Artemisia Gentileschi was the greatest woman artist of the Baroque period. She endured terrible ordeals—a rape, followed by a long, difficult trial, and a husband who deserted her. These have made her a feminist icon, the subject of countless articles, three novels, and a movie.
Exhibits have been less plentiful. This show, which pairs her with her father, Orazio, strives to make up for that. It’s the biggest one for both – 50 paintings by him, 32 by her. Given the size of Baroque paintings, that’s a lot of canvas.
In their day, Orazio’s fame eclipsed Artemisia’s. He’s considered the most gifted of the many followers of Caravaggio. His conversion to this revolutionary naturalism, didn’t come tillt age 45, by which time Artemisia was 15 and beginning to learn from her father. So both embarked on this new path together, Orazio in his second career, Artemisia in her first.
Revenge fantasy? Artemisia’s “Judith slaying Holofernes.”
Artemesia doesn’t appear until midway, but does it with a bang: brutally realistic depictions of biblical stories like “Judith slaying Holofernes.” One is bloodier than the next, and support feminist interpretations of her paintings as revenge fantasies. Judith slays the Assyrian general Holofernes by getting him drunk, then decapitating him with his own sword. In “Jael and Sisera,” it’s a similar scenario. The Israelite woman, Jael, slays the sleeping commander of the Canaanites by hammering a spike into his temple.
Artemisia makes us empathize with the women in her paintings. In “Susanna and the Elders,” two men spy on the heroine while she is bathing, then threaten to smear her name unless she grants them sexual favors. Male painters tended to step back from this scene, putting the lechers on one side of the picture, Susanna on the other, and playing up the eroticism. But Artmesia arranges the composition vertically, so that the recoiling Susanna is right in front of us, and the men loom threateningly above the garden wall. Nor does her treatment of Susanna seem designed to arouse. Though naked, she is an object of sympathy and pity. Artemisia brought the female nude back down to earth, made her feel more natural, and therefore real.
This kind of dramatic realism was also pure Caravaggio. Both Gentileschis had adopted Caravaggio’s practice of using neighborhood commoners as models. The idea was to cast off Renaissance otherworldliness in favor of an earthy, realistic effect. Orazio also employed Caravaggio’s dramatic, often foreshortened poses so that arms or legs—or, as in one picture, the gigantic hand of Goliath—thrust out at us.
What was Artemisia like? Some portraits cast her as defiant and brazen with a mane of tousled hair—a look that wasn’t so unusual for artists then. Both her father and Caravaggio were arrogant and bristly, and Caravaggio was notoriously slovenly. She’s been variously portrayed as provocative and promiscuous, an angry proto-feminist, and a woman of letters.
Rumors of her lasciviousness were spread during the rape trial by allies of the defendant, Agostino Tassi. Tassi, a painter friend of her fathers, raped Artemisia in the family house when she was 18. A deflowered woman had diminished prospects marriage, and Tassi carried on an affair with Artemisia for several months, all the while promising to marry her.
When, several months later, the truth came out, the family brought charges. Tassi turned out to be already married. He was found guilty of rape and exiled from Rome.
Artemisia was forced into a marriage of convenience to a mediocre painter who ran up debts and ultimately abandoned her. Three of her four children died before maturity.
Artemisia painted for about 40 years, dying in 1652, 13 years after her father. Some of their paintings are tossups for attribution, although Orazio in his later years veered from the drama and sensationalism of Caravaggism, developing a style of stillness and spiritual feeling.
Artemisia stuck with drama – preferring operatic gestures to prayerful ones. Her own face and figure appear again and again in her pictures. Like Caravaggio, who perversely put his own face on the decapitated head of Goliath, Artemisia got a kick out of painting herself into the pictures, appearing as a sensuous, nude Cleopatra and a penitent Mary Magdalene.
Later in life, she moved to Florence and was the first woman inducted into its art academy. She was a friend of Galileo. Some have cast her as a clever, drawing room wit, though her education, outside of painting, didn’t go much beyond basic literacy.
In the end, Artemisia’s paintings tell us all we need to know about her. She emerges as more multi-dimensional than the stereotypes imposed on her. Certainly, she had to be strong-willed and aggressive to succeed in a male-dominated profession. However, the show doesn’t support the feminist line that Artemisia’s full creative powers only emerged when she was painting vengeful or assertive women. Scenes with erotic overtones say nothing more about her than that she knew how to put a sexual charge in a painting, as did plenty of male artists. She was, by all appearances, an artist first, and a woman second.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
February, 2002
