Articles

‘Virgo faciebat’: Artistic Self-Fashioning in Latin Inscriptions by Women Artists in Early Modern Italy

---

Abstract

This article examines the Latin inscriptions used by early modern women painters as sites of rhetorical self-fashioning shaped by classical authority, humanist culture, and gendered constraints on learning. Taking the Latinate signatures and epigraphic texts of Sofonisba Anguissola (c.1532–1625), Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614), and Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–after 1654) as case studies, it argues that—unlike previously thought—women’s use of Latin did not constitute a distinctively feminine language of authorship, but rather participated in the same rhetorical system that governed male artistic self-presentation. Informed by the wider effort in Renaissance Italy to raise the status of the visual arts, that system was heavily grounded in the emulation of classical exempla as well as the reception of classical sources to claim virtù. In inscriptional practice, this was reflected by the popularity of the so-called Plinian signature, as well as the emulation of technical ideas inherited from Antiquity. By analysing the grammatical choices, classical allusions, and placement of Latin inscriptions in paintings by women, the article demonstrates how female artists with differing levels of access to Latin education adapted these humanist conventions to their own professional and social circumstances. While constrained by ideals of chastity and exemplary female virtue inherited from classical and mediaeval sources, women painters nonetheless deployed Latinate inscriptions strategically to negotiate authority, learning, and artistic identity. In doing so, their inscriptions emerge as an active answer to the question how to reconcile humanist demands for public honour with restrictions on women’s public actions and speech.

Keywords: Latin inscriptions, women artists, self-fashioning, artistic authorship, classical reception, humanism, Pliny the Elder, early modern Italy

How to Cite:

Berendse, H. F., (2026) “‘Virgo faciebat’: Artistic Self-Fashioning in Latin Inscriptions by Women Artists in Early Modern Italy”, Journal of Latin Cosmopolitanism and European Literatures 13. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/jolcel.99838