Whitney Chadwick

Women, Art,and Society

Third edition

302 illustrations, 78 in colour

~ Thames & Hudson world of art

For Moira

This book is heavily indebted to rhe many feminist scholars whose work has charted this newart historical territory and to my students on the Women and Art course at San Francisco StateUniversiry whose questions helped me shape and refine the material. Linda Nochlin, M o ira Roth,and Lisa Tickner have read the rnanuscript and rnade many helpful suggesrions.jo Ann Bernstein,Cristelle Baskins, Susie Sutch, Pat Ferrero.josephine Withers,janet Kaplan, Mira Schor,judithBertelheirn, and Mary Ann Milford-Lutzker offered valuable critica) cornmentary on specificchapters. Darrell Garrison and George Levounis spent many hours checking bibliography andreferences Moira Roth provided valuable advice and consrrucnve crrncism 111the prepara nonof the revised edition.I would also like to thank Monique Gross for her diligent bibliographicresearch.I arn especially indebted to Nikos Stangos and the staff ar Thames & Hudson whoenthusiastically undertook this book and who have cheerfully coped with my hesitations anddoubts as the manuscript expanded far beyond our original projections.

Any copy ofthis book issued by the publisher as a paperback is so Id subject to the condition that irshall not by way of trade or otherwise be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without thepublisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is publishedand without a similar condition including these words being irnposed on a subsequent purchaser.

First published in the United Kingdorn in '990 byThames & Hudson Ltd, 181A High Holborn, London, WCIV 7QX

www.thamesandhudson.com

1990,1996, and 2002 Thames & Hudson Ltd,London

Third edition 2002

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Contents

Preface 7Introduction: Art History and theWoman Artist 17

ONE The Middle Ages 43TWO The Renaissance Ideal 66

THREE The Other Renaissance 87FOUR Domestic Genres and Women Painters in

Northern Europe II4FlVE Amateurs and Academics: A New Ideology of

Femininity in France and England 139SIX Sex, Class, and Power in Victorian England 175

SEVEN Toward Utopia: Moral Reform and AmericanArt in the Nineteenth Century 205

ElGHT Separate but Unequal: Woman's Sphere andthe New Art 228

NlNE Modernism, Abstraction, and the NewWoman, 1910-25 252

TEN Modernist Representation: The Female Body 279ELEVEN Gender, Race, and Modernism after the

Second World War 3I6TWELVE Feminist Art in North America and

Great Britain 355THlRTEEN New Directions: A Partial Overview 378

FOURTEEN Worlds Together, Worlds Apart 423

Bibliography and Sources 467List oi Illustrations 486lndex 492

works by Anguissola, like the late Virgin with Chiid, reveal her close-ness to Correggio and Luca Cambiaso, as well as the circle of the

Campi.Arnilcare Anguissola's decision to dedica te his daughter to art set a

precedent. Other Italian artists took on female pupils, and the intro-duction to a collection of poems assembled on the occasion of thedeath of Titian's pupil, Irene di Spilimbergo, records that, "havingbeen shown a portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola, made by her ownhand, presented to King Philip of Spain, and hearing wondrous praiseof her in the art of painting, moved by generous ernulation, she wasfired with a warm desire to equal that noble and talented damsel."Anguissola's invitation to the court ofPhilip II w~s the precedent formany other women artists who, excluded from institutional help-academic training, papal and civic patronage, guilds and workshops-found support in the courts ofEurope between the sixteenth and theeighteenth centuries. Her work also directly inAuenced that ofLaviniaFontana, one of a group of important women artists produced by thecity ofBologna in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

CHAPTER THREE

The Other Renaissance

Art history's conception of the Renaissance as an historically, geo-graphically, and culturally unique period is based on the lives andachievements of men. The history of women's contributions to visualculture does not necessarily fit neatly into categories produced by andaround men's activities, and accepting the concept of the Renaissanceas a frame carries with it inherent risks for a feminist history. There is,on t~,e one hand, a"danger of rewriting wornen's production in waysthat fit them into preexlstlOg categones; and on the other, the riskof trivializing women's achievements by seeing them through thelens of sexual difference. Women artists such as Properza de' Rossi,Lavinia Fontana, Elisabetta Sirani, Diana Mantuana (also called DianaScultori): ando Artemisia Gentileschi achieved a remarkable degree ofpublic visibility and renown during their lifetimes. Their achieve-ments were cited as evidence of what a woman could do but malewriters often followed Boccaccio's example and asserted that famouswomen were miraculously endowed with the qualities that enabledthern to succeed and thus could not serve as models for ordinarywomen.

Without exception, the artists mentioned above are identified withthe sixteenth and seventeenth centuries rather than the fifteenth. Andwith the excep:ion of Anguissola (discussed in the previous chapter):nd Gentileschl-whose fortunes are identified with Rome, Naples,1nd Florence m the seventeenth century-aD were part of the intel-erctual and artistic flowenng that took place 111 Bologna, a city geo-

g aphically displaced from the centers of early Renaissance culture.Our knowledge of their careers is far from complete, and althoughthey are but a few of the many names scattered through the literatureof this period, their achievements deserve serious study .. Bologna was unique among Italian cities for having both a univer-

Slty which had educated women since the Middle Ages and a fernalesamt who painted. By the fifteenth century the organization of the~Ullds under the spiritual protection of specific saints had established

t. Luke, who was believed to have painted miracle-working icons

86

88

33 (right) Giovanni Benedetti"S. Caterina de Vigri,' 'Libro devoto r 502

induding one of the Virgin Mary, as the patron saint of painter .Painters in Bologna, where the guilds remained powerful long afterthey had lost polítical and economic effectiveness in the rest of ltaly,had their own saint.

Caterina dei Vigri (St. Catherine of Bologna, canonized 1707),whose cult flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, isanother example of the transmission of learning and culture bywomen in convents. Born into a noble Bolognese family in 1413 andeducated at the court of Ferrara, she entered the Convent of the PoorClares there after her father's death in 1427. She was known for herLatin and skiil in music, painting, and iilumination. Elected abbesssoon after the Poor lares moved to Bologna in 1456, her reputationas a painter grew swiftly. According to accounts by her friend andbiographer, Sister Illuminata Bembo, she "Ioved to paint the DivineWord as a babe in swaddling bands, and for many monasteries inFerrara and for books she painted him thus in miniature," Thebest known of her writings, The Sellen Weapons, recounts the spiritualbattles of a religious woman who saw her inteilect and wiil in conflictwith the submission and obedience demanded by the Church.

Although references to Caterina dei Vigri's painting enter the lite-rature in the sixteenth century, attempts by fem.inist scholars toassemble an OelAllre for her have proved disappointing. The srnallgroup of works preserved in the Convent Church, the CorpusDomini of the Order of Santa Caterina dei Vigri in Bologna, show anaive and untrained hand, or hands, at work. X-rays taken in 1941 ofthe most famous ofher paintings, a St. Ursula now in Venice, reveal anindecipherable inscription underneath her signature. Nevertheless,although we know all too little about her achievements, thesignificance of a woman painter, saint, and patron of painters tosixteenth-century Bologna, whose civic pride and ecdesiasticalauthority then reached new heights, should not be underestimated.

St. Catherine ofBologna's cult, stimulated by her mirades and hermystical autobiographical writings, dates from the exhumation of herperfectly preserved body (now enshrined in the church of the CorpUsDomini) shortly after her death in 1463. Pope Clement VII formallyauthorized her cult in 1524 and in 1592 the title Beata was conferredon her. The cult, enormous and ideaily suited to the pietistic temperof Counter-Reformation Italy, flourished through the seventeenthcentury along with her reputation as a painter. Malvasia mentions heramong a group of painters active in Bologna between 1400 and J 500and a representation of her playing her violín to an assembled

34 (below) MarcantonioFranceschini S. CaterilJa Vigriseventeemh centurv

34Heavenly Host of musical angels and plump putti appears inpreparatory drawing by Marcantonio Franceschini for his fresco cycl aillustrating events from her life in the Corpus Dornini. e

The presence of Sto Catherine's cult in Bologna was only one of anumber of factors that worked to create an unusually supportive con.,text for educated and skilled women in that city. After the Church, themost important institution in Bologna was the university, founded inthe eleventh century. By the time it began admitting women in thethirteenth century, it was Italy's most famous center of legal studiesand was also widely known as a school of the liberal arts. The cityprided itself on women learned in philosophy and law-BettisiaGozzadini, N ovella d' Andrea, Bettina Calderini, Melanzia dall'Ospedale, Dorotea Bocchi, Maddalena Bonsignori, Barbara Ariente,and Giovanna Banchetti, who all wrote, taught, and published.

The connections between the university and the arts in Bolognaneed to be documented, but we do know that the publishing housesthat grew up around the university encouraged the rise of a group ofminiaturists during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that, inaddition to women lay miniaturists, included a Carmelite nun, SisterAllegra, and another woman identified only as "Domina Donellaminiatrix." Diana Mantuana (c. 1547-1612), later given the nameDiana Scultori by art historians and mentioned by Vasari in the 1568edition of his Lives, was-as far as we know-the only femaleengraver of the sixteenth century to sign her prints with her ownname. Shortly after moving to Rome in 1575, she obtained a papalprivilege that protected her rights to produce images she broughtfrom Mantua and gave her the right to print and sell works under thename Diana Mantuana (or Mantovana). This signature identified herwith the Mantuan court and a printing tradition begun withMantegna and continued through her family. The names of DianaMantuana and Veronica Fontana, a famous seventeenth-centurymaker of woodcuts who illustrated Malvasia's Felsina Pittrice inBologna, point to a still unwritten history of women in the publishingtrade in Renaissance Italy. Social historians have noted that in Bolognaat the beginning of the fifteenth century women outnumbered men, afact which may well have encouraged their participation in trades likepainting and printing which remained under guild control until atleast 1600. Luigi Crespi's Vite de Pittori Bolognesi (1769) Jists rwenry-three women active as painters in Bologna in the sixteenth and seven-teenth centuries; at least two of them-Lavinia Fontana and ElisabettaSirani-achieved international stature.

Women artists in Bologna benefited from the civic and ecclesiasti-cal patronage that accompanied the naming of the Emilian regionaround Bologna as a papal state in 1512 (culminating in the election ofthe Bolognese Ugo Buoncompagni as Pope Gregory VIII in 1572);the artistic competition that developed between Rome and Bologna,and the fact that the Renaissance ideology of exceptional womencould be used to claim unique status for the city and its women.

Bolognese art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was an artof elegance and sensibiJity produced for learned and aristocraticpatrons and imbued with the sentiments and moral imperatives of theCOunter-Reformation attempt to reform the Catholic Church. Theabundance of work available for artists must have eased wornen'saCcess to commissions, despite the incidents of male jealousy andSplteful accusations that dogged the careers of de' Rossi and others.1'he Church served as an active patron throughout the sixteenth cen-tUry and noble families, desiring to demonstrate their wealth andrefinement, ordered frescoes and wall decorations for their palaces andfUrnished them and churches with chapels complete with elegant and

35 Diana Scultori Christ and the Woman Taken in Adulterv 1575

90 91

tasteful altarpieces. Encouraged to combine wealth with intellectualand cultural pursuits, members of Bologna's richest families joinedliterary and scientific academies; a self-portrait of the I570S by thepainter Lavinia Fontana places the artist firrnly in the context of thislearned and cultivated citizenry. She depicts herself as prosperous andscholarly, in the act of writing and surrounded by antique bronzes andplaster casts from her private collection. Although Fontana had noclaim to noble birth, Vasari identifies her famil y with the educatedelite of Bologna and her early self-portraits present the image of aneducated woman. A Self-Portrait of 1578 repeats the conventions ofAnguissola's Self-Portrait of 1561, showing Fontana at the keyboard of aclavichord with a female servant, barely visible in the background,holding her music. An empty easel stands in front of the windowand an inscription identifies her as LAVINIA VIRGO PROSPERI

FONTANAE.That the women artists of Bologna were exceptional is without

question. While their work relates more directly to that of their malecontemporaries than to that of other women, and confirms the dorni-nant artistic and social ideologies of its time and place, the extent towhich Fontana and Sirani at least were integrated into the culturallifeof Bologna deserves far more study. They are exceptions in a historyof artistic production by women which forces us to confront wornen'stangential relationships to artistic institutions and systems of patron-age. It remained for Arternisia Gentileschi in the seventeenth centuryto negotiate a new relationship to dominant cultural ideologies andher case is considered at the end of this chapter.

The building campaign intended to make the Bologna municipalchurch ofSan Petronio the largest in Italy after StoPeter's brought for-ward Properzia de' Rossi, Renaissance Italy's only woman sculptor inmarble. A drawing pupil of Marcantonio Raimondi, de' Rossi firstachieved recognition for her miniature carvings on fruit stones. Herambitious shift from these to public cornmissions in the I520S appar-ently brought her close to overstepping the bounds of "fernininity"and Vasari, while assuring his readers of her beauty, musical accorn-plishment, and household skills, also relates that she was persecuted bya jealous painter until she was finally paid a very low price for herwork and, discouraged, turned to engraving on copper.

De' Rossi was first commissioned to decorate the canopy of thealtar of the newly restored church of S. Maria del Baraccano. She thensubmitted a portrait of Count Guido Pepoli as a sample of her workfor the rebuilding at San Petronio and was cornmissioned for severa!

. ceso Records of payment indicate that she completed three sibyls,~o angels, and "two pictures" before abandoning the work.The "pictures" probably refer to bas-reliefs of the Visit of the Queen ofs/¡eba to So/aman and aJoseph and Potiphar's Wife (c. 1520), now in themuseum ofSan Petronio.

joseph and Potiph.ar's Wife perfectly expresses the persistence of the 9classical Ideal m sixteenth-centurv Bologna, combmmg it with anotion of elegance derived from the work of the major figures ofEmilian art of the period: Correggio and Parmigianino. The Biblicalswry of Joseph fleeing from his seductress was a popular one in theeady days of the Counter Reformation. The balanced and muscularbodies, as well as their classical dress, reveal de' Rossi's familiarity withantique sources, while the energy of the figure in motion pointswward Correggio's exuberant figural groups. De' Rossi died in 1530,still a young woman, four years after the last recorded payment for herwork at San Petronio. The city of Bologna continued to pride itselfon having produced her, but it remained for her followers to developthe anti-Mannerist tendencies of Bolognese art under the spiritualinfluence ofthe Counter Reformation and the artistic influence oftheCarracci and Guido Reni.

Lavinia Fontana began painting around 1570 in the style of herfather and teacher, Prospero Fontana, whose work combinedCounter-Reformation pietism, Flemish attention to detail, and agrowing northern Italian interest in naturalism. The diverse strands ofclassicism, naturalism, and mannerism were united in ProsperoFontana's desire to produce religious art that was clear and persuasivem accordance with the teachings of Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, Bishopand later Archbishop of Bologna, whose influence was widely felt inthe arts. Prospero Fontana's pupils-v-Lavinia Fontana, LudovicoCarracci, and Gian Paolo Zappi-inherited these tendencies.

Fontana's early self-portraits, and the small panels intended as pri-vate devotional pieces, combine the influence of her father with thenaturalism of the late Raphael and the e1egance of Correggio andP~rmlglanino. Although Fontana became best known as a portraitist,th e also executed numerous religious and historical paintings, many of~ ern large altarpieces. Paintings like Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata.~579) and the Noli Me Tangere (1581) adhere closely to the religious~ eology of spiritual and social reform expressed through prayer,

eV~tlon, and contemplation. "Popularized" religious paintingss~~ . as Fontana's Birth of the Virgin (I580s) and her Conseaation to the 36,41

lrglll (1599) often incorporate domestic motifs or familial pieties,

92 93

reinforcing Paleotti's desire to extend pastoral care to individual fami_lies through prayer and instruction.

The Birth if the Virgin is closer to a genre scene of family !ife inBologna than to its Biblical source, despite its outdoor setting andnocturnal iilumination. It balances a sense of monurnentality anddecorum with a naturalism close to that of the Cremonese school,and was influenced by Anguissola, whose work Fontana knew andadrnired and who no doubt provided an important artistic model forher. Fontana's Consecration to the Virgin, originaily intended for theGnetti Chapel in S. Maria dei Servi in Bologna, combines figureselongated according to Mannerist conventions with greater natural-ism in the treatment of the children's figures. Prospero Fontana'sinfluence continued to be felt in Fontana's later religious paintings, asdid that of Paleotti, for links between the Bishop and the painter'sfamily remained strong.

By the late 1570s, Fontana's fame as a portraitist was firmly estab-lished. Despite her adherence to the principIes of naturalism advocat-ed by the Carracci family, she was prevented fromjoining the Carracciacademy, founded in the 1580s, because of its emphasis on drawingfrorn the nude model. Her Portrait oi a Gentleman and His Son (1570s)recalls Anguissola's Portrait if a Young obleman (15 50S) in its straight-forward pose and in the quiet dignity of the figures. At the same time,the painting reveals the calculated mix of moderate social responsibil-ity espoused by Paleotti and the worldly pretensions of the Bolognesearistocracy which insured Fontana's success as a portraitist. Theelegant, elongated fingers and the briiliance of the rich detail on thesitter's garments oppose their monumentality and social rank to thesober space they inhabit.

Fontana's marriage to Gian Paolo Zappi in 1577 was contractedwith a provision that the couple remain part ofher father's household;her husband subsequently assisted her and cared for their large family.When the Bolognese Cardinal Buoncompagni succeeded to the papa-cy in 1572 papal patronage for Bolognese artists increased. prosperoFontana had enjoyed the patronage of three previous popes; Fontanareceived her first papal commission and a summons to Rome from thelocal branch of the Pope's family. It is a sign of her status as a pamterthat she was able to postpone moving to Rome until the papacy ofClement VIII which did not occur until after her father died. She leítfor Rome around 1603, preceded by her husband and son and a paint-ing, a Virgin and Sto Ciacinto, commissioned by Cardinal Ascoli. Thepainting created a demand for her work in Rome. Working m the

36 Lavinia FontanaBirth of tlie Virgin 1580s

palace of Cardinal d'Este, she painted a Martyrdom if Sto Stephen for the~aslhca ofSan Paolo Fuori le Mura. The painting, destroyed in a fire inB823, IS known today only through an engraving of 16II by Callot.

agltone reports that the work was a failure with the Roman publicand that Fontana, in despair, renounced public commissions andreturned to portrait painting.

Late portraits, like the Portrait if a Lady with a Lap Dog (c. 1598) are~O~ldly and sophisticated. The exquisite details of costume and fur-lifi tngs iso late the sitters against a space rendered in a broad and simp-t~led manner. Prices for Fontana's portraits soared with her election tole e/Id Roman Academy, allowing her to pursue her interest in col-po tng art and antiquities. Contemporaries report that she executed

rtralts of Pope Paul V, as weil as those of ambassadors, princes, and

94 95

37 Felice Casoni Lavinia Fontana r é r r

cardinals, a testament to the continuing patronage of women artists byaristocrats and eeclesia tieso Her reputation continued to grow and in1611, shortly before her death, a portrait medal was struek in herhonor by the Bolognese medallist Felice Antonio Casoni. The faceeontains a dignified portrait and an inscription identif)ring her as apainter. On the reverse, an allegorieal female figure in adivine frenzyof creation sits surrounded by compasses and a square, as an earlierRenaissanee emphasis on mathematies and inspired genius belatedlymodifies the ideal of the Renaissance woman artist.

Women artists like de' Rossi and Fontana set an important prece-dent for women of seventeenth-eentury Italy, particularly in the areaaround Bologna. Yet the work of the two best known of thosewomen-Artemisia Gentilesehi (c. 1593-1652), born in Rome butactive in Florence, aples and London, and Elisabetta S¡raJ1l(1638-65), whose short life was spent entirely in Bologna-was evenmore powerfully shaped by the pervasive influences of Michelang~oMerisi da Caravaggio and Guido Reni. Caravaggio's insistent natur dism, shallow pictorial spaee, and dramatic use of light generat~yamong his followers a large body of paintings charactenzed 15unidealized, boldly illwninated figures placed against dark, mysten

Ole

backgrounds. Guido Reni, who inherited the mantle of the Bolognde5

d. . d bien esehool from the Carracci at whose academy he was trame , nd

elegant refinement and naturalistie expression. In eharacter aorepersonality, these two influential figures could not have been rn

96

E1isabetta S· .lranl T/¡e Ho/ F../ .

Y allll y With a Kneelino Monastic Saint C. [660

39 (above) Sofonisba AnguissolaBernardino Campi PaintingSojonisba Anguissola late 1550S

40 (left) Elisabetta SiraniPortrait of Al1l1a Maria Ralluzzias Charity 1665

41 (opposite) Lavinia FontanaConsecration to the Virgin 1599

different: Reni, educated and cultured, perpetuated the image ofgentleman artist; Caravaggio, rebel and outlaw, epltomized a ne th.efor the artist as bohemian. Vvrole

Like many women artists of the time, Gentileschi and Siranithe daughters of painters. Orazio Gentileschi was one of the Vvereimportant of Caravaggio's fol1owers; Giovanni Andrea Sirani a ;10St

and fol1ower ofReni, and an artist of considerably less interest tha uhildaughter. Gentileschi is the first woman artist in the histor~ l~

Western .art whose historical significance is unquestionable. In t~ecase of Sirani, her early death has prevented a ful1 evaluation of hcareer despite her evident fame durin~ her life. Sirani's father took :l~her mcome from a body of work which she herself, fol1owing a cus,tom gaining favor during the seventeenth century, catalogued at ISO

paintings, a figure now considered too low. Despite her catalogue, nomonograph exists and her reputation has suffered from an Over-attribution of inferior works in Reni's style to her. As Otto Kurznotes: "The list of paintings to be found under her name in museumsand private col1ections and the list of those paintings which sheherself considered as her own work, coincide only in rare instances."

Sirani has frequently been disrnissed as one of several insignificantfol1owers ofReni in Bologna, and a painter of sentimental madonnas.But the subtlety ofher pictorial style, and the graceful elegance ofhertouch, have prompted recent reevaluations of her significance in rela-tion to that of contemporaries in Bologna like Lorenzo Pasinelli,Flarninio Torre, and the Flerning Michele Desubleo. Sirani's PortraitofAnna Maria Ranuzzi as C/tarity (r665) is an outstanding example ofBolognese portraiture in the second half of the seventeenth century.

The proud gaze of Madame Ranuzzi, the younger sister of CauntAnnibale Ranuzzi, who commissioned the painting, and the wlfe ofCado Marsigli by whom she had two sons, is intensified by conceilltrated brushwork. Lively touches of red and blue il1uminate the aver.color scheme of grays, lilacs, and browns and set off the rich purple~~~garments and background which envelop the figures. Despltevirtuoso brushwork and richness, the emphasis in the work is onRanuzzi's maternity rather than her social rank. 1 y

Sirani's Judit/t witn the Head oJ HoloJernes (Walters Art Cal e~~Baltimore) is perfectly in keeping with the grace, elegance, and plct serial refinement which secularized the subject for wealthy Bolagney,spatrons. Yet it also suggests that Sirani shared the seventeenth centu~usinterest in female heroines; Sirani and Gentileschi produced nUI~er hefpaintings on the theme of the heroic woman who tnumphs Y

40

roo

42 Elisabetta Sirani Portia Woundir¡g Her Thigh 1664

virtue. In addition to several Judiths, both women painted penitentMagdalenes and monumental sibyls. In addition, Gentileschi offeredeveral allegorical female figures, Sto Catherine, a Cleopatra, and a

Lucretia, among others, while Sirani supplied a Timoclea (r659),unusua~ in its depiction of the defiant heroine, and a Portia WoundingHer Thigl: (r664). The latter was commissioned by Signore Simone~asSl and intended for an overdoor in a private apartment. The subject

el~ngs with a group of themes, including the rape ofLucretia, whichexp ore the relationship between public political and private oftenexual behavior. '

~ncic~ h ..he se t e rnoment at which Portia wounded herself to testr strength f hwork's o c aracter before asking Brutus to confide in her. The

female sexuahzed content is evoked through the titillating image ofother mVvoundmg and the figure's almost voluptuous disarray, but itsh eanmgs a li .ow sex 1 di re more comp icated and return us to the issue ofdeeply inu:h l~erence IS produced and reinforced. Stabbing herselfPolitical t e t 19h, Portia has to prove herself virtuous and worthy ofPl rusr by .Utarch' separatmg herself frorn the rest of her sex-in

s Vvords· "1 e , . .\Veake to k . Con resse, that a wornan s wit commonly IS tooCOmpany oefepea secret safely: but yet, Brutus, good education, and the

vertuou hs men, ave some power to reforme the defect of

ror

43 Artemisia GentileschiJlAdith Decapitoting Holojernes c. 1618

nature. And for my Selfe, 1 have this benefit moreover: that 1 a!11thedaughter of Cato, and wife ofBrutus." f

The composition reinforces Portia's removaJ from the world °dwomen. She is physically separated from the women who splO an

ngossip in another room, betraying their sex by talk. Presenting w~I11aofas a "defect" of nature, Christian doctrine often used the volub¡[¡tYthewoman as a metaphor for her uncontrolled desires. Removed froJ11ertprivate world of women to the public world of men, Portia must a55

102

her control over speech before she can claim exceptional st. atus Shdemonstrates, finally, that women who prove their virtue th

r· e

individual acts of bravery can come to be recognized as aln OUgh. .. 10St 1·1-men. Yet the ernphasis on bared flesh and self-rnutilann-¡ erotic· Il\eact of valor. The signs of female sexualiry are reconfigured Wit~es theconventions of representations of the threatening femme fiat ¡111the

. a e Inmanner no doubt designed to appeal to the tastes of a new class f aular private collectors. The rich colors and the confident brus~ sec_displayed by the hand of a woman established Sirani's repUtati~o:kBologna as a phenomenon. n

Sirani's skill and the speed with which she worked led to gossip thher father was claiming her work as his own in order to exploit thepublicity value of a female prodigy in the workshop. In order to repu~diate the all too familiar allegation that her work was not her own, shebecame accustomed to working in publico Around 1652, she opened aschool for women artists in Bologna. There she trained a number ofyounger women artists who, for the first time, were not exclusivelyfrom farnilies of pamters, as well as her two younger sisters, AnnaMaria and Barbara, who eventually produced their own altarpieces forlocal churches.

Sirani's death in r665 was fo11owed, on November 14, by a massivepublic funeral in the Dominican church attended by a large and distin-guished crowd of mourners. The funeral announcement described heras PITTRICE FAMOSISSIMA and the lavish scheme ofdecoration forthe ceremony was supervised by the artist Matteo Borbone. Acatafalque, intended to represent the Temple of Fame, was erected inthe middle of the nave. The octagonal structure of imitation marble, ItS.cupola-shaped roof supported by eight columns of pseudo-porphyry,had a base decorated with figures, mottoes, and emblematic picturesand, on a platform, a life-size figure of the dead artist painting.

Sirani was eulogized in a funeral oration which was also a rhapsod~of civic pride in the city of Bologna. Her funeral, rhe fin~identification of her fame with that of the city which had produce

l. ntl-her, was comparable to the funerals of other well-known slxtee ..and seventeenth-century artists in that they were accorded the pnvlcileges of other distinguished citizens. In the fifteenth century, Ghlbernhad requested that his body be interred in Florences Santa Croce In. d aS athe company of the noblemen to whose position he aspIre s-artist. Less than a hundred years later, Michelangelo's body was tra~t_ported from Rome back to his native Florence in 1564, where a sut~anuous catafalque was erected in the Medici family basJllca o

I04

I na Reni's funeral in r 642 was also treated as a publicreoto. In Bo o~ offered for him in towns surrounding Bologna, andot with mas~ome. His body was carried to San Domenico withfar away as d honor past huge crowds in the streets. Upon Sirani's

great po~P an 's two most famous artists of the seventeenth centurydeath, ~o ogn:est side by side in the ancestral tomb of the wealthywere lald t~ignor Saulo Giudotti. A testament to their public civicBolognese, . ts the internment was also deeply ironic; during his life,

tuS as artls , ..ea t ic Reni had refused to have anything to do with women,

the eccen r . fi f ooi . h fi hei. them from his house 111 ear o pOlson or witc cra t at t eirbarrtog

hao~~ fame of Sirani in Bologna during her lifetime was riva11ed by01 one other woman artist 111Italy: Artemisia Gentileschi, a painter

o hose life and work are a challenge to hurnanist constructions of;minine education and deportment. In May 1606, Caravaggio RedRome, accused of stabbing a young man to death. Among his fo11ow-ers in Rorne were Orazio Gentileschi, a founder of the style that cameto be known throughout Europe as Caravaggism, and his daughterArtemisia, whom Ward Bisse11 has identified as one of the two mostimportant Caravaggisti to reach maturity between r6ro and 1620.Caravaggio and the Gentileschi farnily (which included a son as wellas the daughter born in r 593) were far removed in lifestyle and tem-perament from the learned painters of the Bolognese school withtheir emphasis on piety and refinement. Historical accounts of thelawI:ss bohemian artist, whose hands were as skilled with the daggeras Wlt~ the paintbrush, and in whom a revolutionary style of paintingcom~l1ngled with unrestrained passions, usually begin with Cara-vagglO,. though Rudolph and Margaret Wittkower have skilfu11ytraeed its prot ty he si .G ·1 . o pe to t e sixteenth century. Archival research on thelil:~tl eschi family has produced a history rich in court orders andGe:¿l as ;;11 as the famous trial in r ór z of Orazio's assistant andthe .ese l s teacher, Agostino Tassi, on charges that he had raped

nlOeteen_y Id· 1 . ..taken ti ear-o glr , withdrawn a prormse of marriage, and}udith a;~ rorn the Gentileschi house paintings that included a large

even~een ~ truth of the matter remains buried under conflictingIllents W~i "hceh11turydocuments and modern readings of those docu-teenth_e cave often irnposed anachronistic attitudes on seven-ha entury se al d .. . .d les, to d .xu an matrimonial mores. At ItS heart, the trialfeIationship t o 2;'lth Artem~sia Gentileschi's virtue than with Tassi'sdaugbter G o razio Gentileschl's legal property, which included his

. er1l1alne G ' . . .reer s argument, that the trial, and the publiciry

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which accompanied it, removed the remaining traditional obstthe development of Gentileschi's professional life, is convincin ac\es toa point. But it ignores the egually favorable confluence of bup toGentileschi's defiant reputation and his unswerving support ofhraz11}ented daughter. Mary Garrard's recent monograph on the artist IShtaI-also brings together for the first time in English all the doc~W lchrelating to the artist, as well as the complete transcripts of th~llentstrial, has convincingly shown how this public scrutiny of female s rapeality reshaped those issues of gender and class relevant to Gentilesexhu~

b . . e ISsu seguent emergence as a maJor artist.The growth of naturalism in the seventeenth century led to a n

emph~sis on the depiction of courage and physical prowess in rep~~sentation. Images of heroic womanhood, qualified by the moralisticrhetoric of the Counter Reformation and well suited to the demandsof Barogue drama, replaced earlier and more passive ideals of femalebeauty. This new ideal, traceable in the work of the Carracci and Renicirc!es as well as in the followers of Caravaggio, coincided withexpanding roles for the artist which admitted a wider range ofbehav-ior and attitudes, and assured even the unconventional Caravaggio ofthe continuing patronage ofthe powerful cardinal, Scipione Borghese.However colorful Gentileschi's life, and accounts vary widely, it wasmarked by a sustained artistic production (despite the fact that shemarried and had at least one child) egualled by few women artists.

Artelllisia Gentileschi Susanna and lile Elders J 61 o

'fintoretto SI/Stl/llla and tlie Elders 1555-56

46 Among Gentileschi's earliest works is a Susanna and thinscribed ARTE GE TILESCHI ró r o, which already disPlay~ Elders,ClOUS evidence ofher later development. The opportunity to e preco_the work (long inaccessible in a private collection) when it a;ai1l1nein the exhibition, Women Artists 1550-1950, in 1977 led to it pearedbution to Artemisia rather than Orazio, despite a formal and co~ attn_debt to the older Gentileschi. The painting's indusion in the°rtStlcexhibition of Gentileschi's work held at the Casa Buonarro?91Florence moved at least one art historian to argue for the work I In

collaboration between the daughter and a father, "who, in an un;s astandable reversal of workshop tradition, proudly encouraged ~r-daughter-assistant to take the credit," Issues of content as well as attri,bution continue to surround the painting, and Mary Garrard's fem:_nist readings have been challenged by other Renaissance and Baroguescholars, among them Richard Spear and Francis Haskell.

The painting, executed in Rorne only ayear after she began hercareer (if we are to believe Orazio's testimony at the trial), has source,in similar representations by members of the Carracci circle, as well asaDavid and Goliath (c. 1605-10) by Orazio, The Apocryphal story oftheattempted seduction by the two Elders ofJoachim's wife, Susanna, wasextremely popular in Italy by the late sixteenth century. Garrard pointsout the many interpretative traditions within which the theme hasfigured. The figure of Susanna has symbolized the Church, conspiredagainst by Elders representing pagans and other opponents. She canalso signify deliverance (the young Daniel cleared her narne and savedher life), or a female chastity that would rather die than bring dishonot011 a husband. During the Renaissance, focus on a single dramatICmoment that emphasized the more violent and voyeuristic aspects ofthe theme, replaced broader narrative themes. This focus also served toprovide a Biblical occasion for the painting of an erotic nude. Thedrama is played out in terms of the sexual dynamics oflooking, and th~interplay of male aggression and femal e resistance. Male possessJOI1othe female body is initiated through a look which surprises the UI1SU~pecting and defenseless woman at her bath. "The nude's erotic app~could be heightened," Garrard argued in an important article 011t ~painting, "by the presence oftwo lecherous old men, whose incluslo"was both iconographically justified and pornographical1y effect;V~·nThe freguency with which Susanna is assigned a complicitoUS ro e ofthis drama of sexualized looking, as we see in Tintoretto'S versJOI1cw1555-56, points to the theme as reinforcing social ideologies of masline dominance and female subordination.

45

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., rsion departs from this tradition in significant ways.Genrileschl s v~a from the garden, a traditional rnetaphor for the

. g Susal1 G il hi i 1 h f .eJllOvlO ti . inity of nature, ent ese I ISOates t e Igure againstbOunteoUs em~~nic frieze which contains the body in a shallow anda rigid archltec The awkward twist and thrust of the body with itsrestricted space·transforms the image into one of distress, resistance,oudlung an~s~hysicality very much at odds with representations byand awkwa~uido Reni, and others who choose to position the female'fintoret~oh'· attitudes of graceful display. Other representations of thefigure wit 111 .. 1 d· h b h C .. 1 d. . Italian paintmg, me u mg t ose y t e arracci circ e anub·ect 111 . fc h l· b di .

• ".J B d locchio (c. 1609) rein orce t e mascu me gaze y irecnnglstoaa he consni ·11 fboth looks toward the female body. T ~ COI?sp~ratona g anceo one

Elder toward the view~r m Gentileschi s pamtmg may be umgue. Itals produces a more disturbing psychological content, as the tnangleins~ribed by the three heads, and the positioning of the arms, not onlyfocuses Susanna as the object of the consplracy, but also implicates athird witness, a spectator who receives the silencing gesture of theolder male as surely as if "he" were part of the painting's space. Thefigure ofSusanna is fixed like a butterfly on a pin between these gazes,two within the frame of the painting, the other outside it, but implic-idy incorporated into the composition. Abandoning more traditionalcompositions in which Susanna's figure is off-center, along a diagonal~r orthogonal line which allows the spectator to move freely in rela-non to the image, Gentileschi moves the figure close to the center ofthe composition and uses the spectator's position in front ofthe canvasto 6x her rigidly in place.

Gentileschi's biography has often been read in her representations.Mo~ ~emarkable for her development as a painter, however, is the~P~t.stlcauon of this early intuitive and empathetic response to a

Gatn1~larsubJect. Susanna and the Elders offers striking evidence ofenn eschi' bilicentu 1s a Ity to transform the conventions of seventeenth-

the i ry pamtmg m ways that would ultimately give new content to1:m~~ery of the female figure.

assi s eventual . 1induded G . acquitra at the celebrated trial in Rorne, whichtain the tr e

hnt1leschi's torture by thumbscrew in an attempt to ascer-

to a weal~ ~fher statements, and Gentileschi's subseguent marriagewhere she y . orentme were followed by several years in Florenceeveral of h el1Joyed an excellenr reputation as a painter, executed

Disegno ther most lI11pOrtant works, and joined the Accademia delbe ' e arch1V f hi .tween 1616 es o w ich include several references to her

and 1619. The Florentine period, which ended with

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47 Orazio Gentileschi[udith wiih Her Maidservan¡ c. r6[0-12

her return to Rome in r620 according to Bissell's chronology, seerns to43 have included the Judith With Her Maidservant, the Judith Decapitafi1/g

Holojemes, and an Allegory oJ the Inclination commissioned in r617 forthe salon ceiling in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence.

Gentileschi's Judith With Her Maidservant is the first of six knownvariations on the popular theme from the Old Testament Apocryphawhich relates the story of the slaughter of the Assyrian general,Holofernes, by the Jewish widow, Judith, who crept through enemylines to seduce and then decapitate the sleeping general. The monu-mental composition, naturalistic rendering and strong contrasts oflight and shadow, and use of contemporary models, are all indicatorsof Gentileschi's adherence to the principles of a fully developedCaravaggism. In this painting, as in the earlier Susanna and the Elders,she emphasizes the psychological complicity of the two figures b~squeezing them into the same space, mirroring their bodles, a~repeating the direction of the two, in this case female, gazes. T dfocused intensity of Judith's action, reinforced by the clenched hanthat clutches the sword hilt, is a radical departure from ora~l~Gentileschi's version of the same subject (c. r61O-12). In the latt~r, tn fstability of the pyramidal composition created by the positionJl1~·fethe bodies of the two women emphasizes the figures' passlvlty, ;~s Irothe directing of their gazes outward In different directions WO h ofdefuse their intensity and comrnitment to a shared goal-the deat v~Jl

bi t GIO 'the enemy leader. In yet another version of the same su ~ec , d oiGiosefa dal Sole's Portrait oJ a Woman as[uditl», executed at the en

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I\rternisia Gentileschi)1/d· I .

111 wlfh Her MaidserlJant c. r6I8

the century, the presence ofHolofernes's head lends a mereltal touch to the languid figure ofJudith, an image of sensu~ a7ecdo,who, with breasts bared, turns toward the spectator. P eaSUte

Yael Evan has traced the prototype ofthe female hero whomates a triumphant man in stature to Mantegna's (or his fo~pprol(i,drawing ofjudith (1491), one of the earliest depictions to inv~~ers')textual portrayal of the original Vulgate judith who is said t hthe"behaved like a mano" Tracing the changing image of Judith t~ aVethe Renaissance and Baroque periods, Evan and others have ~oughhow the iconography of Judith was gradually transformed d oVvnthe sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and have pointedunng

Gentileschi's considerable role in constructing a female hero O~ttranscends the female norm by displaying a capacity for moral be: oior in the public realm that is normally denied to wornen. av,

The most insistent feature of Gentileschi's judith Decapilatillg43 Holcifernes-the ferocious energy and sustained violence of the

scene-has attracted extensive critical commentary, often by writerswho have found intimations of Gentileschi's personal experience asthe recipient ofTassi's sexual advances in the scene. Yet the naturalisticdetails-the choice of the moment of the decapitation and the bloodwhich jets from the severed arteries-are present in several other sev-enteenth-century versions, including those of Caravaggio and JohannLiss, whose judith in the Tent 01Hoioiernes (c. 1620) rivals Gentileschi's inlurid detail. A more relevant source for Gentileschi's representationmay be a lost work by Rubens, known today only through an engrav-ing by Cornelius Galle 1 (1576-1650), which sheds light on the paint-ing's iconography as well as its grueso me nature. Rubens's workprovides a possible source for the powerful female figure with its mus-cular arms, neck, and upper torso, but is significantly different frornGentileschi's rendering in its attention to the graceful and reveahngswirl of drapery around the female body. Despite pictorial sources ~nCaravaggio, Rubens, and Orazio Gentileschi, there is nothing In t ehistory ofWestern painting to prepare us for Gentileschi's expres~o~of female physical power, brilliantly captured in the use of a pinw -nscomposition in which the interlocking, diagonally thrusting arn;econverge at Holofernes's head. It is not the physicality of rhe fe!11~11figures alone, however, which makes it unusual, but its combInatl rn

oh d h 1 d d fWestewit restructure gazes. T e coy g ances an averte gazes o 011-painting's female figures are missing here. The result is a dlrect eeel1frontation which disrupts the conventional relationship be¡tWuO"han "active" male ~pectator and a passive female recipiento Alt 10 "

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o, ork shares subjects and female heroines with that of atile Chls w

hseventeenth-century painters from Francesco del

ot er o C 1 S . d G .dt J1laoy . Castello to Guercmo, ar o araceru, an UI o. aod Va]eno muscular male figures appear in works like

eni. aod a~~~:fredi's Mars Punishing Amor (c. 16IO), its celebration)JartoloJ1leo expressed in direct rather than arrested acuon was

e: ale eoergy '1' o o{leJ1l r to the preval mg artistic temper.ftIOfouodly a ien fJudith and Holofernes is repeated in the work ofr---The theme o o b h o o

oth-century women artists, ut t eirs contam noneotber se~eote:eristicS that distinguish Gentileschi's. A judith and Herof rbe cOdaracainted by Fede Galizia, the daughter of a miniaturistElandmal el! p o o hT t at the end ofthe sixteenth century, reiterates t e conven-f!oJ1l r;o ~:ned Eemale portraiture in combination with the stern,uo~ °m;;sage of the severed head. Sirani's judith, despite following~~ntileschi's chronologically, is closer to ~he mannered elega~ce ofBolognese painting than to the new pictorial ideals of the Gentileschi

~;-the time Artemisia Goentileschi arrived in Naples in 1630 shea celebrity, living magmficently and enJoymg the patronage and

protection oE the nobiliry, An allegorical figure of Fame, dated 1632,

and a Seif-Portrait as the Allegory cifPainting (1630s) are important works 44which signal her transition to a more refined later sryle, Self-Portrait astireAllegory cifPainting has been thoroughly analysed as a sophisticatedcommentary on a central philosophical issue of later Renaissance art~eory. and an audacious challenge to the core of artistic tradition in• creation of an image unavailable to any male artist-an allegoricalfigun: ~hich is at the same time a self-image. Following Ripa'sdes~nptlOn of the image of Pittura, Gentileschi has given herself theattributes of the Eemale personification ofPainting: the gold chain, the::;'dant ~ask standing for imitation, the unruly locks ofhair that sig-ing cok d!Vme Erenzy of artistic creation, and the garments of chang-col co ors which allude to the painter's skill, The richly modulatedpa:~-red-browns, dark green, blue velvet-are repeated in the five

hic~s of color on the palette, The work belongs to a tradition inand all pamtmg IS identified as one of the liberal arts, but here artistin the pegory are one. Unlike the self-portraits of Anguissola discussed

revlOUs chapr I e h fi o o dPresent h 1 er, 'iere, ror t e irst time, a woman artist oes noterse f as a gentlewoman, but as the act of painting itself.

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