Fathers and Daughters – Part 3
PUBLISHED IN FOUR PARTS, ELIZABETH CROPPER explores HOW THE EXPERIENCE OF BEING THE DAUGHTER OF AN ESTABLISHED ARTIST SHAPED THE CAREER OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI AND LAVINIA FONTANA.
In 1604, when Lavinia ‘s household arrived in Rome, Artemisia Gentileschi was just eleven years old. Her family life, as Patrizia Cavazzini has also suggested, could not have been more different from Lavinia’s.[57] Her father Orazio (fig. 30), born in Pisa in 1563, was the third son of a Florentine goldsmith, Giovan Battista Lomi, who died in 1575. Orazio and his older brother Aurelio (b. 1556), who would also become a successful painter, were sent to Rome around 1575/76 to live with their mother’s brother, whose Gentileschi name Orazio took. Aurelio returned to Pisa, leaving Orazio in Rome, lending some credence to Baldinucci’s claim that Giovan Battista Lomi was not his father.[58]
Orazio’s education as an artist, like Prospero’s, remains vague, though we know of his early work as a medalist and a few fresco commissions and altarpieces, the quality of which Keith Christiansen has described as “dismal.”[59] Ward Bissell stated that “it is art based on existing art, imagination stimulated by the imaginative acts of others. Nature and recognizable human experience play no part,” never confronting reality: in other words, very like the mannerist approach Malvasia detected in Prospero Fontana’s work.[60] It was, then, very bold, as Christiansen has observed, for Orazio, then thirty-seven and with a wife and four children, to consciously set about changing his style entirely, according to the new and revolutionary model provided by Michelangelo da Caravaggio.[61]
This is not the place to examine how Orazio remade himself as an artist, but the basic facts are simple. In addition to seeing public works by Caravaggio in San Luigi dei Francesi and Santa Maria del Popolo, Orazio knew the Lombard artist personally, being named together with Caravaggio in the lawsuit brought by Giovanni Baglione for slander in 1603. In the course of this suit, Orazio recorded that he had lent Caravaggio a Capuchin habit and a pair of wings.[62] But through a simple comparison of, say, Orazio’s Triumph of St. Ursula in Farfa of 1598 with his Baptism in Santa Maria della Pace of around 1603 (fig. 31), and considering the evidence of such works as the Corsini Ecstasy of Saint Francis and the Mother and Child in Bucharest (fig. 32), we immediately see the dramatic change in his work.[63] But our story is about Artemisia, not her father, and we have gotten ahead of ourselves.
Artemisia was born to Orazio and his wife Prudentia Montone (fig. 33) on July 8, 1593, and baptized just two days later, with Artemisia Capizucchi, wife of a nobleman, and Offredo Offredi, an influential cleric standing as godparents. In this moment, then, the Gentileschi parents resembled the Fontanas, providing godparents of a higher status to their daughter.[64] From that point on, however, their lives diverged. Orazio, not untypically, never owned a house in Rome, and in the first seventeen years of Artemisia’s life the family would move some five times, though remaining in the artist’s neighborhood between Piazza di Spagna and Santa Maria del Popolo (where Caravaggio’s work was to be seen).[65] In March 1605, Orazio and Prudentia were living on via Paolina with four children—Artemisia and three younger brothers, Francesco, Giulio, and Marco (aged 1). Eleven-year-old Artemisia was confirmed on June 12th, perhaps the most stable moment of her childhood. Two other infant brothers had died, and on December 26, 1605, Artemisia’s mother Prudentia died in childbirth.[66] Though Orazio’s widowed sister lived in the household for a while, the burden of taking care of the three younger siblings fell to the only girl.
Some of Orazio’s commissions took him out of the house, but he also worked at home, where living spaces and studio were in close proximity. We can assume that Artemisia watched her father work from early on and assisted him, as did her brother Francesco, born in 1597. Also available to Artemisia through Orazio, as in the case of Lavinia and Prospero, would have been the prints and drawings, and plaster casts, to be found in any artist’s studio at this time. She could not share, however, Orazio’s access to the Accademia di San Luca, of which he was an early member, and, like her father, she did not learn to read and write with fluency.[67] Some of the assignations between Agostino Tassi and Artemisia following the initial sexual assault in 1611 occurred with the collusion of associates who took Artemisia out for carriage rides around Rome, including one to San Paolo fuori le Mura, where she would have seen Lavinia’s 1604 altarpiece (fig. 34), as well as Orazio’s earlier work of 1596 (fig. 35).[68] Closer to home she could have visited Caravaggio’s work in her parish of Santa Maria del Popolo, and very likely in San Luigi dei Francesi and Sant’Agostino, but she always had to be accompanied, even by those who would betray her, and her movements around the city were consequently restricted. On the other hand, she surely saw her father at work every day. The notion that she was somehow kept safely apart from her father’s studio in a rented house is indefensible. Whatever else, he taught her to paint, and she would have learned by watching him constantly, not in some imagined series of appointments in dedicated spaces.
It is deeply unfortunate that much of what we know about Artemisia’s apprenticeship with her father is provided in the transcripts of the legal proceedings brought in 1612 against Orazio’s colleague Agostino Tassi for his rape of Artemisia in the spring of 1611. This event, which took place in a chaotic household far from that ideal harmony depicted by Orazio in his Woman with a Lute (fig. 36), came to dominate Artemisia’s reputation in the twentieth century in ways that many feminists decried because it detracted from her reputation as an artist. Much has been written about Tassi’s sexual assault on Artemisia, and I will only say that, in my view, valid attempts to historicize and contextualize the trial also risk denying the profound effect this had on Artemisia and her family.[69] It changed everything, beginning with Artemisia’s departure for Florence with the husband who was quickly found for her when it was clear that Tassi was already married. There she gained the literacy and comportment Lavinia acquired at home, but which Orazio could not provide. That the event happened when Orazio had allowed Tassi into the household on the pretext of teaching Artemisia perspective, reflects badly on a father’s care for his daughter, even as it reflects his ambitions for her as an artist. Orazio was known to be an irascible and bad-tempered man with little culture. When there was interest in having him come to work for the Medici in Florence in 1615, where he would have joined Artemisia, the Florentine ambassador in Rome wrote that Orazio was “so thoughtless in his life, and manners, and of such a temper that one cannot get on or deal with him.” Giovanni Baglione was a personal enemy, but his published view cannot be discounted entirely. He records that Orazio was “more bestial than human, and he had no regard for anyone, however eminent. He was opinionated and offended everyone with his satirical tongue.”[70]
The transcripts of sworn testimony tell us a good deal about the working practices and spaces in the Gentileschi household. We hear from one now famous witness, a seventy-three year old man from Palermo called Angelo Molli, that he came to model for Orazio in his house for several weeks in 1611, stripping to the waist to pose as Saint Jerome in Penitence (fig. 37).[71] Other neighbors also posed, including one Costanza Ceuli, together with her children (fig. 38).[72] We understand that Artemisia, then eighteen, was already teaching a young boy to draw, and that Orazio had a garzone who came to sweep up. Francesco, also learning to paint, prepares colors for his sister.[73] Some witnesses claimed to have heard Artemisia was a painter but had never seen her at work. It was said that she was kept in a place apart, though unfriendly witnesses claimed that she was always looking out of the window and entertaining men.[74]
Artemisia signed and dated a Susanna and the Elders in 1610 (Pommersfelden, Schloss Weissenstein) (fig. 10). While recognizing the origin of various aspects of the work in such sources as Agostino Carracci’s print of the same subject, several critics have expressed doubt that this work could be by the seventeen-year-old Artemisia.[75] And yet, even while conceding that Orazio may have added some touches, I would insist upon its autograph status at this critical moment in her father’s studio. The consubstantiality of art and artist she achieves here is not something she learned from Orazio, but rather a direct link to Caravaggio, among whose interpreters she, like Orazio, is outstanding. As I wrote in 2001, “A large painting organized around the figure of a female nude gazed upon by men and painted by a nubile seventeen-year-old female painter could never be just a declaration of a skill that would help her compete with other painters who were all men. It was from the very beginning already scandalous, and it is on that knife-edge between the already scandalous and the accomplished and skillful painter that Artemisia’s fame balanced throughout her life.”[76] The use of the model in the domestic studio by Caravaggio and Orazio was, of course, also already quite scandalous, though Caravaggio did not paint entirely nude figures: but the implication that in this signed work Artemisia had painted herself in her father’s house, where male models were also being used (fig. 39), was even more provocative.
One witness testified in the 1612 trial that Orazio liked to paint Artemisia in the nude: Tassi capitalized on the power of gossip to suggest that Artemisia herself claimed that Orazio wanted to use her “as a wife.”[77] Other works from the shared studio around this date, such as the and the Danaë and Cleopatra (figs. 40 and 41) are also shocking in their revelation of a model, and these too have been attributed back and forth to Orazio and his daughter. Through technical analysis, Keith Christiansen determined that, though many practices were shared, it is just possible to distinguish between father and daughter on the basis, for example, of their preparation of the composition—with Orazio making more careful preparation and Artemisia moving more swiftly to paint on the surface.[78] Paradoxically, these conclusions only confirm the closeness of father and daughter in the Gentileschi shop, that was, as Christopher Marshall has observed, patriarchal in a literal sense. Marshall’s suggestion that the Susanna was signed and dated as a way of promoting the Gentileschi name in a new niche of female nudes painted by a young female prodigy makes sense, as does his proposal that Orazio was aware of Lavinia’s fame in Rome.[79] I would also argue, however, that the signature and date on the Susanna and the Elders served precisely to insist that this work of a voluptuous female nude spied upon by men was not painted by Orazio.
In conclusion, we should note that the similarity of the figures of Cleopatra and Danaë show how the practice deployed by Caravaggio of making templates or cartoons to record and repeat compositions arrived at through posing models was also adopted in the Gentileschi studio.[80] Orazio continued this practice in ambitious and elegant paintings in later life (figs. 42–43), and upon arrival in Florence Artemisia was immediately able to produce novel single figure, female images based on such a template (figs. 44–45), and also some of her most famous dramatic works (figs. 46–47).[81]
The Fontana family business required Lavinia Zappi to stay close to her father at home, and even, after Prospero Fontana died, to take her household with her to Rome. Artemisia was forced to leave her father’s chaotic home for Florence to preserve her reputation and career, and she would continue to move throughout her life, back to Rome, to Venice, and Naples. In 1621, Orazio, for his part, left Rome for Genoa. Just three years later he left Genoa for Paris at the invitation of Marie de’ Medici. In 1626 he arrived in London, where he would stay until his death in 1639, working for the Queen: like Caravaggio he inhabited noble households that were not his own. After causing trouble for Artemisia in Rome in the early 1620s, her father was essentially out of her life until he needed her. In 1638 she took the long journey to London with some hope of royal patronage, but more than anything to join Orazio. Even after more than a decade, Artemisia was able to work so closely beside her father that the attribution of scenes painted in oil for the ceiling of the Queen’s House at Greenwich remains in dispute (fig. 45).[82]
Yet from this short moment of collaboration, which ended with Orazio’s death less than a year after she arrived, Artemisia went on to a further decade or so of work in Naples, taking up her signature themes in new ways, often with the intervention of her own studio (figs. 46 and 47). Had her early difficulties steeled her for this, or was her resilience and survival part of a character that she shared in part with her irascible father? In either case, she had watched him develop his new style at the very moment she was learning from him, and she was then able to change her own.