Properzia de' Rossi

Properzia de' Rossi (c. 1490–1530) was an Italian female Renaissance sculptor. 

This daughter of a notary studied under the Bolognese artist and master engraver Marcantonio Raimondi, who is best known today for his engravings of the paintings by Raphael.

Early in her career, Properzia was celebrated for her complex but small-scale sculptures fashioned from stone-fruit pits, such as from apricots, peaches and cherries. The subject of these small "friezes" was often religious, with one of the most famous being a Crucifixion in a peach pit.

As she approached her thirties, de' Rossi began working in large scale. Her marble portrait busts from this period gained her prominence and public commissions, including the decorative program for the high altar of Santa Maria del Baraccano in Bologna. She also won a competition to create sculpture for the west facade of San Petronio in Bologna. Records show that she was paid to create three sibyls, two angels, and a pair of bas-relief panels, including a panel depicting Joseph and Potiphar's Wife. In the scene, Joseph attempts to escape from the wife of an Egyptian officer. De' Rossi uses fluid drapery to illustrate the tension in this dynamic scene.

While de' Rossi won important commissions in her life, she died before reaching forty, bankrupt and without close relatives or friends.

De' Rossi was one of about 40 woman artists, mostly painters, in Renaissance Italy. Female sculptors were rare. She was one of four women included in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, collecting biographies of those he viewed as the most prominent artists of the recent centuries.