Panel: Gender in Artists’ Life Stories and Contemporary Biopics
Copanelists: Julie F. Codell and Julia K. Dabbs
Carlo Cesare Malvasia’s Felsina pittrice (1678) documents the lives and accomplishments of artists who flourished in the Italian city of Bologna. Given the limited number of historical sources on women artists of the early modern period, Felsina pittrice is important for its inclusion of several notable women artists. Yet, its importance lies not only in the historical data that it reports, but, more significantly, in the insight it provides on how these exceptional women were portrayed by a contemporary biographer.
Elisabetta Sirani (1638–1665) is a successful woman artist of the seventeenth century whose life story is included in Malvasia’s work. It is apparent from the text that Malvasia felt a special bond toward this artist: he was sincerely amazed by her artistic prowess, mesmerized by her character, and deeply saddened by her sudden death at twenty six. In my collaboration with Professor Julia Dabbs on the translation of Sirani’s life story (soon to be published in Life Stories of Women Artists, 1550–1800, Ashgate), I became convinced that an intriguing part of Malvasia’s representation of Sirani’s death might easily be “lost in translation.” In this paper, I focus on Malvasia’s speculations on Sirani’s death as resulting either from poisoning by the hands of a malicious female servant or from “gli effetti matricali,” literally the effects of the womb. “Gli effetti matricali’ are often mentioned by Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793) in his comedies and by Guido Gozzi (1720-1806) in his satires to explain hysterical female behavior. The main purpose of this paper is to ensure that Malvasia’s suggestively gendered account of Sirani’s life and death should not be lost in a merely literal translation of this colorful life story.
Pieranna Garavaso is Horace T. Morse Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Her areas of interest include the philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, Wittgenstein, Frege, and feminist epistemologies. She is the author of Filosofia della matematica. Numeri e strutture (Guerini, 1998), and coauthor of Filosofia delle donne, with Nicla Vassallo (Laterza, 2007). She has edited the 90th volume of the Monograph-in-Debate Series of The Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Science and the Humanities (Rodopi, 2006). Some of her most recent works discuss the impact of feminist philosophy on analytic philosophy, and focus on personal identity and the role that narratives play in it. For this reason, she is interested in examining how exceptional women are represented in biographical and autobiographical literature.