Artemisia Gentileschi at the National Gallery
How times have changed. Last time I visited the National Gallery, it was to see Titian: Love, Desire, Death in mid-March. There were no queues, and I had not booked a ticket in advance. To do so would have been bizarre; I was almost the only person in the exhibition and, as it turns out, it was the last time the gallery would be open for 111 days. This time, I had to near-neurotically refresh the gallery’s webpage for a week to be in with a chance of securing a ticket to see Artemisia sometime this month.
But almost any level of inconvenience would have been worth it – the exhibition is outstanding.
Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 – c.1654) was an Italian Baroque artist. She was born in Rome but worked across Italy: she was the first woman to gain admission to the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, painted for a great deal of wealthy patrons, and created a number of large altarpieces in Naples.
But for all of her considerable fame during her lifetime, she is perhaps best known in our time for the fact of her rape. When she was seventeen, Agostino Tassi – an artist who was working with her father – assaulted her. Gentileschi had to testify at trial and was tortured to verify her story. Discussions of this, and its relevance to her paintings of female vulnerability and strength, have tended to drown out any discussion of her talents as a painter.
But Gentileschi exists beyond her victimhood; her paintings are arresting even without knowledge of her biography. The exhibition treads this tricky line between acknowledgement and erasure: the manuscript transcript of the rape trial is displayed in public for the first time, but not every painting of an ancient heroine or nude woman is linked back to it.
“Judith beheading Holofernes” (1613-14) is probably Gentileschi’s most immediately recognisable painting: with its primary colours, spurting arcs of blood, and shadowy drama. I was lucky enough to see it in September in the Uffizi, and I would make a make a comment about how the painting looks different when you have the joyful knowledge that an Aperol awaits you rather than the delights of the Bakerloo line – but the truth is that it could sparkle anywhere.
Just to the left, and slightly smaller, is a painting by the same name and painted only a year earlier – it is the Naples version of the same composition. The changes between the two paintings are subtle but noticeable: Judith’s dress changes from blue to yellow and her maidservant, Abra’s, from red to blue. The view afforded of Holofernes laid on the bed is slightly different. In the later composition, more of his body is visible and his lower half is draped in a red blanket. It is the addition of the red blanket that makes sense of the colour-changing dresses: many of Gentileschi’s most striking paintings make use of yellow, red, and blue in close primary opposition. The less visible, dowdier green blanket in the earlier painting lacks the intensity of the red.
But the changes do more than just deepen the drama. By the time an exhibitiongoer sees this painting, they have already seen Gentileschi’s reclining nudes “Cleopatra” (1611-12) and “Danaë” (1612). In these paintings, the women lay back on white beds dressed in disturbed, rumpled red blankets. The subtle changes in the Uffizi composition render Holofernes a grotesque parody of these sensual, observed women.
In these two paintings and the others on the same theme – “Judith and her Maidservant” (1614-15) and “Judith and her Maidservant with Head of Holofernes” (1623-25) – the curators make much of the fact that Abra is included in the drama rather than simply guarding the outside of the tent whilst Judith does the dirty work. There is a palpable desire to read this as some moment of feminist collusion – which in a way, it is. But it is not just of Gentileschi’s creation: the involvement of Judith’s maidservant is found as far back as an Old English poem of the same name in the Beowulf Manuscript. The two women are described as “collenferhðe eadhreðige mægð” meaning “courageous, victoriously blessed women”.
As the exhibition progressed, I found myself oddly fixed upon Gentileschi’s depictions of hands. In the first room, the curators explain how Gentileschi’s own fingers would have been stretched and pulled under a method of judicial torture known as “sibille”. In the trial, Gentileschi told her rapist that these torture-screws were the wedding ring he had promised her. In both versions of “Judith beheading Holofernes”, Judith’s hand is almost as big as Holofernes’s head. On her arm, which holds a chunk of his hair, is a beautifully ornate gold bracelet. In the “Self Portrait as a Female Martyr” (1613-14), her hand is unbelievably tiny; she is holding a palm frond as a sign of her martyrdom. In her “Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria”, one hand rests on St Catherine’s wheel – the intended method of her tortuous execution – and in the other hand is another palm; a sign of her sanctity. In her famous “Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting” (1638-9), one hand is raised as if mid-work and the other clasps a palette: the canvas is engaged in an almost-meta construction of itself.
I am not alone in my consideration of Gentileschi’s hands: the exhibition includes a 1625 drawing of Artemisia’s right hand holding a paintbrush by Dumonstier le Neveu. The inscription lauds her hand as something that can “make marvels”. Just as Gentileschi’s hands could and did make marvels, they were also a proof of her truth and her identity in both her trial and her career. And, in the women she paints, they provide the same function – they are weapons of great strength and power.
The exhibition ends with Gentileschi in London which is, of course, fitting. But Gentileschi was not happy to remain where she was – and, neither should the exhibition. With so many loans from all over the world, its existence – despite its unavoidable delay earlier this year – is a testament to global interconnectedness even in a time of difficulty. The exhibition should go everywhere and be seen by everyone (but not until I’ve had the chance to go again).