Old Women and Art in the Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior

Drawing on a wide range of visual and historical sources, this study examines the remarkable flowering, largely overlooked in portraiture scholarship, of portraits of old women in Northern Italy and especially Bologna during the second half of the sixteenth century. Erin Campbell argues that these images of unidentified women provide an opportunity to present new conceptual frameworks, and question our assumptions about old age, portraiture, and the domestic interior.