Artemisia Gentileschi Around 1622; The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic Identity. (Reviews).

Mary D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi Around 1622; The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic Identity

(Discovery Series, 11.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 2001. xxiv + 179 pp. $60 (cl), $24.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-520-22426-4 (cl), 0-520-22841-3 (pbk).

For well over a decade, feminist art historians have wrestled with the question of how to interpret the art of seventeenth-century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi. The initial terms of this debate were established by Mary Garrard's seminal 1989 monograph Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton, NJ). Garrard's approach was predicated on a biographical and modified essentialist reading of Artemisia's oeuvre. She interpreted the works as having been shaped by the artist's experiences and by her peculiar status as a female painter in Baroque Italy. In the introduction to her monograph, Garrard contended that Gentileschi's work was "radically different in expression and in the interpretation of traditional themes from that of male contemporaries," and that this difference represented "another dimension of the artist's 'hand' and thus another tool for connoisseurship judgments" (Artemisia, 5-6). In her new book, Artemisia Gentileschi Around 1622, Garrard has appli ed this premise to three problematic works: two paintings of the Magdalen (one in Seville Cathedral, and the other, until recently, in a French private collection) and one of Susanna and the Elders (in the Burghley House collection).

Garrard dates the Seville Magdalen to 1621-22, on the basis of style. She suggests that it was initially produced on speculation, subsequently purchased by the duke of Alcala during his stay in Italy in 1625-26, and then exported to Spain. Garrard suggests that the French Magdalen is a copy which Artemisia painted before the first version left Italy. As the author observes, the differences between these two works are subtle, but significant. For example, the cloth draped over the Magdalen's left shoulder is considerably fuller in the Seville version. However, X-rays reveal that this veil was enlarged in the Seville painting in order to cover the Magdalen's partially exposed left breast, an adjustment which may have been made to reduce the erotic content of the image in order to accommodate a more severe Spanish sense of decorum. If this is so, the new owners must not have shared Garrard's reading of the exposed breast as "a pure Peircian index" of the Magdalen's sexually abusive past (39).

In order to distinguish the particular character of Artemisia's Magdalen, Garrard traces the history of the representation of the saint through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Unlike other renderings of the saint, Artemisia's Magdalen rests her head on her right hand, which is bent at the wrist. In Garrard's view, this pose signifies a state of "creative artistic melancholy" (74). She interprets the figure, whom she rechristens Mary Magdalen as Melancholy, as a symbolic self-portrait of the artist couched in terms which had previously been the exclusive property of Artemisia's male contemporaries. As intriguing as this reading may be, however, the gesture also can be read as simply signifying sleep and/or melancholy, conditions which, as Garrard herself admits, are perfectly consistent with traditional representations of the saint. "Despite Artemisia's subtextual allusions to Melancholy and artistic creativity in this painting, she has cast the figure as primarily Mary Magdalene [sic], whose receptiv e, visionary state is perfectly legitimate to her Christian identity" (72). This straightforward explanation of the image's appearance raises the question of whether the artist-self-portrait subtext which Garrard has hypothesized is actually discernible in the image or is merely a projection onto the canvas. This question looms even larger if the work was actually commissioned by the duke of Alcala in 1625-26, as Ward Bissell recently proposed (Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art, University Park, PA, 1999, cat. nos. 16 and 17), and not produced on speculation.

The Burghley House Susanna presents a different kind of problem. Garrard had originally doubted the attribution of this painting to Artemisia on both expressive and traditional stylistic grounds. However, cleaning and technical examination of the work in the 1990s revealed new information which led the author to change her mind. Although Garrard rejects the signature which emerged during the cleaning as false -- it is on top of a section of the canvas which was at some point repainted -- there is sufficient morphological and documentary evidence for her to accept the work as being at least partially by Artemisia's hand. She dates its conception to the same period as the Magdalens, 1621-22. Garrard's interpretation of the painting is complicated, however, by the fact that parts of the canvas were heavily repainted in a Guercinesque idiom, making the painting more overtly appealing to a masculine taste for female display. She addresses the questions of who was responsible for reworking the canvas, whether it wa s a matter of collaboration or the result of unwelcome alterations, and why the changes occurred. Ultimately, Garrard decides that the introduction of a more traditional eroticism into the image through the display of the figure (an eroticism which the author admits was present in the painting even before it was reworked), the introduction of a landscape, and refiguration of the fountain are all inconsistent with Artemisia's professional and personal personae. Thus, Garrard concludes, the painting must have been reworked for the market not by Artemisia or with her consent, but after it left her possession, perhaps at the behest of a dealer who wished to create a work which would appeal to a public identification of the artist with her beautiful, sexually compromised subject.

For Garrard, one of the puzzles of the reclaimed "regressive" Susanna, even in its initial somewhat less "masculinist" form, is the notion that it was produced at the same time as the "progressive" Magdalen (116). Garrard ultimately resolves this conflict by attributing greater complexity to Artemisia as a artist and by framing both works as illustrations of "Artemisia's determination to succeed as an artist." That is, the Magdalen reveals the painter's ambition, while the Susanna shows her willingness to compromise (118). All three paintings may illustrate the effects, both before and after the fact, which the market can have on the art of a savvy, as well as creative individual such as Artemisia.