"Maestra mia": Artemisia Gentileschi, Diana di Rosa, and Women Artists in Seventeenth-Century Neapolitan Workshops

Abstract

This thesis examines the artists Artemisia Gentileschi and Diana di Rosa to re-evaluate the fortunes of female painters in Naples during the first half of the seventeenth century. Using the methodology termed “Thinking from Women’s Lives,” the thesis aims to analyze previously known archival evidence and to address gaps within it concerning the lives and artistic education of these two women, particularly their role in teaching their daughters to paint. The thesis then challenges the persistent attribution of paintings to single artists in the context of the Neapolitan workshop. Based on the reconstruction of a highly familial and consolidated Neapolitan workshop structure, it appears likely that larger, multi-figure paintings were completed by many more artists than just the individual artists named or the occasionally noted “workshop” suggests. Through this examination, the thesis points to evidence for a proliferation of female artists in seventeenth-century Naples whose historical presence has been rendered absent by the structure of the archive and art history’s longstanding investment in the single-authored painting. The thesis concludes by calling for expanding methodologies to highlight the work and lives of these women.