Artemisia Gentileschi

Writing about Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652/3) is a double-edged sword. She is famous for her life as much as for her work, a problem which she managed to turn around in her own lifetime, but which we can’t seem to accomplish in these supposedly more enlightened days.

Born in Rome to the Caravaggesque painter Orazio Gentileschi, Artemisia was raised in the studio environment, painting from a young age, and perhaps even modelling in the nude for her father. At 17 she produced her first version of Susannah and the Elders, a work famous for its fresh approach to the popular Biblical story. Male painters loved to pose the naked Susannah seductively, eyes heavenward, only mildly perturbed by the old men. Artemisia showed a frightened woman trapped on all sides, boxed in by the lascivious Elders, and pinned against hard stone by our eyes, party to the crime.

The following year she was raped. Her father brought charges against his colleague, the painter Agostino Tassi, and Artemisia was subjected to character assassination – and torture – in the law courts of Rome. Tassi was convicted, and exiled from the city. Despite the scandal, Artemisia married another painter soon after, and became the first woman to enter the Accademia del Disegno in Florence.

As well as bearing four children, the painter went on to enjoy the patronage of the influential Medici family and through a mixture of talent, hard work and diplomacy Artemisia won fame and respect from kings and artists all over Europe. She was renowned for her images of virtuous and heroic women, often capable of brutal acts in the pursuit of justice.

However it is the little-known Penitent Magdalene of 1625-6 which is, in my opinion, Artemisia’s best work. It is a powerful image of a beauty in ruin, slumped, emotionally drained, in a chair. She is dishevelled, her nose red from crying and her legs splayed in a dual sign of exhaustion and sexual experience. This is a woman at her lowest ebb, the glamour all gone and a tortured soul exposed.

Unfortunately it is for her most violent images that Artemisia is today remembered. It may be no coincidence that the artist’s first – and most gruesome – version of Judith Slaying Holofernes, showing two very real women engaged in the messy job of decapitating the lustful army captain, was painted in the year of Artemisia’s rape trial. However, those feminists who rightly rescued the artist from art historical neglect did her no favours by foregrounding the rape as the defining feature of her oeuvre. Every image – even those painted before the crime, has been analysed in relation to it, permitting the artist no escape.

Poor old Artemisia is right back where she started. Her life makes a juicy story and the power of her most violent works is grist to that mill. Today’s cult of celebrity hands fame and fortune to those who make the biggest splash over those who display the best talent. Artemisia was supremely talented but this fact, having been glossed over by the patriarchal opinion-formers of the past, is once again sidelined by the shock headlines of her personal tragedy.

When will we ever learn?

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 09.11.03