Artemisia Gentileschi : The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art
Mary D. Garrard (Author)
Artemisia Gentileschi, widely regarded as the most important woman artist before the modern period, was a major Italian Baroque painter of the seventeenth century and the only female follower of Caravaggio. This richly illustrated volume is the first full-length study of her life and work. Its scope is broadly interdisciplinary, drawing on classical mythology, theology, literature, drama, art theory, and psychology. In a lucid and compelling style, Mary Garrard shows that the artist's powerfully original treatments of mythic-heroic female subjects - Susanna, Judith, Lucretia, Cleopatra, the Allegory of Painting - depart radically from traditional interpretations of the same themes. For instance, Gentileschi's several versions of Judith beheading the tyrant Holofernes are in sharp contrast to those of male interpreters of the Apocryphal story - who often, it seems, felt threatened by its implications. Male artists of Artemisia's time were changing Judith's image from a paragon of Hebrew chastity, strength, and courage to a beautiful but vacuous mannequin or a subtly evil temptress. Gentileschi's Judiths, in contrast, are complex, multidimensional women acting in a world that mirrors contemporary reality. The rape of Artemisia Gentileschi by the artist Agostino Tassi, a family friend, and the ensuing trial that she endured is one of the causes célèbres of art history. Although some scholars have seen Artemisia's Judiths as expressions of fantasy revenge stemming from this experience, Garrard argues that this view is an oversimplification. In persuasive terms she demonstrates that Gentileschi's images of Judith and other female heroes offer models of psychic struggle and liberation in alien and repressive environments that would have been as relevant to the ongoing seventeenth-century feminist debate - also discussed in the book - as they remain today. Appendixes include the first English translations of Artemisia's letters and of an abridged transcript of the rape trial." -- Dust Jacket
Print Book, English, 1989
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1989