ABSTRACT
‘A very great miracle of nature’; ‘most singular’; ‘a noble ornament’: these were some of the ways in which early-modern women artists (namely, Properzia de’ Rossi, Lavinia Fontana, and Marietta Tintoretto) were characterised by their contemporaneous male biographers. 1 Their comments often designate the woman artist as something unnatural, as ‘other’, as a beautiful exception. Yet by the seventeenth century the woman artist was also becoming somewhat more common throughout Europe, as we see reflected in genre paintings and prints. 2 Before we delve into historical aspects of the early-modern woman artist, let us first consider how two Dutch genre paintings featuring women artists demonstrate contrasting approaches by male contemporaries to these artists’ presence and representation.
