This knowledge also awakens imagination, and we wonder in what other ancient countries there were women artists.  We know that in Egypt inheritances descended in the female line, as in the case of the Princess Karamat; and since we know of the great architectural works of Queen Hashop and her journey to the land of Punt, we may reasonably assume that the women of ancient Egypt had their share in all the interests of life.  Were there not artists among them who decorated temples and tombs with their imperishable colors?  Did not women paint those pictures of Isis—­goddess of Sothis—­that are like precursors of the pictures of the Immaculate Conception?  Surely we may hope that a papyrus will be brought to light that will reveal to us the part that women had in the decoration of the monuments of ancient Egypt.

At present we have no reliable records of the lives and works of women artists before the time of the Renaissance in Italy.

* * * * *

M. Taine’s philosophy which regards the art of any people or period as the necessary result of the conditions of race, religion, civilization, and manners in the midst of which the art was produced—­and esteems a knowledge of these conditions as sufficient to account for the character of the art, seems to me to exclude many complex and mysterious influences, especially in individual cases, which must affect the work of the artists.  At the same time an intelligent study of the art of any nation or period demands a study of the conditions in which it was produced, and I shall endeavor in this resume of the history of women in Art—­mere outline as it is—­to give an idea of the atmosphere in which they lived and worked, and the influences which affected the results of their labor.

It has been claimed that everything of importance that originated in Italy from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century bore the distinctive mark of Fine Art.  So high an authority as John Addington Symonds is in accord with this view, and the study of these four centuries is of absorbing interest.

Although the thirteenth century long preceded the practice of art by women, its influence was a factor in the artistic life into which they later came.  In this century Andrea Tan, Guido da Siena, and other devoted souls were involved in the final struggles of Mediaeval Art, and at its close Cimabue and Duccio da Siena—­the two masters whose Madonnas were borne in solemn procession through the streets of Florence and Siena, mid music and the pealing of bells—­had given the new impulse to painting which brought them immortal fame.  They were the heralds of the time when poetry of sentiment, beauty of color, animation and individuality of form should replace Mediaeval formality and ugliness; a time when the spirit of art should be revived with an impulse prophetic of its coming glory.

But neither this portentous period nor the fourteenth century is memorable in the annals of women artists.  Not until the fifteenth, the century of the full Renaissance, have we a record of their share in the great rebirth.