Women Representing Women

Women Representing Women

Many female artists in the 17th century used women as subject matter. Images of women are powerful because women have often been treated as the second sex. Such images are often paradoxical in their power. Female artists often times represent the most extreme representations of women’s subservience in effort to convey their messages. Two instances are in Elisabetta Sirani’s, Our Lady of Sorrows and in Geertruyd Roghman’s, A Woman Ruffing. I will contend that in both pieces the female artists have integrated subject matter, light, space and symbolism to create both a characterization of female and emphasis on man’s prevailing role in woman’s life. In these two pieces I find substantiation that the female artists have been influenced by hierarchically ordered male-female relations.
Elizabetta Sirani’s 1657 piece, Our Lady of Sorrows is a religious etching depicting the Virgin Mary. She shows her mourning the death of Christ. ...