The statue of Elena Cornaro Piscopia

At the foot of one of the staircases leading to the upper floor of Palazzo del Bo, the statue of Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, a famous woman admired for being the first graduate in the world (magistra et doctrix), right at the University of Padua.
This monument, in the course of history, has proved to be "cumbersome" in many respects.

Died prematurely at the age of thirty-eight, Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia was immediately the protagonist of many tributes. A month after the funeral, Father Giovanni Battista Cornaro made contact with the famous sculptor Bernardo Tabacco for the construction of a cenotaph to be placed in the central nave of the Basilica del Santo in Padua.

The work not only gives us a plausible portrait of Elena, made a few years after her death, but above all, in relation to the other figures that made up the now lost complex, it allows us to better understand how contemporaries interpreted her exceptional feat. Thanks to the description contained in the second edition of Massimiliano Deza's Life of Helena Lucretia Cornara Piscopia (1692), we know that the cenotaph consisted of several colored marble statues of philosophers, doctors of the church, allegories of virtue, arranged on several levels to symbolize the high moral value of Helena, whose life-size statue still preserved today stood in the center of the upper order.

In 1727 , as a result of the family's economic problems, Girolamo Baldissera, our younger brother, was forced to give up some family property and the cumbersome cenotaph was removed from the Basilica. Almost fifty years later a noble woman also literate, Caterina Dolfin wife of  Andrea Tron, procurator of San Marco and reformer at the Studio, recovered the statue of Elena and decided to place it inside the University of Padua.

Removed from its original context, freed from the many allegories that surrounded it, qualifying it, it remains the monument of an intelligent and tenacious woman, a figure who for more than three centuries has broken down all forms of gender stereotypes.