In 1610, when most girls her age were confined to embroidery and sewing, Artemisia Gentileschi was in her Roman studio producing an artistic back flip. "Susanna and the Elders" had, until Gentileschi stepped into the ring, been painted as a case...
[more]In 1610, when most girls her age were confined to embroidery and sewing, Artemisia Gentileschi was in her Roman studio producing an artistic back flip. "Susanna and the Elders" had, until Gentileschi stepped into the ring, been painted as a case of two repectable elderly gentlemen peeking at a sexually innocent young woman. The young woman had always been placed in a garden, a symbol of Eve's temptability, and the expression on the men's faces perpetuated the age-old myth that a line merely the width of dental floss separates seduction from rape.
Enter Gentileschi. In her painting two swollen perverts loom large in the background, while a naked Susanna twists terrified in the foreground. No one plays in this garden; the rosebushes and hummingbirds are carved decoration.
Gentileschi, Italian Baroque celebrity, led no ordinary life. Her father Orazio was a founding member of Caravaggism, the Mannerist school of painting inspired by its namesake Caravaggio. Daughter Artemisia was thrown in with the big boys at a young age. When Caravaggio fled Rome in 1606 after being accused of a stabbing, Orazio Gentileschi vigorously trained his daughter and others in the absent master's dramatically realistic style. Before she learned to read or write, Gentileschi was painting masterpieces.
"A daughter of the plaintiff has been deflowered by force," began the prosecution's argument in the sensationalistic trial of 1612. Agostino Tassi, Orazio's assistant and Gentileschi's mentor, was charged with the rape of the 19-year-old girl and the theft of one of Orazio's paintings. The seven-month trial took on grandiose, exploitative
proportions. Gentileschi was ordered to receive a
vaginal exam (quite a different process than a twenty-first-century pap smear) and was tortured with thumbscrews in the hope that she would withdraw her story: that Tassi repeatedly raped her, promised to marry her, and then backed out of the promises. Tassi, although he had already served time for incest and had once been charged with attempting to murder of his wife, was acquitted.
Humiliated and truly pissed off, Gentileschi bounced back. She married soon after the trial and enjoyed several years in Florence as a reputable painter. By the time she arrived in Naples in 1630, she was receiving commissions from coast to coast.
However, her frustration and rage can be seen in the carefully crafted works that followed the trial. Examining a story she would return to many times, her 1613 interpretation of "Judith Slaying Holofernes" is bold, violent, and bloody. Judith and her maidservant are painted as robust, strong, and determined, with sleeves rolled up. Loose strands of brain hang from Holofernes's head; he is as dead as they come.
Thirty-four Gentileschi paintings remain, many of which were until recently attributed to her male counterparts or her father. She also left behind two daughters, both artists, from two different marriages. Although she was successful in the Italian art world and miraculously continued painting through marriages and pregnancies, her death is recorded only in two satiric epitaphs that fail to mention her art but refer to her as an adulterer and a nymphomaniac.
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