Who Was Artemisia Gentileschi

Any work of fiction about history or a historical person is and must be a work of the imagination, true to the time and character always, but true to minor facts only so long as fact furnishes believable drama.
In order to serve my chosen thematic focus, I have combined actual people into composite characters. Artemisia Gentileschi's daughter Palmira represents her two daughters, Palmira and Prudenzia. Her friend and agent, Don Francesco Maringhi, represents several men, her clerk and her agent. I have eliminated other characters, most conspicuously her brothers and two sons; and have invented still others, the nuns and her models. Using what evidence is known, I have imagined the personalities and interaction of Artemisia, her father and her husband. However, the trial record and her associations with Galileo, Cosimo de' Medici II, and Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger are documented in art histories. All paintings referred to are actual works indisputably ascribed to her in roughly the same chronology.
Like a painter who clothes figures from centuries earlier in the garb of his or her own time, so have I sought to render Artemisia Gentileschi in a way meaningful to us three and a half centuries later, yet concordant with the soul and passions of the real Artemisia Gentileschi, for whom the story behind the art was always vital.

This historic Artemisia, born in 1593 in Rome and died in 1653 in Naples, was the first woman to paint large scale historical and religious paintings, the first woman to be admitted into the Accademia dell' Arte del Disegno in Florence, the first woman to make her living by her brush, the only female artist to adopt Caravaggism, and most significantly, one of the greatest artists of the Italian Baroque (17th century).

Taking her subjects not from genre paintings (domestic scenes) or still lifes, which were common to the few women painters of her time, Artemisia plunged into large scale figure paintings of historic subjects, even at the age of seventeen. Apparently fearless of potential criticism of her departure from the more conventional and unchallenging works executed by women prior to her emergence, Artemisia chose subjects in the true Baroque spirit: historic stories frozen en medias res, realistic portrayals of individual human beings in moments of decision, dramatic scenes of danger and tension, many of them executed in the Caravaggist style of tenebroso, the use of strong contrast between light and dark, the light areas directing our attention to the most telling aspects of the paintings.

Artemisia had one advantage over the male painters contemporary to her: She could paint women from nude models, a practice not permitted at the Accademia. Therefore, her nude paintings of Susanna and Cleopatra were rare works at the time. As for her heroic women, most notably Judith, but also Lucretia, she expressed a feminist sensibility decrying the image of women as meek and questioning the necessity of suicide after rape or humiliation. In addition, she had one skill undeveloped by some of the other painters of her time: she was able to change her style based on regional and fluctuating tastes.

I wish to acknowledge Mary D. Garrard's Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton University Press, 1989), which was an invaluable scholarly source for me in researching Artemisia's life and the principal source for my interpretation of her individual paintings. It includes the actual testimony of the rape trial of 1612. Other valuable sources were Germaine Greer's The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work, (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979) and R. Ward Bissell's Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art: Critical Reading and Catalogue Raisonné (Pennsylvania University Press, 1999). More recent but not available to me when I wrote the novel, is Mary Garrard's Artemisia Gentileschi Around 1622: The Shaping and Reshaping of Artistic Identity, (University of California Press, 2001).

The Image Gallery of this site shows the major works appearing in the novel with chapter references, and lists Artemisia's paintings in the museums of the United States.

Other Artemisia sites:

Life and Art of Artemisia Gentileschi, an annotated gallery of twenty eight paintings with details of the artist's life at the time they were painted.

Artemisia Gentileschi on the Internet, Artcyclopedia links