The study of women artists of the Renaissance is still in its early years, just barely out of infancy. In their path-breaking exhibition and study, Women Artists 1550-19550 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1977), Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin devoted 16 pages to women artists from the 15th century to the end of the 17th century. Harris quotes a 1521 entry by Albrecht Dürer in his Journal of his Trip to the Netherlands that presents what might justly be said to present the minority position: "Master Gerard, the Illuminator, has a daughter about eighteen years old called Susanna. She made an illumination of the Savior, for which I paid one guilder. It is a great marvel that a woman can do so much" (p. 25). In a 2007 exhibition of Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque (Washington DC: National Museum of Women in the Arts), the editors, Elizabeth S. G. Nicolson, Rebecca Price, Jane McAllister, and Virginia Karen I. Peterfreund, offer a feast: eight essays on Italian Women Artists of the period and works by seventeen of them. Yet there were clearly many in the Renaissance who would have begrudged us this feast. Ann Sutherland Harris begins her essay by quoting Bernini's account of Pope Urban VIII about "girls who painted" : "that it was rare for them to do any good, as from the moment they began they got so much priase that they very early on had far too high an opinion of themselves. Anyway they could never draw as well as men, as it was against all propriety for them to draw from the nude; the best advice one could give to them was to choose only the best examples to copy" (p. 49). In these 255 pages of texts and illustrations, it is clear that Dürer was closer to the mark than Pope Urban VIII. Yet it is also clear that while many of these talented artists benefitted from the novelty of praiseworthy work by women artists, the numbers are a tiny fraction of the number of male artists working in Italy during the same period. It is also clear that having a father who was an artist available as a teacher was almost a pre-condition for success.

Our 2008 exhibition, Images of Women in Old Master Prints and Drawings / Images by Women in Old Master Prints and Drawings was reviewed by Jodi Cranston (Associate Professor, Art History, Boston University) in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 3 (2008), 309-318, in a very-thought provoking essay on the presentation of works of art that charcterized our show as one that explores "the discursive structures of gender in iconographic categories that were predominant in the early modern representations of women in graphic media. Images of heroines and worthy women, the Virgin, Eve, and Venus, among others, provided opportunities for considering the significance of prints within the context of reception and social history and without regard for aesthetic criteria" (309). While I would like to think that the prints and drawings in the show can make their own claims of aesthtic merit and that the delight the viewer can take from the works themselves is always available, especially when seen in a context akin, for the moment, to that in which they were originally presented, as works of art that make a claim upon the viewer's intellect and emotions and offer the poossibility of acquisition and future delights as they are studied over time in the privacy of the purchaser's own viewing space, can only help augment their own merit in the eye and mind of the viewer. The review reproduced three of the works in the show, an engraving by Diana Scultori and two drawings, one by Giulio Romano, with whose works Diana sometimes worked, and Federico Zuccaro, one of which, the Zuccaro drawing of The Lamentation, will shortly be on display again in our next show, opening 28 July 2010 (the other two were sold before the show ended).

We are pleased to present ten works by three women, two Italians and one Netherlandish, all of whose fathers were their first teacher.