Since the Renaissance, salons with the portraits by the “Uomini illustri,” a group of acclaimed male artists, have been a part of the décor in castles and palaces. Ancestral portrait galleries were maintained as a matter of congeniality allowing these masters to illustrate their creativity. The Venetian Café Florian beneath the St. Mark’s Place Arcades, where Lord Byron, Goethe, Proust and Stravinsky drank their espresso and, as legend has it, where the idea for an art biennial arose in 1895, affords such illustrious company. From Marco Polo to Titian to Goldono, they have gathered ten heroes from the thousand-year history of the Laguna Republic. Irene Andessner, born in Salzburg in 1954, has temporarily replaced the ten men with ten famous Venetian women. The photographer, dressed in the respective period styles, portrays herself as such celebrities like the portraitist Rosalba Carriera, the composer Barbara Strozzi, the courtesan Veronica Franco or Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, the first woman in history to obtain a doctorate. The female celebrities in Andessner’s photographs are empathized with the revered men in appearance and attitude so that their interchangeability becomes more evident, making the traditional constraints of the male sex more questionable. In addition to her bust portraits, Irene Andessner takes full body portraits, showing the caged-in environment, which, through the accumulation of obscure objects, becomes a cabinet of curiosities where these self-confident women can assert their superiority. The “Donne illustri” are subtle transferences to the present from age-old epochs. Without negating the past, they are a direct and unobtrusive scrutiny of socially fortified gender roles and are a surprisingly lively piece of Venice. Exhibited at the 2003 Biennial in Café Florian, they are now available to everyone who wants to create their own ancestral portrait gallery.

Dr. Boris von Brauchitsch