Artemisia Gentileschi e il suo tempo (review)

Bearing witness to the unflagging enthusiasm for Artemisia Gentileschi's art, the exhibition Artemisia Gentileschi e il suo tempobrings the tally to five exhibitions on this artist in just twenty-five years; or seven, if we include the 2010 Florence exhibition, Caravaggio e caravaggeschi a Firenze, featuring seven of her works, and the 2013 focus exhibition at Wellesley College, Violence and Virtue: Artemisia Gentileschi'sJudith Slaying Holofernes.

While not immediately manifest in the exhibition (curated by Nicola Spinosa, Francesca Baldassari, and Judith Mann), or even in the hefty catalog (with essays by the co-curators, as well as Jesse Locker, Anna Orlando, Cristina Terzaghi, and Maria Beatrice De Ruggeri), the justification for this latest exhibition was nonetheless clearly articulated by Spinosa. At a press conference timed with its opening, he described the show as a corrective to the many misconceptions people hold about the artist, above all the notion that her artistic production was strongly influenced by her experience of being raped in 1611 (for Spinosa, the assault was "del tutto marginale," or "hardly relevant," to her art); and the presumption that she was a Caravaggist painter "tout court." ¹Spinosa's position on the irrelevance of the assault, along with many other biographical aspects, to the understanding of her art sharply rebuts the premise of such exhibitions as the 2011 Artemisia Gentileschi. Storia di una passione, held in Milan's Palazzo Reale, and the aforementioned Violence and Virtue. By contrast, Spinosa's contention that Artemisia's art cannot be reduced to Caravaggism is, in truth, far less controversial than he would have us believe: the diversity of her artistic sources has been widely acknowledged, beginning with Mary D. Garrard's 1989 monograph.

Most visitors probably experienced this exhibition unaware of this polemical posturing. What they did tend to notice was that the show included works by thirty-eight other artists that made up more than twice the number of Artemisia's own works. Some of these works by other artists lacked a clear connection to Artemisia's oeuvre. One of the more memorable examples is Tarquinius's Rape of Lucretiaby Felice Ficherelli, painted in Florence around 1640, two decades after Artemisia's departure from the city. Ficherelli's Lucretia meekly smiles at her aggressor, and is so uncommitted to her own defense that she holds her thighs coquettishly open, unperturbed by the vicinity of her assailant's unsheathed knife, while the scene delights the eye with a saccharine palette of colors applied with feathery softness. In the context of a show dedicated to Artemisia, the inclusion of this anodyne and eroticized scene of sexual violence seemed to be a deliberatively provocative choice. Perhaps the aim was to demonstrate that violent subjects were an established part of the Baroque repertory, and that the artists who depicted them did not necessarily have a personal experience with such traumas. Be that as it may, the striking difference between Artemisia's resolute and valiant heroines and Ficherelli's pliant victims underlines the relevance of gendered perspectives to any explanation of Artemisia's artistic strategy.

Another painting whose inclusion may have confounded visitors is the Ariadne Abandoned by Theseusattributed by Baldassari to a Tuscan painter, Francesco Morosini, and which she dates to about 1625–30. Despite its dating, it was located in the exhibition's section on Artemisia's Florence period extending from 1613 to 1620. Why was Morosini's painting placed in this room? In the catalog for the 1991 exhibition, Artemisia, Roberto Contini published the same painting in order to compare the figure of Ariadne with the queen in Artemisia's Esther Before Ahasuerus, a work made long after she left Florence. ²In her catalog entry for Morosini's painting, Baldassari acknowledges that this was her purpose as well, arguing that Artemisia must have based her pose of Esther on...