4 The New York ReviewPainting Herself
Ruth Bernard YeazellThe Mirror and the Palette:
Rebellion, Revolution,
and Resilience:
Five Hundred Years of
Women’s Self Portraits
by Jennifer Higgie.
Pegasus, 328 pp., $27.The Self- Portrait
by Natalie Rudd.
Thames and Hudson,
175 pp., $16.95 (paper)Among the legendary figures whose
stories Giovanni Boccaccio relates
in Famous Women (1361–1362) is a
Roman virgin named Marcia, who
earned her fame as much for her skills
as an artist, he tells us, as for her chas-
tity. Both outpacing and outearning her
contemporaries, the energetic Marcia
is said to have worked in ivory as well
as paint, but the only object Boccaccio
specifically describes is a self- portrait,
“painted on a panel with the aid of a
mirror.” A charming illumination from
an early- fifteenth- century French man-
uscript shows Marcia at work on the
picture, her visage tripled, as she gazes
at the small convex mirror reflecting
her face in her left hand, while her right
wields a brush with which she touches
up the lips of the painted image.
It’s tempting to imagine that the un-
known illuminator was also a woman,
who perhaps amused herself by multi-
plying her own features in multiplying
Marcia’s. Presumably she would have
been less amused to learn that Boccac-
cio nonetheless seems to have judged
the admirable Marcia an anomaly. The
Greek painter Irene “merited some
praise,” he explains elsewhere in the
book, “because the art of painting is
mostly alien to the feminine mind and
cannot be attained without that great in-
tellectual concentration which women,
as a rule, are very slow to acquire.”
While a half- century of feminist art
history has provided us with all too
many such passages, it has also taught
us to recast the terms in which they are
formulated—to understand women’s
relative lack of artistic achievement
not as a consequence of “the feminine
mind” but of institutional constraints
that, deliberately or not, prevented them
from receiving the training and encour-
agement that might have enabled their
gifts to flourish. Linda Nochlin’s “Why
Have There Been No Great Women
Artists?” (1971) famously adduced the
taboo on drawing from the nude model,
a fundamental exercise for anyone who
aspired to paint those grand scenes
from myth and history that long ranked
as the pinnacle of the art.
Other institutions, from the appren-
ticeship system to the royal academies,
posed related obstacles, as did, of
course, the pressures exerted by hus-
bands and families. It’s clearly not by
chance that Boccaccio describes Mar-
cia as both legally independent and a
lifelong virgin, or that he tells us how
she avoided painting images of men,
lest the ancient custom of rendering
them in the nude conflict with her
“maidenly delicacy.” What she obvi-
ously could do, on the other hand, was
paint her own portrait. All she needed
has been laid out with precision by the
medieval illuminator: a set of brushesand paints, a support for the picture, a
palette, and a mirror.Studies of the self- portrait have often
emphasized the centrality of the mirror
to the development of the genre, but
Jennifer Higgie argues that its reflect-
ing surface proved particularly liberat-
ing for female painters. “It meant that,
for the first time, their exclusion from
the life class didn’t stop them paint-
ing figures,” she declares early in The
Mirror and the Palette. “Now, with the
aid of a looking glass, they had a will-
ing model, and one who was available
around the clock: themselves.”
The point is well taken, even if the
chronology behind these somewhat
breathless pronouncements is notably
loose. Higgie begins her account with
the story of Marcia, whose mirror-
assisted picture can in turn be traced
back to a report by Pliny the Elder in
AD 77 of a female painter named Iaia
of Cyzicus—the first recorded allusion
in Western literature, as it happens, to a
self- portrait painted with a mirror. Im-
mediately before the lines just quoted,
Higgie refers to the mass production
of mirrors made possible by a German
invention of 1835, but that date can
hardly represent the liberating moment
she has in mind, since it would exclude
almost half the paintings reproduced in
her book, including some particularly
strong examples from the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. In The Self-
Portrait: A Cultural History (2014),
James Hall argued, in fact, that the ef-
florescence of the genre in Europe be-
ginning around 150 0 owes more to “the
late medieval fascination with the sci-
ence and symbolism of mirrors” than
to any developments in technology. Ifa number of gifted women at that time
began to paint themselves too, they
may have been responding as much to
the liberating opportunities opened up
by other artists as to some newfound
access to their own reflections.
There is, however, a striking differ-
ence between the images they produced
and those of their male counterparts,
and in this, too, the illumination of
Marcia is exemplary: from the begin-
ning, the women chose to show them-
selves at work. While male artists of the
period typically sought to elevate their
status by representing themselves as
gentlemen, far removed from the mate-
rial business of painting, female artists
seem to have been more concerned to
demonstrate that they could handle a
brush as well as anyone.
In 1548 the Flemish painter Cath-
arina van Hemessen produced what
is generally regarded as the first self-
portrait of any artist in the act of paint-
ing. Clutching a tiny palette and set
of brushes in one hand and propping
the other on a maulstick as she grasps
the brush with which she apparently
outlines her own head on a canvas,
the creator of this Self- Portrait at the
Easel seems determined to crowd as
many of the tools of her trade into its
small surface as possible.^1 (The entire
picture measures approximately 12 by
9 1/2 inches.) Lest anyone doubt the
significance of the image, she also took
care to add an inscription in Latin: “I
Caterina van Hemessen have painted
myself /1548 / Her age 20.”The difference women made is viv-
idly on display in Natalie Rudd’s The
Self- Portrait, which begins its brief
survey of the genre with the magnif-
icent painting of a man in a red tur-
ban by Jan van Eyck that Rudd says is
often considered “the earliest autono-
mous self- portrait (one with the artist
as the central focus) in existence.” It
follows that up with Albrecht Dürer’s
depiction of himself in the likeness
of Christ (1500) and Parmigianino’s
Self- Portrait in a Convex Mirror (circa
1523), among other works, before turn-
ing to the book’s first female artist, So-
fonisba Anguissola, who also provides
its first image of a painter at work. (The
artist, in her mid- twenties at the time,
would go on to become the most pro-
lific self- portraitist in Europe between
Dürer and Rembrandt.)
Completed around a decade after
Van Hemessen’s picture, Anguissola’s
Self- Portrait at the Easel Painting a De-
votional Panel (circa 1556) bears some
notable resemblances to its predeces-
sor, from the half- length format to the
artist’s pose and the orientation of her
hands. Indeed, the resemblances are so
conspicuous that Higgie, who includes
both pictures, finds herself wondering
whether the two women might have
met: a speculation at once encouraged
and frustrated by the knowledge that
they nearly crossed paths at the Span-
ish court of Philip II, where Anguissola
arrived not long after Van Hemessen,
who had been invited there by Philip’s
aunt Mary of Hungary, had departed.
But by representing herself in the act
of painting a Virgin and Child, the Ital-
ian artist also does something differ-
ent from her Flemish predecessor—at
once demonstrating her skill as a his-
tory painter and implicitly identifying
herself with the patron saint of artists,
Saint Luke, who is traditionally shown
working on just such a picture. Another
inscription drives home the argument:
“I, Sofonisba Anguissola, unmarried,
am the equal of the Muses and Apelles
in playing my songs and handling my
paints.” Acknowledging the material
basis of their art evidently didn’t pre-
vent female painters from staking a
claim to its loftier aspirations too.
A still more daring self- portrait by
the seventeenth- century Italian painter
Artemisia Gentileschi offers a fur-
ther twist on the theme. For her Self-
Portrait as the Allegory of Painting
(1638–1639), which was probably pro-
duced on a trip to London, she draws
on Cesare Ripa’s popular emblem
book, Iconologia (1593–1603), in order
to equate her own energetic body with
the figure of Painting itself. Artemisia
adheres to Ripa’s specifications for rep-
resenting Painting just closely enough
to make her intentions clear—like him,
she depicts a beautiful woman with
disheveled black hair and a mask dan-
gling from a gold chain at her throat—
while discarding those elements that
she appears to have resisted.^2
As Higgie observes, Artemisia does
away with the mouth covering thatSofonisba Anguissola: Self-Portrait at the Easel Painting a Devotional Panel, circa 1556Alamy(^1) The painting was reproduced in these
pages to accompany Jenny Uglow’s
review of Michael Pye, Europe’s Bab-
ylon: The Rise and Fall of Antwerp’s
Golden Age, February 24, 2022.
(^2) I follow the convention of identifying
the artist by her first name in order
to distinguish her from her father, the
painter Orazio Gentileschi.
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