Expanding Worlds: Italian Women Artists and Cross-Cultural Encounters in Early Modernity

Bridging the disciplines of art history and cross-cultural studies using a feminist interpretive lens, this dissertation challenges historical narratives of exceptionalism and Eurocentrism through analysis of patterns in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women’s engagement with expanding worlds through their networks and visual representations of world-traveling people and imported objects. To arrive at an inclusive understanding of the significant relationship between the visual arts and cultural exchange, this dissertation offers a new perspective on the cross-cultural circulation that hallmarked early modern Europe by foregrounding women artists, who as a group have been traditionally excluded from the historical record. A data-driven methodology is used to analyze European women’s access to cross-cultural encounters with cosmopolitan courtiers, enslaved people, and imported curios of Asia, Africa, and the Americas through a database of 249 artists designed and populated for this dissertation. Visual analysis of artworks by a subset of these artists is conducted to understand the relationship between women’s worldly encounters and their subsequent creative choices in depicting artistic subjects that came to be considered exotic, thus positioning the artist as cultural mediator. This research makes a dual contribution: first, it challenges persistent narratives that frame women artists’ access to the world as unavoidably limited by gendered social norms. Second, it constructs a new narrative centered on cross-cultural exchange that moves beyond the limits imposed by traditional accounts that focus exclusively on male artists or treat women artists as anomalies. The first key finding of this dissertation challenges popular narratives that present early modern women artists as “magnificent exceptions” or as products of unusually tolerant environments. This project decenters traditional focal points of individual artists and cities through a database used to map artists’ connections and sites of encounter. The data visualized through maps, graphs, and tables demonstrate the geographic breadth and continuity of European women’s artistic activity. These analyses evince many nodes of activity to support the artists’ cross-cultural exposure. The volume of representations in which women artists engaged with wider worlds demonstrates that they actively participated in the history of cross-cultural circulation, rather than existing outside it. By restoring women’s rightful places in this history, we gain the opportunity to assess whether women artists challenged pre-existing imagery and attitudes of cultural imperialism. The second key finding stems from case studies organized by scales of physical and cultural distance, a structure that enables assessment of the relationship between the intimacy of the artist-subject encounter and the quality of the resulting representation. First, investigation of portraits of world-travelers artists encountered in courtly settings addresses whether women’s depictions aligned with conventional representations of the same subjects. Then, examination of women’s representations of manufactured curiosities and naturalia from Asia, Africa, and the Americas explores how such depictions distinctively relate to European desires for universal power and possession. Finally, this dissertation works to center the erasures of Black figures in visual constructions by women artists in early modern Italy by assessing how women’s representational choices participate in the perpetuation or subversion of pre-existing cultural narratives. These three lines of analysis circumvent the draw to exceptionalize certain figures by focusing on sets of relationships and bringing unnamed figures into the framework. Ultimately, although the artists’ choices conform to some racially biased conventions, they also open the possibility of collaboration with foreign individuals; pay homage to the production of artists from different continents; and create expansive roles for imaginary characters represented as Black. This analysis contributes to our understanding of women’s complex intersectional positions in matrices of variable power and access, and to the debate on their roles as producers of knowledge and culture.