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Jul 16, 2025 Jane Hatter, Spring 2025 DM Faculty Grant Recipient, Echoes of Women’s Musical Voices in Visual and Material Evidence from 1450-1550

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Although she was painted almost exactly 500 years ago, this female musician might not seem out of place if she arrived on the stage of Dumke Recital Hall or appeared in an opera at Kingsbury this weekend. In her portrait she is presented before a neutral dark background, with her left hand resting on an open book. Although the notation it too degraded for us to be able to sing from it, the traces of staves, notes, and clefs along with the oblong format of the book clearly identify it as vocal music of the kind written and published in Venice during her lifetime. Her right hand is held up, proudly displaying a gold ring. Her dress is refined and sumptuous, including silk colored with expensive red dye and ornate embroidery made using thinly hammered and carefully wound golden thread. Her dark hair is parted in the middle and modestly bound back in a creamy textured linen or silk cloth, revealing and framing her ear, cocked towards the viewer. Though her lips are firmly closed with the hint of a smile, the strongly engaged but slightly oblique look in her eyes implies an invitation to the viewer for some kind of interaction, perhaps a reference to the music book open and ready for use in front of her.

Painting of a woman in a red Renaissance-style dress with one hand resting on an open book and the other raised to her breast, gesturing toward the book. She is shown from the chest up, with her body facing forward and her head tilted down and turned slightly to the left.

Bernardo Licinio, Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1520. Collection of the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Alte Pinakothek München © CC BY-SA 4.0.

Despite the familiarity of her face and gestures, modern interpreters of this painting have struggled to understand the role of music in her identity. In a time and place where music was strongly associated with professional courtesans, should we see her as a musically skilled sex-worker? Or does the ring on her finger along with the rich red dress—a color often worn for weddings in the sixteenth-century—identify her as a member of elite society who had been recently betrothed or married? Regardless of our individual hunches and conclusions, this painting highlights the ambiguous status of music for women in the early sixteenth century.

While this mysterious woman seems destined to remain silent about who she was or why she was painted as a musician, when placed in consort with over 180 similar images and other artifacts of musical women, the echoes of their voices are strengthened, and themes begin to emerge.

My recent Digital Matters Faculty Grant, Echoes of Women’s Musical Voices in Visual and Material Evidence from 1450-1550, allowed me to continue work I started in Florence last year at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti, where I worked to compile data on as many visual representations of female musicians as possible. This work is part of a book project that will examine the musical lives of Italian women in the decades around 1500. My grant last spring allowed me to hire a research assistant and start the process of preparing this database for open-access digital publication.

My database currently includes over 180 examples of visual representations of female musicians, ranging from a majolica basin featuring an overtly erotic nude tuning a lute—who would have been revealed whenever the pitcher that sat in this basin was removed—to a gilded panel featuring a chaste nun kneeling in her habit, apparently perpetually singing the musical prayer notated above her. Literally on opposite ends of the social and moral spectrum, these figures form a chorus with actresses and duchesses, poets and painters, amorous goddesses and scholarly brides of Christ, all represented as musical in Italian material culture between 1450 and 1550.

Additionally, there are at least nine extant Italian manuscripts of polyphonic repertoire created during the same timeframe that can be associated with named women, either as owners or users. What can consideration of these sources as a group and in conversation with my database of visual representations of female musicians tell us about these women’s musical identities and how can knowing about women’s lives improve our understanding of these musical documents, both the manuscript sources and the visual representations?

Female musicians have been underrepresented in scholarly discourse on European music of the early modern period for two main reasons:

  1. women were rarely able to function solely as professional musicians in the modern economic sense of receiving payment for their performance in public spaces, and
  2. they were seldom attributed as composers of notated music.

However, despite these restrictions there is plenty of evidence that music was an essential skill for women, particularly those of the more affluent and urban social circles in Northern Italy, both noble women of the courts and female monastics. From their formal painted portraits as musicians to the carefully copied and sometimes wine-stained pages of the music manuscripts that they sang from on a regular basis, these women used music as a tool to build social capital and hopefully also to express themselves, a rare opportunity in a society that was highly restrictive for women.

This project is innovative because musicians have traditionally used these individual sources only as materials for recreating musical sounds for performance, not as objects of material culture that can inform us about the ways that women interacted with them and reveal how music was central to their identities. Visual materials, like individual paintings, are usually interpreted by musicologists as direct evidence of performance practices and are dismissed if the artist did not render the musical data with complete accuracy. On the other hand, art historians usually lack the requisite practical knowledge to interpret the musical information. My project pushes the boundaries of my field using digital tools to integrate data on a wider range and larger number of visual and material resources. Hopefully, placing these objects, dispersed across the world in archives and museums, into conversation with each other will amplify their lost voices and reinvigorate our understanding of both the sounds and purposes of sixteenth-century female musicians.