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Notes

  1. Caroline Jones, “The Artist-Function and Posthumous Art History,” Art Journal 76, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 144–145.

  2. Jones 2017, 145, discussing the perceived coherence of the “posthumous author-function” created by historians.

  3. Giovanni Baglione, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti. Dal pontificato di Gregorio XIII del 1572. In fino a’ tempi di Papa Urbano Ottavo nel 1642 (Rome, 1642). On Baglione’s biographies of the printmakers, see Giovanni Maria Fara’s edition of Intagliatori (Pisa, 2016). Fara shows that Baglione used Giulio Mancini’s Considerazioni sulla pitture (section V, part 1) for information on many of these biographies. Those that do not appear in Mancini and seem to be Baglione’s invention include: Camillo Graffico, Raffaello Guidi, Giovanni Maggi, Giovan Giorgio Nuvolstella, and the Parasole family.

  4. Baglione 1642, 387: “Sogliono, ò Signor mio, esser’anche intendenti di disegno I buoni Intagliatori di acqua forte, o di bulino. E però tra Dipintori possono havere il luogo, poiche con le loro carte fanno perpetue l’opere de’ piu famosi maestri. Et benche le fatiche loro al cospetto del publico non sempre sieno stabile, e si mirino, pure non si puo negare, che li lor fogli non nobilitono, & arrichiscano le Città del Mondo. Anzi alcuni Artefici di Pittura, in fin essi hanno d’acquaforte, o di bulino le proprie opere intagliare, e come erano Pittori, così anche Intagliatori furono, & in loro queste Virtù hebbero commune il vanto, et indistinta la lode.”

  5. See Susan Nalezyty, “Girolama Parasole among the ‘Illustrious’ in the Portrait Collection at the Accademia di San Luca,” The History of the Accademia di San Luca, c. 1590–1635: Documents from the Archivio di Stato di Roma.*

  6. For an overview of the Parasole family, see Evelyn Lincoln, “The Parasole Family Enterprise and Book Illustration at the Medici Press,” in The Medici Oriental Press: Knowledge and Cultural Transfer around 1600, ed. Eckhard Leuschner and Gerhard Wolf (Florence, 2022), 110–118.

  7. Marco Pupillo, “Gli incisori di Baronio. Il maestro ‘MGF,’ Philippe Thomassin, Leonardo e Girolama Parasole (con una nota su Isabella/Isabetta/Elisabetto Parasole),” in Baronio e le sue fonti, ed. Luigi Gulia (Sora, 2009), 845.

  8. Thomas Kuehn, Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1991), 237. For the Roman adoption of the Florentine custom, see Simona Feci, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Didier Lett, and Marian Rothstein, “Women’s Mobility, Rights, and Citizenship in Medieval and Early Modern Italy,” in “Gender and the Citizen,” Clio. Women, Gender, History, no. 43 (2016): 48–72.

  9. Document substantially published in Gian Ludovico Masetti Zannini, Stampatori e Librai a Roma nella seconda metà del Cinquecento (Rome, 1980), 279–280.

  10. The date of the family’s arrival in Rome is calculated from Leonardo’s deposition at the canonization trial of Filippo Neri on December 12, 1598. Testimony in Giovanni Incisa della Rocchetta and Nello Vian, eds., Il primo processo per San Filipo Neri (Vatican City, 1958), 2:212–214.

  11. Herbario Nuovo di Castore Durante (Rome, 1585).

  12. Vitaliano Tiberia, “Attività e ‘eredità’ di Giovanni Baglione per la Compagnia di San Giuseppe di Terrasanta,” in Studi sul Barocco romano. Scritti in onore di Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco (Milan, 2004), 35–38; J. A. F. Orbaan, “Virtuosi al Pantheon,” Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 37 (1915): 17–52, for lists of women affiliated with the sodality.

  13. Evangelium Iesu Christi quemadmodum scripsit Mar Mattheus unus ex duodecim discipulis eius (Rome, 1590), with a bilingual Arabic-Latin edition in 1591. See Caren Reimann, Die Arabischen Evangelien der Typographia Medicea, Buchhandel un Buchillustration in Rom un 1600 (Berlin, 2021).

  14. Orbaan 1915, 40–41; Pupillo 2009, 844.

  15. The documentation that disambiguated the relationships of the family members is published in Pupillo 2009.

  16. Bernardino was still alive and was named “unico figlio et herede” by the court when Girolama died intestate in 1622.

  17. Pupillo 2009, 847–848; Rose Marie San Juan, Rome: A City Out of Print (Minneapolis, 2001), 95–128; Alessandra Franco, “The Conservatorio di Santa Caterina della Rosa: Sheltering and Educating Women in Early Modern Rome” (PhD diss., Brown University, 2015).

  18. I am grateful to Tom and Libby Cohen for their help in confirming the definition of “capillarius.”

  19. ASR 30 Not Cap. uff. 16, ASR 30 Not Cap., Atti Bernardino Pascasius, f. 193r: 21 febraro 1586. In 1593 Rosato is documented as painting a decoration on a wall for a client, May 18–19, 1593, Atti Tino, v. 14, cc. 383r–384r.

  20. Lincoln 2022, 101.

  21. Isabetta Parasole, Specchio delle Virtuose Donne, dove si vedono bellissimi lavori di punto in aria, reticella, di maglia, & piombini, disegnata da Isabetta Catanea Parasole (Rome, 1595).

  22. Baglione 1642, 396, in the section on Intagliatori: “Et hora l’età nostra mirasi ne’legni figurar gl’intagli delle sue opere. Cava è la parte, che non serve; e l’altra, che serve, restandovi a guisa di basso rilievo, mostra l’imagini, e rappresenta l’historie; e lo stromento a ciò fare è un ferro, che dall’Artefice maneggiato co’l taglio opera, e mentre sminuisce la materia, cresce la forma, e dal mancamento delle parti riceve la perfettione il tutto.”

  23. Il modo di scrivere le cancelleresche et altre maniere di lettere di Lodovico Curione. Intagliato in legno per Leonardo Parasole, Libro Primo (Rome, 1586).

  24. Pupillo 2009, 849, suggested that another family member probably carved the lace manuals, as the working and designing of lace was the specialty taught at Augustinian convents.

  25. Pupillo 2009, 848, suggests that Isabella herself may have had a noble parent.

  26. Antonio Agustín, Dialoghi di Don Antonio Agostini arcivescovo di Tarracona intorno alle medaglie inscrittioni et altre antichità (Rome, 1592), 124. Leonardo’s monogram appears on page 126.

  27. Antonio Gallonio, De SS. martyrvm crvciatibvs (Rome, 1594), 44. Leonardo’s monogram appears on page 123. See Giuseppe Finocchiaro, Cesare Baronio e la tipografia dell’oratorio (Florence, 2005), 86–89. See also Jetze Touber, Law, Medicine, and Engineering in the Cult of the Saints (Leiden, 2014), 222–230; Marco Pupillo, in La Regola e la fama: San Filippo Neri e L’arte (Milan, 1995), 513–514; Pupillo 2009, 840.

  28. Pupillo 2009, 837–840. A different woodcut image of Giove Pluvio appears in the 1590 edition of the Annales printed at the Tipografia Vaticana. Girolama’s version was used as a model for subsequent editions of the Annales, such as the one printed in Cologne by Anton Hierat and Johann Gymnich, without her monogram. For the double printing of the volume, see Finocchiaro 2005, 28–40.

  29. Cesare Baronio, Annales Ecclestiastici (Rome, 1594), 2:209. Finocchiaro 2005, 122: record of payment of eight scudi to Leonardo Parasole “per l’intaglio in legno di Giove Pluvio che va nel secondo tomo dell’Annali…”

  30. Thanks to Jamie Gabbarelli for alerting me to the Dente engraving.

  31. Impressions of The Last Judgment are in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Biblioteca Panizzi.

  32. Impressions of Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and New York Public Library. The British Museum holds an impression dated 1623 published by Maurizio Bona, who also published posthumous editions of Isabella Parasole’s Teatro delle Nobili et Virtuose Donne.

  33. The largest sheet of paper, the foglio imperiale, was about 500 by 740 millimeters. The impression of Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs at the Art Institute of Chicago measures 415 by 672 millimeters. The next paper size, foglio reale, measured circa 445 by 615 millimeters.

  34. Pupillo 2009, 845: “Adi 8 [07.1622] morì la sig.ra Girolama Parasole scultrice, e pitrice…”

  35. The liturgical books included the Cerimoniale Episcoporum (Rome, 1600) and the Pontificale Romanum Clementis VIII… (Rome, 1595).

  36. Gabriele Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, trans. William McCuaig (Los Angeles, 2012), 205.