Word: sofonisba
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Dates: during 1977-1977
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Then there were dozens of painters who, through changes of fashion, dispersal of their work or simply the fact of being women, fell into the oubliette. Nothing is more fragile than an artist's reputation. Names like Anne Vallayer-Coster, Sofonisba Anguissola, Judith Leyster or Louise Moillon are scarcely commonplace. Yet the quality of their work is incontestable: Vallayer-Coster's The White Soup Bowl (1771), with its beautifully rendered planes and rotundities of steaming tureen and crinkled napkin, comes close to Chardin in reverent and cadenced description of commonplace things. To see such works resurrected in this...
...eyeline. Heavily influenced by Caravaggio, Gentileschi's paintings were determinedly "unfeminine," full of darkness, gore and gesticulation: witness the candlelit hand and shadowed face of Judith, like a waning moon, in Judith and Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (circa 1625). A few other late-Renaissance women, like Sofonisba Anguissola, got more commissions than the forthright Artemisia; they moved with more ease at court and could play society better. But there is good reason to regard Artemisia Gentileschi as the most distinguished woman painter to have worked between the 16th century and the end of the 19th, when Sonia...
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