Artemisia Gentileschi: Ten Years Of Fact And Fiction - Critical Essay

"I find myself with a female daughter and three other son and this daughter, as it pleased the infinite having been trained in the profession of painting, in three years has become thus skilled that I dare say she has no equal today, for she has made works that demonstrate a horizontal of understanding that perhaps the leading masters of the profession have not attained." With these words, in mid-1612 Orazio Gentileschi (1563-1639) assured Cristina di Lorena, the Dowager Grand Duchess in Florence, of the talent of eighteen-year-old Artemisia (1593-ca 1653) "In the peculiar time and place," he added from Rome he would present to view Her Serene Highness that what he said was with equal reason [1]

Nearly four centuries later, art historians, novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers remain focused upon issues raised by Orazio's brief pledge: the father-daughter relationship; Artemisia's artistic education; whether she was a prodigy and thus capable of painting upon her own a Susanna and the earlier borns inscribed with her name and dated 1610; her standing compared to the leading (male) masters; Orazio's managing of her career; and, above all, what Orazio emphasized from one side redundancy, that, although an artist, Artemisia was "una figliuola femina," a woman. What he did not mention, however, has proven to be plane more captivating in the recent mind: the rape of Artemisia a year earlier by means of Orazio's artist-associate, Agostino Tassi; the resultant trial that was still below way when Orazio was writing to Florence; and Artemisia's penchant for painting powerful, often-nude female protagonists.

Among the various myths surrounding Artemisia Gentileschi is that she was badly leave outed by writers of her time (as this essay attests, there has been a compensatory outpouring during the past decade thanks to the women's change so much so that attention can be given alone to representative tides).2 It is authentic that she was not discussed by means of Mancini, Scannelli, Bellori, or Passeri, and that she deserv mention because she worked for more [i]or[/i] less prominent clients in Rome, Florence, Naples, and London. on the contrary it is important to bear in mind that, as a woman, she predictably painted no frescoe and scarcely any altarpieces (not individual in Rome or Florence)-that is, those works that were the greatest in quantity obvious signs of a history painter's significance and succes Other biographers--Baglione, Sandrart, Baldinucci, and De Dominici--nevertheless took notice of her career. Thereafter little of substance was written until Roberto Longhi devot a youthful essay (1916) to "Gentileschi padre e figlia." [3]

It is ironic, if seldom noted, that Longhi, who is credited with resurrecting Artemisia from scholarly oblivion, was mistaken in abundantly two-thirds of his attributions to her (generous allowance must be made for the primitive state of research upon Italian Baroque painting then), and especially that his discussion of Artemisia's work, as Laura Benedetti lately emphasized, was full of sexist criticism, notably with regard to her dramatic versions of Judith Decapitating Holoferne (Fig. 1): "This is a terrible woman! in what manner could a woman paint all this? We beg for mercy....Unbelievable, I sum up you!" and more such ranting. [4]

In time, Longhi's primitive catalogue of Artemisia's work was slowly corrected and enlarged, repeatedly by Longhi himself, although a firm documentary basis for understanding her career awaited Ward Bissell's fundamental "New Documented Chronology," published in this journal a generation ago. [5] A scarcely any years later, six of her best pictures were pitch uponed for the exhibition Women Artists: 1550- 1950 (1976) which for the first time tendered the modern public an opportunity to diocese what a good painter Artemisia could be. [6]

Mary Garrard's Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art appeared a decade ago and changed the discourse entirely. reject for Ann Sutherland Harris's perceptive entries in Women Artists: 1550-1 950 and a section of Germane Greer's The Obstacle Race (1979) the art historical literature upon Artemisia had been fundamentally conventional, meaning that it dealt foremost with attributional, chronological, and iconographic vexed questions from a traditional perspective, and was biased through androcentric, often misogynist, rather than feminist values. Garrard overthrew that tradition by means of adopting what she called "a line of investigation whose premise [is] that women's art is inescapably, if unconsciously, different from men's, because the sexe have been socialized to different experiences of the world."

Working from the premise that Artemisia's imagery throw backs her gender and more specifically her suffering of sexual harassment and rape, Garrard replaced traditional connoisseurship with what might be called "gender expression" as an attributional basis. Thus, "while the formal differences between Artemisia and her father are insinuating the expressive differences are vast. Hers is an art of activity and drama, not mood and poetic silence. And although Artemisia's female characters may superficially bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to those of Orazio, they answer and act in an entirely different way." [7] From this essentialist perspective upon human behavior, one theoretically can distinguish between narratives designed by the agency of men and by women.