Artemisia Gentileschi

Artemisia Gentileschi the Italian Baroque painter of the seventeenth century (1593-c. 1656), the most celebrated woman artist of her age and one of the most forceful interpreters of the dramatic style introduced by Caravaggio. She painted powerful biblical and historical scenes, above all those of women who triumph over violence, and she became the first woman admitted to the academy of design in Florence.

Early Life and Training

Artemisia Gentileschi was born in Rome in 1593, the eldest child of the painter Orazio Gentileschi, a follower of Caravaggio. Her mother died when she was young, and she grew up in her father's workshop, where she learned to grind pigments, prepare canvases and draw from life. Because the academies of the day excluded women, she was trained privately by her father, who recognised her exceptional talent.

She showed precocious ability, and by her late teens she was producing paintings of remarkable assurance. Her father arranged for her to study perspective with a friend, the landscape painter Agostino Tassi. Tassi raped her in 1611, and the subsequent trial, which dragged on for months, became one of the best documented episodes of her life. During the proceedings she was subjected to torture to test her testimony, and she endured it while repeating that what she said was true.

After the trial she married a Florentine painter, Pierantonio Stiattesi, and moved with him to Florence, leaving Rome and its gossip behind. The marriage gave her a measure of respectability and independence, and it opened the door to the court and the intellectual circles of the Tuscan capital.

Florence and the Grand Ducal Court

In Florence Artemisia moved among the leading artists and writers of the day. She was befriended by Galileo Galilei and by members of the Medici court, and in 1616 she became the first woman to be admitted to the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, a distinction that gave her professional standing unusual for a woman of her time. She painted for the grand duke Cosimo II and for patrons in the city.

Her Florentine years produced some of her most admired works, including a celebrated Judith Beheading Holofernes in which the heroine's grim determination is rendered with extraordinary physical and psychological force. The subject, the killing of an enemy general by a widow he desired, recurs in her work and has often been read in the light of her own experience, though she treated it as a professional painter addressing a favoured biblical theme.

She also painted the Penitent Magdalene, the Conversion of the Magdalen and other devotional pictures in which the light and shadow of Caravaggio serve an intimate, emotional naturalism. Her letters from this period reveal a woman of sharp intelligence, keenly aware of the value of her own work and determined to be paid for it.

Naples, Venice and Later Career

Artemisia returned to Rome and then settled in Naples, a city that welcomed foreign painters and offered a large market for religious pictures. There she ran a busy workshop, took on commissions for churches and private patrons, and trained assistants. She worked alongside such painters as Massimo Stanzione and Bernardo Cavallino, and her presence helped shape the development of Neapolitan painting in the middle decades of the century.

She travelled to Venice about 1627, and later made a journey to London, where her father was working at the court of Charles I. After Orazio's death she remained in England for a time, completing commissions and probably working on the ceiling paintings her father had left unfinished. By late 1638 she was back in Naples, where she spent the rest of her life.

Her activity is documented well into the 1650s, and no reliable record of her death survives, though a document of 1656 suggests that she was already dead by that year. She had by then produced a large body of work and secured a reputation that outlasted several of her male contemporaries.

Style, Technique and Subject Matter

Artemisia worked in the tenebrist manner of Caravaggio, using a strong contrast between dark grounds and concentrated light to isolate her figures and heighten their emotional intensity. She was a consummate colourist, however, and her flesh tones, draperies and highlights show a refinement and a warmth that distinguish her from the more austere followers of Caravaggio.

She favoured heroic and tragic women: Judith and Holofernes, Jael and Sisera, Lucretia, Bathsheba, the repentant Magdalene. In her hands these figures are not passive victims or decorative beauties but agents of their own destiny, caught at moments of decision and violence. This concentration on female action and resolve gives her work a distinctive moral weight.

Her brushwork is confident and her drapery convincingly modelled, and she was equally skilful in the muscular handling of bodies in motion, as in the famous depiction of the murder of Holofernes. She signed many works and used her signature as a claim to authorship, aware that a woman painter had to insist on her own hand and reputation.

Reputation and Legacy

For centuries Artemisia's art was overshadowed in the literature by the story of her rape and the trial, and she was often described primarily as a victim. Only in the twentieth century did critics and scholars begin to assess her achievement on its own terms, recognising her as a major painter whose ambition and skill placed her among the foremost artists of the Baroque.

Modern exhibitions and scholarship have restored her to prominence and established the extent of her production, including works formerly confused with those of her father. She has become a symbol of women's place in the history of art, and her life has inspired novels, plays and films that dramatise the relation between her experience and her painting.

Her influence reaches beyond her own output. She demonstrated that a woman could run a workshop, negotiate with patrons and command large commissions, and her example encouraged later women artists who looked to her as a precedent. The Judith of the Uffizi and the canvases of Naples remain among the most compelling images of the European Baroque.

See also

• Caravaggio
• Orazio Gentileschi
• Baroque painting
• Judith beheading Holofernes