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Female self portrait painter10/2/2023 Immediately before the lines just quoted, Higgie refers to the mass production of mirrors made possible by a German invention of 1835, but that date can hardly represent the liberating moment she has in mind, since it would exclude almost half the paintings reproduced in her book, including some particularly strong examples from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Higgie begins her account with the story of Marcia, whose mirror-assisted picture can in turn be traced back to a report by Pliny the Elder in AD 77 of a female painter named Iaia of Cyzicus-the first recorded allusion in Western literature, as it happens, to a self-portrait painted with a mirror. The point is well taken, even if the chronology behind these somewhat breathless pronouncements is notably loose. “Now, with the aid of a looking glass, they had a willing model, and one who was available around the clock: themselves.” “It meant that, for the first time, their exclusion from the life class didn’t stop them painting figures,” she declares early in The Mirror and the Palette. Studies of the self-portrait have often emphasized the centrality of the mirror to the development of the genre, but Jennifer Higgie argues that its reflecting surface proved particularly liberating for female painters. All she needed has been laid out with precision by the medieval illuminator: a set of brushes and paints, a support for the picture, a palette, and a mirror. It’s clearly not by chance that Boccaccio describes Marcia as both legally independent and a lifelong virgin, or that he tells us how she avoided painting images of men, lest the ancient custom of rendering them in the nude conflict with her “maidenly delicacy.” What she obviously could do, on the other hand, was paint her own portrait. Other institutions, from the apprenticeship system to the royal academies, posed related obstacles, as did, of course, the pressures exerted by husbands and families. Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971) famously adduced the taboo on drawing from the nude model, a fundamental exercise for anyone who aspired to paint those grand scenes from myth and history that long ranked as the pinnacle of the art. While a half-century of feminist art history has provided us with all too many such passages, it has also taught us to recast the terms in which they are formulated-to understand women’s relative lack of artistic achievement not as a consequence of “the feminine mind” but of institutional constraints that, deliberately or not, prevented them from receiving the training and encouragement that might have enabled their gifts to flourish. The Greek painter Irene “merited some praise,” he explains elsewhere in the book, “because the art of painting is mostly alien to the feminine mind and cannot be attained without that great intellectual concentration which women, as a rule, are very slow to acquire.” Presumably she would have been less amused to learn that Boccaccio nonetheless seems to have judged the admirable Marcia an anomaly. It’s tempting to imagine that the unknown illuminator was also a woman, who perhaps amused herself by multiplying her own features in multiplying Marcia’s. Both outpacing and outearning her contemporaries, the energetic Marcia is said to have worked in ivory as well as paint, but the only object Boccaccio specifically describes is a self-portrait, “painted on a panel with the aid of a mirror.” A charming illumination from an early-fifteenth-century French manuscript shows Marcia at work on the picture, her visage tripled, as she gazes at the small convex mirror reflecting her face in her left hand, while her right wields a brush with which she touches up the lips of the painted image. Among the legendary figures whose stories Giovanni Boccaccio relates in Famous Women (1361–1362) is a Roman virgin named Marcia, who earned her fame as much for her skills as an artist, he tells us, as for her chastity.
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