Women Painters in Rome

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 were 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 lesser-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 that has been until recently overlooked.

Author: 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 a curatorial assistant, she organised 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.

Selling Points:

• This book stems from the great success of the exhibition Roma pittrice currently running until May 2025 at the Museum of Rome (ed. by Ilaria Miarelli Mariani and Raffaella Morselli).
• In recent years, there have been numerous studies, exhibitions, and publications dedicated to these themes, arousing great interest in the public.
• The book, with its agile format, consists of an introduction on the insertion of women artists into Roman society and the artistic world, 56 bibliographies of women artists (most of them little known to date), with important new archival and bibliographical information.
• Includes colour images of their most representative works.
• Two maps in the flaps showing both the places where the women painters lived and worked and the sites where their works can currently be seen.

Featuring 65 colour illustrations.