writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

“A MARTYR OF ART”: ‘STAGING’ ELENI ALTAMURA’S LIFE
Ioulia PIPINIA *
In 1998, Rhea Galanaki, a well‐known Greek woman writer, published the novel Eleni, or Nobody
(Eleni, ē o kanenas), the text that shed a new startling light on Eleni Altamura‐Boukoura’s life, the
first, as often considered, woman painter of the modern Hellenic state. Galanaki’s fictional biography
was not the first narration of Altamura’s astonishing story; but it was certainly the one that fostered
historical research on Eleni and encouraged discussions on Greek women artists of the 19 th century.
Moreover, the popularity and critical acclaim Galanaki’s work achieved, prompted a whole new life
for Eleni: her transgressive behavior, her achievements but also her sufferings as depicted in the
novel made her an iconic figure of women’s conduct in 19 th century Greece.
In this paper, I want to discuss the ways Eleni Altamura is portrayed in the texts written by three
Greek women writers: Kallirhoe Parren, Athina Tarsouli and Rhea Galanaki. Although different in
form and purpose (a journal article, a biographical account, a novel) and spread over a long period of
time, all three narratives are critical in unveiling Eleni’s life for they explore and construct Eleni’s
identities by focusing on performative and theatrical features. The interest, furthermore, these
women artists and novelists have shown on the historical figure and their attempt to narrate or
rewrite her story maps, as I intend to illustrate, the developments but also the limitations of feminist
thought and women’s writing in Greece during the past century; for, as I will argue, Altamura’s
uncommon attitude and choices are faded away while the dramatization of her sufferings, as a wife
and a mother, often set the canvas to the representation of her life.
Eleni was born in the island of Spetses in the 1820s. 1 Her father, Yiannis Boukouras (Boukouris or
Chrysinis) was a war hero and the owner of the first theatre building in Athens. Eleni was among the
very few women who got a formal education just after the Greek War of Independence and studied
painting privately. In the late 1840s, she moved to Italy to study at an art school. In order to attend
all classes she lived for sometime disguised as a man. While in Rome, she had a love affair with the
Italian painter and political refugee Francesco Saverio Altamura (1822‐1897). They had two
illegitimate children before getting married in 1853. Prior to the wedding, Eleni had to denounce
Orthodoxy and espouse Catholicism. Soon after, the couple had a third child (a second boy) who
stayed with his father, when Eleni, reacting to Altamura’s love affair with the painter Jane Benham
Hay, left Italy (most probably in 1855), taking with her the two elder children. Eleni never met her
husband again. In Greece, she was financially supported by her family but she also worked as a
painter and entered into a profession dominated by men. In 1873, shortly after moving to the island
of Spetses, her daughter died. Her elder son, Ioannis Altamouras, a promising painter as well, died at
the age of 26 in 1878. Her younger son, Alessandro rarely visited his mother. Eleni Altamura died
wretched and seriously distressed in 1900.
The woman who first dug out Eleni’s story was Kallirhoe Parren‐Siganou (1859‐1940), the editor
of The Ladies’ Newspaper (Efimeris ton kyrion) and an advocate of women’s rights in Greece at the
turn of the 19 th century. Parren visited Eleni in Spetses to meet the woman who, as she declares,
“broke new ground and opened up new horizons for female spirit”. 2 Parren, most probably, looked
for Altamura while preparing the first Women Artist Exhibition in Athens (1891). Altamura was in her
late sixties at the time and according to a note found by Galanaki in her papers, she was approached
in order to participate in the exhibition. 3 Parren published, in her journal in May 1890, two articles
based on her meeting and interview with Eleni but also on rumors she apparently heard during her
stay on the island.
*
School of Drama, Faculty of Fine Arts, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
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