Star Woman Artist of the Baroque Spotlight

NEW YORK, March 11 (UPI) -- Artemisia Gentileschi, generally considered the first great European woman artist, is getting star treatment this year with a major museum show, a novel and a play concerning her colorful career and her relationship to her equally famous painter father, Orazio Gentileschi.

Artemisia (1597-1651) shares honors with Orazio (1562-1647) in the Metropolitan Museum's blockbuster exhibition of more than 80 of their paintings from a score of museums and private collections, on view through May 12. She is the heroine of novelist Susan Vreeland's "The Passion of Artemisia" (Viking, 288 pages, $24.95), and of Cathy Caplan's Off-Broadway drama, "Lapis Blue Blood Red."

There is no rational accounting for this eruption of interest in one of art history's most elusive heroines who followed her father in rejecting the artificial, idealized Mannerist painting style that had dominated Italian art after it emerged from the High Renaissance in the early 16th century.

Both Gentileschis adopted the new practice of working with live models to attain the naturalism made fashionable by Caravaggio in the early 17th century, heralding the birth of the Baroque era in art. But Artemisia developed her own style with a more brilliant palette that Orazio's, and she clung to extreme light and shadow contrasts typical of the Baroque long after her father had abandoned them.

Feminist art historians have kept the memory of Gentileschi alive because she was the victim of rape at 17 by one of her father's collaborators, Agostino Tassi. He was the subject of an infamous trial in Rome in 1612 that resorted to torturing Artemisia in an attempt to get her to confess she had consented to intercourse. Her father, convinced he had a disgraced, unmarriageable daughter on his hands, happily married her off to an insignificant Florentine artist for a small dowry, possibly supplied by Tassi.

Artemisia's penchant for painting strong, sexually involved women -- Judith, who beheaded Holofernes when he got her into bed, Susannah who was falsely accused of adultery by the Elders, the notorious Cleopatra, and penitent Mary Magdalene -- has been interpreted by women's right advocates as her way of getting back at her tormentors.

But since her father painted the same heroines because they were popular with art collectors of the day, this interpretation doesn't hold water. It is best to approach Artemisia's paintings for reasons other than notoriety and judge them for what they really are -- some of the most beautiful pictures in the Baroque style, full of grace no matter how violent.

The Metropolitan Museum begins works painted by Artemisia in Rome when she was still working in her father's studio.

A "Madonna and Child," dating from 1609, indicates she is not yet as accomplished as Orazio, a great artist in his own right, although able to create a feeling of domestic intimacy that is far more naturalistic than Renaissance madonnas. The nude figure in her 1612 "Danae," depicting a voluptuous beauty reveling in Jupiter's shower of golden coins, is borrowed directly from Orazio's "Cleopatra," one of their most recycled subjects.

Once in Florence in an unhappy marriage that ended in abandonment in 1623, Artemisia came into her own. She was the first woman elected to the prestigious Academy of Design and painted Cosimo II de' Medici and his Austrian wife, the first of her many portrait works. Two arresting self-portraits painted circa 1617 show Artemisia as a Christian martyr holding a palm frond and as a beautiful young lute player.

Two works with powerful visceral wallop circa 1620, "Judith Slaying Holofernes" and "Judith and Her Maidservant," depict the Jewish heroine and the servant, Abra, as they killed the enemy general who had invaded their homeland and as they carried off his head in a basket as though it were a melon from the market.

These paintings may be unnerving to present-day viewers, but such stories from the Biblical Apocrypha were popular with the pious public of the time. Artemisia followed them up with an even bloodier but strangely matter-of-fact painting, "Jael and Sisera," showing the Jewish woman Jael driving a spike through the temple of Sisera, a Canaanite commander.

When Artemisia returned to Rome in the 1620s, she found herself on the periphery of the Roman art world despite her reputation as a painter at the Medici court in Florence, so she left after a few years for Venice and finally settle in Naples.

Paintings from these later years showed that Artemisia sometimes veered away from Caravaggesque naturalism to conform to a more classic style of painting with origins in Bologna, exemplified by her 1622 work, "Susanna and the Elders." She often painted lovely but not too original subjects such as "Sleeping Venus," to keep commissions flowing in from rich clients.

Her residency in Naples, where she died, was the longest of her career and the most productive. There are many fine paintings from this last period on display, including more Susannas and Cleopatras, a strange "Penitent Magdalene" showing the saint taking catnap in a chair, and a bold "Portrait of a Gonfaloniere," depicting a Neapolitan knight, in the grand tradition of formal portraits.

A book, "Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi: Father and Daughter Painters in Baroque Italy" accompanies the show (Yale University Press, 476 pages, $65, softcover $55).