In 17th-century Italy, you might find artist Artemisia Gentileschi wearing one of her signature opulent gowns, and mingling with nobility and fellow creatives to drum up patrons for her stunning paintings.
She craved a life surrounded by art, and even back then, Gentileschi’s peers respected her as one of the most skilled artists of her time. She’s now best known for her stirring paintings of powerful women (Lucretia, anyone?). But 400 years later, art historian Shelia Barker found herself with still-unanswered questions about the enigmatic feminist artist.
Barker, director of the Jane Fortune Research Program on Women Artists in the Age of Medici at the Medici Archive Project, dug through the Florentine archives for 10 years searching for answers. She recently published her findings in a new book, Artemisia Gentileschi. She also wrote the introduction to Lives of Artemisia Gentileschi, a collection of letters, biographies, court testimonies, and essays. Both were recently published by Getty Publications.
In a recent conversation, Barker revealed the insights she uncovered about how Gentileschi navigated the male-dominated art world, fighting against sexist societal norms with artistic skill, gumption, and a willingness to subvert expectations of womanhood to her advantage.
Erin Migdol: What questions did you have about Gentileschi that weren’t addressed in previous accounts of her life?
Sheila Barker: I didn't think it was clear why she set out to become an artist. Why, of all the daughters of artists, did she decide to become an artist and why did she make it her goal to undertake the most intellectually challenging and competitive kind of art? Why did she decide to enter the most masculinized of all the artistic realms?
EM: What did you discover?
SB: I believe that the death of her mother in her early life, and her status as the oldest child in her family who began to emulate her father, Orazio, made a difference. Maybe it's because when she was just beginning to pick up a paintbrush, her father was himself struggling to learn the principles of Caravaggio, which gave her a way of learning in pace with her father. He was her teacher, but he was a student as well.
She also had a genuine thirst for engaging with the highest forms of human intellectual endeavor. She definitely appreciated the great masters. She was interested in literature and science. She performed on stage musically and had many friendships with musicians, poets, and playwrights. This woman has a physiological need to be surrounded by creative people and to be inspired by art. Life for her is art, it’s about seeking perfection and inspiration, and striving for something beyond the ordinary.
That world had traditionally belonged to men. They were also the gatekeepers in many cases to the highest levels of patronage.
EM: One interesting thing you talk about in your book is how Gentileschi was able to take advantage of her gender, especially when it came to painting nude figures. How did she do this?
SB: There was a longstanding taboo against male artists studying the female nude because this almost always implied paying a prostitute to take off her clothes. It was even more scandalous to put your naked wife all over the walls of other men's houses. So the female nude was usually created through the artist’s study of ancient nude statues of women, perhaps some study of live models, and the imagination. But because Artemisia was female, she could have women take off their clothes in front of her with no moral impasse whatsoever. Artemisia could depict nudity for a religious, devotional painting, like Susanna and the Elders, without the viewer ever worrying that behind that imagery is a real-life situation of a man ogling a prostitute.
And I think that for men, it was kind of exciting to see a woman's body through a woman's eyes. There was a social separation of women's and men's lives except in the marriage bedroom and things like that. So men were fascinated by the idea of the harem or the women's bathhouse. They fantasized about what women say and do when they're together. Artemisia's art gave them a voyeuristic privilege of entering the sanctuary of women's lives and seeing how women see themselves and other women.
EM: She seemed quite modern in how she portrayed women’s bodies.
SB: Yes. A hundred years before her, the artist Raphael spoke of how he created his ideal of female beauty by taking the best features of many different women. It's a monolithic notion of female beauty. But Artemisia said in a letter that in a single painting, she needed to use many models, not to create one type of beauty like Raphael, but to show many types of female beauty. She saw each individual woman as a real woman, a natural example of being beautiful in and of herself. And because she stated that in a letter, setting up a paragon with Raphael, I think she was very aware of what she was doing—that she was toppling an old canon that did not allow real women to enter the pantheon of beauty. She was allowing real women to feel like goddesses. She doesn't do that in all her paintings—some of the paintings have bodies that are waxy and idealized. But in others, you look at them and you're like, "Oh, that woman had given birth," or, "She has stretch marks. She has little dimples." You feel like you could pick that model out of a lineup because the body is so specific.
EM: In your research, what did you learn about Gentileschi that surprised you?
SB: I discovered that she was not the first woman to join the art academy, the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno. She joined in 1617, but I found that in 1604, a female puppet maker joined, and then I found women before that who joined. There was never a ruling or prohibition against women joining the Academy. I think it's an important discovery because it means that there was not a glass ceiling. A glass ceiling means that a woman thinks she can rise to the top, but as she's rising, suddenly there's a real obstacle. But this was totally different. Women could hit glass that they didn't see before. There were very few written limitations about what women artists could do because what they had was not a glass ceiling, it was a dark ceiling. They didn't know what was there. The women who preceded Artemisia in joining the artists' guild did not have her bold ambitions or her talent. Yet lowly as they may have been, these women did Artemisia a big favor by providing social and legal precedents. It’s a tiny point, but it's important for me because it shows that social progress is oftentimes the result of ordinary women taking small risks in their lives.
She was also somewhat exploitative towards her female servants and spoke condescendingly and degradingly about some of the women models that she hired. She promoted the notion of women's potential, but that doesn't mean that she saw every woman in her everyday life as a sister-in-arms. It was necessary for her to uphold the best part of womanhood and separate herself from the parts that men criticized. That was the way she advanced herself. So it's complicated. I think one contribution the book makes, in a very tenuous way, is that yes, she's a feminist, but her views of womanhood are complex and changing throughout her life.
EM: What message do you hope readers take away from your book, and Gentileschi’s life?
SB: I hope it inspires people to learn more about the individual lives of women of the past and the present because our stereotypes and assumptions make it hard for us to see them as role models for our own lives. The more we learn about Artemisia's defects, and her struggles, and the complications of her life, the more we see that she went through a lot of the things that we ourselves are going through. And I think that makes her artistic achievements all the more astonishing.
