A major "monographic" exhibition that had its U.S. opening in February at the Metropolitan Museum and is now at the Saint Louis Art Museum was unusual for being devoted to not one but two artists: Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, father and daughter painters whose careers spanned the first half of the 17th century. It's fair to say that neither of these painters' works are known to the broad public. But Artemisia's modern reputation far outweighs that of her father. After both the Gentileschi were launched critically in a 1916 article by the dean of Italian art history, Roberto Longhi, Artemisia's fame was spread by Longhi's wife, Anna Banti, in a 1947 novel, precedent for a series of more recent fictionalized treatments in different mediums--literature, film and theater. (1)
In the American art world, awareness of Artemisia Gentileschi grew especially after 1976, when several of her works could be seen in the show curated by Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, "Women Artists: 1550-1950." (2) Full-dress scholarly studies followed: articles by Mary Garrard led to her important monograph of 1989, and ongoing publications by R. Ward Bissell culminated in his critical catalogue raisonne of 1999. (3) In the context of feminist theory and art practice, Artemisia also became an exemplar and sometime heroine, among the first of the female "old masters" to warrant textbook inclusion. One can assume that most of the visitors to this well-attended show were drawn there by Artemisia's modern celebrity, something the organizers must have counted on, using this occasion also to give Orazio his due.
Thanks to the efforts of the Metropolitan Museum's energetic curator of European painting, Keith Christiansen, this survey of some 50 works by Orazio and about 30 by Artemisia was considerably larger in scope in New York than at its first stop in Rome's Palazzo Venezia. With many of the examples coming from private collections, some altarpieces from provincial churches (Viterbo, Ancona, Fabriano) and other paintings from museums off the main line of tourism (Naples, Oslo, Birmingham), this display also undoubtedly provided first-time viewing experiences for much of its audience, even when it came to some of the best-known examples, such as Artemisia's Susanna and the Elders and Orazio's Annunciation.
The exhibition is perhaps most instructive in laying bare what it took for an artist to sustain a viable career, after the age of such towering figures as Michelangelo and Titian, at the center of a transformed, post-Reformation Christendom. The resulting shifts of contexts and functions for the painterly medium are reflected in the exhibition in the vast array of sizes and formats, ranging in scale from miniature works such as Orazio's Saint Christopher (8 1/2 by 11 inches) to Artemisia's colossal Esther Before Ahasuerus (82 by 107 1/4 inches). Cast in terms of the arena of "Baroque Italy" (the full title of the show is "Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi: Father and Daughter Painters in Baroque Italy"), the works also exemplify a changing repertory of subjects deemed relevant for depiction. At a moment when, especially in Northern Europe, but also in Italy, nonfigural genres such as landscape and still life were coming into their own, the Gentileschi's exclusively figural examples chart a growing popularity of personages and themes from the Old Testament and the Apocrypha (David, Lot and his daughters, Susanna and the Riders, Judith and Holofernes), along with such Classical exemplars as Lucretia and Danae.
If their familial relationship was the reason for showing this teacher and student together, we might begin by asking what we expect to learn by such a pairing. One should recall that once Artemisia's artistic training in her father's studio was complete, the actual time they spent in each other's orbits was extremely limited. Orazio may have visited Florence, where Artemisia moved after she married in 1612 and where she lived until around 1620; but no sooner did she return to Rome, where Orazio was living, than he accepted an invitation from an eventual patron in Genoa, working there for three years before he proceeded to Paris and London. By 1630, Artemisia, in turn, had settled in Naples; the only interruption of a 20-year stay was her voyage to London, where she arrived a few months before her father's death there in 1639.
Of course, we have the human interest in this case of a working relationship of father and daughter. Moreover, concerning this father and daughter, there exists an unusual primary document, extensive in detail and charged in content, that is bound to affect any consideration of these two figures. It is the much discussed transcript of a trial brought by Orazio against his collaborator and friend, Agostino Tassi, charging the rape (or, more precisely, "deflowering") of Artemisia. In New York, a wall-size photographic installation in the entranceway to the show invoked this constellation of characters. It reproduced a section of the fresco decoration for Scipione Borghese's Casino delle Muse on the Quirinal in Rome, where Agostino Tassi had laid out illusionistic architecture and Orazio Gentileschi the festive figures-including one probably modeled on his daughter--during the very time of the rape and subsequent trial (1611-12). This notorious scenario was also a recurring reference in the exhibition's wall texts.
When it came to the actual paintings at the Metropolitan Museum, however, father and daughter were presented for us to ponder almost exclusively at the professional level of teacher/student, or, later, artistic peers. The display unfolded by first presenting a group of Orazio's paintings; then Artemisia's beginnings were laid out, in tandem with contemporaneous examples by her father; and finally their respective oeuvres were shown to develop along separate lines, mainly determined by the changing locations to which their activity as artists took them outside Rome. A curatorial reluctance to enter the realm of psychology in exploring these two figures may be understandable, given the ink that has already been spilled in both theorizing and fictionalizing Artemisia. At the same time, the appearance of clear-cut stylistic paths for these two artists that the museum's handsome installation suggested--and with it, the commitment to discernible artistic identity--is complicated by information that emerges upon studying the extensive catalogue, where one learns how debated the dating of certain works has been and how unstable some of the attributions. The entry on the Madonna and Child (ca. 1610-11; Galleria Spada, Rome), a picture presented in the exhibition as a significant early example by Artemisia, reveals the painting's past assignment to no less than five different artists; its more recent general acceptance as by Artemisia is challenged once again in Bissell's latest publication. (4)
A batting back and forth of authorship for certain pictures between Orazio and Artemisia is to be expected, since even early inventories tended to conflate attributions for the two. Today, however, when opinion runs strong about what constitutes each of their stylistic imprints, the terms of the debate may be difficult to follow. The small painting of Danae (ca. 1612) is a case in point. It was bought by the Saint Louis Art Museum in 1986 as an Orazio. But Judith W. Mann, Saint Louis's curator of early Italian painting, has come to argue for Artemisia. The picture was the catalyst for her involvement in the present exhibition, Keith Christiansen supporting the Artemisia attribution. As for the Cleopatra (ca. 1611-12; Amedeo Morandotti, Milan), its large-format female nude in the same pose as the nude in the Saint Louis picture, the one clearly a variant of the other, Mann and Christiansen agree to disagree. In an unusual move, they even contribute separate catalogue entries for the picture: Christiansen places it under Orazio's works, while Mann attributes it to Artemisia!
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This is in essence, then, a connoisseur's or specialist's exhibition that can leave the untutored viewer feeling perplexed about what the going criteria are for such judgments and who establishes them. The assembled pictures reveal canny practitioners who could be uneven in the realization of their subjects, and sometimes in the level of craftsmanship they brought to their works. (5) However exceptional Artemisia was in forging an artistic career, she and her father were essentially second-tier masters. The two of them needed to keep on the lookout for employment. Unlike their contemporary, Peter Paul Rubens, who traveled across Europe as a diplomatic emissary, his art requested by kings and princes, the Gentileschi went to great lengths in the pursuit of commissions. Their letters often curried favor with distinguished patrons. Paintings were sometimes donated as a lure for potential patronage, Orazio trumping his own gift of a Lot and His Daughters to the Duke of Savoy with yet another gift, arguably his most splendid work, the huge and radiant Annunciation altarpiece (1623; Galleria Sabauda, Turin).
Once a picture was successfully marketed, its thematic and compositional treatment could be recycled to appeal to another patron. This practice helps to explain an important feature of this exhibition--the existence of replicas or variants, especially among Orazio's paintings, as with Lot and His Daughters (1621-22, Getty Museum, Los Angeles; 1622, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), and Danae (1621-22, Richard L. Feigen, New York; 1622-23, Cleveland Museum of Art) and, in the case of Artemisia, the Judith Slaying Holofernes (1612-13, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples; ca. 1620, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence). (6) Other examples, notably Orazio's David (1611-12; Gemaldegalerie, Berlin), show us much reduced versions of the artist's large-scale compositions, employing oil on copperplate, with its characteristic effects of precise rendering and smooth finish. (For most viewers the splendid small works on copper supports are surely a novelty.)
Although we know that Artemisia learned her craft from her father while growing up in his household in the parish of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, information about Orazio's beginnings is scant, his actual artistic training open to conjecture. Was he taught by his older brother, Aurelio Lomi, who was also a painter? Was it to further a career as an artist that the early-adolescent Orazio went to Rome (ca. 1576-78)? Born in Pisa in 1563, the son of the Florentine goldsmith Giovanni Battista Lomi, Orazio adopted the Gentileschi name from his Roman guardian uncle. In Rome, there is evidence of Orazio's participation with a team of fresco painters in the Vatican's Sistine Library in the late 1580s; he also completed a now destroyed altarpiece for the basilica of San Paolo Fuori le Mura, and he is associated with works done at a Benedictine monastery in Farfa, outside Rome. But with only one painting in the exhibition tentatively dated before 1600 (Madonna and Child with Saints Sebastian and Francis, 1597-1600, private collection), the viewer is presented with an uncommonly late debut--at about 35 to 37 years old--for Orazio Gentileschi as an independent artist (it should be recalled that Caravaggio died in his late 30s).
Orazio's first significant work was achieved, only after the pivotal year of 1600, in a Rome that had recently become home to the Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci, and to his student Guido Reni. It was also the city in which various northern artists had settled, such as the German landscape painter Adam Elsheimer, and it would shortly be host to Rubens, who first painted there in 1601-02. But most significant for Orazio was the presence of Caravaggio, who had come down to Rome from Milan during the late 1590s, and whose characteristic still lifes and half-length genre subjects had found favor with the great Roman collector, Cardinal del Monte. Caravaggio and Orazio Gentileschi became friends of sorts; documents have them eventually sharing studio props. The moment of truth for Orazio, as previous literature and this exhibition emphasize, was the unveiling in 1600-01 of Caravaggio's paintings of the life of St. Matthew in San Luigi dei Francesi, as well as his dramatic images of the conversion of St. Paul and the crucifixion of St. Peter in Santa Maria del Popolo. In these two churches, Caravaggio first applies his commitment to painting directly from the live model to the religious sphere, henceforth the exclusive domain for his representations. These compositions were rendered all the more striking because of the "tenebroso" effect, a darkness pierced by telling shafts of light. Under the impress of such works, Orazio revised his methods and goals as a painter. Accordingly, the first examples in the exhibition are presented and commented on in terms of their relative proximity to Caravaggio's approach.
Thus we are meant to distinguish Orazio's small Madonna and Child with Saints Sebastian and Francis from his slightly later Way to Calvary (1605-07; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). (7) In the earlier picture, Orazio appears to draw from a North Italian/Venetian picture type, popular earlier in the 16th century, varying slightly the half- or three-quarter-length figural format of such domestic devotional works by seating the Madonna in the foreground. Her whitened pink garment and the grainy white cloth with which she holds the infant suggest certain parallels to Titian's flexible handling. By contrast, the Way to Calvary expands and clarifies the pictorial field. Figures are magnified, their dramatic movements and foreshortened gestures edged sharply against a cloudy sky, draperies and faces sculpted by juxtaposing bright light with deep brown shadows.
But applying the yardstick of Caravaggio also obliges us to take note of sensibilities that are Orazio's own. The Madonna and Child with Saints Sebastian and Francis highlights his ability to explore the intimate exchange between two figures: the infant Christ's body angled back into the picture, head near the frontal plane, as he lifts his arms and tenderly fingers Mary's transparent veil. This tenderness is also conveyed with light and shadow as they dapple the faces, scarcely touching, of the Madonna and Child in a somewhat later painting in the same gallery (ca. 1607; Barbara Piasecka Johnson Foundation). Pronounced and sometimes unconventional combinations of colors further distinguish Orazio's works; in the Way to Calvary, Mary Magdalene's mustard-yellow robe and Christ's chalky-pink gown create a dissonant harmony pitted against a patch of bright red in the shirt and hat of the background youth and bright white for the sleeve of the tormentor.
The broad sample of such works by Orazio also illuminates aspects of contemporary religious culture when, during the Counter-Reformation, a revived spirituality led to the founding of new religious societies and altered patterns of piety, with certain themes and personages coming to the fore in representation. Thus, even students of art history aware that the Circumcision of Christ provided an occasional subject in earlier painting (as in late-15th-century North Italian and Venetian examples by Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini) might be surprised to see the large-scale figural group watching and commenting while a turbaned priest in richly brocaded vestments intently guides his scalpel to the infant's genitals, all of this rendered with sunlit precision in an altarpiece nearly 13 feet high (Pinacoteca Comunale, Ancona). Catholic theology had stressed the distinction between the old and new orders by contrasting the physical purification embodied in the rite of circumcision with the spiritual cleansing of baptism. Orazio's altarpiece, originally for the church of the Jesuits in Ancona, further reflects Ignatius Loyola's recommendations in his Spiritual Exercises that the Circumcision of Christ be a special focus for meditation.
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In smaller-scale private commissions, too, we witness Orazio's propensity to detail the body of the Christ child, calling attention to the genitals. The Johnson Madonna and Child is an especially striking example, because the baby is otherwise clothed. This motif had already gained currency in the naturalistic representations of Renaissance artists, as Leo Steinberg has amply demonstrated. (8) But in some of Orazio's later works, such as the Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1620-22; City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham), the artist would bring to bear this and other signifiers for Christ's human--as opposed to divine--nature, such as the nursing Madonna. In these sizable pictures of horizontal format, often depicting religious themes but destined for the secular/domestic context, such traditional motifs--a slumbering Joseph, the Madonna's bared breast, the Christ child nursing, the infant's naked body, genitals exposed--were inflected to new and engaging genrelike effect.
One of the distinguishing features in the treatment of religious subject matter starting with the Renaissance is the way in which certain themes and personages, whose popularity was culturally determined, could nevertheless be invested with an artist's personal commitments or sense of identification. Thus, the renewed cult of St. Francis around 1600 surely helps to account for the fact that no less than six of Orazio's paintings in the exhibition show the 13th-century monastic saint as the object of devotion. But just as Albrecht Durer had gravitated toward St. Jerome, Orazio seems avid in his exploration of St. Francis. Unlike Caravaggio's earlier horizontal picture of St. Francis, where the saint reclines in the foreground of a landscape scene, his head cushioned in the lap of a seated angel, and in contrast to Orazio's own enormous later altarpiece (ca. 1616-20), formerly in the Roman church of San Silvestro in Capite, where the fine-boned, full-length, backward-arching saint is seen in the middle distance against the steep, rocky terrain, several of the artist's earlier, midsize, vertically oriented pictures zero in on the voluminously habited figure of the saint.
Two of them (both ca. 1600) show his swooning body rotated to near-profile view close to the picture plane; a broadly winged angel, who keeps him from collapsing is the only other protagonist in these densely filled paintings. Small shifts of emphasis are underlined by the titles. Saint Francis Supported by an Angel (Stephen Mazoh) has the saint's sandal-shod foot nearest the viewer at the bottom frame; the young, round-cheeked angel confronts the gaunt, bearded Francis at the picture's upper limit. Here the saint's eyes are closed, his body overtaken by a mystical swoon; the angel's buttery-yellow sleeve and pink-accented wing and cheek animate the studied dullness of taupe vestments and pitch background. The Stigmatization of Saint Francis (Richard L. Feigen and Co., New York) shows an open-eyed visionary and presents a broader view. Leaves, wildflowers and the branches of a fig tree at the left are restorative attributes in a tradition of miraculous healing associated with St. Francis and his stigmata. Accordingly, the saint's bare left foot is angled so that we can see the wound that has pierced the sole. A worshiper's active concentration on this spot at the very bottom of the picture might be disrupted by the optically charged accents above: golden light rays, white feathered wings, the angel's mauve sleeves and dark pink stole.
The capacity for identification with the meditational and visionary aspects of faith in these paintings by Orazio also causes us to reflect on the scarcity in Artemisia's oeuvre of Christian subject matter and the general absence of pictures with expressly devotional function. Only one or two examples in the exhibition from her later career in Naples may of may not be altarpieces, such as Saint Januarius in the Amphitheater (1636-37) and the Annunciation (1630; both Museo di Capodimonte, Naples). In this context, any viewer mesmerized by the palpable purity of the angel's white lily or the iridescent streaks of grayish mauve and pink on the angel's left sleeve in Orazio's Turin Annunciation will admit that, when we compare father and daughter, it is clearly Orazio whose painterly transformations into color and light were more directly inspired by the mysteries and the miracles of Christianity. Indeed, confronted by Artemisia's rippling female nudes and scenes of violent action, one can't help but contemplate, with a sense of irony, Michelangelo's alleged criticism of Netherlandish painting: that its pious content and devotional function appealed mainly to women. But should we merely deduce from the absence of evidence in Artemisia's works that the spiritual aspects of human experience went against the grain for her? Her gender complicates the question.
For one thing, the large-scale church altarpiece, which was, along with fresco decoration, still the most sought-after type of public commission in Italy, seems to have been generally foreclosed as an outlet to women artists, in a manner that parallels their later exclusion by the academies from the category of history painting. (9) Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614), like Artemisia the daughter of a painter and still alive in Rome during the years Artemisia was beginning her career, must have been a focus of special admiration, not only because she managed to forge a career more than a generation earlier, but because, importantly, she did create a number of altarpieces for churches in Rome. For this achievement Lavinia did not escape criticism, however. Portraiture was considered to be the more suitable subject for a female painter, as witness the oeuvre of Sofonisba Anguissola (1532/35-1625). Judging by the presence in this exhibition of only one fully accepted, surviving portrait by Artemisia (apart from possible self-portraits), the Portrait of a Gonfaloniere (1622; Palazzo d'Accursio, Bologna), her celebration by several early writers as a portrait painter must contain an element of wishful thinking, the better to accommodate her output to prevailing expectation for the "pittrice." (10)
If Orazio was slow to find himself as a painter, then given Artemisia's birth in 1593, the 1610 date inscribed along with her name on the remarkable Susanna and the Elders, in fact, has her bursting onto the art scene as an accomplished 17-year-old. In principle, this age is consistent with many of the career beginnings within the traditional Renaissance workshop and apprenticeship system. Furthermore, the circumstances of Artemisia's family constellation and early training are striking in themselves. The eldest of six children (four lived into adulthood), she was the only daughter. Their mother, Orazio's wife, Prudenzia, died at the age of 30, leaving behind a preadolescent (12-year-old) Artemisia. Her talent must have revealed itself early. (11) While there is later mention of her brother Francesco as a painter, Artemisia was the one singled out and nurtured by their father for his special tutelage. Of all the children, only she would achieve a notable career, and Orazio was clearly active in furthering it, as we learn also from his well-known letter of 1012 to the grand duchess of Tuscany in praise of Artemisia's skills as an artist. (12)
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There can be little doubt that Susanna and the Elders was meant as a declaration of Artemisia's artistic prowess, with its mastery in handling of large-scale figures "dal naturale"--male and female, old and young, clothed and nude. The bold, almost minimalist structure of this composition, with its fleshy seated nude at the frontal plane, is what first strikes the viewer. Three large-scale figures, relieved against stone wall and cloud-streaked blue sky, occupy most of the picture's abstract ground. But the painting is also filled with knowing pictorial illusions and allusions that deserve comment. Not least is the handling of the inscription itself: a shadow cast by Susanna's bent right leg covers the last letters of Artemisia's name, calling attention to this sign of her identity by partly obscuring it. (Are "Art" and "Gent" strategically revealed to indicate both individual and familial artistic identity?) Other details challenge the viewer to make distinctions: the cascading rivulets of Susanna's hair intermingle with foliate ornament on the stone fountain wall directly behind. A double reading is elicited by the small, detached, V-shaped arabesque of white paint that describes the dark-haired man's collar and also suggests the dove familiar to us from Annunciation scenes. (From a Christian theological perspective, Susanna, as well as other ancient Jewish heroines, were routinely explained as prototypes of Mary.) Then, too, there is the powerful auditory realm evoked by the whispering and the silencing gestures on the part of the two men, as Susanna's left ear is bared for the viewer through the reflexive turn of her head.
It will not come as a surprise that, in spite of the inscription, much of the literature on the Susanna has been concerned about the extent of Artemisia's responsibility for this picture. Accordingly, at the Metropolitan Museum, Orazio's David Contemplating the Head of Goliath (1610-12; Galleria Spada, Rome) was hung opposite Susanna. Were we intended to deduce from the monumental David, so palpable in the way his muscular body is pushed close to the viewer, his creamy flesh made tangible through the play of light, the teacher's possible masterminding and even intervention in his pupil's realization of the 1610 Susanna?
Countering this dialogue of father-and-daughter paintings in the Met gallery was the juxtaposition of Susanna with Artemisia's best-known work, Judith Slaying Holofernes (1612-13; Museo di Capodimonte, Naples). These two pictures turn out to make fascinating, obverse pendants. (13) The clear daylight environment of Susanna counters a tenebroso realm that engulfs the Judith figures. The nude Susanna is seated, body upright and parallel to the picture plane, while Holofernes is pinned down on the bloodstained bed, his body angled, feet first, into the pictorial depths. The one painting shows two overbearing male figures that loom above a defensive female; in the other, two women look down from the upper zone of the picture as they perform physical violence on the male. One scene conveys a mood of menace, the other captures the gory climax of the narrative action.
However much has been written about such subjects in Artemisia's paintings, and about the pictures' theatrical modes of address, the sheer impact of confronting so many of these works in the exhibition forced one to take stock of these choices. Of course, Artemisia's subjects were not new for the visual arts. Having made its debut for the movable picture in 16th-century Venice, the Apocryphal story of Susanna and the Elders had become fairly popular by the time Artemisia painted it; Annibale Carracci's engraving and a lost composition by Rubens are frequently mentioned as specific sources. As for Judith and Holofernes, Renaissance examples (Donatello's statue the most famous among them) tended to posit these protagonists in terms of virtue overcoming vice. Orazio Gentileschi also treated the subject. Two of his paintings in the exhibition center on Judith and her maidservant, Abra. The earlier shows three-quarter-length figures of Judith facing forward and Abra seen from behind (ca. 1608-09; Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo). The maidservant's blue-sleeved left arm holds a basket with Holofernes's severed, seemingly sleeping, head as the two women pause and glance out beyond the right frame of the picture.
But these contemplative explorations of the theme by Orazio only make it harder to assess where Artemisia was coming from. Her Naples version of Judith Slaying Holofernes--with limbs crisscrossing in a complex thrust and counter-thrust, highlighted flesh battling the dark--shows the Assyrian general's head pressed nearly upside down as the blade wielded by the heroine disappears into his shadowy throat, blood already streaming down wrinkled bedsheets. Even in the less violent Judith and Her Maidservant (ca. 1625-27; Detroit Institute of Arts), with its tall, looming format and nocturnal staging, Artemisia turns her father's pensive tableau into a threatening scenario of accomplices caught in the act. How did it happen that a woman artist could pursue these unprecedented directions? The understandable tendency to see works like the Susanna and the Judith and Holofernes--especially given the perspective of the rape trial documents--as deeply felt responses on Artemisia's part to male domination and to actual sexual aggression, and thus as "natural" outcomes of her personal experiences, somewhat begs this question. Pictures pointedly challenging their audience (although the actual patronage circumstances of many of them remain quite unclear), they deploy Orazio's and Caravaggio's modes of vision to more rhetorical and melodramatic effect.
One cannot escape the notion that such high-key presentations, the exemplary female characters (the Susannas, Judiths, Cleopatras, Lucretias), and the female nude body itself were choices made by Artemisia in the service of forging a unique oeuvre; she undoubtedly undertook these career moves with the support of Orazio. Another biographical factor is no less relevant to this discussion: the early loss of her mother. We cannot begin to assess the emotional effects it had on the 12-year-old Artemisia. It seems important, however, that Artemisia's training as a painter under Orazio took place exclusively after her mother's death. Had her mother seen the young girl into adulthood, if only in terms of the decorum a wife/mother's continuing presence in the household could be expected to maintain, Artemisia's artistic career might well have taken a more predictable path.
The above discussion also provides us with a somewhat altered perspective on the Susanna. So directly does this scene with its nude female body--front and center, in broad daylight--address the viewer that one can hardly speak of voyeurism, with its structure of a hidden viewer privy to "forbidden" sights, the fantasy to which post-Renaissance pictorial treatment of the theme of Susanna and the Elders most frequently appealed. Here, it is exposure as such that is thematized: there is no escape for this life-size subject, swiveling in her seated position at the frontal plane, her back to the wall. Needless to say, the fantasy/fear of exposure has special application in the case of the visual artist. Is it more basic to female psychology? Among the striking and haunting effects of Artemisia's works--most obvious in her paintings of nudes but endemic also to her "performances" of suspense and violence in the Judith and Her Maidservant and Judith Slaying Holofernes--is the way this anxiety comes across in terms of its necessary counterpart, exhibitionism, the drive also prerequisite to a painter's ongoing production. (14)
How much and what to reveal as an artist, self-presentation and self-fashioning: these are issues that are telescoped in the self-portrait, a subject Orazio never pursued, as far as we know. By contrast, even the female figures in Artemisia's narrative paintings, starting with the nude Susanna, have been linked to Artemisia's own appearance. Her raw beauty was praised during her lifetime and her likeness captured in a contemporary engraving. Several self-portraits make this the only subject that she shared with other women painters, for whom, starting in the mid-16th century, self-portraiture became a touchstone in attempts to declare and delineate professional identity. But whereas Sofonisba Anguissola, for instance, renders herself as the contemporary noblewoman she was, Artemisia reveals her self-dramatization repeatedly. In one finely painted small panel she assumes the guise of a female martyr saint (ca. 1615; private collection); in another, a lute-playing courtesan, elaborately turbaned, with earrings and blue satin decollete (ca. 1615-17; Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis).
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Regrettably, Artemisia's most engaging and most touching self-representation, the so-called Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura) (1638-39; Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II), was missing in New York and traveled only to Saint Louis. This vertically oriented picture contains a nearly three-quarter-length female figure. Rather than facing the viewer, her body and head are turned to the left edge of the canvas, toward which her raised right arm aims the painter's brush. At the bottom of the picture, in the foreground, her left hand cradles a palette. The arch of her body extends out, reaching each end of the pictorial field. The image actually derives from the late Renaissance iconographic dictionary by Cesare Ripa wherein the art of painting, interestingly enough, is personified by a beautiful woman who, as we see here, wears a gold chain around her neck. Ripa's prescription that her clothing should display shimmering (cangiante) colors finds a seemingly spontaneous outlet in the sleeve of Artemisia's figure; rendered in subtle shifts of hue and highlight, it is a passage of painting worthy of Orazio's strength as a colorist.
Because this picture's provenance goes back to the collection of Charles I, it is generally assumed that Artemisia painted it when she was in England in the late 1630s. She carne there shortly before Orazio died, but her letters show that she went to London reluctantly, when no better offer could be arranged. Orazio's will and testament, in turn, provided for his three surviving sons and made no mention of Artemisia. Still, the fact is that father and daughter were in the same place for the first time in nearly 20 years. It is tempting to think that the Allegory of Painting, in its relaxed self-referentiality and its deft handling, was animated by this renewal of their earlier bond.
As the exhibition tracks the later work of these two artists, we can also appreciate that when Orazio and Artemisia reconnected in 1638/39, they encountered in each other painters very different from the ones they had left behind. In the court circles of England, Orazio's works had to vie for attention with those of visiting Dutch masters, such as Gerrit van Honthorst, as well as those of the brilliant Flemings, Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. Judging by Lot and His Daughters (1628; Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao), a subject Orazio had already tackled in Genoa, or especially the Finding of Moses (ca. 1630-33; private collection), his paintings became at once vaster in scale and more precious in conception. The standing female figures bunched together toward the left foreground of the Finding of Moses are both bloated and elongated, their attenuated gestures reaching somewhat lamely into the distant landscape that is their setting. Employing glazes and fine brushwork, Orazio creates pearly flesh tones and lime green, lemon yellow, crisp blue, pink and violet silks and taffetas for the draperies, carrying the day with sumptuous and decorative effects.
Artemisia had for her part spent the 1630s in Naples, where she would shortly return, to remain in that bustling administrative and commercial center until her death in 1652/53. As with Orazio in England, Artemisia's works from Naples are often vast in scale, deploying large figures and elaborate architectural staging, at times straining the limits of her compositional skills (see Esther Before Ahasuers, ca. 1628-35, Metropolitan Museum, New York; and David and Bathsheba, ca. 1636-38, Columbus Museum of Art). (15) Some of these paintings revisit the biblical and mythological subjects that had by then made her famous (Susanna and the Elders, 1649, Moravska Galerie, Brno; Cleopatra, 1633-35, private collection, Rome); others explore for the first time traditional religious themes (Annunciation, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples; Birth of John the Baptist, 1636-335, Prado, Madrid), on demand from the rich feudal families and burgeoning religious orders in Naples that could provide Artemisia with commissions. In England, Orazio's pictorial tonalities and textures would conform to prevailing tastes affected by Venetian painting and the work of Rubens and van Dyck. Similarly, we notice in Artemisia's dark backgrounds, the deep brown shadowing of figures and a softer overall handling of paint, her adjustments to a Neapolitan mode of vision, one that was heir to Caravaggio and transmitted in the looser brushwork and grainier surfaces of the visiting Spanish masters.
That father and daughter were capable of responding to the stylistic models and esthetic preferences of their changing milieus shows admirable flexibility and adaptability. Yet one feels a letdown in surveying these later works, their somewhat turgid quality kept in check in Orazio's case through effects of grace and opulence, and in Artemisia's, through rich earthiness and moody atmospheres. Indeed, the "late" paintings of both Gentileschi present a contrast to the last productions of those acknowledged "greats" such as Titian, Rembrandt, Michelangelo or Goya, through whose stylistic development art historians and critics came to identify and characterize a paradigmatic "late" (or "old age") style. Whether we think of Titian's or Michelangelo's final Pietas, Rembrandt's last self-portraits, or Goya's "black" paintings, these disparate works have in common an increased abstraction and/or spirituality, a shorthand approach to their material finish and a gestation independent of external, worldly stimuli.
I began by crediting this exhibition with teaching us something about what it took to carve out a working career for visual artists who were not of the highest rank. A poignant sense of the efforts extended and disappointments sustained by this pair of painters also accompanies this assembly of works, in spite of how the show demonstrates the father's and daughter's respective--and, in Artemisia's case, extraordinary--successes.
(1.) Roberto Longhi, "Gentileschi padre e figlia," L'Atrte, 1916, pp. 245-314; Anna Banti, Artemisia, Florence, Sansone, 1947.
(2.) Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, Women Artists: 1550-1950, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.
(3.) Mary D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1989; R. Ward Bissell, "Artemisia Gentileschi: A New Documented Chronology," Art Bulletin, June 1968, pp. 153-68; Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art, University Park, Penn., Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.
(4.) The picture is listed in the section "Incorrect and Questionable Attributions" in Bissell, Authority of Art, p. 327.
(5.) There were greater than usual problems of overall condition and finish with many of these paintings. A few examples were shown in partially restored states and revealed significant surface damage; among them were Orazio's Crucifixion altarpiece (Cathedral of San Venanzio, Fabriano) and Artemisia's Venus Embracing Cupid (private collection). Many material and technical questions can be raised concerning the later vicissitudes of some of these pictures and also their original workmanship. Some compositions may have been cut down, such as Artemisia's Naples version of Judith Slaying Holofernes and her Lucretia (Gerolamo Etro, Milan). Visible cracks in paintings by both artists (Orazio's David Contemplating the Head of Goliath, Galleria Spada, Rome; Artemisia's Conversion of the Magdalene, Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence) have occurred where seams joining pieces of canvas sewn together break through the paint surface.
(6.) Keith Christiansen's catalogne essay, "The Art of Orazio Gentileschi," examines this phenomenon, reproducing X-rays of pictures and superimposed tracings of several versions of a composition. Needless to say, such sets of pictures have been approached in terms of issues of connoisseurship, as well as for the evidence of workshop practices they provide.
(7.) Dates of works presented here follow the catalogue's chronology.
(8.) leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, New York, Pantheon/October Books, 1983.
(9.) Interestingly, in this respect, religious women were at an advantage. The 16th-century Dominican nun Suor Plautilla Nelli (1523-1587) painted a monumental Last Supper for her convent in Florence and was also commissioned to do numerous large-scale altarpieces. Indeed, an awareness of the benefits that convent life could provide in furthering the career of its artist-nuns may have been a factor in Orazio's apparent persistence (mentioned in trial documents) in urging his daughter to become a nun.
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(10.) Perhaps not enough significance has been attached to the staging by Artemisia of this unidentified Gonfaloniere as a full-length figure. In choosing a format that had gained prominence in northern Italy in the mid-16th century and was employed and refined by Titian and others especially to display figures of authority, Artemisia was surely defying expectations for a woman painter, even when it came to portraiture.
(11.) See the interesting discussion by Aim Sutherland Harris about the phenomenon of precociousness (actual and legendary) specifically in women artists of the Renaissance and Baroque periods in Women Artists: 1550-1950, pp. 41-42.
(12.) "I find myself with a daughter and three sons, and this woman, it has pleased God, having been trained in the profession of painting, has in three years become so skilled that I can venture to say that today site has no peer: indeed, she has produced works which demonstrate a level of understanding that perhaps even the principal masters of the profession have not attained, as I will show Your Serene Highness at the proper time and place."
(13.) This observation is also made in the context of a stimulating consideration of these two works by Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon, Routledge, London and New York, 1999, p. 100.
(14.) Conversations with Ellen Phelan and Joan B. Erle helped to bring some of these ideas into sharper focus.
(15.) These large paintings sometimes had the input of specialized collaborators. For example, an 18th-century source discusses David and Bathsheba primarily as by Artemisia but ascribes the architectural setting and landscape background to two different artists, Viviano Codazzi and Domenico Gargiulo. The nature of collaboration in some of Artemisia's Neapolitan works is explored in Riccardo Lattuada's catalogne essay, "Artemisia and Naples, Naples and Artemisia ."
"Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi: Father and Daughter Painters in Baroque Italy" started in Rome's Palazzo Venezia [Oct. 20, 2001-Jan. 20, 2002]; it traveled to the Metropolitan Museum, New York [Feb. 14-May 12], and is currently on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum [June 14-Sept. 15]. The 476-page catalogue was written by Keith Christiansen and Judith W. Mann, with contributions by Livia Carloni, Patrizia Cavazzini, Roberto Contini, Elizabeth Cropper, Jean-Pierre Cuzin, Gabriele Finaldi and Jeremy Wood, Riccardo Lattuada, Mary Newcome, Richard Spear and Alessandro Zuccari.
Andree Hayum is a professor of art history at Fordham University, currently engaged in a study of the early public museum and its effects on the idea of the Renaissance.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
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