Sirani were the ablest women painters

Lavinia Fontana and Elisabetta Sirani were the ablest women painters whose travels did not extend beyond Italy. The first was a member of the old Roman Academy, and Pope Gregory XIII. made her his portraitist in ordinary. She was born of good family in Bologna, anno 1552. It was her father that shaped the laggard talents of Lodovico Carracci,oil paintings for sale, and from him came the girl's first lessons in drawing. Lavinia spent most of her life in Rome, where, for close on two generations, she held society by the austere truth of her portraiture. Ladies of high rank vied with one another to become her sitters, and a long red line of cardinals sat to her. Pope Paul the Fifth was among Lavinia's models; very high prices were paid readily for her work, and not a few noblemen wished to marry her; but the artist remained true to the young Count of Imola, Giovanni Paolo Zappi, a good, kind, simple-hearted fellow, an aristocratic Barnaby Rudge. Him she married, and it was her ill-hap to see his simplicity repeat itself in one of their two sons, a lad who kept the Pope's antechamber merry. art oil painting online
My artist's style, though modelled to some extent on that of the Carracci, has a distinction of its own. Even the arid Kügler gives Lavinia his rare good word, reckoning her a better artist than her father, and adding: "Her work is clever and bold, and in portraiture, especially, she has left good things."

Does Elisabetta Sirani take precedence of Lady Waterford? Perhaps they may be regarded as two equal queens in the world of woman's art, each with a beautiful artistic intellect. Even at the age of nineteen, as old Bartsch admits, Elisabetta etched exquisite plates; and,modern abstract oil painting, before she was twenty-three, her paintings were sought after by all the patron-critics of her country. Yet her male rivals hinted that she was dishonest, that she did not paint her own pictures, but had "ghosts" to win fame and fortune for her—especially her father, a poor "ghost," afflicted with inherited gout. Elisabetta happily soon turned the sneer against her rivals. This she did by working before an audience of distinguished persons, like Cosimo, Crown Prince of Tuscany, who on May 13th, 1664, stood by whilst she painted a likeness of his uncle, the Prince Leopold. wholesale oil paintings