“Grand Narratives” and “Personal Dramas”: (Re)reading the Masterpieces by Artemisia Gentileschi

In the Kensington Palace pinacotheca, currently owned by King Charles III, there is a small-scale canvas that is both an allegorical representation of the art of painting and a (presumed) self-portrait of Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1653), an Italian Baroque pittrice1 now included among the most prominent Caravaggisti. This painting, interpreted by modern sensibilities as a kind of artistic credo, was painted around 1638 in London. Gentileschi, who was then in the prime of her life, an artistic “celebrity” feted at European courts, came there to assist her father Orazio in his last paintings, commissioned by Charles I. Autorittrato come allegoria della Pittura (Figure 1) fulfils (almost) all the requirements detailed by Cesare Ripa in his canonical work on Iconology (Cesare Ripa [1593] 1764; see also, e.g., Mary D. Garrard 1980; Anna Reynolds 2016).2 The Artemisia’s props fit into the allegorical convention: a stately, shining robe, a palette and paintbrushes, and a mask pendant crowning a gold chain around her neck. Nevertheless, a significant detail here deviates from visual orthodoxy. In this type of depiction, the mouth of Pittura (Painting) is usually obscured by a blindfold to emphasise the fact that painting is a silent and contemplative art.3 In contrast, Gentileschi leaves out the cloth, as if she “refused to be silenced” (Breeze Barrington 2020; see also: Emily LaBarge 2020). This omission strongly stimulates the imagination of contemporary viewers, particularly in the context of the painter’s biography.

And it is a biography rich in moments of triumph and pain, brilliance, and shadow; metaphorically speaking, it is a veritable “chiaroscuro” of life. The trajectory of Gentileschi’s artistic itinerary, from her birth in Rome to the courts of Florence, Naples, and London, is punctuated by traumatic and even devastating events. Suffice is to say that only one of her five children, a daughter named Prudenzia, lived to adulthood. But the event that founded the myth of Artemisia, on which her social “persona” (the etymology refers to a “mask”) is based, was her rape by Agostino Tassi, a respected painter, friend of the family, and collaborator of Orazio (see: Elizabeth S. Cohen 2000). Under 17th-century Roman law, Tassi was not held liable for the crime of rape, but for the “infringement of the personal rights” of Gentileschi’s father, who had sued him in 1612. The archival records of these proceedings were quoted directly by one of Artemisia’s biographers, Alexandra Lapierre, in the appendix to her 1998 biographical novel.4 What is significant, is that these archives contain a drastic theme related to what we would now call “secondary victimization”, the torture of Sybil to which the young painter was subjected, involving the gradual crushing of fingers. Interestingly, this procedure was fully within the standards of the time for interrogating all parties to a case, including defendants, witnesses, and victims of crimes “alike without distinction” (Alexandra Lapierre [1998] 2001, p. 148). As Lapierre puts it, it was “an exemplary trial” (Lapierre [1998] 2001, p. 185).5

For nearly three centuries, the Italian painter was excluded from the canon of art history. She was, as one might say, “erased” from it. The restoration of the memory of her works is largely attributed to art historian Roberto Longhi (1916), who in 1916 published in “L’Arte” an essay titled Gentileschi, Padre e figlia (Gentileschi, father and daughter). Additionally, Anna Banti (née Lucia Lopresti), also an art historian and Longhi’s wife, published the first fictionalised biography of Artemisia in 1947.6 Banti’s book follows the convention of the Kunstlerroman, and is rich in autobiographical motifs. Its narrative reveals the mechanism of personal projection, considered by psychoanalysts to be crucial in the context of the creation and reception of cultural texts. Banti, somewhat overshadowed by her spouse, “stands in solidarity” (subconsciously or not) with the forgotten artist, “animating” her, and returning her to the light of day.

The term “projection” is emphasised here intentionally, as “Artemisia of the 21st century” is a myth partly woven from narratives used by feminist scholars. For example, Luce Irigaray’s “positive otherness” which leads to (self)liberation (Irigaray 1974) or Hélène Cixous’s figure of the “laughing Medusa” (Cixous [1975] 2003). Most importantly, however, this myth is constructed from various modern clichés of pop-feminism. The artist is often portrayed as “a feminist icon”7 who overcomes systemic obstacles and is a survivor and avenger of those who mistreated her. Unfortunately, she is primarily perceived as a victim of sexual aggression who sublimates her trauma and compensates her loss through artistic activity.8

This construct is somewhat “flexible”. Its evolution can be observed, albeit very slowly, in both academic texts9 and popular culture products, as demonstrated in the following sections. A new and uncommon approach to interpreting Gentileschi’s art has been heralded in writings by Nanette Salomon, Griselda Pollock, and Patrizia Cavazzini (see Salomon 1991, 2006; Pollock 1999, 2006; Cavazzini 2001). This approach deconstructs the label of victim and places the artist’s works among the most fundamental canon of the Baroque imagery. Nevertheless, it can be challenging to dismantle the preconceptions and projections to which we are accustomed, especially when they are emotionally charged. Ultimately, I add another layer to this rich palimpsest called “Artemisia”, another re-mediation, another (empathic) reading based on my own experience as a female painter. Using Plato’s metaphor, I sketch the outline of my own shadow projected onto the canvases of the famous Roman pittrice.

Before I turn to selected examples of contemporary texts mediatising Gentileschi’s work, let me refer to the two most frequently quoted, discussed and paraphrased of her paintings. If we consider that a work of art is a “symptom” of the epoch in which it was created, along with its philosophy of life or mentality (Panofsky 1939, p. 8; Bazin 1986, p. 217), then our aesthetic choices and interpretations relating to the past are equally symptomatic. Longhi, in his monograph on Caravaggio, demonstrated that it is the present that provides colour to the past, (see Longhi 1952; see also Tabbat 1991). The name of this brilliant artist is one of the first to be associated today with the term “Baroque in the visual arts”. The biography of Merisi, a criminal and an expellee who painted some of the most poignant religious works, has been subject to romanticised adaptations; a prime example of this is Derek Jarman’s film of 1986.10 Rarely, however, have the facts of Caravaggio’s life affected the assessment of his capolavori11 by art historians or art theorists. A scholarly reading of Caravaggio’s Medusa of 1598 (Figure 2) or Judith Beheading Holofernes of ca. 1599 (Figure 3) tends to be free of intrusive psycho-biographism. Merisi’s paintings are considered not in relation to his violent temperament and lifelong transgressions, but rather in relation to the general idiom of Baroque art, to issues of “Dionysian”, bizarre, emotional, sensual style, based on the play of strong contrasts.

As Salomon points out in her text titled The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission, in the first sentence referring to Giorgio Vasari’s canon-making Vite…12 (1550–1568):

“Whereas Vasari used the device of biography to individualize and mythify the works of artistic men, the same device has a profoundly different effect when applied to women. The details of a man’s biography are conveyed as the measure of the ‘universal’, applicable to all mankind; in the male genius, they are simply heightened and intensified. In contrast, the details of a woman’s biography are used to underscore the idea that she is an exception; they apply only to make her an interesting case. Her art is reduced to a visual record of her personal and psychological make up”.

In 20th century literature, the modes of interpreting Gentileschi’s œuvre are, most of all, influenced by “victimology”. The dominant image is that of Artemisia as “donna forte” (“a strong woman”), bravely overcoming systemic obstacles posed by the 17th century art world, and what is more significant, “exorcising” the trauma of rape through subtly woven, painterly narratives, (self)identifying with the culturally charged figures of Judith, Lucrezia, Susanna or Cleopatra, thus taking symbolic revenge for her sufferings. It is worth noting that this cathartic and compensatory aspect is also highlighted in many blog entries today. (A Google search for “Artemisia Gentileschi” + “revenge” yields 72,000 results–as of January 2024).13 It is in this context that the artist’s (alleged) particular predilection for the biblical theme14 of Judith Beheading Holofernes, which she has taken up several times over the years, is accentuated; wherein, the version painted around 1920, found in the collection of Galleria degli Uffizi (Figure 4), is usually considered as the most naturalistic and “brutal”.

Here, for example, is how Anna Banti imagines a scene where Judith (and Artemisia as Judith) meet their audience. In this multilayered fantasy, or play of projections, ladies gathered in front of the painting are sharing…

“… tales of secret, legendary tortures evoking the ghosts of wives who had been cloistered or poisoned, who had disappeared without trace, ghosts who seemed to mingle with this group of living women, subtly goading them into ideas of revenge which, with the smell of the turpentine, made their nostrils flare. From time to time, very rapid, harsh glances were darted towards the model and passed beyond him, glittering. Then the women would turn their back on him, make a show of suddenly and affectionately remembering the artist and her painting, crowding around to note its progress, to admire it in their own way: ‘The sheet looks like silk: was Holofernes a prince?’ ‘Blood from the throat is darker than that’ ‘Is that how you hold a dagger?’ ‘I wouldn’t be able to stick it in’ “I would’ ‘I’d love to try’. ‘All that blood…’ They always came back to the blood that Artemisia was painting, a carnage woven, drop by drop like embroidery on the white linen”.

Numerous scholarly studies have been conducted on this painting. Thousands of pages have been devoted to the physiognomy of the figures depicted, their gestures and facial expressions (see Garrard 2006),15 the trajectory of their gazes, the dynamics of the composition built on diagonal rhythms, the intricately rendered draperies and even the streams of Holofernes’s blood, arranged to suggest that the painter had benefited from achievements of the sciences. This is possible, given that she had a close friendship with Galileo (see: LaBarge 2020). All these inquiries are of momentous value insofar as they do not reduce Gentileschi’s œuvre exclusively to the “personal drama” of “Artemisia”. (As Marcel Bleuler has shown, the performances of Marina Abramović today are met with a similarly reductionist reception; see Bleuler 2018).16 Meanwhile, it should be remembered that the work of the Italian pintrix17 is also, to refer to Jean-François Lyotard’s dichotomy (see Lyotard 1979), part of the “grand narratives” of its era. In the age of the Counter-Reformation, the chief task of the art of painting was to evoke fascination, horror, and awe, monumental and purifying (cathartic) emotions that were to bring the faithful back to the Church. Hence, for example, there was keen recourse to the Old Testament parables of Judith and Holofernes, Jael and Sisera, David and Goliath. It is in this respect that the Gentileschi canvases should be considered conventional.

For example, in an extensive entry for the catalogue of a 2001–2002 exhibition titled “Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi: Father and Daughter Painters in Baroque Italy”, Patrizia Cavazzini draws a comparison between Caravaggio’s famous Judith (Palazzo Barberini, Rome; Figure 3) and Gentileschi’s early interpretation of the same theme rendered “exactly while the trial was going on” (c. 1612–1613, Museo Capodimonte, Naples; Figure 5). Cavazzini warns against the temptation “to read Artemisia’s biography into the picture”:

“Even if Artemisia intended her canvas as a personal vendetta against Tassi, the mood with which she infused it is barely distinguishable from that of Caravaggio’s picture. The goriness and violence are similar, as is the distaste for the task shown by the two Judiths. In both, a feeling akin to sadness is combined with a finicky fear of dirtying one’s clothes”.

It is important to note that the decapitation motif, so favoured in the Baroque era, has gained a very particular interpretation in the light of psychoanalytic theory. According to Freudians and post-Freudians it is linked to the castration complex and thus to the metaphor of power.18 The head of Holofernes appears as the antithesis of the Gorgoneion. Judith and Medusa belong to the same psychoanalytic “bestiary”,19 and participate together in a (post-)modern mythology inspired by the work of the Viennese physician. (In this context, for example, Luciano Garbati’s sculptural realisation of 2009,20 which was set up in front of a New York court during the trial of Harvey Weinstein, is significant, as is Mikołaj Sobczak’s Gorgon of 2020 (Figure 6), directly inspired by Caravaggio’s Judith but also, it seems, alluding to Gentileschi).

The Freudian concept of castration complex (in both its male and female forms) has penetrated popular consciousness and imagery profoundly. It is hard to resist the thought that it the origin of the clichés of victimhood and vengeance cast upon art created by Gentileschi (and other female artists exploring “brutal” themes). Presumably, these clichés or projections are somehow reinforced by cinematic images to which we are now accustomed, such as “rape and revenge” films. This genre, initiated by Ingmar Bergman’s Jungfrukällan/ The Virgin Spring (1960), and continued by, among others, Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972), has been explored by Barbara Creed in her extensive study titled The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, apparently inspired by Irigaray’s thought (see Creed [1993] 2007). As published in 1993, the book could not account for some newer productions such as Gaspar Noé Irréversible (2002) or David Fincher’s Promising Young Woman (2020).

Gentileschi’s interpretation of the biblical story of Susanna (see, e.g., Tilford 2012) is just as frequent as that of the figure of Judith. The most widely discussed version of Susanna and the Elders (from the Collection Graf von Schönborn in Pommers-felden, (Figure 7), was painted in 1610, before the tragic meeting with Agostino Tassi. Contemporary readings of this work, again based on gender-biased projections, illustrate perfectly the notion of “preposterous history” defined by Mieke Bal as “the reversal of what came chronologically first (‘pre’) as an aftereffect behind (‘post’) its later recycling” (Bal 1999, p. 7). This creative “recycling”, the reversal of temporal relations, is exemplified by the work of Kathleen Gilje, a painter and art conservator, titled Susanna and the Elders. Restored (1998; Figure 8). The artist’s technical skill allowed for precise replication of Gentileschi’s work and the concealment of any pentimenti, or “repaints”, which are only visible through X-rays. This “earlier version” is Gilje’s fantasy, a performative projection, an authorial, one must admit: a fascinating footnote to the myth of “Artemisia”. In this fantasy, Susanna is armed with a voice and a knife. It is somehow contrary to Lapierre’s projective interpretation of Artemisia as vulnerable and mired in the past:

“In her painting, Susanna and the Elders, she represented the people who harried her. The head of one of the two men which, earlier, Orazio had mercilessly obliterated, would now wear Agostino Tassi’s fine dark curls. Faceless, his eyes hidden, he merged into the other figure, that of an older man–perhaps Cosimo Quorli. Or maybe the grey hair, straight nose and sharply angled eyebrow evoked another likeness: that of Orazio Gentileschi.”.

Griselda Pollock proposed a distinct interpretation of Gentileschi’s Judiths and Susannas in a chapter of her book Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (1999). The chapter aims to answer two questions, “what does feminism bring to art history when it intervenes in its discursive field” and “what does feminism desire in looking at work by women artists” (Pollock 1999, p. 98). The author’s findings on the interrelation between trauma and metaphor are particularly intriguing and refreshing. These findings are supported by Cathy Caruth’s research on trauma pathology. According to Pollock, individuals who have experienced the pain of rape tend to metaphorize or symbolize it through a language of body signs, rather than veristically rendering or reenacting its details using painterly forms (Pollock 1999, p. 109). The subject of Gentileschi’s Judith is “not a revenge theme”, as the author suggests. Furthermore,

“Its biblical basis is the story of a political execution carried out by a widow who puts herself at risk in the camp of the besieging enemy in order to kill the general, and thus to dishearten his troops and liberate her people from a deadly siege which her slain enemy has mounted”.

In other words:

“The painting Judith is not about revenge. Yet it is about killing. But it is a metaphor, a representation in which the literalness of killing a man is displaced on to a mytheme wherein the action is necessary, politically justified, not personally motivated”.

It is possible to perceive it as an expression of female agency rather than victimhood. This interpretation is further supported by Gentileschi’s letters, discovered in 2011, which were addressed to, among others, her artistic patrons. In a letter from 1649, while Artemisia was negotiating a price for her painting with Sicilian collector Antonio Ruffo, a phrase was written that illustrates her character: “With me, Your Illustrious Lordship will not lose, and you will find the spirit of Caesar in the soul of a woman” (after: Treves n.d.a).

The novel by Alexandra Lapierre ([1998] 2001) opens with the scene of the execution of Beatrice Cenci and her relatives. Lapierre’s work, which spans over five hundred pages, is the result of many years of study, including language studies and multiple visits to Italian and English archives. The extensive appendix at the end of the book can be considered a scholarly text, providing knowledge not only about the Gentileschi family but also about the culture of 17th-century Italy. The narrative rhythm of this classic Kunstlerroman is marked by “close-ups” on the two key works described above: Susanna and Judith. We observe how Artemisia, a figlia d’arte (“a daughter of art”) a girl playing in her father’s studio, helping him to rub out pigments, gradually transforms into a young woman trying her hand at art, “a miracle of nature, an extraordinary phenomenon” (Lapierre [1998] 2001, p. 188), and finally, fully aware of her talent, becomes a famous artist and, at the same time, a matron tired of the hardships of life.

Susan Vreeland also portrays this evolution in the pages of an equally classic and emotional novel, published in 2002. In this case too, Gentileschi’s works are the silent “protagonists” around which the story revolves, although the American author places the emphasis differently. For example, this text opens with another element of Artemisia’s “founding myth”: the Sybil’s torture that had been “designed to bring truth to women’s lips”(Susan Vreeland 2002, p. 2). What is more, Vreeland devotes more attention to the person of Orazio. In contrast to the rather unflattering, or at least controversial, image outlined by Lapierre, Orazio in this interpretation is a loving father and grandfather. His genuinely affectionate figure forms the plot buckle: Orazio supports his daughter and sympathises with her in her moment of pain, while in the final passages, it is she, digested with grief, who bids him farewell forever in cold London. In contrast, on the pages of a graphic novel published in 2017 by Nathalie Ferlut and Tamia Baudouin (Figure 9 and Figure 10), a narrative bracket is formed by the motif of motherhood.21 Undoubtedly, the merit of this publication is that it considers the figure of Prudence, the artist’s mother, who died in 1605, a figure almost absent from other biographies; Prudence, whose name was inherited by Artemisia’s daughter. In turn, the motif of lost motherhood, that is, the grief and mourning experience following the death of her son Cristofano, is accentuated, in a beautiful, symbolic form, by Gina Siciliano in her ball-pen graphic novel titled I Know What I Am (see Siciliano 2019; see also: Treves n.d.b).22

Further comparisons are beyond the scope of this article. Therefore, I will only mention one other significant and symptomatic detail recorded in Vreeland’s novel. In the imagined conversation with her daughter that takes place before the image of Judith, the agitated Artemisia, pointing to Holofernes’ bed, says: “That’s my blood on that mattress, and it’s my pain that started this career” (Vreeland 2002, p. 335). The same prop-a bloodstained mattress-acquires a particularly significant, yet contradictory meaning in the film directed by Agnès Merlet.

The lawyer interrogating Artemisia poses a confounding question: “Qui est victime de qui?”/“Who is whose victim?” It is unclear how to interpret this peculiar role reversal. Is this thematic “perversion” simply a matter of decorum, as perversity is inherent in the Baroque idiom? Or is it an attempt to escape from the onerous myth of the victim? (In the French language the word victime is feminine). Griselda Pollock formulated an intriguing response in an article titled Feminist Dilemmas with the Art/Life Problem, included in a volume edited by Mieke Bal (2006). According to the scholar, Merlet’s interpretation redefines Artemisia as an active explorer, a “draughtswoman of the male body” (Griselda Pollock 2006, p. 192), and removes the negative connotations of the femme fatale by portraying her as “a seduced and desiring woman, without any thought of revenge” (193). This reading “moves in another direction, making not he rape but the sex the foundation for Gentileschi’s art” (193). However, Pollock notes that the female artist is depicted as “a creature revealed to herself by a man’s desire” (193),23 highlighting the objectification of women in art.