Mary D. Garrard's Artemesia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art is, without question, an important work of scholarship. It brings before us in elaborate detail an artist who, though known to some degree, has never been the kind of household word that Caravaggio and now Guido Reni have become.
It is also important in another respect, however. Garrard's work is a monograph written from a feminist perspective by a member of the generation of feminist art historians that has come of professional age in the decade and a half since Linda Nochlin began her pioneering efforts in this area. (Garrard acknowledges her debt to this outlook and singles out her work on Gentileschi as something of a rite of passage.) Garrard's approach is happily lacking in the kind of tendentiousness often to be found in other works of this kind. If the book has its drawbacks, they are, for once, more to do with the subject than the method Garrard applies in bringing her to us.
Both as a woman and an artist, Artemesia Gentileschi cuts an intriguing figure. From the feminist point of view, she is almost too good to be true. Born in Rome in 1593 (she died in Naples in 1652), she was the daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, one of the most gifted of the Italian followers of Caravaggio. She began studying art at a very young age. At the age of nineteen, she was raped by one of her father's colleagues who had been hired as an art teacher. Although he consoled her with empty promises of marriage, he was arrested and subjected to a lengthy trial, during which, apparently, the veracity of young Gentileschi's testimony was tested with a thumbscrew. Although her attacker-teacher was convicted, the event garnered her a reputation for promiscuity that was to dog her the rest of her life.
Sexual Victimization
Nonetheless, Gentileschi pursued her vocation as a painter, following the Caravaggesque tradition of dramatic subjects revealed in high-contrast lighting but interpreting them in a highly personal way. A successful artist, she acquired an estimable name in her day, traveling widely throughout Europe and coming into contact with such figures as Marie de'Medici and Anthony van Dyck. It is partly on the basis of her travels that her reputation rests among art historians, for she was responsible for the spread of Caravaggesque ideas throughout Europe. Among feminists, Gentileschi's appeal lies in her sexual victimization and in her determination to be a different sort of woman painter, both in her art and in her life.
On one level, then, there is plenty to work with here: a relatively little-known artist who in her day faced many of the problems confronting women artists today. Certainly, the story is worth telling. Yet one cannot help wishing Gentileschi were a better painter. In a career spanning a half century, she painted two, perhaps three, first-class works. What this means is that Gerrard's monograph is a work divided against itself: a major exegesis in feminist aesthetics and methodology, it focused on a figure who in the final analysis is not the heavyweight the author would like her to be.
With few exceptions, all of Gentileschi's paintings take women as their central subjects, women ranging from the Virgin Mary to Judith to Cleopatra. Aside from an early Madonna and Child and one or two other paintings, her women are almost
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