Unsung figures in the history of art, marginalised and poorly documented, women artists of the renaissance have largely been ignored. We explore the careers and personal lives of the best known, including the Flemish miniaturist Levina Teerlinck at the Tudor court, the Florentine nun Plautilla Nelli, the wildly successful portraitists Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana, and finally the racy life of Artemisia Gentileschi, who truly rivalled her male peers in Florence, Naples and Rome. We also look at female patrons of art, from abbesses and wealthy widows to rulers such as Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Ferrara and her great (if today less famous) contemporary, Margaret of Austria, regent of the Habsburg Netherlands and the most powerful woman in early sixteenth-century Europe.