Artemisia
Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes is not a painting easily forgotten.
Today, the dramatic scene is among the most well-known images of the Baroque
era and most art lovers are at least vaguely familiar with the painting’s
autobiographical and feminist interpretations.
Gentileschi’s
bloody scene was likely a commission for Cosimo II de’ Medici, the Grand Duke
of Tuscany. In it, we see Judith in a darkened bedroom, dramatically slashing
the throat of Holofernes, the Assyrian general, who had invaded her home city
of Bethulia. Much of the popular interpretation of the scene has centered on
the life of the artist, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1653), a remarkable woman
in many regards. Daughter and student of the successful Baroque painter Orazio
Gentileschi, she would become the first woman member of Florentine Accademia
del Design.
But, as
is commonly known, her life was marked by terrible struggle as well. Judith
Beheading Holofernes is often viewed as reflecting the artist’s rape by her
mentor Antonio Tassi, at the age of 17, and the grueling public trial that
followed. There’s good reason for the interpretation: Artemisia used herself as
the model for this particularly steely depiction of Judith, a figure often been
said to embody female rage.
Still,
if you dig a little deeper, this proto-feminist masterpiece is full of
surprises. Here are three facts you might not know about Artemisia
Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes.
1)
There’s a (Literal) Cameo by a Greek Goddess
Artemisia
painted two versions of this particularly gory Judith Beheading Holofernes
scene, a decade apart—along with a number of other scenes featuring Judith and
Abra, her maid.
She
painted the first of the two major canvasses in Rome (ca. 1611–12) when she
would have been 18 or 19 years old, in the direct aftermath of her assault. Her
versions of the Biblical scene are both particularly violent and particularly
active in their rendering of both women.
But it’s
worth keeping in mind that the graphic violence of Gentileschi’s depiction was
part of a larger trend towards blood-and-guts drama in Baroque art.
Caravaggio—something
of a friend of her father’s—was undoubtedly the most powerful artistic
influence on Artemisia. His version of the same scene at the turn of the 17th
century probably influenced her (in the 1800s, her first version would be
misattributed to Caravaggio).
Gentileschi’s most famous depiction of the scene contains a subtle signal that she was knowingly taking advantage of this evolving, more active symbolism: the cameo bracelet on Judith’s forearm. Its tiny images are hard to make out. But in her essay “Costuming Judith in Italian Art of the Sixteenth Century,” Diane Apostolos-Cappadona makes a guess:
In essence, this law of motion states that for a projectile to come to rest from a state of motion, energy must be dissipated by resistance over time, thus making it describe a parabolic arc in space. This was a new idea, and one Galileo explained graphically via drawing out the different paths that cannonballs would make as they rained down to earth—describing the same pattern that gives such a vivid quality to the blood erupting from Holofernes’s neck in Gentileschi’s indelible painting.
Mary Garrard’s compelling new book Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe was supposed to publish on May 1 in the United States, but (like so many things) it was delayed for months due to COVID-19, so arrived instead in mid-September. It’s more than worth waiting for, and, as it turns out, the timing is good. A major exhibition of Artemisia’s work at the National Gallery in London had been due to open this past spring, but was put on hold on account of the pandemic and is now opening in early October.
There’s not a little irony in reading Garrard’s lively account of a 17th-century artist’s life wherein plague is plentiful — Artemisia likely died of it — when a plague (or at least pandemic) is back on the table. How strange that a book about the late Renaissance and Baroque would now prove so very much of our time. It’s timely in the sense of the aforementioned deadly and contagious illness, but also features tyranny, religious persecution and reaction. And it is timely in its exploration of feminist outrage at patriarchal power, of men’s control over women’s bodies, and in the exploration of an art of anger, accusation, and even great wit. It’s a lot and it’s awesome.
Artemisia Gentileschi, daughter of the once better-known Baroque painter Orazio Gentileschi, is undoubtedly the most recognized woman artist of the early modern era. Her work is regularly shared across social media; there have been films, novels, plays about her life, and just this week, a piece about her in The New Yorker. This is not a bad run for an artist mostly overlooked until the early 20th century (although to be fair, so was Caravaggio).
Today, Artemisia’s art and life are often reduced to her rape as a teenager by an artist colleague of her father. Garrard doesn’t gloss over the rape or infamous trial that followed — wherein Artemisia underwent a pelvic exam supervised by the court and public torture of her hand, a particularly brutal ordeal for a budding artist — but resists allowing it to dominate Artemisia’s story. Garrard describes Artemisia’s most recognized (and shared) work, “Judith Slaying Holofernes,” (c. 1618-20) often interpreted as an artistic vendetta:
“It is important to remember that this is art, not psychotherapy. The pictorial revenge that Artemisia took on her rapist was not a defensive psychological reaction by a female victim, but might be better understood as poetic justice — a playful, imaginative expression of retribution she was due.”
Rather than focusing on the bloody act, Garrard draws our attention to the women in Artemisia’s painting — Judith and her maidservant Abra — who work in unison to get the dirty job done. Judith and Holofernes were not unusual subjects in Renaissance and Baroque art (see Botticelli, Donatello, Caravaggio, et al), so Artemisia’s innovation lies not in depicting a woman beheading a man, but in representing a powerful sisterhood.
Garrard’s book is part of the Renaissance Lives series from book publisher Reaktion, the only title out of 17 so far that’s dedicated to a woman. But as Garrard’s own title indicates, she’s not interested in the myth of the “exceptional woman.” Rather, she situates Artemisia as an artist inspired by, and in community with, other talented and explicitly feminist women, especially writers.
“Scholars sniff that Artemisia’s fans project a modern concept, anachronistically, on to an artist who painted before the term “feminist” was invented. Yet feminism was a vital force before it was given that name, and Artemisia’s embrace of feminism was a distinctive component of her claim to fame.”
Garrard, it’s clear, is a different kind of scholar — one not satisfied with simply exploring the past, but is about clarifying its connection across time, how it helps create us, how it might warn us. “Over and over, women’s voices are heard in their own time, then seem to die away,” she writes. “But history is created by repetition and magnification — something men have been quite good at — and if a woman artist or writer is not augmented through these tools, her ars will not be longa.”
Visual art has the benefit of endurance and of quick transmission, especially now. Probably most people reading this have seen Artemisia’s “Judith Slaying Holofernes” before, but likely very few have read Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies. Pizan’s early 15th-century work — a recitation and recovery of important women of history — was written in reaction to the widespread publication of misogynist texts in her own time. It attempted to reveal the hidden legacy of women’s achievements and to offer a blueprint for the future. If such an undertaking sounds exceedingly familiar, it is. “The ideal of a transhistorical community of women that extends into the present permeates the long catalogue of female paragons named by Christine de Pizan,” writes Garrard. “The same impulse motivated Judy Chicago to create The Dinner Party during the ‘second-wave’ feminist movement in 1970s America.” In Chicago’s piece, both de Pizan and Artemisia have a place at the table.
It’s the same impulse that makes Garrard’s book on Artemisia and her 17-century feminist counterparts feel so urgent today. Much more than an exploration of a singular female artist of the Italian Baroque, it’s a map of interconnected traditions, intellectual conversations, inspirations and leapfrogging, a whole network of early modern European feminists in conversation with one another, and with us, across time.
A Witty and Refreshingly Feminist Look at Artemisia Gentileschi. By Bridget Quinn. Hyperallergic , October 7, 2020
The
story of Susanna and the Elders, related in the Book of Daniel, was a popular
subject for artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and no wonder.
Susanna, a virtuous, beautiful young woman, is bathing in her garden while two
older men spy on her. The men suddenly accost her and demand that she submit to
rape; if she resists, they warn, they will ruin her reputation by claiming that
they caught her with a lover. The tale offered painters an irresistible
opportunity to replicate a similar kind of voyeurism. Tintoretto depicted the
scene several times; in a version painted in the fifteen-fifties, which hangs
in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, he portrayed Susanna as serene and
abstracted, towelling a raised foot and regarding herself in a mirror, unaware
of a bald man who is concealed behind a rose trellis and peering between her
parted thighs. In a treatment by Rubens from half a century later, on display
at the Borghese Gallery, in Rome, Susanna is shown reaching for a shawl,
realizing with horror that she has been exposed to two leering men. Sometimes
the violence threatened against Susanna is indicated in the tableau: in a
version by Ludovico Carracci that hangs in the National Gallery in London, one
of the elders is tugging at Susanna’s robe, pulling it off her body. Giuseppe
Cesari (known as Cavaliere d’Arpino) made a painting that enlists the viewer’s
participation in the lasciviousness it represents: its naked subject looks
almost seductively out from the canvas, coolly brushing her golden hair.
A very
different Susanna is offered by Artemisia Gentileschi, who was born in Rome in
1593, and who painted the scene in 1610, when she was seventeen. In her
version, two men emerge from behind a marble balustrade, violently interrupting
Susanna’s ablutions. Her head and her body torque away from the onlookers as
she raises a hand toward them, in what looks like ineffectual self-defense.
Strikingly, her other hand shields her face. Perhaps this Susanna does not want
the men to identify her or see her anguish; it’s equally likely that she does
not want to lay eyes on her persecutors. In its composition, execution, and psychological
insight, the painting is remarkably sophisticated for a girl in her teens. As
the scholar Mary Garrard noted, in a 1989 appraisal titled “Artemisia
Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art,” the painting
represents an art-historical innovation: it is the first time in which sexual
predation is depicted from the point of view of the predated. With this
painting, and with many other works that followed, Artemisia claimed women’s
resistance of sexual oppression as a legitimate subject of art.
As one
of the first women to forge a successful career as a painter, Artemisia was
celebrated internationally in her lifetime, but her reputation languished after
her death. This was partly owing to fashion: her naturalistic mode of painting
went out of style, in favor of a more classical approach. Seventeenth-century
scholars barely mentioned her. When she registered, it was as a footnote to her
father, Orazio Gentileschi, a well-regarded artist who specialized in the kind
of historical and mythological scenes in vogue at the time. (Academics tend to
refer to Artemisia by her first name, in order to distinguish her from her
father.) Her work received little substantial critical attention until the
early twentieth century, when Roberto Longhi, the Italian art historian, wrote
a grudging assessment, calling her “the only woman in Italy who ever understood
what painting was, both colors, impasto, and other essentials.”
In the
second half of the twentieth century, Artemisia was reconsidered. A turning
point was the inclusion of half a dozen of her works, among them the 1610
“Susanna and the Elders,” in a landmark survey, “Women Artists: 1550-1950”;
curated by the art historians Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, it
opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976, later travelling to the
Brooklyn Museum. Although individual works of Artemisia’s had been on view in
museums, this was the first time they were seen as a group, their cumulative
power recognized. In the years since, Artemisia has come to be counted among
the most important Baroque artists, especially after a 2001 show at the
Metropolitan Museum in New York, which explored her work alongside that of her
father. This October, a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery in
London will bring together about thirty of her pieces, from museums and private
collections across Europe and the United States.
The
show, whose opening was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, is organized in
broad chronological order, and features Artemisia’s most significant
achievements. (More than a hundred and thirty works have been ascribed to her
hand, but only about half that number are universally agreed to be hers.) Among
the paintings included is “Self-Portrait as St. Catherine of Alexandria,” from
the National Gallery’s collection, in which the subject gazes at the viewer,
her brow dimpled in concentration, while wearing a gauzy turban and other
finery. The painting, recently rediscovered, was acquired by the museum in
2018, for nearly four and a half million dollars. It is only the twenty-first
work by a female artist to enter the gallery’s collection.
The
reëvaluation of Artemisia’s work has included a newfound appreciation of her
technical skill, especially her command of chiaroscuro—a heightened
juxtaposition of light and shadow. Chiaroscuro is most commonly associated with
Caravaggio, who was an acquaintance of Artemisia’s father, and whom she may
have encountered as a young adolescent. (Caravaggio notoriously fled Rome in
1606, after killing another man in a duel.) One of Artemisia’s greatest
paintings, “Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes” (completed
in the sixteen-twenties, and now owned by the Detroit Institute of Arts),
offers a masterly execution of the technique, with its subjects illuminated,
mid-action, by raking lamplight. In the background are virtuosic examples of
still-life painting: a burnished brass candlestick, a draped velvet curtain.
Letizia
Treves, the curator of the forthcoming National Gallery show, notes, “In
Artemisia’s lifetime, she had a kind of pan-European celebrity that places her
on a level with later artists such as Rubens or Van Dyck.” Treves cautions,
however, against overstating Artemisia’s place in the Baroque pantheon.
Artemisia was an artist who adapted to fashion rather than setting it. “I can’t
name a single Artemisia follower,” Treves says. Of course, this may well have
been connected to her gender: what male artist of the period would have
acknowledged being her disciple?
Artemisia’s
reëmergence is also tied to a greater awareness of her life story, which was at
least as eventful as that of Caravaggio. In 1611, the year after she painted
“Susanna and the Elders,” Artemisia was raped by a friend of Orazio’s: the
artist Agostino Tassi. The assault has inevitably, and often reductively, been
the lens through which her artistic accomplishments have been viewed. The
sometimes savage themes of her paintings have been interpreted as expressions
of wrathful catharsis. The fascination with her work on these terms is
understandable, given the continued prevalence of sexual violence against
women, and the dismissal of women’s accounts of it. In 2018, when Brett
Kavanaugh was elevated to the Supreme Court despite the testimony of Christine
Blasey Ford, who said that Kavanaugh had assaulted her when they were both
teen-agers, a particularly bloody work by Artemisia—“Judith Beheading
Holofernes,” which hangs in the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence—was widely shared
on the Internet, as commentary. It shows the Biblical heroine with her sleeves
rolled up over muscular arms, her mouth set, deftly butchering the Assyrian
general.
Artemisia’s
life story has inspired more than one fictional reimagining, beginning in 1947,
with a work by Anna Banti—the pen name of the Italian novelist and critic Lucia
Lopresti, who was married to Roberto Longhi. (Susan Sontag, in an admiring
essay from 2004, wrote that Banti’s protagonist is “liberated by disgrace.”) A
1997 film, by the French director Agnès Merlet, made the questionable
suggestion that Tassi was a partially welcome seducer. Five years later, the American
writer Susan Vreeland published a novel that hewed to the feminist line of
Artemisia’s rape as a defining trauma. (“I stepped up two steps and took my
usual seat opposite Agostino Tassi, my father’s friend and collaborator. My
rapist. . . . His black hair and beard were overgrown and wild. His face, more
handsome than he deserved, had the color and hardness of a bronze sculpture.”)
Joy McCullough’s 2018 novel, “Blood Water Paint,” captured Artemisia’s
perspective in charged language:
the
woman in the bath
is no exalted doll.
She is all light and terror,
the Susanna I finally summon
from stories,
from first fire,
and finally,
from paint mixed with
my own sweat.
A raft
of recent papers by academics, however, have objected to portraying Artemisia
as if she herself were a two-dimensional mythological figure—a victim exacting
revenge through brushwork. As more of her personal history is unearthed by
scholars, a more complex picture emerges. And Artemisia’s art is increasingly
being appreciated for the knowingness with which she made use of elements of
her life—not just sexual violation but also motherhood, erotic passion, and
professional ambition. Artemisia recognized that being a woman offered her a
rare perspective and authority on many artistic subjects. “You will find the
spirit of Caesar in the soul of a woman,” she once assured a patron. Such
insight makes Artemisia feel, four hundred years after she lived, like one of
our more self-aware contemporaries.
Artemisia
had a sheltered childhood, in the most literal sense of the term: as a girl,
she spent most of her time within the walls of her family home, as Rome’s
streets were not considered a safe or appropriate space for her to journey
through alone. She was the eldest child in her family, with three younger
brothers; at the age of twelve, she became their principal caregiver when her
mother, Prudentia di Montone, died, in childbirth. Artemisia received no
academic education and was functionally illiterate until her twenties, when she
finally had the opportunity to learn to read and write—the latter never without
error. But as a child she was allowed to draw, and her gifts were noted early
on. As Orazio wrote to one of his patrons, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, in
1612, she “has in three years become so skilled that I can venture to say that
today she has no peer.”
Artemisia
served an apprenticeship in her father’s studio, with his paintings as her
primary exemplars. Unlike male aspiring artists, she was unable to visit many
of the churches and public buildings where the work of contemporaries had been
commissioned, but in her local church, Santa Maria del Popolo, on the Piazza
del Popolo, she would have seen two remarkable Caravaggio paintings:
“Crucifixion of St. Peter,” in which the elderly martyr is being raised, upside
down, on a cross, and “Conversion on the Way to Damascus,” in which a young,
muscled St. Paul is sprawled on the ground after receiving a heavenly vision. Artemisia
had access to Orazio’s materials and to his models. She is thought to have sat
herself for Orazio’s “Young Woman with a Violin (St. Cecilia),” painted around
1612, which shows a musician with a cleft chin, a rounded cheek, and an alert
expression.
is no exalted doll.
She is all light and terror,
the Susanna I finally summon
from stories,
from first fire,
and finally,
from paint mixed with
my own sweat.
Although
the young Artemisia remained largely cloistered in her father’s studio, she was
nonetheless vulnerable to attack there by Tassi, a successful artist; some
scholars suggest that Orazio had engaged him to tutor Artemisia on perspective.
(In “Blood Water Paint,” McCullough plausibly suggests that Artemisia was, in
part, a victim of her father’s professional opportunism: Orazio hoped that
Tassi would bring him in on a commission.) The decision to publicly accuse
Tassi of rape was made not by Artemisia but by her father, who sought to force
Tassi to marry her. The official record of the trial, which is housed at the
Archivio di Stato, in Rome, includes Artemisia’s vivid account of her ordeal.
Tassi, she claims, pushed her inside her bedroom and locked the door. “He then
threw me onto the edge of the bed, pushing me with a hand on my breast, and he
put a knee between my thighs to prevent me from closing them,” reads a translation
provided by Mary Garrard in her 1989 book. Tassi placed a hand over Artemisia’s
mouth to stop her from screaming; she fought back, clawing at his face and
hair. In the struggle, she grabbed Tassi’s penis so roughly that she tore his
flesh. Afterward, she grabbed a knife from a table drawer and said, “I’d like
to kill you with this knife because you have dishonored me.” Tassi opened his
coat and taunted her by saying, “Here I am.” Artemisia hurled the knife at him.
“He shielded himself,” she tells her interrogator. “Otherwise I would have hurt
him and might easily have killed him.”
The
Roman archive contains trial transcripts for other women who were raped.
Elizabeth Cohen, a scholar who has examined the transcripts, argues that the
crime of rape had a different cultural connotation than it does now, and was
understood less as a violent act against a woman than as a besmirching of her
family’s honor. Cohen contends that characterizations of Artemisia as an
outraged proto-feminist, with even her early art expressing enraged resistance,
are anachronistic. A seventeenth-century woman would not have conceived of her
body with the “corporeal essentialism” that a woman does today, Cohen writes:
“Artemisia spoke of her body during the trial, but as the material upon which a
socially significant offense had been committed.” According to the transcript,
at least, Artemisia’s outrage is couched in terms of having been dishonored,
rather than having been assaulted. After Tassi raped her, he immediately
assured her that he would marry her, and she reports that “with this good
promise I felt calmer,” and confirms that, believing his nuptial pledge, she
consented to have sex with him on numerous occasions thereafter.
Orazio’s
goal of coercing Tassi into making good on his word to marry Artemisia would be
unthinkable in a rape trial today. Artemisia’s testimony was, for the most
part, by the book: she knew, or had been instructed on, which points she needed
to make in order to meet the standards for conviction. Like other unmarried
accusers of rapists, she was obliged to undergo examination by a midwife, to
verify that she was no longer a virgin. Nonetheless, the force of Artemisia’s
character emerges. At the time, to insure that rape accusations were truthful,
alleged victims were required to submit to a form of torture: cords were
wrapped around their hands and tightened like thumbscrews. “It is true, it is
true, it is true,” she repeated as the cords were tightened. The transcript
notes that she interrupted her litany to address Tassi directly, with a
mordantly ironic reference to the bindings around her fingers: “This is the
ring that you give me, and these are your promises.”
Tassi
was found guilty but he was sentenced only to a brief period of exile, which he
ignored. He did not have to marry Artemisia—it emerged in the courtroom that he
had already married someone else. During the trial, her father arranged for her
to marry Pierantonio Stiattesi, a minor artist in Florence. Stiattesi was the
brother of Giovanni Battista Stiattesi, a friend of Orazio’s who had testified
against Tassi in the trial, asserting that he had confessed to having taken
Artemisia’s virginity. Artemisia apparently found her husband something of a
nonentity, and after about a decade together they separated; most traces of
Stiattesi have since been lost. Nevertheless, the betrothal, intended to remove
her from the city of her scandalous past, was the making of Artemisia. It gave
her an opportunity to establish herself as an artist independent of her father,
and her status as a married woman offered her something she had never truly
experienced: liberty.
Arriving
in Florence in the winter of 1612-13, Artemisia initially set up her studio in
the house of her father-in-law, a tailor. Over time, she seems to have
established a studio apart from the family home, where, among other things, she
could more easily work on large-scale canvases. Embarking on a period of
abundant creativity, she executed several of the paintings for which she served
as her own model—among them “Self-Portrait as a Lute Player,” which hangs in
the Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford, Connecticut. Some art historians believe
that this work was commissioned by the Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici, in
whose collection it was later recorded. The Duke’s eye would have been drawn to
the sensitivity and animation of the face, but also to the delicacy and
articulation of the hands, shown mid-strum on the instrument.
In July,
1616, Artemisia became the first woman to be admitted to the prestigious
Accademia delle Arti del Disegno. With the respectability of marriage
guaranteeing her the freedom to circulate socially, she got to know
intellectuals, performers, and other artists, including Galileo and the poet
Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, a great-nephew of the Renaissance master.
The poet commissioned her to paint part of the ceiling in a gallery dedicated
to Michelangelo at the family estate. Her contribution, “Allegory of
Inclination,” depicts a female nude sitting on a tuft of cloud.
Around
the time she moved to Florence, she made her first iteration of Judith
beheading Holofernes, which can now be seen in the Capodimonte Museum, in
Naples. In this version and in the one at the Uffizi, a maidservant, Abra,
forcefully holds Holofernes down while Judith confidently hacks away at his
neck. Treves says of the paintings, “Artemisia is subverting a well-known
traditional subject and empowering the women in a way that hasn’t been done
before.” (The painting at the Uffizi, now prominently on display there, was for
decades hidden from public view, presumably on the ground that it was
distasteful. The nineteenth-century art historian Anna Brownell Jameson wrote
of wishing for “the privilege of burning it to ashes.”) Treves says that
Artemisia’s renderings of the tale offer “a picture of sisterhood—of these two
women doing this extraordinary thing.” By contrast, Caravaggio’s treatment of
the story, in a work that hangs in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, in
Rome, focusses on the horrified face of Holofernes, and depicts Judith as a
pallid girl gingerly holding a sword and grasping her foe’s curly hair at arm’s
length. She hardly seems to have the oomph required for decapitation.
Artemisia
bore five children, between the years of 1613 and 1618, making her execution of
large-scale paintings during that period all the more impressive. It was not
just a matter of physical endurance: three of her children died in infancy, and
a fourth, Cristofano, born in 1615, died before the age of five. Only her daughter,
Prudenzia, born in 1617 and named for Artemisia’s mother, lived into adulthood.
Such repeated maternal loss—and the risk that successive pregnancies then posed
to a woman’s life—is unimaginable today. Twenty-odd years after the birth of
her children, Artemisia received a commission from Philip IV of Spain to paint
a Biblical work, “The Birth of St. John the Baptist.” Artists from Tintoretto
to Murillo had painted the scene, but Artemisia’s version underlines her
intimacy with the dynamics of the birthing room. She depicts a capable cluster
of midwives—sleeves pushed up, basins in hand—tending to the infant while his
mother, Elizabeth, lies wan and exhausted, barely visible in the dim
background.
The
turmoil of Artemisia’s early life—and the remarkable evidence of it that
survives—has inevitably overshadowed the less sensational, and less documented,
narrative of what followed. Nevertheless, her later career was extraordinary,
and it is reasonable to conclude that the fact of having been raped was less significant
to Artemisia’s sense of self than some of her modern champions have suggested.
She swiftly became recognized as one of the most accomplished artists of her
day, and retained her preëminence for decades; she was often strapped for cash,
however, and never stopped hustling for commissions. (Her assurance that her
work demonstrated the “spirit of Caesar” was delivered, in part, to justify a
painting’s high price.) Artemisia, for all her renown, rarely painted for
public spaces. She did little work for the Church, although an early Madonna
and Child, painted around 1613, the year her first child was born, suggests
what she might have done had churches commissioned devotional themes from her.
Mary swoons, eyes closed, as the infant Jesus reaches for her cheek, his eyes
locked on her face with palpably needy attachment.
After
half a dozen years in Florence, Artemisia returned to Rome. The city’s census
report of 1624 suggests that she and her husband had by then parted, and that
she was self-supporting. She began associating with Flemish, Dutch, and French
painters who also lived in Rome. Treves suggests, “It may be she was hanging
out with the foreigners because she felt a bit like an outsider herself.”
In the
late sixteen-twenties, Artemisia went to Venice, seeking fresh patronage. In
1630, she settled in Naples. She received commissions from, among others, the
Infanta María of Spain, who was spending time in the city. Artemisia cultivated
such ladies of the court with gifts of beautiful gloves, which she had sent
from Rome. Naples became her base for much of the rest of her life, although
she disliked the city, which was crowded, poor, and violent. In a letter to
Andrea Cioli, a minister at the Medici court, she complained of “the warlike
tumults, the badness of life, and the expense of things.” In the next two
decades, she continued to secure influential clients among the Italian nobility
and foreign royal houses. Her paintings entered the collections of the Grand
Duke of Tuscany, King Philip IV of Spain, and King Charles I of England. Much
remains unknown about her later life, though, including the date and cause of
her death. Artemisia’s final documented act is a payment made in Naples in
August, 1654, against an overdue tax bill. She was reputed to have been buried
in the city’s Church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, her grave marked by a
stone inscribed, simply, “heic artimisia”: “Here lies Artemisia.” But any such
stone had disappeared by the time the information was written down, in 1812, by
the Italian historian Alessandro da Morrona, and the church was destroyed in
the twentieth century. Given the absence of later documentation, scholars
theorize that Artemisia died in 1656, when the plague swept through Naples,
killing a hundred and fifty thousand residents—half the city’s population.
Her last
known dated work, from 1652, is a large canvas in which she revisits Susanna
and the Elders, one of her earliest themes and one to which she had returned
repeatedly. As in the 1610 version, Susanna is seated on a balustrade, but this
time there is a tenebrous sky, rather than a clear blue one. In this iteration,
she does not turn away from the two onlookers: she faces them. The painting was
rediscovered a dozen years ago by Adelina Modesti, a professor who found it,
badly damaged, in the archive of the Pinacoteca Nazionale, in Bologna. In a
monograph, Modesti argues that Susanna’s raised left arm and uplifted hand
deflect the elders’ “intrusive male gazes” from her body, which is draped in
translucent fabric. It could be argued, though, that this Susanna draws the
elders’ attention away from her body not by blocking their gaze but by meeting
it with her own—staring at them just as they stare at her, and obliging them to
acknowledge her as a human being.
Increasingly,
Artemisia is celebrated less for her handling of private trauma than for her
adept management of her public persona. Throughout her career, she demonstrated
a sophisticated comprehension of the way her unusual status as a woman added to
the value of her paintings. On a formal level, her representation of herself in
the guise of different characters and genders prefigures such postmodern
artists as Cindy Sherman. Unlike Sherman, however, Artemisia had few female
peers. She was not the only woman working as an artist during the early
seventeenth century: a slightly older contemporary was the northern-Italian
portraitist Fede Galizia, born in 1578, whose father, like Artemisia’s, was
also a painter. But Artemisia must often have felt singular. In a series of
letters written to one of her most important patrons, the collector Antonio
Ruffo, she wittily referred to her gender: “A woman’s name raises doubts until
her work is seen,” and, regarding a work in progress, “I will show Your
Illustrious Lordship what a woman can do.” In 2001, the scholar Elizabeth
Cropper wrote, “We will never understand Artemisia Gentileschi as a painter if
we cannot accept that she was not supposed to be a painter at all, and that her
own sense of herself—not to mention others’ views of her—as an independent
woman, as a marvel, a stupor mundi, as worthy of immortal fame and historical
celebration, was entirely justified.” On art-adjacent blogs, Artemisia’s
strength and occasionally obnoxious self-assurance are held forth as her most
essential qualities. She has become, as the Internet term of approval has it, a
badass bitch.
Recent
research has also complicated the understanding of Artemisia’s moral character,
rendering her less blandly heroic. In 2011, the art historian Francesco Solinas
was exploring the archive of the Frescobaldis, a Florentine banking dynasty,
when he discovered a cache of letters written by Artemisia, including some sent
to Francesco Maria Maringhi, a Florentine nobleman. It turned out that she had
had a torrid affair with Maringhi when she was in her mid-twenties, and five
years into her marriage. Several of the letters are included in the National
Gallery show; in the exhibition’s catalogue, Solinas writes that they “reveal a
passionate, adventurous and even libertine way of life.” In one letter,
Artemisia addresses Maringhi as “my dearest heart”; in another, she chastises
him for writing only two lines to her—“which if you loved me would have gone on
forever.” In a third, she refers to a self-portrait in Maringhi’s possession
and warns him not to masturbate in front of it. (Sadly, the exact portrait is
not identified.) In the same letter, she saltily expresses her satisfaction
that he has not taken any other lovers, other than his “right hand, envied by
me so much, for it possesses that which I cannot possess myself.”
Another
work by Artemisia that has only recently been rediscovered, having been in a
private collection in France, is “Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy” (c. 1620-25). The
subject reclines voluptuously, her eyes closed, her face turned up to the
light, a silky white chemise slipping carelessly from her ample shoulder. The
painting, which ostensibly depicts Mary Magdalene in the reveries of devotion,
is less spiritual than erotic: her interlaced fingers may be motionless, but
her slight smile seems labile, indicating that Artemisia understood a woman’s
sensuality from the inside out.
The
Frescobaldi archive also contains correspondence written to Maringhi by
Artemisia’s husband, Stiattesi. Evidently, he was aware of the liaison, and
hoped that her highly placed lover would help advance her career. In one
letter, Stiattesi apologizes to Maringhi that Artemisia cannot write to him
herself; their house, he explains, is perpetually full of cardinals and princes,
and she is so busy that she barely has time to eat. Solinas describes Artemisia
as “extraordinarily courageous, manifestly unscrupulous, opportunistic and
ambitious.” Art historians now contend that the energy and the passion that can
be glimpsed in her letters—and even in her testimony at the rape trial—are the
same qualities that infuse her work with such vitality.
Artemisia’s
fame in feminist circles started with the dissemination of her bloodiest and
most distressing images. Her variations on the theme of the murderous Judith
remain irresistible iconography, and her differing treatments of Susanna offer
a forceful lesson about the power of the apparently powerless. (In the Bible,
Susanna does not submit to rape, and, in a trial, the elders’ scandalous accusations
against her are proved false.) Such tales of resistance remain as riveting, and
as necessary, in the twenty-first century as they were in the seventeenth.
But, in
recent years, Artemisia’s academic admirers have turned their attention to one
of her quieter paintings. In the late sixteen-thirties, Artemisia travelled to
England, where her father had become a court painter. Several works that she
painted there entered the Royal Collection, among them “Self-Portrait as the
Allegory of Painting,” also known as “La Pittura.” Such works traditionally
depict the allegorical figure as a woman. In Artemisia’s version, which will be
prominently placed in the National Gallery exhibition, the woman has abundant,
mussed hair and plump cheeks, a brown apron tied around her waist and the
billowing green silk sleeves of her dress pushed up past her elbows. Rather
than looking out of the frame, as is typical with self-portraits, the figure is
looking at a prepared canvas, with a raised brush in one hand and a palette in
the other. She bends forward, not elegantly but with the command of an
experienced artist. As scholars have pointed out, no male artist could have
attempted this clever visual doubling, in which Artemisia combined a realistic
portrait of herself at work with an allegorical representation of the art form
that she so ardently and successfully pursued. This is an Artemisia for today:
accomplished, original, and contentedly absorbed in her vocation.
A Fuller
Picture of Artemisia Gentileschi. By Rebecca Mead. The New Yorker , September
28, 2020.
Artemisia Gentileschi is painting for all she’s worth. Light flashes from her forehead and breast, and the naked white forearm where the sleeve falls back to reveal an unexpected strength. Her fingernails are dirty and her hair coming loose as she wheels towards a large empty canvas. It is a picture of passion: the artist showing herself in dizzying motion, head tilting up towards the mark she is so urgently making – which could be anything, such is her freedom. This is painting as live performance.
Self-Portrait As the Allegory of Painting is exhibit A in any history of women’s art, just as Gentileschi (1593–c1654) is the most celebrated female painter of her age. It was the first self-portrait by a woman to become internationally famous – the painting hand swooningly copied in prints – and among the first to enter a royal collection, perhaps even commissioned by Charles I, at whose London court Gentileschi was employed.
It is also the first to make a drama of the physical labour of painting. The artist was hard at work that day in 1638, yet the image still feels so forceful, immediate and original. She looks like an action painter three centuries in advance.
Gentileschi is overwhelmingly present in this epochal show, the first survey of her art in this country. It is not just that she appears everywhere, posing as musician, martyr, painter, saint and avenging heroine. You will recognise her distinctive features from the start: the bow lips and flushed cheeks, large eyes with pronounced lids, the strong nose with its prominent bridge. But you will also recognise the force of those hands.
Lucretia cups a breast in one determined hand, the other gripping the dagger she must somehow plunge into her own flesh; an imponderable act made unflinchingly palpable. Mighty Cleopatra, all hope lost, grasps the fatal asp as if it were no more than a lollipop. In Judith Beheading Holofernes, it takes two women to hold down the tyrant, violently struggling as he forces his fist in the face of Judith’s maid, her knuckles dotted with fresh blood.
Judith herself takes Holofernes by the hair, slicing through his carotid artery with a sharpened sword. Blood floods the sheets and mattresses as the scarlet spatter arcs upwards, flecking Judith’s braceleted forearm and half-exposed bosom. But still she keeps at it, hellbent on her task, resolute as a master butcher.
These were all subjects painted by Gentileschi’s male contemporaries. But she made them her own, not least with her profound inner knowledge. Gentileschi knows the shifting shape of a breast as no other baroque painter; she knows the blue of a woman’s intimate veins, the creases in her armpit, the weight of a pendent pearl in a lobe, the feeling of sunshine on a drowsy décolletage; certainly, the revolting touch of unwanted male hands.
About her life, this show is judicious, content simply to display Gentileschi’s ardent letters. For the story is almost better known than the art. She learns from her painter father, Orazio, is influenced by Caravaggio’s altarpieces in her native Rome, has a 40-year career in other Italian cities. Even if Gentileschi hadn’t been famously hard-working by nature, life might have forced it upon her. Raped as a teenager by a fellow painter, forced to endure torture during a public trial, her future as a marriageable virgin was also stolen from her. A marriage of convenience, arranged for money, failed after the death of four infants, leaving her with a surviving daughter to raise. Gentileschi painted for more than art’s sake, and more than herself.
A vengeance theory inevitably persists – all those paintings of Judith hacking the head off Holofernes, or Jael driving a tent peg into Sisera’s skull. But this puts no premium on her originality. There is scarcely a painting that doesn’t turn the screw, the angle or the emphasis of the narrative; and this was the case even from youth. A shattering picture in the National Gallery shows the naked Susanna taking her bath as the leering Elders bear down upon her. This is not a case of distant spying, but practically assault; and what a tremendous vision of Susanna’s abrupt recoil from the hot elderly breath on her back – painted when Gentileschi was 17.
A revelation of the show, too, is the driving scale of her art. It is not just that the paintings are much larger than expected, but that the figures are monumental within each scene. Cleopatra, shown dying in a second version, rises like a white wave against deadly darkness. Mary Magdalene leans back, eyes closed in ecstasy, shirt falling from a shoulder that edges straight into our space. Judith turns, as if brushing against us. Gentileschi’s figures fill the frame.
And the whole show feels like a succession of nonstop scenes from some magnificent theatre. Here are Judith and her maid decapitating Holofernes, once, twice, three times; and here they are, moments later, startled as if hearing a sudden noise in the darkness. And again, Judith stopped in her tracks, raising a silencing hand to her maid as she scoops the severed head into a basket. Will they get away with murder?
Gentileschi
can be pungently erotic (she writes to an aristocratic lover that he must not
masturbate in front of her self-portrait). She can also be comical. There is a
jocose painting of a nymph trying to escape a satyr, leaving her hairpiece
dangling in his fist. A picture of St Januarius at the Coliseum features two
laughably ridiculous lions. Her anatomy is sometimes out of whack, her details
occasionally glossed over (or perhaps painted by assistants). But the
outstanding drama of emotions played out by bodies in action, in raking light
or dark space, belongs uniquely to Gentileschi.
The
National Gallery opted for a one-word title for its new blockbuster show:
“Artemisia.”
The name of the exhibition, which opened on Saturday and runs through Jan. 24, 2021, has a pop star ring, befitting the most celebrated female artist of the 17th century. In her lifetime, Artemisia Gentileschi was lauded by the artist Jérôme David as “a miracle in painting, more easily envied than imitated”; today, she is the subject of feverish new scholarship, not to mention films, plays, novels and even a cameo in a 2017 children’s book, “Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.”
But why does first-name familiarity seem to be so often applied to women artists and not men? Kahlo is endlessly referred to as Frida, but only Kanye West takes the liberty of calling Picasso just Pablo.
Perhaps the title is intended to distinguish Gentileschi from her father, Orazio, who was also an esteemed painter. Born in Rome in July 1593, she was 12 when her mother died in childbirth, and she was left in his sole care. Giovanni Baglione’s “Lives of Painters, Sculptors and Architects” (1642) describes Orazio as “more beast than human,” with a “satiric tongue” that “offended everyone.” But at least he was aware of the prodigal talents of his only daughter: When she was 18, he boasted to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany that she was “already capable of such works that many principal masters of this profession never arrive at.”
The National Gallery show is Gentileschi’s first exhibition in Britain, and it proves that her father’s statement sprang from more than parental pride (or a bid for patronage). The 29 paintings on display — just under half of the total works believed to be by her hand — demonstrate her startling emotional sensitivity as she brought a new kind of intimacy to the theatricality of Baroque art.
In 2018, the National Gallery acquired its first work by Gentileschi, “Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria,” making her only the eighth female artist in a collection that has work by more than 700 men. The curatorial team recognized the opportunity to stage a major monographic show, which would resonate with the #MeToo movement and help counter the gender imbalance of the collection. The gains would be considerable, but it would be no mean feat: Those who own Gentileschi’s works don’t part with them lightly, several paintings are riddled with conservation challenges, and others are clouded in dispute.
Women artists were rare in early modern Italy, and they tended to be aristocratic. (When Germaine Greer wrote about Gentileschi in 1979, she called the chapter “The Magnificent Exception.”) Becoming an artist required much more than “a room of one’s own,” so the few women who managed to become professionals generally had fathers already in the trade. To quote Simone de Beauvoir: “One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius” — and it is the becoming that’s been the trouble for women for centuries.
It feels fitting, then, that the exhibition’s opening room features a work by Gentileschi’s father, “Judith and her Maidservant,” especially as she would later make the subject her own. Some scholars have argued for this work to be attributed to his daughter, and, while that is now thought unlikely, it’s important to understand her artistic debt to his style, which borrowed heavily from Caravaggio’s flare-lit scenes, worked up from live models in the studio.
How could it have been otherwise? A male apprentice would have roamed the streets of Rome and drawn directly from facades and frescoes; Gentileschi was almost exclusively restricted to the upper floor of her home, where she had only her father’s work and some engravings for inspiration. In court documents, she described her captivity as “noxious”; after all these months of lockdown, the feeling is familiar.
The show’s opening room also features Gentileschi’s earliest known painting, “Susannah and the Elders,” from 1610. This is the biblical story of the beautiful wife of Joachim, who is preyed upon while bathing in her garden by two lascivious old men who threaten to accuse her of adultery (punishable by death) if she does not submit to their advances.
The bodily proportions in this work are uneven in places — perhaps inevitably, given that the only anatomy Gentileschi could have studied in detail at this point was her own — and the textiles lack the tactility of her later works. But these are easily forgiven when you turn to the luminosity of Susannah’s flesh and the nuance of her expression: Watch how centuries are collapsed in that look of disgust.
Gentileschi, who was just 17 when she painted Susannah’s contempt, may well have been drawing on direct experience. We know that the following year, in May 1611, Agostino Tassi, a collaborator of her father’s who had been employed to teach her perspective, raped her. Orazio denounced Tassi to the authorities after he refused to marry his daughter, and the trial that followed has come to be synonymous with Gentileschi’s name. Recorded in minute detail in paperwork discovered in 1876 and exhibited in this show for the first time, the court records offer crucial insight into the dreadful treatment of women in early 17th-century Rome.
Tassi had previously been tried for incest with his sister-in-law, and he had also been accused of shooting a pregnant lover, but his assault on Gentileschi could only be considered a crime if she could prove that he had violated her virginity — this being a matter of damaged property, rather than personal damage. She was subjected to a public gynecological examination, and then tortured to see if she stuck to her testimony, forcing her to cry out: “It’s true, it’s true, everything I said was true!” Although found guilty, Tassi’s punishment was scant: He was banished from Rome, but the exile was never enforced.
How then can we look at the defiant strength of Gentileschi’s paintings without thinking of what she endured? That question has preoccupied scholars of her work since at least 1976, when Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris featured Gentileschi prominently in their groundbreaking exhibition “Women Artists: 1550-1950,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the two curators included information about the trial in an accompanying publication. How much biography finds its way into artists’ work remains a fraught question. In an essay in the National Gallery’s catalog, Elizabeth Cropper writes that dismissing the experiences that shaped Gentileschi leads to “a dismal narrowing of our understanding” of her life and work, and I am inclined to agree.
Take Gentileschi’s famed “Judith Beheading Holofernes,” which she painted twice around 1613, after fleeing to Florence with a husband Orazio had hastily sought for her to quell the scandal of the trial. In the painting, Judith and her maidservant pin down Holofernes, an Assyrian general, whose eyes bulge as blood sprays from a wound Judith carves in his neck with a knife. There was a fashion at the time for depictions of strong biblical women (all the more titillating if, like this Judith, they resembled their painters), and plays of Old Testament stories were performed at the court of the Medicis, who were Gentileschi’s patrons during her years in Florence. But can this fully account for the violence and viscera of the scene?
The name of the exhibition, which opened on Saturday and runs through Jan. 24, 2021, has a pop star ring, befitting the most celebrated female artist of the 17th century. In her lifetime, Artemisia Gentileschi was lauded by the artist Jérôme David as “a miracle in painting, more easily envied than imitated”; today, she is the subject of feverish new scholarship, not to mention films, plays, novels and even a cameo in a 2017 children’s book, “Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.”
But why does first-name familiarity seem to be so often applied to women artists and not men? Kahlo is endlessly referred to as Frida, but only Kanye West takes the liberty of calling Picasso just Pablo.
Perhaps the title is intended to distinguish Gentileschi from her father, Orazio, who was also an esteemed painter. Born in Rome in July 1593, she was 12 when her mother died in childbirth, and she was left in his sole care. Giovanni Baglione’s “Lives of Painters, Sculptors and Architects” (1642) describes Orazio as “more beast than human,” with a “satiric tongue” that “offended everyone.” But at least he was aware of the prodigal talents of his only daughter: When she was 18, he boasted to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany that she was “already capable of such works that many principal masters of this profession never arrive at.”
The National Gallery show is Gentileschi’s first exhibition in Britain, and it proves that her father’s statement sprang from more than parental pride (or a bid for patronage). The 29 paintings on display — just under half of the total works believed to be by her hand — demonstrate her startling emotional sensitivity as she brought a new kind of intimacy to the theatricality of Baroque art.
In 2018, the National Gallery acquired its first work by Gentileschi, “Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria,” making her only the eighth female artist in a collection that has work by more than 700 men. The curatorial team recognized the opportunity to stage a major monographic show, which would resonate with the #MeToo movement and help counter the gender imbalance of the collection. The gains would be considerable, but it would be no mean feat: Those who own Gentileschi’s works don’t part with them lightly, several paintings are riddled with conservation challenges, and others are clouded in dispute.
Women artists were rare in early modern Italy, and they tended to be aristocratic. (When Germaine Greer wrote about Gentileschi in 1979, she called the chapter “The Magnificent Exception.”) Becoming an artist required much more than “a room of one’s own,” so the few women who managed to become professionals generally had fathers already in the trade. To quote Simone de Beauvoir: “One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius” — and it is the becoming that’s been the trouble for women for centuries.
It feels fitting, then, that the exhibition’s opening room features a work by Gentileschi’s father, “Judith and her Maidservant,” especially as she would later make the subject her own. Some scholars have argued for this work to be attributed to his daughter, and, while that is now thought unlikely, it’s important to understand her artistic debt to his style, which borrowed heavily from Caravaggio’s flare-lit scenes, worked up from live models in the studio.
How could it have been otherwise? A male apprentice would have roamed the streets of Rome and drawn directly from facades and frescoes; Gentileschi was almost exclusively restricted to the upper floor of her home, where she had only her father’s work and some engravings for inspiration. In court documents, she described her captivity as “noxious”; after all these months of lockdown, the feeling is familiar.
The show’s opening room also features Gentileschi’s earliest known painting, “Susannah and the Elders,” from 1610. This is the biblical story of the beautiful wife of Joachim, who is preyed upon while bathing in her garden by two lascivious old men who threaten to accuse her of adultery (punishable by death) if she does not submit to their advances.
The bodily proportions in this work are uneven in places — perhaps inevitably, given that the only anatomy Gentileschi could have studied in detail at this point was her own — and the textiles lack the tactility of her later works. But these are easily forgiven when you turn to the luminosity of Susannah’s flesh and the nuance of her expression: Watch how centuries are collapsed in that look of disgust.
Gentileschi, who was just 17 when she painted Susannah’s contempt, may well have been drawing on direct experience. We know that the following year, in May 1611, Agostino Tassi, a collaborator of her father’s who had been employed to teach her perspective, raped her. Orazio denounced Tassi to the authorities after he refused to marry his daughter, and the trial that followed has come to be synonymous with Gentileschi’s name. Recorded in minute detail in paperwork discovered in 1876 and exhibited in this show for the first time, the court records offer crucial insight into the dreadful treatment of women in early 17th-century Rome.
Tassi had previously been tried for incest with his sister-in-law, and he had also been accused of shooting a pregnant lover, but his assault on Gentileschi could only be considered a crime if she could prove that he had violated her virginity — this being a matter of damaged property, rather than personal damage. She was subjected to a public gynecological examination, and then tortured to see if she stuck to her testimony, forcing her to cry out: “It’s true, it’s true, everything I said was true!” Although found guilty, Tassi’s punishment was scant: He was banished from Rome, but the exile was never enforced.
How then can we look at the defiant strength of Gentileschi’s paintings without thinking of what she endured? That question has preoccupied scholars of her work since at least 1976, when Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris featured Gentileschi prominently in their groundbreaking exhibition “Women Artists: 1550-1950,” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the two curators included information about the trial in an accompanying publication. How much biography finds its way into artists’ work remains a fraught question. In an essay in the National Gallery’s catalog, Elizabeth Cropper writes that dismissing the experiences that shaped Gentileschi leads to “a dismal narrowing of our understanding” of her life and work, and I am inclined to agree.
Take Gentileschi’s famed “Judith Beheading Holofernes,” which she painted twice around 1613, after fleeing to Florence with a husband Orazio had hastily sought for her to quell the scandal of the trial. In the painting, Judith and her maidservant pin down Holofernes, an Assyrian general, whose eyes bulge as blood sprays from a wound Judith carves in his neck with a knife. There was a fashion at the time for depictions of strong biblical women (all the more titillating if, like this Judith, they resembled their painters), and plays of Old Testament stories were performed at the court of the Medicis, who were Gentileschi’s patrons during her years in Florence. But can this fully account for the violence and viscera of the scene?
Look at the tufts of hair caught between Judith’s knuckles as she clutches Holofernes’s skull to sever the arteries of his neck. This is one of many occasions when Gentileschi makes Caravaggio look tame: In his rendition of the same moment, a meek Judith leans demurely to one side, bemused and limp-wristed. The stark difference suggests Gentileschi is both drawing on her intimate experiences of the brutality of life at the time (such as the deaths of four of her five children), as well as shrewdly amplifying her notoriety from the rape trial to market herself for future commissions of formidable women.
Maybe that was part of what she meant when she told her Sicilian patron, Don Antonio Ruffo, “I will show your Illustrious Lordship what a woman can do.” The meticulous selection at the National Gallery by the curator, Letizia Treves, certainly showcases Gentileschi’s strengths: rich pigments, sumptuous textures and heart-rending emotion. That such a powerful body of work has been brought together in just two years, despite all of the obstacles and additional delays brought about by a global pandemic, is testament to that sentiment, too.
Blood, Passion and Captivity :Gentileschi’s Life is In Her Paintings. By Eleanor Nairne. The New York Times , October 5, 2020.
Her paintings blaze across the centuries. A prodigy who was raped at the age of 17, forced into an arranged marriage and suffered the death of four of her five children, Artemisia Gentileschi emerged from hell to become one of the great storytellers of the baroque. For the first time in the UK, 29 of her paintings – loaned from more than 20 museums – are on view in ‘Artemisia’, curated by Letizia Treves, at London’s National Gallery. Also on display are works by other artists, including her father and teacher Orazio, as well as the passionate letters she wrote to her lover, Francesco Maria Maringhi.
This thrilling exhibition – the first-ever devoted to a historic female artist at the National Gallery – is chronological: opening with Gentileschi’s beginnings in Rome, where she was born, it moves through her success in Florence to her later years in Venice, Naples and London. Portraits of formidable women in history abound: from Bathsheba, Cleopatra, Clio and Corisca, to Danaë, Esther, Jael, Lucretia and Mary Magdalene. Gentileschi painted her earliest major work, Susannah and the Elders, in 1610, when she was just 17. This biblical story was popular in the Renaissance: a young Hebrew wife is accosted by two lecherous old men who falsely accuse her of taking lovers. They threaten to reveal her secret unless she has sex with them, but their machinations are revealed and they are put to death. In Gentileschi’s brilliant, claustrophobic version, Susannah recoils in horror from her tormentors, her hands raised high as if to fend off the blows of their words. It’s a painting that would prove horribly prophetic.
The following year, Gentileschi’s teacher, the artist Agostino Tassi, raped her. He was arrested, found guilty and exiled from Rome but, as he was close to the Pope, it was only briefly enforced. Much of the 300-page transcript of the seven-month trial has survived and is included in the exhibition. It records how Gentileschi was tortured to test the truth of her words and repeatedly cried out: ‘It’s true, it’s true.’ The day after the trial finished, Gentileschi was married off to Pierantonio Stiattesi, a mediocre painter who traded in pigments. They moved to Florence, where she painted her fierce Self-Portrait as a Female Martyr (c.1613–14) and Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (c.1615). Bought in 2018 by the National Gallery, the latter is the first 17th-century Italian self-portrait by a woman in the museum’s collection of around 2,300 works, of which only 24 are by female artists. The work’s intense framing creates a sense of intimacy; you can almost feel the artist breathing. Despite being condemned to death for her beliefs and vulnerable to the ghastly machinations of men and their politics, Catherine/Gentileschi is clearly not broken. This is a self-portrait as a show of strength: a young woman in total control of her own representation.
In the years immediately after the trial, Gentileschi painted two graphic versions of Judith Beheading Holofernes (c.1612–14), both of which are on display here. The story concerns the assassination by the Biblical heroine Judith of the Assyrian General Holofernes, whose armies had invaded her homeland. It’s likely that Gentileschi had seen Caravaggio’s version from 1598–99; however, her interpretation of the story is far more brutal than his – and Caravaggio was a convicted murderer.
In 1638, Gentileschi joined her father in London, where he was working for the royal family. Here, she painted her extraordinary Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1638–39). Although the work is relatively small, its ambition is huge. It’s an astonishingly active self-portrait of an artist at work: Gentileschi is consumed with the canvas in front of her; her cheeks are flushed and her dark-brown eyes gaze upwards, both at the painting she is concentrating so hard on and into the light. The angle of her self-depiction is complex and original; the perspective is tilted, so we can’t help but look up at her – or, perhaps, up to her? The painting is a defiant statement that Gentileschi, a woman, is not simply the embodiment of an allegory but is also a human being hard at work.
Orazio died and Gentileschi returned to Naples. Her final years were professionally successful, but the letters she wrote to her patron, Antonio Ruffo, make clear her daily battles – with illness, the cost of models and the violence of the city. Yet, Gentileschi was never cowed, proclaiming in one missive: ‘You will find the spirit of Caesar in the soul of a woman.’
Her final painting is dated 1652: poignantly, it’s another version of Susannah and the Elders. The date of the artist’s death is unknown; the last we know of her is a payment towards an overdue tax bill in 1654. She possibly died of the plague in 1656, which nearly eradicated the population of Naples that year. Gentileschi left behind around 57 major paintings, many of which feature a woman as a powerful, often violent, protagonist: victorious, whatever life has thrown at her.
Artemisia’s Defiant Women Were a Prophecy. By Jennifer Higgie. Frieze, October 22, 2020.
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