Broad Strokes, page 2
Orazio was chummy enough with Caravaggio to go to prison with him for a short time, in 1603, when Artemisia was just six, after the two artists were found guilty of libel for writing nasty verses about another painter’s altarpiece.
Note that I’ll refer to Artemisia by her first name, both to distinguish her from her painter-father and because first names are often standard for the Italian greats: Dante, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Madonna, and so on. It’s true that Caravaggio is known by the name of his birthplace, but that’s because Michelangelo was already taken.
To his credit, Orazio recognized early that his own child, though a girl, was very good. Artemisia was the oldest of four and his only daughter, but Orazio trained her from an early age in the art of painting. When Artemisia was just twelve, her mother died, and so she spent the rest of her childhood in a world of men. Not just her father and brothers, but also her father’s students and assistants and colleagues and models. In coming centuries, one of the strenuous feelings against allowing women to study the creation of art was the coming and going of so many men in the “dark hallways” of academies, studios, and ateliers.
At the death of his wife, another man might expect his only daughter to put away childish things—drawing, paints—and take up some duty as woman of the house. But Orazio recognized Artemisia’s talent and she became a valued member of his workshop. Her education must have included artistic necessities like prepping canvases, mixing paints, life drawing, and the like, but as with most non-aristocratic girls, niceties like reading and writing did not figure in. At the age of nineteen, Artemisia would tell a Roman court, “I cannot write and I can read very little.”
Still, her father took her artistic education seriously. As part of her training, Orazio hired his colleague Agostino Tassi, who specialized in illusionistic architectural paintings, to instruct Artemisia in the subtle details of perspective.
Artemisia was rarely out in public. She was mostly secured at home or in her father’s studio, as was culturally expected. Think of all those high-walled gardens and nearly impregnable homes of Romeo and Juliet, or the fact that Dante only met his beloved Beatrice, a neighbor girl since childhood, just twice in his entire life.
But even staying home could not protect Artemisia. When she was just seventeen, her neighbor—an older woman named Tuzia, a friend to the motherless girl—slipped the instructor Agostino Tassi into the Gentileschi apartment through an adjoining door. There, the older painter raped his student, while Artemisia called out for help that did not come.
Artemisia’s account of the rape is heartbreaking: Lifting my clothes, which he had a great deal of trouble doing, he placed a hand with a handkerchief at my throat and on my mouth to keep me from screaming. . . . I tried to scream as best I could, calling Tuzia. I scratched his face and pulled his hair . . . After he had done his business he got off of me. When I saw myself free, I went to the table drawer and took a knife and moved toward Agostino, saying, “I’d like to kill you with this knife because you have dishonoured me.”
It’s crucial to point out here that what Tassi had done was not “rape” as we know it, but “defloration” or the “theft” of Artemisia’s father’s property. That is: his only daughter’s virginity.
Tassi knew he was in trouble. He’d broken the law in depriving Orazio of his daughter’s hymen, so he told Artemisia he’d marry her. If they married, then all was well. Artemisia, who, under Italian law and church doctrine and social propriety and every other measurable yardstick of female ease in the world, was ruined otherwise, agreed to the arrangement.
Alas, after months of promises, it turned out that Tassi was already married. Orazio sued, offering up his “despoiled” daughter for legal, and very public, scrutiny.
The seven-month trial that followed was gruesome. To verify the truth of her rape account, Artemisia was subjected to torture in the form of the sibille, a kind of thumb-screw where chords are fastened to rings around the fingers of one hand and then tightened to excruciating degrees. It was the seventeenth-century version of a lie detector test, the legal gold standard for truthfulness of its time. In agreeing to the sibille, Artemisia not only accepted terrible pain but also risked damage to her hand, an unthinkable fate for an artist. But to be believed, she had to endure it.
Court transcripts record that midtorture, when to every question asked by the court, Artemisia insisted, “It is true, it is true, it is true, it is true,” she suddenly broke off and cried out, “This is the ring that you give me, and these are your promises”! Tassi was sitting in the courtroom.
Possibly as torturous as the sibille itself was the requirement that the teenaged Artemisia endure two obstetrical exams to confirm her “defloration.” The court notary was present, in order to record the findings. The record shows that both midwives “touched and examined the vagina of Donna Artemisia Gentileschi” and found “that she is not a virgin” on account of her “broken hymen.” One added, “And this happened a while ago, not recently, because if it were recent one would recognize it.”
Orazio won his case. This was due in no small part to his daughter’s fierce endurance, but also because in the course of the trial it came out that Tassi had contracted to have his wife murdered and had impregnated his sister-in-law. He was an exceptionally bad guy. It was a blessing that Artemisia could not marry him.
Tassi was “banished” from Rome, which was never enforced, and he even worked with Orazio again on a commission. Economics sometimes trump honor.
For her part, Artemisia was bundled off in marriage to a minor Florentine painter named Pierantonio Stiattesi within a month of the trial’s end in 1612. By 1614, they were living in Florence.
In essence, Artemisia fled her Roman home where, no matter what the trial’s outcome, her name was forever tainted. For centuries her reputation as a “loose woman” was remarked upon whenever her name was resurrected by historians.
What she fled to was an arranged marriage to a man her inferior as an artist and to a city that was the seat of Medici power. If you are unfamiliar with the dangerous reputation of the Medicis, there’s a slim volume I can recommend called The Prince, written by a Florentine official named Niccolo Machiavelli from his jail cell.
Artemisia was essentially alone in a volatile new world. True, she had a husband, but she was no longer her father’s daughter, working under him in his studio. She had to stand on her own merit as a professional, and secure her own commissions. She had no choice but to proffer her talent and the new style of Caravaggio, with its heightened emotion and theatricality, at the feet of the Medicis. Fortunately, they liked it.
Florence was, on the whole, good to her. Her mentor was none other than Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, grandnephew of the High Renaissance master. Artemisia was one of the first artists he commissioned for the frescoes of Casa Buonarroti, then being decorated in lavish tribute to Michelangelo. Her contribution was, fittingly, a female nude. She was good at them. Because, unlike male painters, she had access to her own body and to those of female models (forbidden to men).
Even an anatomical master like Michelangelo had some trouble with the female form. Consider his tomb sculptures for the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo. There, the female personifications of Night and Dawn have distinctly male-looking chiseled torsos beneath wide-set breasts that are as bulbous and affixed looking as any inept plastic surgery. The lack of access to female models explains the odd female anatomy of many Renaissance and Baroque nudes. (No one can explain the plethora of strange babies.)
Artemisia was friendly with members of the Medici court, most notably Galileo Galilei, and the Medicis provided her with crucial patronage. By 1616, just two years after arriving in Florence, she was elected to membership in the Accademia del Disegno, the first woman member since its founding in 1563.
But life was not, nor would it ever be, one of unbroken success. By 1624, the census of her household makes no mention of her husband, who disappears from history entirely. By the time Artemisia painted the Judith here, she had given birth to at least four children, one of whom, a girl, was also a painter. She’d also taken a lover. She was her household’s only breadwinner, busy beyond belief with children and getting commissions and making paintings and, not always successfully, getting paid.
Artemisia painted her first version of Judith not long after the trial, a veritable prototype of the painting here, which she did in Florence after the birth of her children. She may have felt it suited Medici taste, with its high drama, opulence, and violence. Or maybe given her reputation, there was interest in a scene of implied revenge. I’d like to kill you with this knife because you have dishonoured me. Tassi had dark hair, and also a beard.
If it is difficult to look at Caravaggio’s full-lipped young men and not feel a sexual undercurrent (he may have been gay), then the case for reading a biographical urge into Artemisia’s work is even more tempting. A young woman experiences rape followed by public torture and humiliation. Shortly afterward, she paints her first version of a scene depicting a woman decapitating a bearded man.
But Artemisia was hardly the first artist to depict the story of Judith. It was long a popular theme. Caravaggio has a famous version, with a more typical Judith as a lovely young thing (complete with erect nipples pushing through her blouse) and Abra as a Disneylike old crone. Less typical is that Caravaggio, like Artemisia, chose to illustrate the moment of decapitation.
The vast majority of artists skirt the gruesome act: Botticelli has a beautiful Judith swaying through a field with Abra carrying Holofernes’s head in a basket perched atop her own. They might have been out picking apples for the ruddy wholesomeness of the scene.
Artemisia Gentileschi. Susanna and the Elders. 1610.
John Ruskin thought Botticelli’s version by far the best of a terrible tradition. If you don’t know Ruskin, he was a voluminous Victorian critic whose influence was vast. (I can’t resist this take on him from a New York Times review of the Mike Leigh film, Mr. Turner: “Ruskin [Joshua McGuire] appears as a pretentious carrot-topped nitwit with a voice like a posh Elmer Fudd.” But I digress.) Ruskin complained of the “millions of vile pictures” of Judith, specifically in Florence.
But Ruskin was just one of many critics of Artemisia’s Judith. The last Medici, the Grand Duchess Anna Maria Luisa, loathed it. And according to feminist historian Germaine Greer, when British writer Anna Jameson beheld Artemisia’s masterpiece in 1882, she called it a “dreadful picture” and of its maker, “a proof of her genius and its atrocious misdirection.”
But why? Why despise Artemisia’s version above the hundreds of Judiths (Ruskin said “millions”) to come before hers?
This may be the moment to back up and ask, just who is Judith and why is she doing that very bad thing to the oddly named Holofernes?
The story goes that Judith was a beautiful Jewish widow living in the village of Bethulia. Like all of Israel, her village was threatened by King Nebuchadnezzar, who sent his Assyrian general Holofernes to destroy it. The Assyrians were unspeakably bad. The kind of conquerors who would flay an entire army, then paste the human skins outside their palaces like wallpaper advertising how badass they were. No one messed with Assyrians if they could help it.
The Jews of Bethulia are rightly terrified, but their fear annoys Judith, so she sneaks into the enemy camp with her maidservant Abra and becomes friendly with the general, if you know what I mean. Her beauty inflames Holofernes, who goes about seducing her. Pretending to be willing, she gets him drunk. When he reclines on his bed, a come-hither or a nodding-off moment, Judith leaps upon him with a sword.
Judith and Abra escape the enemy camp, bringing the head of Holofernes with them as evidence of their triumph. Head in hand, they inspire their people to victory.
For artists of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Judith story was akin to David and Goliath, a tale of the victory of weakness over might. David was only a shepherd boy, and Judith was just a woman. But favored by God, they do the impossible, destroying otherwise invincible enemies.
When Artemisia was “rediscovered” in the twentieth century (not long after Caravaggio himself) it seemed obvious in both a Freudian and a feminist sense to interpret her powerful Judith Severing the Head of Holofernes as a cri de coeur, a symbolic wish fulfillment to hurt the man who made her suffer. In short: a painterly act of revenge.
This may be true. And it was likely viewed that way even in her own time. But it doesn’t explain Artemisia’s interest in other great heroines, both before and after she painted her first Judith. And it doesn’t explain why her Judith was so despised.
Artemisia’s earliest dated painting is from 1610, the year of Caravaggio’s death. She was just seventeen. Susanna and the Elders also depicts a scene from the Catholic Old Testament. It’s the story of two older men who spy on a young woman bathing, trump up a charge of promiscuity (punishable by death), then blackmail her to secure sexual favors. The painting is dated from before we know Artemisia experienced her own violation by an older man. But again, the Susanna motif had long been popular with artists, not least because there weren’t many opportunities for depicting the female nude outside of Eve, some unfortunate saints (Agatha, Barbara), and Venus.
Though young, Artemisia shows a handling of anatomy that is already sure. And in this, her first professional picture, she already stakes out her vision of the ideal heroine. Susanna is solid, not soft. For the rest of Artemisia’s life, her heroines tend to this type of full-bodied but not overtly erotic women. Rather, they are heroic-size. Powerful, but in the sense of real power—physical, artistic—not sexually manipulative.
She also establishes a new perspective for viewers. Susanna turns midwaist, cringing away from the men leering down at her. As spectators, our point of view is allied with the nude woman. We cringe with her, disgusted, rather than voyeuristically eyeing her nudity like another leering elder on the other side of the picture plane.
All viewers of Artemisia’s time would have known the full story of Susanna. That she refused sexual demands and risked death as a result. Here the men are clothed and she is naked, but ultimately Susanna is the powerful one. Willing to face death before dishonor, she is pardoned at the last minute when it’s discovered the elders have lied. Then they are the ones who pay with their lives. Portraits of many formidable women followed: Esther, Mary Magdalene, Cleopatra, Lucretia, etc. A virtual pantheon of feminine power, one that included Artemisia herself.
Artemisia Gentileschi. Self-Portrait as La Pittura. 1638–1639.
While briefly reunited with her father in England at the court of Charles I, Artemisia painted a deceptively simple composition that contains multitudes: Self-Portrait as La Pittura.
La Pittura is the Allegory of Painting, female embodiment of the art itself. Crucially, La Pittura is not a muse. She is no female goad to the (almost universally) male artist. No, La Pittura is the art of Painting itself, with all the procreative power and mystery that evokes.
It’s a radically simple canvas: the artist at work. And at the same time, Artemisia here is manifold and audacious. She is subject and object, creator and created. A deceptively uncomplicated and persuasive portrait of Painting herself, in the person of a painter and woman. By declaring that I AM SHE, Artemisia claims a position that no male artist ever can.
Cesare Ripa. Cropped image of La Pittura from Iconologia. 1644.
The ideal of La Pittura had been around about a hundred years when Artemisia painted herself as such. La Pittura’s attributes were outlined in Italian Cesare Ripa’s influential emblem book (a text filled with allegorical figures embodying the arts and sciences, virtues, vices, and more), called the Iconologia. First published in the 1590s, Ripa’s book was widely consulted by painters, sculptors, and architects. In her own painting, Artemisia cleanly ticks off La Pittura’s attributes as codified in the Iconologia:
Hair. La Pittura’s hair appears undone, indicative of creative passion. Embodied by Artemisia, this, we can imagine, is just how a woman at work looks: hair pulled out of the way, but not fussed over. She’s not there to be looked at, but to make something happen. She is the subject of this painting, not its vapid object.
Chain. Around her neck, Artemisia wears La Pittura’s attribute of a gold chain with a mask charm. The mask symbolizes imitation, which, as a follower of Caravaggesque naturalism, is Artemisia’s forte. Naturalism continues in the casual hanging to one side of the necklace. It’s not there to make her more beautiful or more affluent looking, not even to call attention to the bosom across which it hangs. It hangs askew, unnoticed, as she works.
Gown. Artemisia as La Pittura wears a green gown of some iridescent material that shimmers violet in places like a sharkskin suit. This is the drappo cangiante, a garment of changing color, indicating a painter’s skill with color, amply on display by Artemisia here.
The dress has three-quarter sleeves, giving the effect that she has “rolled up her sleeves” before the canvas. It’s both fitted through the torso and puffy in the arms, but somehow doesn’t look odd on a woman at work. Artists in self-portraits of this time, and later, often depicted themselves in fancy dress, to the point where your first reaction is, “You’re really gonna paint in that?” But such finery was a necessary conceit, a way to separate one sort of manual labor—painting or sculpting, say—from horseshoeing or bricklaying.
