Women Artist during the Renaissance
During the Renaissance period, countless outstanding architects, sculptors and artists emerged; however, “all of the most famous and most prolific Renaissance artists were male” (Wiesner-hanks, 158). Properzia de’ Rossi (1490-1530) is the only female sculptor whose name is known. This sculpture Joseph and Potiphar's Wife was deemed to be the most beautiful sculpture done by Properiza de’ Rossi and the one that she was most satisfied with “since with this figure from the Old Testament she felt she had expressed in part her own most burning passion” (Vasari, 341). Properiza de’ Rossi is also one of the few female artists being mentioned in Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists.
Though the Renaissance period was of bursting intelligent artists, the societal constrains for women to learn to paint and make sculptures still greatly hindered the flourishing of women artists. For example, “women were not allowed to study the male nude, which was viewed as essential if one wanted to paint large history paintings with many figures” and “neither did women learn the technique of fresco,” because the work of applying colors directly to wet plaster walls was judged in appropriate for women (Wiesner-hanks, 159). As a result, the few known women artists were either the daughters of painters or coming from aristocratic families.
The difficult career as women artists was closely related to the difficulties as women to receive education in general compared to men. Since religious institutions, for example, Jesuits college and municipal schools were still the primary resources of offering education to kids, and usually only boys. The only two ways of women receiving education were either being cloistered as women religious, or through private tutor for the vernacular. Both ways require either a huge amount of religious commitment or a privileged family background, which were uncommon and thus made it hard to achieve the prevalence for girls’ education.
However, it is also important to notice that Vasari, as an important figure in the intellectual world, had started to recognize the role and power of women artists in his book, which also planted the seed for future humanistic discussion about the capability and role of women in the early modern period.