Artemisia Gentileschi in a Changing Light ed. by Sheila Barker (review)

Artemisia Gentileschi in a Changing Light is the fourth title in The Medici Archive Project/Brepols Medici Series. The volume serves as a record of the 3rd Annual Jane Fortune Conference organized by the Jane Fortune Research Program at the Medici Archive Project held in Florence, 6–7 May 2015, "Artemisia Gentileschi: Interpreting New Evidence, Assessing New Attributions." Most of the speakers from that conference expanded their presentations here, and the twelve published essays clearly signal that scholarship on Artemisia Gentileschi continues to focus on connoisseurship and attribution, but it has also grown in directions that at one time seemed unlikely.

Interest in Gentileschi was sparked by the Women's Movement of the 1960s as Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (1974–79) brought the painter and her sexual assault to the attention of a broader public and made her seventeenth-century life relevant to a generation of women claiming rights and demanding justice. Mary Garrard's 1982 article, "Artemisia and Susanna," was, in some respects, a case study responding to Linda Nochlin's 1971 "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" Both Nochlin and Garrard focused on artists' educations and opportunities as well as society's expectations of and limitations imposed on women, with Garrard exploring the artist's biography and connecting Artemisia's early life to her development as a painter. Garrard's subsequent monograph, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (1989), cemented the painter's place in feminist art historical analysis. Feminist approaches continue to reward Gentileschi scholars, and Garrard reminds us in her current contribution, "Identifying Artemisia: The Archive and the Eye," of Artemisia's position among protofeminists, such as the Venetian Lucrezia Marinella, whose writings on powerful women the painter likely became familiar with while in Venice from 1627 to 1630.

Garrard's primary focus in her essay is on "the intrinsic Artemisia," here defined as the painter's sense of her own artistic identity (13). Garrard's compelling visual analysis of the painter's work is in the service of revealing how Artemisia "aspired to artistic greatness in terms that were set by earlier ambitious artists" (14). For Garrard, Gentileschi was not only influenced by Michelangelo and Caravaggio, but presented herself as their equal. To illustrate, Garrard compares a work recently attributed to Artemisia—the Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy from a private collection and currently at the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp—with Caravaggio's painting of the same subject (believed to be lost but known through numerous copies). Compositionally similar, as Garrard details, "Artemisia's Magdalene deviates from Caravaggio subtly but significantly. She is a more specific model, slightly plump and rather homely. Even more particular than Caravaggio's Magdalene, she is in a certain sense more 'real,' for she lacks the skull on which Caravaggio's figure leans, to ground her religious identity. With her eyes rolled back and lips parted, Caravaggio's Magdalene is recognizably in a state of anguish or ecstasy. … Artemisia's calmer figure might not be the Magdalene at all, simply a young woman tilting her head back, closing her eyes to meditate or dream" (16). Indeed, this Magdalene is more like Caravaggio's earlier depiction of the saint, described by Giovanni Pietro Bellori in the seventeenth century as an image of a woman pretending to be the Magdalene. Garrard concludes, "In producing a Magdalene inspired by both of Caravaggio's paintings, Artemisia shows her understanding of the master's radical innovation. Yet when her version is compared to its compositional point of departure, we can see that she goes farther than Caravaggio in giving the Magdalene a believable modernity. Artemisia's saint does not weep or moan in ecstasy, and there are no attributes. … We know that she is Mary Magdalene because she references Caravaggio's picture, which, in comparison, now looks theatrical and staged. This is competitive painting at its best, for Artemisia has...