skepticlawyer

[SL: Adrien, as you all know, is a regular commenter on this blog and over at Catallaxy. A while ago, he offered us a series of occasional guest posts on matters artistic, to which we heartily agreed as Adrien has forgotten more about fine art than most of us have ever known. In light of recent comments on this thread over at Catallaxy that Ozblogistan -- and specifically, the libertarian bit of it -- could do with some more art writing, we're very pleased to present Adrien's first piece in what will be an ongoing series, on Italian early Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Enjoy].

The king of the Babylonians, Nebuchadnezzer, has sent his armies forth to conquer those who refuse to become his ‘allies’.  Again Israel, in some nether period between the Babylonian exile and the birth of Jesus Christ, is confronted with an enormous foreign army. The general Holofernes has laid seige to the city of Bethulia, cutting off its water supply. This is a religious contest. Holofernes asks what god is there but Nebuchadnezzer? The Israelites’ response, as usual, is that there is no God but G-d. Despite this defiance, the Jews are dispirited. They have decided that the one true God has abandoned them for their sins. They despair.

But in this city (which never, in fact, existed) there lives a woman of great beauty. A widow who is famous for strict piety. Rich, she wears coarse cloth. But now she dons finery, accompanied by her servant and supplied by many days-worth of kosher food. She approaches the Babylonian camp. Then, as now, beauty had power and she is shown to Holofernes’ tent. Here she tells the general that she has a plan by which Bethulia will submit without bloodshed. He believes her, or he believes her pretty face. She’s lying.

They have many meetings. Dinners really. She refuses the Babylonian cuisine, preferring her own pious fare. Before their last dinner Holofernes declares to his comrades his intentions: he will seduce this woman or be a laughing stock. What happens is much worse for him. He drinks too much at Judith’s behest. And when Holofernes is inebriated to incapacitation she takes his sword and cuts off his head. She and her servant then return to the Bethulia. Assuming the general’s success, the guards at the gate smile knowingly. They are unaware of the deadly irony.

This is not a modern army. Not even a Roman one. When made aware that they are deprived of their leader the Babylonians panic and scatter. Emboldened by Judith’s brave act the Jews rise and slaughter those left. Israel is saved.

The Book of Judith, a book not regarded by Jews or Protestants as scripture, was nevertheless affirmed as such by the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent. Judith was a popular subject in the opening decades of the 1600s for reasons of propaganda as much as anything else. The Baroque era demonstrates well that great art and excellent propaganda are not mutually exclusive, provided that the artists don’t understand the ideology too well and the ideologues don’t understand the art. Following the schism the Catholic authorities had decided to clean the house of the corruption that had alienated so much of northern Europe during the 16th century. Of course, this did not mean changing their ways but everyone else’s. The banning of the vernacular Bible was strictly enforced. And copies of such were publicly burned. Banned, also, were some of my favourite books: The Decameron, The Courtier, The Prince.

The brief for painters was to make use of the spectacular achievements in Italian art over the previous two hundred years to impress visually upon all who saw it the mysteries and superiority of the Catholic faith. At the end of the 16th century emerged a new school of painting many thought ideal for the purpose. The preeminent art critic of the time, Giovanni Bellori, remarked that the shining light of this school had come along at a time ‘when realism was not much in fashion’ and that this new style ‘avoided prettiness and vanity’ giving to its figures ‘flesh and blood’. The shining light of this new school was one Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio from Milan.

Despite his acknowledgments of excellence Bellori did not much approve of Caravaggio or his work. Many concurred. Caravaggio got into trouble occasionally for taking his gritty reality too far: saints with dirty feet. He would also get into trouble regularly with the law: arrested many times for crimes of the sword. It was illegal to carry a sword unless noble or licensed and Caravaggio was neither. Arrogant, with red-hot temper, he finally killed someone and had to flee Rome leaving a group of influential followers. Among these followers was an older man, Orazio Gentileschi, who’d been converted to the new style when he was almost forty. This style perfected chiaroscuro, a technique featuring illuminated figures against dark backgrounds. Caravaggio rendered this so realistically that adherents of the Hockney–Falco thesis, myself included, believe it to be a kind of photography. No matter, it was a new highpoint for narrative art, cinematic almost, in which the moment portrayed is the one that punctuates the highest drama. It was at that point the most visceral depiction of action yet devised. Gentileschi had four children. Only one inherited his talent, his daughter Artemisia. In 1620 she painted this:

Even critics like Catherine Puglisi — who prefer Caravaggio’s version — acknowledge that Gentileschi the Younger has surpassed the master in narrative realism. Many prefer Caravaggio’s work still. They argue that it possesses a psychological ambivalence absent in other work. However there is general agreement that Artemisia’s looks more like the real thing. Look at it. They mean business, these women. Look at their faces; look at their clothes. They are of different social rank. The smaller woman serves her that does the killing. Her job is to hold down he who is being put to death. She is small but she is strong. Her arms are muscular. They are serious women, ruthless, business-like. Germaine Greer mused that this may depict two prostitutes murdering a hapless client. Indeed Caravaggio’s work had established that duality where mythology and social realism co-exist simultaneously in the same picture. But this is not murder, it is an act of war.

What makes it so real is that the artist that created this understood what it would take for a woman to kill a much larger and more powerful individual. There are two of them. There has to be. Where Caravaggio’s painting appears ritualistic, this looks like it’s actually happening. Caravaggio’s Judith (the courtesan Fillide Melandroni) is, like the Biblical Judith, beautiful and young. But her sword arm is held at an awkward angle and Holofernes is almost co-operative. In Gentileschi’s picture he is surprised, slowly struggling out of stupor. It’s too late. Judith is serious about her work and it is almost done. He’s gone. Notice that, contrary to tradition, Gentileschi’s Judith is not especially beautiful. She is older, too. A matriarch putting something odious out of its misery. There’s nothing sadistic in her countenance but I’d wager the artist enjoys the blood. There is so much of it. It splatters Judith’s finery. It spurts from the neck in macabre jets (Artemisia pinched that from Caravaggio, he’d had first hand experience). This is the bloodiest picture Gentileschi the Younger ever painted. Among the bloodiest that anyone ever painted.

It’s thought by the pre-eminent Gentileschi scholar, Ward Bissell, to be the last commission completed for her Florentine patron Cosimo d’ Medici II. By this time she had spent years in Florence refining her technique and absorbing the work of her other major influence: Michaelangelo. But the picture is a mature version of  a painting she first executed 8 or so years before when she was a teenager. That execution is obviously more primitive. The colours are basic. Red and blue. The shading on the faces is not so nuanced and the tip of the sword actually looks more like a stain. It’s unclear who commissioned this early version, if anyone. But what is known is that the painting was executed soon after Gentileschi was raped.

The perpetrator was one Agostino Tassi, a colleague and friend of her father. A man so odious as to make Caravaggio seem a good bet for cucumber sandwiches at Lady Windemere’s. Years before he’d been arrested for assaulting a courtesan who’d had the temerity to decline him. Witnesses testified to him screaming at her: ‘whore, bitch, trollop. I’ll throw a basin of shit in your face’. He’d cut her face. Years later he boasted he’d had his wife killed. Charming guy. Then, as now, rape trials were unpleasant for those seeking justice because it was they that found themselves accused in turn. Some comfort can be had in the fact that rape is now a criminal offence. In Artemisia’s time it was an action for compensation filed by her father. She was his property and Tassi had damaged it. The trial lasted for months and created a scandal that would follow Artemsia all her life, even to London. Orazio had filed charges some months after the rape, as he’d apparently remained ignorant of it. Agostino and he had even had dinner together the day the crime took place. Justice was also delayed by the fact that after Tassi had taken Artemisia by force he promised to marry her and she agreed.

Strange as it seems today, this was then the standard solution. Rape only went to the courts if the victim was a virgin. Punishment was then meted out only if the rapist refused to marry his victim. For months afterward Artemisia had carried on an affair with Tassi assuming them to be virtually husband and wife. The charges were pressed only when it became clear that Tassi had no intention of honouring his obligations. Eventually he was found guilty, but powerful connections saw to it that he never faced his punishment: 5 years exile. He never even left the city.

Look at the painting again. Tassi was a handsome man with black hair and a beard. Is this a revenge fantasy?

That reading of Gentileschi the Younger’s Judith Slaying Holofernes is the standard one asserted by feminist advocates for the inclusion of female artists within the Canon. As the second most pre-eminent Gentileschi scholar (and feminist) Mary Garrad has acknowledged, Artemisia Gentileschi was the centrepiece of such revisionism. Germaine Greer called her the magnificent exception. A lot of such advocacy is facile and even silly. But Garrad’s work is sound, and I believe she’s right. Gentileschi the Younger had been excluded from scholarship on the period until c.1970, and I can’t think of any reason for this to be so apart from her sex. Garrad has gone further then Bissell and shown that Gentileschi not only succeeded in her time but influenced the depiction of the female figure for posterity. Those influenced include Rembrandt and Reubens. I didn’t read Garrad’s arguments on this matter; I simply looked at the paintings she cites. She’s right. The influence is obvious. Garrad argues that Gentileschi was the first female artist who set out to compete with the finest in her craft. To be the finest. She also asserts that, tho’ a celebrity, she was not taken seriously. This contradicts her other assertion and cannot be the entire truth, considering that Gentileschi was admitted to the Accademia del Disengo, the prestigious institution founded at Vasari’s suggestion by Cosimo d’Medici I (the Great) and including such talents as Michelangelo.

Still, Gentileschi’s correspondence is full of quite civil but angry complaints that she is being taken advantage of because she is female. In one, for example, she is declining a client’s requests to send preparatory drawings for a commission. The reason she gives is that she had done so previously and that the client had given them to a lesser painter who used them to create a much cheaper painting. She got nothing. “This would not have happened to me if I was a man”, she writes. I agree. Women didn’t carry swords and the justice system obviously left much to be desired. Still, she worked at the top of her field: in Rome, in Florence, in Rome again, London and Naples, the relative backwater that welcomed her as a celebrity but saw her decline largely due to the relegation of her style to the status of the recently unfashionable. This happens to the best of them, Rembrandt for example. The facts are plain however: she was successful. She was working until her death at the age of 65.

Her negligence by posterity is however also a fact. Interest in Caravaggio and his followers was rekindled at the beginning of the 20th century, but all of the authoritative tomes from this period exclude her. It is thanks both to Bissell’s excavations and feminist revisionism that we can think her current status now so official that Judith Slaying Holofernes appears in the latest Art History reference books (eg A World History of Art Hugh Honour et al) as representative of the period. Likewise in the excellent reference Art: The Definitive Visual Guide (Andrew Graham-Dixon ed). Artemisia’s painting represents the Caravaggisti in a double spread that focuses on Caravaggio’s importance. If you, as they say, come to adore the period, your preference for Caravaggio, Artemisia, her father or any of the other Caravaggisti is, I think, largely a matter both of personal feeling and the importance one ascribes to stylistic innovation, movement leadership and correspondence with the artist-as-rebel motif. For my money, however, this Judith by Gentileschi the Younger is the apex of the form. The thing that makes the early Italian Baroque remarkable is not just the vivid depiction but the social verisimilitude. These figures may illustrate scripture but they could also very well be ordinary, contemporary folk. Caravaggio’s Judith does not look like any woman on the street. Gentileschi’s does.

At her trial Artemisia repeated her testimony under torture. The device used was the sibille, which consisted of cords tied around the knuckles of the witness and tightened, causing agony. Gentileschi consented to this cruelty and repeated the truth of her statement in front of the accused to whom she cried: “this is the ring that you give me and these are your promises!” She was 17 when she was raped. She finished the first version of this picture by her 20th birthday. But exactly when, and in what circumstances, she began work on the first Judith Slaying Holofernes is unknown. Some feminists attribute the warring sexes theme that runs through her oeuvre to the rape. I disagree. It appears beforehand in her version of Susanna and the Elders (executed in 1610). This was subject to centuries of argument about date and authorship, grounded in the skepticism that such a young girl could be so skilled.

However when she began this Judith it isn’t much of a stretch to think that her fingers were still swollen and sore from the sibille. That she herself — her future in doubt at the time as a fallen woman — was bitterly angry and expressed this anger by depicting one of the few female heroes in Western literary history at grisly work.

We shall never know. She was one of the finest, but still merely labouring a trade. A prestigious trade and a prestigious tradeswoman but nonetheless one who worked and with her hands. At the time they were, as Shakespeare put it, unvalued persons. The internet is awash with various feminist takes on the rape in connection with this picture. I tend to agree with Mary Garrad that this is a facile reduction. But what is obvious is often the truth of the matter, and the link cannot be denied. She would not be human if Artemisia had not put her scorched feelings into the picture. How sad and sadly unsurprising that history’s first significant female artist should be forever linked with male sexual venality.