The gallery of the Casa Buonarroti in Florence clearly demonstrates the high social prestige prominent artists could achieve during the Early Modern period. Between 1615 and 1628, Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger created a gallery in memory of his famous great-uncle, where Michelangelo appeared above all else as a court artist, raised to honour through the favour of powerful patrons. One of the paintings proudly recalls how the Prince Francesco de’ Medici offered his own seat to Michelangelo and hung on every word the master spoke, in a stark reversal of the accepted court hierarchy. The special position of the court artist could hardly be made more apparent. Artists who managed to secure the favour of a sovereign were like the pop stars of their time. They formed the highest rank of their profession and were objects both of esteem and envy for their less successful colleagues.

The standard work on this topic has long been Martin Warnke's monograph Hofkünstler, a classic in the field of art history first published in 1985 and reissued in a new edition in 1996. Although the Trier University unit for the Social History of the Artist has ensured constant and increasingly focused research on the situation of the court artist in recent years, there have been very few publications on the topic of female court artists to date.