Artemisia Gentileschi's self-portrait, Allegory of Painting, painted in 1630, has activated a complex discussion of female artistic identity in which performance is tied to concerns with status. This thesis addresses an earlier history of development in allegorical self-portraiture in the work of the sixteenth-century Bolognese artist, Lavinia Fontana, and her seventeenth-century successor, Elisabetta Sirani. I argue that the female artist's negotiation for status was played out in the transformation from a more official mode of self presentation, such as Fontana's Self-Portrait at the Keyboard , to a deliberate performative shift of embodied personification in her self-portrait as Judith with the head of Holofernes and her later self portraits as St. Barbara in the Apparition of the Madonna and Child to the Five Saints. This negotiation of artistic status continues with Sirani's self-portraits in Judith and the Allegory of Painting, and as what I suggest are more ambiguous and ambitious representations of anti-heroines, Cleopatra and Circe. I also discuss the important role that the emerging genre of biography plays in the female artist's struggle for status. The thesis explores the shift in visual conventions in relation to discourses of artistic identity, gender and genre---such as the donnesca mano---that circulated in Renaissance historiography in Italy, and more specifically, in the cultural milieu of Bologna.

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