Fathers and Daughters – Part 1
Published in four parts, Elizabeth Cropper investigates how the experience of being the daughter of an established artist shaped the career of Artemisia Gentileschi and Lavinia Fontana.
After centuries of neglect, major museums are acquiring works by Early Modern women as fast as they can.[1] (figs. 1-3) The recent identification of a Portrait of a Gentleman, his Daughter and a Servant, an ambitious work by Lavinia Fontana (previously attributed to Pieter Fransz Pourbus) in the storage of the Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai, is a reminder that even when such works were previously collected by museums, they were often misattributed, especially if they were of high quality.[2]
This change in attitude towards the importance of works by such artists as Lavinia Fontana and Artemisia Gentileschi did not come about overnight, and the art market that now stimulates this development was long hostile to works by Early Modern women. We should not forget that generations of feminist art history made this relatively recent change possible. In the long and deep history of the women’s movement in the field of art history (which deserves to be better documented), one landmark moment still stands out in this context in the United States. 1971 saw the publication in Art News of Linda Nochlin’s “Why have there been no great women artists?”[3] (fig. 4)
In Nochlin’s essay, the title of which she attributed to a provocative question by the New York art dealer Richard Feigen, she examined what she called “the total situation of art making.”[4] After challenging the myth of “the Great Artist” and the entrenched allure of notions of unique genius and romantic talent, she wanted to lay bare the social, institutional, and economic structures under which art was made and that rendered it nearly impossible for women to become artists of success. Both sides of her argument were important, for Nochlin was as dedicated to undermining the naturalized positions of “the white western male” as to promoting the work of forgotten women. To do only the latter in the spirit of feminism, she wrote, “is to swallow the bait, hook, line and sinker, and to attempt to answer the question as it is put: that is, to dig up examples of worthy or insufficiently appreciated women artists throughout history; to rehabilitate rather modest, if interesting and productive careers.”[5] Such worthy efforts, in her view, added to our knowledge of women’s achievement more generally, but did nothing to question the underlying assumptions behind the question asked.
Nochlin knew that her proposal for a different kind of history of art would not be accomplished quickly, and despite her reservations about digging up forgotten women, she contributed to the foundational exhibition, Women Artists: 1550–1950, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976 (figs. 5a and b).
Its history is telling. Feminist groups in Los Angeles had noted that LACMA’s 1971 Art and Technology exhibition (fig. 6) included no women at all, and only one person of color. Artists in the Feminist Studio Workshop demanded more representation.[6] According to Ann Sutherland Harris, who recruited Nochlin to co-curate the show, the women’s group had proposed an exhibition devoted to Artemisia Gentileschi, but Harris’s own counter proposal for an exhibition representing a larger group of neglected women artists from Europe and North America was accepted.[7] Artemisia would have to wait another thirty years for a monographic show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 7), and even then shared this with her father.[8] Both Harris and Nochlin contributed essays to the Los Angeles catalogue in 1976. Nochlin went more deeply into the question of the role of economic and institutional factors in her discussion of work from 1800–1950.[9] Harris’s conclusions about the women working between 1550 and 1800 focused more on what Germaine Greer would soon call “the obstacle race,” the difficulties facing women artists and their fulfillment of their potential.[10] Harris’s concluding questions, including “What is the place of these women in the history of Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo painting? To what degree has prejudice resulted in the neglect and inadequate appreciation of their work? Do any of these women deserve a place in the standard survey courses that introduce students annually to the peaks of achievement in Western art?” all tended more towards what Nochlin had called “taking the bait.”[11] These questions (especially the last one) may not be asked so frequently today, when university survey courses devoted to canonical works have lost their grip, but they are still to be heard among those dealers, curators and collectors who are responsible for acquiring and displaying works of art, and even among the general public. The principle of integration into the canons of art history they imply would persist as a powerful current even in feminist art history.[12]
The questions asked by Harris and Nochlin and others in the early 1970s were put in a climate that was often hostile for women’s rights more generally. Subsequent feminist writings, benefiting from social changes achieved, could be severe in their rejection of what they considered “additive feminism” that tended to see the history of women only as a fight against exclusion (Greer’s obstacle race). For example, Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker, writing in the 1980s, were scornful of what they saw as feminists “rummaging in dusty basements to find Old Mistresses,” and proposed that surmounting obstacles had no meaning without a parallel history of the rules of the game (something that Nochlin had pointed to).[13] Instead of monographic rehabilitation, they started from the position that women artists had always existed but had been obliterated from the record. Recovery of the history of women would not come from the “relocation of women in art history on the discipline’s own terms,” but only in the context of a “concomitant deconstruction of the practices of art history itself.”[14] In the specific case of Sofonisba Anguissola, for example (fig. 8), Parker and Pollock substituted the question of just why she was so admired by contemporaries in place of the integrationist position, expressed by Harris, that, while she did not perhaps belong in a Renaissance textbook, her celebrity gave her historical impact, opening up the profession to women.[15]
My own engagement with the lives of Early Modern women artists, and with Artemisia Gentileschi specifically, came, quite paradoxically, through thinking about Michelangelo Buonarroti, the supreme example of male Renaissance genius, whose work and Vasari’s appreciation of it set the terms of art historical thinking for centuries (fig. 9). So great is Michelangelo’s reputation that no aspect of his life and work has gone unstudied. This includes not only his literary remains in the form of poetry, but also his extensive correspondence with friends, patrons, and family, the modern publication of which from the 1980s on provided us with extraordinary insight into every aspect of the artist’s life.[16] In addition to providing a remarkable body of evidence of the important new level of literacy in sixteenth century Italy, these documents give extraordinary insight into family affairs and material culture. More attention is given to olives and grain, fabric for clothing, the acquisition of real estate, to births, deaths, and crimes of violence, than to matters concerning the production of art. Not accidentally, this major publishing venture coincided with developments in modern history writing in which the details of ordinary everyday life were understood to provide important insights of their own and also into larger narratives: microstoria, as practiced in Italy, became a necessary companion to larger narratives, and the case of Michelangelo is outstanding. Studies by William Wallace, for example, focussed on the artist’s social life, his family, and his daily activities, as much as upon, and in relation to, his well-studied works.[17] Other canonical male artists have received similar treatments, establishing their special context, family relationships and education, their successes and failures and technical knowledge, to some extent changing the rules of the art historical game. The production of great works is seen to intersect with the mundane details of every day life that sustain it. But has this held true for the women who lacked a place in history?
The production of great works is seen to intersect with the mundane details of every day life that sustain it. But has this held true for the women who lacked a place in history?
Over the past decades, Lavinia Fontana and Artemisia Gentileschi, whose work and lives I have chosen to discuss here, have indeed recovered reputations high enough to gain their places in a textbook, or to be required acquisitions in major museums. These are the successes of the “additive feminism” of the last century, if not yet exemplifying the analysis of the rules of the game that Nochlin, Pollock, and Parker saw as necessary. It was fortunate for me that I was asked to review Mary Garrard’s groundbreaking Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton, 1989) around the time I was immersed in the daily habits of Michelangelo Buonarroti and his friends and family, for this coincidence presented an unmistakable paradox.[18] Seeking to place Gentileschi in the art historical canon, while focusing on what she perceived as the essential feminism of the style of works and their meaning, Garrard linked her with Michelangelo, seeing a conscious rivalry with the great master on Artemisia’s part.[19] She tells the story of Artemisia’s life, yet, even while publishing a translation of some of the documents from the trial of Agostino Tassi for sexually assaulting Artemisia in 1611, and connecting the painter’s Susanna and the Elders (1610) (fig. 10) to her personal experiences, Garrard generally prefers to focus on her as a female hero, a remarkable figure set in the context of those heroines she depicted. Details of a woman artist’s life, and especially the crime of violence against Artemisia, were at this point (and not altogether without reason) felt to distract from the accomplishment of the work.[20] As Griselda Pollock would put it in 2005, the conflation of a male artist’s biography and his works of art “appears to give us access to the generic mystery of (masculine) genius,” whereas in the case of a woman artist it “merely confirms the pathology of the feminine, saturated by her sex, of which she becomes emblem and symptom.”[21] In my review of Garrard’s book, I regretted that much information about her life was missing. It was this perception that led me to document the birth of her children in Florence, and the burden presented by her feckless husband: others have contributed much to this productive line of research into Artemisia’s lived experience.[22]
Lavinia and Artemisia (figs. 11–12) belonged to different generations, resided for the most part in different cities, and took different paths to success, but they shared much in common. Beyond their gender and their ancient names, they were both provided with noble godparents; they married and had children, and they eventually kept households that clients could visit. Their fame was well established in their lifetimes, and their self-awareness was, as we shall see, quite unusually marked by medals cast in their honor (figs. 13–14). Fundamental was their shared status as the daughters of established painters.
It is often claimed that the most significant requirement for a woman to become a painter in this period was to be the daughter of a painter.[23] Given that women artists “all, almost without exception, were either the daughters of artist fathers, or, generally later, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had a close personal relationship with a stronger or more dominant artistic personality,” Nochlin herself suggested it would be interesting to investigate the role of “benign if not outright encouraging fathers” in the formation of women artists.[24] As Greer put it: “the single most striking fact about the women who made names for themselves as painters before the nineteenth century is that almost all of them were related to better known painters.”[25] Caroline Murphy, writing in 2003 about Lavinia in particular, comments that “it is widely acknowledged that the majority of the best-known Italian women painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came from artist’s families, though few celebrated male artists taught their daughters to paint.”[26] The reasons for this are obvious: social restraints made it difficult for women to study other artists’ work or seek instruction in often rowdy studios. While women could sign their paintings, and did so with great regularity, they could not sign contracts or receive payment for their own productions. Recently Babette Bohn has argued that this father/daughter model was less prevalent in Bologna in the 17th century, but the general perception holds, often carrying with it an unfortunate, literally patronizing, stigma that seems not to affect the many young men who studied with relatives.[27]