67–71, Artemisia dexterously ex-
ploited her testimony during the rape trial of 1612 as an opportunity
for self-fashioning, assertively putting “forward the image by which she
wishes to be known”, that is to say, as a virtuous, conscientious, and con-
fident young woman whose honorable reputation had been assailed by
unscrupulous and nefarious individuals. Furthermore, while the details
of her stories were not always plausible, “in both language and behavior
Artemisia stuck to the course that she hoped would best secure her hon-
orable, public identity” (ibidem, p. 71).

sional identity in the gap between her society’s cultur-
al lexicon of female stereotypes and the complexity of
her reality.94

I wish to dedicate this article to the memory of Jane Fortune (1942–
2018), who underwrote my research unstintingly and who inspired me with
her total dedication to uncovering the history of women artists. Vital support
was given to me throughout its gestation by the trustees and staff of the Medici
Archive Project. Warm thanks go to Francesca Fantappiè for bringing Bron-
zini’s manuscript to my attention, and to Babette Bohn, Mary D. Garrard,
Fredrika H. Jacobs, Ortensia Martinez Fucini, Chloe Bazlen, Aoife Cos-
grove, Carlotta Paltrinieri, and my two anonymous peer-reviewers for reading
drafts and offering invaluable suggestions for improvement. I am particularly
grateful to Samuel Vitali for his meticulous scrutiny of the manuscript as
well as his insightful additions throughout. Finally I thank the staff of the
Sala dei Manoscritti at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze and the
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz for having graciously assisted my use of
their collections. All translations and transcriptions in this article are my own.

Appendix

Transcriptions of notes on early modern women artists from Cristofano
Bronzini, Della dignità et della nobiltà delle donne, BNCF, Magl.
Cl. VIII, 1525, I.

In the transcription, accents, apostrophes, and word divisions have been
adapted according to modern usage, whereas the original spelling, punctuation,
and capitalization have generally been maintained. Marginal and interlineal
additions to the text are designated by circumflex accents (^… )̂.

1. Properzia de’ Rossi
[ fol.  89r] [loss] che hebbero generoso animo di mettersi

[ fol. 89v] con le bianche, e tenere mani, nelle cose ^di^ pietra
più dure, fra la ruvidezza de’ marmi, et l’asprezza del fer-
ro per conseguire l’honorato desiderio tale et riportarsene
eterna ed immortal fama, come fece non molti anni sono
Properzia de’ Rossi Felicini gentildonna bolognese e giovane
virtuosa e [loss; possibly: soll]icitatissima non solamente nelle
cose di casa (come l’altre) ma tanto versata in molte scienze
che non che infinite persone, ma gran parte degli uomini gli
hebbero invidia. Costei fu di aspetto bellissimo, et sonò, e
cantò nei suoi tempi meglio forse che altra persona della sua
città, et percioché era di sottilissimo et rarissimo ingegno, si
mise (come per passatempo, essendo da natura inclinata al
dissegno) ad intagliare noccioli di persichi, li quali sì bene e
con tanta pazienza et diligenza lavorò, che fu cosa singolare
et maravigliosa il vederli, non solamente per la sottilità del
lavoro, ma per la sveltezza delle figurine che ella [ fol. 90r] in
quegli faceva, et per la delicatissima maniera del compartirle.
Et certamente era un miracolo vedere ^in su^ un nocciolo
così picciolo tutta la Passione di Christo Signor Nostro, fatta
con bellissimo intaglio, con una infinità di persone oltre i
crocifissori et gli Apostoli. Questa cosa le diede animo, do-
vendosi fare l’ornamento delle tre porte alla prima facciata
del San Petronio in Bologna, tutta a figure di marmo, ch’ella
per mezzo del marito chiedesse a gli capi scultori una parte
di quel lavoro, li quali di ciò furono contentissimi, ogni vol-
ta ch’ella havesse fatto veder loro qualche opera di marmo
condotta a perfezzione di sua mano. Onde ella subito posto
mano a’ scarpelli fece in brevissimo tempo al Conte Alessan-
dro de’ Pepoli (come uno de’ principali Deputati a tant’opera)
un ritratto di finissimo marmo, dov’era il Conte Guido suo
padre tanto del naturale che niente più ^essendo tenuta da
tutti una bellissima testa^; la qual cosa piacque infinitamente
[ fol. 90v] non solo al Conte Alessandro e tutti capi scultori,
ma a tutta la città, e perciò più che volentieri le diedero poi
una parte di quella loro tanto importante opera. Nella quale
a concorrenza d’Alfonso da Ferrara (scultore a quei tempi
celeberrimo) intagliò, ed in pochi giorni ella finì (con gran-
dissimo stupore et maraviglia di tutta Bologna) un grande e

| THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI | 427

97 Published in Borghini (note 22), p. 428.
98 Published in Giulio Cesare Croce, La gloria delle donne, Bologna 1590,
p. 18.

95 The Bolognese painter and sculptor Amico Aspertini (1474/75–1552).
96 Pompeo Vizzani, I due ultimi libri delle historie della sua patria, Bologna
1608, lib. xi, p. 1.

leggiadrissimo quadro dove fece la moglie del maggiordomo
del faraone, che innamoratasi di Giuseppe, quasi disperata
di tanto pregarlo all’ultimo gli toglie la veste d’attorno, con
una donnesca grazia, e più che mirabile; la qual opera, come
da tutti fu riputata bellissima, fu a lei, per altro rispetto, di
grandissima sodisfazione, doppo la quale, non volle far altro
mai, per conto di detta fabrica, ancorché ne fosse grandemen-
te pregata, e fuor di modo scongiurata da tutti i principali
della città, et [ fol. 91r] intendenti dell’arte; eccettoché da un
certo maestro amico95 (anzi nemico di honorate azzioni) che
per invidia sempre la disuase, e sconfortò da così bell’opera
(non sapendo egli cercar fama, se non col dissuadere, et con
l’opporsi appresso, et contradire) a fine che l’opera di tanto
eccellente donna non caminasse. Vizio naturale d’alcuni che
conoscendo l’imperfezzione loro e ’l valore altrui non posso-
no vedere, se non con gli occhi pregni d’invidia, arrivar altri
dove essi appena possono solamente col temerario ardire loro
avvicinarsi. Ma non poté però operar tanto questa sciocca
maligna emulazione di costui che finalmente non si conosces-
se il valor di lei, et la malignità di lui, il quale segretamente
poi si adoperò ancora perché il tanto da ogniuno pregiato
lavoro d’essa Properzia le fosse riconosciuto con pochissimo
prezzo, di che ella non curò nulla, mostrando con generoso
animo di far anco di ciò pochissimo conto. [ fol.  91v] Fece
nondimeno doppo due angeli in marmo di grandissimo ri-
lievo e di belissima proporzione ^diligentemente lavorati^
che tuttavia hoggidì si veggono della medesima fabrica della
stupenda et gran Chiesa di San Petronio, onde per le maravi-
gliose opere in duro marmo da lei con dotta mano intaglia-
te, e con grand’arte condutte a fine, meritò di esser celebrata
fra i più degni scultori della sua età ^essendo arrivata costei
nell’arte della scoltura Dedalo di Mezione, e più di Panopeo
e Teodoro Samio, e qualunque altro eccellente in tal arte^ (a
Pompeo Vizani lib. xi).96 All’ultimo poi (per sua nuova ricre-
azione) si diede ad intagliare stampe di rame e ciò fece con
grandissima lode, riuscendole ogni cosa perfettissimamente.
Andò la fama di così nobile ed elevato ingegno per tutta Ita-
lia, pervenendo sino agli orecchi di Papa Clemente settimo, il
quale subito che hebbe coronato l’Imperatore in Bologna, di-
mandato di lei, trovò esser morta quella medesima settimana
^l’anno millecinquecentotrentatré; e perciò^ al Papa, ch’era
volenteroso di vederla, spiacque grandissimamente la morte
di così eccellente donna. Ma molto più spiacque a’ suoi cit-
tadini et ad altri che appieno conobbero il valor suo, li quali
mentre ella visse, la tennero per un grandissimo soggetto a’

suoi tempi, onde poi Vincenzo di Buonaccorso Pitti fece so-
pra di lei questo epitaffio:

Fero splendor di due begl’occhi accrebbe
Già marmi a marmi, o stupor novo e strano
Ruvidi marmi delicata mano
Feo dinanzi vivi, ahi morte, invidia n’hebbe.97

[ fol. 92r] Ho veduto nel libro di Giorgio Vasari pittore e
architetto aretino, ritrovarsi per testimonio del valore et gran-
de eccellenza di tanta donna, alcuni dissegni di mano di lei,
fatti di penna, et altri ritratti dalle cose di Raffaello da Urbi-
no, molto buoni, et grandemente lodati da persone intendenti
dell’arte. Così è, et holli veduti anch’io, come viddi quella bel-
lissima ottava, fatta in sua lode da Giulio Cesare della Croce,
che veramente è rara, parlando di lei in questa guisa:

Fu Propertia de’ Rossi sì fondata
ne la scoltura e sì famosa e chiara
Ch’ancora l’opra sua si mira e guata
Come cosa stupenda unica e rara
Onde in quei tempi molto fu stimata
Dal Gran Scultor Alfonso da Ferrara
E fu in tal Arte di tanta eccellenza
Che co’ i più dotti fece a concorrenza.98

2. Plautilla Nelli
[ fol.  92r] Né però mancarono altre donne (ancorché

[ fol. 92v] Properzia disegnasse benissimo) che la paragonas-
sero non solamente nel dissegno ma fatto con così bell’opere
in pittura, com’ella in scoltura, e acquistatosi perciò nome
immortale. Di queste la prima fu Plautilla, fattasi monaca
et priora poi nel monastero di Santa Caterina da Siena in
Firenze, la quale cominciando a poco a poco a dissegnare
et ad imitare, co’ i colori, quadri et pitture de’ maestri ec-
cellenti, condusse con tanta diligenza alcune cose a fine, che
fece maravigliare i più dotti [et] ^eccellenti^ pittori de’ suoi
tempi. Di mano di lei si trovano due tavole nella Chiesa del
detto Monastero di Santa Caterina, et una particolarmente
ve n’è che è molto lodata, dove sono i Magi che adorano il
Signore Nostro: fece ancora oltre a ciò altri quadri che an-
dorno fuori di Firenze, et hoggi trovasi ^anco di sua mano^
nel monastero di Santa Lucia di Pistoia, essere stata tuttavia
conservata [ fol. 93r] una tavola grande nel Choro, nella quale
è la Madonna col Bambino in braccio, San Tomaso, Sant’A-

428 | SHEILA BARKER |

gostino, Santa Maria Maddalena, Santa Caterina da Siena,
Sant’Agnese, Santa Caterina Martire, et Santa Lucia, tutte fi-
gure bellissime, et di maniere notabili. Nel suo monastero poi
di Firenze è un Cenacolo grande, et di gran considerazione;
nella sala dove le monache lavorano è una tavola ampla fatta
parimente per mano della detta Plautilla opera ^(per quanto
fu a me raccontata da Mons. Ill.mo Arcivescovo di Fiorenza)
veramente esquisita,^ et di molta eccellenza, un quadro d’al-
tare e in Santa Maria del Fiore nel quale sono Istorie della
vita di Santo Zenobio, antichissimo vescovo di Firenze, molto
belle, et per le case di molte gentildonne et gentilhuomini di
Firenze suoi parenti sono tanti quadri di bellezza notabili
veduti da me che troppo saria lungo a voler di ciò ragionare.
Et perché questa virtuosa donna innanzi che lavorasse tavole
grandi et opere d’importanza, attese ancora a lavorare et far
di minio ^con isquisita delicatezza varie e diverse figurine di
Christo Signor Nostro, della Vergine Santissima Sua Madre,
d’Angeli e vergini bellissime^. Sono di [ fol.  93v] sua mano
molti quadri belli affatto appresso diverse persone, de’ quali
non accade far altra menzione al presente. In quelle cose poi
ch’ella ricavò da altri, mostrò bene che havrebbe fatto ope-
re maravigliose se (come fanno gli huomini) havesse havuto
commodo di studiare et attendere al dissegno, et ritrarre cose
vive et naturali. Et che ciò sia vero, si vede manifestamente in
un quadro d’una Natività di Christo Signor Nostro, ritratto
da uno che già fece il Bronzino a Filippo Salviati. Similmente
il vero di ciò dimostra in questo che nelle sue opere, i volti
et fattezze delle donne (per haverne vedute a suo piacimento)
sono assai migliori, che le teste de gli huomini et più simili
al vero, e veramente mirabili. Ha ritratto in alcuna delle sue
opere in volti di Donna Costanza de’ Doni (stata a suo tem-
po d’incredibile bellezza, et honestà) tanto bene, che non si
può più oltre desiderare. Fece questa rara donna tal profitto
nella pittura ed in quella appresso così buone discepole, che
perciò molt’altre dello stesso monastero invaghitesene furono
cagione che di comun consenso si destinasse (come fu desti-
nato) una stanza appartata per la pittura, in che molte di loro
riuscirono e tuttavia riescono in somma eccellenza.

3. Felice Lupicini
[ fol.  94r] […] vi si trova hoggi [i.e. in the convent of Santa

Caterina da Siena in Florence] la Lupaccina Felice, discepola de-
gnissima e sorella consobrina amatissima di Cristofano Bron-
zini degli Allori, pittore famosissimo (et oso quasiché dire
senza pari in questa nostra età) la quale con l’istruzzione, e
avvertimenti di così gran maestro è riuscita anch’ella così rara,
che nel miniare e pingere, viene giudicata eccellentissima; et
andare al pari (per non voler dire, superiore) a qualsivoglia
altra persona passata e presente celebrata per singolare in tale
professione.

4. Maria Vincenza Brandolini and other women artists at the convent of
Santa Caterina da Siena

[ fol. 94r] Ho veduto io in Fiorenza quadri e figure mirabi-
li [ fol. 94v] d’angeli e sante vergini, e martiri, altre dipinte ed
altre miniate da loro con tanta eccellenza con tant’artificio e
con sì dolce maniera, che sembravano appunto creature celesti,
onde sperar si deve che l’onorata fama del loro virtuoso operare
sia per avanzar molti secoli, e durar anco forse sinché dura il
mondo. Dentro all’istesso monastero vi è anco Maria Vincenza
Brandolini, rara nella sua scoltura, et ve ne son molte dentro
all’istesso monastero, et ve ne sono molte altre ancora (che no-
minatamente non mi si permette il ramentarle) le quali in tanta
eccellenza lavorano di minio di rilievo e di scultura, che vera-
mente è un stupore, ed il tutto con tanta delicatezza e diligenza
che le Serenissime Altezze di Toscana vi han perciò volsuto
mandare e mandano tuttavia (come per maraviglia e stupore) le
opere loro in Ispruch, in Germania, in Spagna, in Francia, in
Baviera, ed in molti altri luoghi dove son monache e signore loro
attinenti, ed in tanta copia, che altri però difficilmente possono
sperare di havere loro quadri e figure stimate e pregiate dentro e
fuori di Fiorenza a maraviglia.

5. Ortensia Fedeli and Alessandra Martelli
[ fol. 95r] In Santa Agata quivi ancora in questo nostro se-

colo del 1631 [previously written as: 1625], con gran fama di va-
lore, di bontà, e di eccellenza in quest’arte della pittura, Suora
Ortensia Fedeli, dotta nella lingua latina e greca; musica molto
graziosa, nella quale vi compone con molt’arte e giudicio; suona
de’ più sorte d’istromenti; e nella pittura è tanto rara e pregiata;
anzi son tante rare e pregiate le sue opere, che oltre le spirituali
in buon numero dipinte con gran devozione ^sin quando era
fanciulla, come vedersi può nell’ingresso della Chiesa di detto
Monastero, ove maravigliosamente dipinse la vita e miracoli di
detta Santa;^ se ne veggon’ altre però de’ fuori de’ frutti, fiori, e
piante, con augelli; ritratti in tanta eccellenza che ben pare che
[ fol. 95v] in lei volesse dimostrar la Natura quanto ella operi in
quelle persone, che a far tutte quelle cose si mettono a cui da
essa natura sono inchinate, e molto ben disposte. Ho veduto io
presso Illustrissimi signori quadri ecclesiastici grandi, mezzani,
e piccioli, fatti di sua mano con tanta eccellenza che fan stupire
ogniuno. Come parimente fanno quelli di Alessandra Martelli,
la quale oltre a ciò è sì eccellente e rara nella miniatura che
molte sue opere rimaste in Fiorenza (oltre le mandate a Roma,
ed in molt’altre parti della Christianità) sono tenute per opere
molto rare e care, e degne di stare al paragone di quant’altre ne
vadino hoggi in volta.

6. Alessandra del Milanese
[ fol. 96r] Famosa parimente nella pittura fu Alessandra del

Milanese, monaca dell’istesso Ordine di San Domenico in Fi-

| THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI | 429

100 Muzio Manfredi, Madrigali […] sopra molti soggetti stravaganti composti, Ve-
nice 1606, pp. 228f.
101 Ibidem, pp. 202f.

99 Paolo Mini, Discorso della nobiltà di Firenze, e de’ fiorentini, Florence 1593,
pp. 107f.

renze, nel Monastero di Santa Caterina sudetta, la quale come
afferma Paolo Mini99 (medico et istoriografo di que’ tempi)
scrivesi haver ella introdotto et rinovato il miniare, già arte
quasiché affatto tralasciata et spenta a quel secolo.

7. Fede Galizia
[ fol.  96v] Famosa e celebre (anzi eccellentissima) nell’arte

della pittura fu anco Fede Galizia fanciulla milanese, la quale
nel pinger del naturale ^et particolarmente^ frutti et piante,
riuscì tanto rara, che perciò da molti et in spezie dal Manfredi,
con l’occasione di dare naturalissimi ritratti ^(veduto da lui e
fattone fede a me)^, ne venne lodata, come hora udirete con li
seguenti versi:

Mirai due forme di beltà celeste
E nuntio n’hebbe in sicurtà del vero;
Ma mentre co ’l pensiero
L’una e l’altra, e con gli occhi e col desio
Contemplavo, vid’io
D’ambe le labbra, benché finte aprirsi,
E ciascuna per Dea meco scoprirsi
[ fol. 97r] Allor forte gridai, Chi ne fa fede?
Echo rispose: fede.
Queste, ch’io miro qui bellezze finte
Da Verginella man dotta, dipinte
Esser non pon terrene
Che troppo rare son, troppo perfette
E sol parono elette
A render vana l’amorosa spine,
Ma pur creder si dee, se ne fa fede,
La purissima fede
Angeli son, non donne
Le Due, e hor miro, finte non, ma vive,
O ch’al men sono dive
Ma pur sono Donne, e finte
E da Donzella pinte
Credalo ogni huom’ s’io ’l credo;
E chi nol crede?
Se fede ce ne fa l’istessa Fede?100

8. Barbara Longhi
[ fol. 97r] Celebre e famosa parimente fu Barbara Lunghi da

Ravenna, eccellentissima anch’ella nel pingere, et rarissima nel
conservarsi Vergine sinché [ fol. 97v] visse, la quale non tralignò

punto dal valore di Luca, cittadino ravennate suo padre, e dal
fratello, nell’istessa professione eccellentissimi, di cui però un
bel spirito scrisse ^Muzio Manfredi^ tre madrigali in tal guisa:

La Barbara Pittrice
Cui di vincer pingendo, altrui non lice
Sì dissegna, o colora
La Natura, dell’Arte s’innamora:
E sol, ch’un tratto tiri,
Apena, che si miri,
Quel che esser deve, al mirator predice.
Pinger la vidi un fiore
E non finito ancor, spirò l’odore

La Barbara Pittrice
È si perfetta d’Arte
Che per lei cede la Natura a l’Arte
Anzi si tien felice,
Poiché da man sì rara
[ fol. 98r] D’abbellir ciò che fa, gioiosa impara:
E già sì nel oprar fatta è sicura,
Ch’esser si crede insieme Arte e Natura.

La Barbara Pittrice
O dipinga, o disegni
Par, ch’a Natura d’operar insegni;
E l’insegna e le dice
Che non sarà mai come lei felice:
Risponde la Natura
Altri che tu, mai non me fe’ paura,
Ma sei donna e donzella
E ti fo mia compagna e mia sorella.101

9. María de Jesús Torres
[ fol.  98r] Oltre a queste, Maria di Giesù spagnuola (della

città di Toledo) figliuola di Giovanni Torres nell’età di sedici
anni, fu sì esperta nella pittura et nel ritrarre al naturale, che
ben mostrò di non voler esser di men valor in tal’arte di quante
famose persone, nell’istessa sieno state a’ tempi andati: a cui
però non fu mostrato nel nobilissimo essercizio suo alcun am-
maestramento che in tale opera si ricerchi, perché i mirabili ar-
tifici delle sue mani ne tranno ogniuno di dubbio, et fra gli altri,
li nobilissimi et artificiosissimi quadri fatti a [ fol. 98v] intuito
di persone grandissime, ne fanno et faranno sempre, perpetuo
testimonio del valor suo.

430 | SHEILA BARKER |

10. Isabel Sánchez Coello
[ fol. 98v] Vive hoggi Isabella da Monviedro, terra nel regno

di Valenzia, figliuola d’Alfonso Sanchies, famoso pittor del Re
Filippo, la quale fa ritratti tanto del naturale, che ammirati ne
restano tutti quelli che sono dell’arte. E oltre a ciò letterata;
versata nella musica; suona con somma eccellenza di arpa, di ce-
tera, di viola, et d’altri stromenti; ma quel che rende più chiaro
il valor suo è la sua gran bontà, l’honestà, et la sua gentilezza,
che è senza pari.

11. Lucrezia Quistelli
[ fol. 98v] Celebrarono già Clemente e Didimo (ambo duo

alessandrini) Anassandra, per donna singolare et rara, perché
hebbe mirabile cognizione dell’arte della pittura, ma de’ nostri
tempi celebrano, et fanno particolar menzione che al dissegno
et alla pittura insieme attendesse similmente con molta sua lode
^et facesse mirabile riuscita^ Lucrezia figliuola d’Alfonso Qui-
stelli [ fol. 99r] della Mirandola, et moglie del conte Clemente
Pietra, come si può vedere in molti quadri et ritratti che lavorò
di sua mano, degni d’esser lodati da ogniuno.

12. Sofonisba Anguissola
[ fol. 9r] Soffonisba ^Angosciola^ cremonesa (oltre lo esse-

re stata gran letterata, et nella pittura ^molto essercitata anzi^
eccellentissima) fu anco nella musica tanto esperta, et così bene
ammaestrata che in essa si conobbe mirabile et rara, et molto
comendata. […]

[ fol.  99r] Ma Sofonisba nobilissima Cremonese, figliuola
d’Amilcare Angosciuola, con più studio, et con miglior gra-
zia, che qualsivogli altra persona de’ suoi tempi, s’affaticò die-
tro alle cose del dissegno, onde non è maraviglia se poi seppe
non pur dissegnare, colorire, e ritrarre del naturale, et copiare
eccellentemente cose d’altri, ma da sé sola far cose rarissime
et bellissime di pittura onde meritò per mezi d’un suo ritratto
d’esserle onoratamente scritto da Papa Pio quarto l’anno 1561,
e che Filippo secondo, Re di Spagna, havendo inteso dal Duca
d’Alba le rare virtù et gran meriti suoi, mandasse per lei. Et
fattala condurre honoratissimamente in Spagna, la tenesse ap-
presso la Regina con grossa provisione, et con stupor di tutta
quella corte, che ammirò come [ fol.  99v] cosa fuor di modo
maravigliosa la grand’eccellenza di tal donna, delle opere della
quale ne mandò già Tommaso Cavalieri, gentilhuomo romano
al Gran Duca Cosimo, che ancora con gran riguardo si serba-
no insieme con un’altra bellissima opera, parimente di mano di
detta Sofonisba, nella quale si vede una fanciullina, che si ride
d’un putto che piange perché havendogli ella messo innanzi un
canestrino pieno di gambari, uno di essi gli morde un dito, del
qual dissegno et invenzione gentile non si può vedere cosa più
graziosa, né più simile al vero, et più gustosa.

13. Angela Cherubina Angelelli
[ fol. 99v] Angela Cherubina Angelelli, nel monastero degli

Angeli in Bologna, dipinge et fa ritratti tanto bene e tanto del
naturale che ha poche altre persone che la uggualino.

14. Diana Scultori
[ fol. 99v] Diana Mantovana la quale visse negli anni 1577

non solo dipingeva eccellentemente ma intagliava in rame con
tanta isquisitezza particolarmente i dissegni, e fogliami fatti
dall’eccellente Battista di Pietrasanta suo marito, che era un
stupore. Tengoci appresso di me duo dei suoi bellissimi intagli
levati da un capitello antico d’una colonna di pietra numidica
ch’era già nella chiesa antica di San Pietro di Roma, lavorati
con tanta diligenza e belezza che par veramente non si possa
vedere in questo genere cosa né con più diligenza fatta, né più
bella.

15. Three sisters of Ferrara who excel in needlework
[ fol.  99v] In molte altre città, luoghi, e terre d’Italia

[ fol. 100r] infinite donne potrei annoverare che dell’invenzio-
ne, dissegno, pittura, o ricamo sono state e sono tuttavia ve-
ramente mirabili, ma basti per hora ramentar solamente le tre
sorelle ferrarese [sic] (così per l’eccellenza loro nominate) che di
ricami, et inventioni, con dissegno belissimo, trapassano i più
periti che vi sieno; et fanno di seta e d’oro nobilissime tele di
diverse imagini figurate; appresso alle quali (o misera Aragne)
le tue sarebbono parute offuscate di nebulose macchie, sì come
altra volta parvero quando con Pallade haveste ardire di lavo-
rare a prova (di Aragne e Pallade, veggasi le Metamorphosi di
Ovidio libro 6).

16. Francisca de Jesús
[ fol. 100r] Non vo’ tacere però Francesca di Giesù spagnuo-

la Toletana, che s’ella ancora fosse stata ne’ tempi antichi, con
maggior ragione havrebbe potuto competere con Pallade, po-
sciaché i più arguti et elevati ingegni di questi tempi ammirano
nella sua arte di tessere damaschi et broccati, le stupende opere
sue, facendo ella [ fol. 100v] nelle tele ciò che qualsivoglia valente
pittore potrebbe a pena con penna o con pennello dissegnar in
tavole.

17. Chiara Varotari
[ fol. 102r] Et in Venezia, l’opere di Santa Padovana, donna

eccellentissima nella pittura se si consideran con buon occhio,
si toccherà con mano, e non solamente ella ugguagliò nella pit-
tura il famoso Alessandro Padovano [Alessandro Varotari, called il
Padovanino] suo fratello, in quella tanto eccellente e celebre, ma
superò infiniti di questo nostro secolo, effetti della sua virtù che
la rese e renderà pregiata appresso i più pregiati e nobili spiriti
di questo nostro e de’ venturi secoli.

| THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI | 431

18. Arcangela Paladini
[ fol. 102r] Veggansi anco in Fiorenza l’opere di Arcangela

Paladini la quale nella pittura e dissegno fu così rara che ne
fece stupire i maestri di quella. Lascio al presente il ramentarci
di nuovo che nel canto musicale ella fu rarissima, e facciovi sol
menzione che nella detta città di Fiorenza vi si veggano de’ suoi
più e più quadri di devozione, particolarmente nelle stanze e
nelle guardarobbe [ fol. 102v] di quelle serenissime Altezze; tra’
quali un ritratto del serenissimo Gran Duca Cosimo secondo,
fatto con la penna, e così ben deliniato, che avanza la maestria
d’ogni altro di tale professione. Vedevisi in oltre un altro ri-
tratto grande dell’istesso Serenissimo Gran Duca al naturale,
armato dal petto in su, tutto lavorato da lei di punti di seta di
ricamo e colorito così bene, e con tanta arte, e diligenza che vien
tenuto per cosa veramente rara, e tra le pregiate delle stesse Al-
tezze serenissime di Toscana, le quali per tante sue rare qualità
in vita et in morte, ne tennero grandissimo conto, la onde essen-
do chiamata a più gloriosa vita, le fecero a perpetua memoria un
deposito di marmo nobilissimo in Santa Felicita. […]

[ fol. 128r] Vive ancora fra tant’altre virtuose donzelle e don-
ne et viverà ancor lei ne’ secoli avvenire pe ’l suo gran valore et
gran bontà di vita l’Arcangela ^di cui pur dianzi fu brevemen-
te ragionata^ [sic] moglie di mastro Giovanni Ricamatore [Jan
Broomans], uno de’ principali in quest’arte, et ambedue stipendia-
ti dalla Serenissima Arciduchessa d’Austria Maria Maddalena
Gran Duchessa di Toscana; ma specialmente per le sue rare vir-
tù amata, et sovente accarezzata e regalata l’Arcangela, la quale
(lasciando stare di ramentarvi di nuovo, ch’ella suona, et canta
con voce delicatissima et gratiosamente con passaggi et trilli
artifitiosissimi) dissegna e dipinge al pari di qualsivoglia no-
minata persona in questa professione; ricama del naturale tanto
eccellentemente con l’ago qualsivoglia ritratto di faccia huma-
na, figure d’animali, piante, fiori, et frondi, uccelli, et pesci, che
più né meglio potria, né potrà già mai fare qualsisia huomo
[ fol. 128v] per bene eccellente che si trovi nella Pittura. Se ne
veggiono opere conservate con molto riguardo appresso di Sua
Altezza Serenissima quali han fatto stupire non pure molte Si-
gnore et Dame principali (ben rare nel ricamare) et altre persone
intendenti dell’arte, ma i maggior pittori et dissegnatori che vi-
vono in questi tempi in Italia et fuori, in Germania, in Polonia,
in Francia, et in Spagna, dove dalla Serenissima sudetta ve ne
sono stati mandati, per singolari et con singolar maraviglia rice-
vuti, stimati, havuti cari, anzi tenuti carissimi.

19. French woman artist, wife of “monsù Bonelli”
[ fol. 102v] E se queste memorie non bastano, veggansi quella

della moglie di monsù Bonelli in Parigi, la quale dipinge così
eccellentemente che le sue opere sono pregiate quanto altra di
qualsivoglia pittore famoso di questi nostri tempi.

20. Irene di Spilimbergo
[ fol. 103r] Veggansi in oltre quelle de Irene, una delle signo-

re di Spilimbergo, la quale fu così eccellente nella pittura che
Tiziano gran pittore si stupì del valore di così nobile vergine. Et
non solamente fu rara nel pennelleggiare, ma virtuosa in lettere
et in costumi. Morì in giovanile età, che altrimente superava
quasi quanti mai furono eccellenti in quest’arte. La cui morte,
con mesti accenti et lacrimose rime, fu meritatamente et pianta
et cantata da i più famosi poeti del suo tempo.

21. Chinese women artists
[ fol. 104v] E per uscire de’ nostri paesi, habbiamo che nella

China sono le donne di grand’ingegno e sapere nella pittura e
scoltura, e riescono eccellentemente così nel dissegno come nel
dipingere; nel lavoro di rilievo e d’intaglio, e specialmente nel
far pitture di fogliami, d’ucellami, e d’ogni sorte di selvaggiu-
mi, come si può molto ben giudicare dalle tavole che vengono
di là ne i nostri paesi; una delle quali, dice il Padre Giovanni
Gonzalez di Mendozza nella sua Storia della China libro primo
cartella 16, vide egli fatta portare a Lisbona l’anno millecin-
quecento ottantadue, dal Capitan Ribera, di tanta eccellenza,
e bellezza, che non solamente fece stupire tutti quelli che la
videro, ma quel che poche volte suol occorrere, parve opera mi-
rabile all’istessa Maestà de Re Cattolico, e sino a i più famosi ed
eccellenti huomini di quella professione.

22. Lavinia Fontana
[ fol. 121v] Et chi non ammirerà con stupore ^dopo Anto-

nia Grandina Bresciana pittrice famosissima anco la famosa^
Lavinia di Prospero Fontani [sic] bolognese, donna aggrazia-
ta et modesta al possibile et in tutte le sue azzioni humile,
et gentilissima, et nella pittura eccellentissima? [ fol. 122r] E
benché nel trattato del Domenichi, nella traduzzione di Leon
Battista Alberti, intitolata La Pittura, nella quale forma un
perfetto pittore, non trovasse ella forse la perfezzione sua
(essendo già perfettissima) si poteva però humilmente in se
stessa allegrare, veggendosi compita in quello, che l’autore
forse trovare non seppe, et parimente conoscere quelle molte
e rarissime doti a lei dalla natura concedute, e dall’arte lima-
te, le quali solo non consistono intorno la pittura, ma intorno
alle nobilissime parti dell’animo, facendola anco eloquente,
amabile, e discreta ^al possibile^, dandole appresso giudicio
et cognizione più che mediocre delle belle et buone lettere,
onde col mezzo loro fu cara a’ principi et signori grandi, e
carissima a i privati; e tanto più quantoché non vide giamai
in lei quella affettata et maninconica bizzarria la quale molti
pari suoi tanto fastidiosamente sogliono mendicare per mo-
strarsi singolari. Anzi in cambio di quella [ fol. 122v] trattan-
dosi ogni hora in lei gentilezza, cortesia, et nobiltà d’animo
(oltre a quella, che le vertù sue meritatamente acquistate le

432 | SHEILA BARKER |

hanno) la fa, et farà sempre grata et fuor di modo pregiata
presso ogni gente. Lavinia Fontana adunque oltre il sonare,
et cantare molto bene, scriver meglio, e dettar benissimo, di-
pinge tanto eccellentemente che l’opere sue havendole vedute
i primi huomini dell’arte, se ne sono stupiti; li principi grandi
le hanno ammirate; l’altre persone ne son rimaste attonite,
sicome attonito, stupido, et confuso rimasi io in particolare
quando favorendomi lei di farmi vedere qui in Roma quella
gran tavola et raro quadro di San Stefano lapidato, copioso
in eccellenza d’invenzione, et di diverse eccellenti figure po-
sto nella [ fol. 123r] imperial chiesa di San Paolo fuori delle
mura di Roma che non pure a paragone degli altri fatti nella
Pontificia di San Pietro nel medesimo tempo della medesi-
ma grandezza da’ primi huomini che di tal professione erano
dentro et fuori di Roma, fu giudicato stare non solo al pari
dei loro, ma superarne molti di arte, d’invenzione, di maniera
dolce, di giudizio, et di perfezzione; onde veramente parvemi
(come anco ad altri, realmente pare, et è in effetto, e così forse
giudicherano altri) di veder non opera mortale ma soprana-
turale. Ha fatto oltre a ciò questa rara donna alcune altre
pitture tanto rare et care che non so se verun’altra persona
(ancorché ben esperta nell’arte) potrà mai pensare o sperare
di aggiugnere di dissegno, né di grazia a lei; poiché in quelle
et il suo valore et il poter dell’arte, eccellentemente si scorge.
In tutte vi si vede una dolcissima aria di teste, una [ fol. 123v]
rara concordanza nelle congiunture delle membra, e tant’al-
tre stupende maraviglie che lo stupore istesso si maraviglia,
che mano di donna humana habbia potuto così raramente e
così eccellentissimamente far in brevissimo tempo pitture sì
mirabili e divine. Ha poi, oltre ciò, questa rara donna, un in-
gegno di tant’eccellenza et maggior forse (et senza forse, che
se havesse quel Giotto, ^nacque l’anno 1276 nel contado di
Firenze, et apparò l’arte da Cimabue, nobil fiorentino, et in
brieve tempo non solo pareggiò il maestro ma di gran lunga
se lo lasciò a dietro, annullando in tutto quella toza maniera
Greca, risuscitando interamente la pittura, et introducendo il
ritrarre del naturale, il che si era più di dugento anni trala-
sciato. Et come che alcuno provato si fosse, non gli era felice-
mente riuscito. In somma egli diede lume alla buona maniera
del dipingere^, pittore tanto eccellente, e così nominato) che
niuna cosa della Natura (madre di tutte le cose, ed operatrice
col continuo girar de’ cieli) è, o tuttavia si vien producen-
do, ch’ella, con lo stile, con la penna, et col pennello non
dipinga, così simile a quella che non simile, anzi più tosto
l’istessa, pare. Intanto che molte cose da lei fatte si trovano
che il visivo senso altrui vi prende errore, quello credendo
esser vero che è dipinto. Onde con verità [ fol.  124r] si può
dire che i suoi pennelli non comportano che questo nostro
secolo riguardi con invidia l’antico. Di molti quadri nobili
et naturali e d’infinite cone, tavole, e figure bellissime, fatte

di lei in Roma et fuori, et mandate in diverse parti del mon-
do, non parlo io per hora, perché son tante e tante, e tanto
pregiate che bisognerebbono gli anni, nonché così brevi hore
per potere in una minima particella discorrere delle grandi
eccellenze loro, et dell’eccellente grandezza nell’arte di questa
veramente eccellentissima donna, di cui anco forse più vera-
mente, che d’altri si può dire, che vedendo il sommo facitore
del tutto, l’opinione di molti nella pittura assai più lontana
dal vero, che le tenebre dalla luce, per cavarli da tanti errori,
si dispose mandare in terra (et particolarmente nell’alma città
di Roma) questa rara donna, perché mostrasse che cosa sia
la perfezzione dell’arte del dissegno nel lineare, d’intornare,
[ fol.  124v] ombrare, et lumeggiare, per dar rilievo alle cose
della pittura. Volle oltre a ciò compagnarla con una bontà
di vera scienza morale, et con l’ornamento di belle lettere,
accioché il mondo, e del mondo la Regina Roma la elegges-
se, e ammirasse per suo singolarissimo specchio nella vita,
nell’opera, nella modestia, nella bontà de’ costumi, e in tutte
le azzioni honorate, et perché da noi, più tosto celeste che
terrena cosa si credesse. Le singolari qualità et nobili maniere
della quale mi legarono in modo col suo honesto, e grazioso
procedere, che con verità posso ben affermare essere lei una
delle rare et singolari donne ch’io m’habbia mai vedute o vive
al secolo nostro, o vive al Tempio della Fama Immortale, la
quale bene con sonora tromba spero che per altra voce, che
con la mia rauca, porterà il celebratissimo nome suo dall’un
[ fol. 125r] Polo all’altro, come sonoramente principiò Giulio
Cesare della Croce con que’ versi:

Tra’ quali a questa etate par, che sia
Gran stupor dele genti, e di Natura
Lavinia Fontana alta pittrice,
Unica al mondo, come la fenice.

Ch’agguaglia Apolodor, Zeusi, et Apelle,
Michelagnol tra gli altri sì eccellente,
Il Correggio, Tizian, e Raffaelle,
E nel ritrar sì rara e diligente

Che non ha pari in queste parti, o in quelle,
Tal c’hormai risonar s’ode il suo nome
Per tutto dove il sol spiega le chiome.

Vorrei s’io havessi vena, alzarmi tanto
Ne le lodi di questa, ch’io farei
Splender per tutto il suo gran merto, e ’l vanto
Degno di palme, e d’immortal trofei;

Ma perché a tanta impresa, uguale il canto
Non è, qui taccerò, perché di lei

| THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI | 433

102 Croce (note 98), pp. 19f.

[ fol. 125v] Canteran’ altri in versi più sonori
I sommi pregi e i suoi sublimi honori

E questi non son pochi.102

23. Artemisia Gentileschi
[ fol. 125v] [crossed out: ^Et doppo Artimitia ]̂ Vive hoggi ^an-

chora, e potrebbe forse vivere molti secoli^ [crossed out: et vivere
finché dura il Mondo] Mizia [crossed out: Artimitia Lomi Romana]
de Progenitori [crossed out: però] fiorentini ^bene se nata in Roma
[crossed out: figliuola del Gentileschi fiorentino Pittore famoso in
Roma] la quale giunta all’età di Dodici anni in circa, volendosi
un giorno porre un grembiule ^lavoratole^ [crossed out: ricamatole]
pochi anni prima da sua Madre et riuscendole ^fuor di^ [crossed
out: oltre] modo corto ^si mise ella da^ [crossed out: se pose da] se
stessa per allungarlo alquanto [crossed out: il lavoro] a farli di suo
capriccio, un nuovo disegno di ricamo; il quale veduto da persone
esperte, et pratiche ^molto^ nel Dissegno et nella Pittura; giu-
dicato da loro che la fanciulla era per far riuscita mirabile, et nel
Dissegno, et nella Pittura appresso posero in consideratione al
Padre [crossed out: per] che la dovesse applicare alla Pittura, il quale
non solo non vi volle acconsentire, ma per distorla in [ fol. 126r]
tutto, et per tutto da questa professione la rinchiuse (per educa-
zione) nel Monastero di Santa Apollonia in Trastevere, dove tro-
vandosi ella più che mai inclinata a questa professione, pregò la
Badessa che secretamente le volesse procurare qualche bel quadro
di Pittore eccellente, et havuto tra gli altri una Susanna [crossed out:
in particolare tanto] del Caravaggio (pittore a suo tempo princi-
palissimo) ricopiò quelli (et questo di Susanna in particolare) tan-
to bene, e con tanto stupore di ogniuno (et particolarmente del
Padre, quando lo vide, et fu certo esser opera della figliuola) che
ne restò fuori di sé, ed oltre modo ammirato; né fidandosi di ciò,
volendone egli far nuova sperienza le mandò alcuni altri quadri
assai ben grandi del medesimo Caravaggio (il cui stile ella s’in-
gegnò sempre d’immitare come quello che sempre grandemente
le piacque) quali ricopiati da lei [ fol. 126v] ed in eccellenza finiti,
alcuni furono venduti (et pur [crossed out: ella] erano de’ primi suoi
lavori) trecento et più scudi ^l’uno ed^ altri cinquecento, et sei-
cento, ed oltre. Maritata poi e condotta dal Marito in Firenze sua
Patria, quivi fece Quadri, et Ritratti tanto stimati, e pregiati che
non meno di quelli di Lalla Cizicena (dianzi nominata), adorna-
rono et tuttavia adornano le camere et sale de’ maggiori et più
pregiati huomini ̂ e Principi^ illustrissimi, et serenissimi insieme
[crossed out: in lode di cui (degnamente però i più elevati ingegni di
Firenze [oltre quei di Roma] fecero compositioni nobilissime) tra’
quali] che hoggi vivano della detta Città.

24. Marietta Robusti called la Tintoretta
[ fol. 126v] Et pur tuttavia vive anch’hoggi in Venezia una

giovane chiamata Marietta (da tutti universalmente detta la
Tintoretta, figliuola di Jacopo Robusti veneziano, chiamato
anch’egli comunemente il Tintoretto) la quale oltre alla bellezza
[ fol. 127r] et alla grazia, et al sapere sonare di gravicembalo, di
liuto, e d’altri stromenti, dipinge non solo benissimo, ma eccel-
lentissimamente et ha fatto molte belle opere. Fra l’altre fece il
ritratto di Jacopo Strada antiquario dell’Imperator Massimilia-
no secondo, et il ritratto di lei stessa, li quali come cosa rara sua
Maestà gli tenne in camera sua, e fece ogni opera di havere ap-
presso di sé questa eccellente donna, la quale fu ancora mandata
a chiedere al Padre, dal Re Filippo e dall’Arciduca Ferdinando,
ma egli, che molto l’amava non la si volle tor di vista, et però
havendola maritata, si fruiva delle sue virtù, non lasciando ella
continuamente a quei tempi (che ritrovavasi intorno a ventiotto
anni) di far opere, che potessero stare al pari non solo del padre,
ma de’ più famosi pittori de’ suoi giorni. Fu così eccellente il
Padre,103 che perciò dal Serenissimo Gran Duca Francesco de’
Medici fu come cosa rara tenuto caro. Ma et del padre et della
figliuola si [h]a detto abastanza.

25. Lucrezia Capponi, Lucrezia Torrigiani, Giovanna Monsalvi, Maria
Vincenza Brandolini, Caterina Eletta Rosselli, and Reparata del Bono

[ fol. 127v] Vivono pur anco hoggidì nella Città di Firenze
alcun’altre nobilissime e virtuosissime donne come le Signore
Lucrezia Caponi, Lucrezia Torreggiani, e Giovanna Monsal-
vi, tutte molto graziose nella pittura; oltre molte altre virtuose
e valorose giovani fiorentine, tra queste Vincenza Brandolini,
Caterina Eletta Rosselli, et Reparata del Bono, le quali in tutte
le attioni loro, hanno per compagne la pudicità, la religione,
la divotione, et con queste le lettere, et le nobili arti, essendo
versatissime nello studio della sacra Scrittura et tanto graziose
nel discorso di quella, che con verità si può dire che habbino le
grazie stesse per Ministre. Né qui si han voluto fermare, per-
cioché se altri per fuggire l’otio si sono impiegati a coltivar orti,
a tesser sporte, et così simile, queste per ricreazione d’animo
senza punto tralasciare le solite orazioni loro si sono poste a
far varie et divote immagini bellissime, et quando prendendo le
naturali effigie delle stesse Virgine Compagne, si sono date a far
figure del naturale, sono riuscite tanto mirabile che hanno tolto
il vanto a qualsivoglia persona che hoggidì in cera o stucco fac-
cia professione di eccellentemente lavorare et insomma queste
loro virtù, tanto maggiormente risplendono in esse, quantoché
sono accompagnate da gran modestia, da somma bontà, et da
una devozione indicibile.

103 Perhaps by “il Padre” the author meant to indicate a portrait either
by, or representing, Jacopo Robusti.

434 | SHEILA BARKER |

26. Giovanna Garzoni
[ fol. 128v] Con questa occasione mi pare anco far menzio-

ne di una fanciulla de’ nostri tempi, la quale disegna, dipinge,
minia, colorisce, suona, et canta eccellentissimamente chiama-
ta Giovanna Garzoni veneziana, et fanciulla al presente del
^1625^ di quindici anni in circa, e nata nel [ fol. 129r] felice
nostro secolo l’anno milleseicentocinque: ^1605^ et allevata
da’ suoi Progenitori con quei più nobili costumi, virtù et Arti,
che in qualsivoglia bell’ingegno desiderare si possano; poiché
ella (come si è detto), dissegna, dipinge, colorisce, et minia tan-
to eccellentemente bene, che eccede ogni credenza: Ho veduto
io (et l’hanno veduta ancora infinite altre persone con esso me
insieme) una Maddalena in particolare (oltre alcun’altre sue
rare Pitture et opere) miniata in cartapecora, col suo nome,
et cognome in bellissimo Carattere, scritto da lei in una fin-
ta carteletta di sotto, tanto ben lineata, colorita, et sottilissi-
mamente (anzi giudiziosissimamente lavorata) che la giudicai
(come anco fecero altri) degna nel vero di quelle virtuosissime
mani, che la miniarono, et dignissima di quelle eminentissime,
alle quali pervennero, che fu la [ fol. 129v] Serenissima Arcidu-
chessa d’Austria Maria Maddalena Gran Duchessa di Toscana,
sovranominata. Vidi in oltre, tre sue cartelle, scritte a penna
da lei, in tre principalissimi, et varii Caratteri ^cancelareschi^
corsivi, formati, e moderni talmente ben tirati, et belli, che po-
tevano bene stare al pari di quelli de’ più sopremi, et maggiori
scrittori, che hoggidì vivano. Ornati poi a torno a torno non
solo di artificiosi tratti, ma due di essi con dissegni bellissimi
di festoni, frondi, fiori, frutti, et di diversi animali volatili, et
terrestri, et tutti talmente naturali, che pareano gareggiassero
con la stessa Natura. Questa virtuosissima giovane, doppo ha-
verne pasciuto gli occhi, et l’intelletto con opere tante artifizio-
samente condotte da lei a somma perfezzione, si compiacque
favorirne appresso, spiegare quelle sue [ fol. 130r] virtuose mani
(che hanno veramente più virtù che dita) sopra un dolcissimo

manaccordo, et doppo alcune piacevoli riuscate [i.e.: riuscite],
sciogliendo la voce (più celeste che humana) cantò prima al-
cuni mottetti spirituali; poi alcuni madrigali, ed ultimamente
alcune Arie musicali, con tanta grazia, con tanta dolcezza, con
tal melodia, et stupore, che non fu veruno, che non la giudicas-
se superare di gran lunga ogni altro soggetto in qualsivoglia
particolare di sopra accennato e da lei in somma eccellenza
posseduto: ed in effetto da ogniuno fu stimata essere fanciulla
senza pari. Meritatamente però quel nobilissimo ingegno, ed
Intelletto mirabile di Francesco Maria Gualterotti fiorentino104
essendosi ritrovato anch’egli quivi in compagnia nostra a vedere
et udire quanto vi ho detto di sopra, si compiacque [ fol. 130v]
(come sempre suole honorare i virtuosi soggetti) di stendere in
sua lode il seguente bellissimo sonetto [in the margin: Canonico
Francesco Maria Gualterotti]:

O d’ingegno sublime, e di bellezza
Giovinetta gentil, lume e splendore
D’Adria, vita d’amor, nume d’honore
c’ha la virtù per pompa, e per grandezza.
Tu vinci in grazia, in modi, in gentilezza
Ogni più raro, e celebre scrittore;
E s’adopri i color d’ogni Pittore
Trapassi il vanto, ad opre grandi avvezza;
E scrittrice, e pittrice, alteri, e nuovi
Pregi acquisti al tuo nido ond’io t’honoro
Nova Minerva, o Cinthia altra, mortale:
Tu la fama aggrandisci, e le rinovi
Ogn’hor chiaro, e pregiato, un secol d’oro
Ch’altri rende felice, e te immortale

Talmente che dalle qui poche nominate, si può vedere
[ fol. 131r] Quanto le Donne, in ogni sorte di virtù e di
Nobili Arti, siano eccellenti, e maravigliosamente dotate.

104 Little is known about Francesco Maria Gualterotti, son of the well-
known Florentine poet Raffaello Gualterotti (1544–1638).

| THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI | 435

Abbreviations

ASF Archivio di Stato di Firenze
BNCF Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze

Abstract

Between roughly 1615 and 1622, Cristofano Bronzini
(1580–1633) wrote Della dignità et della nobiltà delle donne, a
defense of women that was partially published during his
lifetime with the patronage of Medici women. This article
brings to light the unpublished sections of Bronzini’s
manuscript containing descriptions of some thirty-three early
modern women artists, ranging from Properzia de’ Rossi to
the female court artists of the Ming Dynasty. At the focus
of this study is Bronzini’s profile of Artemisia Gentileschi,
offering a narrative account of the discovery of her artistic
talent at age twelve and detailing her earliest vocational
training in Rome up until the time of her marriage to
Pierantonio Stiattesi of Florence.

Artemisia’s profile in the Bronzini manuscript stands out
not only because it is the earliest biographical account ever
written about her, but also because it is rife with statements
that have no bearing upon the real facts of her life. It is
argued here that Artemisia herself supplied Bronzini with
this fictitious account and that she deliberately distorted the
facts of her youth in order to fashion herself according to
her own aspirations as well as her society’s morality codes,
its female stereotypes, and its mytho-heroic archetype of the
artist. In this account of Artemisia’s youth in Rome, the name
of Agostino Tassi and Artemisia’s relationship with him are
completely suppressed, while Artemisia’s own father, Orazio
Gentileschi, is portrayed in a negative light as her primary
antagonist. Moreover, the biography purports that Artemisia
taught herself to paint by studying Caravaggio’s canvases,
effectively asserting her place among the master’s earliest and
most devoted followers.

Photo Credits

From Jesse M. Locker, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Language of Painting,
New Haven/London 2015: Fig. 1. – Author (reproduced courtesy of the
Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo): Figs. 2, 3, 6. –
© 2018 The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence:
Fig. 4. – © Asian Art Museum of San Francisco: Fig. 5. – Licensed-PD-
Art: Fig. 7. – Palazzo Pitti, Galleria Palatina, Florence: Fig. 8. – Courtesy
of Polo Museale Regionale della Toscana, Gabinetto Fotografico: Figs. 9, 10. 
– Archive of the author: Fig. 11. – Courtesy of Scala/Art Resource NY:
Fig. 12. – © 2019 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Fig. 13.

Umschlagbild | Copertina:

Simon Vouet, Porträt von Artemisia Gentileschi | Ritratto di Artemisia Gentileschi, ca. 1625.
Privatsammlung | Collezione privata

(Abb. 1, S. 404 | fig. 1, p. 404)

ISSN 0342-1201

Stampa: Gruppo TCT, Firenze
febbraio 2019