Three faces of Artemisia Gentileschi
Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, of about 1638–9,* stops you in your tracks and takes your breath away; in its day, it was revolutionary. It is one of the earliest self-portraits by a woman artist to survive.
We see Artemisia in profile – a feat of considerable technical skill, requiring the use of multiple mirrors – her bare right arm raised high to the canvas with brush in hand. She wears a deep-green silk dress shot through with hues enriched by candlelight and by the folds of the material; her body is angled towards the viewer with the eye drawn to her pale cleavage, from which a gold necklace with masked pendant hangs, almost casually; red lips are pronounced and cut directly against the dark green of her shoulder. This artist is a sexual being, the more so because her eyes are intent on her work; she is uninterested in what art historians identify as the ‘male gaze’ – a marker for the essential prurience of much Renaissance art. The foreshortening of her facial features is a deliberate self-advertisement for the artist’s acknowledged brilliance as a disegna, a draughtswoman. Implicitly, she is painting herself painting herself –a fine pre-surrealist joke on infinity and mortality and the philosophical paradoxes of paint on canvas. As Mary Garrard showed in the first major analysis of Gentileschi’s work,1 both necklace and wild hair, which falls unruly from her temples, are nods to a description of pittura – the female embodiment of the skills of artists – by Cesare Ripa in his Iconologia (1593: the year of Artemisia’s birth). She alone of Baroque artists might intensify the allegory by portraying herself in the role. That the picture was produced at the court of, and possibly for, Charles I, whose narcissism ended up costing him his own pretty head, is an unintentional but neat irony.Artemisia (1593–1656) was the only daughter of Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639), a well-connected and successful Roman painter among whose acquaintances and inspirations was the brilliantly innovative Caravaggio (1571–1610). Artemisia’s mother, Prudentia, died when she was twelve, leaving the precocious young artist to grow up in an all-male household with four brothers. One of her earliest surviving works, Susanna and the Elders, painted when she was about seventeen and in the year of Caravaggio’s mysterious disappearance, justified her father in boasting of his daughter’s brilliance; she had already assisted him in some important commissions.
If the Self-Portrait is not the most famous of Artemisia Gentileschi’s works, it is because her more conventional subject matter – interpretations of familiar female biblical heroines and wronged women like St Cecilia, the cephalophoric martyr† – carries such loaded and shocking overtones: shocking because of the infamous rape trial of 1612 in which her father’s colleague, Agostino Tassi, was accused of violent sexual assault on Artemisia in her own home. Judith Slaying Holofernes of 1613 and several later depictions of that story have been read, unsurprisingly, as narratives of revenge.
In May 1612, Artemisia testified that Tassi had raped her with the connivance of another family friend, a woman named Tuzia, who owned an adjoining apartment. He had then offered, or been forced to agree, to marry her; but he failed to fulfil his promise. In any case, he was already married and had, in fact, previously been convicted of incest. The graphic testimony of a very public trial of 1612 survives. In it, Artemisia describes attempting to kill her attacker with a knife, while the defendant consistently defames her with fabricated accusations of sexual availability and consent, which the court found incredible. Artemisia was tortured with thumbscrews to determine the truth of her account; Tassi served six months in prison before being released.
Within a month of the trial, as a function of social necessity, Artemisia was married to a minor Florentine artist, Pierantonio Stiattesi. In 1618 they had a daughter, called Prudentia after her grandmother, but the history of the marriage suggests that it was a matter of no more than mutual convenience and public show. Artemisia sustained a passionate affair with another man for several years, and husband and wife became estranged.
Her scandalous history did not prevent Artemisia from being recognised as one of Italy’s foremost painters. She was brought to Florence by a great-nephew of Michelangelo, through whom she was commissioned to paint a ceiling at the family home, Casa Buonarroti. She attracted the patronage of Cosimo II de’ Medici and was elected a member of the exclusive Accademia delle Arti del Disegno. After spells in Venice, London – with her father, who became court painter to Charles I – and Rome, she finally settled in Naples, where she was still painting in 1654.
Artemisia’s most famous works illustrate the story of Judith slaying Holofernes. In the Book of Judith, the eponymous heroine is a Jewish widow who, with her maidservant, infiltrates the camp of her people’s enemy, the Assyrian general Holofernes, and wins his affection. Coming to him asleep, lying dead drunk in his tent one night, she decapitates him with a sword and takes his head back to the Israelites as a trophy, while the Assyrian army collapses in chaos. Judith’s story was often the subject of poetic verse from the Anglo-Saxon period onwards and her assassination of Holofernes was painted many times in the Renaissance and after – perhaps the most famous incarnation being Gustav Klimt’s dazzling 1901 confection. Caravaggio’s 1598 and 1607 treatments of the scene are obvious contemporary exemplars for Artemisia, but the very personal nature of her interpretation, of about 1613,‡ is expressed in the brutal intimacy of Judith’s act, as she holds Holofernes down by his hair while drawing the bright sword blade across his throat.
He, supine on his litter, stares out at the viewer almost pleading, daring us to intervene. The maidservant presses down on his chest, while his right fist pushes at her throat to fend her off. Blood runs down the perfectly white bedclothes. Chiaroscuro lighting enhances the muscular violence of the scene – both women have their sleeves rolled up; he is naked – while the extravagance of Judith’s rich blue silk dress embroidered with gold thread and the haemoglobin red of the maidservant’s gown garishly complement the blood of the victim. It is not merely wishful thinking that propels the viewer to see in Judith a likeness of the artist: not as an allegory of painting but as the personification of a violated woman. A year later, a more composed reading of the story was imagined in Judith and her Maidservant,§ in which the two women, seen in complicit profile, look stage right, Judith carrying the fatal sword with its blade upright against her own shoulder while the maidservant carries Holofernes’s head in a basket on her hip with all the sangfroid of a costermonger carrying apples to market.In a 1620 version of the assassination,# subtle differences tell of a development in Artemisia’s theme seven years on from the immediate aftermath of the trial. First, we notice that in the new painting the artist steps back a couple of paces from the scene, offering a slightly wider view that concentrates the action against a dark background: it is more theatrical. Then, we see that the wound inflicted on Holofernes is now spurting bright jets of blood; that Judith is drawing away so as not to get spots on her – now golden-fabric – dress. One arc of blood directs the eye towards a gold and enamel bracelet that Judith wears on her left wrist; and the cameos that we can barely make out on the bracelet are seen2 as depictions of Athena and of Artemis, the virgin hunter-goddess, prototype for the Virgin Mary and namesake of the artist. It is a nice touch.
A longer contemplation of the scene shows us that the maidservant’s gown is now darker and more discreet, while the blood-red of the bedclothes emphasises Holofernes’s vulnerability and the ultimate payment for his sins against the Israelites. And then, the muscularity of the first painting is enhanced by the guard of Judith’s sword, painted vertically to show the hilt as a cross, which presses into her enemy’s bicep.If the Judith story became and remained a personal narrative for Artemisia, it is perhaps surprising that her very early treatment of Susanna and the Elders of 1610,∫ a year or so before the rape by Tassi, should substantially address the same theme. Here, a naked but chaste Susanna sits on a marble bench against a wall over which two men are gossiping lasciviously about her while she fends them off: their huddling dual form designed, perhaps, to make them look like a mountain on her back. The tightness of the depiction of the three heads makes the scene claustrophobic. It is an extraordinarily mature and accomplished, almost revolutionary conception for a young adult. Had the right poet known Artemisia at this age, he or she might have written of her, as Christine de Pizan wrote of Jeanne d’Arc, the following lines…
A girl of only sixteen years
(Does this not outdo Nature’s skill?)
Who lightly heavy weapons bears,
Of strong and hard food takes her fill,
And thus is like it. And God’s foes
Before her swiftly fleeing run,
She did this in the public eye.
There tarried not a single one.
Susanna’s story comes from the Old Testament Book of Daniel. Susanna, a respectable married woman, enjoys a private bath in her garden while two elders watch and lust after her. They follow her back into her house, where they threaten to accuse her publicly of a secret assignation unless she agrees to have sex with them. Her refusal leads to her trial on the capital charge of promiscuity. The young hero, Daniel, saves her when he exposes the men’s perjury; and they are later executed. Artemisia’s treatment of the scene, despite its physical sensuality, emphasises the complicity and moral bankruptcy of the Elders, in contrast with treatments by contemporary male artists who had begun to exploit the story’s supposed innate eroticism and resulting popularity with wealthy male patrons. She is reacting against the lasciviousness of her peers. If Judith is Artemisia slaying her enemy, Susanna expresses the young artist’s solidarity with all women against all predatory men. It has been said, echoing a description of Michelangelo, that her art is a gift to the twentieth century – since no other century would have her.3 In the second decade of a new millennium, her Susanna might be re-captioned: ‘#MeToo’.