Aristotle knew what he was talking about. ‘A woman is like a deformed man. She lacks an essential element: a soul.’ Painting and sculpture were forbidden kingdoms for the beings without souls. In sixteenth-century Bologna, there were five hundred and twentyfive painters, one of whom was a woman. In the seventeenth century, the Académie des Beaux-Arts of Paris had four hundred and fifty members, fifteen of whom were woman, all of them wives or daughters of male painters. In the nineteenth century, Suzanne Valadon was a market vendor, a circus acrobat, and a model for Toulouse-Lautrec. She used corsets made of carrots and shared her studio with a goat. That she was the first woman who dared to paint male nudes surprised no one. She had to be nuts. Erasmus of Rotterdam also knew what he was talking about: ‘A woman is always a woman, in other words, crazy.’ – Mirrors, stories of almost everyone, Eduardo Galeano (translated by Mark Fried)