Viatouch Teacher Articles
Art

The Art of Artemisia
by Margaret Etherton

In the days when people rode horses and women wore long dresses, there lived a girl
who loved to paint. She used a mirror to sketch the muscles, the flesh, and the bones of her own back. Artemisia Gentileschi wanted to be an artist like her father, Ozario, but everyone said that only men could be painters. Artemisia stuck to her great love and succeeded in overcoming the prejudice against women artists. She grew up to become more famous than her teachers, more famous than her own father, and one of the greatest woman artists of all time.

Artemisia was born in Rome in 1593, at a time when women were not supposed to paint unless they had an older brother or a father who painted. Artemisia was lucky that her father recognised her talent and put her to work as an apprentice in his studio. An apprentice had the job of painting the boring bits in the background, but Artemisia did not mind—she was happy to be painting.

When she finished school, Artemisia applied to go to an art academy, but because she was a female they refused to let her in. So her father employed an artist friend of his to teach her, called Agostino Tassi. Agostino showed her how to use perspective. (An artist uses perspective to show distance on a flat canvas. Objects further away are smaller than objects close up.)

Artemisia's first painting of Judith Slaying Holofernes shows Judith, from the bible, cutting off the head of Holofernes with his own sword. This is a story in which the heroine, Judith, saves her country by killing an evil tyrant while he is asleep. She painted the subjects' faces showing realistic expressions against a dark black background with a single source of light coming in from one side. Artemisia showed skill in anatomy, colour, brushwork, and structuring a picture—knowing what to place where on the canvas.

Artemisia was very beautiful, with full cheeks, a classical nose with a small dip at the end, and a bow mouth. We know this because it she often painted herself! It was difficult to get women to pose as it was not proper for them to take their clothes off. Her paintings showed strong women, women in charge, in bright contrast to the dark backgrounds with heavy fabrics and shadowy interiors of the old homes and castles of her times.

When she was 20 Artemisia married and moved to Florence to make her living painting portraits. The Medici family were her patrons. That means that they paid her money that allowed her to paint what she wanted. Without patronage many artists could not afford to live. When her patron died, she moved around Italy to Rome, Genoa, Venice, and Naples, drawing inspiration from the countryside, the people around her, and other artists.

When she was 23, Artemisia was accepted as a member of the Academy of Design in Naples. This was the first time that a woman had been allowed in. It proved that she had impressed her patrons and that the art world recognised her talent.

For three years from 1638 to 1641, she lived in England, where her patron was Charles I of England. Here she helped her father with a big commission to paint the ceiling of the Queen's house in Greenwich. When the royal family started fighting, she moved back to Naples and spent the rest of her life there quite comfortably.

We don't know a great deal about Artemisia because she lived so long ago. But she must have had great determination to paint the way she did and to succeed in a job people thought was suitable only for men. After she died, even though she had produced a powerful body of work, no one displayed her paintings. Sometimes they were hung with her father's name or someone else's name. For a long time people forgot about her, but 34 of her paintings have survived the ages. Today she is recognized as the greatest female artist of her time. She was Artemisia, possibly one of the greatest classical woman artists of all time.

Bibliography
Christiansen, Keith. Orazio and Artemisia Gentilesch. NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001.
Vreeland, Susan. The Passion of Artemisia. London: Headline Book Publishing, 2002.

Internet:
http://www.u.arizona.edu/ic/mcbride/ws200/gentil.htm http://data.club.cc.cmu.edu/~julie/text/ARTEMESIA.HTML
http://gallery.euroweb.hu/bio/g/gentiles/artemisi/biograph.html