ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI’S WOMEN

***Beheading of Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi***

My mother gifted me a coffee table book, ‘Great Women Artists’. Each page a key work alongside a snippet about an artist’s life and oeuvre. A gory image of two women bracing themselves over a man they held down on a bed. One seemed to come over the top of him, pinning him down at the torso, while the other, eyebrows furrowed perhaps in both rage and concentration, was beheading the man with a large sword. The image is expressive and forceful, the painting precise. This is Judith (with her maid servant) beheading Holofernes. The artist was Artemisia Gentileschi.

Gentileschi (1593 – circa 1662) was an Italian Baroque painter. Her style, in its tenebrism, was influenced by Caravaggio, though her depictions are thought to exceed his in their naturalistic quality. She had a 40-year career at a time when female artists were scarce, and those taking on the ‘important’ subjects, like biblical and historical scenes, even more so. Yet Gentileschi, having trained with her father, had not only the skill to compete with her male counterparts, but in her depictions of women, she uniquely painted with insight, gusto and authenticity. Of her 57 well-known and attributed works, 49 feature a strong female protagonist, often in a moment of tension, hesitation or decision.

When she was 17 her father hired an artist, Agostini Tassi, to teach her drawing and perspective. Tassi came with a reputation of sexual aggressiveness and violence, so it’s odd that a father would invite him into his daughter’s life. Though Tassi’s potentially profitable connections such as Pope Paul V might explain Ozario Gentileschi’s incentive. Tassi raped Gentileschi. Seventeenth century law considered rape a matter that centred on whether virginity had been taken away. Even then, the seriousness of the crime was less about concern for the woman as it was for the depreciated monetary value she would be worth when being married off. So, Gentileschi’s father took Tassi to court and Gentileschi was tortured with thumbscrews when giving her testimony to discern truthfulness. She maintained her graphic version of events which have been preserved in the trial records that were exhibited at the National Gallery in London in 2020. This wasn’t the only trial she endured, she also lost two of her son’s during her life and her father and brothers are said to have been harsh with her. Gentileschi herself was also said to be violent. For instance, when a servant asked for payment, she and her husband beat him severely.

Whether or not her life’s challenges influenced her work is debated, especially in reference to her violent depiction Judith Beheading Holofernes. Holofernes was a general known for sexual violence, so some consider that she took revenge on Tassi through this work. As Siri Hustvedt notes in her essay A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, ‘How can art come from anything but life? The dead don’t make it.’ I’m not sure that Gentileschi used her art purely as a vessel for this rage, but rather as a resilient woman, perhaps she intended to depict women with a will of their own - women of the biblical stories as deliberate, calculating and determined in their actions with courage. Not the nonchalant puppets to a higher power that previously had been depicted. In Judith Beheading Holofernes the maid is participating, unique to Gentileschi’s interpretation, the women work in a kind of solidarity. Their sleeves are rolled up exposing strong arms and the process of beheading is labourious. The lines of the limbs draw the eye into the centre of the deed.

***Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, Artemisia Gentileshi***

While women are often naked in Baroque and Renaissance works, Gentileschi reveals more about her protagonists in the way she has covered them. Works like Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy and Lucretia, pierce a window into the mind of the subject. In Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy the eroticism comes through in her tensed posture, contorted neck as her head throws back, the consumed facial expression. Her top may be about to slip from her shoulder, but it’s not required to convey a pool of electric bliss. Lucretia, a Roman heroine who was married, then captured and raped, kills herself to save her family from dishonour. Gentileschi’s version shows the moment as Lucretia is deciding whether or not to go through with it. Lucretia’s form is strong, she clutches her breast deliberately with one hand, a knife in the other. Her leg and decolletage only are revealed. With a severe expression she gazes above. It seems as though the questions of dishonour, power and will over oneself and body are more important to Gentileschi as the cause of the moment, than the act of suicide - the consequence.

Her talent was recognised and she was the first woman invited to the Academia del Disegno. This meant she could buy her own supplies and sign her own contracts without the permission of her husband. It meant independence. She was also awarded a commission to paint an altar which was symbolic of her reaching the pinnacle of a male-dominated mountain. Painting an altar meant she was considered a great artist worthy of painting for the most important and impressionable audience – the public.

Gentileschi did something different with her art, she conveyed women as they really were, not in the idealised form they were meant to aspire to. Her works didn’t simply depict an action from a historical scene – rather her talent captured emotion, thought and the complexities of women.

Despite being a woman in a man’s world, Gentileschi’s storytelling held her in high esteem in her day. Then we forgot about her for 300 years. This is thought to be because many art history scholars were men, writing about men, for men. Gentileschi came back into the public eye around 1970 as feminism heightened. Just like reading a newspaper, looking at art requires keeping in mind whose lens one is looking through. Just as we interpret art individually, so does each artist interpret life.

Gentileschi painted heroines of the bible and of history. She retold their stories with a new focus on the strength their actions would have required. Her works, rife with empathy, rage and power at a time when these women were often depicted tranquilly adorned with vacant expressions, as though posing - their courage act a pretence. Gentileschi made her protagonists actions real and their own, something new and visceral for the women of her day.

Her works have been described as a kind of feminist rebellion. Maybe, but I think she also did something more powerful - she corrected. She took a red pen to the work that came before her, margin notes explaining that this is what a real woman looks like, how she thinks, how she feels and how powerful she can be. Her legacy then is perhaps not depicting a new kind of woman at that time, even if it was new for the art world, but showing honestly the way women had always been.

In a documented letter from 1649 to a regular patron, Don Antonio Ruffo, she writes ‘With me your lordship you will not lose and you will find the spirit of Caesar in the soul of a woman…I’ll show you what a woman can do’

Though she apparently wrote these lines to justify her professional skill, each of her works seems to attest to her point - to show what a woman can do. Just as she was inspired by courageous historical heroines, perhaps she’s become one of them for the twenty-first century.

Then again, this is just speculation,

through a lens,

all of my own.