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

Monuments to historic women are almost entirely absent from European public streets, parks, and plazas. However, notable exceptions to the rule of exclusion and marginality existed within art studios that functioned as transnational dialogic spaces in mid-19th-century Italy. The proposed paper investigates American neoclassical sculptor Harriet Hosmer’s (1830-1908) creation of a public women’s art in Rome through her life-size statues of queens and other historical women. Her effigy for the tomb of Judith Faconnet, in Basilica Sant’Andrea delle Fratte, 1858, was the rare public sculpture commission by a woman. Further, Hosmer’s open studios catalysed social debates about women’s autonomy at a time of emerging feminist and suffrage movements. The Prince of Wales visited and discussed her sculpture Zenobia with a group, as depicted in an 1859 illustration in Harper’s Weekly. “All Rome goes to the studio of Harriet Hosmer to see her exquisite statue of the ex-Queen of Naples,” an American newspaper wrote in 1872 of Hosmer’s sculpture Maria Sophia, the recently dethroned Queen of Naples. Habermas’s theory of salons as bourgeois public spheres that facilitated free discourse on politics and art provides a methodological framework to situate women’s agency beyond the gendered binary of public/private which reinforces the rule of marginality. This paper will center Hosmer’s studio as an open, accessible space in which she pushed sculptural representations of women’s power as far into the social and cultural consciousness as was possible at the time.

Daniel Belasco is Executive Director of the Al Held Foundation, New York. His archive-based research on women artists has been published in international journals, books, and catalogues, most recently Women Artists in Midcentury America: A History in Ten Exhibitions (Reaktion, 2024). His criticism and interviews on painting, sculpture, video, and architecture have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Gagosian Quarterly, and other publications. He holds a MA and PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and a BA in Sociology from Amherst College.

Thanks to the research of Professor Marjan Sterckx, we know sculpture made by women was more likely to be erected at the city’s periphery, for instance as decoration in public gardens. But their work merits investigation when it comes to representing women in public space. Did women sculptors challenge the rules when it comes to the representation of women’s bodies? Are they less sexualised or idealised? Through the study of public works representing naked women by Noémie Debienne and Amélie Colombier, we will see how complex the issue of the gaze in sculpture is. Some of these women sculptors introduced new public images of the iconography of women and child, relating to new roles of women in society. For instance, Blanche Moria made The Botany Lesson, set at the Lycée Molière, one of the first to open its doors to female students and the State bought from Thérèse Quinquaud her Past and Future or National Defense to spread the idea that women should raise their children to be soldiers, and stirring up animosity towards Germany. Did these women sculptors actually believe in the politics they helped promote, or did they strategically compromise to pursue their chosen career? Statues to ‘grandes femmes’ were rare in the public space besides those representing Joan of Arc, but there were two sculptures in bronze, one made by Elisa Bloch, to celebrate the feminist Maria Deraismes (1828-94), this example allows us to understand how the feminism of the artist may be expressed in public sculpture.

Eva Belgherbi is a PhD candidate in Art History. Since 2017, her work has focused on the teaching of sculpture to women in France and the United Kingdom (1863-1914).

The impressive civic sculpture of Leeds has a lot to offer not only in regard to its inherent aesthetic beauty, but symbolic and allegorical meaning that still needs further exploration. This paper would seek to address this by examining how the representation of (classical) female figures were in multiple cases, contrasted with chivalric medieval male counterparts. The primary works addressed would be: Alfred Drury’s eight Nymphs that surround Sir Thomas Brock’s The Black Prince, and the Leeds War Memorial designed by Henry Charles Fehr (which features figures such as Pax and St George). At the centre of these conceptions of mythological, historical, and legendary figures is a perceived ‘ideal’ of the human form and a series of iconographic symbols demonstrating how it was to be read. This is particularly important for considering how and why these responses have changed over time in relation to our perception of gender including up to the present day. This approach would also take into account how the spatial arrangements of these works impacted upon their reception as well as the changes that have occurred over time including relocation and alterations. The works explored all have a place within public memory and continue to represent Leeds and the values of the city making further analysis of the gendered, ideological, and social contexts essential in understanding why.

Thomas Dunwell is a Leeds based researcher in the first year of his PhD in Art History focused on the representation and reception of the body in late 19th-century Neoclassical painting at the University of Leeds. Thomas currently works at the Henry Moore Institute and gives tours for exhibitions as well volunteer talks at Leeds Art Gallery, including on the topics of Victorian Medievalism and Victorian Neoclassicism. He most recent lecture was for the V&A Museum entitled ‘Gauguin’s Search for the “Primitive”: From Brittany to Tahiti’.

In 1932 in Oslo, while discovering Vigeland’s sculpture park, which was still under construction, the Guatemalan poet Miguel Ángel Asturias wrote an enthusiastic report entitled ‘Estatuas y mujeres’ (Statues and women). The life power inspired by this crowd of nudes – particularly female nudes – was, in the writer’s view, a reflection of the empowerment of women in Scandinavian societies. What are the elements of fantasy and truth in this poetic observation? The Oslo city landscape is, indeed, marked by the building of Gustav Vigeland’s project (ca. 1901-43). As the author of a public monument dedicated to the feminist writer Camilla Collett, one could expect him to express a renewed vision of the female body. In the sculpture park, mankind is depicted in some 700 poses, with a strict equality between male and female representations. The granite and bronze women are mostly lively and sporty, but others are depicted as passive or even melancholic. Refusing allegory as well as historicism, Vigeland is above all influenced by vitalist philosophy and by the Lebens Reform movement. In this frame, the traditionally Christian maternity theme is reinvented in a both mystical and biological way. One can speculate whether this is a progressive or a conservative approach. Endlessly supported by the city authorities, the Vigeland park, as well as the whole public sculpture in the interwar Oslo – basically a male sculptors art – question the ambivalence of the woman image through the social democracy frame.

Louis Gevart is an art historian and critic, and an AICA-France member. Defended in 2017 in Université Paris-Nanterre, his PhD dissertation deals with sculpture gardens in Europe (1901 1968). His research focuses on the public monument question, the relationship between art and landscape, sculptor’s writings and the open-air sculpture museums and collections of Europe. He mainly studies the Northern Europe, and particularly Scandinavian art. He has been lecturer at the École des Arts de la Sorbonne (Paris, 2010-22), and has taken part in several symposia, for instance the first Vigeland Symposium in Oslo Sentralen (May 2019).

This paper focuses on the typology of female statues from the discussed period in Central Europe (personifications of nations, nudes), and presents a case study. The Statue of Hungarian Pain, a standing female nude, was erected in 1932 in Budapest. It was donated to the Hungarian nation by an English viscount, Lord Rothermere, and designed by a French sculptor, Émile Guillaume. The sculpture commemorated the Treaty of Trianon, the 1920 dictate of the winning allies after World War I. The decision led Hungary to lose two-thirds of its former territory and two-thirds of its inhabitants, which lingered as a national trauma of Western injustice throughout the 1920s and ‘30s. During the inauguration of the statue, the nationalities of the donor and the sculptor played a significant role in the political discourse in Hungary, suggesting that out of the four judges at Trianon, two – the English and the French – had already regretted their unjust decision. However, during the changing political contexts of Central Europe throughout the 20th century, it was the statue’s politically neutral form that saved it for posterity. Demonumentalised, renamed, and relocated multiple times, it found itself in different contexts, such as Sunbathing Woman in public baths in Hungary.

Zsóka Leposa (b. 1976 in Szekszárd, Hungary) is a curator and art historian, currently based in Iceland. She holds a PhD in Art History. She researches the cultural heritage of Hungary, focusing on how art reflects and shapes historical narratives under political regimes. She started working with public art in 2005 when she joined the Advisory Office for Fine and Applied Arts in Budapest, the institution in charge of art in public spaces nationwide. In 2015, as a project manager in the program War of Memories, she investigated how memory politics manifest in artistic practices and cultural institutions in Hungary. As a curator of the Collection of Sculptures at Municipal Gallery – Kiscell Museum in Budapest, she curated exhibitions about how public art reflects and interacts with political and social contexts. Since 2019 she has been living in Iceland and working at the Reykjavík Art Museum.

At Middelheim Museum, Astrid Noack’s Anna Ancher (1939) stands out in the public sculpture park by challenging traditional representations of female bodies in modern sculpture. This quietly radical bronze is a rare tribute by one woman artist to another. Danish sculptor Astrid Noack depicts painter Anna Ancher not in action, but in a moment of contemplative stillness – with a focused gaze, sketchbook held close, poised at the threshold of creation. Rather than glorify or idealise, Noack honours the inner strength of the artistic process. Rejecting heroic drama, the sculpture’s upright form and calm presence focus on attention, integrity, and becoming – qualities rarely represented in public monuments figuring women. Its modest scale and sober composition challenge conventions of monumentality, foregrounding professional agency over symbolic femininity. Acquired in 1950 as the first work by a woman artist in Middelheim’s collection – and one that commemorates another – Anna Ancher holds a singular place. Female bodies in the museum’s modern sculpture collection (1870-1940) are predominantly anonymous, nude, and allegorical, representing untamed natural forces (such as La Méditerranée by Maillol, or Océanide by Laurens). For decades, Noack’s bronze stood secluded in the woods, among allegorical and mythological nudes. In the revised collection display, it features in a thematic cluster on human nature, questioning who is remembered in statues, and why. Now positioned opposite Rodin’s Balzac (1892), on a low pedestal in a closed hedge room, this spatial and conceptual recontextualisation – supported by digital interpretation – invites renewed reflection on women’s historical (in)visibility in public sculpture and its continued influence on contemporary views of gender and commemoration.

Veerle Meul is Lead of Research at Middelheim Museum in Antwerp and formerly Head of Collections (2018-24). She holds Master’s degrees in Art History and Archaeology, Art History Education, and Conservation of Monuments and Landscapes, with extensive experience in the cultural heritage field.

Chiara Pazzaglia is a PhD candidate in Art History at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and Université Paris Nanterre. She holds degrees in Art History from the University of Pisa (BA 2019, MA 2021) and a second-level Master’s from the Scuola Normale Superiore (2022), and spent a semester at the École du Louvre. Her doctoral research examines public monuments in Europe after the Second World War from a transnational perspective. In 2023, she was a Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute. Her work focuses on Fascist art and European sculpture from the 19th to the 20th century, with particular attention to public space and monumentality.

Alberto Pirro is a postdoctoral fellow at the Michalsky Department of the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, where he researches Risorgimento monumental production in Naples and Palermo between 1861 and 1940. He earned his PhD in Art History from the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II with a dissertation on the public oeuvre of Carlo Marochetti (1805-67). He holds degrees from Roma Tre (BA 2017) and the University of Turin (MA 2020), and pursued further studies at the École Nationale des Chartes and the Département des Sculptures at the Musée du Louvre. He has held fellowships at the Bibliothèque et Villa Marmottan in Paris and the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. His work focuses on nineteenth-century public sculpture, with particular attention to transnational circulations and monument production across Italy, France, and Britain.

Malvina Hoffman installed Russian Bacchanale in Paris’ Jardin du Luxembourg in 1919. When France accepted the sculpture, Hoffman became the first female sculptor represented within the garden. Her large figural sculpture depicts the bacchanale famously performed by Anna Pavlova and Mikhail Mordkin, the acclaimed Russian ballet dancers, during the autumn section of The Seasons. Hoffman shows the male and female figures moving perfectly in step with one another. They create a lyrical composition, leaning toward one another as they each hold a billowing cloth overhead. Grapes intertwine within the female figure’s hair, gesturing toward the legendary ancient Roman god of wine whose followers inspired the ballet. As a sculptural depiction of a woman in public space, Russian Bacchanale appeared in sharp contrast to the earlier 1840s series of twenty sculptures representing notable French women. Largely commissioned by King Louis-Philippe, these elegant, moralising marble figures appeared in the garden following complaints about the impropriety of nude statues. By choosing to represent Pavlova and Mordkin in the midst of their Bacchanale choreography, Hoffman captures their performance in permanent form. She also takes full advantage of the artistic license granted to ballet dancers to use their bodies to create compelling stories. Her nude figures appear simultaneously as individual figures, allegorical references to Roman mythology, and celebrations of emerging twentieth century beliefs about artistic form. Unfortunately, visitors no longer encounter the bronze figural group in the Jardin du Luxembourg as Nazi soldiers melted Hoffman’s sculpture down during World War II.

Isla Stewart is a second-year PhD Student at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. Her research focuses on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American female sculptors. As an MA student at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, Stewart began exploring public representations of women through a thesis on Vinnie Ream and Adelaide Johnson’s sculptures in the United States Capitol Rotunda. As the 2023-24 Curatorial Research Fellow at the Preservation Society of Newport County, Stewart continued her research on women artists, contributing to the recent exhibition Wild Imagination: Art and Animals in the Gilded Age.

The issue of representing Anita Garibaldi in sculpture is a compelling case in the monumental landscape of the Italian Risorgimento. The first monument entirely dedicated to the heroine was completed by Mario Rutelli in 1932 on Rome’s Janiculum Hill and is renowned in its long, troubled genesis. The Fascist regime’s attempt to inappropriate Anita’s symbolic legacy marked nonetheless the final episode of an evolving narrative, starting immediately after Italian unification and yet to be fully reconstructed. Proposals to erect a statue of Anita Garibaldi in Ravenna, where she did in 1849, appeared as early as 1864. However, it was only in 1888 that a monument honouring both Anita and the Martyrs of Independence was inaugurated, combining two separate fundraising efforts. The central female figure served as an allegory of the city, while Anita was confined to the reliefs on the base. The challenge of publicly commemorating a woman was also compounded by Anita’s revolutionary and antimonarchic legacy. This tension was underscored by a statue temporarily erected in 1889 in Livorno by democratic circles. In every case, Anita’s physical presence was nonetheless either obliterated or only alluded to, mediated through allegory. With an approach grounded in historical sources, informed by the methodologies of art history, this study seeks to investigate why was it so ‘difficult’ to monumentalise Anita Garibaldi and what were iconographical compromises adopted in this long-standing effort. Considering the single episodes as stages of negotiation, the inquiry aims to shed light on the layered challenges of the attempt, where issues of gender representation and contested memory intersect within the post-unification political terrain.

Claudio Tongiorgi graduated in Art History (BA 2020, MA 2023) at the University of Pisa. He completed his undergraduate studies at the Scuola Normale Superiore (2017-22), where he is currently pursuing a PhD focused on Italian historical-revivalistic painting after the Italian unification. His research interests include Italian and European painting and sculpture from the 19th to the early 20th century. In 2022, he undertook a research stay at the École Normale Supériore in Paris. In the same city he had an internship at the Musée Rodin in 2023, and he will undertake a residency at the École du Louvre from September 2025.

The formation of a new state necessitates the development of a national identity that encapsulates its history and values, particularly through the lens of public art. After the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was established in 1918, there was a pressing need for a unified identity among the various nations with distinct histories. Sculptor Ivan Meštrović emerged as a pivotal figure in the creation of Yugoslavia’s visual profile. His monumental sculptures were well-suited for public spaces and earned him commissions both in his own country and internationally. For over a decade, public sculptures predominantly commemorated male figures, often depicting clergy and royalty. In 1929, Meštrović shifted this narrative by introducing female figures in his designs for the Monument to Bolivar in Bolivia. Although the project did not come to fruition, these designs influenced his later work, including the Monument of Gratitude to France for Belgrade in 1930, where the goddess of Victory was reinterpreted as Marianne. A decade later, Meštrović would again adapt this concept to symbolise the provinces of Wallachia, Moldavia, Transylvania, and Bessarabia in his proposal for the Monument to King Ferdinand I in Bucharest. This paper aims to explore how classical influences were reinterpreted through the depiction of the goddess of Victory. It will compare the universal anonymity of female figures with the prominence of historical male figures and consider the allegorical significance within various national identities. Additionally, it will analyse Meštrović’s work in the context of contemporary art that draws inspiration from Antique style

Barbara Vujanović, PhD, serves as the Chief Curator at the Ivan Meštrović Museums – the Meštrović Atelier in Zagreb. She authored a doctoral dissertation titled From Antique Models to Neoclassicism: A Classical Component in the Work of Ivan Meštrović. The British Museum invited her to design and curate the exhibition Rodin: Rethinking the Fragment, which toured three venues in the UK from 2018 to 2019. Additionally, she has curated and co-curated many exhibitions featuring Ivan Meštrović, Carl Milles, Auguste Rodin, and other European sculptors in Croatia and abroad.