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They painted kings, saints and themselves, when women were not supposed to paint.
For centuries, a woman in Italy could not easily study art, travel alone or join a painters' guild. Some did it anyway. In Bologna, Florence, Rome and Venice, women became famous artists, and a few earned more than the men around them.
Most women artists started in a family workshop: their father was a painter, and they learned at home. Others were nuns who painted inside the convent. Bologna was a good city for them. Families there were proud of a daughter who could paint, and the city even had its own painter saint, the nun Caterina de' Vigri. Lavinia Fontana had eleven children and still painted large altarpieces, while her husband helped run the studio. Artemisia Gentileschi survived a rape and a painful public trial, then built a career in Florence, Rome and Naples. After their deaths many of these women were forgotten, and some of their paintings were even credited to men. Today museums are putting their names back on the walls.
Pick a colour to follow one story. Every moment shows where you can still see it.
Properzia de' Rossi from Bologna is one of the first known women sculptors. She first became known for tiny carvings on fruit stones.
See it at: Museo di San PetronioYoung Sofonisba Anguissola from Cremona sends a drawing of a laughing girl. The story goes that Michelangelo asks for something harder: a crying boy. She draws a boy bitten by a crayfish.
See it at: Museo di CapodimonteSofonisba moves to Madrid to serve the young queen of Spain, Elisabeth of Valois. She paints the royal family for years.
See it at: Museo del PradoIn her convent in Florence, Plautilla Nelli paints a Last Supper about seven metres long. Women almost never painted this subject.
See it at: Museo di Santa Maria Novella →Lavinia Fontana paints herself playing a keyboard instrument, a sign of a well-educated lady. A maid stands behind her.
See it at: National Academy of San Luca →In Rome, Artemisia Gentileschi's father takes the painter Agostino Tassi to court for raping her. During the trial she is tortured to test her words, but she does not change her story.
Now in Florence, Artemisia becomes the first woman member of the Academy of the Arts of Drawing. Her Judith slaying Holofernes is one of the strongest paintings in the Uffizi.
See it at: Uffizi Galleries →Sirani ran her father's workshop in Bologna and opened a school for women artists. She painted so fast that visitors came to watch her. She died at only 27.
See it at: Bologna National Art Gallery →Rosalba Carriera from Venice makes pastel portraits that all of Europe wants. In Paris she is accepted into the Royal Academy of Painting.
See it at: Gallerie dell'Accademia di Venezia →Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici signs the Family Pact: the family's art must stay in Florence for ever, for everyone. That is why the Uffizi is still full.
See it at: Uffizi Galleries →The museums and places where this story comes alive.
Find Artemisia's Judith slaying Holofernes: brave, bloody and impossible to forget. And thank Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici, who made sure all this art stayed in Florence.
The great Medici palace across the river. Look for Artemisia's Judith and her Maidservant, and for the fruit and flower pictures of Giovanna Garzoni, who painted like a scientist.
The house of Michelangelo's family. On one ceiling, the young Artemisia painted a woman who stands for Inclination, or natural talent.
Bologna's great gallery, with paintings by two stars of the city: Lavinia Fontana and Elisabetta Sirani.
Look for Lavinia Fontana's Minerva dressing, one of her last paintings, made in Rome. Very few women of her time painted a nude goddess.
The old academy of Rome's artists. It owns Lavinia Fontana's self-portrait at the keyboard.
She served the queen of Spain in Madrid for years.
She trained other women, including her own sisters.
Her soft pastel portraits were wanted all over Europe.
