National Museum of Women in the Arts
1250 New York Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20005
202.783.7375

Pomp and Power: Antoinette Bouzonnet Stella's 'Entrance of the Emperor Sigismond into Mantua'
through August 22, 2010
Pomp and Power features a set of twenty-five engravings entitled The Entrance of the Emperor Sigismond into Mantua by Antoinette Bouzonnet Stella (1641–1676), a French artist who mastered the art of printmaking with help from her uncle, painter and printmaker Jacques Stella. A close friend of Nicolas Poussin and court artist to Cardinal Richelieu in Paris, Jacques invited thirteen-year-old Antoinette and her siblings to live in his prestigious lodgings in the Louvre. There, she produced copies of paintings by her uncle and Poussin and received important commissions from French officials.

In 1675, Antoinette executed The Entrance of the Emperor Sigismond into Mantua for Louis XIV’s minister of finance as part of a large-scale effort by the French government to emulate the appearance of Classical Greek and Roman sculpture in French national art. Engraved after a sixteenth-century stucco frieze in the Palazzo del Te in Mantua, Italy, by Renaissance artists Giulio Romano and Francesco Primaticcio, Antoinette’s prints employ the grand pictorial language of ancient Rome to depict the visit of Holy Roman Emperor Sigismond to Mantua in 1433. Masterfully executed, her engravings illustrate the power of a narrative borrowed from antiquity, employed in sixteenth-century Italy, and sought after by the seventeenth-century French court.

The exhibition is curated by Curatorial Assistant, Raphael Sikorra
http://www.nmwa.org