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The Baroque Period

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The Baroque Period

Defining the Baroque Period

Baroque is a period of artistic style that started around 1600 in Rome, Italy, and spread throughout the majority of Europe.

Learning Objectives

Name the most prominent characteristics of Baroque art and its best known artists

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• The most important factors during the Baroque era were the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation ; the development of the Baroque style was considered to be closely linked with the Catholic Church. The popularity of the Baroque style was encouraged by the Catholic Church, which had decided at the Council of Trent that the arts should communicate religious themes and direct emotional involvement in response to the Protestant Reformation .

• The Baroque style is characterized by exaggerated motion and clear detail used to produce drama, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture , painting, architecture, literature, dance, and music.

• The chiaroscuro technique refers to the interplay between light and dark that was often used in Baroque paintings of dimly lit scenes to produce a very high-contrast, dramatic atmosphere.

• Famous painters of the Baroque era include Rubens, Caravaggio, and Rembrandt. In music, the Baroque style makes up a large part of the classical canon, such as Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi.

• The later Baroque style was termed Rococo , a style characterized by increasingly decorative and elaborate works.

Key Terms

• Counter-Reformation: The period of Catholic revival beginning with the Council of Trent (1545–1563) and ending at the close of the Thirty Years’ War (1648); sometimes considered a response to the Protestant Reformation.

• Reformation: The religious movement initiated by Martin Luther in the 16th century to reform the Roman Catholic Church.

• Council of Trent: One of the Roman Catholic Church’s most important ecumenical meetings, held between 1545 and 1563 in northern Italy; it was prompted by the Protestant Reformation and has been described as the embodiment of the Counter-Reformation.

• chiaroscuro: An artistic technique popularized during the Renaissance, referring to the use of exaggerated light contrasts in order to create the illusion of volume.

Overview: The Baroque Period

The Baroque is a period of artistic style that started around 1600 in Rome , Italy, and spread throughout the majority of Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries. In informal usage, the word baroque describes something that is elaborate and highly detailed.

The most important factors during the Baroque era were the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, with the development of the Baroque style considered to be linked closely with the Catholic Church. The popularity of the style was in fact encouraged by the Catholic Church, which had decided at the Council of Trent that the arts should communicate religious themes and direct emotional involvement in response to the Protestant Reformation. Baroque art manifested itself differently in various European countries owing to their unique political and cultural climates.

Characteristics

The Baroque style is characterized by exaggerated motion and clear detail used to produce drama, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, architecture, literature, dance, and music. Baroque iconography was direct, obvious, and dramatic, intending to appeal above all to the senses and the emotions.

The use of the chiaroscuro technique is a well known trait of Baroque art. This technique refers to the interplay between light and dark and is often used in paintings of dimly lit scenes to produce a very high-contrast, dramatic atmosphere. The chiaroscuro technique is visible in the painting The Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Paul Rubens. Other important Baroque painters include Caravaggio (who is thought to be a precursor to the movement and is known for work characterized by close-up action and strong diagonals) and Rembrandt.

The Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Paul Rubens: Chiaroscuro refers to the interplay between light and dark and is a technique often used in paintings of dimly lit scenes to produce a very high-contrast, dramatic atmosphere. This technique is visible in this painting by Peter Paul Rubens.

In the Baroque style of architecture, emphasis was placed on bold spaces , domes , and large masses , as exemplified by the Queluz National Palace in Portugal. In music, the Baroque style makes up a large part of the classical canon. Important composers include Johann Sebastian Bach, George Handel, and Antonio Vivaldi. In the later part of the period, the Baroque style was termed Rococo, a style characterized by increasingly decorative and elaborate works.

Queluz National Palace, Portugal: In the Baroque style of architecture, emphasis was placed on bold spaces, domes, and large masses, as exemplified by the Queluz National Palace in Portugal.

July 29, 2021 3:09pm

Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Elephant and Obelisk may have been his most important collaboration with Alexander VII. Photo Beate Schleep/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

When Gian Lorenzo Bernini began his rapid ascent as his generation’s leading sculptor during the mid-17th century, Rome was again in a steady decline. Once among the most prosperous cities in Europe, it was no longer an important business hub—London and Paris had begun to steal its thunder in that regard. It was also no longer the art destination that lured talents like Raphael and Michelangelo during the Renaissance. Add to all this the Thirty Years’ War, which began in 1618 and resulted in millions of deaths, and a quick succession of popes, which only added to the chaos.

Rome was, in other words, a has-been. Then Bernini and Pope Alexander VII started working together and changed all that. “For twelve years, the divinely inspired artist and the imperious pope shared centre stage in the ‘world’s theater’ and during that time they took the ragged remnants of the ancient city and clothed it in Baroque for its many roles, as capital of the Catholic Church, fount of Western civilization and premier tourist destination,” Loyd Grossman writes in his new book The Artist and the Eternal City: Bernini, Pope Alexander VII, and the Making of Rome (Pegasus).

In this fast-paced tome, Grossman makes the case that Bernini and Alexander’s working relationship represented the perfect merger of art and power. Their partnership lasted more than a decade, and was the rare ideal match between a cunning diplomat and a talented artist. Without them, Grossman convincingly suggests, Rome may not look the way it does today.

When it came to working with the papacy, Bernini’s collaborations with Alexander VII were hardly his first rodeo. Depending on who was in power, Bernini was either in high demand or in the doghouse. Urban VIII, for example, took a liking to him—he had Bernini produce what would count as one of his most famous works, the baldacchino at St. Peter’s Basilica, a dramatic bronze canopy with twisting columns, a giant gold crucifix, and ornate gilding. Innocent X, who succeeded Urban VIII and was in power from 1644 to 1655, railed against everything his predecessor stood for. He kept Bernini from working with the pontificate, and the effect was “almost career-ending,” Grossman writes. But the artist was too famous for the prohibition to end his career. He continued receiving private commissions, including his famed Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, completed in 1652.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Self-Portrait, ca. 1623. Via Wikimedia Commons

There was something different about his relationship with Alexander VII, with whom Bernini grew unusually close. In Alexander’s diaries, Bernini appears more often than any other artist—and there were many other artists with whom Alexander interacted frequently. Bernini and Alexander often met several times a week, and Grossman writes that Alexander “regarded himself not as a mere patron but as a collaborator.”

When Alexander was elected pope in 1655, Bernini was still in high demand. Grossman reports that, during the 17th century, the average Roman worker earned 50 scudi annually. Bernini, by contrast, had a fortune of anywhere between 300,000 and 600,000 scudi by the end of his career. He’d become known for pioneering an extravagant style that could be considered “rather embarrassing, like a guest who talks too loud or someone who keeps bursting into tears,” Grossman writes. Bernini’s style is one of swirling fabrics, overstated emotions, profane sexuality, and largesse. These days, it would probably be considered camp.

It’s hard not to get swept up in Bernini’s work, and those with money during the 17th century fell for it hard. (Never mind that Bernini was poorly behaved, and once even beat his brother with an iron bar for sleeping with his bedmate, who was herself married to someone else in his studio.) The French king Louis XIV liked Bernini so much that he even made a bid to get the artist to leave Rome. But he stayed, and became Alexander’s go-to artist.

Alexander gave Bernini the opportunity to do more than just sculptures. The artist was also enlisted to design a new colonnade for St. Peter’s Cathedral, a new setting for the Cathedra Petri (St. Peter’s throne), and a new layout of what is now the Via del Corso, a major roadway in the capital city’s historic center that Bernini widened in order to keep it from getting jammed with private carriages. An artist as an urban designer? It wasn’t a crazy thought in 17th-century Rome, where the boundaries between artistic mediums were blurrier than they are now. As Bernini’s friend and biographer Filippo Baldinucci wrote at the time, it was “common knowledge, that he was the first to unite architecture, sculpture and painting in a way that they together make a beautiful whole.”

Giovanni Battista Gaulli, Portrait of Pope Alexander VII (Fabio Chigi), ca. 1667. Walters Art Museum

Grossman is a passionate Bernini fan, and his fervor for the artist keeps this book from getting staid. As only a true devotee can, Grossman calls a relatively little-known monument Bernini’s ultimate work for Alexander. It’s a monument that today doesn’t command much attention—or, at least, not as much as Bernini’s best-known works. (Technically, the sculptor Ercole Ferrata crafted it, though Grossman is quick to note that Bernini regularly employed numerous assistants and never credited any of them. The idea was Bernini’s, anyway.) Set in the Piazza della Minerva, near the Pantheon, the work is a statue of a snarling elephant that has on its back an ancient Egyptian obelisk that had been discovered on the grounds of a church in Rome in 1665. Alexander died in 1667, just days before the monument was unveiled.

The work was meant to “exalt [Alexander’s] erudition and still satisfy the demands of modesty,” Grossman writes—modesty, of course, being a relative term when discussing an 18-foot-tall artifact from a fallen empire that was hauled through the streets of Rome. Looking at Bernini’s sketches for it, one yearns for something more extravagant, however. Bernini had toyed with the idea of having the monument perilously perched on a diagonal, or perhaps held atop the backs of sculpted allegorical figures; Alexander’s disapproval and physics prevented both from getting executed. The result, however, is stately and quite impressive, no less. There’s evidence that contemporary audiences loved it—the monument is even depicted in paintings that could be bought as souvenirs at the time, a sign of the work’s fame.

Bernini’s statue for the Piazza della Minerva is hardly the defining work of the Baroque movement. It’s not even Bernini’s best work. But Grossman finds it telling of a certain line of thinking that pervaded the 17th century during the Age of Absolutism, the era when monarchs and religious officials ruled with total control: throw enough money at a project, enlist a particularly good artist, and you may just have on your hands an effective way of communicating authority. Speaking of that tendency, Grossman writes, “If you feel that art exists in a political, social, or religious vacuum, perhaps you should look away now.”

Via Oneworld

By Jenni Murray

October 12, 2018

I’ve long been a fan of a great crime story, whether in book form or as a television series, and a recent favorite has been Endeavour. It’s inspired by Colin Dexter’s character Morse, the Oxford detective who loves a vintage car, listens to opera, is classically educated and partial to a good pint of beer. In the original television series John Thaw played the detective from middle age to his death, and he was never anything but Morse; his first name was never revealed. Endeavour is the young Morse, played by Shaun Evans, learning his trade as a detective constable, then sergeant, and already quite brilliant at solving Oxford’s many murders.

Only a couple of weeks ago, as I was buried in research for this book, I switched on the television on a Sunday evening to enjoy an hour or so’s relaxation with Morse. Three murders of men—a taxi driver, an academic and an art dealer—followed in quick succession and the methods of killing were brutal. The first victim was shot and then had a metal bar drilled into his ear; the second, a history don, was stabbed in both eyes with a steak knife; the third was decapitated. The body was left in his bed, the head concealed under a silver cloche.

Morse solved the mystery thanks to his great interest in art. The eureka moment came as he was flicking through a book of the paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi. It turned out the murders had been committed by a latter-day Gentileschi (the story is set in the 1960s). The murderer, Ruth Astor, was exacting her revenge on the men, who had been at a Bullingdon-style private members’ club where she and a friend were waitresses. The men had become drunk and violent; Ruth had been thrown across the table, gang-raped and had wine poured over her face and head.

The rape, and the desire to avenge herself, were a parallel to what we know was the inspiration for so many paintings by the extraordinary Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi. She didn’t actually murder the man who violated her, but she turned the horror of her own life into scenes of women’s vengeance on the men at whose hands they had suffered. She used biblical stories to portray, in exquisite paintings, her fury at the sexual violence she herself had endured. I was delighted to see her marked and celebrated in an acclaimed television programme.

Artemisia was well known as an artist of the Italian Baroque in her day and was considered one of the most accomplished painters in the generation that followed Caravaggio. In an era when it was tough for a woman to become anything other than a wife or a nun, she was the first woman admitted to the prestigious Accademia delle Arte del Disegno in Florence, and she counted dukes, princes, cardinals and kings among her clients. She wrote of her success to her friend, the astronomer Galileo, in 1635. “I have seen myself honoured by all the kings and rulers of Europe to whom I have sent my works, not only with great gifts, but also with most favoured letters, which I keep with me.”

But, as has happened to so many great women of the past, she disappeared from public consciousness, from museums, catalogues and exhibitions for some four hundred years. Ripe for rediscovery, she was put back in her rightful place by the women’s movement in the twentieth century. Endeavour is not the only popular work in which Artemisia has appeared in the 21st century. After centuries of neglect there came articles about her in the New York Times, a popular novel (The Passion of Artemisia, written by Susan Vreeland), a play, Lapis Blue, Blood Red, appeared on Broadway and one of her paintings appeared in a play, Painted Lady, starring Helen Mirren.

“[Gentileschi] didn’t actually murder the man who violated her, but she turned the horror of her own life into scenes of women’s vengeance on the men at whose hands they had suffered.”

Perhaps the most important signal of her appreciation as a great artist by a modern audience was the exhibition in 2002 at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. She shared the billing with her father, Orazio but it was Artemisia’s art that inspired the New York Times to describe her as “this season’s ‘it’ girl.”

Artemisia was born in July 1593. She was the eldest child of Orazio Gentileschi, a Tuscan painter, and his wife Prudentia Montone. She was only 12 when her mother died in childbirth in 1605. Her father harbored no artistic ambitions for his only daughter; he fully expected she would become a nun. As a lone father, he had to keep the children with him in his studio while he worked, and Artemisia showed herself a quick learner. Under her father’s tutelage she displayed a precocious talent for drawing, mixing color and painting and, like him, she was drawn to Caravaggio’s dramatic style. By the time she was 15 it was obvious to her father that his daughter demonstrated a much greater natural talent than the brothers who served the same apprenticeship in their father’s workshop.

Nevertheless, Artemisia was only too well aware that she would have to fight for her father’s support if she, rather than her brothers, was to become a professional painter rather than a dabbling amateur. She was clearly conscious that she had to resist any traditional attitudes and psychological submission to what she saw as brainwashing and jealousy of her obvious talent.

Her first painting is testament to her awareness of the sexual politics of the position in which she, and indeed any woman who attempted to break away from convention, might find herself. Her paintings are often inspired by biblical stories; this first one, completed when she was only seventeen, followed this source. Like Caravaggio, she chose not to paint in an idealized style but to make the people in her work look real, fleshy and passionately involved in the events being portrayed. She used live models and, in the case of Susanna and the Elders, it’s likely she included a self-portrait, looking at her own face reflected in a mirror.

The painting depicts the story of Susanna, from the book of Daniel. She’s a virtuous wife who is sexually harassed by the elders in her community. It was common for all painters of the period to use the same run of biblical stories as their inspiration. In works on a similar theme by male artists, Susanna is generally depicted as “asking for it,” appearing flirtatiously coy and seductive. In Artemisia’s painting, Susanna sits naked apart from a white cloth across her lap. Above her are two old men, lasciviousness oozing from every pore. She twists her head away from their pointing fingers, her hands raised in a gesture that clearly indicates, “Go away and leave me alone.” Her face shows fear and vulnerability as the men lean over the wall towards her, whisper to each other and leer. No one who stands before this painting could doubt that the men’s attentions are unwelcome.

No other painting I’ve seen on the subject contains any hint that the uninvited lecherous attentions of two nasty old men might have been traumatic for Susanna. Isn’t it interesting that it took until the 21st century for women to come together and say “Me too,” as the similarly disgusting behavior of the film producer Harvey Weinstein came to light. Artemisia Gentileschi got it in 1610 and wasn’t afraid to make it known that treating women as sexual objects was really not on.

This painting was to prove somewhat prophetic. Artemisia’s father, as might be expected, kept his daughter confined to the house and often left her at home alone as he went about his business. As the house doubled as his studio it was not unusual for friends and fellow artists to pop in from time to time. One fateful day Orazio left his 17-year-old daughter in the care of a family friend, Tuzia Medaglia, who was there with her infant son.

Artemisia was raped. The man responsible, a fellow painter, Agostino Tassi, was tried for his crime. The court report of the case brought by Orazio in 1612 describes what happened from his perspective:

Agostino, having found the door of Artemisia’s house open, entered the house as an ungreeted guest and went to Artemisia. He found her painting and with her was Tuzia, who held her son on her lap. As he approached Artemisia he ordered Tuzia to go upstairs because he wanted to speak to Artemisia in private. Tuzia stood up immediately and went upstairs. On that very day Agostino deflowered Artemisia and left.

Artemisia was questioned at home by two magistrates who ordered her to swear to tell the truth. She told them what happened in staggering detail. She had told Agostino that she was a virgin and that any rumors about her having been engaged in sexual activities were untrue. Any man who desired her, she said, would have to marry her and put a ring on her finger. He continued to press his case even though he was already married:

When he found me painting he said, “Not so much painting, not so much painting” and he grabbed the palette and brushes from my hands and threw them around, saying to Tuzia “Get out of here.” And when I said to Tuzia not to go and not leave me as I had previously signaled to her, she said, “I don’t want to stay here and argue. I want to go about my own business.” . . . As soon as she was gone he took my hand and said “Let’s walk together a while, because I hate sitting down.” . . .

After we had walked around two or three times, each time going by the bedroom door, when we were in front of the bedroom door, he pushed me in and locked the door.

He then threw me onto the edge of the bed, pushing me with a hand on my breast, and he put a knee between my thighs to prevent me from closing them. Lifting my clothes, which he had a great deal of trouble doing, he placed a hand with a handkerchief at my throat and on my mouth to keep me from screaming. He let go of my hands, which he had been holding with his other hand, and, having previously put both knees between my legs with his penis pointed at my vagina he began to push it inside.

I felt a strong burning and it hurt very much, but because he held my mouth I couldn’t cry out. However I tried to scream as best I could, calling Tuzia. I scratched his face and pulled his hair and before he penetrated me again I grasped his penis so tight that I even removed a piece of flesh. All this didn’t bother him at all, and he continued to do his business, which kept him on top of me for a while, holding his penis inside my vagina. And after he had done his business he got off me. When I saw myself free, I went to the table drawer and took a knife and moved towards Agostino saying “I’d like to kill you with this knife because you have dishonored me’” He opened his coat and said “Here I am,” and I threw the knife at him and he shielded himself, otherwise I would have hurt him and might have easily killed him. And the said Agostino then fastened his coat. I was crying and suffering over the wrong he had done me, and to pacify me he said, “Give me your hand, I promise to marry you as soon as I get out of the labyrinth I am in.” . . . This is all that happened between Agostino and me.

In the 17th century rape was considered more of a crime against the family’s honor than as the violation of a woman, and it was only when Tassi went back on his promise to marry Artemisia that her father decided to bring the charges against him to court. When Artemisia appeared in the court to give her evidence she was tortured with thumbscrews—a primitive form of lie detector test. As they were tightened around her fingers she cried out to Tassi: “This is the ring you gave me and these are your promises.”

Clearly she passed the test and was believed. Not always the case even today when a woman gives details of her sexual assault. Tassi was convicted and sentenced to be banished from Rome for five years, although there’s no evidence the punishment was ever carried out. Artemisia’s father’s response to the scandal was to marry his daughter off to a minor Florentine painter, Pierantonio Stiatessi. The couple moved to Florence, bearing a request for patronage for the talented young painter, written by her father, Orazio and addressed to the grand duchess of Tuscany. He wrote “[She] has in three years become so skilled that I can venture to say that today she has no peer; indeed she has produced works which demonstrate a level of understanding that perhaps even the principal masters of the profession have not attained.”

“No other painting I’ve seen on the subject contains any hint that the uninvited lecherous attentions of two nasty old men might have been traumatic for Susanna.”

Her time in Florence made her famous, and by her late twenties she had painted at least seven works for the Grand Duke Cosimo II de Medici and his family. As a family and as patrons of the art, the Medici of Florence need no introduction.

Artemisia then made the difficult decision to quit the Tuscan capital, which under the Medici had been the cradle of the Renaissance and was still, a hundred years after its flowering, a key artistic hub. She explained her decision in a letter to her father, describing “troubles at home and with my family”. She had had four children, but only one, her daughter Prudentia, had survived. Her husband was unfaithful, jealous and extravagant and in 1621 he walked out on his wife and daughter.

It was a struggle for a single mother to find commissions for her work in Rome, so she moved again. In Venice she received the patronage of Philip IV of Spain, who commissioned a painting of Achilles. Soon Artemisia found herself having to move again, this time to flee the plague, which in 1639 wiped out a third of the population. She moved on to Naples, then under Spanish rule, and had some success in painting an altarpiece and a public commission for a major church. She often complained, though, about how difficult it was for a woman to find work when she was competing in an almost exclusively male arena. A brief scan over Vasari’s Lives of Artists, regarded as the first definitive book on Renaissance art, reveals how few female artists there were. Of the numerous painters and sculptors listed in his text, only four are women—Properzia de’ Rossi, Sister Plautilla, Madonna Lucrezia and Sofonisba Anguissola. Artemisia was born some forty years after the publication of Vasari’s work but this was the background and culture against which she had to make her way.

She wrote to her last major patron, Don Antonio Ruffo, angry at always having to haggle and beg for a decent wage for her commissions, “You feel sorry for me because a woman’s name raises doubts until her work is seen. If I were a man I can’t imagine it would have turned out this way.” The question of unequal pay was obviously as much of an issue in the 17th century as today!

Her best-known paintings—the ones spotted by Endeavour Morse as his clue to the murders in the story of Ruth Astor—are Judith and her Maidservant and Judith Slaying Holofernes. The biblical story is set in the time of King Nebuchadnezzar, who sent his general, Holofernes, to subdue his enemies the Jews. Judith, a beautiful widow, hears that her people are on the brink of capitulating to the invaders and makes up her mind to deliver her city from the enemy. She creeps into the Assyrian camp, seduces Holofernes, waits until he is drunk and cuts off his head. The Jews regain their courage and drive the enemy away.

How much of the artist can one really read into a work of art? Some critics have argued that Artemisia’s graphic depictions of two women beheading a man and conspiratorially carrying off his head in a bloody basket were nothing more than gory examples of a subject popular with painters of the period, simply designed to appeal to wealthy patrons with a taste for violence and eroticism. Given her difficulties in getting decent payment for her work it would not be surprising if Artemisia had indeed decided to make horror an important part of her portfolio. But I don’t believe it for a second.

Her first two versions of the Judith story were painted early in her career, in 1612 and 1614, not long after she was raped. You have only to look at the expressions on the faces of the women and the power of Artemisia’s brushstrokes to know that anger and revenge were her motivations. Her Judith is not the pretty pretty, rather delicate woman seen in work painted by her male contemporaries. She’s strong and powerful woman, not unlike the Susanna of Susanna and the Elders, thought to have been painted using Artemisia’s own image in the mirror.

Artemisia had been let down by the woman, Tuzia, left by her father to chaperone her before the attack by Tassi. In these paintings she imagines a sisterhood among women as the two work closely together. In Judith Slaying Holofernes, the strong arms and hands of her maid hold down the man lying on his back on the bed. He has no chance of pushing her away, although he tries. Judith wields the sword like a hefty professional. Neither woman appears remotely shocked or horrified as the blood pours from their victim’s neck. They are just determined to get the job done.

In Judith and her Maidservant we see the same two powerful women conspiring to carry away in a basket the head of the man they have assassinated. For me this is the manifestation of the endless hours a once-powerless woman spent asking what she might have done to save herself. She expressed her fury and what she might have liked to have done in the way she knew best—with her paintbrush.

In 1638 Artemisia was drawn to London and the court of Charles I. Her father Orazio was already there as a court painter, so he and his daughter were again in harness after a 17-year separation. She was, though, not there only to help him. She had been invited by King Charles himself, a request based not on her father’s reputation but rather on her eminence as an artist. It was in London that she painted one of her best-known and most beautiful works, Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting. It hangs in the Royal Collection.

Her father died in 1639. Artemisia had left England by 1642, just as the Civil War was beginning. In 1649 she was back in Naples, working again with her former patron, Don Antonio Ruffo, and, no doubt, still complaining about the lack of equal pay for work of equal value. Plus ça change!

The date of her death is not certain. Some have placed it in 1652 or 1653, others have speculated that she died in the Naples plague of 1656, but there are no works dated during this period and no records I could find of her death.

“Her Judith is not the pretty pretty, rather delicate woman seen in work painted by her male contemporaries. She’s strong and powerful woman, not unlike the Susanna of Susanna and the Elders, thought to have been painted using Artemisia’s own image in the mirror.”

I’m no professional art critic. I only know what I see and what excites me but I know in my heart she’s a truly great painter and, thank goodness, there are critics who agree with me. Roberto Longhi, an important Italian critic, described her in 1916 as “the only woman in Italy who ever knew about painting, coloring, doughing, and other fundamentals”. And, of her style in the portrayal of women, he wrote, “There are about 57 works by Artemisia Gentileschi and 94 per cent (49 works) feature women as protagonists or equal to men.” Another critic said of her in the 19th century, “No one would have imagined it was the work of a woman. The brush work was bold and certain, and there was no sign of timidness.” It may seem surprising that it should be assumed that the work of a woman would somehow have a distinctly feminine style that’s softer, prettier and more hesitant than work that’s painted by a man. When I compare Artemisia with Caravaggio, whose realistic style influenced her, I simply can’t see it. There’s strength and brutality in the work of both artists. Maybe I would have to concede the focus is somewhat different, although it’s not Artemisia who gives the impression that a woman is weaker than a man.

In Caravaggio’s painting of Judith and her maidservant slaying Holofernes a pretty, slim and rather delicate Judith looks barely capable of wielding the sword with which she’s slicing off the still-screaming head. Her maidservant, who looks on from behind, is portrayed as a bit of a wrinkled old hag. In Artemisia’s depiction of the same subject the two powerfully built young women work together to complete their task.

I have no doubt that much of her work was inspired by events that could only have happened to a woman, particularly the terrible sexual violence she experienced as a teenager, but it would be wrong to assume her fame and appreciation was purely a result of her notoriety and vengefulness. Yes, she was a victim who fought back through her work but as an artist she is wonderful. She may have complained about equal pay but patronage came to her thick and fast. Michelangelo, supported by the Medici, had established the Renaissance principle that great wealth should support great art. Like her contemporaries, Artemisia was a considered a real artist, worthy of financial backing and not merely a jobbing tradeswoman.

What I love about her is the way she painted other women as she saw them: courageous, resourceful, rebellious and strong. And she painted them beautifully. While her Susannas and her Judiths have delighted me for precisely those reasons, I have to confess one of her more tender portraits is my favourite. Her Madonna and Child shows us a rather buxom Mary, dressed in pink rather than the traditional blue, halo around her head and her feet somewhat inelegantly wide apart, to balance her solid little boy on her lap. She gazes down lovingly on her golden-haired child and offers her nipple as he reaches up and touches her face. It’s a picture of an adoring mother preparing to breastfeed, with no hint of salacious intent for the titillation of the viewer. It’s captivating and, I think, could only have been painted by a woman. As she once declared herself, “The works will speak for themselves.” They do!

Uncovering Caravaggio The following article picks up on, and extends, our general introduction to Caravaggio. Here, we we delve further into the details of Caravaggio’s early life and relationships and use available evidence to piece…

11 Oct 19 · 19 mins read

The following article picks up on, and extends, our general introduction to Caravaggio. Here, we we delve further into the details of Caravaggio’s early life and relationships and use available evidence to piece together his career and events leading to his untimely death. Odyssey Traveller offers a tour based on the life and work of Caravaggio. It visits Italy, Malta and Sicily in order to follow in the artist’s footsteps, and develop an understanding of this time in history. If you wish to research further, we have recommended a reading list of ten books on Caravaggio. And if you are interested in accompanying us on the Caravaggio tour, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We have several departures scheduled for 2020 and 2021.

Michelangelo Merisi, known to us as Caravaggio, was probably born on the 29th of September, 1571 – the feast day of his namesake, Saint Michael. There is some debate as to whether he was born in Milan or the nearby town of Caravaggio (which would become his namesake) where his father’s employer, Francesco Sforza, was the Marquis.

Francesco Sforza had attended the wedding of Caravaggio’s parents, Fermo Merisi and Lucia Aratori. Lucia was from a well-known local family and it was possibly this, as much as the fact that Fermo worked for the Marquis, which took Francesco to the wedding. For whatever reason, the Sforza-Colonna family was to play a very important role in Caravaggio’s future.

Caravaggio probably spent the first few years of his life mainly in Milan. However, the outbreak of plague in 1576 caused the family to move out to the fortified hillside town of Caravaggio, where Fermo Merisi owned property and where they could expect to enjoy the protection of the Marquis. Unfortunately the move was too late for Fermo. In a very short space of time Caravaggio was to lose his father, uncle, grandmother and grandfather to the plague, all before he was six. This tragedy would leave an indelible mark on Caravaggio and many believe it could be one of the explanations for his life of violence.

Caravaggio, his mother, brother and sister went to live with his maternal grandparents on property they owned in Caravaggio. Here he remained until 1584, when, aged 13, he moved to Milan and entered into an apprenticeship with the painter, Simone Peterzano. Peterzano, according to the contract details, had been a student of Titian but very little is known about the four years Caravaggio spent under his tutelage. There are no known works existing from this period. In fact, there are no authenticated works known up until the time Caravaggio reached Rome at the age of 21.

Caravaggio’s mother is thought to have died in 1590 when he was 19. At this point he sold the land that had been his inheritance and lived on the money. Not much is known about this period in his life. It is possible that he travelled in Northern Italy and absorbed some of the painting techniques of the local artists both past and present. It is even possible that he travelled as far as Venice where he would have seen, and perhaps been influenced by, works of Titian, Tintoretto and Jacopo Bassano.

In 1592 Caravaggio, having spent his inheritance, set out for Rome. One of Caravaggio’s early biographers, Giovanni Baglione, a rival and bitter enemy, claimed that Caravaggio had committed murder in Milan and it was this that caused him to flee the city. Despite a great deal of recent research no evidence for this murder has emerged.

Caravaggio made little initial impression on the Roman art scene. Rome was full of painters and Caravaggio was just one more trying to make a name for himself. In 1593 he took a placement in the studio of Giuseppe Cesari, a member of Rome’s painting academy, where he was set to work as a ‘painter of flowers and fruit’. This, Caravaggio found far from exciting.

Medusa, painted on a leather jousting shield

By the time Caravaggio was born in 1571, Milan had lost its independence. The Visconti dynasty had been followed by that of the Sforza family but they, although still important landowners, in turn had given way to French rule some 50 years before Caravaggio’s birth. Eventually the Spanish Habsburgs had made Milan part of their vast empire.

When Caravaggio was born, Milan had a population of 100,000 and was full of noise, bustle, trade and industry. It was very different from the small town where he spent most of his childhood. Milan was a city of conspicuous opulence and luxury trades such as silk and sword making. It was also distinguished by its very large number of churches.

Milan was built on a circular plan with the massive Castello Sforzesco at its centre. Built originally for the Sforza dynasty, by the time Caravaggio knew Milan, the Castello was the refuge of the Spanish governors. From the Castello they kept a watchful eye on the city and the surrounding countryside.

The dominant figure in Milan in Caravaggio’s time, however, was not a Spaniard but an Italian, Carlo Borromeo, who became Archbishop of Milan in 1565. He was a deeply pious man with a fierce sense of mission. Borromeo was a charismatic leader who had renounced wealth and privilege to follow in Christ’s footsteps.

Under his steely control the citizens of Milan were to be indoctrinated in the ways of his own brand of piety, whether they liked it or not. He had a bleak view of human nature, believing that man was tainted by original sin. He believed it was his duty to transform the life and habits of the men and women of Milan. For two decades, throughout the formative period of Caravaggio’s life, the archbishop pushed through “reforms” intended to control the hearts, minds and souls of the people. He saw sinfulness everywhere and his priests were seen by him as the army leading the fight against man’s sinful nature.

Borromeo tried to ban dancing on feast days and Sundays. He attempted to kill off the pre-Lenten tradition of Carnival. He prohibited jousts, tournaments, plays and masquerades. A popular uprising following these prohibitions, however, forced him to admit that there were some limits to his power.

Despite his inflexibility Borromeo was a charismatic leader who changed his world. There is good reason to believe that his ideas would have had a profound influence on Caravaggio and his art. Borromeo seems to have preferred the more traditional, popular representations aimed squarely at the promotion of mass piety. Caravaggio’s mature paintings such as The Crucifixion of St Peter and The Conversion of St Paul are rooted in the tradition of popular pious realism so espoused by Borromeo.

The Conversion of St Paul

The religious art that Caravaggio was destined to create was closely aligned to the beliefs of Borromeo despite the many aspects of Caravaggio’s life and work of which the archbishop would have strongly disapproved.

‘Rome was even more violent than Milan, full of plague survivors and refugees from the endless wars among the Italian peninsula’s patchwork of petty states. Soldiers, labourers, priests and painters were all on the lookout for a living and Caravaggio revelled in the squalid, crowded and neglected conditions.’ (This is Caravaggio, Annabel Howard, p9.)

When Caravaggio arrived in Rome, the city was in the midst of a great program of rebuilding. The sack of the city by the forces of Charles V in 1527 had left it in ruins and restoration was a long time coming. Then, in 1585, a new pope, Sixtus V, was elected and he set out to rebuild Rome, spiritually and physically. Under Sixtus V and the popes who immediately followed, Rome was dramatically altered. New roads were built, the Dome of St Peter’s was completed and ancient Christian monuments were restored.

Caravaggio arrived in Rome shortly after the election of a new pope, Clement VIII. Clement was determined to carry on the work of his predecessors. He wanted to reassert Rome as the centre of Christendom and believed that the beauty of Rome’s churches would help to bring this about. Consequently, Rome began to fill with artists of all kinds as painters, sculptors and architects all flooded into the city. Rome became the artistic capital of Europe.

Self-portrait as Bacchus

At first Caravaggio made little impression in the overcrowded art world that was Rome. Although he found a position in the studio of Giuseppe Cesari in 1593, he found the work and life far from congenial. Bored with the endless flowers and fruit that were his lot, Caravaggio began to experiment with a self-portrait depicting himself as Bacchus. Caravaggio’s realism was considered shocking by many establishment painters in Rome, but it was beginning to create interest among influential patrons of art.

In 1595 Caravaggio came to the attention of Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte who bought one of his paintings, The Cardsharps. Del Monte lived in the Palazzo Madama, owned by the Florentine Medici family, for whom he acted as a political agent and artistic advisor.

Del Monte was described by his contemporaries as a philanthropist, patron and a generous, intelligent man. He was a busy and successful diplomat with an interest in art. His collections were varied and included sculptures, ceramics, antiquities and books as well as paintings. His interest in Caravaggio and his work made a huge difference to the young painter’s life.

Not only did Del Monte buy Caravaggio’s paintings, he offered him a home in the Palazzo Madama. Caravaggio now had stability, wealthy patrons and an influential protector. And, a protector was something he needed increasingly as the years went on and his character remained tempestuous and his actions unrestrained.

The Cardsharps

The Palazzo Madama (now the seat of the Senate of the Italian Republic but once home to Cardinal Del Monte and Caravaggio).

The Palazzo Madama (now the seat of the Senate of the Italian Republic but once home to Cardinal Del Monte and Caravaggio)

Over the next few years Caravaggio continued to live in the Palazzo Madama under the protection of Del Monte. His paintings were bought by Del Monte and other members of his circle. Vincenzo Giustiniani, a wealthy friend and neighbour of Del Monte, went on to buy a total of 13 works from the artist. It was, however, some time before Caravaggio managed to break into the church scene where reputations could really be made. By 1599 Caravaggio had still not been offered even one public commission. This situation was about to change.

Caravaggio was put forward by Del Monte to paint two canvasses for the Contarelli Chapel in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, just around the corner from the Palazzo Madama. The priests in charge of the chapel were desperate for the decorations to be completed before Jubilee celebrations of 1600 and decided to give Caravaggio the chance.

The two paintings, The Calling of St Matthew and The Martyrdom of St Matthew were completed in 1600 and caused a sensation. People flocked to the chapel to view the paintings. Not everyone was delighted and notable criticism came from the president of the Academia di San Luca who declared that the paintings were “too natural” and lacked imagination. Fortunately, not everyone agreed and Caravaggio was given a number of further commissions.

The Calling of St Matthew, Contarelli Chapel

Del Monte now encouraged Caravaggio to move to the nearby Palazzo Mattei, home of ‘the erudite, wealthy and pious Cardinal Girolamo Mattei’ and his two brothers. The Mattei brothers were big art collectors and did a great deal to extend Caravaggio’s reputation. Del Monte, however, remained a good friend to the young painter, helping him to get out of trouble a number of times when Caravaggio had problems with the police.

Despite the fact that he was now settled into comfortable accommodation and making a name for himself as a painter, Caravaggio often found himself in trouble with the law. He was hot tempered and quick to retaliate if he felt himself to be insulted. A number of times he was arrested for carrying a sword through the streets after dark. In 1600 he got into trouble for engaging in a sword fight with a young mercenary whom he wounded. In the same year, he ambushed a painter called Girolamo Spampa, causing considerable damage but not killing him. Caravaggio was fortunate to have influential friends who were able to rescue him from the problems he was causing himself.

Caravaggio had rich and influential patrons but he also had many friends from very different walks of life. Many of the young painters he socialised with were just as hot tempered as he was. In 1603, Caravaggio and two of his friends found themselves in prison for writing insulting and libellous poetry. His trial did not go well but he was suddenly released on bail. It seems that his powerful patrons had come to the rescue once again.

He left town for a while hoping that the trouble would blow over. He spent some time in the town of Loreto where the house of the Virgin Mary had been deposited by angels! Caravaggio was researching his next big altarpiece. On his return, a year later, he painted his revolutionary, barefoot virgin, The Madonna of Loreto. The model for his Madonna was a woman called Lena, one of the local prostitutes with whom he was friendly. In fact, one of his early biographers called Lena, ‘a courtesan whom he loved’. This fact did not go down well with the Church, nor did the fact that the pilgrim’s dirty feet were very much on display.

The Madonna of Loreto

On his return to Rome Caravaggio did not stay out of trouble for long. In April 1604 he was arrested for throwing a plate of artichokes at a waiter. Later that year he was arrested again for throwing stones at a policeman. In 1605, he was back in court for throwing rocks at the door of his ex-landlady. Each time he escaped serious punishment, probably through the influence of Del Monte and other friends in high places.

In May 1606 Caravaggio found himself in trouble too great for even his friends to rescue him. Today there is still a lot of dispute over what actually happened but what is known is how the story ends and what it meant for Caravaggio. Early biographies claimed that it was a fight over a tennis match. It was said that he had accused his opponent of cheating and that in the resulting sword fight, his opponent was killed. It now seems more likely that a duel had been arranged between the two men. There is evidence that Ranuccio Tomassoni, the murdered man, and Caravaggio had been in conflict for some time. There have even been suggestions that Tomassoni and Caravaggio were running rival prostitutes and that this was the cause of their quarrels. What is certain is that the fight took place.

Each man appeared at the tennis court with three witnesses, which indicates that a duel had been planned. In the fight that followed, Caravaggio struck Tomassoni in the groin and he died within minutes, bleeding out from femoral artery. It has been suggested that he was aiming to castrate rather than to kill but, whatever his intention, Caravaggio had committed murder. Escape from Rome was to be the only option.

Now was the time that Caravaggio most needed some influential friends.

Fortunately, Caravaggio had important friends who were not collectors of art. Throughout his life he was to receive help from various members of the Sforza-Colonna family, particularly from Costanza Colonna.

Costanza Colonna was the widow of Francesco Sforza, the same man who had attended the wedding of Caravaggio’s parents. It seems that Costanza took an interest in Caravaggio throughout his troubled life and her help continued despite the fact that he was now on the run for murder.

According to Helen Langdon (Caravaggio: A Life), ‘the Colonna claimed descent from Aeneas, the legendary founder of Italy. They were warlike and vain of their prowess at arms, and in the sixteenth century were famed as fighters against heresy. United as they were by marriage to the noblest Italian families, their power extended throughout Italy. Two of Costanza’s sons, Muzio and Fabrizio, were, like Caravaggio, stormy characters. Their father, Francesco Sforza, died in 1580, but Costanza and her family were to watch over Caravaggio, their feudal subject, with touching loyalty. Perhaps his birth at the tense moment of Lepanto particularly endeared him to them. Their shadowy presence, running through a vast network of feudal relationships, will often be sensed in the background of his life’.

It seems likely that Caravaggio, wounded in the duel, and wanted for murder, made first for the Colonna palace and took refuge there until he could be smuggled out of Rome. The next that is reliably heard of him is in the Colonna strongholds in the Alban Hills. From there, he eventually made his way to Naples.

With a price on his head in Rome, Caravaggio made his way to Naples where he probably sought refuge in the Colonna’s Neapolitan residence. Naples, with a population of 300,000, was the largest city in southern Europe. It had always been a port town earning its money from maritime commerce and at the time of Caravaggio’s visit was crowded out with the very rich and the very poor. Like Milan, it was ruled from Spain. An army of Spanish soldiers was stationed in its garrisons, and a fleet of Spanish galleons moored in the harbour. The Neapolitan nobles were compensated richly for their loss of power and lived lives of luxury inside their city palaces while beggars, unable to find work, crowded the streets.

While the poor lived on the streets or in tiny over-crowded dwellings, the city was full of churches and monasteries built on a grand scale. Land was at a premium and houses often rose to as much as six storeys. The streets were narrow and dark, overshadowed by the tall buildings.

It appears that Caravaggio was deluged with work the moment he appeared in the city. No one seems to have been bothered by the fact that he was an escaped murderer. Soon he was at work on a monumental picture for the Chiesa del Pio Monte della Misericordia, a new church in the heart of the city. The subject of the painting was to be “The Seven Acts of Mercy”, the good works that were supposed to be encouraged by a spirit of Christian charity: something much needed in Naples. The church was being built by a confraternity of young nobles attempting to do something to alleviate the plight of the poor.

Caravaggio’s new patrons were rich and powerful and they offered him a large sum to complete the altar piece. One of the founders of the confraternity was Giovanni Battista Mansio, a man interested not just in relieving poverty, but in art and poetry as well. He is known to have been tolerant of outsiders and also to have been close to the Colonna family. All this makes it likely that he was particularly keen to have Caravaggio decorate their new church.

“For a dark and desperately overcrowded town, he (Caravaggio) created a dark and desperately overcrowded altarpiece.” (Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane, Andrew Graham-Dixon.)

The Seven Acts of Mercy

Caravaggio painted the monumental altarpiece in a very short space of time and by the start of 1607 it was probably already installed on the high altar of the church where it soon became one of the confraternity’s greatest treasures. (At a meeting of the congregation in 1613 it was decided that the painting should never be sold at any price!)

The success of this painting soon led to further commissions. His next painting, The Flagellation of Christ, also caused a sensation. Many were shocked by Caravaggio’s intense realism. The paintings were greeted with admiration but also bewilderment and he was responsible for a change in the way the Neapolitans saw art. His brutal sense of reality and his use of light caused a new school of painting to develop, first in Naples and later Spain.

It is not known exactly why Caravaggio decided to leave Naples and head for Malta. His friends in Rome were still working behind the scenes to have him pardoned but so far without success. Perhaps Caravaggio hoped that by going to Malta he could gain himself a knighthood (which he did) and use that as a bargaining point in his quest for a pardon. For whatever reason, Caravaggio set sail for Malta in June 1607. (Checo, his long-time model and companion decided that it was time for a parting of the ways and remained in Naples.)

Malta was at that time an important military outpost held by the Order of the Knights of St John. The order had its origins in the Crusades and the Crusader kingdoms of the Middle East and had continued the struggle against the Islamic states long after the Holy Lands were lost. They were formally constituted as a nursing and military order and continued the fight against the Ottoman Empire from Malta after being expelled, first from the Holy Lands and then from Rhodes.

Alof de Wignacourt, Grand Master of the Order of St John

The Knights of St John were drawn from among the most aristocratic and militaristic families of Europe and were very proud of their position in society as well as their history of military prowess. They wanted to fight and, if necessary die a martyr’s death, in what they saw as a Holy War. In the circumstances Caravaggio had little to offer apart from his fame as a painter. It seems that this skill was enough to impress the Grand Master of the order and Caravaggio was given permission to land on the island.

The Grand Master, Alof de Wignacourt, wanted great works of art by the most acclaimed painter in Italy to beautify the churches of Malta and Caravaggio was that painter. Caravaggio may also have had help from some old friends. Costanza Colonna’s son, Fabrizio Sforza Colonna, had been exiled to Malta for “unmentionable crimes” but had managed to redeem himself and become something of a hero. It is quite possible that Costanza and her son helped Caravaggio to gain the support of the Grand Master.

Caravaggio managed to paint some of his most admired works on Malta before running into trouble once more. His The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist is considered by many to be the greatest painting of the seventeenth century. It is also the only known painting signed by Caravaggio, signed in the blood spurting from the saint’s neck! The painting was a great success and Caravaggio was given a gold chain and entry into the Order of St John.

The Beheading of St John the Baptist, St John’s Co-Cathedral, Valetta

Once admitted into the Order of St John, Caravaggio had to promise to stay out of trouble but this, he could not do. Just weeks before his painting was due to be unveiled Caravaggio was arrested and thrown into prison. For 400 years it was not known exactly what happened. Rumours abounded, one of the most common being that he had been arrested for molesting one of the young pages, possibly the one shown in the painting with the Grand Master.

Recently, documents from the court case have finally been deciphered and they indicate that once more Caravaggio was caught up in a brawl. It seems that the brawl broke out in the house of an organist, Fra Prospero Coppini, and a high ranking knight was seriously wounded. Those involved, including Caravaggio, had broken their vows and punishment was inevitable.

The prison was meant to be invulnerable but somehow Caravaggio achieved what was thought to be impossible. He escaped from the prison and from the island. Once again he must have had help — and his old friends the Colonna family and their associates are the people most likely to have stepped up. Caravaggio was on his way to Sicily. He was tried in his absence and cast out of the order. Now, he was not only a declared felon in the Papal States, but he had upset the very powerful Knights of St John.

Sleeping Cupid

Strangely enough the Knights seem to have made little attempt to recapture Caravaggio in Sicily. In Sicily he went to stay with an old friend, Mario Minniti. Minniti had modelled for Caravaggio’s Bacchus in Rome in 1596-7 but had returned to his home in Sicily where he had established a successful workshop in Syracuse. Now he was a well-respected member of the community and able to offer Caravaggio considerable assistance. He recommended Caravaggio to the Senate of Syracuse as the “best painter in Italy” and secured him a commission to paint The Burial of St Lucy. Caravaggio completed the commission but headed north to Messina before the work was unveiled.

The Burial of St Lucy

The Burial of St Lucy, 1608, Syracuse.

Caravaggio stayed working in Sicily until the autumn of 1609. During his time on the island he seems to have been troubled and afraid. He always kept a sword or dagger close at hand and bought himself a large guard dog named Crow. His work was in great demand and he was able to charge very high prices. None of this made him happy and his friends continued to work to gain him a pardon which would enable him to return to Rome.

The Raising of Lazarus

It appears once again to have been Costanza Colonna who arranged for Caravaggio to be able to leave Sicily and return to Naples. She was working with Scipione Borghese, the Pope’s nephew and a keen collector of Caravaggio’s work, to enable Caravaggio to obtain a pardon from the Pope in Rome. It seems that she had already obtained, at least, an unofficial pardon from de Wignacourt in Malta.

In the middle of September, Caravaggio went back to Naples and went to stay in the Colonna palace at Chiaia. Once he was back in Naples, he found himself again in great demand but he continued to worry about his safety. This worry was not unfounded and one night, after a visit to a tavern, Caravaggio was attacked and badly wounded by a group of armed men.

The identity of his attackers has not been established but one possibility is that the man responsible was the same one wounded in the fight in Malta. For him to take revenge could be seen as an act of honour. Caravaggio was cut on the face, a common form of ‘honour’ revenge. This appears to have been a premeditated act: three men to hold him down while a fourth marked his face.

Caravaggio was taken back to the Colonna palace while rumours of his death spread around Italy. His recovery was slow and the paintings he did over the next six months reflect the toll the attack had taken. The two paintings from this period, still known to exist, are very dark and the brush strokes (apparently) less assured. Buyers were, however, were still clamouring for his work.

Caravaggio still hoped for a pardon from the Pope and to be able to return to Rome. He still had friends and patrons in Rome and he had good reason to believe that his quest for a pardon would be successful. Scipione Borghese, the Pope’s nephew, was a particularly keen collector of Caravaggio’s work.

On the 9th July, 1610, Caravaggio set out for Rome. He boarded a sailing boat previously used for transporting some of his paintings. Caravaggio must have felt that his troubles were over. Unfortunately, the boat made a routine stop at the port of Palo where Caravaggio once more found himself in trouble. He was arrested, for reasons unclear, and imprisoned. By the time he was released the boat had sailed away with three of his paintings – paintings he needed to secure his safety in Rome.

It is assumed that Caravaggio set out in pursuit of the boat and his paintings. His early biographers have him running madly along the beach. It is more likely that he hired a horse to carry him the 50 kilometres to the boat’s next port of call. Caravaggio made it to the next port, Porto Ercole, but he made it no further. Sick with fever he died in Porto Ercole and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Portrait of Caravaggio by Ottavio Leoni

The pioneering painter survived a rape, but scholars are pushing against the idea that her work was defined by it—and celebrating her rich harnessing of motherhood, passion, and ambition.

By Rebecca Mead

September 28, 2020

In Artemisia’s “Judith Beheading Holofernes,” the heroine is a deft butcher.

The story of Susanna and the Elders, related in the Book of Daniel, was a popular subject for artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and no wonder. Susanna, a virtuous, beautiful young woman, is bathing in her garden while two older men spy on her. The men suddenly accost her and demand that she submit to rape; if she resists, they warn, they will ruin her reputation by claiming that they caught her with a lover. The tale offered painters an irresistible opportunity to replicate a similar kind of voyeurism. Tintoretto depicted the scene several times; in a version painted in the fifteen-fifties, which hangs in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, he portrayed Susanna as serene and abstracted, towelling a raised foot and regarding herself in a mirror, unaware of a bald man who is concealed behind a rose trellis and peering between her parted thighs. In a treatment by Rubens from half a century later, on display at the Borghese Gallery, in Rome, Susanna is shown reaching for a shawl, realizing with horror that she has been exposed to two leering men. Sometimes the violence threatened against Susanna is indicated in the tableau: in a version by Ludovico Carracci that hangs in the National Gallery in London, one of the elders is tugging at Susanna’s robe, pulling it off her body. Giuseppe Cesari (known as Cavaliere d’Arpino) made a painting that enlists the viewer’s participation in the lasciviousness it represents: its naked subject looks almost seductively out from the canvas, coolly brushing her golden hair.

A very different Susanna is offered by Artemisia Gentileschi, who was born in Rome in 1593, and who painted the scene in 1610, when she was seventeen. In her version, two men emerge from behind a marble balustrade, violently interrupting Susanna’s ablutions. Her head and her body torque away from the onlookers as she raises a hand toward them, in what looks like ineffectual self-defense. Strikingly, her other hand shields her face. Perhaps this Susanna does not want the men to identify her or see her anguish; it’s equally likely that she does not want to lay eyes on her persecutors. In its composition, execution, and psychological insight, the painting is remarkably sophisticated for a girl in her teens. As the scholar Mary Garrard noted, in a 1989 appraisal titled “Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art,” the painting represents an art-historical innovation: it is the first time in which sexual predation is depicted from the point of view of the predated. With this painting, and with many other works that followed, Artemisia claimed women’s resistance of sexual oppression as a legitimate subject of art.

As one of the first women to forge a successful career as a painter, Artemisia was celebrated internationally in her lifetime, but her reputation languished after her death. This was partly owing to fashion: her naturalistic mode of painting went out of style, in favor of a more classical approach. Seventeenth-century scholars barely mentioned her. When she registered, it was as a footnote to her father, Orazio Gentileschi, a well-regarded artist who specialized in the kind of historical and mythological scenes in vogue at the time. (Academics tend to refer to Artemisia by her first name, in order to distinguish her from her father.) Her work received little substantial critical attention until the early twentieth century, when Roberto Longhi, the Italian art historian, wrote a grudging assessment, calling her “the only woman in Italy who ever understood what painting was, both colors, impasto, and other essentials.”

In the second half of the twentieth century, Artemisia was reconsidered. A turning point was the inclusion of half a dozen of her works, among them the 1610 “Susanna and the Elders,” in a landmark survey, “Women Artists: 1550-1950”; curated by the art historians Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, it opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976, later travelling to the Brooklyn Museum. Although individual works of Artemisia’s had been on view in museums, this was the first time they were seen as a group, their cumulative power recognized. In the years since, Artemisia has come to be counted among the most important Baroque artists, especially after a 2001 show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which explored her work alongside that of her father. This October, a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery in London will bring together about thirty of her pieces, from museums and private collections across Europe and the United States.

The show, whose opening was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, is organized in broad chronological order, and features Artemisia’s most significant achievements. (More than a hundred and thirty works have been ascribed to her hand, but only about half that number are universally agreed to be hers.) Among the paintings included is “Self-Portrait as St. Catherine of Alexandria,” from the National Gallery’s collection, in which the subject gazes at the viewer, her brow dimpled in concentration, while wearing a gauzy turban and other finery. The painting, recently rediscovered, was acquired by the museum in 2018, for nearly four and a half million dollars. It is only the twenty-first work by a female artist to enter the gallery’s collection.

The reëvaluation of Artemisia’s work has included a newfound appreciation of her technical skill, especially her command of chiaroscuro—a heightened juxtaposition of light and shadow. Chiaroscuro is most commonly associated with Caravaggio, who was an acquaintance of Artemisia’s father, and whom she may have encountered as a young adolescent. (Caravaggio notoriously fled Rome in 1606, after killing another man in a duel.) One of Artemisia’s greatest paintings, “Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes” (completed in the sixteen-twenties, and now owned by the Detroit Institute of Arts), offers a masterly execution of the technique, with its subjects illuminated, mid-action, by raking lamplight. In the background are virtuosic examples of still-life painting: a burnished brass candlestick, a draped velvet curtain.

Letizia Treves, the curator of the forthcoming National Gallery show, notes, “In Artemisia’s lifetime, she had a kind of pan-European celebrity that places her on a level with later artists such as Rubens or Van Dyck.” Treves cautions, however, against overstating Artemisia’s place in the Baroque pantheon. Artemisia was an artist who adapted to fashion rather than setting it. “I can’t name a single Artemisia follower,” Treves says. Of course, this may well have been connected to her gender: what male artist of the period would have acknowledged being her disciple?

Artemisia’s reëmergence is also tied to a greater awareness of her life story, which was at least as eventful as that of Caravaggio. In 1611, the year after she painted “Susanna and the Elders,” Artemisia was raped by a friend of Orazio’s: the artist Agostino Tassi. The assault has inevitably, and often reductively, been the lens through which her artistic accomplishments have been viewed. The sometimes savage themes of her paintings have been interpreted as expressions of wrathful catharsis. The fascination with her work on these terms is understandable, given the continued prevalence of sexual violence against women, and the dismissal of women’s accounts of it. In 2018, when Brett Kavanaugh was elevated to the Supreme Court despite the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, who said that Kavanaugh had assaulted her when they were both teen-agers, a particularly bloody work by Artemisia—“Judith Beheading Holofernes,” which hangs in the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence—was widely shared on the Internet, as commentary. It shows the Biblical heroine with her sleeves rolled up over muscular arms, her mouth set, deftly butchering the Assyrian general.

more than one fictional reimagining, beginning in 1947, with a work by Anna Banti—the pen name of the Italian novelist and critic Lucia Lopresti, who was married to Roberto Longhi. (Susan Sontag, in an admiring essay from 2004, wrote that Banti’s protagonist is “liberated by disgrace.”) A 1997 film, by the French director Agnès Merlet, made the questionable suggestion that Tassi was a partially welcome seducer. Five years later, the American writer Susan Vreeland published a novel that hewed to the feminist line of Artemisia’s rape as a defining trauma. (“I stepped up two steps and took my usual seat opposite Agostino Tassi, my father’s friend and collaborator. My rapist. . . . His black hair and beard were overgrown and wild. His face, more handsome than he deserved, had the color and hardness of a bronze sculpture.”) Joy McCullough’s 2018 novel, “Blood Water Paint,” captured Artemisia’s perspective in charged language:

the woman in the bath
is no exalted doll.
She is all light and terror,
the Susanna I finally summon
from stories,
from first fire,
and finally,
from paint mixed with
my own sweat.

A raft of recent papers by academics, however, have objected to portraying Artemisia as if she herself were a two-dimensional mythological figure—a victim exacting revenge through brushwork. As more of her personal history is unearthed by scholars, a more complex picture emerges. And Artemisia’s art is increasingly being appreciated for the knowingness with which she made use of elements of her life—not just sexual violation but also motherhood, erotic passion, and professional ambition. Artemisia recognized that being a woman offered her a rare perspective and authority on many artistic subjects. “You will find the spirit of Caesar in the soul of a woman,” she once assured a patron. Such insight makes Artemisia feel, four hundred years after she lived, like one of our more self-aware contemporaries.

Artemisia had a sheltered childhood, in the most literal sense of the term: as a girl, she spent most of her time within the walls of her family home, as Rome’s streets were not considered a safe or appropriate space for her to journey through alone. She was the eldest child in her family, with three younger brothers; at the age of twelve, she became their principal caregiver when her mother, Prudentia di Montone, died, in childbirth. Artemisia received no academic education and was functionally illiterate until her twenties, when she finally had the opportunity to learn to read and write—the latter never without error. But as a child she was allowed to draw, and her gifts were noted early on. As Orazio wrote to one of his patrons, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, in 1612, she “has in three years become so skilled that I can venture to say that today she has no peer.”

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Artemisia served an apprenticeship in her father’s studio, with his paintings as her primary exemplars. Unlike male aspiring artists, she was unable to visit many of the churches and public buildings where the work of contemporaries had been commissioned, but in her local church, Santa Maria del Popolo, on the Piazza del Popolo, she would have seen two remarkable Caravaggio paintings: “Crucifixion of St. Peter,” in which the elderly martyr is being raised, upside down, on a cross, and “Conversion on the Way to Damascus,” in which a young, muscled St. Paul is sprawled on the ground after receiving a heavenly vision. Artemisia had access to Orazio’s materials and to his models. She is thought to have sat herself for Orazio’s “Young Woman with a Violin (St. Cecilia),” painted around 1612, which shows a musician with a cleft chin, a rounded cheek, and an alert expression.

She would have learned to reproduce her own features, too, with the use of a mirror. The fact that Artemisia’s female characters often are, like her, russet-haired, with full cheeks, has led many of her paintings to be described as self-portraiture. Even Artemisia’s male figures have sometimes been linked with the female visage characteristic of her work. In 2018, a painting that shows David sitting triumphantly next to Goliath’s severed head—long attributed to the Baroque artist Giovanni Francesco Guerrieri—came to auction. A collector at an auction in Munich acquired it for just a hundred and nineteen thousand dollars; in a subsequent forensic examination of the canvas, the London-based conservator Simon Gillespie discovered Artemisia’s signature on the hilt of David’s sword. Given Artemisia’s recent auction history, the work is now likely worth several million dollars. In an essay published this past March in the arts journal The Burlington Magazine, the scholar Gianni Papi suggests that the figure of David “projects the distinctive proud and cool virility we find in so many of Gentileschi’s heroines,” and persuasively compares the defiant expression of the Biblical hero to that of an apparent self-portrait that can be found in the Palazzo Barberini, in Rome.

Letizia Treves, of the National Gallery, told me that Artemisia’s face “has been read into every heroine she ever painted,” adding, “I don’t think she’s every Judith or Susanna.” Treves argues that it is Artemisia’s depiction of female bodies, rather than her replication of her own face, that most strongly expresses her understanding of what it was like to be a woman. “The way she portrays the female body is very naturalistic—more so than her father’s,” Treves said. “This is someone who really knows the hang of a woman’s breast—who has a real sense of how a woman’s body behaves.” In a pioneering 1968 essay, the art historian R. Ward Bissell wrote of the “uncompromising sensuality” of the recumbent nude depicted in “Cleopatra” (1611-12), describing the figure’s physique as “almost animalistic.” Treves particularly admires Artemisia’s representation of the nude female body in “Danaë” (c. 1612), which is now in the St. Louis Art Museum. Creases around the figure’s armpits and swells in the stomach reveal an awareness of the way a woman’s flesh settles and subsides. By contrast, Orazio’s “Danaë and the Shower of Gold,” painted in the early sixteen-twenties and now at the Getty, features bed linens so realistic that the viewer feels she could climb between them, but the princess’s breasts defy gravity with an almost comical perkiness.

Although the young Artemisia remained largely cloistered in her father’s studio, she was nonetheless vulnerable to attack there by Tassi, a successful artist; some scholars suggest that Orazio had engaged him to tutor Artemisia on perspective. (In “Blood Water Paint,” McCullough plausibly suggests that Artemisia was, in part, a victim of her father’s professional opportunism: Orazio hoped that Tassi would bring him in on a commission.) The decision to publicly accuse Tassi of rape was made not by Artemisia but by her father, who sought to force Tassi to marry her. The official record of the trial, which is housed at the Archivio di Stato, in Rome, includes Artemisia’s vivid account of her ordeal. Tassi, she claims, pushed her inside her bedroom and locked the door. “He then threw me onto the edge of the bed, pushing me with a hand on my breast, and he put a knee between my thighs to prevent me from closing them,” reads a translation provided by Mary Garrard in her 1989 book. Tassi placed a hand over Artemisia’s mouth to stop her from screaming; she fought back, clawing at his face and hair. In the struggle, she grabbed Tassi’s penis so roughly that she tore his flesh. Afterward, she grabbed a knife from a table drawer and said, “I’d like to kill you with this knife because you have dishonored me.” Tassi opened his coat and taunted her by saying, “Here I am.” Artemisia hurled the knife at him. “He shielded himself,” she tells her interrogator. “Otherwise I would have hurt him and might easily have killed him.”

The Roman archive contains trial transcripts for other women who were raped. Elizabeth Cohen, a scholar who has examined the transcripts, argues that the crime of rape had a different cultural connotation than it does now, and was understood less as a violent act against a woman than as a besmirching of her family’s honor. Cohen contends that characterizations of Artemisia as an outraged proto-feminist, with even her early art expressing enraged resistance, are anachronistic. A seventeenth-century woman would not have conceived of her body with the “corporeal essentialism” that a woman does today, Cohen writes: “Artemisia spoke of her body during the trial, but as the material upon which a socially significant offense had been committed.” According to the transcript, at least, Artemisia’s outrage is couched in terms of having been dishonored, rather than having been assaulted. After Tassi raped her, he immediately assured her that he would marry her, and she reports that “with this good promise I felt calmer,” and confirms that, believing his nuptial pledge, she consented to have sex with him on numerous occasions thereafter.

Orazio’s goal of coercing Tassi into making good on his word to marry Artemisia would be unthinkable in a rape trial today. Artemisia’s testimony was, for the most part, by the book: she knew, or had been instructed on, which points she needed to make in order to meet the standards for conviction. Like other unmarried accusers of rapists, she was obliged to undergo examination by a midwife, to verify that she was no longer a virgin. Nonetheless, the force of Artemisia’s character emerges. At the time, to insure that rape accusations were truthful, alleged victims were required to submit to a form of torture: cords were wrapped around their hands and tightened like thumbscrews. “It is true, it is true, it is true,” she repeated as the cords were tightened. The transcript notes that she interrupted her litany to address Tassi directly, with a mordantly ironic reference to the bindings around her fingers: “This is the ring that you give me, and these are your promises.”

Tassi was found guilty but he was sentenced only to a brief period of exile, which he ignored. He did not have to marry Artemisia—it emerged in the courtroom that he had already married someone else. During the trial, her father arranged for her to marry Pierantonio Stiattesi, a minor artist in Florence. Stiattesi was the brother of Giovanni Battista Stiattesi, a friend of Orazio’s who had testified against Tassi in the trial, asserting that he had confessed to having taken Artemisia’s virginity. Artemisia apparently found her husband something of a nonentity, and after about a decade together they separated; most traces of Stiattesi have since been lost. Nevertheless, the betrothal, intended to remove her from the city of her scandalous past, was the making of Artemisia. It gave her an opportunity to establish herself as an artist independent of her father, and her status as a married woman offered her something she had never truly experienced: liberty.

Arriving in Florence in the winter of 1612-13, Artemisia initially set up her studio in the house of her father-in-law, a tailor. Over time, she seems to have established a studio apart from the family home, where, among other things, she could more easily work on large-scale canvases. Embarking on a period of abundant creativity, she executed several of the paintings for which she served as her own model—among them “Self-Portrait as a Lute Player,” which hangs in the Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford, Connecticut. Some art historians believe that this work was commissioned by the Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici, in whose collection it was later recorded. The Duke’s eye would have been drawn to the sensitivity and animation of the face, but also to the delicacy and articulation of the hands, shown mid-strum on the instrument.

In July, 1616, Artemisia became the first woman to be admitted to the prestigious Accademia delle Arti del Disegno. With the respectability of marriage guaranteeing her the freedom to circulate socially, she got to know intellectuals, performers, and other artists, including Galileo and the poet Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, a great-nephew of the Renaissance master. The poet commissioned her to paint part of the ceiling in a gallery dedicated to Michelangelo at the family estate. Her contribution, “Allegory of Inclination,” depicts a female nude sitting on a tuft of cloud.

Around the time she moved to Florence, she made her first iteration of Judith beheading Holofernes, which can now be seen in the Capodimonte Museum, in Naples. In this version and in the one at the Uffizi, a maidservant, Abra, forcefully holds Holofernes down while Judith confidently hacks away at his neck. Treves says of the paintings, “Artemisia is subverting a well-known traditional subject and empowering the women in a way that hasn’t been done before.” (The painting at the Uffizi, now prominently on display there, was for decades hidden from public view, presumably on the ground that it was distasteful. The nineteenth-century art historian Anna Brownell Jameson wrote of wishing for “the privilege of burning it to ashes.”) Treves says that Artemisia’s renderings of the tale offer “a picture of sisterhood—of these two women doing this extraordinary thing.” By contrast, Caravaggio’s treatment of the story, in a work that hangs in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, in Rome, focusses on the horrified face of Holofernes, and depicts Judith as a pallid girl gingerly holding a sword and grasping her foe’s curly hair at arm’s length. She hardly seems to have the oomph required for decapitation.

Artemisia bore five children, between the years of 1613 and 1618, making her execution of large-scale paintings during that period all the more impressive. It was not just a matter of physical endurance: three of her children died in infancy, and a fourth, Cristofano, born in 1615, died before the age of five. Only her daughter, Prudenzia, born in 1617 and named for Artemisia’s mother, lived into adulthood. Such repeated maternal loss—and the risk that successive pregnancies then posed to a woman’s life—is unimaginable today. Twenty-odd years after the birth of her children, Artemisia received a commission from Philip IV of Spain to paint a Biblical work, “The Birth of St. John the Baptist.” Artists from Tintoretto to Murillo had painted the scene, but Artemisia’s version underlines her intimacy with the dynamics of the birthing room. She depicts a capable cluster of midwives—sleeves pushed up, basins in hand—tending to the infant while his mother, Elizabeth, lies wan and exhausted, barely visible in the dim background.

The turmoil of Artemisia’s early life—and the remarkable evidence of it that survives—has inevitably overshadowed the less sensational, and less documented, narrative of what followed. Nevertheless, her later career was extraordinary, and it is reasonable to conclude that the fact of having been raped was less significant to Artemisia’s sense of self than some of her modern champions have suggested. She swiftly became recognized as one of the most accomplished artists of her day, and retained her preëminence for decades; she was often strapped for cash, however, and never stopped hustling for commissions. (Her assurance that her work demonstrated the “spirit of Caesar” was delivered, in part, to justify a painting’s high price.) Artemisia, for all her renown, rarely painted for public spaces. She did little work for the Church, although an early Madonna and Child, painted around 1613, the year her first child was born, suggests what she might have done had churches commissioned devotional themes from her. Mary swoons, eyes closed, as the infant Jesus reaches for her cheek, his eyes locked on her face with palpably needy attachment.

After half a dozen years in Florence, Artemisia returned to Rome. The city’s census report of 1624 suggests that she and her husband had by then parted, and that she was self-supporting. She began associating with Flemish, Dutch, and French painters who also lived in Rome. Treves suggests, “It may be she was hanging out with the foreigners because she felt a bit like an outsider herself.”

In the late sixteen-twenties, Artemisia went to Venice, seeking fresh patronage. In 1630, she settled in Naples. She received commissions from, among others, the Infanta María of Spain, who was spending time in the city. Artemisia cultivated such ladies of the court with gifts of beautiful gloves, which she had sent from Rome. Naples became her base for much of the rest of her life, although she disliked the city, which was crowded, poor, and violent. In a letter to Andrea Cioli, a minister at the Medici court, she complained of “the warlike tumults, the badness of life, and the expense of things.” In the next two decades, she continued to secure influential clients among the Italian nobility and foreign royal houses. Her paintings entered the collections of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, King Philip IV of Spain, and King Charles I of England. Much remains unknown about her later life, though, including the date and cause of her death. Artemisia’s final documented act is a payment made in Naples in August, 1654, against an overdue tax bill. She was reputed to have been buried in the city’s Church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, her grave marked by a stone inscribed, simply, “HEIC ARTIMISIA”: “Here lies Artemisia.” But any such stone had disappeared by the time the information was written down, in 1812, by the Italian historian Alessandro da Morrona, and the church was destroyed in the twentieth century. Given the absence of later documentation, scholars theorize that Artemisia died in 1656, when the plague swept through Naples, killing a hundred and fifty thousand residents—half the city’s population.

Her last known dated work, from 1652, is a large canvas in which she revisits Susanna and the Elders, one of her earliest themes and one to which she had returned repeatedly. As in the 1610 version, Susanna is seated on a balustrade, but this time there is a tenebrous sky, rather than a clear blue one. In this iteration, she does not turn away from the two onlookers: she faces them. The painting was rediscovered a dozen years ago by Adelina Modesti, a professor who found it, badly damaged, in the archive of the Pinacoteca Nazionale, in Bologna. In a monograph, Modesti argues that Susanna’s raised left arm and uplifted hand deflect the elders’ “intrusive male gazes” from her body, which is draped in translucent fabric. It could be argued, though, that this Susanna draws the elders’ attention away from her body not by blocking their gaze but by meeting it with her own—staring at them just as they stare at her, and obliging them to acknowledge her as a human being.

Increasingly, Artemisia is celebrated less for her handling of private trauma than for her adept management of her public persona. Throughout her career, she demonstrated a sophisticated comprehension of the way her unusual status as a woman added to the value of her paintings. On a formal level, her representation of herself in the guise of different characters and genders prefigures such postmodern artists as Cindy Sherman. Unlike Sherman, however, Artemisia had few female peers. She was not the only woman working as an artist during the early seventeenth century: a slightly older contemporary was the northern-Italian portraitist Fede Galizia, born in 1578, whose father, like Artemisia’s, was also a painter. But Artemisia must often have felt singular. In a series of letters written to one of her most important patrons, the collector Antonio Ruffo, she wittily referred to her gender: “A woman’s name raises doubts until her work is seen,” and, regarding a work in progress, “I will show Your Illustrious Lordship what a woman can do.” In 2001, the scholar Elizabeth Cropper wrote, “We will never understand Artemisia Gentileschi as a painter if we cannot accept that she was not supposed to be a painter at all, and that her own sense of herself—not to mention others’ views of her—as an independent woman, as a marvel, a stupor mundi, as worthy of immortal fame and historical celebration, was entirely justified.” On art-adjacent blogs, Artemisia’s strength and occasionally obnoxious self-assurance are held forth as her most essential qualities. She has become, as the Internet term of approval has it, a badass bitch.

Recent research has also complicated the understanding of Artemisia’s moral character, rendering her less blandly heroic. In 2011, the art historian Francesco Solinas was exploring the archive of the Frescobaldis, a Florentine banking dynasty, when he discovered a cache of letters written by Artemisia, including some sent to Francesco Maria Maringhi, a Florentine nobleman. It turned out that she had had a torrid affair with Maringhi when she was in her mid-twenties, and five years into her marriage. Several of the letters are included in the National Gallery show; in the exhibition’s catalogue, Solinas writes that they “reveal a passionate, adventurous and even libertine way of life.” In one letter, Artemisia addresses Maringhi as “my dearest heart”; in another, she chastises him for writing only two lines to her—“which if you loved me would have gone on forever.” In a third, she refers to a self-portrait in Maringhi’s possession and warns him not to masturbate in front of it. (Sadly, the exact portrait is not identified.) In the same letter, she saltily expresses her satisfaction that he has not taken any other lovers, other than his “right hand, envied by me so much, for it possesses that which I cannot possess myself.”

Another work by Artemisia that has only recently been rediscovered, having been in a private collection in France, is “Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy” (c. 1620-25). The subject reclines voluptuously, her eyes closed, her face turned up to the light, a silky white chemise slipping carelessly from her ample shoulder. The painting, which ostensibly depicts Mary Magdalene in the reveries of devotion, is less spiritual than erotic: her interlaced fingers may be motionless, but her slight smile seems labile, indicating that Artemisia understood a woman’s sensuality from the inside out.

The Frescobaldi archive also contains correspondence written to Maringhi by Artemisia’s husband, Stiattesi. Evidently, he was aware of the liaison, and hoped that her highly placed lover would help advance her career. In one letter, Stiattesi apologizes to Maringhi that Artemisia cannot write to him herself; their house, he explains, is perpetually full of cardinals and princes, and she is so busy that she barely has time to eat. Solinas describes Artemisia as “extraordinarily courageous, manifestly unscrupulous, opportunistic and ambitious.” Art historians now contend that the energy and the passion that can be glimpsed in her letters—and even in her testimony at the rape trial—are the same qualities that infuse her work with such vitality.

Artemisia’s fame in feminist circles started with the dissemination of her bloodiest and most distressing images. Her variations on the theme of the murderous Judith remain irresistible iconography, and her differing treatments of Susanna offer a forceful lesson about the power of the apparently powerless. (In the Bible, Susanna does not submit to rape, and, in a trial, the elders’ scandalous accusations against her are proved false.) Such tales of resistance remain as riveting, and as necessary, in the twenty-first century as they were in the seventeenth.

But, in recent years, Artemisia’s academic admirers have turned their attention to one of her quieter paintings. In the late sixteen-thirties, Artemisia travelled to England, where her father had become a court painter. Several works that she painted there entered the Royal Collection, among them “Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting,” also known as “La Pittura.” Such works traditionally depict the allegorical figure as a woman. In Artemisia’s version, which will be prominently placed in the National Gallery exhibition, the woman has abundant, mussed hair and plump cheeks, a brown apron tied around her waist and the billowing green silk sleeves of her dress pushed up past her elbows. Rather than looking out of the frame, as is typical with self-portraits, the figure is looking at a prepared canvas, with a raised brush in one hand and a palette in the other. She bends forward, not elegantly but with the command of an experienced artist. As scholars have pointed out, no male artist could have attempted this clever visual doubling, in which Artemisia combined a realistic portrait of herself at work with an allegorical representation of the art form that she so ardently and successfully pursued. This is an Artemisia for today: accomplished, original, and contentedly absorbed in her vocation. ♦

Published in the print edition of the October 5, 2020, issue, with the headline “A Brush With Violence.”

Rebecca Mead joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1997. She is the author of, most recently, “My Life in Middlemarch.”