Unsung figures in the history art, marginalised and poorly documented, women artists of the Renaissance have largely been ignored. We will look at the lives and careers of the best known, including miniaturists, nuns, and wildly successful portraitists. In addition we will consider a number of female patrons of the arts, who became amongst the most powerful women in the sixteenth century.

Lecture 1: Women Artists I

We look at the career opportunities and challenges for women seeking to become artists in the 15th-16th centuries, and the types of artwork they produced, considerably more restricted than their male counterparts.

Lecture 2: Women Artists II

This session focuses two highly successful painters, Lavinia Fontana and Artemisia Gentileschi, who pushed the boundaries of ‘womanly’ subject matter and competed seriously with men in the commercial art world. 

Lecture 3: Women Patrons

We turn to wealthy and powerful women who commissioned art – invariably from men, including Raphael, Mantegna and Correggio. They range from abbesses and rich widows, to rulers such as Isabella d’Este and the supremely powerful Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands.

(Booking Thursday 16 September)

Paula Nuttall has published widely on her specialist subject of Renaissance art. She has taught, amongst others, at the Courtauld Institute and the British Institute of Florence, and, until her recent retirement, was Director of the V and A Medieval and Renaissance Year Course.