Elisabetta Sirani (1638-1665) est une femme peintre du XVIIème siècle bolonais. La ville de Bologne mérite en soi un discours philogyne, dans la mesure où plusieurs femmes étaient non seulement reconnues pour leur érudition, mais également diplômées dans les domaines littéraire et scientifique. Elisabetta Sirani ne déroge pas à la règle en associant une solide culture générale et une profession considérée en premier lieu comme virile : la peinture. Le profil d’Elisabetta Sirani présente à la fois un intérêt biographique et iconographique ; double orientation reliant étroitement art et littérature. Le personnage d’Elisabetta Sirani s’inscrit également dans l’histoire, superposant les différents genres littéraires. Le XIXème siècle est en ce sens révélateur de la revisitation d’un fait divers en mythe. / Elisabetta Sirani (1638-1665) was a Bolognese 17th century women painter. Bologna was considered a philogynous city, since many Bolognese women were famous for their erudition and for being laureates in literature and sciences. Elisabetta Sirani was not an exception, she was a well-educated and cultured woman whose occupation as a painter was mostly seen as a virile one. Elisabetta Sirani’s profile presents both a biographical and iconographic interest ; a double orientation that closely relates art to literature. Elisabetta Sirani was part of history too as her character was reintrepreted by various literary genres. The 19th century revealed the reinterpretation of a chronicle into a myth.

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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