• • • • • • |
|
Heroinas The history of Western art is full of images of seductive, indulgent, submissive, defeated and enslaved women. But the women whom this exhibition centres on are strong women: active, independent, defiant, inspired, creative, domineering and triumphant. Or, to use a key word that has been at the top of the feminist agenda for the last few decades: this exhibition is interested in images which could be sources of “empowerment” for women themselves. Lists of heroines have a long history, starting with the first catalogues of famous females by Hesiod and Homer, in which women appeared only as “accessories” to the males – as the heroes’ or gods’ mothers and daughters, wives and mistresses. The first compendium of women who were illustrious on their own merit was that in Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus, which followed in the footsteps of Petrarch’s De viris illustribus. Inspired by Boccaccio’s work but intent on correcting his point of view, in 1405 Christine de Pizan wrote the first defence of women to be penned by a woman: The Book of the City of Ladies. Pardon the anachronism but Christine de Pizan was the first feminist – because she attributed the disadvantages of being a woman not to Mother Nature but to force of habit. Her book led to a long Querelle des Femmes which has lasted seven centuries and is still very much alive. |
ISBN 13: 978-0-9668595-1-5
|
|