Women Artists and Artisans in Venice and the Veneto, 1400-1750

This book of essays highlights the lives, careers, and works of art of women artists and artisans in Venice and its territories from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The collection represents the first fruits of an ongoing research program launched by Save Venice, Inc., Women Artists of Venice, directed by Professor Tracy Cooper of Temple University, in conjunction with a conservation program, led by Melissa Conn, Director of Save Venice, Inc. Inspired by a growing body of research that has resurrected female artists and artisans in Florence and Bologna during the last decade, the Save Venice project seeks to recover the history of women artists and artisans born or active in the Venetian republic in the early modern period. Topics include their contemporary reception — or historical silence — and current scholarship positioning them as individuals and as an underrepresented category in the history of art and cultural heritage.

Cooper Tracy :

Tracy E. Cooper is Professor of Art History at Temple University and on the Board of Directors of Save Venice, Inc., where she is director of the Women Artists in Venice research program. She is best known for Palladio’s Venice: Architecture and Society in a Renaissance Republic (Yale, 2006), winner of the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize from the Renaissance Society of America.

“…marks a pioneering contribution to our understanding of early modern Venetian women visual artists … A sumptuous feast of scholarly perspectives and case studies that weave the lives and work of female artists into the multi-textured fabric of the Serenissima, this groundbreaking volume is the first to bring Venetian women artists to the table, placing them in dialogue with one another as well as with the female members of the wider intellectual and creative circles to which they belonged; with the women and men of the collecting elite for whom they worked; with their male artist peers; and with the richness of the arts of Venice.”
-April Oettinger, Woman's Art Journal, April 1, 2025