ABSTRACT
In sixteenth-century Italy, two women of extraordinary ability, the poet, Gaspara Stampa, and the painter, Sofonisba Anguissola, subtly realigned the relationship between motherhood and artistic “procreativity.” Closely investigating the genesis of Gaspara Stampa’s novo stile and Sofonisba Anguissola’s unusual self-portraits, the chapter examines the way in which each of these women manipulated ‘conceptual’ paradigms in her work. In Gaspara Stampa’s poetry, an alternative vision of Petrarch’s Latinate universe appears; in Sofonisba Anguissola’s paintings, the singular female artist mirrors and manipulates linguistic and iconic symbols. Petrarch’s allusion recalls the Aristotelian moment of‘male’ conception, when the male spirit animates female matter, while the creative moment in Stampa’s poem seems to evoke an alternate ‘conceptual’ model. The forms Stampa draws for herself and her lover imply a new relationship between the poet and her strangely introjected muse. Stampa’s simultaneous enclosure of Creatore and of her signore within a maternal body would seem to privilege the site of female creativity in a similar fashion.
