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This seminar will explore the artistic experience of women in Renaissance Italy. A large body of recent scholarship has sought to “recover those women...who have been erased from history in modern literature, rendered invisible or obscured by history or scholarship, as well as those who were overshadowed by male relatives, political accident, or spatial location” (Katherine A. McIver, preface to Wives, Widows, Mistresses and Nuns in Early Modern Italy). Drawing upon a consideration of both current research and primary sources, this course will investigate the role women played as the makers, the commissioners, and the subjects of art in Italy during the period from ca. 1250-1600. Among other issues, we will examine the constraints that limited women’s contribution to the arts in this period when women’s participation in public life were quite circumscribed, as well as the various means they found to overcome them. We will investigate what types of women were able to become artists. We will learn what categories of women were most likely to commission art, and what kinds of art they generally commissioned. Lastly, we will examine portraits of women, to understand what these representations tell us about the view of women in Renaissance society. Students will develop their own critical positions on the issues through a close reading of both texts and works of art, participation in online discussions, and in several substantial writing assignments.