Artemisia Gentileschi
(July 8, 1593 - c. 1652) |
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historical, religious narratives Art Work
| Name: |
Artemisia Gentileschi |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Rome, Italy |
| Nationality: |
Italian |
| Birth: |
July 8, 1593 |
| Death: |
c. 1652 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
historical, religious narratives |
| Medium: |
oil painting |
| Method: |
oil painting |
| Style: |
Baroque |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painter
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Biography
The Apocryphal story of Judith and Holofernes has always captured the imagination of painters and sculptors, especially in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Artemisia Gentileschi was certainly familiar with a painting by Caravaggio in which the Roman artist rendered Judith's bloody deed with alarming force. Gentileschi brings the figures even more closely together in the foreground and intensifies the effect of the scene by dramatic lighting. The painting is disturbing not only because of its unvarnished representation of a murder, but also because the perpetrators are women. The picture, the artist's best known, was not her only treatment of the subject. In Gentileschi's images women are depicted as strong in character, as beautiful heroines with powerful bodies who assert themselves in extreme situations. They are generally famous figures of history or legend, such as Susanna, Cleopatra, Lucretia, Bathsheba, Delilah and Esther. The artist shows them harassed or threatened by men or, as with Judith, triumphing over them.
Gentileschi was a victim male violence at first hand. At the age of eighteen she was raped by one of her teachers, Agostino Tassi, in her father's workshop, where she trained as a painter. Orazio Gentileschi did not take his erstwhile friend to court until one year later. Tassi had attempted to avoid punishment by promising to marry Artemisia, a common solution in such cases. The court case caused a scandal and dragged on for months, making Artemisia's situation still worse. Under torture by thumbscrew she was compelled to reveal every detail of the rape and to submit to gynecological examination. Although Tassi was eventually sentenced to several months imprisonment, Artemisia's reputation was ruined.
Shortly afterwards, Gentileschi married the Florentine painter Pierantonio Stiattesi and moved with him to his native city, where she bore four children in the space of a few years. She soon established herself in Florence as an influential artist, but she later separated from her husband and worked in Rome, Naples and London. As tastes changed over the decades Gentileschi found it increasingly difficult to market her type of stark realism a la Caravaggio, but she was never willing to accept less favorable terms than male artists simply because she was a woman. |
Samples of Work
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