ORAZIO AND ARTEMISIA

BENNETT SCHIFF

A fascinating tale of a father and his daughter

The story of the painters Orazio Gentileschi and his daughter Artemisia, set in Rome four hundred years ago, could have been written by Shakespeare and later staged as a full-blown opera by Verdi. All of the color and high drama are displayed. There are principal parts for popes, other prelates of the church, King Charles I of England, Queen Marie de Medici of France,King Philip IV of Spain, various nobles of the Italian dukedoms, justices of the highest Roman court, a villain to rival Shakespeare’s Iago, and a score of supporting players, all of this embellished by some of the finest paintings of the turbulently creative Baroque era from the hands of the Gentileschi.

Act One opens in Rome with the arrival of Orazio, a young painter looking for work. He marries and fathers four children, including his firstborn and only daughter Artemisia, a name derived from Artemis, the Greek virgin goddess of hunting and light.

There is a prologue, in a sense, to the drama in the form of a letter posted from Rome, dated July 3, 1612, from Orazio to the Dowager Grand Duchess Cristina di Lorena in Florence. In it he pleaded for her support in the trial of Agostino Tassi, a rogue painter notorious for his sexual escapades, and a man whom he had charged with raping his daughter Artemisia when she was 17. Tassi, who was working on a commission with Orazio, had, it was charged, raped the young girl in Orazio’s studio.

Just several weeks before the letter was written, Artemisia had been tortured with thumbscrews, according to the trial transcript, “in order to remove any mark of infamy and any doubt that might arise against her...or about the things she had said...” The dubious rationale was that if the plaintiff could stand up to the agony without recanting the charge, it was proof that she was telling the truth. Artemisia went through the bloody ordeal unflinchingly, insisting on the justice of her complaint.

Tassi eventually was found guilty and was banished from Rome for five years, although he apparently never left the city and even managed some four months later to have the sentence revoked. He now is regarded as a minor figure, notable only because of the scandal caused by the trial.

R.Ward Bissell, professor of art history at the University ofMichigan, opens his recent study and catalog raisonne of the work of Artemisia with a prescriptive examination of her Susanna and the Elders. It is an extraordinary work. That it came from the hand of a 17-year-old girl, at a time when women of any age or ability could not be considered in a professional sense, makes it all the more remarkable.

That Artemisia was familiar with painting, how it was made, what materials to use, how a canvas was prepared, and all the painstaking work and the passion that went into the realization of a painting, was not that unusual. After all, she had grown up in the household of a busy painter. It was natural for her to pick up a pencil, to begin to draw, and, in time, to take up a brush and paint.

Orazio was the son of a highly regarded Florentine goldsmith and grew up, as his children did, surrounded from infancy by the materials for making art. Born in Pisa in 1563, Orazio came to live with an uncle in Rome when he was about 13. It is uncertain as to where he trained, but in the late 1580s he was a member of a team of artists who worked for Pope Sixtus V, decorating the Vatican’s Sistina Library and the nave walls of the great, ancient church of Santa Maria Maggiore.

The Rome of that day was an energized, burgeoning society in which artists competed for commissions from the church, the aristocracy, bankers, and merchant princes. Orazio continued to work steadily and, in 1600, 37 years old with a wife, three sons, and a daughter, he discarded his concept of what painting should be and emerged, as if from a chrysalis, an entirely different painter. The catalyst for the transformation was the charismatic artist Caravaggio, whose paintings had become proclamations of a new order that brought a down-to-earth, but dramatically heightened, naturalism to the art of his time.

Judith Decapitating Holofernes (1611-1612) by Artemisia Gentileschi. Oil on canvas, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples. Photo courtesy of Art Resource.

Caravaggio did this in two ways.Working directly on the canvas, he threw out the Renaissance convention of elaborate and detailed preliminary sketching. Then, in another radical departure from tradition, he used people from everyday life as his models. Rather than idealistically imagining what the characters in his work should look like, he employed models in his studio, displaying them as real people with real, if exaggerated, feelings.

Then, as if with spotlights hitting from different directions, he focused on their gestures and expressions, emphasizing all of this through the subdued backgrounds from which his carefully composed figures arose. The results were immediately dramatic and compelling. In a sense, he had turned paintings into performances.

Both Orazio and Artemisia learned a great deal from Caravaggio in different ways. Orazio gentled Caravaggio’s intensity into a more poetic vision. Artemisia, however, in her early works depicting scenes from the Bible in Caravaggio’s style, came up with some of the goriest paintings of any time. She later modified this approach as she emerged as a fullfledged professional artist, the equal, remarkably regardless of gender, of any painter of the time. No wonder then that, beginning some 25 years ago, she became an iconic figure in feminist studies, the subject of scholarly monographs, novels, and even a movie that fantasized a life that in reality was quite fantastic enough.

She was born in Rome on July 8, 1593. Her mother Prudentia Montoni died in 1605 at the early age of 30, leaving Orazio to look after the 11-year-old girl and her three younger brothers. It was a busy household, with models coming and going. There were frequent visits from patrons or their agents discussing contracts for paintings and church or palace decorations. By the time Artemisia was about 15, it was decided that she would be trained in painting. She was otherwise unschooled, and virtually illiterate. In the Catholic society of the time, young women either married or went into a convent.

It wasn’t until years later that she came to read and write, and wrote very well, judging by her letters. She writes to possible patrons selling her wares. She argues about fees and contracts for commissioned works. She argues with landlords and acknowledges fees paid and complains of fees delayed. She is involved in litigation regarding debts for painting supplies. In one letter to a patron regarding fees, she argues “You will find the spirit of Caesar in this soul of a woman.” She stands up for her rights and competes as an equal. She holds her own.

Her independence can be dated to November 29, 1612, the day after Tassi is sentenced to banishment, when, cleared of the ordeal of the trial, she is quickly married to Pietrantonio Stiattesi, a Florentine, and departs Rome to live with him in Florence. She is 19 and it is here that the paths of father and daughter diverge. Artemisia was not to see her father for any extended period of time, according to the rather hazy records; they had just two or three visits, lastly in London, where he died in his 76th year.

Both artists dealt mainly in mythological, allegorical, historical, and biblical themes. For Orazio, it was the customary work of a professional artist. For Artemisia, it was a radical departure for a woman to deal in these subjects, particularly in nudes of women, in which Artemisia specialized. Women who painted at all were expected to paint still lives or portraits.

It is simple enough to follow the separate lives of the artists, but an examination of their work is more complex. Looking at this work side-by-side through the years shows them to be distinctly different painters. Orazio envelops his canvases in an even, sheltering light. His balance is exquisite, his color range harmonious and luminous.

At times, even art historians have trouble distinguishing between the two artists. According to Judith W. Mann of the St. Louis Art Museum, “Anyone who has delved into recent scholarship on the Gentileschi knows that they are not always perceived as independent artists. Indeed, there remain a few paintings that carry convincing attributions to each—pictures that were probably produced when father and daughter worked together in Rome, from about 1609...until 1612 or 1613 when Artemisia left Rome...”

For the most part, until her last years, Artemisia is a decidedly Baroque painter, influenced by Michelangelo’s muscular tensions, emphasizing high-pitched contrasts, working in diagonals and rich, vivid colors, her scenes inhabited by monumental figures in which a canvas becomes an emotional extravaganza. Think of Rubens.

There are no more intense examples of this than her versions of Judith Decapitating Holofernes (1611-12), Lucretia (1611), and Judith and Her Maidservant (1612). It is difficult to look at Artemisia’s terrifying Judith- Holofernes paintings in which a bare-armed woman,with the help of her maid, is with calm determination, a look of distinct satisfaction on her face, methodically sawing off the head, gore splashed everywhere, of a soon-to-be cadaver without seeing these as the work of a wronged woman deep in the act of revenge. It is paintings such as these that became, and continue to be, a central focus of feminist studies.

In contrast, Orazio soon was to depart from this intense, high-pitched style. His later lyrical work is bathed in an envelope of gently clarifying incandescence so characteristic of his best paintings (as witness his Saint Cecelia and an Angel). Orazio left Rome for Genoa in 1621 at the invitation of the wealthy aristocrat Giovan Antonio Sauli, for whom he painted a number of works, including at least three masterpieces, a Penitent Magdalene, a Danai, and Lot and His Daughters, as well as “other works of great exquisiteness,” according to an account of the time. It was such work that art historian Roberto Longhi, in a groundbreaking 1916 article that rediscovered Orazio after three centuries of oblivion, characterized as a “clear and evident license for beauty.”

Saint Cecelia and an Angel (1617-1618) by Orazio Gentileschi and Giovanni Lanfranco. Oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art. Photo courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

His work had been attracting increasing attention. When a call came from Marie de Medici, Queen of France, to join her court in Paris, Orazio quickly accepted. In 1626, he arrived in London at the invitation of the Duke of Buckingham, minister of King Charles, where again he worked for the ruler of the country. He was then 63.

Orazio often was seen in the company of the King.He was awarded an annual pension and became known as “His Majesty’s Picture Maker.” As Orazio’s reputation spread, King Philip IV of Spain became an admirer and collector of his work.

Artemisia’s rise to prominence, beginning with her arrival in Florence, was steady. By the 1620s, as she perfected her technical ability, her work became spectacular. Her paintings were collected by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the King of Spain, Michelangelo Buonarroti, the Younger, and other members of the aristocracy, the clergy, and the merely wealthy.

She spent eight years in Florence juggling her time as an artist and wife, during which she became pregnant four times. Only one child survived. She became a fully accepted member of the artistic society of Florence and gained the support of the Grand Duke Cosimo II de Medici. It was during this time that she painted at least two indisputable masterpieces, the Penitent Magdalene, which is a purely magnificent, dazzling work of technical mastery fully achieved and with an emotional impact of stunning intensity, and another Judith Decapitating Holofernes, dated 1620.

By 1621, she is back in Rome with daughter Prudentia and her husband. She had written to Cosimo II de Medici that “I have made up my mind to take a short trip to Rome” hoping to recover from “my many past illnesses” and “not few troubles at home and with family.” She hoped to spend “a few months with my people.” In fact, she was to stay about six years, during which time her husband Pietrantonio disappeared from her life and from history. Years later she was to ask if anyone knew where he was. Apparently, no one did.

A year after her return to Rome, she painted another Susanna and the Elders, dated 1622. She sold three paintings to the Spanish ambassador, the Duke de Alcala, establishing a connection with the Spanish court that was to serve her well in years to come. She was then 29.

In about 1627, she is living once again in Venice, where she is lauded by poetic inscriptions and madrigals. She works on a commission for Philip IV of Spain and paints a St. John the Baptist, among other works. Three years later, she is living in Naples, which, with the exception of her two-year stay in England, was to be her final home.

At the time of her arrival there,Naples, under the rule of Spain since 1504, was a busy and thriving city. Twice the size of Rome, it was second in population only to Paris. Artists, including some of the most prominent in Europe, came at different times to decorate churches and secular mansions. The city had seen the most active period of ecclesiastical construction in Italy between the 15th and the 17th centuries.

And, as she had in Florence, Rome, and Venice, Artemisia immediately was engulfed in the artistic ferment of the city. She established a studio and embarked on “some works for the Empress,” according to a letter she wrote to a correspondent in Rome. Her correspondence over the next seven or eight years is concerned largely with commissions and fees, and flattering letters to various dukes and church dignitaries asking for support. Often enough she provides samples of her work. She acted as any professional painter of the time did.

In 1638, she made the arduous voyage from Naples to London to visit the father she had not seen for 17 years. He was then 75 years old. There had been reports that he was not in the best of health and there was, to be sure, the promise of commissions from the King.

Orazio had embarked on the largest commission of his career, to cover the enormous ceiling of the Queen’s House in Greenwich with an ambitious series of canvases. Artemisia worked side by side with her father. Several distinct panels from the series today are attributed to her, as is the compellingly composed Allegory of Painting, said to be a self-portrait dated 1638-39. It is now in the collection of Queen Elizabeth. In it, a large figure of an intent, strikingly attractive woman, a palette in her left hand, her right holding a paintbrush, carries with it a great sense of serene majesty.

After Orazio’s death, Artemisia went back to Naples to take up her life. Although these are the years in which the greater part of her correspondence is available, her letters have to do with the continuing business of selling her work, and little to do with her life. It is known that she was pressed to find a dowry for her daughter. On the day of her daughter’s marriage, March 13, 1649, she writes to a collector in Messina that the cost of the wedding left her “broke” and in danger of being dispossessed. She may have been exaggerating. Probably, it was a way of seeking further commissions, a thread which was consistent in her correspondence.

From 1640 until her death in Naples in 1653, although her style changed significantly, becoming more elegant, decorative, and sensual, she continued to display a dazzling technical skill, a deep and vibrant use of color, and dramatic positioning of the monumental figures who, as always, dominated her canvases.

In his catalog raisonne, Bissell documents 57 works of Artemisia’s, of which 51 are extant. These, he says, must be a relatively small number of the many works she painted and which are, at least for now, lost.

Taken all together, it seems that Orazio had an easier time of it through the years. Once he had left Rome, he found ready and appreciative attachments with the high and the mighty, going from one to another, painting a knockout picture here and there.His career is marked by highly proficient and always beautiful paintings as his range changes in style, eventually leaving almost all traces of Caravaggio behind as he became his own master.

Anyone who has seen the image of Orazio’s Sleeping Christ Child, breathtaking in its dreamlike stillness, appreciates that the dream stays with you. With all the thousands upon thousands of the “Madonna with the Infant” scenes that have been painted through time, there is none more beautiful, or suffused in simple majesty.

Artemisia had a much more difficult time. She almost always seemed to be seeking commissions, always desperately short of money. Her style also changed as she moved from one city to another. In her last years in Naples, as the command of her art became more facile, the substance at times became somewhat watered down.

Every now and then, out would come a staggering work, like her two Magdalenes, or the singularly astonishing Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting. They take your breath away with their beauty, their force, their reflective depth. There has been nothing like this unique father and daughter in painting, before or after.

Bennett Schiff (CC ’81) wrote art criticism in New York before becoming the founding fine arts editor of Smithsonian magazine.

Return to COSMOS 2004 Table of Contents
Return to COSMOS Journals
Return to COSMOS Home Page