Despite being a generation apart and thus unlikely to have ever met, both Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–c. 1654) and Barbara Strozzi (1619–1677), frequented, and were celebrated by, a close-knit network of Venetian poets, librettists, musicians, artists, collectors, and patrons closely linked to the infamous Accademia degli Incogniti. The Incogniti valued wit, improvisation, performance, and ribald humor, and were particularly fascinated with in the so-called “questione della donna,” which examined, often irreverently, the status of women in ancient and modern society. This chapter explores what can be gleaned about the interactions between artists, musicians, collectors and painters in little-studied years that Gentileschi spent in Venice (1626-1629?), such as the lawyer, letterato, and collector and Giacomo Pighetti, the writer Giovan Francesco Loredan, and the painter Alessandro Varorari, known as Il Padovanino. These connections, I propose, help elucidate the works Artemisia painted in these years, even if many of them are lost or unidentified.

This article traces the career trajectories, publishing strategies, and intertwining networks of Barbara Strozzi and two of her Venetian contemporaries: the Jewish salonniére and poet Sara Copia Sulam (1592?–1641) and the forced nun and polemicist Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–1652). All three figures were connected to the influential Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti, a libertine circle of writers, critics, and opera librettists with interests including literature and music. Each woman pursued a career as a public intellectual in an early modern world that often chafed at women’s voices, and each broadcast their ideas by publishing on prominent presses. The experience of Copia Sulam, who was prominent as the Incogniti academy was beginning to coalesce and was forced from the public eye after meeting with a vicious backlash for her intellectual activities, could in the coming decades serve as a cautionary tale to Strozzi and Tarabotti, who had long and prolific careers that were nevertheless beset by controversy. Though the trajectories of these three women varied in significant ways, their shared literary networks and their use of the presses to craft a commanding public persona illuminate the editorial environment for women in seventeenth-century Venice.

The musicological literature has tended to focus on Giulio Strozzi’s career as a librettist, and on his participation in three academies, Ordinati in Rome, and the Incogniti, and its musical offshoot, the Unisoni, in Venice. In this chapter I discuss two biographies published about Strozzi during his lifetime, one of them quite well known (present in the Le Glorie de gli Incogniti), the other one less so (from Gian Vittorio Rossi’s Pinacotheca Imaginum Illustrium). I will highlight the means by which these biographies nuance Strozzi’s time before he became one of Venice’s most noted librettists. I offer new insight into Strozzi’s time in Rome (circa 1601–1615), and suggest that, contrary to his published Incogniti biography, he most likely never earned a degree in law from the University of Pisa.

Barbara Strozzi’s Opus 3 stands apart from her other works by virtue of its mysterious dedication to the “Ignotae Deae”—a feminized version of the motto “Ignoto Deo”— that the Accademia degli Incogniti had borrowed from St. Paul’s sermon to the Athenians. Although seemingly affirming Strozzi’s links to the Incogniti, the enigmatic dedication also speaks to Strozzi’s ability in her music—both in this volume and elsewhere in her oeuvre—to dissimilate: to use music as means not of expressing her feelings but hiding them from her listeners. This hypothesis is born out in an overview of the volume’s organization, her choice of poems, and treatment of the poems that continually emphasize deception and deceit, where the musical setting often contradicts or even undermines the poem. In the end Strozzi herself emerges as the Unknown Goddess, who neutralizes even seemingly misogynist poems with deft humor, irony, always keeping her mask firmly in place.

This essay looks at the artistic patronage of the Strozzis and Widmanns, who were connected not only through commerce and culture, but also through the relationship between Giovanni Paolo Widmann and Barbara Strozzi. Both Giulio and Barbara, as well as various members of the Widmann family, were painted by the leading artists active in Venice at that time, such as Tiberio Tinelli, Bernardo Strozzi (well known as Il Prete Genovese) and Nicolas Régnier. Through the surviving documents and works of art, the dense intertwining of painting, music and poetry emerges, fostered by the Accademia degli Incogniti, the most famous literary circle flourishing in Venice in the seventeenth century, and to which Barbara and Giulio Strozzi and the abovementioned artists were connected. Furthermore,the essay sheds new light on the genre of the and the role it plays in celebrating the individual’s features and perpetuating personal memory.

This essay connects Barbara Strozzi’s life and career to the complex dynamics of Seicento Italian academies and to the strategies women cultural producers and their academic supporters devised in navigating and even reshaping gender norms. We begin with analysis of two thorny discourses in which Strozzi plays a starring role: a 1637 satiric dialogue in manuscript (“Sentimenti gioiosi”) that lampoons the Accademia degli Unisoni, a sodality that served in part as a performance venue for Barbara Strozzi assembled by Giulio Strozzi, a poet and probably her father; and a printed celebration of the Unisoni’s interdisciplinary activities, the Veglie de’Signori Unisoni (Venice, 1638). These representations of Strozzi’s engagement with the Unisoni lead us to consider other women cultural producers who interacted with Italian academies, particularly Isabella Andreini and Virginia Ramponi (fl.1580s–1630s). This exploration affords a new appreciation of the ways that Italian academies both enabled and constrained creative women.