Artemisia Gentileschi

Italian painter

• Born: July 8, 1593
• Birthplace: Rome, Papal States (now in Italy)
• Died: 1652 or 1653
• Place of death: Kingdom of Naples (now in Italy)

At an early age Artemisia began producing paintings in the strong, bold manner of chiaroscuro popularized by Caravaggio, and she painted in the history style, which had been traditionally closed to women. She was the first Italian woman whose works were praised by contemporaries and whose paintings were influential in the work of other artists.

Early Life

Following the death of their mother, Prudentia Montoni, in 1605, Artemisia Gentileschi (ahrt-eh-MIHZ-ee-ah jayn-tee-LEHS-kee) and her brothers were raised by her father Orazio Gentileschi in the Roman home that combined their family living quarters with his very active painting studio. Artemisia was exposed to the workshop and to painting from an early age, although critics still debate the extent to which social decorum prevented her from coming into contact with other artists, apprentices, and models. Women of the period were banned from life-drawing, but she might have had the opportunity in the privacy of her father’s studio, and she herself served as a model for some of her father’s paintings. She received no formal education. She did not learn to read and write until she was an adult, and she was seldom seen outside the Gentileschi family home.

In 1610, at the age of seventeen, she produced her first painting, Susanna and the Elders . It is possible to see the coercion of the elders in the Susanna story as Artemisia’s commentary on personal experience. In 1611, artist Agostino Tassi, a teacher of perspective who had been hired by her father, raped Gentileschi. A suit was brought by Orazio Gentileschi against Tassi for raping his daughter. Tassi was already an accused criminal (accused of incest with his sister-in-law and conspiracy to murder his wife), but it is uncertain whether Orazio knew his background before hiring him. The violence of the initial rape is clearly evident from Artemisia’s testimony, but the situation was complicated because the two had a sexual relationship after the rape on the understanding that Tassi would marry her. Orazio might have pressed the lawsuit not because of the rape of his daughter but because Tassi had reneged on the marriage.

Although Tassi was the accused, it was Artemisia who was subjected to questioning under torture. In the end, Tassi was found guilty and Artemisia was vindicated. On November 29, 1612, Artemisia effectively regained her status in the community by marrying an acquaintance of her father.

Life’s Work

After moving to Florence, Artemisia began her independent career. She received assistance from Michelangelo Buonarotti, the Younger, who provided her with the social entrée necessary to win patrons. She also began to correspond with Galileo. With the help of intermediaries such as Buonarotti, Artemisia’s works, including the Penitent Magdalene (c. 1617-1620) and Judith Slaying Holofernes (c. 1613-1614), were purchased by Cosimo II de’ Medici, grand duke of Tuscany. King Philip IV of Spain, the collector Cassiano del Pozzo, and Prince Karl Eusebius von Liechtenstein all owned paintings by her. She was commissioned, with several male contemporaries, to paint an Allegory of Inclination for the decoration of the Casa Buonarotti (1615-1617). It was this commission that led to her matriculation in the Florentine Academy.

Many of her paintings are remarkable for her exploitation of the emotional possibilities of relatively compressed spatial composition and chiaroscuro. Judith Slaying Holofernes features a muscular Judith in the actual act of decapitation, literally holding down a struggling Holofernes whose large hand, at the center of the spiraling trio of figures, grasps ineffectually upward toward Judith’s maidservant accomplice. The instinctive patterning of the brightly spotlighted actors against the dark, murky background contributes to the psychological and physical tension. A later version of Judith and Her Maidservant (1625-1627) is almost like a sequel, in which an alert and listening Judith, lit by the flickering candlelight in the enemy’s chamber, calls for silence with her upraised hand, while still grasping in her right the scimitar of Holofernes and cautioning her crouching maidservant. One almost feels their fear of discovery, while the decapitated head of the mute Holofernes, at the lower foreground edge, turns pleadingly to the viewer. In both paintings Judith is draped in the remarkable yellow gold that Artemisia preferred for her draperies in the 1620’s and 1630’s, and which she, like her father, often combined with a clear, cool, cobalt blue.

In 1623, Artemisia appears to have broken with her husband. By 1626, she was living on the Via del Corso in Rome with her eldest daughter, Prudentia. A second daughter died almost immediately after birth, and two sons (Giovanni Battista and Cristofano) disappear from the record with her husband (he is only mentioned again in 1637, when Artemisia asked a correspondent if he were still alive). In 1634, an English visitor to Naples noted that Prudentia was a painter in her own right (no extant works are attributed to her).

After becoming independent from her husband, Artemisia embarked on a peripatetic career, moving first to Genoa and then to Venice. Some of Artemisia’s paintings made their way into premier European collections, but she seems to have lacked direct patronage, relying on intermediaries to broker deals for her.

In 1627, a pamphlet published in Venice praised three of her works, and while there she completed a Hercules and Omphale for Philip IV, king of Spain, and painted other works for the duke of Alcalà. By 1630, she was in Naples. In a famous self-portrait of this period she appears as the Allegory of Painting (1630). In this image, Artemisia fashions herself in a traditionally male role, as master of the heroic physical labor of painting, combining a view of herself at work at her easel with symbolism that alludes to the intellectual foundation of the painter’s art (although her intellectualism is often questioned, she did possess a ready grasp of standard classical and biblical subject matter). Artemisia’s self-presentation as a somewhat masculine working painter is entirely appropriate given that she did live entirely off the proceeds of painting.

It is difficult to know how she established and maintained the succession of studios that she must have required to complete her work. Her only assistant might have been her daughter Prudentia. In 1635, although clearly in financial straits in Naples and looking for patronage, she resisted a summons to England from Charles I . She was forced by circumstances to leave Italy for London and was there when her father, who had worked in England since 1626, died in 1639. Some of her works entered the royal collections. Despite success in England, by 1640-1642, Artemisia was back in Naples, where she died in 1652 or 1653. Although she did complete works for Neapolitan patrons in this final decade, her last years are poorly documented.

Significance

For many years, the transcripts concerning the rape trial against Tassi were more widely known than any of Artemisia Gentileschi’s paintings. They provided the basis for an early, fictionalized biographical account and for more recent novels and even a biographical film. Her artistic personality and her painterly oeuvre have therefore largely been constructed by feminist scholarship stemming from the biographical details. For this reason, her bold, decisive treatment of historical or biblical accounts of female victimization, subjugation, and often heroic virtue (subjects not uncommon to the period), and especially her tendency to present her female subjects as frank, heroic nudes, have been widely read in terms of her own physical and psychological trauma.

Such a reading privileges only one aspect of her subject matter, and it has tended to overshadow serious treatment of her talents as a painter. She did overcome the notoriety that resulted from the trial, and the rampant misogyny of the period and the profession, to become a successful independent painter. She became a member of the Design Academy established by artist and writer Giorgio Vasari in Florence, and she went on to work all over Italy and for Charles I in London.

As is the case with Caravaggio, modern scholarship has made it difficult to separate the circumstances of Gentileschi’s life from her art. The many versions of the story of Judith Slaying Holofernes made by male painters of the Baroque period have not received nearly so much scrutiny as those by Artemisia, because hers are read in the context of her rape, subsequent trial, and her relationship with her father. Such readings tend to obscure her talents as a painter in general, claiming that her work addressed feminist concerns mainly, while ignoring her more-general portraits and religious and allegorical works.

Given the limitations on women in this period, it is remarkable that Artemisia was able to successfully adapt herself to the business of painting, earning commissions, communicating with patrons, moving from city to city, establishing a series of studios, and earning her living through her work. She deserves to be further studied for her technical mastery and eye for clarity of color and purity of form.

Bibliography

Banti, Anna. Artemisia. 1947. New ed. Translated by Shirley D’Ardia Caracciolo. Introduction by Susan Sontag. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. A biographical novel of Artemisia based on available archival sources, which brought to light the remarkable circumstances of her life.

Bissell, R. Ward. Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art: Critical Reading and Catalogue Raisonné. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. An examination of Artemisia’s complete oeuvre, with a thorough catalog of works and exhaustive transcriptions of all relevant documents. Contains a valuable appendix with a technical examination of her works, discussing pigments, varnishes, and techniques.

Christiansen, Keith, and Judith W. Mann, eds. Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001. An exhibition catalog and excellent study of the complete Gentileschi oeuvre, and the first exhibition to consider father and daughter together. Adds new documents concerning Orazio’s career and new inventories of Artemisia’s household effects in Florence. Contains a particularly incisive, thoughtful, and eminently sensible reassessment of Artemisia’s career by Rona Goffen.

Garrard, Mary D. “Artemesia and Susanna.” In Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard. New York: Harper & Row, 1982.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Artemisia Gentileschi Around 1622: The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. This work examines two little-known paintings by Artemisia.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. All three works provide a feminist reading of Artemisia’s subjects and her life. The 1989 book offers valuable English translations of documents relevant to her trial, and is a thorough iconographical study of selected works.