Elisabetta Sirani

Elisabetta Sirani (born January 8, 1638, Bologna, Italy—died August 28, 1665, Bologna) was a painter of the Baroque period, among the most famed Bolognese artists during her lifetime. Notably, she painted large-scale historical subjects during an era in which female artists were often relegated to the less prestigious genres of portraiture and still life. Sirani fell into obscurity in the centuries after her death, but renewed interest in her practice developed during the feminist wave of the 1970s and grew in the 21st century.

Early life and training

Sirani was a daughter of Giovanni Andrea Sirani, a professor of life drawing and the principal assistant in the workshop of Guido Reni, then a dominant force in the Bolognese art world. Bologna in the 17th century had a comparatively open attitude toward upper-class women’s education and professionalization, and Elisabetta Sirani was highly educated. She trained under her father and was working as a professional artist by age 17. By age 24 she had begun overseeing the operation of her father’s workshop when worsening health forced him to retreat from his practice. Her sisters, Barbara Sirani and Anna Maria Sirani, who may have been trained by their father or Elisabetta Sirani, also worked in the shop.

First commissions

Early in her career, Sirani completed several small altarpieces for churches outside Bologna. At age 19 she received her first major Bolognese commission, for an altarpiece in the church of San Girolamo della Certosa. The massive work (14.11 × 11.5 feet [4.3 × 3.5 meters]) depicts the baptism of Christ and comprises more than 30 full-scale human figures. It is the largest-known altarpiece painted by a woman of the early modern period.

Judith with the Head of Holofernes, Timoclea Killing Alexander’s Captain, and other subjects

Throughout her career, Sirani depicted powerful women (a genre called femme forte) and chose ambitious, atypical subjects or moments from popular narratives not usually found in the art historical register. For example, in Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1658), instead of focusing on the biblical heroine Judith decapitating the enemy general Holofernes or on the immediate aftermath, as artists such as Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi had done, Sirani portrayed Judith upon her return to Bethulia, lifting the severed head from a sack.

In another work, Timoclea Killing Alexander’s Captain (1659), Sirani depicts a rare subject—a moment from classical history in which the Theban heroine Timoclea takes revenge against her rapist. The noblewoman was raped by a captain serving under Alexander the Great after the king’s army destroyed Thebes in 335 bce. When the captain demanded that Timoclea give him her valuables, she tricked him into searching for them in the depths of a well. The painting captures Timoclea at the height of her powers, pushing the captain, who has been distracted by his search, down the well. In the story, she then stoned him.

Overall career

Sirani amassed a prodigious body of work and received commissions from a range of prominent European patrons, including Cosimo III of the Medici dynasty. The artist’s surviving personal journal, which includes a ledger of completed works, lists some 200 pieces created for a number of patrons. Scholars believe that Sirani made additional works but left them undocumented to hide her earnings from her father, who managed the family’s accounts. About 149 existing artworks can be attributed to Sirani.

Although she worked in an environment favorable to the development of women artists, Sirani was often forced to prove her skills to a skeptical public. She invited audiences to watch her paint, lest anyone doubt her ability to produce canvases of such caliber or lest they try to attribute her work to her father. Furthermore, she signed her paintings, an unusual practice that was generally eschewed by her male colleagues. Sirani may have trained other female painters.

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Death at 27 and funeral

Sirani died at age 27, most likely because of lacerations in her stomach caused by peptic ulcers. Her father initially regarded her sudden, early death as suspicious and accused the maidservant Lucia Tolomelli of poisoning his daughter out of jealousy. An autopsy of Sirani’s body at the time revealed that she likely died of natural causes, and the charges against Tolomelli were dropped.

In keeping with Sirani’s widespread fame, the funerary festivities that followed her death were richly and artfully appointed. The decorative scheme, designed by fellow painter Matteo Borboni, included a temporary wooden building (a catafalque) containing a life-size wax sculpture of the artist at her easel. A choir sang in her honor as mourners were reportedly heard to “sob and gasp.” Befitting her stature as an artist, Sirani was buried alongside Guido Reni in the Basilica of San Domenico in Bologna.

Legacy

Although Sirani’s work faded from prominence after her brief lifetime, feminist art historical scholarship has begun to explore her successful navigation of the painterly profession as a woman of the early modern period. Formal analyses by Babette Bohn and a recently published biography by Adelina Modesti have brought attention to Sirani’s central role in 17th-century Bolognese art production, her unique selection of subject matter, and her approach to iconography.