SYMHC Classics: Artemisia Gentileschi

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileski is going to come up in one of our upcoming episodes, so we are bringing out our episode on her as Today's Saturday Classic. This episode originally came out on March fourth, twenty fifteen.

00:00:17
Speaker 2: In this episode, we mentioned that we are going to put the paintings we are talking about on our pinterests so people can see them, and we did do that, but unfortunately a while back, we had to archive several of our pinterest boards because our website moved to a new platform and eventually all of those old links no longer worked, which meant all the pins were broken. That included the bord where we had pinned all of this artwork. But fortunately, her artwork is all over the web, and a search for something like Artemisia Gentileski art should bring it right up, even if you muddle up the spelling of her name. I checked, yes, so enjoy.

00:00:57
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

00:01:09
Speaker 2: I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V.

00:01:11
Speaker 1: Wilson. Today's topic is often called the greatest female painter of the Baroque period. But that's kind of one of those things that makes me chuckle because there weren't very many women painters to speak of during that time, though there were a couple of others in addition to today's topic, but today's subject was quite extraordinary. We've had a couple of requests for this one, but the most recent one came from mother and daughter Shelley and Annie, and also, interestingly enough, right before we came into the studio today, I got another one from another listener named Sophie. I believe I'm going from memory, so apologies if that is wrong. So we are talking about artmedia. Gentileski and I have to issue a trigger warning because this episode does talk about sexual assault and it's not something we can kind of skip through really quickly because it's part of an event in the artist's life that was quite significant. So if that is a topic that you would rather not hear or share with younger listeners, be advised this may not be the episode for you. We're also going to do something a little bit different here, and before we actually get into Artemisia's story, we're going to talk about her father, Orazzio Gentileski, because he was a vital part of his daughter becoming a painter. He is an important figure in art history and his own right, and because the pair did collaborate, we just wanted to give you a little bit of context on him, because he is referenced a good bit and he's, as we said, pretty important. So we're going to start with Orazzio's story. Arazzio was born Orazzio Lomi in fifteen sixty two in Pisa, Italy, and when he was still a young man, so not a child anymore, Lomi moved to Rome, and the timing of this move is uncertain, but most historians will date it somewhere around the late fifteen seventies or early fifteen eighties. He would have been roughly twenty at this time. As a caveat sort of going forward with this episode, almost any date that we mentioned, without with a few exceptions, are going to be approximated, and we'll talk about that some a little bit later. But anytime you look up the work of Arazzio or Artemisia, when you see their works painted, they're always circa these years or these years, So just know we'll use some specific years, but it's really kind of a it was around this time, so Arazzio, like we said, would have been about twenty when he moved to Rome in the fifteen seventies or early fifteen eighties, and this is also roughly the time when he started painting. Early on in his time in Rome, Arazzio worked on church frescoes in collaboration with Agostino Tassi. Tassi was a really well known landscape painter, and together the pair decorated the walls of the Santa Maria Maggiore, San Giovanni La Terrano, and Santa Nicola. I'm not quite sure exactly when Orazzi Lomi changed his name to Gentilesci, but he did and in the early seventeenth century he became heavily influenced by Caravaggio. And of course Caravaggio is known for his use of contrast. He offset light areas by deepening the shadows around them, and this is known as tenebrism, and this created incredibly dramatic paintings. Yeah, there are many other things that Caravaggio is known for, but that's kind of one of the things that when you're doing a quick art history course, they'll mention his use of light and dark in contrast to create great drama, and right around sixteen hundred, when Arazzio was thirty seven and his daughter at this time would have been about seven, Caravaggio completed two paintings that would create this significant shift in the art world and give rise eventually to what was called the Baroque style. The Calling of Saint Matthew and The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, which are two paintings that he did roughly at the same time, introduced this signature signature style of light and show shadow that were juxtaposed for both dynamic tension and also a high level of realism.

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Speaker 2: Arazzio Gentileski was mesmerized by Caravaggio, and the two of them became friends and drinking buddies for a while. Their camaraderie didn't really last, though both of the men had reputations for being really hot headed, but Arozzio's work from this period shows a Caravaggio's sway in his style. Erazzio's paintings David and Goliath, Saint Cecilia and an Angel, and his sixteen oh nine piece Madonna and Child really bear a clear mark of his admiration for Caravaggio.

00:05:38
Speaker 1: And of course Arozzio's style did continue to evolve, and while that Caravaggio influence remained in his work, the paintings that Gentileski produced going forward started to favor this sort of lighter color palette, and it also reintegrated the mannerist style that he had studied when he was younger.

00:05:58
Speaker 2: In sixteen twenty three, he paidinted what's considered to be his masterpiece. It was called The Annunciation. This painting features the Virgin Mary and the Angel Gabriel, and there's still a level of drama and immediacy about the composition, but it's less visually heavy than the two that we mentioned a moment ago.

00:06:19
Speaker 1: And just a few years after he painted The Annunciation, Arazzio was invited to England by King Charles, the first to become court painter.

00:06:28
Speaker 2: To finish out his artistic career, Arazzio worked alongside his daughter Artemisia on a huge project in the Queen's House in Greenwich. Throughout sixteen thirty eight. The father daughter team painted the ceiling panels there. Yeah, we'll talk about those a little bit more later. And that's just like I said. A quick mini biography of Arazzio, And before we get into Ardemisia's specific story, do you want to have a word from a sponsor, Yes, I do so.

00:07:03
Speaker 1: Arazzio's daughter, Artemisia Gentileski, was born in Rome, Italy, on July eighth of fifteen ninety three, to of course, her father Orozzio and her mother, Prudencia Montoni. When Artemisia was twelve, which was in sixteen oh five, her mother died in childbirth, and at that point it seemed likely that she was probably going to be sent to a convent to become a nun. But over the.

00:07:26
Speaker 2: Next several years, Arazzio became aware that his daughter had artistic leanings and he started to teach her how to paint.

00:07:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, he also had sons, and he was kind of teaching all of his children, but Artemisia was really the one that stood out as having a real talent for this, and she produced her earliest signed work in sixteen ten, at the age of seventeen, and that's called Susanna and the Elders, And this painting depicts the biblical story of Susanna who rejected two men and is then accused by them of adultery in retribution for her unwillingness to be with them, and in Gentileski's version, the two men are very conspiratorial. One is whispering in the ear of the other, and while Susannah, who is unclothed, holds up her hands as if to shield herself from their words. The next year, and back to the warning that we had at the top of the podcast, would turn into a really harrowing one. On May sixth of sixteen eleven, Artemisio was raped by her father's colleague, Augustino Tassi. This is the same landscape painter that her father worked on church frescoes with. For historical context, at the time, rape was not really viewed quite the same way we do today. It was not so much considered an affront to the female victim or a brutalization of her. It was looked at a little bit more as an insult to her family. So the retribution that Arazzio demanded was that Tassi must marry his daughter. This is actually not uncommon in sort of the kind of sexual interactions of the day, that a man would take a woman by force and eventually end up married to her as part of an agreement with the family and Initially, Agustino Tassi agreed to this. He was actually already already married. There's some question marks around that, and he apparently used this promise that he was going to marry Artemisia as leverage to continue his sexual relationship with her. But eventually he backed out of the deal and said he was not going to marry her after all.

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Speaker 2: Tassi's reversal on the matter sent Aratzo into a fury. He sought legal action against his associate, and this resulted in the episode of Artemisia's life that often eclipsed her work. It was a trial that dragged on for nearly eight months, and the transcript of this trial still exists, and it's more than three hundred pages long.

00:09:56
Speaker 1: And I will confess I did not read it because it is an Italian but I read various excerpts in translation. Just fyi. And even though we mentioned it at the top of the episode, and Tracy mentioned it again just a moment ago, I really feel like I should issue a quick warning before we get into sort of talking about the testimony, because it's very upsetting, not just for the actual event that happened, but how the victim was treated in the process.

00:10:20
Speaker 2: Of all of this, so Artemisia had to testify repeatedly during these proceedings, and in her account, she said that Tossi stormed into her father's studio while she was painting. And because her father was a working painter with a studio at his home, people did come and go all.

00:10:36
Speaker 1: The time, and according to her testimony, she said that Tossi came in yelling not so much painting repeatedly, and then he took her tools from her and threw them on the floor and then proceeded to attack her. She fought back, but she was overpowered. She actually turned a knife on him. After it was over.

00:10:55
Speaker 2: It wasn't enough that she gave this testimony. The veracity of her statement had to be tested. It was tested by torture, using thumb screws to see if she would change her story under duress, but she remained steadfast in her account and eventually referred to the torture device when yelling at her attacker, this is the ring you gave me, and these are your promises. It's very hard for me to think about that, especially because Agostino Tassi faced no such torture when it came to his testimony. Even though he had at best a checkered history, and he gave obviously contradictory testimony. Records indicate that the judge would even stop him periodically and go, wait, that's completely different than what you said before. He had been imprisoned prior to this for incest, and he had told multiple witnesses that he had been sleeping with Artemisia, But then during the trial, even though those witnesses had testified to those conversations, he said that he had never had a sexual relationship with her and that he would only visit the house to protect her virginity from other would be rapists. So his story kept changing, and he also claimed that she had slept with her father, and that her mother and her aunt, who were women that he did not know, were in fact whoors, and he insinuated that prostitution was something of a family tradition, and even at one point suggested that her father had sold her to other men. In short, he was utterly vile and just said horrible things, and he did not have to face this horrible torture that she did. He didn't even have to really face his sentence. He was found guilty and exiled from Rome for five years, but it appears that his exile was not enforced. And a note on the timeline, We're going to jump back a little bit and talk about that painting that we mentioned earlier. So, because the dates of Artemisia's paintings are generally all approximated, some people place her painting of Susannah and the Elders in different positions, suggesting slightly different interpretations of the work. So scholars that place it as being painted just prior to the rape suggest that she may have been expressing a scenario in which she had been fending off the advances of her father's friends for a while already, and we do know some of that was going on. There was another man in addition to Augustino Tassi, named Cosimo Corli, who had been pretty sexually aggressive with her and had perhaps even attempted to rape her as well. So the idea of.

00:13:19
Speaker 1: The two men in the painting being Corley and Tassi is certainly one possibility and is a popular interpretation. Alternately, when scholars placed the painting of Susannah concurrently on the timeline with the trial, or just prior but after the rape, it's perceived more as a statement about her defense of her virtue having been taken from her and her being innocent in all of it.

00:13:42
Speaker 2: After the Tassi ornell Artemisia did marry and she married another painter, and this is a match that was arranged by her father. Her husband, Pierantonio de Vicenzo Stia Tesi, was also a painter, and the couple left Rome and headed to Florence. Arazzio had already written to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany on his daughter's behalf, asking for a patronage. The patronage was granted and Artemisia and her husband stayed in Florence for almost a decade. While she was there, she was producing works for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Kuosimud di Medici, and she became really ingrained in the art world there and she made a lot of friends. She even became friends with famed astronomer Galileo. One of the paintings that Artemisia worked on during her time in Florence was Judith's Slaying Holofernes, And as with Susannah and the Elders, it focuses on a female character, and in this case that's Judith and she's killing the Assyrian military leader holophernes to save the Jewish people of Bethulia, and this painting is quite graphic. Her painting shows Judith cutting the general's throat with the assistance of a handmaiden, and in a follow up painting entitled Judith and her maid Servant, the two women are depicted after the general's defeat, carrying the head of Holophernies in a basket. A popular theory about these paintings, particularly the first, is that this was part of how Gentileski was working through her experience of having been sexually assaulted and then having to go through the horror of that long trial, and that depicting a woman enacting such brutal violence on a male figure was something of a revenge statement when the painting was unveiled. This, of course, is all speculative, though it's all art interpretation, and also as a counterpoint, there are scholars who are quick to point out that there was definitely a taste for violence and gore amongst art patrons at the time, so she may well have just been making lucrative decisions about her work subjects. There's a two thousand and two interview with Smithsonian in which Judith Man, who's a curator of early European art at the Saint Louis Art Museum at the time, and she mentioned that while a lot is made of Artemisia's work being vengeful in nature, fewer than a quarter of the painter's works feature women in that vein. And before we get to what happens to Artemisia after she leaves Florence, do you want to have another quick word from a sponsor, let's do so.

00:16:19
Speaker 1: Back to Artemisia around sixteen twenty, she was ready to leave Florence. She and her husband had had four children together, but three of them did not make it past childhood. They died, and moreover, her marriage was not a particularly happy one. Pierre Antonio had a problem with spending money more quickly than they were taking it in, and he's alleged to have cheated on her repeatedly, and just sort of that. They had a contentious and unhappy union.

00:16:47
Speaker 2: So, perhaps hoping for a fresh start, Artemisia, Parantonio and their surviving child, who was named Prudentia, moved to Rome, and, as had been the case in Florence, the painter made friends within the art community, and this put a strain on her already crumbling marriage. Pier Antonio actually slashed the face of one of Artemisia's male acquaintances, and not long after that he left the marriage for good, leaving behind his daughter as well. So roughly ten to twelve years after she had painted the image of Judith and her maid servant carrying the severed head of Holophernes, Artemisia revisited that same subject of Judith again in her work, and this was somewhere around sixteen twenty three or sixteen twenty five, so it was during her time in Rome, and the painting that she created at this point was Judith and her maid servant with the head of Holofernes. This time it's still a depiction of two women and again after the beheading, and it's in a way that creates tension and urgency. The scene is lit by candle light, and that candle light itself is part of the composition. The light and shadows she creates around that light source are just incredible. Even the gossip fabric that's draped over one of Judith's shoulders is affected by the light of the flame in a way that makes the candle almost seem like it must be flickering. There's also a less This is also a less brutal representation of the story than the earlier works. There's a lot less gore. Yet it feels a little bit more like it is less about the murder and more about the two women, if that makes sense. I will be pinning all of these on Pinterest, and then our listeners can go and kind of get a sense of what we're talking about and decide for themselves how they feel.

00:18:33
Speaker 1: Like it looks. And while she was not the toast of Rome the way that she had been in Florence, and this was largely due to shifting tastes among art patrons, Gentileski did receive a commission from King Philip the fourth of Spain in sixteen twenty seven, and this particular project provided her enough money that she could stay afloat and also support her daughter.

00:18:56
Speaker 2: In sixteen thirty, the Bubonic plague took a huge t on Venice that killed a third of the people there, and to escape the sickness, Gentileski moved to Naples.

00:19:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, this, other than a brief fora elsewhere which we're about to talk about, Naples really became her home for the rest of her life. Around sixteen thirty eight or sixteen thirty nine, depending on when you look, but most favor sixteen thirty eight, she went to London to work with her father on the Queen's House for Queen Henrietta Maria, and she had resisted several requests to go to London prior to this, in part because she did not want to work for the Anglican king, although Queen Henrietta Maria was Roman Catholic. But frankly, her work had really dried up in Italy. She was having trouble making ends meet, so she finally acquiesced on this trip to London. During the work on a house at Greenwich, Arazzio died, and that was in February of sixteen thirty nine. Artemisia stayed in London for a couple of more years, but as soon as she had work back in Italy, she went back to Naples. Yeah, and she continued to work for the rest of her life. But she died in Naples around sixteen fifty two. She would have been approximately fifty nine at that time, and while she had been painting, really most art scholars kind of regard her earlier works as her best work. So for a long time, Artemisia's works were actually attributed to other artists, and this was in part due to the fact that her father had been her primary teacher, as well as the fact that she was a woman, and there are even sort of ongoing debates about this. We mentioned earlier that Susannah and the Elders was her first sign painting, and that was in about sixteen ten, But there is another piece called Madonna and Child from sixteen oh nine that is sometimes credited to Artemisia and sometimes to her father. We mentioned it earlier as one of her father's pieces, but that continues to be some debate about it. Even though Susannah and the Elders has her signature, it was long believed to be her father's work because a lot of people found it really difficult to believe that a young woman of seventeen could paint with that much maturity, and also because she was a woman, that rape that had so affected her life we mentioned earlier sometimes really overshadowed her abilities in her work, and having been part of a rape trial basically cast doubt on her sexuality and her honor for her entire life, even though the aggressor had been found guilty, it still just kind of put a stain on her reputation. And even prior to that assault, her reputation was constantly questioned because of the open nature of her father's studio and the men and women who often visited as both colleagues and models. Just the idea that she was exposed to so many people coming and going led to some rumors about her. So while her talent was really obvious, people really wanted to talk about the possible scandals attached to her. Her amazing skill in the amazing work she is doing. For her own part, she readily recognized and openly discussed her struggles working in a field that was dominated by men. In a letter to a patron later in her life, she described the tiresome nature of trying to defend her work as her own and the fight to get a fair price for it. She wrote, you feel sorry for me because a woman's name raises doubts until her work is seen. If I were a man, I can't imagine it would have turned out this way. But it's also important to note that there was also a lot of a claim for her in her lifetime, and in fact, some scholars have suggested that because of the huge scandal when she was seventeen, it actually kind of opened the door for her to be able to paint some of her more gory and graphic pieces. That it was more accepted for her at that point to be able to do those things, but still again an issue of debate. In sixteen thirty five, though, she wrote this note to her friend Galilee quote, I have seen myself honored by all the kings and rulers of Europe, to whom I have sent my works, not only with great gifts, but also with most favored letters, which I keep with me.

00:23:11
Speaker 2: Those ceiling panels that she and her father worked on together in London were removed from the Queen's House and now they're in Marlborough House in London. And in two thousand and two, so it's more than a decade ago, but quite neat the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted an exhibit entitled Arazzio and Artemisio Gentileski, father and daughter painters in Baroque Italy, and the works of both of the artists were featured together, which is kind of a lovely wait to sum up their lives and how they affected one another, and we'll link to We have one of the catalogs from that exhibition was one of my sources, so we'll have a link to that in the show notes. And it's worth a look because it's very interesting to see sort of the lineage and development of style. You can see like the Caravaggio style and a lot in her father's work, and then it evolves in his work, and then her work kind of evolves it some more. It's it's pretty interesting to look at if you're into art history. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Our old house Stuffworks email address no longer works. You can find us all over social media at Missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or where whoever you listen to your favorite shows.