Piscopia Statue Issue

Who was Piscopia?

• Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia or Helen Cornaro was a 17th century Venetian philosopher.
• In 1678, she became the first woman in the world to earn a PhD. She received it for her disposition on Aristotelian philosophy from the University of Padua.

On the issue of representation:

• Despite achieving this feat, she stood excluded from the list of 88 luminaries in whose honour statues were installed in the Prato della Valle in the 18th century.
  • Prato della Valle is the largest public square in Italy.
  • 10 of these statues were destroyed by the army during Napoleon’s invasion of Italy in 1797. These pedestals now either s