This one's for Artemisia
Talented painter, woman in a man’s world, rape victim.
Recently I was inspired by an excellent post Daniele Bolelli wrote about the Italian painter Caravaggio. I am a professional historian who primarily studies Vikings, but I also have a degree in Art History and spent a fair amount of time working in museums and with a private collection before I entered academia. Historical art is definitely a love of mine, and I have always been drawn to Caravaggio. He was the subject of the very first public history talk I ever gave, many years ago.
As Daniele points out, Caravaggio was an unbelievable genius who basically created what we know as the “Baroque” style that dominated the 17th century in Europe. His distinctive compositions use high-contrast, raking light, and ordinary-looking people in ways that made people wonder in awe and sometimes shock both then and even still today. He was responsible for influencing many other artists, chief among them in my book was another Italian…..Artemisia Gentileschi.
Like Caravaggio, Artemisia had a challenging life. The difference is that Caravaggio created his own challenges due to his, shall we say, “unruly” personality. Artemisia’s challenges were not of her own doing, but rather those of the men in her life — not an untypical plight for a 17th century woman.
Artemisia actually knew Caravaggio through her father Orazio, also a painter, who was highly influenced by Caravaggio and his style. Orazio taught his daughter how to paint from an early age. He was a controlling single father, raising her alone after her mother had died when Artemisia was just 12. As a painter, she turned out to have more talent than he probably could have ever imagined, and indeed in modern popular conception she has eclipsed him to such a degree that one might ask, “Orazio who?” She has been called the “Female Caravaggio,” and you can certainly see why in her surviving works.
It was through Orazio’s friendship with another artist — Agostino Tassi — that Artemisia’s life would forever change.
When she was just 17, Tassi came to her family home and raped her. There were others in the house, including a female friend of Artemisia’s, but who refused to help her. When Tassi tried to remedy the situation with promises of marriage, Artemisia fell for it and started a sexual relationship with him. But after a year when his promise turned out to be empty, she told her father who prosecuted the rape because it had damaged the family honor.
The transcript of the trial survives and has been translated into English, so we have a good idea of what went down.
It went on for months in 1612. The court forced Artemisia to undergo a public physical examination by a midwife and to swear under torture to her hands — no doubt a serious ordeal for a painter — that she was telling the truth. Tassi underwent no such thing. The benefit of the doubt was always his.
With Tassi standing right there, when asked about the truthfulness of her claims, the transcript tells us she said, “A vero, a vero, a vero” (It is true, it is true, it is true).
Eventually, Tassi was convicted of the rape, which was not actually a conviction of assault on her, but of the crime of damaging her father Orazio’s honor. Tassi got off lightly with a sentence of exile from Rome, which was never enforced.
Artemisia left Rome for Florence not long after the trial to start fresh a new life. She married another artist, Pierantonio Stiattesi. Even still, her art from the period betrays a woman going through some tough things. Many of her subjects are women in various states of dealing with “problematic” men, and one can’t help but feel that her art was imitating life. Some, like the examples I’ve included here, seem to simultaneously scream “Leave me the f**k alone” and “Don’t f**k with me or you’ll be sorry.”
She embarked on a career which would see her as a celebrated, or at least recognized, artist in her own time. She ended up painting for some of the wealthiest patrons around, including the Medici family in Italy and King Charles I of England. In 1616, she became the first woman inducted into Florence’s Academy of the Arts and Drawing at just 23 years of age.
While not all of her works betray a woman scorned, they do reflect a level of skill and depth of feeling that is inescapable. Like Caravaggio, she now has a reputation as one of the greatest painters to ever live. Not bad for a woman who was barely literate, living in a man’s world doing what was then thought of as a man’s profession, a victim of sexual assault, and a mother who lost four of her five children before they reached the age of five. She lived to be 62 or 63 years of age.
Like Caravaggio, Artemisia was a genius. Unlike him, she was a survivor.
Thank you for posting this.
I encourage everyone to subscribe to Daniele's podcast, there are some true works of art to be found there.
Some dislike the heavy accent, but it increases my immersion!
(and on top of that he is an accomplished MMA practitioner, so he'd likely kick your arse if he wanted to)
Thank you for sharing! I loved reading this :)