Embodied Ideals: The Representation of Women in European Public Sculpture (1836-1937)

This workshop investigates the representation of women in European public sculpture from the mid-nineteenth century to the eve of the Second World War. Throughout this period, monuments were key in shaping national, republican, imperial, and civic identities. However, this commemorative landscape reveals a persistent contradiction: while artists and commissioners often portray women as allegories of abstract ideals, they seldom honour actual women as historical figures worthy of commemoration.

Building on foundational scholarship – from Maurice Agulhon’s seminal work on Marianne (1979) to Christel Sniter’s research on gendered commemoration in France (2012) and Anne Lafont’s analysis of race and allegory (2019) – this workshop endeavours to reassess the sculptural representation of women through both established and emerging perspectives. Pioneering feminist studies by Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock have shown that women’s exclusion – or selective inclusion – in visual culture reflects deeper power structures.

From François Rude’s Le Départ des Volontaires (1833-36) to Vera Mukhina’s The Worker and the Peasant Woman (1937), female figures in public sculpture were predominantly cast in allegorical roles as embodiments of liberty, nationhood, justice, or political entities. These representations drew on enduring classical models while adapting to local artistic traditions, political imperatives, and urban contexts. The transformation of France’s Marianne into Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty (1886) vividly illustrates how feminine forms transcended national boundaries and accrued new political and cultural meanings.

At the same time, exceptions such as Joan of Arc in France or Anita Garibaldi in Italy raise crucial questions about when real women were deemed suitable subjects for monumentalisation. How did artists adapt the visual schemes traditionally reserved for male heroism? What new iconographic or narrative strategies emerged to depict female agency, and how were these shaped by the gender, social status, and political affiliations of both artists and patrons? As Linda Nochlin famously asked, what systemic structures determined who was deemed ‘great’ enough to be immortalised, and by whom?

The workshop also addresses how colonial frameworks informed the representation of women, especially in the exoticised depictions of Africa and Asia that served to justify European imperial imaginaries. It explores how cultural, artistic, and political forces channelled broader anxieties about nation, race, and modernity onto the gendered body.

To structure this inquiry, the workshop focuses on three main lines of investigation: the construction of visual imaginaries of femininity, including those influenced by women artists; the use of female imagery to construct or challenge narratives of nationhood; and the tensions inherent in allegorical representations of women, particularly in their urban display and critical renegotiation in everyday contexts.

Bringing together case studies from across Europe – including Denmark, England, France, Hungary, Italy, Norway, and the former Yugoslavia – the workshop adopts a comparative perspective to identify both shared patterns and local specificities in how female figures, whether allegorical or historical, have been represented in public sculpture. Employing diverse methodological approaches, we aim to illuminate how women’s (in)visibility in monuments has reflected past sociopolitical tensions and continues to shape present-day cultural imaginaries. In doing so, the workshop seeks to contribute to broader critical debates on the hierarchies of memory, visibility, and power that underpin the very notion of the monumental.

Programme

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