The Allegory of Painting

The allegory of painting, according to Renaissance iconographer Cesare Ripa, must be a woman with wild hair and a colourful dress, a mask pendant, and she must be gagged, because painting is silent poetry. I have painted myself with all of the above, but the gag is a bra. I was writing to an artist friend about a nude self-portrait she was working on, considering painting one of my own, when she told me that she was altering her painting because men were making inappropriate comments on her social media about it. As women artists we are still limited by the things we can say.