Woodblock illustrations carved by Leonardo (d. 1612) and Girolama Parasole (d. 1622) were defining features of some of the most ambitious books of the Catholic Reformation. Little known today, the couple worked alongside papal physicians and aristocratic philosophers, erudite Orientalists and Rome’s most prominent artists, to illustrate the publications with which newly reformed social and intellectual institutions made their mark on the world stage. Those illustrated volumes of New World botany, antiquity, Christian history, geometry, and iconography, along with manuals for lace-making, handwriting, and the performance of liturgy, flowed into every distribution channel for illustrated books. The woodblocks the Parasole couple carved translated drawings made by others into ingenious systems for rendering complex hatching in multiple impressions. Their dependence on designs they did not create, however, put them in an uneasy relationship with the fine arts, which were then being codified at the new Roman Accademia di San Luca. While the main figures of my narrative are Leonardo and Girolama Parasole, whose woodblocks illustrated the books that are still central to our notion of early modern Roman publishing, the larger subject of my book is a discussion of the workers who realized the artistic projects most consequential to Rome’s modernization. Focusing on the skills, commitments, and affiliations of the Parasole family over three generations produces a deeply textured understanding of the working lives of the men and women who made images for the printers, patrons, and readers of their time, and a more expansive sense of the aspirations and material worlds that shaped the direction of the arts in Rome around the year 1600.

Leonardo’s brother Rosato Parasole, a painter and mosaicist who published the first of several woodcut pattern books for lace-making, designed by his wife Elisabetta Catanea Parasole, worked on the decoration of the dome of Saint Peter’s as well as public festival decorations. One of Leonardo and Girolama’s children, Bernardino, joined the studio of the most popular Roman painter of the time, the Cavaliere d’Arpino (Giuseppe Cesari). Working together on projects across media, genres, and written languages that spanned elite and artisanal cultures, the family was consequential in realizing the city’s aspirations to become a center for intellectual and artistic as well as spiritual renewal. My research follows the circumstances of these artisans during the rapid modernization and increased control of the conduct of life and work that affected every aspect of their personal and professional lives.

Throughout this period of change in the regulation of their professions, the dispersed structure of the medieval family workshop continued to enable the extended family’s resilience as they entered into partnerships with new institutions and took on projects that furthered the global ambitions of both the papacy and the scientifically minded elite. Their illustrations for New World herbals and the Arabic Gospels connected them with global initiatives to understand the secrets of nature and medicine, and to bring Eastern Christians into the Roman Church. As the first congregants of the new Oratorian order, Leonardo and Girolama took part in the spirit of religious renewal personally as well as professionally, providing illustrations for the Oratorian press under the Inquisition’s supervision of printing and publication. Along with staying abreast of rapid developments in technology and requirements for protecting innovation and ensuring compliance, navigating the bureaucracy of the Holy Office relative to their business of book illustration was a perilous affair that required its own constantly renewable skills. 

The Parasole family’s engagement with the fine arts after the foundation of the Accademia di San Luca in 1593 shows how such artisans perceived newly arising professional opportunities at a moment when the academy was debating whether to include all, or just some, practitioners of the arts. As one of the early modern institutions that came to define and control the professional lives of artists, the Accademia offered an option for artisans who found the alliance beneficial, particularly when they felt themselves to be unprotected by other economic and social systems. The painters Rosato and Bernardino joined the academy, but Girolama was the only Parasole family member whose portrait is included among the early academicians. We know from the Center’s Early History of the Accademia di San Luca project that no women’s names appear among the attendees of the academy’s early meetings. However, two single-sheet prints by Girolama, never intended as book illustrations, seem to display an ambition to change her profession to academic artist. This suggests that the academy may have offered new opportunities and status for prints of translation, helping us to understand the strategies of female artisans before the institutions of modernity were fully articulated.

Brown University (emerita)
Kress-Beinecke Professor, 2025–2026

In addition to completing her book about the Parasole family in Rome, Evelyn Lincoln will be working with her digital humanities site, The Theater That Was Rome, to discover more about the interconnected worlds of readers, artists, printers, and publishers in early modern Europe.