June 2023

Beatrijs Vanacker and Lieke van Deinsen have pointed out that the relation between gender and the representation of intellectual authority is deeply rooted in European history, while women in the early modern period struggled to forge intellectual authority through textual and visual constructions of themselves as scholarly personae. (2022, 7) In this context, women mathematicians were not indifferent to how they were portrayed and something that has struck me in excavating their lives is their interest in their  visual representations, which varied depending on their social status, personal desires and inclinations, but also their philosophical and cultural standpoints. 

Portraiture relies heavily on representation and is related to a life or a real person, the woman mathematician in our case, but the way this life or this person is being represented varies according to the period, artistic conventions and trends, social and cultural expectations of the era, the artist’s talent and genius, and of course the sitter's expectations and demands. Similarly portraits and self-portraits have been interpreted and analyzed from a variety of theoretical positions in philosophy and trends in art history. Whether the portrait depends on the artist’s intention, the sitter's desire or the viewer’s interpretation, what is highly problematic in all cases is the overall conception that the portrait should capture the essence of its subject and fix the presence of its referent. 

Interpreting portraits thus requires much more than a juxtaposition of narratives, discourses and visual images: it calls for close attention to the historical, social and cultural contexts that condition the emergence of the work of art under consideration, whether a painting, a sculpture or a photograph. The interpretation should therefore be particularly attentive to the processes of recontextualization: what happens to the work of art when it is placed in a different context of analysis and understanding and how this recontextualization can create new levels of meaning that are transdiciplinary, particularly so when considering visual representations in the world of science. It is in the backdrop of such questions and issues that I have been considering the visual representations of the six women mathematicians, philosophers and scientists in this project. Below I offer some initial thoughts in thinking about them in their interrelation.

References