Artemisia Gentileschi:
From Obscurity to Celebrity and Myth
“ I think Your Most Illustrious Lordship will not suffer any loss with me and that you will find the spirit of Caesar in this soul of a woman.”“ And I will show Your Most Illustrious Lordship what a woman can do.” Letters from Artemisia Gentileschi to her patron Don Antonio Ruffo, 1649
Artemisia Gentileschi( 1593-1653) Susanna and the Elders 1610 oil on canvas 67 x 47” Schloss Weißenstein, Pommersfelden, Germany
Artemisia Gentileschi( 1593-ca. 1653), an Italian Baroque artist, was the first woman elected to the Florentine Accademia del Disegno. She attained renown among noble and cultured patrons in Italy and abroad, and then faded into obscurity for 300 years after her death. All that began to change in the late 20th century when feminist art historians began to seriously address the neglect of women artists in art history, generally, and sparked especially Linda Nochlin’ s seminal essay,“ Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”( 1971)
The first I ever heard of Artemisia was after I found The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work( 1979) on the library’ s new books rack. Author Germaine Greer entitled her chapter on Artemisia“ The Magnificent Exception,” describing her as“ the great painter of the war between the sexes” with her violent, bloody depiction of Judith Beheading Holofernes appearing on the facing page( likely not by accident). This identity as a protofeminist, or even an archetypal one, would attain mythic and heroic status in the popular imagination by the 21st century.
Witness a blurb promoting the 2015 television documentary Michael Palin’ s Quest For Artemisia:
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