The life and career of Artemisia Gentileschi have something highly cinematic about them, so that it would not surprise me in the least to see this mildly lurid combination of novel and biography become a high-grade film biopic. Superficially it has just about everything, including rape and scenes of studio nudity, and it is also highly topical because there has been a tendency in the past two decades to elect Artemisia as a martyr-saint of woman's rights.
Since she belonged to the Roman milieu immediately succeeding that of Caravaggio -with whom her painter-father had been on friendly terms for a while - she can be placed in time against a background of violence, amorality, religiosity, and ruthless careerism. Counter-Reformation Rome was a strange place, ruled by austere reforming popes, yet a city in which about a tenth of the population consisted of courtesans and even common prostitutes; a place where duelling, tavern brawls, unseemly lawsuits, sexual rivalry and even assassination were everyday matters. In Artemisia's youth the memory of the Cenci family - particularly the beautiful Beatrice, beheaded for her part in killing her brutal father - was part of popular folklore. And the art circles in which her father moved were shaken by violence, slander and litigation - witness the case of Caravaggio, who in some ways was not untypical of his age.
She was born in 1597, the eldest of five but the only girl; her father trained her to be a painter like himself and used her as an assistant - and possibly as a model too, even for nude figures. Woman painters were rare at the time, but Artemisia was no mere dabbler or studio assistant. She became a thorough professional while still in her teens, though the relationship with her father was always a difficult one. He was socially ambitious, touchy, competitive, rather autocratic in the home, a widower who wanted no scandal or gossip about his only daughter and laid down rigid rules for her behaviour. Artemisia, however, was no submissive domestic angel; instead she had a rebellious, high-powered, tempestuous temperament which is mirrored in her paintings. Tragedy came when she was 17, at the hands of her father's friend and one of her teachers, the painter Agostino Tassi.
Tassi was married, but passed in Rome as a widower (according to this book he had hired assassins to kill his wife, but the plot miscarried and she escaped and found a lover in Naples). He was a careerist and a womaniser, socially charming but also scheming and ruthless, and when his pursuit of his friend's daughter met with cold, contemptuous rejection, he took his revenge by raping her when he knew she was alone in the house. Though at first she spoke of killing either him or herself, he succeeded in pacifying her with a promise of marriage - knowing that this was about as much as a raped single girl could then hope for. In the meantime he became her lover perforce, until her father discovered both the affair and the fact that Tassi's wife was still alive. This led to a legal action by the family against the rapist-seducer which was longfought and bitter.
Her own testimony at the court hearings has survived. Describing the actual assault, she stated: "When we came to the door of the bedroom, he pushed me inside it and locked it. Once it was locked, he pushed me on to the edge of the bed . . . and with his member pointed at my vagina he began to push it into me, having first put his knees between my legs. I felt a terrible burning and it hurt me very much, but because of the gag on my mouth (Tassi had tied a handkerchief over her mouth to stifle her cries) I could not cry out. And I scratched his face and I pulled his hair, and before he could put it inside me again I grabbed his member so tightly that I even removed a piece of flesh . . ."
Tassi, needless to say, denied it all and claimed that she was little better than a prostitute. He even bribed a servant lad to claim that he had frequently carried letters from Artemisia to lovers all over Rome - which was quickly disproved when it was pointed out that she could not read or write. Tassi had some powerful friends, and at least one member of the papal household was implicated, so to confirm the truth of her story Artemisia agreed to undergo judicial torture - which, by Lapierre's account, seems to have been some form of thumbscrew. The pain was severe, but she stuck repeatedly to what she had said, and in the end the court found in her favour. Tassi's punishment was light - a choice of five years in the galleys, or exile from Rome. Naturally, he chose the latter, though later he returned and resumed his career both as an artist and seducer.
Though a deflowered woman was generally regarded as spoilt goods, a high-ranking cleric promised her a dowry and thanks largely to this Artemisia was married off to a certain Pierantonio Stiattesi, a painter of sorts and rather a nondescript personality. He had at least the wit to appreciate his wife's talent, and he encouraged her to work and to spread her wings. In his native Florence, tutored in the manners of polite society, she was a success from the start, but her husband soon ran them into debt, and then their two children died in one of the recurrent bouts of plague. In the end, a single daughter survived, named Prudenzia after Artemisia's own mother.
ARTEMISIA lived and worked for a time in Rome, then later in Naples where her sombre, dramatic, often gory style of painting suited the Caravaggist taste of the city (in Rome, Caravaggio's vogue was already past or passing). Later again, she went adventurously to visit her father in London, where he had become a court painter to Charles I. She stayed there for some years and once again became his assistant, or rather collaborator, in several large-scale works, some of which were later destroyed by the rebelling Puritans. When he died, with England on the edge of civil war, she went back to Naples and resumed her career there, apparently prospering and giving her daughter in marriage to a knight of the Order of St James.
The general verdict of critics is that her late works fell off in quality and may even be largely the work of studio assistants, but she was still a celebrity when she died aged about 60. No grave or gravestone has survived.
Artemisia was both a remarkable woman and an artist of real power, so from the start Alexandra Lapierre had enviable material on which to work. Her style and approach have a good deal of the bodice-ripping romance about them, yet she has done considerable research (the bibliography in itself is impressive) and while at times she has laid on the drama and local colour with a palette knife, she has generally respected the known facts. The colour reproductions at the end of the book stress the goriness of certain of Artemisia's subjects - including the often-reproduced Judith Slaying Holofernes which one school of opinion (largely feminist) has seen as a kind of pictorial revenge for her rape and humiliation.
Perhaps so, but after all, such themes were common at the time, and a picture by her father Orazio in our own National Gallery depicts David slashing with a big sword at huge, fallen Goliath. Baroque art (and literature) loved drama, sadism, sensationalism and scenes of sexual violence, especially if they could be accommodated in a Biblical or classical framework. Artemisia could paint more sedately than that when she chose, though: for me her masterpiece is her smoky, dramatic self-portrait showing her at her easel, with her sleeves tucked up. She may not look quite the beauty some contemporaries claimed her to be, but in her full pouting lips, glowing dark eyes and hair it is easy to read the vehement, generous, combative nature which emerges from her life story. This picture, like its subject, is for real.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic.