Published in Enchanted Living, the Renaissance issue, Winter 2025.

 

 

They had names like Sofonisba and Lavinia and most of all Artemisia. They were brilliant and gifted and (sometimes) ferocious—because they had to be, sure, and perhaps also because they wanted to be. They were courtiers and wives and warriors. They were artists at a time when women just didn’t do that.

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But they did.

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A handful of talented, tenacious, and perhaps rather lucky young women were able to work in what was then the unfeminine medium of paint. Smeary, messy, very physical paint, which required the grinding of stones and beetles and you-just-name-what-else, and mixing with linseed oil, and preparing heavy slabs of wood for the laying on of all that rich, expensive color.

 

We’re talking about lone women working in studios populated by male creatures from first adolescence to well-advanced senescence, women painting some strikingly realistic arms and hands and other body parts into being, newly detailed thanks to a shift in painterly aesthetic. Women who sought to give a good long look to actual flesh, because you couldn’t quite paint it if you didn’t inspect it thoroughly first. And a typically well-brought-up female was never, ever supposed to look, let alone touch.

 

These women simply had to look. And grind. And mix. And create. They felt thwarted by the norms that limited what they could do … and then they painted circles around those norms. Of all these fiercely talented artists, one name stands out. You probably know it already: Artemisia Gentileschi, at the time called a “prodigy of painting, easier to envy than to imitate.”

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She came along at the end of the Italian Renaissance, born in 1593 and alive till about 1656; she worked at the height of the dramatic Baroque style—no, she helped define the Baroque, and she was one of its foremost practitioners.

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And now I come to a trigger warning. Artemisia was born into a milieu in which femininity meant never being entirely safe. That was especially true in a male-dominated profession, for a lower-class girl, no matter how scrappy she was. In short, Artemisia endured a trauma that no one should ever have to experience, and we have to know about it in order to understand both her life and her oeuvre.”

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But her story is not about being a victim. In the next forty years, she became a master of her art, and she is now known for big, bloody pictures of avenging women, heroines, and warrior queens. Given her history, it is natural to see Artemisia as a warrior queen herself … but I think her story and her art are more complicated than that. Painting as she did may have been partly revenge, but great art is never just revenge.

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So if you read on, you’ll encounter Renaissance violence and injustice. You’ll also meet other remarkable artists who rose to prominence in the rich 16th and 17th centuries, women who broke with some traditions and created new ones in masterworks we celebrate today. Artemisia stands on their shoulders.

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Just look at her 1638 Self-Portrait as Allegory of Painting: She’s glorious in mid-career, prosperous, and wearing a fine gown and gold necklace, all surfaces shimmering, all textures finely rendered … a lady. But she’s contorting in order to get the right sight line on the work and keep her fine-tipped brush headed for a precise spot. This is a beautiful woman whose beauty does not matter to her in the moment, because she’s focused on what she can create. Her pose shows the difficulty—for anyone, not only women—of doing the work. And it caps a new tradition for female painters.

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As the centuries rolled on, these artists mostly sank back into perhaps colorful marginal notes as oddities … or else they got no notes at all and dropped into obscurity. But the past thirty or so years have seen a surge of interest in these artists as artists, and not just as female ones. Their work embodies the culture and shifting aesthetics of the era; they also created new modes and genres of paintings, most significantly the self-portrait of the artist as (in fact) an artist. They delved into the problems of flesh, the body, the self, and the nature of art, and their eyes are watching us now.

 

So let us celebrate, once again, their lives and creations, from birth to success and whatever else came along.

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A Rebirth of the Flesh

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O those terrifically louche, very physical ancient Greeks and Romans! The heavenward gaze of the Middle Ages had preferred not to look at what prior cultures had done, with their pagan emphasis on the body and their glory in some of the more animal impulses—depictions of lust, anger, and love, for example, in a recognizably three-dimensional space. Most Inset: Miniature Self-Portrait (1556), by Sofonisba Anguissola medieval art centered on the Christian divine, placing what later seemed like flat, idealized forms in an equally flat symbolic space.

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Sometime in the 1300s, our focus started to shift back to all the messiness of humanity, where it stayed until the religious resurgence of the 1600s. In 1550, Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (more on that worthy tome later) referred to the change as a rinascita—a rebirth. In English and French, the concept caught on around 1855 as the Renaissance. Physicality was just one aspect of humanism, which was an all-around return to interest in people (rather than divinity) with all their flaws and curiosity and doubts and capacity for growth. In other words, creativity and philosophy now were about real, complicated flesh and emotions.

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This is not to take anything away from medieval art, which we love. Women were active painters then too, illuminating manuscripts in convents—where would we be without our perennial girl crush Hildegard von Bingen?—and creating even more pictures with thread in the one medium always approved for women and girls: embroidery. These Renaissance painters emerged as much from these artistic traditions as from the male- dominated studio system.

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As more women took up the brush outside of the convent, they participated in a movement by which the idea of beauty itself—both as something a person possessed and as something they could represent in art—was becoming more individualized. So each face and figure had to stand out as unique. For example, in self-portraits, Artemisia’s pointed nose sets her apart from Sofonisba’s rounded cheeks and blue eyes; they are artists, not an icon meaning Artist. Backgrounds and settings also became more distinctive and realistic, with a rediscovered sense of perspective, because bodies now lived inside a network of light, shadow, and depth, a complex sense of space in which other objects loomed or dwindled with distance.

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Just look at the work of another superstar, Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614). She was known primarily for portraits, but she was also one of a few women who took on religious subjects and classical mythology. The bodies in her work have a certain jarring beauty not entirely in line with what we think we observe every day. That’s because Lavinia’s aesthetic followed the Mannerist school, which strove to achieve elegance and grace through exaggerated poses and sometimes slightly off-kilter proportions. Maybe it was paradox, maybe genius, but it was all still realistic by standards of the time, under a somewhat heightened reality. Lavinia, let us say, was a leg woman. Her archangel Gabriel, in the Annunciation of 1575, has thighs nearly to his underarms— but they suit him, as if there’s no other way for an angel to be. The same is true for her always-a-bit- larger-than-life Christ figures.

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They dominate the space; they force us into a relationship with the body as a body. And her nudes are positively sinuous, as we’ll see below. Therein lay a danger, plus a major obstacle to female painters: Good girls were not supposed to be so familiar with the body.

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Apprenticeship and

the Forbidden Lesson

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There’s no denying that art in the Renaissance was a man’s world. The guilds, the academies, the commissions—all were controlled by men. A girl with a talent and a yearning to accomplish something exceptional had to gain entrée somehow, and that meant learning from (yes) a man. So Catharina van Hemessen took lessons from her painter father, Jan; Lavinia Fontana was trained by her father, Prospero, who bragged about her talent and seems to have needed her to help support him; Nunzio Galizia taught his daughter, Fede (c. 1578–c. 1630); and Artemisia learned from her father, Orazio.

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One exception is the Florentine nun Plautilla Nelli (1524–1588), who is said to have been self-taught. That reputation may be misleading; she resided in a convent originally sponsored by Savonarola (1452–1498), the bossy little zealot who vowed to make Florence great again with bonfires of the vanities and restrictions on citizens’ freedom. He might have been a fanatic, but he did encourage women to draw and paint religious subjects as a way of staying busy. Convents such as Plautilla’s became (in a way Savonarola did not expect, and often after his death) flourishing art colonies. Plautilla would have learned from some of the best. She did quite well with some massive church pieces and even painted her way into Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, the exclusive men’s club of a Who’s Who. Three other women also made the book: sculptor Properzia de’ Rossi and painters Madonna Lucrezia and Sofonisba Anguissola. (We’ll visit with her again in just a moment.)

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What girls picked up in their apprenticeships was not always what an artist wants to learn. The most vital lesson was forbidden: drawing from life. It was a somewhat new idea that in order to paint the body realistically, you had to look at it intimately. Some male painters even dissected bodies to gain an understanding of how muscle and sinew and skin work together. That sort of gaze was forbidden to female painters.

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Not quite paradoxically, the new understanding of the body was possible only because of women’s work. Western art has long depended on sex workers as models and muses. Just imagine everything we’d have missed if prostitutes and mistresses had refused to spend hours on end posing for those serene paintings of the Annunciation or the torments of the Pietà.

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And now we come to the nudes … those enchanting erotic beings who transcend the paint that has made them. In the art world, there’s a difference between someone who’s naked and a nude. Think, for a moment, of what happens when the body undresses. Is it just going about its daily life, or is it trying to prevent you (O presumed-to-be-masculine viewer) from going about yours?

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The nude displays itself for the viewer’s gaze in a certain way, hoping to provoke a reaction. Perhaps a wisp of gossamer veil preserves a last inch or two of modesty, but we confront breasts, bottoms, and bellies, bare arms and legs, set up for a certain pleasure that will not be found, say, in a picture of the Virgin breast-feeding Jesus or in a martyr’s tortured flesh.

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So nakedness might be natural; the nude was (is) dangerous. And women, of course, could not be trusted to make a smart distinction between them. Who knew what ghastly things might happen if they got themselves near enough any bare flesh at all? A girl should not stare at a naked man, obviously, though there must have been plenty of them around the cities, urinating in the streets, wrestling on the bridges of Venice, and whatnot.

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Women were not allowed to look at prostitutes and paint them either. The girls who did manage to train as artists were of a higher social class and had to be protected from those immoral creatures. So instead, a female apprentice spent extra time poring over miniature versions of famous sculptures and plaster casts of hands and feet. A woman would not have the right to paint a nude until Lavinia Fontana, whose Mars and Venus, as we will see, is a masterwork both witty and erotic.

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Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532–1625) had no teacher in the family and not that much of a family fortune, but she did have sisters who were also inclined toward the easel. Her parents managed to give their six daughters and one son good educations that included apprenticeships to local artists. Three other sisters stuck with painting and became professionals, but Sofonisba was the most talented of all. On a sketching trip to Rome at age twenty-two, she impressed a painter whose name now is lost—and he introduced her to one whose name is everything: Michelangelo.

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Michelangelo was gobsmacked. It is easy to imagine the two of them together: he turning over pages of her portfolio, she explaining about all those plaster hands and feet and the statues she was sketching in Rome, along with some drawings of people in the street. Not being allowed to look at a nude—well, it was crippling her work. Michelangelo probably sympathized; he also knew how hard it was to work without being able to study the body so closely. He had fought to win the right, at around age nineteen, to attend public dissections before reputedly finding a way to conduct a dissection himself.

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For such a gifted and otherwise well-educated painter as Sofonisba to miss that opportunity must have been beyond frustrating—but Sofonisba was resourceful. She used her sisters as models. And for at least two years, she enjoyed an honor no doubt envied by just about anybody at work in the art world: She was Michelangelo’s long-distance protégée, sending drawings through the mail for his critique.

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Artemisia came along after all these women had served their versions of apprenticeships, but getting an education was no easier for her—in fact, it was even more difficult, as her family was neither noble nor rich. Her mother died when Artemisia was twelve, and she grew up a bit rough-and-tumble, surrounded by violence and general seediness. Her father, Orazio, was an artist, but his connections were considerably less accomplished and gentlemanly than Michelangelo. They posed a constant, if low-level, danger. When the Gentileschis decided to take in a tenant to help make ends meet, Orazio chose a woman, perhaps thinking she would provide some sort of companionship and motherly influence to young Artemisia … which would turn out to be no help at all, as we will see.

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All these women artists would outshine their fathers and other teachers. Well, except maybe Michelangelo; he seems to be standing the test of time.

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Eyes Up Here

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If you were a girl who wanted to paint a body, then, you probably had just one option: You had to paint yourself. 

So it happened that one day in 1548, when Flemish painter Catharina van Hemessen (1528–1565) was twenty years old, she had the audacity to decide to paint a self-portrait. She set up a mirror—either made of extra-burnished steel or possibly glass—and took a hard look at herself and the way her face and shoulders occupied space. 

Catharina was embarking on something relatively new. The self-portrait was less than a hundred years old—the first example was as recent as 1433 and Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man in a Turban—and it was one of the ultimate expressions of humanistic interest in individual personality, plus depth of perspective in painting. As far as we know, however, no woman had ever made one. And this would not be just any self-portrait: She depicted herself as an artist at the easel, wielding a palette and a brush, gazing into a mirror as she worked. 

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What Catharina did was revolutionary. She made the first known self-portrait of an artist as an artist. She invented a genre.  

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Catharina also staked a claim to the gaze itself. That mirror was the painting’s fourth wall—and it became the space occupied by the viewer. So Catharina is actually looking at her painting’s future viewer head on, meeting that person’s eyes, and saying, “Yes, and?!” That was not how women were supposed to behave, after all—modesty meant not never acknowledging being looked at, never confronting a viewer or a conversation partner. And beyond that, if a woman was considered important enough for a portrait, she typically let the painter capture her profile, nothing more. Only with Sandro Botticelli’s portrait of Smeralda Bandinelli (painted around 1470 to 1480) and Leonardo da Vinci’s of Ginevra de’ Benci (painted around 1474 to 1478) did a gently born lady start to look toward the artist and the viewer. Young Catharina was not going to be modest or self-effacing—not as either painter or subject.

 

We are all indebted to Catharina for leaving an image of the artist in mid-task, the woman in mid-transformation. Her dark eyes draw us in; her attention to texture is exceptional. When we look, we shatter the fourth wall, and we are also her mirror. That steady gaze says she is not embarrassed about her ambition, nor is she particularly proud: This just is who she is, and she is not afraid to confront anybody head-on. 

 

At about the same stage in life, other young women were similarly inspired. Around the time she met Michelangelo, twenty-two-year-old Sofonisba did a very small self-portrait in 1554 (it measures just a little more than 5.5 by 7.5 inches, like the school photo that you might give to aunts and uncles). She is holding a round shieldlike plaque before herself, with her signature[2] running along the edge—staking her claim to a place among artists doing important work. Even after she was established with a career as a portraitist for other people, she kept on painting herself; she is said to have made more self-portraits than anyone else in Renaissance Italy. 

 

Two years later, Sofonisba produced another landmark self-portrait. Here she stands at the easel with a defiant expression—and she is looking at us, even while she’s busily painting a Virgin and Child.[3] This is the height of Renaissance humanism. At twenty-four, she showed herself and her religious subject in equal light, with equal detail—equally important. 

 

The artist was no longer disappearing into her work: She made the world take her seriously. 

 

 

Grabbing Men by the Gaze

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Over the course of her life, Artemisia Gentileschi, also, would paint many self-portraits. They weren’t always identified as such. Her face and body were simply materials she could work with, so they appear on figures from classical mythology and Christian religion—just about anywhere she needed a model and wielded a brush. She inhabited her art completely.

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So we see her face in her earliest surviving picture, Susanna and the Elders,[4] which was painted around 1610. Artemisia was seventeen (try not to hate), and her work was already brilliant, terrifying—and prescient. Susanna is a marvel of dynamic action and dramatic color and shading, an example of Baroque grandeur and awe in full force. And as technically impressive a masterwork as it is, the painting has even more impact emotionally. 

 

The story from the Book of Daniel was a popular subject, often executed by male artists: A young beauty is bathing in her garden, innocently unaware that a couple of (let’s just say it) dirty old men are watching her over the top of the fence. Artemisia’s version is the first one I can think of that doesn’t give the viewer the same lustful, voyeuristic pleasure that the men are taking in spying on the young woman. Artemisia shows the moment they move in and demand sex. Artemisia’s naked Susanna is beautiful; the viewer can’t help but admire what is there … yet she is forcing a complex emotional reaction, because she shows both Susanna’s distress and her resistance. Susanna is covering up and pushing the men away—pushing us away, if we are going to see her only as a luscious object of desire. 

 

And that is recognizably Artemisia’s face on Susanna. She may be inviting us into the picture as an artist—but she refuses to be an object of desire.

 

The picture captures one moment in the story, but anyone at the time would have been aware of the biblical aftermath: The men dodder off to the magistrate and accuse Susanna of lewd behavior. If she was bathing without maidservants, they argue, she must have been planning to fornicate with a young man. As per biblical justice, Susanna is sentenced to death—until the future prophet Daniel steps in, separates the witnesses, and finds contradictions in their stories that exonerate Susanna. 

 

Knowing Artemisia’s life history, the painting not only disturbs, it also foreshadows. We understand the trauma that Susanna went through—the violation from spying neighbors, the lies, unjust imprisonment, an inquiry that put her virtue on trial. And we know that worse was to come for Artemisia herself within the year.

 

Once again, the problem would be come down to flesh and virtue—with the added complication of marriage and marriageability. 

 

 

Marriage, Virtue, and the Small Scale

 

When Catharina van Hemessen made that first self-portrait gazing straight on, what did she envision stretching beyond her mirror? A fulfilling career that might last for decades, herself producing painting after painting … and somewhere in there, perhaps, a good marriage? 

 

She got some of it. 

 

The career of a woman artist often had the shelf life of a plucked peach or a freshly shot pheasant. We know that the expectation of marriage loomed over all females—in fact, everyone in this article did couple up (nuns marry Christ, after all). So many of the women who struggled for their art were really girls: virgins indulging their ambition pre-marriage, because after the ring was on the finger came the real responsibilities—time to put away brushes for broomsticks, paints for cookery. Dreams of running a workshop morphed into running a household instead. After that, inspiration might flicker occasionally, but any paintings were stillborn.

 

Not that there is anything inherently wrong with marriage and children … And it is striking that those who found a way to persist past marriage—like Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana—often became leading innovators of Renaissance painting. 

 

For Catharina, that daring self-portrait won her a series of commissions for portraits. The ones that have survived date to the few years between 1548 and 1552 and are principally small, muted paintings with simple poses depicting more than half of the body, women looking off to the side, not quite facing us head-on.

 

The small scale was considered suited to women, as working tiny required a lot of discipline and self-control. One art historian points out that a very small picture could be ruined by something so trivial as a flake of dandruff falling upon fresh paint. Of course we don’t know how Catharina’s other pictures were composed; what remains is what time has curated through centuries of owning and discarding, with what survives ending up in museums. The portraits are the works people cherished. Two large religious paintings have also survived—meaning that Catharina “graduated” to the grand-scale money-making projects typically given to male painters—but they are less admired than those compositions that invite us into a private universe.

 

In 1554, Catharina married. After that, her painting seems to have stopped. We know she was a guild master and trained three male apprentices, but we have no authenticated pictures left. A patron brought her to Spain and left her a pension, and then she followed her husband’s career as an organist until she died, in Antwerp, at age thirty-seven.

I would like to believe—no, I am sure—that Catharina was always painting in her heart. And I hope that maybe, in some attic in Antwerp, someone has treasured a cache of her self-portraits. When they are discovered, we’ll see her eyes issue a challenge down the centuries.

 

Sofonisba took up that unseen challenge and fared better professionally. After her correspondence course with Michelangelo, she became a well-established portraitist and a teacher to another girl with aspirations, the -year-old Queen of Spain, and Sofonisba joined the Spanish court in 1559. (If only she and Catharina had crossed paths! Imagine the chats!) After the queen died, Sofonisba parlayed her connections, and King Philip’s good will, into a solid career. She and her two husbands lived in several Italian cities (most likely because the men’s work brought them there) while she painted portraits as intimately individual as Catharina’s. 

 

She would live to age ninety-three, and she’d see her praises extolled in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists … and perhaps even more meaningfully, by her adoring second husband, a sea captain who called her “great among mortals” and ranked her, on her tombstone, as “among the most illustrious women of the world.” We applaud the sentiment, though I will point out that the praise would seem even higher if he’d taken gender out of the phrase. 

 

Most successful of all was Lavinia Fontana, the Mannerist who did what very few painters of any gender or genre have managed: She made a living entirely by her art. She also married, and her commissions supported a husband, Count Gian Paolo Zappi (who worked for her as an agent), and eleven children. The marriage contract stipulated that she would continue to paint, and she would not be responsible for the housekeeping. 

 

She even managed another first, because she was a woman who painted nudes. She broke through that major boundary with paintings such as her Minerva Dressing, which features the goddess in the moment just before she dons an elaborate gown. Minerva—Roman goddess of wisdom, medicine, the arts, crafts, and eventually war (a sort of Athena with added features)—looks over her shoulder as if to say she’s willing to drop the dress if the viewer has a better idea. There’s a world of difference between this proudly erotic figure and Artemisia’s Susanna, who is trying to nullify her nakedness. 

 

She showed even more physical proficiency in her Mars and Venus of 1595, which prompts a big question: Did Lavinia sketch her nudes from life? Art historians are divided. She may have found a way to work around the interdiction by using relatives as models. (Her workaround for giving birth to eleven children is even more mysterious, but I suppose she had help.) She died in 1614, aged sixty-one—the first female artist on equal footing with male contemporaries. Like Catharina and Sofonisba, she was great, illustrious, inspiring, and bold at any scale. 

 

And next came Artemisia’s maturity, which made an even bigger impact on the way we view women artists in particular, women of the era in general.

 

Honor, Violation, and Truth

 

Marriage became a particularly thorny tangle for Artemisia. She had painted feminine vulnerability with Susanna and the Elders, but she cannot have expected to be a victim of the patriarchy’s sexual mores. One incident threatened to overshadow her work as an artist. It, and it inevitably colors our understanding of her life. And here the trigger warning goes into effect …

 

One May afternoon in 1611, when Artemisia was seventeen, she was at work on another painting at home when she received a visit from one Agostino Tassi, a colleague with whom her father was painting a fresco. Tassi grabbed her. Artemisia screamed and screamed to the woman who rented a room in the Gentileschi home for help. The woman later admitted hearing Artemisia—and to ignoring her. Thirty-one-year-old Tassi raped Artemisia. 

Reeling from the assault, she was perhaps even more distraught about the dishonor then the physical pain. Now she was no longer a virgin; her father felt the disgrace and blamed her. This predicament was familiar not only from Susanna and the Elders but also from a Roman legend that Artemisia would paint at least three times: Lucretia, a virtuous wife, who was tainted by a rape. She suffered such shame that she killed herself right after reporting the crime. 

 

Under Renaissance custom, there was only one other way that Artemisia could repair her reputation. She entered into a romantic relationship with Tassi, expecting him to make things right by marrying her. Tassi’s wife, a prostitute, had disappeared, and he made Artemisia a number of promises about the future. 

 

But then the wife turned up alive after all. Tassi was not free to marry, and Artemisia’s reputation was destroyed.

At that, Orazio, Artemisia’s father, was furious enough to take Tassi to court on the grounds that he had violated the family’s honor and had to make reparations. What followed was not a rape trial; Artemisia was not going to be granted anything for what had happened. In fact, she was the one who had to prove that a crime—against her father—had actually occurred. The proceedings lasted for seven months and demanded no end of intimate questioning, which included a type of torture that was commonplace at the time: men pulled cords (sibille) tight around her fingers, inflicting pain and possible long-term damage—to her artist’s hands—to make sure she was telling them the truth about her dishonor. 

 

She was angry, defiant. She found her voice. She referred to the sibille as the only ring Tassi gave her, and she declared, “I have told the truth and I always will, because it is true and I am here to confirm it wherever necessary.”

 

Of course Tassi denied everything—at first. He said that he’d never even been at the house that day … Then, after a few months, okay, he admitted he was there, but he’d gone in order to prevent other assaults on Artemisia’s honor … All right, fine (more time had passed), maybe he’d stopped by the house in order to steal some of Orazio’s paintings. His wife had been gone for a while, and he was thinking of murdering her anyway. And Artemisia was just standing there, ready for taking, so …

 

Eventually Tassi was convicted and sent to prison. And then, in 1613, he was released, with the verdict annulled. Meanwhile, a month after the trial ended, Orazio married Artemisia off to a lesser painter, Pierantonio Stiattesi. The new couple moved to Florence to live down the shame.

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Artemisia, I am sorry for your pain—but so glad you did not get stuck with Tassi for a husband. A change of venue seems to have been the best thing for you and for your work. 

 

In Florence, despite becoming a new wife, Artemisia entered the first great phase of her art … painting her truth as well as speaking it.

 

Painting Her Truth

 

In the aftermath of the trial, Artemisia surprised everyone. She outdid everyone—including the marvelous Lavinia Fontana. She captured a sensuality and a range of emotion that very few painters ever have. While Sofonisba and other portraitists mastered their sitters’ formal expressions and decorous poses, Artemisia found the means to express passion, violence, anger, and more. Her eerily calm-faced, resolute warrior women are masterworks of the psyche. So although her departure to Florence appeared to be a banishment, it was perhaps the best thing for her.

There, she flourished. She found patrons among the House of Medici; she was the first female admitted to the Academy of the Arts of Drawing; and she gave birth to five children (only one of whom, a girl, would live to adulthood). It is hard to imagine improving on the technical and emotional proficiency of her Susanna and the Elders, but her work became infused with other emotions—and perhaps some reflection that increased her interest in the contrast of light and shadow in chiaroscuro,plus the refinement of outlines that makes her figures stand out against the space they occupy. 

 

She also undertook the big compositions that established her now-popular image as a warrior painter, an angry woman wronged who was taking vengeance through art. Beginning as early as 1614, she took on the biblical story of Judith, a young widow who confronted the Assyrian general set on destroying her village. The story goes that Judith’s beauty let her shimmy her way into Holofernes’s tent the night before battle—and then she preempted that battle by cutting his head off, later to be displayed on a silver platter. Over Artemisia’s lifetime, she painted six known versions of the death scene, the largest and goriest of which was completed around 1620 and now hangs in the Uffizi in Florence.

 

What is there to say about this awe-inspiring picture? Plenty—more ink has been spilled over it than blood has stained Holofernes’s bedding. The presence of the maidservant is a convention in European paintings of the episode, and it’s worth noting that this time, unusually, she is an active part of the gory enterprise. Perhaps she is offering the feminine support that motherless Artemisia lacked when her tenant refused to intervene in the rape. Then there’s Judith’s face … yet another instance of a self-portrait, because it is recognizably Artemisia’s.

It’s easy to see why feminists of the last thirty or so years have made this painting iconic: It shows women striking a blow for their gender, preventing a man from destroying their peace.

 

Not everyone agrees that Artemisia and her work are so quintessentially (and prototypically) feminist, however. Many believe that it isn’t appropriate to say the emotion in her work came directly from the outrage in her life. Emotion so often clouds the creation of art, and to make the sorts of choices that Artemisia’s allegorical self-portrait shows in process, she needed to keep her head at least somewhat clear. So cultural critic and provocateuse Camille Paglia has said that our girl “was simply a polished, competent painter in a Baroque style created by men.” Here I must say, Erm, really? Ms. P., have you seen the strength and the tension in Judith’s bloody arms, the resolution on that now-familiar face? Maybe Caravaggio invented chiaroscuro, that vivid contrast between light and shadow … but have you ever seen it done better elsewhere? 

 

Because I have—and it was also by Artemisia. Her Judith and her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes of 1623 to 1625 depicts the moment after the women have completed the deed. The maidservant is wrapping the bloody head in a cloth, and Judith is poised to use her knife again if need be. The intense yellow of Judith’s gown is a shock against the dark background—as is the way her hand is positioned between the candle flame and her face, so that the hand shadows all but the outline of her profile. Is there any more dramatic depiction of wary tension, focus, and purpose, the hesitation until just the right moment to make an escape? The answer this time is no.

In Artemisia’s lifetime, no doubt, the rape was remembered—but what people saw and appreciated and bought was the artwork itself. Whether a customer viewed Artemisia’s work as angry or “merely” beautiful and moving, it was the work that mattered most, not the artist’s biography, and feminism as we know it did not exist.

 

But that doesn’t mean she can’t be an icon for us now … just that she probably did not set out to wield that kind of power.

 

 

Taking Back the Nude

 

Judith and her Maidservant is from Artemisia’s second Roman period, by which time her marriage may have ended. She and Pierantonio returned to Rome around 1620; by 1623, all mention of him seems to have stopped. Perhaps Artemisia was single by then. She would become, in time, the first woman to run her own studio full of (male) assistants. And she would know her own worth: She acknowledged to one client that “a woman’s name raises doubts until her work is seen,” then swore that her paintings “will speak for themselves.”

 

And they did. In time her art brought her to London, and she lived in Venice and Naples, where she died around 1656. In the thirty years between, she would enjoy widespread acclaim … and continue to paint her own face on self-portraits and on grand tableaux of martyrdom and mythology. 

 

But let’s return to Florence in the late 1610s and early 1620s. Here we want to linger, because Artemisia experienced great joy in that period. Around 1618, when Pierantonio was still alive, she fell deeply in love with a nobleman, Francesco Maria di Niccolò Maringhi. Thirty-six passionate and often erotic letters survive; Artemisia calls Francesco “mio carisimo core”—“my dearest heart”—and makes thinly veiled references to a variety of erotic activities, which include setting aside her chastity. These letters are remarkable not just for the emotions they express but also because Artemisia had learned to write rather recently; she’d declared herself illiterate at the trial. And there’s a comic addition: Pierantonio wrote to Maringhi too—oddly enough, on the backs of his wife’s letters. 

Artemisia, we are glad that you had such feelings in your heart, such love in your life. 

 

Again, I hesitate to use the life of the artist as the basis for too many conclusions about the work. But it seems to me that over time, some of Artemisia’s paintings became more erotic, more ethereal—even when they addressed one of those wild Bible episodes. She even presented her nudes more traditionally, as erotically available to a gaze that was still presumed male.

 

But these are no ordinary nudes. I believe some details hint at a kind of agency and power that the traditional “Take me, please” nude does not possess. I’m thinking of her Venus and Cupid, also from the fruitful year of 1625, which would have been one of the years of the affair. It is a languidly blissful paean to pleasures of the flesh, and it happens to hang in my hometown museum. It was the first sight I wanted to see when I came to Richmond, Virginia, years ago, and my appreciation has increased over time. Venus is having herself quite a nap, with her body gone limp, one hand draped over her waist, breasts free. Hovering above, Cupid cools her down with a fan made of peacock feathers. In profile, the goddess’s face is a study in pleasure, as her red lips smile in a dream. 

 

This is not a Venus who exists only for men to look at and touch. She has secrets. She has thoughts. Every time I visit her, I find some fresh nuance in the curves of flesh, the rich textures of red velvet and the vast expanse of costly indigo that represents how much the painter and her patron invested in this subject. And in the something familiar in the outline of nose and chin …

 

That smile! This goddess, this Artemisia in paint, knows the pleasures of flesh—and of dreaming, imagining, creating. 

 

She has battled with the gods, and she has survived.

 

 

All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.