Elisabetta Sirani

Italian painter

• Born: 1638
• Birthplace: Bologna, Papal States (now in Italy)
• Died: August 1, 1665
• Place of death: Bologna, Papal States (now in Italy)

Among the earliest female artists to receive worldwide recognition, Sirani was also among the first to open a school of art for girls and young women. Remarkably, she was in her teenage years during this time.

Early Life

Elisabetta Sirani (sihr-AHN-ee) was the daughter of Giovanni Andrea Sirani (1610-1670), assistant to and follower of Guido Reni, then the leading master of Bologna. At the time, Bologna was a major center of the arts and a city with progressive attitudes toward women. The University of Bologna had admitted female students since the Middle Ages, and the patron saint of Bologna, St. Catherina dei Vigri, was herself an artist and manuscript illuminator. Therefore, women enjoyed greater independence in Bologna than in other Italian cities, and female artists were more readily accepted there and were encouraged to pursue a career. As a result, Bologna produced some of the most respected female painters and sculptors of the period, including Sirani, Lavinia Fontana, and Properzia de’ Rossi.

Details on Sirani’s training are unknown. In an era when female artists were excluded from guilds and academies, and therefore from formal training, usually the only girls and women who could receive art instruction were the daughters of male masters or noblemen who could afford a private tutor. As the daughter of an artist, Sirani most likely was trained by her father, though contemporary accounts reveal that, at first, he was against her decision to pursue a career as a painter. Sirani’s paintings, which include portraiture as well as complex mythologies, allegories, and religious scenes, show her confidence in rendering the human form, which suggests that she must have worked from the live model in her father’s studio. Because her father painted in the classicized style of Guido Reni, Sirani also adopted this mode of painting. Her figures are as pale as Reni’s, their anatomical structure purposely de-emphasized to bring out instead their grace and beauty. Sirani’s paintings, however, possess a certain degree of sentimentality not found in Reni’s work.

Sirani demonstrated early on not only her great talent as a painter, engraver, and draftsperson but also great business sense. Around 1652, when she was about fourteen years old, she established her own workshop, training more than a dozen women, including her two sisters, Anna Maria and Barbara Sirani. Count Carlo Cesare Malvasia, an art critic and family friend, encouraged Sirani’s career. He later included a short biography of Sirani in his Felsina Pittrice (Bologna, 1675), in which he praised her as an artist of outstanding merit.

Life’s Work

Sirani compiled her own meticulous record of her works, the Nota, which included approximately 190 entries. This diary, which she kept for a decade, has aided in the identification of a considerable number of her paintings. Her prolific output is remarkable, especially considering that her career spanned just a little more than a decade. She is known to have painted at great speed, which provoked all sorts of gossip about the authorship of her works. To dispel rumors, Sirani invited her accusers to her workshop to watch her paint. Grand Duke Cosimo III de’ Medici of Florence was one of the individuals who visited Sirani’s studio and observed her at work. He was there in 1664 as she rendered a portrait of his uncle, Prince Leopold. When she had finished, Cosimo asked her to execute a Madonna for his own collection. Sirani rendered the image as quickly as she could to allow the pigments to dry so Cosimo could take the work back with him to Florence.

Sirani’s father became ill with gout, which crippled his hands and prevented him from working. It fell on his daughter to run the family workshop to support her parents and her siblings, and she was very successful. Her customers included members of the local nobility, such as Count Annibale Ranuzzi, who commissioned a portrait of his younger sister, Anna Maria Ranuzzi, as Charity (1665). Anna Maria was the mother of three children. The children are included in the portrait, which emphasizes not Anna Maria’s social standing but her role as mother. Maternity is also the subject of Sirani’s Virgin and Child (1663), part of the permanent collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. The two figures in this painting share an intimate moment, smiling lovingly at one another, their heads almost touching. The Virgin wears a turban commonly worn by female Bolognese peasants. In rendering the Madonna in this fashion, rather than as the inaccessible Madonnas of the Renaissance, Sirani emphasized the Virgin’s and Christ’s humanity.

Among Sirani’s favorite subjects were female heroes, including Judith, Lucretia, Saint Catherine, and the penitent Magdalen. Her Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1660’s) is one such example. Judith was the widow who delivered the Israelites from the clutches of the Assyrians, who had cut off the Israelites’ watersupply. Judith wined and dined Holofernes, the commander of the Assyrian army, and, when he fell into a drunken stupor, cut off his head. Sirani depicted the moment that Judith showed the severed head of Holofernes to the Israelites to let them know that the threat was over. In the painting, Judith stands heroically in the center of the composition. Abra, her old maidservant, kneels to Judith’s right to contrast with Judith’s youth and beauty.

In Portia Wounding Her Thigh (1664), Sirani depicted a heroine from Roman history. Portia, the wife of Brutus, wounded herself by plunging a dagger into her thigh to demonstrate to her husband her strength of character. In the painting, Portia is seen in the foreground plunging the knife into her leg to prove that she can be as heroic as a man, while women in the background engage in the feminine task of spinning.

Though most of Sirani’s patronage came from private individuals, she also received a few public commissions. In 1656-1657, she painted an Assumption for the parish church of Borgo Panigale near Bologna. In 1658, she executed the Baptism of Christ for the Certosa di Bologna and a nave painting for the Church of San Girolamo. Among her portraits are her Self-Portrait (1660) and that of Beatrice Cenci (1662). In the first, Sirani presented herself as the noblewoman who engages in painting. She wears the costume of a lady and wears chandelier pearl earrings, a gold rosette brooch on each shoulder, and another gem in the center of her bodice. Her hair is loose, as fashion for unmarried women dictated. The second portrait is a sympathetic rendition of a woman who was victimized by her father. Beatrice Cenci was a Roman noblewoman, the daughter of the wealthy, powerful, and violent Francesco Cenci. He imprisoned Beatrice and her stepmother in Castel Petrella Salto near Rieti. In 1598, Beatrice, with the blessing of her stepmother and siblings, killed Francesco and was later sentenced to death by Pope Clement VIII. In 1599, she was decapitated in front of a large crowd on the Ponte Sant’Angelo in Rome. Her case aroused great sympathy, captured by Sirani in her painting. Sirani rendered Beatrice the innocent victim. She looks directly at the viewer and smiles, her expression conveying the tragedy of her life story.

Sirani died in 1665 at the age of just twenty-seven. Because she complained of severe stomach pains, her father suspected that she had been poisoned by a jealous maid. The maid was tried and acquitted of the charges, however. Most likely, Sirani died from the perforated ulcers revealed by her autopsy. She was given a grand funeral in the Dominican church in Bologna that included orations, poetry, and music, as well as a large catafalque (ornamental structure) representing the Temple of Fame, adorned with mottoes, emblems, and a life-size figure of the artist engaged in the act of painting. She was buried alongside Guido Reni, which indicates that the Bolognese considered her his heir.

Significance

Sirani was fortunate to have been born in a city with progressive attitudes toward women, which allowed her to pursue a career as an artist without much obstacle. In an era when female artists were limited to painting mainly portraits and still lifes—genres ranked low on the academic scale—Sirani broke away from such expectations. Though portraiture was one of the subjects she embraced, her main interests were in mythological and religious stories that celebrate the female as hero.

Furthermore, she contributed to girls’ and women’s empowerment by educating them in the arts, opening the door of opportunity, self-reliance, and self-expression for girls and women in seventeenth century Bologna, and beyond.

Bibliography

Bohn, B. “The Antique Heroines of Elisabetta Sirani.” Renaissance Studies 16, no. 1 (March, 2002): 52-79. Examines Sirani’s portrayals of female historical and biblical figures who performed heroic deeds.

Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. 3d ed. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002. Because a monograph on Sirani does not exist, Chadwick’s book remains the principal source on the artist.

Dixon, Annette, ed. Women Who Ruled: Queens, Goddesses, Amazons in Renaissance and Baroque Art. London: Merrell, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2002. Catalog of a 2002 exhibition on women in art and women artists of the Renaissance and later periods. Includes works by Sirani.

Heller, Nancy G. Women Artists: An Illustrated History. New York: Abbeville Press, 1997. Explores the lives of female artists, from antiquity to the end of the twentieth century, including Sirani’s life and career.

Slatkin, Wendy. Women Artists in History: From Antiquity to the Twentieth Century. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1985. This work includes a section on Sirani’s career and works.