Sarah Hagglund is a Boston-based art historian and currently works in the Division of European and American Art at the Harvard Art Museums. She received her BA in History and Anthropology from Kent State University and her MA in the History of Art and Architecture from Boston University. Her research focuses on 17th-century Italian women artists and women art collectors, and in 2021 she was named a Portz Scholar for her work on the subject. More broadly, Sarah’s love for uncovering the stories of women of the past has led her to be interviewed on the What’sHerName podcast,and she recently worked with a local tour company, Hub Town Tours, to help research and develop a women’s suffrage walking tour  of Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. Before she joined the Harvard Art Museums, she previously held positions at the Gibson House Museum and the Kent State University Museum.

Take it away, Sarah!

When did you first become interested in women artists of the Italian Baroque era?  What sparked that interest?

It wasn’t until my junior year of college that I really became fascinated with the Italian Baroque, and particularly looking at women artists of that period. I had often written my term papers in my other history and art history classes on a specific woman or about gender more broadly, but in the fall of my junior year, I had the opportunity to take a mixed undergraduate/graduate level course focused solely on Italian Baroque Art. The course covered the greats of the period—Caravaggio, Bernini, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Velasquez, among others—and I was immediately captivated by the Baroque style and have been ever since (thank you Dr. Medicus). However, I remember really struggling to come up with a topic for my term paper as the class drew to a close. I knew I wanted to focus on a woman artist and so I started with a simple google search and eventually stumbled upon the name Elisabetta Sirani.

At this point, the only woman artist of the period I had known was Artemisia Gentileschi, and so after finding Sirani’s name, I dove head-first into researching her. Little did I know at the time, I would very quickly become enamored with her art and her story. Sirani was a prolific artist in Bologna during the 17th century and would financially support her family through her art practice before she even turned the age of 20. She taught other women, including her sisters, to paint and draw, and she was known for working so fast that she became a local spectacle that drew in visiting dignitaries and wealthy patrons. Tragically, she died at age 27, likely due to stomach ulcers brought on by overwork, but she left behind a substantial oeuvre that often portrays historical and biblical stories of women with strength and nuance. Her painting, Portia Wounding Her Thigh, immediately struck me when I first saw it on my computer screen, and her work would later go on to inspire my undergraduate thesis focused on women’s cultural production in the city of Bologna in the 17th century.

Why do you think so many of these women have been left out of traditional art histories?

In my opinion, one of the biggest contributing factors to women being left out of our traditional art histories is survival bias. The art that survives today is only a minuscule fraction of all of the art that has been made in human history, and yet, that fraction is what is mostly informing our current understanding of the past. Over time, names have been lost to history, but so has the art made by their hands, and I think women artists were particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon. The art forms that many women would have had access to, such as lace making or embroidery, are not only more susceptible to decay over time because they are made from organic materials, but they were also not always valued as an art form and therefore were not as well protected.

Moreover, women artists who painted or made sculpture in the early modern period, were still often limited to specific genres that were deemed “appropriate” for women such as portraiture or devotional imagery. These genres were more susceptible to being removed from their original contexts which results in information loss over time. One example of this is Sirani herself and particularly the women artists she taught. In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte had captured Bologna, and damaged or looted several convents and churches. Because many of the paintings made by women artists during the centuries prior dealt mostly with religious subjects—as was “appropriate”—they were disproportionately affected by these kinds of events, making some women artists all but disappear from the art historical record.

Additionally, an important factor to consider as to why women were (and sometimes still are) left out of art history narratives, is the bias of early scholars themselves. It is not just lack of documentation, but also a lack of willingness to uncover more about the women that might have been mentioned in the early sources. This is a symptom so many marginalized communities face when trying to uncover and forefront their stories: people, moments in history, and important nuance were forgotten or intentionally overlooked simply because they were not seen as valuable to the already determined historical narrative. This too applies to art history, where often art made by the Old Masters (aka male European artists from the 14th-18th centuries) was valued more highly and as a result, informed not only the taste of the art market, but also the direction of scholarship. Although the field is continuing to progress, we are still left with the legacies of a biased foundation. [Pamela butting it: this is an idea I’m going to come back to!]

What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?

As I have mentioned, the stories, the art, and the documentation we have about the lives of past women are deeply fragmented. To me, this is the very thing that I find not only most challenging, but also most exciting about researching historical women. Rarely do the traditional written sources provide a full picture; we instead have to turn to other additional avenues, such as social histories, art, and material culture to bolster our understanding of women’s stories of the past and the worlds they navigated. In Joan Kelly-Gadol’s seminal essay from 1976, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?,” she posed and explored this question as a way to challenge the historical timeline built around the male experience and highlight the fact that it may not align with what women were experiencing at the same time. If the historical context itself was created by centering male stories, when researching women, we not only have to try and piece together information, but often we must confront the preconceived notions about a period of time or a series of events that prevent more diverse stories from being explored. This excites me because it means there is still so much left to uncover, but it does make it hard at times to really access the nuance around a past woman’s life. And in that way, I think this is what has always drawn me to women artists in particular, because there is something extremely powerful about being in a room in front of a work of art made by a woman centuries ago that we may know nothing about, and yet, the work of art can still resonate with women today.

Portia Wounding Her Thigh. Portia Catonis was the wife of Brutus. According to Plutarch, she came upon her husband while he was thinking about the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar. He would not share his concerns with Portia, for fear that she would reveal the plot under torture. To prove her ability to withstand physical pain, Portia wounded herself and then suffered in silence for a day proving to her husband that she could keep her secrets.

A question from Sarah: As someone who is still developing her career, I would love to know if there is anything you wish you would have known or anything that still to this day surprises you about studying women of the past and then publishing their stories?

I’m going to come at this from a slightly angle, and tell you two things I wish I had understood earlier

1. Take the opportunities when they come if they interest you. Even when they are outside your academic field.  (It sounds like you’ve already figured this one out.)

2. Find your people, in real life and on-line, and nurture your connections to them.

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Interested in learning more about Sarah and her work? Listen to her episode on the What’s Her Name podcast.

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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with historian Stacy Cordery