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Felsina Pittrice: Elisabetta Sirani,

Her Students and Circle,
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and the Maniera Devota

Considering the large number of active women artists working in Bologna

in the seventeenth century, it is ironic but fitting that Carlo Cesare Malvasia
titled his lives of the artists Felsina pittrice. “Felsina” was the Etruscan name
for Bologna and a feminine term, thus appropriate for a city of women art-
ists. The tradition that linked women with piety and visual imagery in the
seventeenth century continued to flourish in Bologna through the heirs of
Lavinia Fontana and the students and colleagues of Elisabetta Sirani. My
discussion of maestra Sirani and her modes of religious painting, leads to the
category of miracle paintings and a look at representations of virtuous (and
not-so-virtuous) women from history as well as the intersection of theatre
and religion against the backdrop of the noblewomen patrons of the city.
Through an analysis of the work of a selection of Sirani’s “students” I
Copyright 2017. McGill-Queen's University Press.

attempt to establish an artistic genealogy for the mani donnesche. Although

normally subsumed under the category of students, some women artists in
this line were actually precursors, while others lived too late to have been
direct students; two others are her sisters Anna and Barbara Sirani. The
seventeenth-century sources Malvasia and Masini mention fewer names,

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AN: 1619720 ; Patricia Rocco.; The Devout Hand : Women, Virtue, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Italy
Account: s3381253.main.ehost
 but eighteenth-century primary sources such as Marcello Oretti and Luigi
Crespi mention far greater numbers of women artists working in Bologna
in the seventeenth century; Crespi speaks of over twenty-eight. Of all the
women artists mentioned by these writers, some remain only names whose
work is still lost or missing.1 However, rather than simply repeat the long
list of names without extant paintings attached, I take the more fruitful
path of analyzing the concrete examples of the surviving works to discover
what they can tell us about women’s production in early modern Bologna.2
In addition to Sirani’s two sisters, four of the listed women have left enough
extant work that one can attempt a comparative visual analysis of the
iconographic themes and stylistic influences among them; other works still
remain to be found, located, or attributed.3 One of these four women, the
engraver Veronica Fontana, will be the subject of chapter 5, but this chapter
explores the works of the three others: Antonia Pinelli, Ginevra Cantofoli,
and Angela Teresa Muratori, as well as Barbara and Anna Maria Sirani.
Most of their works continued the maniera devota into the next generations
of the city’s mani donnesche, and one woman even branched out into the
media of fresco and music.
The mystery of the disappearance of Sirani’s students from history can
be explained by various factors, the most important of which is Napoleon’s
suppression of the convents in Bologna in 1799.4 This is especially relevant,
since many of the paintings of these women dealt with religious subjects,
and thus were to be found in the convents and churches that were dis-
mantled, converted into barracks, or suffered similar atrocious fates. The
upheaval, which dispersed and destroyed, often forever, these precious arti-
facts and their archives,5 has complicated the recovery and reinstatement of
these women and their work. Patron and commission information is often
missing; moreover, the paintings themselves, except for a few cases, have
been moved from their original locations, and without archival documen-
tation it is no longer possible to recover their original sites and patrons.

The Maestra and the Modes of Religious Painting of the

Maniera Devota: Sacred Narratives, Miracle-Working Icons,
Historiated Portraits, and Female Role Models

Elisabetta Sirani is the only female artist of the early modern period to
have started a school for painting that was mostly for women. In her very

120 | the devout hand

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 short career she left a record of her work in her taccuino, or notebook, of
almost two hundred paintings, drawings, and etchings.6 Sirani was quite
famous – a local celebrity of sorts – and anyone who was anyone stopped
by her studio when passing through Bologna. In general, Sirani’s oeuvre
consists of portraits, as well as history painting, religious painting, and
even mythological subjects. Her religious paintings are in the devoto style.
However, many of her other paintings take traditional subjects, such as
women’s role models, and present them with innovative compositions
and/or iconography. These paintings represent an extension beyond the
typical portraits of religious role models to portraits of historical and
literary female figures, encoded with messages about women’s virtue, as
new models of sanctity.
More specifically, Sirani’s work incorporates the three Counter-
Reformatory modes of her predecessor Fontana: sacred narratives, iconic
paintings, and historiated portraits, arising out of Gabriele Paleotti’s
sixteenth-century sermons (discussed in chapter 2). However, Sirani and
her students also added a further dimension to the sacred narrative with
their versions of miracle paintings, a documentation of a type of virtual
pilgrimage in reverse, where the sacred personage appears in the patron’s
space. This category emerged as a natural continuation of Paleotti’s quest to
demonstrate to the faithful the authentic history and truth of Christianity
in visual form.
The first continuing mode, that of sacred narrative, is well represented
in Sirani’s oeuvre. The artist was responsible for full-scale religious
narratives, such as her Baptism of Christ for San Girolamo della Certosa
of Bologna in 1657–58, one of her early public commissions (Fig. 4.1).7 The
scene is a multi-figure composition focusing on the central figures of
Christ and John the Baptist. There are, however, many ancillary figures,
resulting in a crowded but ambitious composition. The artist included a
female figure in the foreground that may represent the allegorical figure
of Charity, as well as two angels flanking Christ that look as though they
were painted from life, perhaps modelled on two young acolytes of the
monastery. The additional figures are placed in this scene to bear witness
to the sacred event, rather than being superfluous like Veronese’s Germans
at the Last Supper in his Feast in the House of Levi (Venice, 1573), for which
the artist had aroused the ire of the Inquisition. Sirani also includes genre
details such as linens hanging out to dry on the branches, linens that may
be both liturgical symbols and references to Bologna’s cloth trade.

Felsina Pittrice | 121

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 Fig. 4.1. Elisabetta Sirani, Baptism of Christ, 1658. Oil on canvas. 400 x 500 cm.
Bologna, Church of San Girolamo della Certosa. This was Sirani’s first large-scale public
commission and, based on the number of figures, a very ambitious one.
Image reproduced courtesy of Museo Civico del Risorgimento di Bologna.

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 Sirani’s Ten Thousand Martyrs (1656) is a much smaller but no
less ambitious painting in terms of anatomical draftsmanship, due
to the number of male nudes required by the scene.8 The painting was
commissioned for the Duchess of Mantua and is based on her father’s
composition of the same subject.9 Ten Thousand Martyrs tells the tale of
Roman soldiers during the period of the Antonine emperors, who converted
to Christianity after a victorious battle and were crucified by the Roman
emperor for refusing to sacrifice to the pagan gods. Sirani includes exotic
turbaned figures and a menacing sky, depicting the dramatic moment of
their agony. She boldly attacks the challenge of depicting male anatomy,
with the body of the crucified figure as the focus of the composition. Sirani
would have studied male anatomy from casts of classical sculpture in her
father’s studio, as was the case for most women artists, since they still could
not study the male nude directly. There is evidence that Sirani’s father had
collected casts of Michelangelo’s sculptures, which Sirani may have used
as models for this work.10 However, although she uses the master’s models,
she does not fall into the error of turning Christ into an Apollo, as Paleotti
and Prospero Fontana had warned against a century earlier. That lesson, it
seems, had been learned.
Sirani’s iconic paintings include Marian images for private devotion,
as well as depictions of important Counter-Reformation saints such as St
Francis and the Magdalene. One of these iconic paintings was a small yet
powerful image of the Virgin Addolorata with the Symbols of the Passion
(1657, Fig. 4.2). This small devotional painting was for Father Ettore
Ghisilieri, the Filippini cleric who had run a small art academy out of his
own house.11 The Virgin wears an expression of extreme suffering on her
countenance; even the cupids are mourning. Sirani made an etching of
this painting, which allowed the image to be widely disseminated, thus
propagating an important aspect of Marian devotion for personal piety
and meditation. This painting can be compared with Fontana’s version
of a similar theme, Dead Christ with the Symbols of the Passion (Fig. 2.1).12
Sirani focuses instead on Marian imagery, but she may have been aware
of her predecessor’s example. The iconic intensity of the image is similar,
although Fontana depicts Christ in a naturalistic landscape in the Flemish
tradition whereas Sirani adopts a more austere background, using it
almost as a stage set for the Virgin’s grief, a seventeenth-century version
of the Andachtsbild.

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 Fig. 4.2. Elisabetta Sirani, Virgin Addolorata with the Symbols of the Passion, 1657.
Oil on copper. 24 x 19.5 cm. Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale. This image functions as a
powerful meditative aid for private devotion in the tradition of Byzantine icons.
Image reproduced by concession of Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e
del Turismo, Polo Museale dell’Emilia Romagna.

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