Introduction

This volume grew out of a session (Women of Power: Architecture and Visual Imagery in Early Modern Italy) that I organized and chaired for the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference held in St. Louis in October 2008 and the discussion that followed, which led to further conversations with Timothy McCall, whose own work and ideas were the inspiration for this anthology. The concept of this volume builds on not only Timothy’s article, “Visual Imagery and Historical Invisibility: Antonia Torelli, Her Husband, and His Mistress in Fifteenth-Century Parma”1 (and an earlier version which I read), but also on an article by Helen S. Ettlinger, “Visibilis et Invisibilis: The Mistress in Italian Renaissance Court Society.”2 Both articles are fundamental sources and stand out in the scholarship for their innovative approaches to the topic of women’s visibility/invisibility as a new/alternative method of recovering women. Two of the papers in that session (those of Jennifer Webb and Kimberly Dennis) were expanded for this volume, while the third (Timothy McCall’s) takes a new approach, yet is a continuation of that paper. I then turned to other scholars whose research interests were similar and solicited papers from them.