Elisabetta Sirani
1638–1665 · 3 works
Elisabetta Sirani built a professional career as a painter, printmaker, and teacher in seventeenth-century Bologna. The daughter of a painter, she worked within a city where women could find artistic training and patronage, while also helping other women develop their practice. Her brief life produced a substantial body of work and a surviving record of commissions. Religious subjects offer one way into her art: familiar stories depend on the placement of bodies, hands, and gazes. Drawings and prints make those choices visible with relatively few means.
3 works · 1655–1662
Compare the hands and faces in a Holy Family scene. Which small gesture gives the sacred figures a sense of human closeness?
Adriaen van Ostade
The Painter, c. 1647
Aelbert Cuyp
View of IJsselmonde Seen Across the New Maas, c. 1640
Agostino Carracci
The Sacrifice of Pelias to Neptune, 1584
