When we talk about women in the National Gallery, particularly from the
Renaissance or Early Modern periods, we think of artists like Artemisia,
Rachel Ruysch, Catherina van Hemessen, these
women who are real exceptions to the rule, working at a time when it was very
difficult, but, today we're going to look at
some other paintings to which women contributed,
women who are named but perhaps less visible in the production of these works.
Yeah, there were countless sisters, wives and daughters who worked in roles such
as workshop assistants and sales agents and
managers, and were really integral to the running of many of the workshops
from where the paintings on the walls of the
Gallery today originated. So, where do you want to start?
So, I thought we could start with a woman who links two of the most important
artists of the 15th century, I wanted to start with Nicolosia Bellini who went on
to marry Andrea Mantegna. Nicolosia Bellini was the sister of
Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, she was the daughter of Jacopo Bellini, so really
part of this integral artistic dynasty of 15th
century Venice. She was married by her father to
Andrea Mantegna, the brilliant young up-and-coming artist, then working in
Padua. So why would Jacopo marry his daughter to
a potential rival? This was relatively common at the time
in 15th-century Venice. Artistic dynasties were very keen to keep tabs on
all their potential rivals and Mantegna seems to be identified as a rising star,
he might potentially interfere with future commissions for the Bellini
workshop, and so this was a way of keeping
Mantegna in the family, bringing him into this Bellini workshop circle
to limit the possible
competition in the future. So do we know much about Nicolosia herself?
We don't know very much about her, we know that she was born into this
artistic dynasty, and she would have been brought up in very close proximity to a
lot of working artists. We know that she had at least four sons
and we know that Mantegna didn't marry again after her death,
which some people have interpreted to suggest that the marriage was a
happy one. But we don't know that much more about
her, unfortunately. It has been suggested, however, that there
is a portrait of her included in Mantegna's
painting of the Presentation in the Temple, it's been suggested that the
woman on the left of this composition and the man on the right represent
Nicolosia and Mantegna himself, and that this is a kind of marriage portrait.
Much later in his career, Giovanni Bellini, Nicolosia's brother, made a
version of the Presentation in the Temple, very closely related to
Mantegna's version. He took a tracing of the of the Holy figures in
the center of the composition and made another version of the
painting, and it would seem therefore that this
painting of the Presentation in the Temple remained with the Bellini family in
Venice, after Nicolosia's marriage to Mantegna, and her move to Padua and then
on to Mantua. So it seems like Nicolosia was a really
important connecting point between the two families, maintaining
communication between them? It would certainly seem that way, I mean,
we know so little about her, and yet I think we can
assume that she would have kept in touch with her family, that she would have
visited her family, particularly when she was living very nearby in Padua, and she
could go back to Venice quite easily. The two paintings in the National Gallery of
the Agony in the Garden really encapsulate the closeness of
Mantegna and Bellini's relationship. At this earlier point in the two men's
careers, Bellini's painting being a kind of
response to Mantegna's painting, which was made while Mantegna was still living
in Padua, still quite close to the Bellini family in Venice,
and while we don't know, I think we can imagine that Nicolosia would have kept
in touch with her family through letters and through visits and and kept those
brothers-in-law potential rivals closer together than they might
otherwise have been. Nicolosia reminds me a lot of another
Venetian artist's daughter, Marietta Robusti, who was the eldest born
child of the 16th-century Venetian artist, Jacopo Tintoretto from where we
have her nickname, 'La Tintoretta', so Marietta, we think, was born around 1554
and in the National Gallery Collection, we have the 'Saint George and the Dragon'
painted by Jacopo around 1555, the year after her birth.
From about the 1570s onwards, the Tintoretto workshop became one of the
most important in Venice, and as the commissions
increased, Jacopo became less involved with the actual execution
of paintings and started to delegate a lot more of this work
to his assistants, which included his children – his sons Domenico and Marco, and
his daughter, Marietta. We know from the 17th-century art writer Carlo Ridolfi,
who wrote a biography of her, that as a teenager Marietta would dress in
masculine clothing so she could accompany her father in disguise to his
studio. So what kind of work would she have been doing with her father?
We know she had a very active role at the workshop, and perhaps even more so
than her brothers. Unfortunately today we know more about
her from written accounts than her actual art. Jacopo was particularly known
for his portrait work, and in the Gallery, we have this wonderful portrait
by him of Vincenzo Morosini. Marietta herself was known during her lifetime as
a 'buona ritrattista', a good portrait painter,
so we can perhaps assume that Jacopo would have taught his daughter the art
of portrait painting after his own manner. There are accounts that the Holy
Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, kept in his bedroom a portrait by her hand
which he held to be a very rare object and in fact her talents were
so widely known that Maximilian Ferdinand I
and King Phillip II of Spain all requested Marietta to join them at
their courts. However
she declined this invitation, which would have been a great boon, to her career.
We think this may have been because her father insisted she stayed in Venice and
married her to a local jeweller in order to make sure this happened.
We're not particularly sure to what extent her own choice came into the
matter, However, I do think it attests to the fact that she was a really integral
part of the Tintoretto workshop. So do any of these portraits that she
painted survive today? Unfortunately we don't have any secure
attributions and, of course, as is often the case with
female members of artistic circles,
traditionally their works are often attributed to their more famous
male colleagues or relatives. There is one portrait in the Uffizi collection
which has a long tradition of being considered to be her own self-portrait,
so our lack of secure attributions for Marietta's work is not helped by the
fact that in her subsequent critical fortune, the fact that she died quite
young, we believe sometime during her 30s and came to be the key point by which
she was remembered by the 19th century, the name Marietta Robusti
conjured up this image of the untimely fate that befalls precocious female
genius and this featured on several paintings and even plays of the time, and so
unfortunately, her identity as a very integral part of the Tintoretto workshop
faded from view. I suppose even if La Tintoretta's
reputation as an artist faded from view after her death, she nonetheless seems to
have had quite a positive reception after her death compared to some of the
other women who we could talk about today, I'm thinking
specifically of Agnes Dürer. Agnes was the daughter of an artisan,
Hans Frey. He was a coppersmith and a lute maker, and so she'd been brought up
as a literate, educated woman. She was married to Albrecht Dürer in
1494, and a very beautiful portrait of her by Dürer's hand survives
from the year of their marriage. This drawing inscribed with the words 'mein Agnes'
so, 'my Agnes' and it's a very moving study of Agnes who seems to be
um depicted unaware that that Dürer is
drawing her. The Dürers never had children and this seems to have been
something that preoccupied Dürer in the later years of his life
and yet, other evidence suggests that they had
quite a happy marriage, and I'm thinking of the many portraits and studies which
Dürer made of Agnes throughout their marriage.
Some of these are portraits, there are six portraits, and others are studies for
figures in his paintings, for figures like Saint Anne, for example.
So she was a model, and did she have any other roles in the Dürer workshop?
She did, Agnes was, of course, the daughter of a
craftsman. She was brought up to
act as a saleswoman, as a representative of Dürer's work at print fairs, and we
know that Agnes and in fact, Dürer's mother Barbara both acted as sales
representatives for Dürer's work and while Dürer was away
in Italy, we know that the women managed Dürer's workshop and the National
Gallery's 'Madonna of the Iris' was perhaps completed during this period
when Agnes and Barbara were operating things back at home.
Fascinating, so they would have really been,
they would have had a lot of cultural agency in terms of overseeing
production of the workshop? And also ensuring Dürer's designs were circulated
widely? Absolutely, and, in fact, Agnes continued this work
after Dürer's death. However, Agnes's really important role in Dürer's career,
and in his life, has been rather overlooked to date, because, it seems, of a
dislike that existed between Agnes and one of Dürer's closest friends, Willibald Pirckheimer,
whose word has been afforded a lot of weight in
subsequent scholarship of Dürer's career. After Dürer died, when Pirckheimer was
was clearly grieving, he wrote a draft of a letter in which he described Agnes as
a shrewish and possessive woman who worked Dürer really hard
and this assessment of Agnes's character
has really remained as a way of thinking about her for a number of years.
Agnes calls to mind another wife of a leading Northern
painter, this is Margaret van Eyck, wife of
Jan van Eyck, who
we think was born around 1406. She married Jan perhaps around the
age of 27, unfortunately though, when he passed
away in 1441, she was left a widow with several children, but this
did not dampen her entrepreneurial spirit, because we know
that she applied to the Duke of Burgundy to receive half of her husband's annual
pension, and she then took on the running of his
workshop. We think she ran the Van Eyck workshop for at least 10 years
after his death. We do have this arresting portrait,
today in the Groeningemuseum, in Bruges, which was painted by her husband Jan
when she was 33-years-old, and what makes this portrait so remarkable is that her
husband has really emphasised her presence and tried to convey to the
viewer this idea of her as a living, this living speaking image, and importantly
the inscription painted around the frame of the painting
shows that Jan took care to record for posterity the name of both the sitter
and the artist. However, this is not just a passive label. So along top of the
frame, which has been painted to imitate marble, there's a Latin inscription which
translates to, 'My husband Jan painted me on the 15th of June 1439', then along the
bottom of the frame, 'My age being 33 years,
as I can'. So here Jan has
quite literally given voice to his wife's image, she appears to
be speaking to us and this is enhanced by
the fact that she's painted directly addressing the viewer
with her gaze, which was quite an unusual feature for female portraiture at the
time, and we think that this date of the 15th
of June could possibly be her birthday, and what's also interesting is this part
of the inscription, 'As I can', 'Als Ich Kan', plays on the surname of Eyck and is also
seen on the 'Portrait of a Man' by Jan van Eyck in our collection, here at the
National Gallery, which is widely held to be a self-portrait of Jan himself.
That's amazing, do you know if the portraits were ever intended to hang
together? So we think, possibly. We know that in
the centuries after Margaret's death, her portrait was kept under lock and key
in the Painters' Guild in Bruges at least into the 17th century,
and around about that time, there are records that suggest its pendant piece
went missing, so there is a tantalising suggestion
that perhaps our portrait here in the Gallery is its missing half.
I mean, what an incredible image for the Painters' Guild to have,
and that really attests to her importance and her reputation long after
her husband's death in the centuries following that as well. Yeah, absolutely,
Margaret, along with Marietta,
and Agnes and Barbara and Nicolosia, all had really integral roles to play in
ensuring the success of the artist's workshop with which they were related,
not only in their own lifetimes but the kind of ongoing legacy
of these artists and their names, so I hope what people might take from these
women that we've brought to life today is that, as you're walking around
the National Gallery, and looking at the paintings we have here,
they're often the result of many hands at work and of a collaborative practice,
which, in some cases, did involve women working behind the scenes.
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