Irene di Spilimbergo

Irene di Spilimbergo (1540-1559) was a female Italian Renaissance painter. Since she died at the age of 21, she is scarcely memorable for her artistic output, but more for an effusive volume of poetic elogies published two years after her death by Dionigio Atanagi and containing 279 Italian and 102 Latin poems, some anonymous, and others either penned or attributed to contemporary cultural luminaries including Lodovico Dolce, Torquato Tasso, Titian, Girolamo Muzio, Luigi Tanzillo, Giuseppe Bettusi, and Benedetto Varchi.

Born in Udine, by report she demonstrated her artistic abilities at a young age. She is compared sometimes with another woman painter, Sofonisba Anguissola (born in Cremona and of greater longevity (1532-1625). Irene studied under the pre-eminent Venetian painter Titian for two years. Few if any of her works are known. Her true nature and skills are difficult to sift from the poetic legend; she was for her eulogists the equivalent of the prototypic ever-innocent feminine charm, what "Beatrice" was to Dante and "Laura" to Petrach, although girded with a paint-brush for the craft-oriented Renaissance.

External links

* [http://www.artnet.com/library/08/0805/T080582.asp ArtNet biography]
*"Irene di Spilimbergo: The Image of a Creative Woman in Late Renaissance Italy", Anne Jacobson Schutte, "Renaissance Quarterly," Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 42-61doi:10.2307/2862405

Persondata
NAME=Spilimbergo, Irene di
ALTERNATIVE NAMES=
SHORT DESCRIPTION=Italian painter
DATE OF BIRTH=1540
PLACE OF BIRTH=Udine
DATE OF DEATH=15 December 1559
PLACE OF DEATH=Venice