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The anthology of original sources from c.1400 to 1650, translated form Italian or Latin, and accompanied by introductions and bibliographies, is concerned with women’s varied involvement with the visual arts and material culture of their day.
The readers gains a sense of women not only as patrons of architecture, painting, sculpture and the applied arts, but as users of art both on special occasions, like civic festivities or pilgrimages, and in everyday social and devotional life. As they seek to adapt and embellish their persons and their environments, acquire paintings for solace or prestige, or cultivate relationships with artists, women emerge as discerning participants in the consumer culture of their time, and often as lively commentators on it. Their fervent participation in religious life is also seen in their use of art in devotional rituals, or their commissioning of tombs or altarpieces to perpetuate their memory and aid them in the afterlife.
Part I The material world of women
1. Buildings and interiors
2. Beauty, quality and elegance: objects in the house
3. Clothes: legislation, description and uses
4. Ceremony and travel: women participants and observers
Part II Women, secular art and artists: commissioning, buying, preserving
5. The building and embellishment of palaces, villas and gardens
6. Women and their use and commissioning of portraits
7. Relationships with artists
Part III Women, devotion and art
8. Private devotion
9. Communal devotion: spectacles, rituals, miraculous images and pilgrimage
10. Public devotional patronage: personal and collective
Part IV Female artists, craftswomen and writers
11. Female artists and craftswomen
12. Women writing on art and artefacts
Index