This is a 5 page paper

Read an article and explore some outside resources and write a positioning paper about Artemisia Gentilschi's later career

In this approximately 5 page double spaced paper (not including endnotes), you will apply the skills developed in class discussion of readings to the analysis of scholarly debates about Artemisia Gentileschi’s later career. Papers should include endnotes in Chicago Manual of Style format.

Instructions:

Scholarship on Artemisia has focused almost exclusively on her earlier career in Rome and Florence and has yet to incorporate the twenty years the artist worked in Naples into our understanding of her career. Though modern scholars have often seen Artemisia’s Neapolitan years as a period of decline, the seventeenth century poems studied by Jesse Locker suggest that her contemporaries greatly admired her later work, especially for its color. The early writers cite in particular her bold use of cinnabar reds and azure blues colors Caravaggio reportedly avoided because they disrupted his illusionistic effects.

For your paper, read Mann’s 2001catalog entries[pp. 296-99 (1610), pp. 355-58 (1622), pp.424-26 (1649)] for Artemisia’s three signed Susanna and the Elders and analyze how the 1649 Susanna relates to Artemisia’s earlier treatments of the theme. In 1989 Mary Garrard wrote that if Artemisia even painted the 1649 Susanna, then her late style is “strange and incomprehensible” (p.134), though she accepted the work without further comment in 2001 in the context of a discussion of the 1622 Susanna (p. 92-93). Based upon both your own comparative analysis of the three Susanna paintings and your knowledge from the course, offer your own analysis of Artemisia’s late development. Also you should do some additional reading and research beyond the catalog entries themselves, in addition to examining the color reproductions of the paintings in the exhibition catalog.