In-Depth: Artemisia Gentileschi

Two exclusive extracts from Sheila Barker’s new book for Lund Humphries’ Illuminating Women Artists series

Extract one

To explain how Artemisia got her start as an artist, it is not enough to say that her father was a painter. Her father was a male painter, and in seventeenth-century Italy, this was quite different from being a female painter. Given the times, Artemisia could never comport herself in society as a male painter did, no matter how sublime her canvases. Moreover, to suggest that her father’s example sufficed to introduce her to the profession overlooks the degree to which emulation in early modern Italy was a gendered and inveterately homosocial phenomenon, meaning that young women hesitated to pursue art seriously unless they knew of other women who had won admiration for their achievements in this realm. 

As a motherless teenager awakening to the conditions of womanhood and to the challenges these conditions presented to her professional ambitions, Artemisia must have begun to seek out appropriate female role models in her immediate surroundings: talented, formidable women who had managed to win the admiration of society. Had Artemisia received a humanist education, we could reasonably speculate that she had perhaps found her female role models in feminist treatises such as Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women (1592/1600) or Lucrezia Marinella’s The Nobility and Excellence of Women (1601). Instead, because she received only the most basic instruction in reading and writing (as is evident from her atrocious spelling in the earliest letters of her Florentine period), she depended much more on oral histories, sermons, plays and artworks that featured famous women. Living or dead, real or legendary, they became the paradigms for her own boldly unconventional life and the living exemplars of her nascent feminism.

EXTRACT TWO: A lonely girlhood

TW: sexual assault

On 8 July 1593, Artemisia Gentileschi was born in Rome, but this did not suffice to make her a Roman citizen. Instead, she inherited the Tuscan nationality of her father, Orazio Gentileschi, a painter and occasional mosaicist who was born in Pisa thirty years earlier, to a Florentine goldsmith named Giovan Battista Lomi. Artemisia’s complex national identity was by no means unusual in a cosmopolitan capital like Rome. Nevertheless, being of ‘Florentine ancestry but born in Rome’ shaped her sense of identity, conditioned her early ambition to go to the Medici court and offered her distinct advantages when she later moved to Florence.

Whereas much is known about Orazio and his Tuscan family of painters and goldsmiths, almost nothing is known about Prudenzia di Ottaviano Montoni (c.1575–1605), the woman who brought Artemisia into the world followed by her three little brothers: Francesco, born in 1597; Giulio, born in 1599; and Marco, born in 1604. […] Prudenzia died at the age of thirty during childbirth on the day after Christmas in 1605, when Artemisia was twelve years old. In her adolescent years, Artemisia’s father lamented that ‘she was always alone and did not have anyone’. It was this solitude, however, that forged the young girl’s resilient and self-reliant character, and which created an opportunity for her to discover her interest in art.

Many years later, when she was already a mother herself, Artemisia still had poignant memories of having to take up the tasks formerly done by her mother. This much is confirmed by her earliest biography, one which, as I have argued elsewhere, was written by Cristofano Bronzini but which was clearly supplied, and thoughtfully shaped, by Artemisia herself – who is referred to in this text by the nickname ‘Mizia’ which had been given to her in her youth. Bronzini’s account begins with the vivid recollection of how ‘one day, when she was about twelve years old, [she] wanted to wear a skirt that her mother had made for her a few years earlier. Finding the skirt now to be by far too short, she decided to lengthen it by herself.’ At this point, something very momentous happened: Artemisia decided to decorate the newly adjoined fabric with ‘an embroidery design that she had invented’. So impressive was the child’s first artistic creation that the professional artists who saw it lavished praise on the young girl. According to Bronzini’s biography of Artemisia, ‘experts in the realms of design and painting . . . were convinced by what they saw that the young girl had a potential for great achievement in these arts’.

This story of the serendipitous discovery of Artemisia’s design skill derives its charm from the literary commonplaces typical of artists’ biographies. The recognition of artistic vocation in spontaneous acts of a humble nature recalls, for example, the legendary story recorded by Vasari about the initial recognition of Giotto’s talent, when he drew a sheep on a rock. Nevertheless, the story about Artemisia remains credible in its essence. Since Orazio’s house on via Margutta doubled as the location of his workshop, it is entirely plausible that visiting artists, art dealers or patrons could have seen Artemisia’s skillfully embroidered skirt. Moreover, in associating the adolescent girl’s design skills in embroidery with potential for achievement in the arts in general, including painting, these enthusiastic critics were taking only a short step, not a big leap. At the time, professional embroiderers were sought after at European courts, and the books that circulated their ingenious designs for lace and embroidery enjoyed pan-European success. Gian Paolo Lomazzo (1538–92), a major academic art theorist of that time, considered embroidery relevant to the triad of the arts of design in his 1590 treatise entitled Idea del tempio della pittura, in which he reserved his highest praises for a female practitioner, Caterina Cantoni.

Artemisia’s decision to tell Bronzini that her early textile work put her on the path to painting could be interpreted as a sign of her feminist outlook. By tracing the origin of her vocation to the embroidery skills taught to her by her mother, Artemisia and her biographer effectively associated her artistic gifts with a matrilineal line of descent, rather than a patrilineal one. The exclusion of Artemisia’s father from the story of her artistic debut carries other implications as well. According to Bronzini’s biography, Orazio had scoffed at other artists’ suggestions that his daughter should be trained in painting, and then for safekeeping, he placed her at the convent of Sant’Apollonia in Trastevere (a claim which cannot be verified at present and which no one mentioned at all in the 1512 rape trial). This insistence that Orazio had no role in her formation – except as an antagonist – inadvertently sheds light on one of Artemisia’s lifelong preoccupations: she wanted to be recognised as an independent professional of the first rank. Orazio may have agreed with Artemisia, for when he wrote to the dowager Grand Duchess of Tuscany in 1612 to implore her to protect his daughter, he boasted of Artemisia’s artistic skills but he did not identify himself as her teacher.

Sheila Barker is an art historian and writer. She is the founding director of the Jane Fortune Research Program on Women Artists at the Medici Archive Project. Her publications include the exhibition catalogue The Immensity of the Universe in the Art of Giovanna Garzoni as well as the edited volumes Artemisia Gentileschi in a Changing Light, Women Artists in Early Modern Italy, and Artiste nel chiostro (co-edited with Luciano Cinelli).

March 2022