Episode 1 The Story of Women and Art

Right in the heart of Florence there is

a place of pilgrimage for any art historian.

Stretching across the Ponte Vecchio,

above the heads of the bustling tourists, lies the Vasari Corridor.

Named after the Renaissance painter

and art critic Giorgio Vasari, its plain, white-washed walls

house the greatest collection of artists' self-portraits

in the world.

Dating from the early 16th century until today,

this kilometre-long corridor charts the journey of Western art history.

A rich and illustrious genealogy,

this is a who's who of the great and the good in art,

a pantheon of masters.

But one thing you notice pretty quickly

is there are precious few mistresses.

There are 1,700 artists' self-portraits

but only 7% - 7% - are by women...

..a situation that I've found repeated on the walls of the world's

most important museums and galleries.

Women are models and muses

but there is an absence of female artists themselves.

Why is that? Do women lack talent?

Or does it speak to a more profound truth about the history of women...

..confined as they often were to domestic and subordinate roles,

starved of art education,

forbidden to even gaze on the naked form?

In this series I want to reveal that there were successful

female artists whose reputations have simply faded into obscurity.

I'll retrieve dazzling female artists from the shadows...

whose talent and tenacity overcame almost insuperable obstacles...

..on a journey from the suffocation of creativity in Renaissance Italy,

through the emerging opportunities

and continuing frustrations of the 18th and 19th centuries,

to a modern pioneer who struck out alone to define an entire landscape,

proving for all time that women could be artists with a capital "A"!

This is the hidden story of how women painted the soul

and crafted the fabric of the world around us.

Florence... cradle of the Renaissance,

where our notion of Western art was born.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, powered by the rich

and ruthless Medici dynasty, this city

was at the frontier of innovation in learning, architecture and art.

The word "renaissance" means rebirth.

But was it only engendered by men?

If you look about the public spaces, the piazzas, the monuments,

the palaces of Florence, you'd certainly think so,

because there's a potent sense of masculinity.

Male bodies everywhere.

Virility, male dominance.

Of course, you could see images of women -

goddesses, nymphs, saints and whores -

but these were the creations of male artists -

flesh-and-blood women were all but invisible.

500 years ago, no respectable Italian woman would be

seen on these squares, except en route to church.

Iron virtue, modesty, obedience -

these were the qualities demanded of Renaissance ladies.

They had to keep their individuality hidden behind a wall of decorum,

public life, street life off-limits to chaste virgins

and discreet matrons.

Female creativity was confined to tapestry and needlework,

crafts that were undervalued and overlooked. Real artists were male!

This is the world in which women lived,

and yet, in the early 16th century, there was one Italian woman

determined to break that convention and, in so doing,

she would become the first great female artist of the Renaissance.

Properzia de' Rossi was born in Bologna in 1490.

She possessed an absurd ambition - to be an artist.

But not just any artist - she wanted to be a sculptor!

The hammer and chisel are archetypal male tools, wielded by artisans

and Renaissance sculptors,

both muscular and inspired.

Women were seen to lack both the physical strength

and the intellectual vigour for such a virile art.

Any artist or sculptor hoping to make it needed an apprenticeship

and then years of training in the workshop. For a woman,

every step on that path was blocked.

We don't know whether de' Rossi railed at

her exclusion from the workshop - she left no diary or letters.

But what we do have are fragments of her early art,

and these are concrete proof of her ingenuity in finding a way to

develop her skills and outflank the obstacles ranged against her.

This extraordinary silver filigree crest

is an object of wonder and curiosity,

and it has inset in it what look like

11 carved buttons.

But the magical thing about this is that these buttons are, in fact,

plum stones, or the stones of nectarines.

This is the Madonna of Mercy

and, to my amazement, under the magnifying glass

you can see that the Madonna is opening her cloak

to a sea of tiny, tiny little faces.

What really amazes me is Rossi's skill.

Rossi might not have been able to work in stone,

but she has taken something, a piece of domestic waste,

and transformed it into magical sculpture.

Necessity was the mother of artistic invention.

By 1525, aged 35, de' Rossi had honed her skills and audaciously

entered a competition against her male contemporaries to become

one of a select team of sculptors working here

in the Basilica of San Petronio, the main church of Bologna.

And she won!

Though you'd never guess it today, judging from where they've

placed one of her works.

In here, tucked away in the corner of the church,

beside the postcards, is Properzia de' Rossi's masterpiece in marble,

but the obscurity of the setting diminishes none of its power.

This is a morality tale called Joseph and Potiphar's Wife.

Here, Potiphar's wife - she doesn't even have her own name -

is hanging onto this man, who's trying to flee away.

We can tell that she's a fallen woman

because her boobs are hanging out - it's always a bit of a sign -

as she's rising off the bed to try and claim him.

Look at it, it has the power of Michelangelo.

Look at the strength of that outstretched arm.

Look at the torsion all across the piece.

She's the first female sculptor in marble in 16th-century Italy.

She had mastered what lay at the very heart of all Renaissance art -

the nude - but therein lay a problem for de' Rossi.

It was unthinkable for a modest woman

to study and recreate the male form.

Why is Properzia not better known?

Well, I think some of the answer is implicit in the marble itself.

She has shown a brilliant understanding of anatomy,

even down to this bisected calf muscle, and Properzia must

have known everything about the male body in motion.

In short, she knew too much.

She damned herself in stone.

Properzia de' Rossi was competing on male turf.

Backlash from the artistic fraternity was inevitable.

First problem with all artists, men or women,

is jealousy.

And in fact she had a main opponent,

her personal enemy was Amico Aspertini.

Amico Aspertini was another artist

and he was always gossiping very, very badly about her.

So what did he say about her to slur her reputation?

He said she was a bit of a bitch.

A bitch?

To do a man's work in a world populated by men,

needed to be very determined, to know what you want to do,

and especially to be very skilled.

She was determined and she got what she wanted.

Well, not quite. Facing increasing attacks on her character

and reputation, de' Rossi retreated from public works -

and in 1530, just five years after working on the church, she died

penniless and alone, in a paupers' hospital.

A wretched end for a woman who the great art critic Giorgio Vasari

included as the only female amongst 142 artists in his hallowed tome

Lives Of The Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects.

As he lamented,

"If only she'd had as much luck and support as she had natural talent,

"she, who now lies buried in the shadows of obscurity,

"would have equalled in fame the most celebrated workers in marble."

Properzia's fate epitomises the risks female artists

faced in the Renaissance.

How many other women dared to make a name for themselves in art?

There is a group of art historians in Florence who are working

tirelessly to find those who did take on the challenge, to prove

that women did play a significant role in our art history.

You just need to know where to look.

'There are scores of store rooms in Florence alone where

'works of art remain hidden from view.

'It's here Linda Falcone,

'director of the Advancing Women Artist Foundation, and her team,

'have sifted through to discover a lost world of female creativity.'

In these storage areas you'll find

approximately 2,000 works by women artists.

We're talking about paintings, about sculpture, about drawing,

and it really gives you an idea

of how many invisible works

are waiting to be rediscovered

and waiting to be restored and presented to the general public.

Like seven-eighths of the iceberg - hidden.

Right, we usually talk about the tip of the iceberg,

this is the bottom part of the iceberg.

-With the female contribution hidden away.

-Exactly.

People are too quick to say women are no good at art.

Why are they no good at art? You might assume that

women are not on the walls because they just can't do it,

whereas, you know, if we don't see the work, how can we decide?

But getting to see it is precisely the problem.

Most female artists did not have the stomach to fight it out in public,

choosing instead to practise their art behind closed doors.

There was one sanctuary where female creativity was protected,

nourished, even celebrated - the Church.

For a glimpse of the possibilities, Linda's diplomacy has got me

access to the monastery of Santa Maria Novella.

So, behind the walls of monasteries

and ex-nunneries, there is the hidden art of religious women?

Definitely, and it was actually one of the easiest ways

in which a woman could produce art was through convent life.

BUZZER

Buonasera!

While to us the convent might suggest confinement and constraint,

for women in the Renaissance it could be a place of liberation.

Relieved of the demands of family, and living apart from society,

with its rules and expectations, entire communities of women

could devote themselves to learning, literature, music, textiles and art.

'In this monastery lies a work by a nun, Sister Plautilla Nelli.

'It has remained hidden from public view for over 500 years

'and now can be found in the monks' dining hall.'

Wow, it's immense!

I think that's the biggest painting

by a female artist I've ever seen.

It's seven metres long.

It's the only Last Supper by a woman artist that we know of.

The courage that a woman would need to face a theme like this,

-and we are talking about a masculine theme...

-Yes.

It's the highest sort of honour that a painter can bestow

upon themselves, let's put it that way.

So, for Nelli to face this theme is

significant in its own right.

But look closely at the male figures.

They are noticeably feminine -

a stark reminder that Nelli had no access to male models.

Naturally, she relied upon the world around her, a world of women.

Think about the scale and spiritual importance of this painting.

You can see that, separated from the strictures of society,

a female artist could have the same artistic ambition

as a Leonardo da Vinci.

The privacy of the convent protected female artists,

but it limited what they could paint and who was able to see their work.

There was, however, another haven for female artistry,

one that offered protection

whilst holding the keys to untold privilege and prestige.

After the Church, THE most influential

patron of art in the Western world was the court,

and no 16th-century court was more powerful

than that of King Philip II of Spain.

But success as a court artist required both talent

and political nous to navigate a glittering but cut-throat world.

Sofonisba Anguissola was to prove a cool tactician.

She was born into minor, impoverished nobility

in northern Italy

but she made it from there to the very heart of the Spanish court.

Sofonisba Anguissola was born in 1532, the eldest of six sisters.

With no money for dowries, her father trained them all

to be exceptionally accomplished instead.

He proudly boasted of Sofonisba's skill to Michelangelo himself,

sending her sketch of a laughing child as proof.

But the master wrote back -

could the teenager tackle a trickier subject, the crying child?

And this is the magnificent result.

It showed her talent for capturing the life of her subject

and she would go on to be a pioneer of an entirely

new genre of informal intimacy known as the conversation piece.

I'm looking at Sofonisba Anguissola's masterpiece,

the chess game.

It's a group portrait of her three sisters,

and the individual personalities shine out of this painting.

My absolute favourite is cheeky little Europa in the middle.

They're playing the great game of strategy and tactics - chess.

Here, Lucia has taken the queen

and, interestingly, it's only in the Renaissance that the queen

becomes the most powerful piece on the board.

Surely Sofonisba is telling us that women can be the queens of strategy.

Her new style of portraiture swiftly won over an influential clientele,

and none more useful than the Duke of Alba, who would offer her

a golden opportunity - an introduction to the Spanish court.

So, in 1559, Anguissola, aged 27, left her home

and sisters behind to come to Spain as a guest at the state wedding

of King Philip II to Isabel de Valois.

Here in the Palacio del Infantado,

she faced the biggest test of her mettle.

The wedding was the culmination of

delicate peace negotiations between Spain and France.

Imagine the tension.

It would daunt even the most experienced courtier.

But Sofonisba Anguissola had more than enough poise

to meet the challenge.

That evening, there was a torch dance,

whereby a man passes the torch to the woman he'd like to dance with,

and then the woman has the power to invite a man to dance.

And then, with unimaginable self-command,

Sofonisba passed the torch to Philip II, the King.

With the eyes of the court upon her,

she took to the floor, and he danced with her.

She was a palpable hit.

Sheer finesse secured Anguissola's entre to court,

but as a woman,

she could not be officially recognised as a court painter

on the same terms as men - her title was lady-in-waiting.

And there was a price to pay for her art, too.

In the 16th century,

state portraits were vital diplomatic tools

amongst the courts of Europe - they were less about art

and more about politics.

Would Anguissola's playfulness serve the art of statecraft?

This is a highly, highly formal portrait of Isabel de Valois.

It subscribes to all the stringent rules of Spanish court portraiture.

The great stiffness of pose.

She's not just a woman, she is a queen,

and queen of the richest nation on Earth.

There's the part of me that can't help

but regret the transition from the intimacy, informality,

mischief and laughter of her earlier paintings, back in Italy.

But that's really to miss the point,

because what a portrait like this shows is Anguissola's capacity

to live by the stringent rules of court portraiture.

Sofonisba Anguissola has proved that she can play the game.

Anguissola never put a graceful foot wrong.

She enriched her family, and pulled off two advantageous marriages.

Even in advanced old age, her reputation was still undimmed.

Not only did she impress and surprise Michelangelo in her youth,

in her 90s, she won the homage of Van Dyck.

In 1624, Van Dyck, aged just 25, himself a celebrated artist in

the courts of Europe, made a special pilgrimage to Anguissola's home,

and here at the British Museum, his notes and sketchbooks survive.

And here is a charming, vivacious, quick sketch

of an old, old lady,

Portrait of Sofonisba, the painter,

done from life in Palermo in July 1624, her age then 96,

still with her memory and her senses "prontissimo" -

so speedy, quick, she's still got all her faculties.

How can it be that Michelangelo and Van Dyck

found Sofonisba so compelling as an artist

and yet her reputation is almost unknown today?

I think the answer must lie in the court context.

The court made her art possible, nurtured her, sheltered her.

But it guaranteed that her art would never be bought

and sold on the open marketplace and ensured that her art remained

an acquired taste of the privileged few.

So, could a woman in the Renaissance ever become an independent

professional artist,

heading her own workshop, earning her own money

and battling it out with men for commissions?

There was one place in Italy where it was possible - Bologna,

home to the first university in the world,

a city with more liberal attitudes to female learning,

and greater legal freedoms.

Lavinia Fontana wasn't born to the Bolognese nobility,

she was the daughter of a struggling artist.

But that is key - she had access to oils, to pigments,

to the brushes,

to the canvases, but above all,

she had an entre

into the mysteries of artistic production - she had training.

Commercial art in the 16th century was in the grip of powerful guilds

who governed access to that essential training, barring women.

Family provided the only alternative for them.

But in a corner of a store room I've discovered proof

that Fontana realised her true value.

This is a self-portrait of Lavinia Fontana. It's exquisite.

But this is not just your ordinary representation of female virtue.

It's actually a very canny piece of marketing.

She sent this painting to her putative father-in-law.

In the background there's a cassone, which is an Italian marriage chest,

which symbolises dowry.

But the Fontanas had very little in the way of dowry to offer.

Next to the cassone, however, spot lit, there's an easel,

a direct reference to Lavinia Fontana's professional skill.

What's she's saying there is, "My marriage chest might be empty

"but I am rich in talent."

And when she got married in 1577 and became a mother,

Fontana was determined to keep her workshop open for business,

as her family manuscripts reveal.

The documents that we have here tell us

so much about what it takes

to become a successful female painter

and at the same time a successful wife and mother.

I mean, this is a woman who turned out hundreds of paintings,

perhaps 200-300 paintings in her lifetime

-and yet was pregnant 11 times.

-It's unthinkable.

We've got a document, in fact, that's amazing

in so many ways, poignant, remarkable.

It's the list that Juan Paulo, her husband, writes of the births

and, sadly, so many of the deaths of their children.

It's a document that also attests to the way that she rises

through society.

Because any couple will always choose as godparents

at this point in time the people they think they know

-that can do the most for their children.

-Yeah, the most good.

Exactly.

So they start out with, as godparents,

the Bolognese bourgeoisie.

As we move on, 1587, she's got Laudomia Gozzadini

as the godmother to one of her children.

And the Gozzadini are THE powerful family, are they not?

They are one of THE most important families in Bologna,

and, of course, Lavinia has an incredibly close relationship

with Laudomia Gozzadini.

I've come to see a painting commissioned by Laudomia Gozzadini

herself, a work which attests to Fontana's intimate understanding

of her female clients, the ladies of the Bolognese nobility.

On the face of it,

it looks to be a simple celebration of the wealth

and dignity of a prominent noble family.

But look behind the surface wealth,

and, in fact, there are all sorts

of secret messages just waiting to be decoded,

which are the surviving record of a torrid and toxic family drama.

Fontana begins the tale with this man, Gozzadini, the father.

He promised to leave his entire fortune to whichever daughter

gave him a male heir first, setting off a cruel fertility race.

And it was not Laudomia, but Genevra who would be the victor.

And you can see this by the fact

that her father is touching her hand.

But Laudomia has her revenge.

Look at Genevra, look at her face,

she is palpably and demonstrably ugly.

Her husband blamed Laudomia herself for his inability to

get his hands on the great fortune.

Laudomia will have none of it.

If you look at Genevra's medallion, on it you can just about see

the figure of a man with a proud, rampant, erect penis,

whereas, on Laudomia, there's another naked man

but his penis is flaccid.

She is saying the fault is not mine, fella, the fault is yours.

Her version of the story is here for all time,

she will not be marginalised, in her family or in art.

This is the world that women made.

Fontana owed her career to the women who commissioned her works,

securing her position as the first

professional female artist of the age.

But for me, her paintings are so powerful

because they provide a precious window upon

the lives of daughters, brides, wives and widows.

Yet perhaps it is this very family focus that has enabled her work

to be overlooked in history.

In the hierarchy of art, such intimate family portraits

were not as highly valued as historical and biblical epics.

For a female artist to secure her place in history,

she would need to live and paint on a far grander scale.

Rome.

At the turn of the 17th century, the city of Caravaggio,

a place of light and dark, the sacred and profane.

The home of Artemisia Gentileschi.

Born in 1593,

Gentileschi, like Fontana,

was the daughter of an artist.

From the outset she tackled the epic.

Her first subject, at the age of 17,

was a favourite of male artists,

Susanna and the Elders,

typically presented by men as a beautiful naked woman

luxuriating in the attention of older men.

In fact, the biblical story is very ugly.

Those elders want Susanna to sleep with them

and when she says she won't they say they'll betray her

to her husband as an adulterer, and she will be executed.

In her depiction, Susanna

doesn't enjoy anything about these men.

They're dirty old men, leering over the wall at her,

trying to touch her,

and she is writhing away in horror.

At the tender age of 17,

Artemisia Gentileschi is trying to give expression to something

which doesn't even have a name, the violence of the male gaze.

This stark judgment upon men was to prove depressingly accurate.

Just two years later, Gentileschi's father brought

charges against the painter Agostino Tassi for his daughter's rape.

Tassi was her teacher and had exploited her.

The subsequent seven-month trial

dragged Gentileschi's reputation through the mud.

Tassi counterclaimed Artemisia was no virgin, an easy lay,

so how could it be rape?

But Gentileschi refused to withdraw her testimony.

In fact, she offered to submit to the thumbscrews

to prove her version of events.

Think about it, she's an artist.

What a risk - she needed those hands.

This demonstrates her dauntless courage, but also

the fierceness of her commitment to her own truth about women and men.

The shadow of this trauma has coloured the way

Gentileschi's work has been viewed,

as a shriek of rage and revenge against male oppression.

But that's not what strikes me.

I see female strength in adversity, and the triumph of art over ordeal.

This, for me, is one of the most stirring paintings in the pantheon

of female art - it's Judith and her maidservant.

They've just committed a political assassination,

creeping into the tents of the Assyrian enemy,

where they have decapitated the general Holofernes.

There is his head, in the bundle.

This was painted probably about a year after Gentileschi's trial,

when she was still around 20.

But actually I don't read female violence against men,

or revenge against patriarchy in this painting.

Just look at those women -

they're shoulder to shoulder, their bodies echo each other.

For me, this painting is all about female unity of purpose and bravery.

It says, in the strongest way possible,

men don't have the monopoly of courage...

..as Gentileschi proved when she left Rome behind

and headed to Florence, determined to reinvent herself.

Here among the tens of thousands of volumes of city records,

there are legal papers that have just been unearthed which

illuminate exactly how she went about it.

These are books that are records of some of the debts she accrued.

In this case,

she's purchased something from a very, very prestigious silk merchant

who could become a potential patron.

If she hasn't paid off her debt in time,

perhaps she can offer him a painting.

She first is seeking out minor patrons.

These patrons of music in the circle of the Medici.

Ultimately, though, we know that she's casting her line,

looking for the big fish.

And does she land her big carp?

Oh, she succeeded at the highest level.

She obtained her ultimate goal,

which was the patronage of the Medici grand duke himself.

What I adore about your archival finds is that I think

they absolutely refute the popular impression of Artemisia as a victim.

We don't see a victim of male violence here.

What we see is a woman who is capable of doing business with men,

doing business like a man, and yet she never ceases to be a woman.

As you might say in Italian, she's a tremenda.

Gentileschi refused to be defined by her gender.

As she promised one sceptical patron,

"You will find the spirit of Caesar in this soul of a woman."

She strode into the male arena, tackling historical epics

and ambitious public works all over Italy and beyond,

her reputation reaching even Charles I in faraway England.

In 1638, Gentileschi came to join her father, who had been

painting at the English Court for 12 years,

on the grand public works that secured a male artist's reputation.

Now Gentileschi came to the rescue of her ageing father

on his most prestigious royal commission,

found here today at Marlborough House in London,

the crowning glory of the main salon.

And this is it - an allegory of peace and the arts

under the English Crown.

She was more than a match for her male contemporaries.

The epic theme and commanding scale epitomise Artemisia Gentileschi's

supreme belief in her own proficiency and power.

The woman who had found herself a man's plaything,

tortured and dishonoured while still in her teens,

had forged an international career,

and this in an era when most Italian women barely left the house.

What a feat, armed only with her fearlessness and her talent.

So, despite the stifling constraints of Renaissance Italy

and Catholic Spain, a handful of dauntless women

had demonstrated just what it took

to scale the heights of artistic endeavour and gain public acclaim.

But the days of Catholic artistic dominance in Europe were numbered.

There was a new empire growing in the north,

where the next great artistic flowering would take place.

Welcome to the Dutch Republic, a different world.

Unsurprisingly, in the 17th century, the Dutch had their own ideas

about the proper role of women in life and art.

Women had greater freedoms than in Italy.

They bustled about the streets and marketplaces,

and even ran businesses.

English visitors were shocked at their bossiness.

Here, the Reformation had rejected the opulence

and excess of Catholicism,

and art was no longer preoccupied with the nude and the epic.

The Dutch liked their paintings on a domestic scale, in a minor key.

No blood and guts, no smells and bells, the aesthetics of restraint.

All of this was encapsulated in a newly emerging genre,

the still life,

a subject at which ambitious female artists could excel.

This is a still life by Clara Peeters.

She is a pioneer

of this form, which is called the breakfast piece.

Clara Peeters was born a year after Artemisia Gentileschi,

but you couldn't have a greater contrast of art,

of world view and, I think, of femininity.

You might think, well, it's all muted monochromes

and it's just the mere makings of a meal - so, big deal.

But, in fact, it's peace and prosperity in miniature.

What she's saying here is, look, these are the concentrated

ideals of our new Dutch Republic.

Plenty, stillness, all within a context of moderation

and religious discipline.

If you look close, you can see, in the shiny pewter lid

of this wine jug, there is a little face.

So there is Clara Peeters, and she's looking back at us.

There she is at the very centre of domestic ritual,

and at the very heart of domestic life.

Ironically, we know little of the life of Clara Peeters herself

but she has left her mark on her work.

She deftly tapped into the Dutch Republic's

most obsessive preoccupation - the home.

A well-run household stood for a well-run republic.

The spotlight on the home raised the status of traditional female

creative occupations such as lace-making and embroidery,

celebrating the talents of the amateur.

300 years ago, Amsterdam was abuzz with it.

The toast of the town was not Rembrandt

but a now long-forgotten woman called Joanna Koerten.

In fact, amazingly, at the time,

one of her works sold for three times that

of Rembrandt's masterpiece, The Night Watch.

And she achieved it all without a paintbrush or a needle.

Isn't paper-cutting seen as a dainty craft?

-Yes, it is.

-Not an art.

Yes, it is, and it's very annoying. People say, "Oh, what do you do?"

"I'm doing paper-cutting." And they say, "Oh, yeah that's what

"children do in elementary school," but it can be so much more.

My word!

My word. It's like a hologram.

It's far too easy today to overlook the dexterity required

to make art with a knife,

but Joanna Keorten was determined her work could not be dismissed.

She was cunning. She would cut portraits instead of landscapes,

and the portraits she cut from famous people like emperors and kings.

It was very rare what she did. She was well-known internationally

because travellers came especially to Holland, to Amsterdam,

to see her and to see her work and to buy it.

It's amazing that, to think of this kind of European celebrity

and now she's kind of, you know, vanished into the smog of history.

Yeah, she did.

Paper is fragile and vulnerable to the elements,

so I'm not surprised to find that so much of Koerten's fine work

has vanished or disintegrated.

But one of her most ambitious works

has survived, and can be found here at the Lakenhal Museum in Leiden.

I can't help but notice, though, as I walk the distinguished halls,

I'm not being led to a gallery.

Non-descript storage. Where is she, then?

Ah, number three here, this one.

There it is, in a frame.

Oh, so here she is, the woman that once outsold Rembrandt,

and you keep her in storage.

Do you think you could get it out

and we can restore it to pride of place and have a good look at it?

-Yeah, sure.

-OK.

And here it is. Joanna Koerten's paper-cut

is a depiction of a king, William III, William of Orange.

At first glance, you never would imagine that this is a paper-cut.

It looks for all the world like a pen-and-ink sketch,

or even a print taken from an engraving.

But, nevertheless, it's a work of stunning artistry,

and by having a king, and by resembling a print,

what Koerten is doing is very cleverly asserting the high status

of her art, she's claiming for this domestic practice

the power and the prestige of a much more public and formal type of art.

So, I think it's rather fitting that at last she's reinstalled

amongst all these other old masters in the Lakenhal.

I think this is where she would imagine her art belonged.

Joanna Koerten, like Clara Peeters,

secured her reputation by evoking the feminine ideals

of the Protestant north - chastity, quiet diligence, domesticity -

but there was quite another side to Dutch life.

The Republic presided over the richest

and most rapacious trading empire of the age.

Prosperity gave birth to a new, broadly based market for art,

and here everyone from a farmer up purchased paintings.

Today's Haarlem is picture-postcard perfect,

but in the 17th century, it was a great hub of the textile trade.

This is not a town that really wants lots of glorious history paintings,

they want small pieces on a domestic scale

and that's what Judith Leyster excelled at -

smaller genre pieces, just the thing for the bourgeois front room.

Judith Leyster's work was more than a match

for her male contemporary Frans Hals.

She excelled at paintings brimming with laughter and the everyday,

but she could also represent the darker side of Dutch life.

Today, we see Dutch femininity - all calmness and serenity -

through the eyes of Vermeer,

but Leyster exposes what it was really like to be

a woman in the Dutch Republic.

For me, this little painting tucked away in the corner

of a museum in the Hague is one of the most compelling paintings

ever produced by a female artist.

It's come to be known as The Proposition.

Here in the centre, we have a lovely young girl

determinedly doing her sewing by candlelight.

A woman sewing is an archetypal expression of feminine duty

and virtue.

And then over her shoulder leers a man.

He's touching her and he's offering her money.

He seems to want her to sleep with him.

This painting oddly reminds me of Artemisia Gentileschi.

This is a Protestant, northern version of Susanna and the Elders.

This bent face is like Susanna's twisting body.

So, although these women, divided by religion and hundreds of miles

and climate,

they're both interested in thinking about what it is

to be a woman who's endlessly looked at by men.

Leyster faced the familiar choice between an independent career

and family life.

Leyster achieved extraordinary technical success

at a very young age.

And then, aged 26, in 1636, she gave it all up.

She married another painter and put down her own paintbrush.

Leyster's husband was half the painter she was,

but the sacrifice had been made.

We know of only two further works she painted after her marriage,

a still life and a tulip.

But not every woman was prepared to limit their horizons to home, hearth

and husband. After all, this was an age of exploration.

Men were venturing from these shores

to the very edge of the known world.

These were waters no woman could hope to cross.

And yet, towards the end of the 17th century, Maria Sibylla Merian

would do just that in bold pursuit of her art.

The first 40 years of the life of Maria Sibylla Merian

were pretty conventional.

She was a dutiful daughter and then step-daughter.

She married appropriately enough.

But all the while in her home town of Frankfurt,

she harboured a passion for painting nature.

As she wrote,

"I collected all the caterpillars I could find

"in order to study their metamorphosis."

She had two daughters and raised them

just as she was raising her caterpillars to be butterflies,

but as she got older you get a stronger and stronger sense

that conventional family life in Frankfurt was a brake on

her artistic ambition, her spirituality

and her scientific reach.

So, in 1685, she did the unthinkable.

She left her home and her husband.

Merian packed her bags, and with her two daughters

and her mother in tow, escaped to the Netherlands

and a religious community in the bleak and empty north.

Protestants believed that nature study combined the ideals

of religious devotion and education, capturing God's wonders on Earth.

Merian set herself the task of revealing

the interconnectedness of life itself.

She was the first who combined in a very

delicate and beautiful manner

all the life cycle...

-In one image.

-..in one image with the host plants.

-Yes.

-And that, she invented that.

-Yes.

This is the pupae, you see,

-so there are different metamorphoses.

-Yes.

It takes extraordinary nerve, I think, in the 17th century,

to leave a living husband.

She knew, "I have to be without my husband

"to do the things I want to do."

And one of her missions was to educate her daughters.

To pursue this she had no choice but to leave

the wilderness behind and remove to cosmopolitan Amsterdam.

But it would be here that Merian would encounter the remarkable

specimens brought back by mariners and merchants

which would intoxicate her.

She loved cabinets of curiosity,

stuffed with the treasures of the East and West Indies,

but over time, she became frustrated with them.

As she wrote, she realised that they were not looking at the habitat

and propagation of the insects that she adored.

It was as if you were looking at a book

and the first two-thirds of the story were torn out,

or, instead of a film of the life of an insect, you just get a snapshot.

So, in 1699, a woman who had already fled home and husband

undertook her most dramatic journey yet,

to voyage for over two months and 5,000 miles across the Atlantic,

to reach the tropical jungle of the Dutch colony of Suriname...

..an inhospitable and uncharted territory

on the coast of South America.

It's hard to recreate now the sheer nerve

of a 52-year-old woman setting off across the Atlantic -

a perilous journey - with her 21-year-old daughter.

She set off into the interior, in a canoe, with her daughter,

four days' rowing.

Finally there, deep in the tropical rainforest,

she saw, teeming in the canopy,

the life that she came to encounter.

The paintings from Merian's expedition were

published in 1705 and greeted with awe and wonder.

Prized in the eminent collections of Europe,

and few more illustrious than the one held here at Windsor Castle.

I've come to see a rare set of Merian's watercolours,

purchased by the future King George III in 1755.

Look what Suriname did to Sibylla Merian's art.

There's nothing miniature, polite or domestic about this.

The whole thing is alive, it's like a freeze-frame in a drama.

It's exploding off the paper with my least favourite of God's creatures.

Spiders.

To me, it has elements of a monstrous, horrific cartoon.

This is nature as imagined by Tarantino, not by Walt Disney.

Maria Sibylla Merian had revolutionised scientific study,

showing the cycle of life for species never seen before.

Finally, people understood the intricate whole.

And yet, over time, as the world of science and art parted company,

deemed neither a scientist nor an artist,

Merian slipped into obscurity.

But I'm impressed to find a woman who refused to be

constrained by conventions of gender or by rules of art.

When I began my journey two centuries before,

a female artist was so desperate to be a sculptor

she practised on plum stones,

yet here is a woman trekking to the deepest reaches of the tropics

to fulfil her artistic ambitions.

Recovering that lineage has not been easy because posterity has

not been kind, so much is hidden, unhonoured and unsung.

But by digging away in stores and dark corners of houses,

churches and museums, you can find a different perspective

on our world that female artists fought so ingeniously to bequeath.

In the next programme, I'm heading for Britain and France,

to discover if the industrial and social transformation

of the 18th century would finally

see women vault the obstacles in the path to becoming artists.