Daughters of Athena: Expressing Kinship, Support, and Admiration Amongst Netherlandish Women
by Annelies Verellen
In 1620, the prolific author, engraver, and printmaker Anna Roemers Visscher (1583–1651) dedicated a poem to thirteen-year-old Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678), who had attracted praise and attention for her formidable achievements in the arts. After extensively praising Van Schurman for her noble pursuit of learning as a young “maiden” and applauding her understanding of multiple ancient languages, Visscher turned her focus to Van Schurman’s creative capabilities:
When with your needle you work linen,
Or paper with charcoal,
So that artists stand amazed,
And liken you to Pallas.1
Visscher generously commends Van Schurman’s promising talent and supports her creative and intellectual endeavours, comparing the younger artist to Athena, pagan goddess of warfare, the arts, and wisdom, who is mentioned here by her epithet “Pallas.”2 Visscher’s praise not only affirms Van Schurman’s talents but also signals the pagan deity as a powerful model of emulation for Netherlandish women artists, writers, and patrons. Through this poetic gesture, Visscher initiated a form of intergenerational female support that framed women’s creative and intellectual achievements as both legitimate and admirable. The invocation of the goddess Athena suggests that Netherlandish women could imagine themselves as heirs to a classical tradition that fused learning, artistry, and moral authority by embracing rather than renouncing their femininity.
The poem demonstrates how Athena’s symbolic power fostered networks of admiration, kinship, and mutual recognition among early modern women. By aligning Van Schurman with the pagan deity, Visscher effectively situates her within a shared feminine genealogy of excellence. In what follows, I propose that such symbolic identification allowed early modern women to celebrate one another’s accomplishments while countering dominant discourses that framed artistic genius and intellectual rigor as inherently masculine traits.3 By examining women’s citation of Athena in panegyrics and historiated portraits, this paper demonstrates how the warrior-goddess emerged as a figure through whom Netherlandish women claimed authority, strength, and creativity as feminine virtues.
Women’s invocation of Athena found visual expression in portraiture in the second half of the 17th century. In 1663, Margarita Trip (1640–1714), daughter of the prominent Amsterdam arms dealer Louis Trip, commissioned Ferdinand Bol to paint her with her younger sister Anna Maria Trip (1652–1681) in an Allegory of Education (fig.1).4 In this life-size portrait, Bol depicts Margarita in the guise of Athena as she instructs her sister, presenting education as both a moral duty and a familial bond. Margarita’s role as teacher is emphasized by her posture and expression: she parts her lips as if mid-instruction and gazes attentively at Anna Maria, who leans toward her while holding a book. The sisters’ physical closeness conveys tenderness and affection, underscoring the emotional dimension of Margarita’s assumed pedagogical role. Anna Maria, in contrast, turns her gaze toward the viewer, her expression suggesting youthful curiosity and innocence. By representing Margarita as Athena, Bol visualizes education as a heroic and protective undertaking, aligning female instruction with divine wisdom and authority. She wears Athena’s armor, including a plumed helmet and breastplate, thereby assuming the goddess’s dual identity as patron of wisdom and war.5 This martial imagery transforms the act of educating a younger sister into a form of moral guardianship and defense. The protective dimension of Margarita’s role is further emphasized through the recurring motif of the female gorgon Medusa.6 Medusa’s head appears both on a large shield leaning against a classical column and on Margarita’s breastplate. Significantly, Medusa’s face appears next to Anna Maria’s, encouraging the viewer to associate the older sister’s protective role over her younger sister with the talismanic protection traditionally attributed to Athena’s aegis (fig. 2).
Through this iconography, Margarita mobilizes Athena’s symbolic authority to affirm her responsibility for her sister’s intellectual development. The painting echoes Visscher’s poetic praise of Van Schurman by presenting Athena as a mediator of sisterly care, protection, and intellectual guidance. Together, these examples reveal a literary and visual tradition in which Netherlandish women recognized the deity’s feminine iconography as a means of expressing solidarity across familial and amicable networks.
Anna Maria van Schurman herself also participated actively in this tradition. In 1648, she reiterated the praise that she had received from Anna Roemers Visscher in 1620 in a laudatory poem addressed to the French author and proto-feminist Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565–1645). Van Schurman had encountered Gournay through the theologian André Rivet, a mutual acquaintance.7 Congratulating Gournay on her ground-breaking treatise The Equality of Men and Women (1622), Van Schurman devoted an epideictic poem to the French author in the “Poemata” chapter of her 1648 work Opuscula. Originally published in Latin, the poem frames Gournay’s achievements through the imagery of warfare and heroism, repeatedly invoking Athena:
…You bear the arms of Pallas, bold heroine in battles,
And so that you may carry the laurels, you bear the arms of Pallas.
Thus it is fitting for you to make a defense for the innocent sex
And to turn the weapons of harmful men against them…8
By likening Gournay’s literary labor to a military campaign, Van Schurman endows her intellectual achievements with the rhetoric of victory and resistance. Gournay is praised as a “heroine in battles” whose weapons are arguments rather than swords. Moreover, in designating Gournay as “Pallas,” Van Schurman invokes the epithet’s reference to the deity’s power to “create cosmic upheaval” by rapidly and violently shaking her shield or spear and thus reinforces the martial nature of Gournay’s literary accomplishments.9 Through Athena, Van Schurman reconfigures authorship as a form of combat waged in defense of women against patriarchal attacks. This rhetorical strategy not only elevates Gournay’s accomplishments but also frames the collective struggle for women’s intellectual recognition as a shared cause.
Van Schurman’s laudatory poem addresses Gournay as a leader who advances the interests of women as a group. Van Schurman urges her to “lead on” and positions herself and other women as followers rallying under Gournay’s example. Such language demonstrates a keen awareness of how classical symbolism could be mobilized to articulate female solidarity and collective agency. Athena, a female deity who fuses wisdom and warfare, provided an ideal figure through whom women could imagine themselves as defenders, rather than transgressors, of femininity.
The invocation of Athena also aligns with Gournay’s own philosophical position. Gournay famously rejected the idea that women should strive to resemble men in order to achieve success, arguing instead that society’s treatment of women as inferior resulted from unequal access to education rather than from the inherent “flaws” of their femininity.10 She vehemently opposed the belief that femininity itself constituted an obstacle to women’s achievements.11 Van Schurman’s praise of Gournay as a “defen[der] of the innocent sex” suggests that she shared this conviction and perceived her own scholarly and artistic success as compatible with—rather than opposed to—her femininity. Her firm self-confidence even threatened her male contemporaries which led to extensive scrutiny and sexualization of her artistic production.12 These criticisms reveal how women who claimed equality without renouncing their gender posed a threat to the patriarchal hegemony of the early modern period. In this context, Athena offered a symbolic and visual framework through which women could defend their intellectual ambitions while affirming their feminine identity.
The repeated invocation of Athena by early modern women when expressing praise and admiration for one another thus constituted a strategic response to contemporary discourses that equated creativity, genius, and authority with masculinity, violence, and virility. As the patroness of both war and art, Athena disrupted these masculinist ideas and enabled women to articulate strength, intellect, and creativity as feminine qualities. Through Athena, women asserted that their achievements were not exceptions to the female sex but expressions of it.
This association between Athena and proto-feminist authors was extended beyond written works by Van Schurman and Gournay. The Amsterdam author Johanna Hobius (c. 1614–1642) appears with Athena on the frontispiece for her authored tract, T’ Lof der Vrouwen (In Praise of Women) (fig. 3).13 The image portrays Hobius seated in her study, quill in hand, drafting the very text that the frontispiece introduces. Athena stands behind her, gazing over her shoulder and preparing to crown her with a laurel wreath. The composition visually aligns Hobius’s authorship with divine wisdom and protection, reinforcing the legitimacy of her intellectual labor.
As in Bol’s Allegory of Education, Athena appears here as a vigilant, sisterly supporter. The goddess’s watchful presence evokes a relationship of care and endorsement, suggesting that Hobius’s defense of women is sanctioned by a divine feminine authority. Hobius’s text echoes Gournay’s arguments, asserting that women’s marginalization stems from male prejudice rather than “innate weakness.”14 Hobius explicitly endorses Anna Maria van Schurman as a model for Dutch women, calling upon them to adorn her with the laurel crown.15 This gesture mirrors Hobius’s own symbolic coronation by Athena, reinforcing a reciprocal system of recognition among women authors and marking a victory for them. Generosity and praise circulated within this network of aspiring “Athenae,” strengthening bonds of mutual admiration and a collective feminine identity.
The praise first offered by Anna Roemers Visscher to the young Anna Maria van Schurman in 1620 set in motion a growing network of “Athenae”: women artists and proto-feminist authors who publicly celebrated one another’s achievements as evidence of women’s intellectual and creative capacities. Through literary and visual traditions, women contested misogynist beliefs that presented femininity as an obstacle to creativity, literary production, and originality. Instead, they identified patriarchal structures as the true barriers to women’s education and recognition. By repeatedly invoking the image of Athena, early modern Netherlandish women forged a shared symbolic language through which they articulated solidarity and defended femininity as a worthy enabler of their success.
This paper draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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Annelies Verellen is a PhD candidate specializing in early modern Dutch and Flemish art at McGill University (Montréal, Canada). Her research examines how Netherlandish women artists assert their creativity by theorizing and performing femininity. She is interested in the extent to which early modern women confronted the gendered language used in artistic theory, the conceptualization of ‘genius,’ and prescriptive moralizing literature when articulating their skill and status as women artists.
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1. “Als gij lijnwaet, met uw naeldt/ Of papier, met kool bemaelt/ Dat de konstenaers staen kijken/ En’ bij Pallas u gelijken.” Unless otherwise indicated, translations are the author’s. The original Dutch poem is cited in Anna Roemers Visscher, Gedichten van Anna Roemers Visscher, ed. Fr. Kossmann (‘s-Gravenhage, 1925), 28.
2. Anne R. Larsen and Steve Maiullo, Anna Maria van Schurman, Letters and Poems to and from Her Mentor and Other Members of Her Circle, ed. Anne R. Larsen and Steve Maiullo (Iter Press, 2021), 69. The Roman equivalent name of Pallas Athena is ‘Minerva.’
3. For more on the gendering of artistic pursuits and originality and requirements of male prowess, see Philip Sohm, “Gendered Style in Italian Art Criticism from Michelangelo to Malvasia,” Renaissance Quarterly 48, no. 4 (1995): 787, https://doi.org/10.2307/2863424. See also Elizabeth Rice Mattison, “The sculptor and the sculptress: Gendering sculpture production in the early modern Low Countries,” Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art / Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek Online 74, no. 1 (2024): 76-105, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004710740_004; Joanna Woods-Marsden, “The Female Self,” in Renaissance Self-Portraiture: the Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist (Yale University Press, 1998), 187-190.
4. Tatjana Van Run, “Nieuw Licht Op Het Trippenhuis: De Verhelderende Blik van de Dichter-Glazenmaker Salomon Oudart (1633-1699),” Oud Holland 132, no. 1 (2019): 20.
5. Margarita’s martial costume may also hint at her family’s dealings in the arms trade.
6. In pagan mythology, Medusa was a faithful, chaste servant of the goddess Athena until she was sexually violated by Poseidon (Neptune) in the goddess’s temple. To avenge the defilement of her temple, Athena punished Medusa by transforming her into a gorgon, a snake-haired monster whose gaze could turn men into stone. Perseus decapitated Medusa, whose severed head became a talismanic image of protection in the iconography of Athena. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. and ed. Stephanie McCarter (Penguin Books, 2022), 124-125.
7. Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, “Anna Maria van Schurman and her Intellectual Circle,” in Whether a Christian Woman Should Be Educated and Other Writings from Her Intellectual Circle, ed. Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, trans. Joyce L. Irwin (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 13. https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226850009.
8. Anna Maria van Schurman, “Poemata,” in Opuscula Hebraea Graeca Latina et Gallica, prosaica et metrica (1648), 264. Elsevier, 2014, accessed via Science Direct, October 29, 2025. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/book/9781493303977.
9. Susan Deacy, “‘We Call Her Pallas, You Know’: Naming, Taming and the Construction of Athena in Greek Culture and Thought,” Pallas, no. 100 (2016): 59–72, see esp. 70.
10. Marie le Jars de Gournay, “The Equality of Men and Women,” in The Equality of the Sexes: Three Feminist Texts of the Seventeenth Century, trans. Desmond M. Clarke, first edition (Oxford University Press, 2013), 54.
11. Gournay, “The Equality of Men and Women,” 60.
12. Male contemporary and leading intellectual Constantijn Huygens repeatedly made fun of van Schurman’s celibacy and independent choice to prioritize her education and artistic pursuits over marriage, for example. For more see Anne R. Larsen, “Anna Maria van Schurman: Self-Portraiture, Female Scholarly Identity, and the Republic of Letters,” Renaissance Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2024): 879-922, and Agnes A. Sneller “If She Had Been a Man: Anna Maria van Schurman in the social and literary life of her age,” in Choosing the Better Part: Anna Maria van Schurman (1607-1678), ed. Mirjam de Baar and Lynne Richards (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), 133-149.
13. Johanna Hobius, Het Lof der Vrouwen 1643, ed. Johan van Dam (Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren, 2009), accessed via DBNL.org on February 14, 2026, https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/hobi002lofd02_01/hobi002lofd02_01_0001.php.
14. Hobius, Het Lof der Vrouwen 1643, A4R.
15. Hobius, Het Lof der Vrouwen 1643, A8R. “Comt Vrouwen al-te-mael en maegden wilt vercieren/ Den Phoenix van ons Landt met groene Lauwerieren,/ Comt hier en vlecht een krans op te stellen op het hooft.” English translation: “Come all women and maidens, who wish to adorn/ the phoenix of our land with green laurels/ come here and weave a crown to place upon her head.”