Lecture: A league of their own…

March 1, 2023, now online

A Calliope Arts-sponsored lecture at the BIF

In 2023, Calliope Arts kicked off its first lecture series at the British Institute of Florence, which aims to share insight and research into female achievement in the fields of art, literature, science and more. In March, during the lecture 'A league of their own', BIF Art History Director Jeremy Boudreau shares the story of women artists and copyists active in Florentine museums through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the aid of artworks, memoirs and historic photographs, the experiences of both local and foreign women are considered against the larger backdrop of Florence’s role as cultural capital in the decades leading to Italian Unification. Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Irene Duclos and Violante Siries Cerroti are just a sampling of the artists featured. From the Uffizi Gallery’s opening in 1770, to the mid-1800s, their starting point was a petition to copy the Old Masters, and roughly 10% of painters copying in Florence during this period were female. Click here to watch the lecture.