The Lesser Genres

Shut out of the grand stuff, women were pushed toward portraits and still life. These paid the bills, but they sat near the bottom of the era's ranking of subjects.

The twist came later. Art history kept that ranking and treated those genres as second-tier — so even the women who succeeded were filed under "minor." The bias that limited their subjects then shrank their reputations a second time.

If the official doors were shut, how did anyone get in? Almost always through family. Marietta Robusti trained in the workshop of her father, the painter Tintoretto. Artemisia Gentileschi learned from her painter father too.

The art world ran like a family business, and a woman usually needed a male relative on the inside to hand her a brush, a teacher, and a first commission.