Italian Art & Architecture - Italy - page 1801

ART, ANGER & ARTEMESIA
Sex, fame and notoriety: the life of Artemesia Gentileschi (1593-1652) could spawn a top-rating soap
opera. One of the early baroque's greatest artists (and one of the few females), Gentileschi was born in
Rome to Tuscan painter Orazio Gentileschi. Orazio wasted little time introducing his young daughter
to the city's working artists. Among her mentors was Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, whose
chiaroscuro technique would deeply influence her own style.
At the tender age of 17, Gentileschi produced her first masterpiece, Susanna and the Elders (1610),
now in the Schönborn Collection in Pommersfelden, Germany. Her depiction of the sexually harassed
Susanna proved eerily foreboding: two years later Artemesia would find herself at the centre of a
seven-month trial, in which Florentine artist Agostino Tassi was charged with her rape.
Out of Gentileschi's fury came the gripping, technically brilliant Judith Slaying Holofernes
(1612-13). While the original hangs in Naples' Museo di Capodimonte, you'll find a larger, later ver-
sion in Florence's Uffizi. Vengeful Judith would make a further appearance in Judith and her Maid-
servant (c 1613-14), now in Florence's Palazzo Pitti. While living in Florence, Gentileschi completed
a string of commissions for Cosimo II of the Medici dynasty, as well as becoming the first female
member of the prestigious Accademia delle Arti del Disegno (Academy of the Arts of Drawing).
After separating from her husband, Tuscan painter Pietro Antonio di Vincenzo Stiattesi, Gentileschi
headed south to Naples sometime between 1626 and 1630. Here her creations would include The An-
nunciation (1630), also in Naples' Museo di Capodimonte, and her Self-Portrait as the Allegory of
Painting (1630), housed in London's Kensington Palace. The latter work received praise for its simul-
taneous depiction of art, artist and muse; an innovation at the time. Gentileschi's way with the brush
was not lost on King Charles I of England, who honoured the Italian talent with a court residency
from 1638 to 1641.
Despite her illustrious career, Gentileschi inhabited a man's world. Nothing would prove this more
than the surviving epitaphs commemorating her death, focused not on her creative brilliance, but on
the gossip depicting her as a cheating nymphomaniac.
From Mannerism to Baroque
By 1520, artists such as Michelangelo and Raphael had pretty well achieved everything
that former generations had tried to do and, alongside other artists, began distorting natur-
al images in favour of heightened expression. This movement, skilfully illustrated in Ti-
tian's luminous Assunta (Assumption, 1516-18), in Venice's I Frari, and in Raphael's La
trasfigurazione (Transfiguration, 1517-20), in the Vatican Museums' Pinacoteca, was de-
rided by later critics, who labelled it mannerism.
By the end of the 16th century, two artists who had grown tired of mannerism took very
different approaches to painting in an attempt to break the deadlock caused by their prede-
cessors.