Eight Female Renaissance and Baroque Artists Whose Work Survived
- Zocine Art
- 2 hours ago
- 9 min read
Painting in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe was an apprenticed trade. Boys joined a master's workshop at twelve or thirteen, ground pigments, prepared panels, learned anatomy by drawing from male models in life classes, and emerged a decade later qualified to take commissions on their own. Women were systematically excluded from this pipeline. They could not attend life classes because mixed-gender life drawing was forbidden. They could not be apprenticed to non-relatives because workshops were domestic spaces and the moral risk was considered unmanageable. They could not register with painters' guilds in most cities, which meant they could not legally sell paintings under their own name in most jurisdictions.
Eight women did the work anyway. They became painters by being born to painter fathers who taught them at home, by entering convents that supported artistic work, or by negotiating exemptions through aristocratic patronage networks that did not need guild membership. Their paintings survive. Many hang in major European collections. Over the last forty years art historians have steadily recovered them from the footnotes of male-named workshops and identified canvases that had been misattributed for centuries. Here are eight, in roughly chronological order.
1. Plautilla Nelli (1524–1588)
Plautilla Nelli was a Dominican nun in Florence who became the prioress of the convent of Santa Caterina da Siena and trained other nuns there in painting. She is the first known female Renaissance painter in Florence whose substantial body of work survives. Giorgio Vasari mentioned her in the second edition of his Lives of the Artists (1568) — the only woman painter in Florence he named. Her major surviving work is a Last Supper measuring nearly seven metres wide, painted around 1568 for the convent's refectory and recently restored. The painting is the first known full-scale Last Supper by a woman in European art history.
Nelli learned by copying prints and devotional images, the only models a cloistered woman could legitimately study. She never had access to life drawing. The figures in her Last Supper have the limitations that absence produces — anatomy is conservative, gestures are stylised. What she had instead was conviction. The Last Supper restoration in 2019 brought the painting into international press attention; it had been in storage for decades. It is now displayed in the same Florentine refectory it was painted for.
2. Catharina van Hemessen (1528–after 1565)
Catharina van Hemessen was the daughter of the Antwerp painter Jan Sanders van Hemessen, who trained her in his workshop. She painted small-scale religious scenes and high-finish portraits in the Flemish style and signed her work — which is the first thing that distinguishes her from earlier women painters whose surviving canvases come down to us anonymously. Her 1548 Self-Portrait at the Easel is the earliest known self-portrait by any European painter, male or female, that shows the artist in the act of painting at an easel. The image — a woman looking out at the viewer with brush poised, mid-stroke on a panel — is structurally important to the European tradition of the artist's self-portrait and was made by a twenty-year-old woman.
Van Hemessen married a musician at the cathedral of Antwerp and moved to Spain in 1556 in the entourage of Queen Mary of Hungary, who pensioned her. After 1560 her output drops off — possibly because her royal patron had died, possibly because of the conditions of court life. About a dozen of her paintings survive, scattered across collections in Antwerp, Vienna, and London.
3. Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532–1625)
Sofonisba Anguissola was the eldest of six daughters in a Cremonese minor-noble family, all six trained in painting at their father Amilcare's insistence. Anguissola became the most successful of the sisters and the first major woman painter of the Italian Renaissance to achieve international reputation in her lifetime. Michelangelo, in his late seventies, corresponded with her — she sent him drawings; he responded with technical advice. She trained briefly under Bernardino Campi in Cremona. In 1559 she was invited to Madrid as a lady-in-waiting and painter-teacher to Queen Elisabeth of Valois, third wife of Philip II of Spain.
The Chess Game (1555), painted when Anguissola was about twenty-three, shows three of her younger sisters playing chess attended by an older maidservant. It is one of the most informally observed Renaissance group portraits. The faces are individual. The interaction is unposed. The painting is technically refined and emotionally exact. Anguissola spent twenty years at the Spanish court, taught the queen to paint, painted Philip II at least three times, married a Sicilian aristocrat after the queen's death, retired to Sicily, and lived to ninety-three. Anthony van Dyck visited her in old age and made a portrait of her in 1624, the year before her death.
4. Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614)
Lavinia Fontana, born in Bologna, was the daughter of the painter Prospero Fontana, who trained her in his workshop. She is the first European woman painter known to have run a full professional studio with her own apprentices and to have taken public commissions — including altarpieces, which were the most prestigious and economically important genre of Renaissance painting and one almost no woman before her had been permitted to paint. Fontana painted more than one hundred and thirty works that survive, including portraits, mythological subjects, large-scale religious commissions, and self-portraits.
In 1604 she was called to Rome by Pope Clement VIII and appointed official portrait painter to his court. Her Roman altarpiece commissions included the largest panel ever painted by a woman in Italy up to that point — the Stoning of St. Stephen (1611) for the basilica of San Paolo Fuori le Mura, which was unfortunately destroyed in a fire in 1823. Lavinia Fontana had eleven children and continued to work throughout. She is the European painter who proved that a woman could run a high-volume professional workshop.
5. Fede Galizia (1578–1630)
Fede Galizia was born in Milan, the daughter of the painter Nunzio Galizia who taught her, and is the first major woman painter of still life in European art history. Still life as a genre was just consolidating in late-sixteenth-century Lombardy, separating from religious painting and decorative work, and Galizia helped consolidate it. Her still lifes are small in scale — usually under fifty centimetres — and built around a single ceramic or crystal bowl of fruit on a dark ground. The fruit is rendered with intense colour and high finish. Compositions are clean, frontal, almost iconic.
Galizia also painted portraits — her 1596 portrait of the Jesuit theologian Paolo Morigia, painted when she was about eighteen, is a Lombard masterwork — and religious paintings on commission. But her historical position is as a founder of the still-life genre. The composition of her Still Life with Peaches (c. 1605) is essentially the template for Spanish bodegón painting half a century later. Without Galizia, the still-life tradition in northern Italy looks substantially thinner.
6. Clara Peeters (c. 1594–after 1657)
Clara Peeters was an Antwerp painter who specialised in still life and was the most important early woman painter in the Netherlands. Documentary records of her life are extraordinarily thin — almost nothing survives about her training, family, marriage, or death. What survives is the paintings: roughly forty signed works, all still lifes, all dated between 1607 and 1621. She painted breakfast pieces (small tables set with bread, cheese, butter, pretzels, olives, beer), banquet pieces (more elaborate tables with crystal goblets, silver-gilt vessels, fruit), and flower pieces. She signed her works prominently — often visible in the reflection on a polished silver-gilt cup or knife handle.
Peeters's technical innovation was the miniature self-portrait. In several of her major still lifes — including the 1611 Still Life with Flowers, Goblet, Dried Fruit, and Pretzels in a Madrid royal collection — her own face is reflected, in tiny scale, on the polished surface of a silver-gilt vessel within the composition. She is looking out at the viewer through the painted object. It is a deeply self-aware move and would become a model for later Dutch and Flemish still-life painters who incorporated reflected studio scenes into their work. The 2016 retrospective in a Madrid collection was the first single-woman exhibition that collection had ever organised in its centuries-long history.
7. Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–c. 1653)
Artemisia Gentileschi is now the most widely known of the women painters on this list, the central figure in the late-twentieth-century recovery of female Old Masters, and the subject of more art-historical literature than the other seven combined. She was the daughter of the Caravaggist painter Orazio Gentileschi and trained in his Rome workshop. In 1611 — when she was seventeen — she was raped by Agostino Tassi, a painter who had been hired to teach her perspective. The trial that followed lasted seven months. Artemisia testified under torture (the standard Roman judicial procedure for verifying witness statements at the time) and Tassi was eventually convicted, though his sentence was commuted.
The painting at the top of this essay — Judith Slaying Holofernes, painted around 1620 in Florence — is the work most often associated with Artemisia, partly because of its violent subject and partly because of the inevitable biographical reading. Whether or not the painting was a direct response to the assault, it is structurally exceptional: two women working together with calm methodical force to behead a male tyrant, the blood arcs anatomically correct, the women's faces composed rather than horrified. Caravaggio painted the same subject around 1600 with a much softer Judith — almost flinching from the act. Artemisia's Judith is not flinching.
Artemisia became the first woman admitted to the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence in 1616. She ran her own workshop. She corresponded with Galileo. She accepted royal commissions in Naples and London. She painted at least fifty-seven documented works, mostly Old Testament subjects featuring strong women (Judith, Susanna, Esther, Bathsheba, Mary Magdalene, Cleopatra). The full Gentileschi catalogue is still being reconstructed; new attributions appear every few years.
8. Judith Leyster (1609–1660)
Judith Leyster was a Dutch painter of the Haarlem school, the only known woman admitted to the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke (the painters' guild) in the seventeenth century. She trained either in Frans Hals's workshop or in a closely allied studio — her style is recognisably Halsian, with the same loose brushwork and the same interest in the snapshot moment of a smiling face or a musician mid-note. She painted around twenty surviving works between 1629 and 1635, mostly genre scenes of musicians, drinkers, and intimate domestic moments.
The Self-Portrait (c. 1630) is Leyster's signature painting and one of the most direct Dutch self-portraits of the seventeenth century. She shows herself seated at her easel, palette and brushes in hand, having turned mid-stroke to look at the viewer. The painting she is working on is itself a genre scene of a smiling violinist — a Leyster-style picture within a Leyster picture. The self-portrait was attributed to Frans Hals for over two centuries; the misattribution was only corrected in 1893 when researchers identified Leyster's monogram on related works. Almost all of Leyster's paintings were misattributed to Hals or to her husband Jan Miense Molenaer for two hundred and fifty years. The recovery of her work in the late nineteenth century is the first major recovery of a forgotten woman Old Master, and the template for the later recoveries of Artemisia and Anguissola.
Why the survivals are partial
Eight is a small number for two centuries of European painting. Many more women painted than the eight names recovered here. The losses are real and the reasons are specific. First, attribution: when paintings by women were sold, they were routinely re-attributed to a male relative or workshop master to increase market value. Leyster's work as Hals's, Artemisia's as her father Orazio's, Marietta Robusti's as her father Tintoretto's. Second, signature: women painters often did not sign work, either because the workshop's master signed everything or because their authorship was a marketable problem rather than a marketable feature. Third, scale: women were largely barred from altarpiece commissions, the genre that produced the largest, most durable, most institutionally documented paintings. Their work survives in smaller, more portable forms — and those forms were more likely to be lost, damaged, or misfiled.
The recovery of these eight is a one-by-one process that has taken art historians, mostly women, four decades and is not finished. Every few years a new painting is correctly attributed to one of them, or a forgotten ninth name emerges from archival records. The canon of European painting before 1700 is still being rewritten.
Key takeaways
Plautilla Nelli (1524-1588), Catharina van Hemessen (1528-after 1565), Sofonisba Anguissola (c.1532-1625), Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614), Fede Galizia (1578-1630), Clara Peeters (c.1594-after 1657), Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-c.1653), and Judith Leyster (1609-1660) are the eight Renaissance and Baroque women painters whose substantial bodies of work survive.
Most became painters through a painter father who taught them at home; a few through convent training; a small number through aristocratic patronage that exempted them from guild restrictions.
Catharina van Hemessen's Self-Portrait at the Easel (1548) is the earliest known European self-portrait of any artist shown actually painting at an easel. Sofonisba Anguissola corresponded with Michelangelo. Lavinia Fontana ran a full Roman workshop and held a papal court appointment.
Fede Galizia is a foundational figure in the European still-life tradition. Clara Peeters incorporated tiny self-portraits reflected on silver vessels within her still lifes — a self-aware move that became a Dutch still-life convention.
Artemisia Gentileschi (Judith Slaying Holofernes, c. 1620) is now the most widely studied. Judith Leyster's work was misattributed to Frans Hals for two centuries; her recovery in 1893 was the first major recovery of a forgotten woman Old Master.
The eight survive because their work was preserved against systematic attribution-laundering, signature loss, and exclusion from altarpiece-scale commissions. Recovery is one-by-one, archival, ongoing.
Browse Renaissance and Baroque prints in the archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.
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