Painter of the Bible
Artemisia Gentileschi
Artemisia Gentileschi was the leading female painter of the Italian Baroque and the most accomplished follower of Caravaggio in the generation immediately after his death.
Life & work
Artemisia Gentileschi was the leading female painter of the Italian Baroque and the most accomplished follower of Caravaggio in the generation immediately after his death. Born in Rome in 1593 to the painter Orazio Gentileschi (a close friend and collaborator of Caravaggio in the early Roman years), trained in her father's workshop from her early childhood, and traumatized at age seventeen by her rape by the painter Agostino Tassi (her father's collaborator on the Casino delle Muse fresco project at the Roman Quirinal — the trial that followed Tassi's prosecution by Orazio in 1612 produced one of the most studied surviving early-modern Italian rape-trial transcripts), she moved to Florence in 1613 where she became the first woman admitted to the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno. She was active subsequently in Florence, Venice, Rome, and Naples, and died in Naples around 1656.
Her Christian religious work is concentrated in dramatic biblical and martyrological subjects in her characteristic combination of Caravaggesque chiaroscuro with a distinctly female-centered narrative perspective on Old Testament heroines and women of the Gospels. The Judith Beheading Holofernes paintings (Naples Capodimonte, c. 1612–1613, and the more famous Uffizi version, c. 1620 — both depicting the climactic moment of the deuterocanonical Book of Judith with characteristic Caravaggesque dramatic intensity, but with a visceral physical realism — the spurting blood, the muscular grip of the female arms, the pressed-down body of Holofernes — that distinguishes Artemisia's treatments from her male contemporaries' versions of the subject), the Susanna and the Elders (Pommersfelden, 1610 — Artemisia's earliest dated work, painted at age seventeen and one of the supreme early Caravaggesque treatments of the Daniel 13 narrative), the Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (London, c. 1615), the Mary Magdalene (Pitti, c. 1620), and the late Naples altarpieces fill the painted corpus.
She worked at the English court of Charles I in 1638–1641 in collaboration with her father Orazio (who had been court painter at Whitehall since 1626), and produced ceiling decorations for the Queen's House at Greenwich. The Civil War interrupted the English commission, and Artemisia returned to Naples where she worked for the rest of her life.
Modern criticism — particularly the feminist art-historical scholarship of the late twentieth century, beginning with Mary Garrard's foundational 1989 monograph — has restored her reputation to its current first-rank position in the Italian Baroque canon, alongside Caravaggio, Bernini, and the Carracci.
Notable works in detail
Judith Beheading Holofernes, painted by Artemisia Gentileschi around 1620 in oil on canvas, depicts the climactic moment of the deuterocanonical Book of Judith in which the young Hebrew widow saws through the neck of the drunken Assyrian general in his command tent. Artemisia stages the act with extraordinary visceral physical realism: Judith leans into the body with the muscular grip of her arms, the elderly servant Abra holds open the linen sack to receive the head, the spurting blood arcs across the white sheets of the bed, the body of Holofernes pressed back against the pillow with his eyes still open. The Uffizi version of this composition (with closely related earlier and later workshop variants in Naples and Detroit) is widely held to be Artemisia's masterpiece and one of the most visceral treatments of the Judith subject in the entire history of European painting. The female-centered narrative perspective — Judith and Abra working together with the cool determination of professional craftswomen, against a male body that has been reduced from threatening tyrant to bound victim — distinguishes Artemisia's treatments sharply from her male contemporaries' versions of the subject.
Esther before Ahasuerus, painted by Artemisia Gentileschi around 1620 in oil on canvas and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, depicts the climactic moment of Esther 5 in which the young Hebrew queen, having fasted three days for courage, enters the throne room of King Ahasuerus uninvited (an act punishable by death) to plead for the lives of her people the Jews. Artemisia stages the scene as a dramatic three-quarter-length encounter: Esther on the right in the act of swooning into the arms of her two attendants, the king on the left rising from his throne in startled response, his scepter extended toward her in the gesture of welcome that pardons her capital offense. The chromatic palette of saturated crimson, gold, and pale silver-blue against the dark architectural ground is characteristic of Artemisia's middle career, and the painting is one of the principal Artemisia treatments of an Old Testament heroine subject.
