GENTILESCHI, ARTEMISIA (1593–c. 1654)

GENTILESCHI, ARTEMISIA (1593–c. 1654), Italian painter. Artemisia Gentileschi is known for her early dramatic biblical narratives presenting forceful female protagonists. Her less-known later paintings feature pensive heroines and classically composed groupings.

She was the daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, a Tuscan painter who trained her to paint in his style combining the artificial contrivance of mannerism with a naturalism inspired by the revolutionary vision of Caravaggio (born Michelangelo Merisi, 1573–1610). Although some scholars have dated her earliest work to 1609, based on Orazio's 1612 boast that she had achieved remarkable successes in only three years, she probably began painting in 1605, apprenticing at age twelve as did many male painters. In 1611 she was raped by Orazio's colleague Agostino Tassi. Testimony from the ensuing trial provides valuable information on Artemisia's early life, including her own account of the assault. She worked in Rome until late 1612 or early 1613, when she married a Florentine and moved to Florence. On returning to Rome in 1620, she entered one of her most successful periods. In 1627 she visited Venice, although the duration of her stay is unknown. She settled in Naples by August 1630, her home for the rest of her life except for a sojourn in London around 1639. Her patrons included major contemporary collectors such as Michaelangelo Buonarroti, nephew to the great Renaissance artist; the grand duke of Tuscany; the kings of England and Spain; the Roman scholar Cassiano dal Pozzo; and Don Antonio Ruffo of Sicily.

Famous in her own day, she was generally ignored until the twentieth century when the reevaluation of Caravaggio and seventeenth-century naturalism extended to his followers, including Artemisia, his sole female disciple. Roberto Longhi, the great Caravaggio scholar, wrote the first serious account of both Gentileschis in 1916. Focus on Artemisia as caravaggista was later supplanted by attention to her role as feminist heroine, beginning with Anna Banti's 1946 novel Artemisia, a personal homage to Artemisia's life and art that highlighted the rape and subsequent trial. Later twentieth-century studies have championed Artemisia as a strong female artist who, having overcome violence, created paintings that asserted women's power over their own lives and expressed revenge against male domination.

Her first signed and dated painting, the 1610 Susanna and the Elders, has been interpreted as a statement of women's strength and courage in the face of male oppression. Among the most compelling images of the story ever painted, it reveals Artemisia as one of the most gifted practitioners of baroque exuberance and an astute interpreter of dramatic narrative. Although it has been disputed whether Artemisia painted the entire canvas or whether her father helped (some claim Orazio alone created it), most scholars accept it as primarily Artemisia's work. Several other early paintings from her Roman period have been attributed to Orazio. There is at present no clear scholarly consensus.

Evaluating Artemisia among Caravaggio's followers has highlighted pictures that emphasize bold lighting, surface texture, and aggressive naturalism (Judith Beheading Holofernes [Uffizi]; Lucretia [Milan]; Judith and Her Maidservant [Detroit]) and led to her being credited with bringing Caravaggio's style to Naples. However, this Caravaggiodominated paradigm no longer holds. From the trial records, we understand her early life to have been severely restricted, with little opportunity to explore Rome's treasures, resulting in limited knowledge of Caravaggio other than through his influence on her father. It is also now clear that Caravaggio's realist style had reached Naples earlier than Artemisia's arrival. In fact, recent discoveries have revealed Artemisia's work as far more varied and less stylistically coherent than the caravaggesque model implies. Although her earliest pictures (1609–1613) demonstrate a debt to Caravaggio, her Florentine paintings move beyond this influence in their freer use of paint and color. Furthermore, her later works, often subdued and poetic, exhibit widely disparate expressive forms. In spite of recent suggestions that Artemisia adopted the style in vogue in the city in which she worked, her surviving paintings reveal a broader and more varied visual response. Having been trained to paint in the style of her father, she continued to demonstrate a remarkable ability to draw from others as she fashioned pictures that ranged from the rich color and compositional power of early Guercino (born Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, 1591–1666) to the restrained idealism of Guido Reni (1575–1642). Her assimilation of disparate styles may have been related to gender. Surviving letters, some thirty in number, reveal her awareness of her difficult position in a male-dominated profession. She may also have understood the impact of her gender on patrons who commissioned female nudes, her presumed specialty.

See also Caravaggio and Caravaggism ; Naples, Art in ; Women and Art .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Baldinucci, Filippo. Notizie de' professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua. 6 vols. Florence, 1681–1728. 5 vols., edited by F. Ranalli, Florence, 1845–1847. Edition by P. Barocchi, with annotations and 2 vols. of appendices, Florence, 1974–1975.

Bellori, Giovan Pietro. Le vite de' pittori, scultori e architetti moderni. Rome, 1672. Artemisia is discussed in the life of Orazio.

Menzio, Eva, ed. Artemisia Gentileschi/Agostino Tassi: Atti di un processo per stupro. Milan, 1981. Partial transcription of testimonies in Tassi's 1612 rape trial.

Secondary Sources

Bissell, R. Ward. Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art: Critical Reading and catalogue raisonné. University Park, Pa., 1999.

Christiansen, Keith, and Judith W. Mann. Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi. New York, 2001.

Florence, Casa Buonarroti. Artemisia. Exh. cat., edited by Roberto Contini and Gianni Papi. Rome, 1991.

Garrard, Mary D. Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art. Princeton, 1988. Includes most of Gentileschi's letters and an English translation of some of the trial testimony.

Lapierre, Alexandra. Artemisia: Un duel pour l'immortalité. Paris, 1998. Although a novel, the footnotes contain the results of important archival research.

Longhi, Roberto. "Gentileschi padre e figlia." L'arte XIX (1916): 245–314.

Spear, Richard E. "Artemisia Gentileschi: Ten Years of Fact and Fiction." Art Bulletin 82 (2000): 568–579.

Judith W. Mann