Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art.

R. Ward Bissell, Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press 1999. 27 color pls. + 257 b/w illus. + 446 pp. $85. ISBN: 0-271-01787-2.

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-652/3) was arguably the greatest woman painter of seventeenth-century Italy. Born in Rome to the Caravaggesque painter Orazio Gentileschi, Artemisia became Caravaggio's only female follower in Italy and the first Italian woman to specialize in history painting. Modern art history has produced important studies on Artemisia by Roberto Longhi, Ward Bissell, Mary Garrard, Roberto Contini and Gianni Papi, Judith Mann, and Alexandra Lapierre, among others. Garrard in particular has constructed Artemisia as an innovatively proto-feminist figure, whose brilliant reinterpretations of traditional subjects produced unprecedented characterizations of women in Italian painting.

Bissell's long-awaited monograph on Artemisia promises to make a major contribution. This book includes a much-needed catalogue raisonne of her works, including 57 autograph entries, 42 "incorrect and questionable attributions," and an astonishing 108 lost works. The disproportionately high number of lost works illustrates a formidable issue for the study of all women artists from the early modern period: the disappearance of works. This situation arises largely from the relative paucity of documented public commissions. Most pictures by early modern women were painted for private collectors, and many privately owned works have disappeared, resulting in extant oeuvres that are either greatly diminished, as with Artemisia's, or entirely unknown today.

Although this far-reaching issue is not discussed by Bissell (nor is he concerned, in general, with matters that pertain broadly to women artists of the period), one of the book's real contributions is the attention to patronage. Bissell convincingly argues that previous scholars have erred in crediting Gentileschi alone with inventions that were impacted both by her patrons' ideas and desires and by the history of taste. Although this argument is well-founded, Bissell goes further, rejecting previous feminist interpretations of Artemisia's work. This unequivocally anti-feminist view will be difficult for many scholars to accept. Some points cannot be dismissed, however, such as Bissell's fascinating discussion of Artemisia's subspecialty in paintings of the female nude, which he argues constitute more than half of her extant canvases from the 1620s on. Bissell concludes that Artemisia did not reject eroticized interpretations of women, as others have alleged; although some will question the author's denial that Artemisia's inventive interpretations of women were intended to impart a new heroism to her gender.

This book includes additions to the artist's known oeuvre and reconsiderations of her chronology and development. Some suggestions are more plausible than others. Surely the Madonna and Child in the Spada Gallery, Rome (no. X-19), which is mentioned as Artemisia's work in a 1637 inventory, is by Artemisia and not by an artist from Giovanni Baglione's circle, as Bissell believes. The author's attributions of a Penitent Magdalen (private collection, no. 17) and a Cleopatra (Paris, no. 29) to Artemisia are not convincing.

Bissell's careful rethinking of several aspects of Gentileschi's life and career is often productive. His reassessment of the circumstances of Artemisia's removal to Florence in c. 1612, his suggestions about historical confusion of Artemisia with the still life painter Giovanna Garzoni, and his discussions of Artemisia's thirty known letters enhance our understanding of the artist. His reassessment of her later career in Naples addresses a period that is often ignored.

Occasionally, important issues are insufficiently explored. Bissell's comment that Artemisia may have drawn male nudes from life, based on Sandrart's remark that she drew from live models (22-23, 62), contradicts a universal belief about Italian practice: that women were not permitted to draw nude men during the early modern period. Bissell's argument is never clearly explained, and he doesn't make his case. The author is also inattentive to Artemisia's unprecedented specialization in history painting. He does not consider how unusual this practice was for women painters in Italy, who generally specialized in portraiture. This oversight impedes a full appreciation of Gentileschi's innovativeness.

Perhaps it is partially the evolving state of Artemisia studies that prevents a clear picture of the artist from emerging. Bessell's book contributes to our growing understanding of this complex painter, whose work will continue to be reevaluated for some time to come.