For this season of ArtCurious, I’m doing something a little bit different. I’m treating you to renditions of eight of my favorite segments from Breaking Barriers: Women Artists of Renaissance Europe, my online course found exclusively at avid.fm. Every other week through January, I’ll share selections from Breaking Barriers, and encourage you that if you like it, you can purchase the whole course. Today’s subject is a major one: Properzia de’ Rossi, a Renaissance sculptor who was (gasp!) female. Why was this a big deal, why was de’ Rossi a rarity? We dig into the details and learn about the highly masculinized world of sculpture. From Breaking Barriers: Women of Renaissance Europe, please enjoy “Properzia de’ Rossi: The “Rare Female Sculptor.”

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Episode Transcript

Hi there, Curious people! Welcome back to the ArtCurious podcast, where we explore the unexpected, slightly odd, and strangely wonderful in art history. If you’ve listened to our last episode, you’ll know that this season of the podcast is different. Instead of our usual spate of new episodes, I’m taking a little time off to research a new book--yay!-- so I’m sharing some slightly zhug-ed renditions of eight of my favorite segments from my audio course, Breaking Barriers: Women Artists of Renaissance Europe. Breaking Barriers is a 21-day course, meaning that you get essentially a mini-episode of ArtCurious every day for three weeks straight, and the unique opportunity to learn about some artists that you may have never heard of before--and they are likely to blow your mind, or become your next favorite artist. That’s three weeks, with every day featuring the story of a new Renaissance painter, sculptor, miniature maker-- from Sofonisba Anguissola and Marietta Robusti to lesser-known artists like Plautilla Nelli and Levina Teerlinc, this course will lead you through the lives and careers of groundbreaking women who’ve made their marks on art history. This evergreen course is all about learning for fun, no tests, no papers, no quizzes, just cool content that you can access on your own time so you can learn at your own pace. Register for the course and start learning today at Avid.fm/jennifer.

And now, without further ado, let’s move onward to the life and art of Properzia de’ Rossi. 

I’d like you to take a minute and recall our course on Fede Galizia, the Italian artist who became one of the earliest adopters of still life painting. In that class, I discussed  this concept of the hierarchy of art-- one that, when specific to painting itself, prized history painting and portraits above all other subject matter, like animal paintings and those poor, lowly still lifes. This, to me, is an admittedly silly concept, but I’m not a Renaissance philosopher and art theorist, so I’m not the target audience for this debate. But even before the hierarchy got so granular about painting, such arguments were more specifically about what types of art were better--painting, sculpting, or architecture-- a debate generally referred to as “paragone,” which basically translates to “comparison.”  And in the Renaissance, a time where some of the best sculptures since ancient times were being created, some people got a bit snippy about comparing sculpture to painting. Sculpture, you see, requires you to get really down and dirty with your materials. In using a hammer and chisel, you’d no doubt kick up a bunch of dust. Your hands would be filthy and calloused. In short: sculpture was considered to be less gentlemanly, less elegant a form of artistic expression, whereas a gentleman could, theoretically, create their masterworks while wearing their finery and just dab-dabbing away at a canvas or panel. So if sculpture was not nearly as refined, in its detractors' minds, as painting, then it was definitely thought not to be a place for a lady. And yet, ladies-- especially Properzia de’ Rossi-- flourished. 

Properzia de’ Rossi was born around 1490 in Bologna, growing up almost a century after another hometown hero, St. Catherine of Bologna, whose life and works we discussed previously. Though her family wasn’t quite as upper-class as Catherine’s was, they were well-off, so Properzia received that typical humanist education required of women. And right away, she had a long list of interests that clearly displays how creative she was: she loved to dance, write poetry, play music, and she loved to paint-- after she learned to draw under the supervision of the famed engraver Marcantonio Raimondi,  one of the most important engravers of the Italian Renaissance. This, by the way, puts her in line with the Anguissola sisters because she, like them, didn’t come from a family of artists-- so her parents had to outsource her artistic training to Marcantonio Raimondi.  All of this creative fascination and talent meant that her life came to a crossroads when she needed to decide which single activity she wanted to pursue as her main talent. Should she write? Should she paint? And then, get this: the story goes--which might be a myth, though there does seem to be at least one physical artwork to back this up-- that she opted to try her hand at sculpting, taking the pits from several stone fruits--peaches, apricots, and even tiny cherries-- and carved away at them, producing miniscule religious vignettes, most notably a crucifixion scene carved into a peach pit. Of these works, Giorgio Vasari, the artist biographer who chose her as one of the only female artists to profile in his book, The Lives of the Artists, wrote, quote, “She executed [these carvings] so well and with such patience, that they were singular and marvelous to behold, not only for the subtlety of the work, but also for the liveliness of the little figures that she made in them and the extreme delicacy with which they were arranged.” All I can think is that you’d have to have a really small little paring knife or another tool to make this happen. But more than that-- as Vasari makes clear, you’d also have to have an incredible amount of skill. 

Like many other artists of any gender from this time period, most of the details of de Rossi's life are spotty. What we do know for sure is that by the time the 1520s rolled around and Properzia de’ Rossi was entering her mid-thirties, she was sufficiently talented, and just as importantly, self-assured about her talents, that she did something extraordinary. She entered into a competition to create a sculpture for the altar of a relatively new Bolognese church called the Sanctuary of the Madonna del Baraccano, which supposedly celebrated a revered, even miraculous, image of the Virgin Mary. Documentation survives that shows de’ Rossi as one of the entrants, but ultimately she didn’t win the commission. Yet it’s wonderful to identify that confidence that she felt in her abilities--and the fact that she didn’t win the competition isn’t too terrible in the long run,  because de’ Rossi did win other major commissions, the most notable being a competition to create sculpture for the  facade of the Basilica of San Petronio- probably the most stunning church in Bologna, and one that is dedicated to the city’s patron saint, St. Petronio. No small potatoes, this win. Here, too, we have to thank Bolognese officials for keeping such great paperwork, because they noted the very specific items that de’ Rossi was asked to create: three sibyls, who were female prophets of ancient times; two angels, and then two bas-relief panels. Bas-relief, by the way, is a type of sculptural carving that chips away at the background of a scene so that the final image appears raised a couple of inches or even centimeters, from that background, which gives it a three-dimensional appearance even though it’s basically still attached to a flat surface. Of this pair of reliefs, the most famous is Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, a scene from the Old Testament showing Joseph, a critical figure from the Book of Genesis, fleeing the Egyptian captain Potiphar’s wife after she made unwanted sexual advances toward him. In de Rossi's work, we see Joseph mid-stride out of the canopied boudoir where Potiphar’s unnamed wife sits, reaching out a muscled arm to ensnare her would-be lover. What’s truly wonderful here is the variety of material that de’ Rossi excels in representing--from the classically-inspired folds of Joseph’s clothing, to the undulating updo on Potiphar’s wife, and the musculature of both man and woman. De’ Rossi is clearly talented and super educated in that humanist standard so praised at the time-- to get that sense of movement in stone, to execute the anatomical elements of her relief--that she must have not only trained long and hard, but knew her art history, too, looking to classical Greco-Roman sculpture as inspiration nearly as much as to the Bible for the religious subject matter. 

Like many of the women we’ve discussed, not a whole ton of Properzia de’ Rossi’s works survive, though there are some lovely works in marble in particular that survive, and which supposedly brought her much fame during her middle years. But one of the other reasons why we don’t have a lot of extant sculpture by de Rossi is, potentially, because she seems to have been a bit of a firebrand. Historians, while searching through the archives of Bologna’s criminal tribunal, found that de’ Rossi’s name popped up twice: first, when she was asked to appear for judgment after vandalizing a neighbor’s garden, and second after assaulting a fellow artist-- apparently she scratched his eyes and threw paint in his face. The man she assaulted may have been Amico Aspertini, mentioned by Vasari as de’ Rossi’s sworn enemy, a man who made it his career to slander her. Truly these artists were in competition with one another, and especially in Bologna, which was truly rife with amazing artists, jockeying for position as a famed sculptor was fierce. And one wonders, too, if it isn’t Amico Aspertini’s actions that have had a longstanding effect on de  Rossi’s acceptance as a major Renaissance artist, because so little, besides Vasari’s narrative, seems to survive. So in some ways, we have to thank Vasari for that inclusion in the first place. His choice to profile her is one of the best sources we have for understanding Properzia’s career and talent. 

Not that the inclusion is without its own controversy today. We’ve mentioned before about how only a handful of female artists were mentioned in Vasari’s The Lives, but here’s where I actually have to make a little bit of a distinction: de Rossi was actually the ONLY female artist to be in the first edition of Vasari's book. In the second edition, he added in other ladies, such as Sofonisba Anguissola. To some historians, like professor Babette Bohn from Texas Christian University, her inclusion at the outset was not only tokenism, but probably also as a,  quote, “curiosity, an attention-getting anomaly,” unquote. So while it’s amazing to know that Vasari did indeed pave the way for further knowledge and study about de’ Rossi, his original discussion of her and her work was potentially based on the idea that she-a super-rare female sculptor--was a bit of a freak show, someone whose career was something to gawk at. As with many artists and theoreticians who were involved in the whole “paragone” debate, Vasari-- himself a painter, remember-- felt that sculpture was a secondary art form in comparison to painting. And Vasari certainly fell in line with the misogynistic assumptions of the time, because it was assumed that  sculpture required a bit more burliness-- an artist had to be physically strong enough to maneuver and handle the sculptor’s instruments and materials. And that was a man’s job, Vasari implies. And yet he doesn’t entirely throw Properzia de’ Rossi under the bus. After acknowledging that women were physically unsuitable to the task of sculpture, he writes, quote,  “Even so, the marbles sculpted by her hand show what a woman can do with vigorous talent and skill,” unquote. 

Properzia de’ Rossi’s time on this earth was sadly all too brief. She died after an undisclosed illness at the age of forty. And what’s truly sad is that it looks like her fortunes may have very well been on the up-and-up at that point. On the day of her death, the pope, Clement VII, was on his way to meet her when he was told that de’ Rossi, whom he called quote, “a noble and elevated genius”--had passed. I wish we could have known what was next for Properzia de’ Rossi, those probable papal commissions and so much more-- but at the very least we have a few surviving examples of her truly unique life and gifted talent.

I so appreciate you taking the time to listen to ArtCurious today-- thank you so much, and I encourage you to check out my website, artcuriouspodcast.com, for images of Properzia de’ Rossi’s artworks, including one of those carved pits from stone fruit. They are wonderful.  As I mentioned at the top of the show, it would sure mean a lot to me as an independent creator if you would register for my course, Breaking Barriers: Women Artists of Renaissance Europe. It’s on sale right now, 21 days, learn on your own time and at your own pace, and it’s fun--I promise. No quizzes or grades, either, just learning for the sake of good old fashioned learning! Please register now at avid.fm/jennifer, and not only will you get the entire 21 day course, but you’ll also receive a PDF with every episode featuring the images discussed and a recommended reading list. So again, that’s Breaking Barriers: Women Artists of Renaissance Europe, available now at avid.fm/jennifer. 

I’ll be back with you again in two weeks to share another story from Breaking Barriers. Thank you, again, for supporting me while I research my next project--you are awesome. Remember that we’ve got exclusive video content coming at you over on YouTube. So check us out there-the link is in the show notes on your handy-dandy podcast app right now. Stick with me, and stay curious!