Giulia Lama

In a Venice that loved pale pinks and powdery blues, Giulia Lama painted in the dark. Her canvases are shadowed and dramatic, closer to the older Baroque than to the light Rococo taste around her, and for a long time some were mistaken for the work of men.

She was trained by her father, a painter, in the parish of Santa Maria Formosa, and she moved in serious company. She was close to Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, a leading Venetian painter of strong light and shadow, who painted her portrait, and she knew the young Tiepolo. She was also a poet whose verses were praised in her lifetime, and she had studied mathematics.

What sets her apart is the drawing. Lama is the first woman known to have studied the male nude from a live model, at a time when women were barred from that training, and around 200 of her drawings of the figure survive. She was admired, then nearly forgotten for two centuries, until those sheets resurfaced and scholars began putting her name back on paintings hanging in Venetian churches.