1. WAS THERE PROGRESS TOWARD EQUALITY BETWEEN THE SEXES IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE?
Literacy rates rose among women, but not as rapidly as they did among men.
Lutherans placed new emphasis on the need for companionship between spouses.
Women remained excluded from almost all skilled trades and professions.
(See Merry Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, 1993.)

2. Raphael, Madonna of Belvedere (1506)
RAFFAELLO Sanzio, Madonna of Belvedere (Madonna del Prato), 1506
Oil on wood, 113 x 88 cm; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
The Madonna of the Meadow is the first of a series of full-length figure compositions that portray the apocryphal encounter between the Child Jesus and the boy Baptist. The boy Baptist is supposed to have recognized and worshipped Christ as the Redeemer even in their childhood. Raphael makes this clear by letting Christ take the cross from John.
Michelangelo's influence on Raphael is evident in this composition. The pyramidal structure of the figure group recalls Leonardo (whose cartoon for the St Anne was shown in 1506 in the Church of Santissima Annunziata). But Raphael exerts his own balancing capacity on the Leonardesque volumetric conception, infusing it with the idyllic serenity which characterizes his paintings from this period. The work as a whole is structurally harmonic, from the figure group (dominated by the affectionate figure of the Virgin Mary who supports the Child and glances tenderly at the young St John) to the sweeping landscape (made luminous by the mirror-like lake which stretches from one side of the panel to the other). The twisting figures of the two children clearly reflect Michelangelo's figurative research.
SOURCE:

3. Hans Baldung Grien, “Adam and Eve” (1520s)
Hans Baldung Grien ( ), ADAM AND EVE (Strasbourg, 1520s)
Oil on wood, 212 x 85 cm (each panel); Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
Hans Baldung Grien was probably the greatest and the most talented of Dürer's pupils, his works being expressions of both an artistic and spiritual intensity. He exulted particularly in his interest for the female nude, a subject which he treated several times and portrayed in a dramatic confrontation death and therefore with the frailty of the body, thus offering up a macabre interpretation of the classical theme of vanitas.
The two figures are given solidity, and cultures, gracious expressions emerge from their faces, thus revealing the painter's interest for Italian Renaissance art. Baldung Grien was in fact a man of high culture; born into an educated family, he became the most authoritative exponent of the humanistic circle in Strasbourg, belonged to the cultural aristocracy and throughout his life had contacts with intellectuals and thinkers.
SOURCE:

4. Lucas Cranach the Elder, “Judith with the Head of Holofernes” (ca
Oil on wood, 87 x 56 cm; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
The robe of Judith represents the fashion of the 1530s, known from other portraits of Cranach.
SOURCE:

5. Caravaggio, “Judith Beheading Holofernes” (ca. 1598)
Oil on canvas, 145 x 195 cm; Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome
A whole book in the Bible is devoted to Judith, because as a woman she embodies the power of the people of Israel to defeat the enemy, though superior in numbers, by means of cunning and courage. She seeks out Holofernes in his tent, makes him drunk, then beheads him. The sight of their commander's bloodstained head on the battlements of Bethulia puts the enemy to flight.
In the painting, Judith comes in with her maid - surprisingly and menacingly - from the right, against the direction of reading the picture. The general is lying naked on a white sheet. Paradoxically, his bed is distinguished by a magnificent red curtain, whose colour crowns the act of murder as well as the heroine's triumph.
The first instance in which Caravaggio would chose such a highly dramatic subject, the Judith is an expression of an allegorical-moral contest in which Virtue overcomes Evil. In contrast to the elegant and distant beauty of the vexed Judith, the ferocity of the scene is concentrated in the inhuman scream and the body spasm of the giant Holofernes. Caravaggio has managed to render, with exceptional efficacy, the most dreaded moment in a man's life: the passage from life to death. The upturned eyes of Holofernes indicate that he is not alive any more, yet signs of life still persist in the screaming mouth, the contracting body and the hand that still grips at the bed. The original bare breasts of Judith, which suggest that she has just left the bed, were later covered by the semi-transparent blouse.
The roughness of the details and the realistic precision with which the horrific decapitation is rendered (correct down to the tiniest details of anatomy and physiology) has led to the hypothesis that the painting was inspired by two highly publicized contemporary Roman executions; that of Giordano Bruno and above all of Beatrice Cenci in 1599.
SOURCE: http//:

6. Bordone, “Venus and Mars with Cupid” (a Venetian courtesan, 1559/60)
Paris Bordone, "Venus and Mars with Cupid" (Venice, 1559/60)
Oil on canvas, 118 x 130,5 cm; Galleria Doria-Pamphili, Rome
The beautiful courtesan, with a bright scarlet dress that falls in cascades, appears in two guises. One is Venus, with an apple (or an orange, which the infant Jesus also holds sometimes instead of an apple, and which represents desire, so that it has the same metaphorical value), symbol of love and beauty, given to her by Bacchus. The fruit has a multitude of erotic associations and also alludes to the artist's own name (Paris). But she also takes on the allegorical significance of Victory, who usually holds a pomegranate in her right hand and a helm in her left. By this she is, in turn, referring to Mars, disarmed by Cupid, winged boy and the son of Venus, seated on the armor. Mars, according to Aristotle, is rightly linked with Venus, for men of war are strongly inclined to lust.
The victorious Venus rests on the stump of a tree. Behind stands a stag, symbol of nobility and courtesy and emblem of the royal house of France. As well as suggesting who may have commissioned the painting, this hints at a connection between Mars and Actaeon, whose attribute is the stag. Its antlers, resembling the branches of a tree, are periodically renewed, symbolizing the continual rebirth of life. Having got this far, we can attempt a more detailed interpretation of the subject, in which, behind the common mythological theme of Mars, Venus, and Cupid, is concealed an 'Allegory of the victory of love (and of beauty) that always overcomes martial vigour,' a subject that could have been dedicated to two people in love or, on the contrary, reflect the world of courtesans, as might seem more likely from the naked breasts, the colour of the dress, and the blond tresses of the woman.
It is no surprise that between 1649 and 1652, when the painting is mentioned for the first time in the collection, its subject remained an enigma and was not stated. It is clear that this sensuous mythological fable of extraordinary chromatic richness, full of stylistic preciosities as well as decorative qualities in the sumptuousness and beauty of the fabrics, has connections with the world of chivalry, the refinements of aristocratic courtesy, the works of erotic art, and the exquisite and elegant style of the Mannerists, that are all typical of Fontainebleau. We know that the artist visited the French court, perhaps twice, in 1538/39 during the reign of Francis I and in 1559/60, in the time of Francis II. Recently critics have dated this painting to both the first and the second of these visits. The second is more likely given the highly evolved style of the work.
SOURCE:

7. Tintoretto, “The Origin of the Milky Way” (1570)
Oil on canvas, 148 x 165 cm: National Gallery, London
SOURCE:

8. Lucas Cranach the Elder, “Ill-Matched Couple” (1520-22)
Lucas Cranach the Elder, "Ill-Matched Couple: Young Man and Old Woman" ( )
Oil and tempera on red beechwood, 37 x 31 cm; Szépmûvészeti Múzeum, Budapest
This panel in Budapest is regarded as the earliest version of the subject of Ill-Matched Couple. The later versions omit the stone balustrade in the foreground. Although most versions show old man with young woman, here the roles are switched, it is a toothless old woman who is buying the affections of a young man. The painting is not erotic rather grotesque.
SOURCE:

9. Rubens, “The Last Judgment” (1617): removed from the Jesuit church in Neuburg in 1653 for its “offensive nudities”
Peter Paul Rubens, "The Last Judgement" (1617)
Oil on canvas, 606 x 460 cm; Alte Pinakothek, Munich
This painting was commissioned by Duke Wolfgang Wilhelm of Pfalz-Neuburg for the high altar of the Jesuit church in Neuburg an der Donau, but it was removed from their in 1653 because of its "offensive nudities."
SOURCE:

10. Geertruydt Roghman, “Woman Spinning” (1640s)
Geertruydt Roghman, _Woman Spinning" (1640s). Roghman was one of the very few professional women engravers during the "golden age" of 17th-century Dutch art. Her father and brothers were also engravers, but she diverged from their example by focusing on women's occupations.
SOURCE: Merry Wiesner, _Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe_ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 98.

11. “The School Room” (1526): A Protestant vision of the ideal school for both boys and girls; in fact, there were very few schools for girls….
Dick Vellert, "The School Room" (1526; housed in the British Museum).
There may not have been any actual 16th-century school that looked like this, but Vellert's woodcut depicts the ideal of Protestant reformers, where men and older boys engage in serious study upstairs, whil respectable women read, converse, and begin the schooling of small schildren downstairs. In most regions of Europe at this time, boys and girls were segregated at an early age, and adult women had no place to meet except for private homes.
SOURCE: Merry Wiesner, _Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe_ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 120.

12. A Midwife’s Manual from 1545: The birthing cradle and illustrations of the most common positions of the fetus
Illustration from a manual for midwives by Thomas Raynalde, _The Byrth of Mankynde_ (1545). Here we see a birthing stool where the child was delivered, and a warning to pay careful attention to whether the baby emerged headfirst or was a breach birth.
SOURCE: Merry Wiesner, _Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe_ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 68.

13. Frans Hals, “Married Couple in a Garden” (ca 1622)
Lutherans argued that the tale of Adam’s rib symbolized the need for companionship between spouses, and Catholic writers soon adopted a similar ideal.
Frans Hals, "Married Couple in a Garden" (ca 1622)
Oil on canvas, 140 x 166,5 cm; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
It is assumed by critics that the sitters are Isaac Massa and his wife Beatrix van der Laen. However, it is debated by others. The pose of the recently married couple, leaning against the trunk of a tree, emphasizes the casual air of the portrait. The ivy twining itself around the tree and curling round at the woman's feet, who, in turn, has her hand negligently resting on the man's shoulder, symbolizes the permanence of the marriage. The thistle growing next to the man in the bare patch of ground at the bottom left of the picture may be an allusion to God's word to Adam after the Fall: "Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee." (Genesis 3, 17f.) Thus, the thistle may symbolize labour, itself a consequence of the Fall. In puritanical Calvinist ethics, which had already gained considerable currency in the Netherlands, work was considered a cardinal virtue, and achievement a central aspect of personal conduct.
Frans Hals's work for this bourgeois couple included an Italian landscape background on the right - a sunlit villa, marble statue and spring - whose purpose was to create the impression of elevated rank and dignified elegance. However, the background features are fanciful, bearing no relation whatsoever to the real world of the couple. Rather than the couple's country residence, scrutiny of iconographical details shows the villa to be the temple of Juno, the goddess of marriage, whose attribute was the peacock.
SOURCE:

14. “Recipe for Marital Bliss” (ca
“Recipe for Marital Bliss” (ca. 1680): The husband should beat the wife for laziness, talkativeness, vanity, or chasing after other men; the wife should beat the husband for drunkenness, laziness, or failure to support his family.
Abraham Bach, _Recipe for Marital Bliss_, ca According to this woodcut, sold as a single sheet, the husband should beat the wife for laziness, talkativeness, vanity, or chasing after other men; the wife should beat the husband for drunkenness, laziness, or failure to support his family.
SOURCE: Merry Wiesner, _Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe_ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 18.

15. Sofonisba Angissola, “Portrait of the Artist’s Sisters Playing Chess” (Cremona, 1555)
Sofonisba Anguissola (b. ca. 1530, Cremona, d. 1625, Palermo)
"Portrait of the Artist's Sisters Playing Chess" (1555)
Oil on canvas, 72 x 97 cm; Muzeum Narodowe, Poznan
That women could be intellectually accomplished and highly rational, even strategic, are the complementary themes of a family portrait showing Anguissola's three sisters playing chess. In this painting, which Vasari saw hanging in the artist's family home in Cremona in 1566, the chivalric game of chess takes place in an idealized landscape familiar in late medieval courtly images of the game and not in a tavern or other questionable locale seen in other contemporary representations of gaming. On the far left Lucia looks out at the viewer, dominating our gaze as her arm and obvious expertise dominate the chess board. She has removed two of Minerva's pieces from the game and the younger sister opens her mouth and raises her hand as if to speak. Their youngest companion, Europa, smiles gleefully at the match, carefully observed by an old maid servant at the far right.
The three Anguissola women are members of a natural nobility capable of entertaining themselves, their status emphasized by the rich surface detail on their brocaded clothes and the fine Turkish carpet set over their table.
SOURCE:

16. Judith Leyster, Self-Portrait, ca. 1635
Judith Leyster (Dutch, ), Self-Portrait, ca 1635
Oil on canvas, 72.3 x 65.3 cm; National Gallery of Art, Washington
Leyster was extremely successful in her day as a portrait and genre specialist. Little is known about her early training but she was mentioned in about about Haarlem as being a local artist. In her early twenties she became the only female member of the Haarlem painters' guild and soon had students of her own. Even though her work is closely identified with that of Hals, their relationship remains unclear. What is known is that she successfully sued Hals for a breach of ethics after he took on one of her students.
SOURCE:

17. Judith Leyster, “Carousing Couple” (1630)
Oil on canvas, 68 x 54 cm; Musée du Louvre, Paris
Judith Leyster is one of the very few women to have been accepted as a member of the Haarlem Guild of Painters. She worked briefly in the studio of Frans Hals, and many of her paintings were long attributed to him. Like Hals she was influenced by the style of Caravaggio. From the mid-1620s, she concentrated on vividly illuminated genre scenes, generally featuring half figures of merry musicians, gamblers, and whores. Leyster's work can be distinguished from that of Hals through her generally more discordant handling of colour, her sketchier treatment of hands, the wryly distorted smiles of her figures and her altogether flightier brushwork.
SOURCE:

18. Judith Leyster, “The Proposition” (Amsterdam, 1631)
Judith Leyster (Amsterdam, ), "The Proposition" (1631)
Oil on panel, 31 x 24 cm; Mauritshuis, The Hague
Although a number of works have been ascribed to Leyster since her rediscovery in the 1890s, the number attributable to her is small. Apart from a few Halsian portraits, a single still-life, and one or two watercolours of tulips, they are genre paintings. The earliest secure ones dated 1629 clearly show that from the start Frans Hals was a principal source of her themes and style. But Leyster did not work consistently in Frans Hals's style. In the early thirties she began to make pictures of 'modern figures' that have a communality with young Miense Molenaer's early works. They obviously had contact before their marriage; at this time they shared studio props and models. But more important for her than the early efforts of Molenaer were Dirk Hals's small daylight and night scenes in interiors. She learned as much from Dirk as from Frans Hals's motifs and style.
An intriguing painting of these years that is closely related to Dirk in composition and technique offers a view of an old man displaying coins to a dramatically lit young woman sewing by lamplight. His hand resting on her shoulder suggests that he is not offering payment for her labour as a seamstress. Is he making a proposition for sex which she virtuously ignores? This interpretation has been offered, and with good reason. The theme had been used by northern artists since the Renaissance, and was not rare with the Caravaggisti. To be sure, Leyster's young woman has nothing in common with the readily seductable recipients of offers of purchased love depicted by earlier artists. Leyster's young woman steadfastly remains occupied with her sewing, a model of domestic virtue. If this reading of the subject is accepted, the painting can be viewed as Leyster's critical response to the salacious treatment of the subject by male artists who demean woman by representing them as sex objects exploited by men. It also would qualify the picture as Leyster's only painting that treats a feminist issue. However, it also has been argued that the painting is not a precursor of feminist ideology, but a depiction of a Dutch tradition of offering a woman coins as an invitation to court, a subject that is also unambiguously represented by Leyster's predecessors and contemporaries. Is Leyster's old man a dishonourable seducer or a respectable suitor? The interpretation is open to question.
SOURCE:

19. Anne Bonny (1725): This famous Irish woman pirate was based in the Bahamas. She retired to South Carolina, married, and lived 80 years.
The Englishwoman Anne Bonney as a pirate, from the _Historie der Engelsche zeerovers (Amsterdam, 1725). Bonney was one of a small number of early modern women who chose to dress in men's clothing to enjoy an independent life. She became quite famous, and many songs and stories were written about her adventures in the Caribbean.
SOURCE: Merry Wiesner, _Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe_ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 55.

20. A French knitwear workshop, 18th century: Women prepare the yarn at the spinning wheels, and the family father weaves the yarn into cloth
A French knitwear workshop in the late 18th century. The spinning wheel at left prepares the yarn, the device in the center is spooling it, and the famly father at right weaves the yarn into cloth.
SOURCE: T.C.W. Blanning, ed., _The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Europe_ (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 49.

21. Men and women work side by side in this metalworking shop.
An old-fashioned metalworking shop, where the women of the household worked alongside the men, and the family's children usually served as apprentices.
SOURCE: Donald Kagan, Steven Ozment, and Frank Turner, _The Western Heritage_, 9th edn (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2007), p. 508.

22. Women managers run this fancy Parisian dress shop in the 18th century, when more and more middle-class customers sought to emulate court fashion
Eighteenth-century illustration of a Parisian dress shop, supervised by women managers, seeking to meet the growing demand for fashionable attire, as the middle class sought to emulate the court nobility.
SOURCE: Donald Kagan, Steven Ozment, and Frank Turner, _The Western Heritage_, 9th edn (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2007), p. 498.

23. “In the Salon of Madame Geoffrin in 1755” (the milieu in which the idea of women’s equality arose)
LEMONNIER, Anicet-Charles-Gabriel, "In the Salon of Madame Geoffrin in 1755"
(1812); Oil on canvas; Château du Malmaison, Rueil
SOURCE:
Many of the important personages of the period assembled in the salon of Madame Geoffrin around a bust of Voltaire.

24. FRENCH WOMEN’S LIFE CYCLES, 1750 and 1960
From Joan Scott and Louise Tilly, Women, Work, and Family (New York, 1978).
In Europe there was no mass movement for women’s equality before the 1880s….
Source: Louise Tilly and Joan Scott, Woman, Work, and Family (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978), pp. 222, 225.

25. Lucas Cranach the Elder, “An Allegory of Melancholy” (1528)
Panel, 113 x 72 cm; National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
Although the concept is radically different, the iconography and imagery of the picture are strongly influenced by Dürer's engraving of "Melancholia".
SOURCE:

26. Entrance to Salpêtrière Hospital, founded in Paris in 1656
By 1780 it was the largest hospital in the world, with 10,000 patients, many of them suffering mental illness, plus 300 imprisoned prostitutes.
Jean-Martin Charcot ( ), director of the Salpêtrière lunatic asylum outside Paris.
SOURCE:
Entrance to the Salpetriere hospital, a public hospital established in 1656 by order of King Louis XIV on the site of an old gunpowder factory. Already by 1789 it had beds for 10,000 patients and a prison wing for another 300 prisoners. In addition to providing medical care for the poor, it was something of a dumping ground for categories of people that the authorities did not know what to do with, including habitual prostitutes, beggars, petty criminals, and the insane. Philippe Pinel began to transform it in the early 19th century into an innovator in the humane treatment of the mentally ill, and under the direction of Charcot, who worked there for 30 years, it became the world's foremost center for neurological research.

27. Inmates of Salpêtrière who typify “dementia, megalomania, acute mania, melancholia, idiocy, hallucination, erotomania and paralysis” (1857)
In the 19th century 80% of lunatics committed to asylums were women…
Armand Gautier, lithograph from 1857 set in the gardens of the Hospice de la Salpêtrière, with personifications of dementia, megalomania, acute mania, melancholia, idiocy, hallucination, erotomania and paralysis. Reprinted in Madness: A Brief History (ISBN ), from which this version is taken.
SOURCE: