GIULIA LAMA (1685-1753) - Receive artist alerts » - More items from this artist »

Zoom Exit

Black and white chalk on grey paper.

324.00mm wide    434.00mm high    (12.76 inches wide  17.09 inches high)

Oberlin College, Ohio, USA (1951); Este Gallery, New York (1962); Prof. Dr. Julius S. Held.

Very good

In a letter written in March 1728 by Abbot Luigi Conti to Madame de Caylus, he wrote:

“I have just discovered a woman here who paints better than Rosalba (Carriera) ……this woman excels as much in the art of poetry as in the art of painting, and I find in her poems all the virtues of Petrarch: her name is Giulia Lama. ….. In her youth she studied mathematics…. The poor woman is persecuted by other painters, but her virtue triumphs over her enemies. It is true that she is ugly as she is witty, but she speaks with grace and polish, so that one easily pardons her face. She works in lace….. perhaps your son saw Lama when he was in Venice. She lives, however, a very retired life. ”
Notwithstanding the fact that she was a painter, mathematician, poetess and lace-maker, not much is known of Giulia Lama except that she was a gifted artist who lived in great seclusion. Probably the first woman to break the barrier of male domination in Venice in the early eighteenth century, she was little known outside her home town. Possibly the daughter of Agostino Lama, an obscure Venetian painter (d 1714), Giulia was a fully trained and accomplished artist by 1719 , emergent from Giovanni Battista Piazzetta ’s studio in the 1720s . Indeed, many of her works were confused with Piazzetta’s until the early 1970s when scholars reconstructed her artistic personality also reassigning to her about two hundred drawings, many of them in one private collection in Bergamo .

Suggested by Hugo Chapman, the attribution of this fine study of a male nude is strongly supported by the marked similarities in style, technique and format of composition to other drawings by Lama. For instance, another Study of a Male Nude in the Museo Correr (Venice) shows the same kind of obsessive concern with an emphasis on form, a kind of anatomical construction of volto. In two other sheets also in the Museo Correr given to Giulia Lama by Ruggeri in 1973, the artist uses the same male model in varying poses, powerfully emulating the antique in her treatment of the virile male torso. Whilst her style is a rather formal and decorative type of academy figure with a less sensuous vitality compared to Piazzetta’s treatment of the nude, she projects a strong naturalism with powerful emphasis on light so as to emphasize the human body. Indeed, it is these examples of her graphic work which show that she studied extensively from the nude male models, thus giving an excellent idea of the modes of academic drawing which prevailed in the ‘school of Piazzetta ‘ where Lama worked.

She was one of the first women artists to work from life, drawing both male and female nudes. Indeed, an example of the latter is in the British Museum, London, Study of a Nude Woman .That she was able to compete at all was amazing as most women of her era did not have access to study nudes. On the one hand, Giulia Lama displays her autonomy and personality, and on the other expresses her respect and debt to the workshop of her master, Piazzetta.