News & Stories

What inspired you to support Save Venice’s “Women Artists of Venice” Research Program and the conservation of pastels by Rosalba Carriera and Marianna Carlevarijs in Venice’s Ca’ Rezzonico Museum? After my mother’s passing in 2020, I was looking for special ways to honor her life so when I saw the online discussion of the conservation of pastels by women artists, I immediately decided this was a meaningful way to connect her to Venice. As a young child, she charged me with the responsibility of “finding the lost women of art.” Of course, this is a huge task and one which is only beginning to come into fruition since the late 1970s/early 1980s. It is also a task I can’t do either by myself or by my students alone. However just as the possibility of supporting the conservation of three of the pastels by Rosalba Carriera and Marianna Carlevarijs seemed the “right fit” in honor of mother, so did the idea of providing some of the initial funding for Save Venice’s “Women Artists of Venice” Research Program. As I have been able to do at other international art institutions including The National Gallery, London, in support of the research of young scholars and programs to aid in “the finding of the lost women of art” a gift to WAV was simply the right thing to do. I am delighted to sponsor both the conservation of actual works by women artists and promote the scholarship on the history and works of the women artists of Venice.

How do you see the role of women’s philanthropy as a positive force of aid and change? Among the many elements in the “missing history” of women’s roles and contributions to the culture and values of our world has been a recognition of the wider boundaries of women’s philanthropy as more than the patronage of artists, writers, and composers by elite society women. Whether members of the aristocracy or the upper classes such as Catherine de’ Medici or Peggy Guggenheim, women have always played a significant role in the support of the cultural achievements and thereby advances of Western cultures, and I suspect Eastern cultures also. Philanthropy takes many forms from moral support to professorial encouragement necessary to promote a worthy individual, group, or project to attain public acknowledgment on the way to financial support, or simply by supplying those necessary funds. My own experience on both sides of this situation—as one who needed funding and as one who is now able to generate financial support—is that women are most prone to decide from the center of their passions and not in pursuit of public acclaim or professional gain. Working from the heart whether that heart focuses on medical, agricultural, pacifist, or humanitarian issues or as mine does on the arts and humanities is the only way to push the world forward in affirming and affirmative ways.

What excites you most about the WAV Program, and what do you hope can ultimately be achieved? This is a rather grand question as I am only one small drop in what needs to be an overflowing river of support for both the conservation of the works of and the research about the Women Artists of Venice. As I noted earlier, my mother charged me with the rather overwhelming task of finding “the lost women of art.” Once upon a time, Artemisia Gentileschi and Elisabetta Sirani were unknown except perhaps to specialist scholars and many of their works lay in need of restoration in grandmothers’ attics as well as museum and church storage rooms. Since the late 1970s, feminist scholars and museum curators have made great strides in expanding the public recognition of those “lost women of art” among whom are the Women Artists of Venice who are now being provided a vehicle to promote both an awareness of their artworks and technical achievements, their places in art and cultural history, and their biographies. I would hope that the conservation of the pastels in Venice’s Ca’ Rezzonico Museum and the restoration of paintings such as Giulia Lama’s Female Saint in Glory in the Church of Santa Maria Assunta are the beginnings of the retrieval of these otherwise “lost works” in Venice. However, I hope that the energies and interests of young scholars can be turned toward the rewards and excitement of primary research that teaches about these women, their struggles, their defeats, and their successes in both exhibitions and monographs. As full as my own bookshelves may be, there is always room for those books that will announce that the lost women of art are on their way of being found.