Art and Women
03/07/2017
Role of Women
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| Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, 1142-52 |
The role of women has always been emphasized by society to be a homebody and taught to be subservient of men. The lives of most medieval women were organized around work (Chadwick, 43). The class system set in place also set inequality between women of the upper and lower class. Upper-class women had more in common with the men of their class than with peasant women. Most of the women that lived during the Middle Ages remained restricted within the limits by a Christian ethic that stressed obedience and chastity, by the demands of maternal and domestic responsibility, and by the feudal legal system that barred women the control of property. The only way into the arts was to have a male family member usually the father in support of educating his daughters or through convents. They were usually determined by noble birth that was fortunate enough to be at the center of intellectual and artistic life. Convents symbolized an alternative life of marriage to women, which became a "haven for nonconformists and female intellectuals" (Chadwick, 45). A female artist who followed religious standards and whose art was influenced by it was Hildegard of Bingen. Her visionary book took ten years to be completed and is recognized as the most remarkable religious compilation by a woman in Western history.
Expanding markets allowed women to have a new working class. Women in the medieval economy allowed them a place in the guilds, despite restrictions. Few advances for female artists specifically flourished in the Middle Ages, give the Renaissance era a feminist challenge. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, the Renaissance allowed artist to be more free in their artwork, despite the critics that surrounded them. Men still had patriarchal ideologies nonetheless, yet women challenged their artistic capabilities and gave a different lens into art.
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| Sofonisba Anguissola, Self-Portrait, 1561 |
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