Properzia de’ Rossi
Active in: Italy
Biography
Born in Bologna in 1490, the sculptor Properzia de’ Rossi was one of just four women artists described in Giorgio Vasari’s Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori, first published in 1550. Many of the details of her life are known through Vasari, who claimed that she taught herself to carve with peach and plum stones. She is also thought to have studied with Marcantonio Raimondi (1480–1534). In 1525, she competed a series of bas-relief panels for the Cathedral of San Petronio in Bologna depicting scenes from the book of Genesis. Of them, the panel depicting Joseph and Potiphar’s wife is now in Museo di Basilica di San Petronio, Bologna. Another notable commission was her engraved marble decoration of the high altar of Santa Maria del Baraccano in Bologna in 1526.
In the 1520s, de’ Rossi faced legal and personal troubles. In 1525, she was charged with attacking a fellow artist, Vincenzo Miola. By 1529, she was documented as an indigent patient at the Ospedale di San Giobbe. Vasari wrote that she dedicated herself to engraving in these later years and her accomplishments had attracted the attention of Pope Clement VII (1478–1534). No surviving engravings can be definitively attributed to her. She died in Bologna in 1530.
Selected Works
Properzia de’ Rossi, Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, 1525. Marble, 53 x 54 cm. Museo di Basilica di San Petronio, Bologna.
Circle
Student of
Marcantonio Raimondi (1480–1534)
Bibliography
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Och, Marjorie. “Vittoria Colonna and Properzia de Rossi in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the artists.” In Wives, Widows, Mistresses, and Nuns in Early Modern Italy: Making the Invisible Visible through Art and Patronage. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.
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Pietrantonio, Vera Fortunati. “Per una storia della presenza feminile nella vita artistica del cinquecento Bolognese: Porperiza De Rossi, ‘scultrice’.” Il Carrobbio 7 (1981): 167–77.
Pietrantonio, Vera Fortunati, and Irene Graziani. Properzia de’ Rossi: Una scultrice a Bologna nell’età di Carlo V. Bologna: Editrice Compositori, 2008.
Rhea, Jennifer Estep. “The Power of Naming Themselves: Artists Properzia de Rossi, Artemisia Gentileschi and Elisabetta Sirani.” PhD diss., University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2002.
Saffi, Antonio. Della vita e delle opere di Maria Properzia de’Rossi, sculptrice Bolognese. Forlì: Luigi Bordandini, 1840.
Vasari, Giorgio. Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori. Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1550.