by Larry WithamFEMALE BAROQUE ARTIST SEEN AS INSPIRATION FOR MODERN WOMEN
THE ITALIAN PAINTER Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1656) has
become a modern heroine of sorts, the topic of novels, countless academic
papers, and a documentary. Artemisia, who painted in the baroque style, has also
prompted the literary critic Susan Sontag to reflect on the different ways that
modern fiction writers handle historical biography.
In an essay
and book review about Artemisia, Sontag said fictional treatments of the past typically
take three approaches: the historical novel, the biographical novel, and the fictionalized
biography.
While the three
distinctions are subtle (or even non-existent), Sontag’s point is that the
first novel about the painter—a novel titled Artemisia (1947) and written by the Italian art critic Anna Banti—followed
none of the three.
Writing in
Italy during WWII, Banti had at first completed a kind of documentary novel
about Artemisia by 1945. Then the manuscript was lost in her native city of
Florence during the final battle that ousted the Germans. Naturally distraught,
Banti re-wrote the novel, but in an entirely different way. It now is a
conversation between her and Artemisia. They share their mutual hardships in a kind of dialogue, what
Sontag calls a story “about a woman of great accomplishment [Banti] haunted by
another woman of great accomplishment [Artemisia].”
Besides
Artemisia’s milestone achievements—the first woman accepted in the Florence
Academy, a friend of Galileo, and a painter of masterworks in Rome, Florence, Naples,
and London—she is remembered mostly for one great injustice. At age eighteen, she
was raped by a man who worked with her father. Her father, also a noted baroque
painter, followed Caravaggio and taught his daughter those techniques of
dramatic dark and light (known as chiaroscuro).
The father
took the rapist to trial (actually, over a stolen painting), and the trial
exposed Artemisia to great public humiliation. Having lost her mother,
Artemisia had a life-long, and problematic, relationship to her father as both only parent
and art mentor. In fictional treatments, Artemisia usually hates him for his allowing
the trial. Still, she must also love him for being her blood and her teacher. He gave her a path to professional accomplishment.
As a
literary critic, Sontag is an uber-feminist, of course. Thus, for her money,
both Banti and Artemisia had become too dependent on a male figure. For Banti, the
dependence was on her husband, the famous art historian Roberto Longhi (who, in
fact, wrote the first historical essay on Artemisia, bringing her obscure past
to the attention of the scholarly art world). In Artemisia’s case, Sontag says
she was probably too dependent on her father, and thus it shows up in fictional
treatments as well.
For
instance, in the Banti novel, Sontag notes, the most thrilling part is about
Artemisia making the daunting trip to London to join her father. By comparison,
the Banti novel has Artemisia narrating her rape simply by telling the sad tale
to Banti in conversation, then resting her head on the author’s shoulder. In short, Sontag does not find either woman modern enough.
Banti,
writing elsewhere, has said that her novel hoped to show Artemisia’s quest to
“to be justified, to be avenged, to be in command.” Artimesia is the classic
proud and indignant woman. And yet Banti’s novel is not built on the “women’s rage and women’s victimization” (Sontag's phrase) that typifies modern feminist literature. Sontag mildly regrets this, since the historical Artemisia has such potential for evoking those particular emotions.
Many years
after Banti’s effort, two more novels have told Artemisia’s story. Neither has
the experimental tone of Banti’s work, putting both of them more clearly in
Sontag’s categories for historical biography. The two novels are: Artemisia (1998) by the French author Alexandra
Lapierre and The Passion of Artemisia
(2002) by the American author Susan Vreeland. (Vreeland’s
novel will be looked at more closely in Part II).
Both the
Lapierre and Vreeland novels have had to ask: Should the novel stay with the
facts, dull as they may be sometimes? Should new significant facts be invented
to dramatize or smooth the narrative? And, finally, should the story have an
agenda—picking heroes and villains, that is—or look for a more complex story in
the factual evidence?
To
simplify, the French author Lapierre sticks with facts and adds ambiguity in
judging the characters. In contrast, Vreeland invents facts for dramatic effect
and presents her tale as a morality play with clear victims and oppressors.
The French
author Lapierre, whose Artemisia novel was translated into English in 2002, began
with a purely factual agenda. She wanted to write a nonfiction biography of
Artemisia, putting the painter and her painter-father, Orazio, “back into the historical,
religious and social contexts of the various worlds that they had inhabited.” But
to do so, she decided, would finally require her to “fictionalize elements of
the story.” The sixty pages of academic notes in the back of the novel testify
to its factual accuracy, at least in explaining why Lapierre “adopted certain
theories and why I made the choices I did.”
The “novel”
is impressive for it details, organizing its chronology of events in forty-one
sections. These bear titles ranging from “The First Five Months After the
Rape,” to “Artemisia’s Bedroom,” “Travelling between Rome and Florence,”
“Florence in Galileo’s Day,” and “The Queen’s House in Greenwich,” where Artemisia
painted ceiling panels with her father.
By the time
Lapierre wrote her novel, already “there were drawers full of doctoral theses
on Artemisia Gentileschi in universities across the United States.” Yet the
baroque painter did not fully enter upmarket commercial fiction until Vreeland seized
on the topic—to be discussed next in Part II.
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