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A gallery of art from Arnold Böcklin |
70 different engravings by Arnold Böcklin on display with translations (Archived 2009-10-25) |
German masters of the nineteenth century : paintings and drawings from the Federal Republic of Germany, a full text exhibition catalog from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which contains material on Arnold Böcklin (nos. 5–10) |
"Brahms, Böcklin, and the Gesang der Parzen", by Eftychia Papanikolaou; article in Music in Art: International Journal for Music Iconography 30/1-2 (Spring-Fall 2005): 154–165. |
Artemisia Lomi or Artemisia Gentileschi (US: , Italian: [arteˈmiːzja dʒentiˈleski]; 8 July 1593 – c. 1656) was an Italian Baroque painter. Gentileschi is considered among the most accomplished 17th-century artists, initially working in the style of Caravaggio. She was producing professional work by the age of 15. In an... |
Many of Gentileschi's paintings feature women from myths, allegories, and the Bible, including victims, suicides, and warriors. Some of her best known subjects are Susanna and the Elders (particularly the 1610 version in Pommersfelden), Judith Slaying Holofernes (her 1614–1620 version is in the Uffizi gallery), and Jud... |
Gentileschi was known for being able to depict the female figure with great naturalism and for her skill in handling colour to express dimension and drama. |
Her achievements as an artist were long overshadowed by the story of Agostino Tassi raping her when she was a young woman and Gentileschi being tortured to give evidence during his trial. For many years Gentileschi was regarded as a curiosity, but her life and art have been reexamined by scholars in the 20th and 21st c... |
Biography |
Early life |
Artemisia Lomi Gentileschi was born in Rome on 8 July 1593, although her birth certificate from the Archivio di Stato indicates she was born in 1590. She was the eldest child of Prudenzia di Ottaviano Montoni and the Tuscan painter Orazio Gentileschi. Orazio Gentileschi was a painter from Pisa. After his arrival in Rom... |
Baptised two days after her birth in the church of San Lorenzo in Lucina, Artemisia was primarily raised by her father following the death of her mother in 1605. It was likely at this time that Artemisia approached painting: introduced to painting in her father's workshop, Artemisia showed much more enthusiasm and tale... |
During this early period of her life, Artemisia took inspiration from her father's painting style, which had in turn been heavily influenced by the work of Caravaggio. Artemisia's approach to subject matter was different from that of her father, however, taking a highly naturalistic approach over her father's comparati... |
Her earliest surviving work, completed aged 17, is Susanna and the Elders (1610, Schönborn collection in Pommersfelden). The painting depicts the Biblical story of Susanna. The painting shows how Artemisia assimilated the realism of and effects used by Caravaggio without being indifferent to the classicism of Annibale ... |
Rape by Agostino Tassi |
In 1611, Orazio was working with Agostino Tassi to decorate the vaults of Casino delle Muse inside the Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi in Rome. One day in May, Tassi visited the Gentileschi household and, when alone with Artemisia, raped her. Another man, Cosimo Quorli, played a part in the rape. A female friend of Gen... |
With the expectation that they would marry in order to restore her virtue and secure her future, Artemisia started to have sexual relations with Tassi, but he reneged on his promise to marry her. Nine months after the rape, when he learned that Artemisia and Tassi were not going to be married, her father Orazio pressed... |
During the ensuing seven-month trial, it was discovered that Tassi had planned to murder his wife, had engaged in adultery with his sister-in-law, and planned to steal some of Orazio's paintings. At the end of the trial, Tassi was exiled from Rome, although the sentence was never carried out. During the trial, Artemisi... |
After her mother died, Artemisia had been surrounded mainly by males. When she was 17, Orazio rented the upstairs apartment of their home to a female tenant, Tuzia. Artemisia befriended Tuzia; however, Tuzia allowed Agostino Tassi and Cosimo Quorli to visit Artemisia in Artemisia's home on multiple occasions. The day t... |
A painting entitled Mother and Child, discovered in Crow's Nest, Australia in 1976, may or may not have been painted by Gentileschi. On the presumption that it is her work, the baby has been interpreted as an indirect reference to Agostino Tassi, her rapist, as it dates to 1614, just two years after the rape. It depict... |
Florentine period (1612–1620) |
A month after the trial, Orazio arranged for his daughter to marry Pierantonio Stiattesi, a modest artist from Florence. Shortly afterward the couple moved to Florence. The six years she spent in Florence would be decisive both for Artemisia's family life and professional career. Artemisia became a successful court pai... |
Artemisia's career as an artist was very successful in Florence. She was the first woman accepted into the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno (Academy of the Arts of Drawing). She maintained good relations with the most respected artists of her time, such as Cristofano Allori, and was able to garner the favour and the pr... |
Her involvement in the courtly culture of Florence not only provided access to patrons, but it widened her education and exposure to the arts. She learned to read and write and became familiar with musical and theatrical performances. Such artistic spectacles helped Artemisia's approach to depicting lavish clothing in ... |
In 1615, she received the attention of Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger (a great-nephew of Michelangelo). Busy with the construction of the Casa Buonarroti to celebrate his noted relative, he asked Artemisia —along with other Florentine artists, including Agostino Ciampelli, Sigismondo Coccapani, Giovan Battista Gui... |
Other significant works from this period include La Conversione della Maddalena (The Conversion of the Magdalene), Self-Portrait as a Lute Player (in the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art), and Giuditta con la sua ancella (Judith and her Maidservant), now in the Palazzo Pitti. Artemisia painted a secon... |
While in Florence, Artemisia and Pierantonio had five children. Giovanni Battista, Agnola, and Lisabella did not survive for more than a year. Their second son, Cristofano, died at the age of five after Artemisia had returned to Rome. Only Prudentia survived into adulthood. Prudentia was also known as Palmira, which ha... |
In 2011, Francesco Solinas discovered a collection of 36 letters, dating from about 1616 to 1620, that add startling context to the personal and financial life of the Gentileschi family in Florence. They show that Artemisia had a passionate love affair with a wealthy Florentine nobleman, Francesco Maria Maringhi. Her h... |
Return to Rome (1620–1626/27) |
Just as with the preceding decade, the early 1620s saw ongoing upheaval in Artemisia Gentileschi's life. Her son Cristofano died. Just as she arrived in Rome, her father Orazio departed for Genoa. Immediate contact with her lover Maringhi appeared to have lessened. By 1623, any mention of her husband disappears from an... |
Her arrival in Rome offered the opportunity to cooperate with other painters and to seek patronage from the wide network of art collectors in the city, opportunities that Gentileschi grasped. One art historian noted of the period, "Artemisia's Roman career quickly took off, the money problems eased". Large-scale papal ... |
But Rome hosted a wide range of patrons. Fernando Afan de Ribera, 3rd Duke of Alcala, a Spanish nobleman, acquired her Penitent Magdalene, Christ Blessing the Children, and David with a Harp. During the same period she became associated with Cassiano dal Pozzo, a humanist and a collector and lover of arts. Dal Pozzo he... |
The variety of patrons in Rome also meant a variety of styles. Caravaggio's style remained highly influential and converted many painters to following his style (the so-called Caravaggisti), such as Carlo Saraceni (who returned to Venice in 1620), Bartolomeo Manfredi, and Simon Vouet. Gentileschi and Vouet would go on ... |
Although it is sometimes difficult to date her paintings, it is possible to assign certain works by Gentileschi to these years, such as Portrait of a Gonfaloniere, today in Bologna (a rare example of her capacity as portrait painter), and Judith and her Maidservant, today in the Detroit Institute of Arts. The Detroit p... |
Three Years in Venice (1626/27–1630) |
The absence of sufficient documentation makes it difficult to follow Gentileschi's movements in the late 1620s. However, it is certain that between 1626 and 1627, she moved to Venice, perhaps in search of richer commissions. Many verses and letters were composed in appreciation of her and her works in Venice. Knowledge... |
Naples and the English period (1630–1656) |
In 1630, Artemisia moved to Naples, a city rich with workshops and art lovers, in search of new and more lucrative job opportunities. The eighteenth-century biographer Bernardo de' Dominici speculated that Artemisia was already known in Naples before her arrival. She may have been invited to Naples by the Duke of Alcal... |
With the exceptions of a brief trip to London and some other journeys, Artemisia resided in Naples for the remainder of her career. |
On Saturday, March 18, 1634, the traveller Bullen Reymes recorded in his diary visiting Artemisia and her daughter, Palmira ('who also paints'), with a group of fellow-Englishmen. She had relations with many renowned artists, among them Stanzione, with whom, Bernardo de' Dominici reports, she started an artistic collab... |
In Naples, Artemisia started working on paintings in a cathedral for the first time. They are dedicated to San Gennaro nell'anfiteatro di Pozzuoli (Saint Januarius in the amphitheater of Pozzuoli) in Pozzuoli. During her first Neapolitan period she painted the Birth of Saint John the Baptist now in the Prado in Madrid,... |
In 1638, Artemisia joined her father in London at the court of Charles I of England, where Orazio had become court painter and received the important job of decorating a ceiling allegory of Triumph of Peace and the Arts in the Queen's House, Greenwich built for Queen Henrietta Maria. Father and daughter were working to... |
Orazio died suddenly in 1639. Artemisia had her own commissions to fulfil after her father's death, although there are no known works assignable with certainty to this period. It is known that Artemisia had left England by 1642, when the English Civil War was just starting. Nothing much is known about her subsequent mo... |
In her last known years of activity she is attributed with works that are probably commissions and follow a traditional representation of the feminine in her works. |
It was once believed that Artemisia died in 1652 or 1653; however, modern evidence has shown that she was still accepting commissions in 1654, although she was increasingly dependent upon her assistant, Onofrio Palumbo. Some have speculated that she died in the devastating plague that swept Naples in 1656 and virtually... |
Some works in this period are the Susanna and the Elders (1622) today in Brno, the Virgin and Child with a Rosary today in El Escorial, the David and Bathsheba today in Columbus, Ohio, and the Bathsheba today in Leipzig. |
Her David with the Head of Goliath, rediscovered in London in 2020, has been attributed by art historian Gianni Papi to Artemisia's London period. Another work, Susanna And The Elders, previously owned by Charles I, was rediscovered in the Royal Collection in London in 2023. |
Artistic importance |
The research paper "Gentileschi, padre e figlia" (1916) by Roberto Longhi, an Italian critic, described Artemisia as "the only woman in Italy who ever knew about painting, coloring, drawing, and other fundamentals". Longhi also wrote of Judith Slaying Holofernes: "There are about fifty-seven works by Artemisia Gentiles... |
Longhi wrote: |
Who could think in fact that over a sheet so candid, a so brutal and terrible massacre could happen [...] but—it's natural to say—this is a terrible woman! A woman painted all this? ... there's nothing sadistic here, instead what strikes the most is the impassibility of the painter, who was even able to notice how the ... |
Feminist studies increased the interest in Artemisia Gentileschi, underlining her rape and subsequent mistreatment, and the expressive strength of her paintings of biblical heroines, in which the women are interpreted as willing to manifest their rebellion against their condition. In a research paper from the catalogue... |
Without denying that sex and gender can offer valid interpretive strategies for the investigation of Artemisia's art, we may wonder whether the application of gendered readings has created too narrow an expectation. Underpinning Garrard's monograph, and reiterated in a limited way by Bissell in his catalogue raisonné, ... |
Because Artemisia returned again and again to violent subject matter such as Judith and Holofernes, a repressed-vengeance theory has been postulated by some art historians, but other art historians suggest that she was shrewdly taking advantage of her fame from the rape trial to cater to a niche market in sexually char... |
The most recent critics, starting from the difficult reconstruction of the entire catalogue of the Gentileschi, have tried to give a less reductive reading of the career of Artemisia, placing it in the context of the different artistic environments in which the painter participated. A reading such as this restores Arte... |
Feminist perspectives |
Feminist interest in Artemisia Gentileschi dates from the 1970s when the feminist art historian Linda Nochlin published an article entitled "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" in which that question was dissected and analysed. The article explores the definition of "great artists" and posited that oppressive ... |
Artemisia and her oeuvre became a focus again, having had little attention in art history scholarship save Roberto Longhi's article "Gentileschi padre e figlia (Gentileschi, father and daughter)" in 1916 and Bissell's article "Artemisia Gentileschi—A New Documented Chronology" in 1968. As Artemisia and her work began t... |
Artemisia is known for her portrayals of subjects from the Power of Women group, for example her versions of Judith Slaying Holofernes. She is also known for the rape trial in which she was involved, which scholar Griselda Pollock has argued had unfortunately become the repeated "axis of interpretation of the artist's ... |
In another vein entirely, American professor Camille Paglia has argued that modern feminist preoccupation with Artemisia is misguided and that her accomplishments have been overstated: "Artemisia Gentileschi was simply a polished, competent painter in a Baroque style created by men." Nonetheless, according to The Natio... |
Feminist literature tends to revolve around the event of Artemisia's rape, largely portraying her as a traumatised, but noble survivor whose work became characterised by sex and violence as a result of her experience. Pollock (2006) interpreted the film by Agnès Merlet as a typical example of the inability of popular c... |
Feminist scholars suggest that Artemisia wanted to take a stand against the stereotype of female submissiveness. One example of this symbolism appears in her Corisca and the Satyr, created between 1630 and 1635. In the painting, a nymph runs away from a satyr. The satyr attempts to grab the nymph by her hair, but the h... |
Other female painters of her time |
For a woman at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Artemisia being a painter represented an uncommon and difficult choice, but not an exceptional one. Artemisia was aware of "her position as a female artist and the current representations of women's relationship to art". This is evident in her allegorical self po... |
Before Artemisia, between the end of the 1500s and the beginning of 1600s, other women painters had successful careers, including Sofonisba Anguissola (born in Cremona around 1530). Later Fede Galizia (born in Milan or Trento in 1578) painted still lifes, and a Judith with the Head of Holofernes. |
Italian Baroque painter Elisabetta Sirani was another female artist from this same period. Sirani's painting Allegory Painting of Clio shares a common colour scheme with Artemisia's work. Elisabetta gained considerable success before her death aged 27. |
In popular culture |
In novels and fiction |
The first writer who produced a novel around the figure of Artemisia may have been George Eliot in Romola (1862–63), where some aspects of Artemisia's story, while set in the Florence in her time, are recognisable, but much embroidered. |
A later and clearer use of Artemisia's story appears in Anna Banti's Artemisia. Banti's book is written in an "open diary" format, in which she maintains a dialogue with Artemisia. |
Susan Vreeland published The Passion of Artemisia (2002), a biographical novel based on her life. |
She appears in Eric Flint's Ring of Fire alternate history series, being mentioned in 1634: The Galileo Affair (2004) and figuring prominently in 1635: The Dreeson Incident (2008), as well as appearing in a number of shorter stories in the 1632 universe. |
The novel Maestra (2016) by L.S. Hilton includes Artemisia as a central reference for the main character, and several of her paintings are discussed. |
The novel Salem's Cipher (2016) by Jess Lourey used Artemisia's painting Judith Beheading Holofernes to send a clue. |
The novel Blood Water Paint by Joy McCullough tells Artemisia's story in poetic form. |
The manga Arte, set in 16th century Florence, is loosely based on Artemisia. |
The graphic biography, I Know What I Am: The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi (2019), created by Gina Siciliano using ballpoint pens. |
A fictional painting by Artemisia, The Lute Player, is a central element in Daniel Silva's 2021 espionage novel The Cellist. |
A Portrait in Shadow (Titan Books, 2023) by Nicole Jarvis is a novel about Artemisia's career and revenge. |
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