Councillors in Padua have agreed to install the first statue honouring a woman in the city’s historic centre, but it remains to be seen if the monument will be placed among the dozens of statues dedicated to men in the prominent Prato della Valle square.
The decision followed a fiery debate that further exposed the scarcity of statues celebrating women not only in Padua but across Italy.
Margherita Colonnello and Simone Pillitteri, the two councillors who submitted the motion, had to backtrack on their original proposal to place a statue of Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia – the first woman in the world to earn a PhD – on one of the two empty pedestals nestled among 78 statues paying tribute to men in Prato della Valle, the second largest square in Europe.
Piscopia, who received her doctorate degree in philosophy from the University of Padua in 1678, was not included when Padua officials devised a project in the late 18th century to adorn the central island of the 90,000-sq-metre square with statues of figures who were either from the city or who had links to it.
Originally there were 88 statues, but 10 statues dedicated to Venetian doges were destroyed by Napoleon’s army after it conquered the republic of Venice. Eight were later replaced by obelisks, while two of the pedestals remained empty.
Critics of the new proposal argued that it was out of context with the square’s history, and that the last two pedestals should remain empty as they were a symbol of the destruction by Napoleon’s troops.
In order to overcome the opposition, Colonnello and Pillitteri removed the caveat that Prato della Valle should be the location and opened up to erecting a statue celebrating a female figure other than Piscopia. Alternative suggestions include the 19th-century painter Elisabetta Benato-Beltrami and the writer Gualberta Alaide Beccari.
“The important thing is that we have raised the debate about the under-representation of women among monuments and it is now very clear to all politicians that we need a very good statue of a woman in a very good place,” said Colonnello. “We now need to decide where and who. But I think we will eventually settle on the square – it is very huge and there is lots of space.”
The proposal was triggered after Mi Riconosci, an association of professionals working in the cultural heritage sector, undertook a census of all statues of Italian figures erected in public spaces across the country and found that only 148 were dedicated to women.
“This is being presented as a victory in Padua but for us it isn’t,” said Federica Arcoraci, an art historian with Mi Riconosci. “The point is that there are 78 statues dedicated to men in Prato della Valle and there needs to be one of a woman.”
• This article was amended on 3 February 2022 to correct misspellings of Prato della Valle as “Prato della Vella”.
