Who were the great female painters of classical Greece and why do we know so little about them?

When addressing the issue of women artists throughout history, a very limited view has prevailed: that of starting from the Middle Ages.

Therefore, it is said that the first woman artist in Europe was the "painter and servant of God" Ende, who signed, around the year 970, together with the painter Emetério, the manuscripts of the Blessed of Liébana, preserved in the cathedral of Girona.

Other medieval nuns would take the next steps, and thus we would arrive at Renaissance Italy.

In the 16th century, Giorgio Vasari dedicated two chapters, in his study on the lives of illustrious artists, to the women artists he knew: he provides data on the interesting sculptor Properzia de' Rossi, and above all, on a brilliant painter, Sofonisba Anguissola, the great portraitist of Philip II.

From that point on, the trajectory of painting in the hands of women would be traced to this day.

However, a few years ago, my colleague Miguel Ángel Elvira and I asked ourselves: were there no female painters in Antiquity?

We studied the problem and, over time, we published a short book entitled Women Artists of Ancient Greece .

A paragraph in history

Greek and Roman theorists who wrote about art already recognized the existence of female painters: Pliny, in particular, anticipated Vasari by centuries and brought them together in a paragraph in his Natural History .

Women also painted: Timarete, daughter of Micon, [represented] a Diana, found on a tablet from Ephesus, executed in a very ancient style; Irene, daughter and disciple of the painter Cratinus, painted a young woman, found at Eleusis; Calypso, painted an old man, the conjurer Theodore, and the dancer Alcisthenes; Aristarete, daughter and disciple of Nearchus, [represented] an Aesculapius. Laia of Cyzicus [who remained] always a virgin, was in Rome when M. Varron was young and painted, both with brush and palette knife on ivory, portraits, mainly of women; in Naples [are found] an old woman painted on a large piece of wood, and her self-portrait beside a mirror. No one had such a quick hand in painting, and yet her artistic value was so great that her price far exceeded that of Sopolis and Dionysius, the most famous portrait painters. famous artists of their time, whose paintings fill the art galleries. A certain Olympias was also a painter, of whom it is only remembered that she had Autobulus as a disciple."

However, this point of view, which is limited to the Hellenistic period, does not seem sufficient to us.

It is worth beginning our analysis with female creators in the field of mythology who, although not, as such, "real", serve as a reference.

The mythological origins

There on Olympus, in time immemorial, the gods Athena and Hephaestus shared dominion over the arts.

Hephaestus, relying on the strength of his muscles, took up sculpture and metalwork.

Athena, more intelligent, mistress of the Mycenaean palaces, turned her attention to the meticulous and creative work that the ladies and slaves carried out in their rooms: she was responsible for the weaving, the embroidery, the ivory sculptures and the paintings that covered the walls.

Over time, epic poetry would deepen such a suggestive division, firmly rooted, on the other hand, in a patriarchal mentality.

Thus, legends arose such as that of Philomela, who embroidered on a carpet the crimes of her brother-in-law Tereus — a monarch — who raped her and then tore out her tongue so that she could not report him to her sister, Procne.

At that time, the image of the great "Homeric" weavers also developed: Helen, who entertained herself in Troy while Paris faced the Greek heroes, embroidering precisely those battles; and, especially, Penelope, a model of conjugal fidelity, who spent months embroidering a cloth—which she unraveled every night—to avoid having to choose a new husband during the interminable absence of her husband, Ulysses.

In the following centuries, women continued to dedicate themselves to their embroidery and created some as grand as the "peplos of Athena", tunics made by entire teams of young women in a room in the Parthenon.

This task was respected by all and gave rise to another legend: that of Arachne, a young weaver who believed she was capable of surpassing Athena herself.

She was defeated (how could a mortal compare to a goddess?), but her boldness would become, over the centuries, the proclamation and cry of honor of artists: Velázquez himself would portray this story in his painting The Spinners .

The 'real' painters

The last part of our study leaves aside fabrics and enters the field of painting on wood, the "true" one, for ancient writers, since there are indisputable literary references to it.

We begin from the moment when certain women began to feel capable of leaving their domestic looms to enter their parents' workshops and work alongside them.

The first artist we know of is actually an anonymous author from the 7th century BC.

Known as "the young Corinthian," she invented the portrait genre: she simply drew the profile of her beloved to keep his memory close.

More than a century later, we discover, in the painting of a vase, a painter in a vase workshop.

However, these are still very isolated figures. The true history of Greek women painters—among whom are those remembered by Pliny—begins after the reign of Alexander.

Then lived Helen the Egyptian, Timarete, Irene of Athens, Anexandra, Aristarete, among others, who were trained with their parents, all of them recognized painters.

Through detailed studies, we have tried to place them in their context, although, we must confess, in most cases we have not been able to attribute concrete works to them, not even through copies.

Yes, we can imagine the mastery of the great Laia of Cyzicus, a brilliant artist of the 1st century BC. From her time dates a portrait of a woman in mosaic, preserved in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, which can be considered the iconographic or compositional starting point of the "Faiyum portraits", of which hundreds have come down to us, in the Nile valley.

It was easier to approach these figures, and other painters of the same period, through paintings found in Pompeii, Herculaneum, or faraway Egypt. Several of the frescoes discovered in the cities of Vesuvius show the activity of female artists in their studios.

The painter who most interested Pliny was Laia. He was fascinated by her virginity and her preference for working with female models. In the author's opinion, if she always remained a "maiden," it was not for religious reasons, but "by the pure integrity of her mind." It was "the strength of her modesty" that kept her from male models.

We can smile at such naivety, but we must not forget that this criterion served as a theoretical basis, during the Middle Ages, to distance artists from heroic and mythological themes, so prosperous in anatomy.

*Marta Carrasco Ferrer is a full professor of History of Art and Humanities at Camilo José Cela University, in Spain.

This article was originally published on the academic news site The Conversation and is republished here under a Creative Commons license. Read the original version (in Spanish) here.