From art history to life writing: Anna Banti's feminist resonance

This essay looks at Anna Banti’s writings on historical women artists as a feminist intervention in art history and historiography. Given the context of the feminization of professional art history in the interwar period, Banti emerges as a unique voice that crossed the boundary between scholarship and fiction. The essay pays particular attention to the role that female recognition plays within Banti’s novels, in the context of its immediate reception in the 1940s, and in relation to the feminist movement of the 1970s. By examining the way in which Banti narrated female recognition across time, the essay demonstrates how books like Artemisia (1947) have created spaces of resonance beside art history that have changed the canon of art history.