Women Painters in Rome

This book offers for the first time an important survey of women artists active in Rome from the 15th to the 18th century with important biographical and bibliographical updates.
Published in conjunction with the exhibition Roma pittrice. Artiste al lavoro tra XVI e XIX secolo (Rome paints. Women Artists at Work Between the 16th and 19th Centuries), at the Museo di Roma in Palazzo Braschi, this guide highlights to an even wider audience the presence of several women artists who where either born in Rome or made the eternal city their place of study and work. Starting from the artists represented in the Capitoline collections, such as Maria Felice Tibaldi (Subleyras), Angelika Kauffmann, Laura Piranesi, Luise Seidler and Emma Gaggiotti (Richards), the book includes other important artists who worked in the city, such as Lavinia Fontana, Artemisia Gentileschi, Giovanna Garzoni and many others, sometimes less known, whose oeuvre has been discovered in recent decades. The initial essay presents the gradual integration of women painters into the cosmopolitan Roman art market, with their laborious achievement of full access to education and to the most prestigious art institutions of the city and then explores the numerous pictorial genres to which they devoted themselves. The second part of the guidebook includes 56 biographies of these artists, revealing a rich and varied production until recently overlooked.

Ilaria Arcangeli is a PhD student at the University of Chieti with a project focusing on women artists active in Rome between the 16th and 17th centuries. As curatorial assistant, she organized the exhibition Roma pittrice. Artiste al lavoro tra XVI e XIX secolo (Museo di Roma di Palazzo Braschi, 2024). She mainly dealt with collecting and artistic patronage between the 16th and 17th centuries, documentary photography and ultimately the artistic production of Roman women's convents