ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Late last month, The Spouse and I had a weekend away to celebrate our wedding anniversary.  We stayed at the Royal Mail Hotel in Dunkeld, (and spoiled ourselves with dining in their iconic restaurant Wickens and the Parker Street Project).  We’ve stayed at the Royal Mail before, so it was an easy choice as a base to visit the nearby Hamilton Art Gallery to see their current exhibition: ‘Emerging from Darkness, Faith, Emotion and the Body in the Baroque’.

Emerging from Darkness exhibition catalogue

This was the exhibition summary from the NGV website that enticed us away from home.

Emerging from Darkness explores the radical transformation in Italian art that took place around the beginning of the seventeenth century. The exhibition focuses on how major Italian Baroque artists treated the human body in a new way, as they rejected the exaggerated, over-idealised representation of the figure by prior Mannerist artists, implementing instead a degree of naturalism based on direct observation.

This exhibition brings together over sixty Baroque works from public and private collections in Australia, underpinned by an unprecedented loan of more than forty major works from the NGV’s internationally-recognised Collection.

Further themes explored in Emerging from Darkness include the influence of Caravaggio and there is a particular focus on women artists who worked in the early seventeenth century, including Lavinia Fontana and Artemisia Gentileschi. As the first truly international art movement, the global impact of Baroque is also highlighted through the exhibition and its themes.

Emerging From Darkness is one of the most ambitious exhibitions ever held in regional Australia and provides visitors with fresh perspectives on this influential period of art history.

It’s not just because it was curated by a friend of mine, Laurie Benson*, Curator of International Art at the NGV, that I think it was one of the best exhibitions I’ve seen recently.  There’s a bit of a fad for spoiling exhibitions by juxtaposing contemporary artworks alongside iconic paintings for some overbearing political purpose, but though there was an element of this, it was entirely complementary, consisting of Robyn Stacey’s four huge exquisite still life chiaroscuro photographs in perfect harmony with the baroque.  (They were like the ones you can see here: ‘Mr Macleay’s Fruit and Flora’ and ‘Fontaine de Vaucluse’, ‘The Duke of Northumberland’s Tablecloth’ and ‘Chatelaine’. Those are not the ones we saw, but it would be naughty to share the photos that we took!)

For as long as it’s a current exhibition, you can see some of the featured works here, and you can get tickets to visit until the 14th of April.

*Other curators were Dr David Marshall, Assoc. Prof., University of Melbourne Culture & Communications, Dr Lisa Beaven, Senior Research Fellow, La Trobe University and Ian Brilley, Exhibitions and Collections Coordinator, Hamilton Gallery.

Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura)-Artemisia Gentileschi

So, when we got  home, it was time to read Alexandra Lapierre’s fictionalised biography of Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1656) which has been on the TBR forever...

Artemesia is a comprehensive work of research about this remarkable artist.  Book One ‘The Great Adventure’ covers the traumatic period of Artemisia’s childhood and adolescence.  It begins with her father’s loving relationship and enthusiasm for teaching her everything he knew about painting; covers the death of her mother and Artemesia’s subsequent role as assistant to her father now bad-tempered, abusive and ungrateful; and goes on to the complete breakdown of that relationship when the family honour (yeah, *sigh* I know) was besmirched by her rape by Agostino Tassi, a family friend who was also an artist.

The book devotes many pages to the ins and outs of the trial that eventuated when her father Orazio took Tassis to court because he had lied about the death of his wife and could not marry Artemisia. This humiliating exposure of what had happened, made messier by the fact that Artemisia had subsequently consented to a relationship with Tassi in the hope that he would marry her, included her torture to ‘prove that she was telling the truth’ (only to show some pages later, that torture failed to get the truth out of a ‘witness’ who was an abject liar). TBH I tired of it all. It seemed a rather heartless retelling in which the political and legal machinations swamped the real story of a young girl’s trauma, her attempts to come to terms with it and the lack of support from anyone, and that includes the live-in female friend of Orazio, Tuzia.

Because that real story explains why, when she made her subsequent career as a successful artist, so many of her works feature violence.

Book Two opens with the marriage that was engineered so that her father Ortazo could offload the ‘spoiled goods’ and she’s in Florence, seemingly happily married with one son and another baby on the way.

Motherhood had calmed and softened her.  She had melted into the solid old family of Stattesi craftsmen as smoothly as butter into a mould. Who would have believed it?  This dishonoured daughter whom her father had described — out of ‘honesty to his future son-in-law — as a shrew, bowed in everything to the wishes of her husband. Admittedly, Pierantonio was not known to be greatly demanding.  He had only two weak points: a liking for comfort and a passion for luxury.  Luxury was something Artemisia had no notion of at the time of their marriage.  Pierantonio was the one who had taught her to recognise and cultivate a preference for rare cloths. (p.204)

Portrait of Cardinal Scipione Borghese (by Ottavio Leoni)

Far be it from me to argue with a scholar who spent years researching this book, but I fail to see understand how Artemisa could have had no notion of luxury when part of her father’s scheming to restore their position after the embarrassment of a notorious trial was to parade her prowess as an emerging artist in front of Scipione Borghese (yes he of the Villa Borghese and its sumptuous gardens).  I bet he was dressed in rare cloths!  Look at those skirts in  Ottavio Leoni’s portrait!!

Yet this ‘calm and softened’ wife and mother, naive about luxury and power, produced the artworks you can see in the slideshow below.  Her works feature Biblical stories and mythological themes, and a shocking number of them feature women as victim and women wielding knives in revenge.  Influenced at first by Caravaggio, she eventually developed her own naturalistic style of dramatic realism.

For reasons not entirely clear to me, Lapierre seems to attribute Artemisia’s themes to her father’s rejection of her, a rejection which was exacerbated by the bizarre workings of courts which exonerated Tassi and by the puerile rush to compare her art with his.   Yet she writes:

Injustice, betrayal and shame — these were what Artemesia unflaggingly painted.  She drew her inspiration from the proud battles of history’s great female protagonists: biblical heroines who stood up to falsehood; mythical figures who rose up against tyranny.  On her canvasses, Judith frees her people by slaughtering the despot whom she has just seduced.  Lucretia brandishes her dagger and Cleopatra her asp, each of them taking her own life rather than submit to the law of the conqueror.  Swords, daggers, poisons.  Amazons, sinners, seductresses.  Mary Magdalene, Galatea, Esther and Bathsheba — all of them struggle with love, death and freedom.  All of them liberate themselves.  All of them triumph.  (p.232)

Well, I wouldn’t call suicide a triumph… sometimes Lapierre has a rather clumsy way of putting things.

Artemisia did do some paintings without lurid themes, e.g. Self-Portrait as a Lute Player, but the paintings which seem to define her are the ones in this slideshow.

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Though these aspects of a book penned well before #MeToo were a disappointing portrayal of a traumatic life made worse by the deaths of four of her five children, the vivid images of life in Rome and Florence were beautifully written and translated. I learned, for example, that Florence in this period was, unlike the papal court, a city of young people, presided over by Cosimo II who was only twenty-five. He only reigned for twelve years because he died young, leaving a legacy of Florence in decline because he only cared about amusement.

While the sovereign pontiffs sought to extend the power of the Church — to establish it throughout the world for all eternity — and Pope Paul V laboured to enrich his family during the limited period of his papacy, the house of Medici had been slumbering in an illusory security for more of its century-long reign.  At the start of the seventeenth century, no political project stirred the city or enlivened the court at Florence. (p.202)

Clearly, economics and trade was not one of Cosimo’s strengths.  His first action when he inherited the Duchy was to close down the Medici banks and their foreign branches.  Artemisia was there at the pinnacle of Florence’s glory, which would collapse within ten years.

Artemisia is one of those fictionalised biographies where thoughts and feelings are inferred, and while this adds a liveliness to the story, they don’t always ring true.  There are passages about Artemisia’s only surviving child Prudenzia about whom almost nothing is known, not even at Wikipedia which presumably has the benefit of more recent scholarship, including the 2011 discovery of thirty-six letters, written during Artemisia’s Florentine period (c. 1616 to 1620).  The pages devoted to disputes and rivalries, insulting dismissals of Artemisia’s art and her relationship issues with her father reinforce the stereotype of Italians as argumentative, jealous and melodramatic, which is disconcerting, to put it mildly.

And the last 50 pages felt like a slog.  Orazio’s time as a spy in England during the Thirty Years War, Artemisia’s affair with a man called Lanier, her worries about love fading while her art was dying, Prudenzia hating Naples — I wanted to read about her paintings!

Author: Alexandra Lapierre
Title: Artemisia
Translated from the French by Liz Heron
Publisher: Vintage, 1999, first published 1998
ISBN: 9780099289395, pbk., 512 pages including Notes which start on p.363, Acknowledgements, a Bibliography and 24 full colour plates of Artemesia’s paintings

Image credits: (all in the public domain, from Wikipedia)

• wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_Gentileschi#/media/File:Artemisia_Gentileschi_Judith_Maidservant_DIA.jpg
• wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_Gentileschi#/media/File:Susanna_and_the_Elders_(1610),_Artemisia_Gentileschi.jpg
• wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_Gentileschi#/media/File:Salome_with_the_Head_of_Saint_John_the_Baptist_by_Artemisia_Gentileschi_ca._1610-1615.jpg
• wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_Gentileschi#/media/File:Gentileschi_judith1.jpg
• wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_Gentileschi#/media/File:Judit_decapitando_a_Holofernes,_por_Artemisia_Gentileschi.jpg
• wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_Gentileschi#/media/File:Giaele_e_Sisara_(ca.1620)_-_Artemisia_Gentileschi_(Museum_of_Fine_Arts,_Budapest).jpg
• wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_Gentileschi#/media/File:Gentileschi,_Artemisia_-_Esther_before_Ahasuerus_-_c._1628%E2%80%931635.jpg
• wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_Gentileschi#/media/File:Lucretia_by_Artemisia_Gentileschi.jpg
• wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_Gentileschi#/media/File:Self-portrait_as_the_Allegory_of_Painting_(La_Pittura)_-_Artemisia_Gentileschi.jpg
• wikipedia.org/wiki/Scipione_Borghese#/media/File:Portrait_of_Cardinal_Scipione_Borghese_(by_Ottavio_Leoni).jpg
• wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_Gentileschi#/media/File:Artemisia_Gentileschi_Cleopatra3.jpg