Project Details
Projekt
Female Self-Forming, “Persona” and the Makeability of the Self in (Early) Modern Portraits (TP 2)
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Valeska von Rosen
Subject Area
Art History
Term
since 2026
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 539990504
Self-portraits by female artists from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century comprise the subject of this sub-project. On the one hand, its premise connects female self-portraits with the early modern discourse on the "“persona" and the roles women adopt. On the other, we also investigate how female self-portraiture is intertwined with notions of self-formation that emerged in antiquity and persisted through to the seventeenth-century conception of subjectivity. Its theme centres on sixteenth- to nineteenth-century female artists who explored the available possibilities for acting on the "stage of life" - the central metaphor in the discourse on persona - when forming images of themselves. This concept is especially critical when considering assumptions about women’s social roles performed for various audiences. We focus particularly on the conditions of these artists’ self-images in terms determined by social and gender norms, i. e. the "makeability" of the self in different contexts and situations. We explore this question both within the images themselves, but also through their public reception and dissemination through various media. The aim of this project is therefore to show how female artists’ self-portrayals in the early modern period up to the nineteenth century were intertwined with social norms, habituated practices, and various discourses around the "self". Examples of these discourses include the female self, appropriate lifestyle, physical appearance, and general behavior. This intertwining principally exists on two heuristically distinct but closely connected levels. On the one hand, this concerns the role and status of female artists and the exercise of their professional activity, i. e. their factual agency. On the other hand, this concerns their self-conception transmitted through their images. Furthermore, the sub-project aims to systematically analyze, the interweaving of pictorial self-representation - against the backdrop of period conceptions of decorum - and the actual 'self-formation' of life and behavior. This analysis will be grounded in the possibilities available to female artists at the time. The premise the project must examine is that self-representations can be a part – particularly effective via imagery - of more comprehensive self-formations, which at the same time can indicate self-formation realized on further levels, such as behaviour, naming, bodily practices, and more.
DFG Programme
Research Units
