So we've just heard about some of the amazing loans that are going to be
coming to our 'Artemisia' exhibition here at the National Gallery which opens on
4th of April so Letizia Treves, the curator of the exhibition, is here to
tell us a little bit more about some of the works that are going to be in the show.
So first of all: tell us why is this show so amazing Letizia?
- So the idea of the exhibition actually came about on the back of our acquiring the
'Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria' in 2018 so we've had about 16
months to put the show together but there's never been an exhibition on
Artemisia in the UK, which is surprising. She even came here in the late 1630s and
joined her father in London at the court of Charles I but there have
been a number of exhibitions around the world on Artemisia but this is the
very first time that we're gathering some of her most famous works and also
some newly discovered works, like our own picture here, at the National Gallery.
- So who exactly was Artemisia Gentileschi?
- She was the most famous female painter
of the 17th century, of the baroque. Her father was a painter as well so she
grew up in Rome, he trained her and then she went on to have an independent
career in Florence and went to Naples as well and lived there for almost 25 years
of her life. Her life spanned about, I mean, she had a sort of 45 year career
and, you know, worked in a number of Italian cities.
- So I think one of the key loans of the show
is probably one of her earliest paintings that she actually
completed when she was a teenager which is pretty amazing.
- That's right. So the show will open with her first known
signed and dated work which is a
painting of 'Susanna and the Elders' and it's dated 1610, so she's just 17 years
old and she paints it and it is absolutely astonishing. It's such a
kind of mature painting both technically but also from a kind of narrative
interpretation point of view. It's a very sensitive portrayal and I think you
already see what a great storyteller she is. I mean it's such a sophisticated
picture that many believe it's actually by her father even though the picture is
signed and dated because at this time, she is painting in her father's studio.
So she's trained alongside her three brothers but we know from a letter of
1612, just two years after this picture was painted, that her father Orazio
writes to someone in Florence saying "My daughter's a
fantastic painter. She's been painting independently for three years and she
has no equal" and you know, this picture's really testament to that. I think
what she brings to these subjects, and we'll talk about it more in a moment, is
she brings a very kind of individual and very particular feminine, if you like,
sensibility to these subjects because she's not the only one painting 'Susanna
and the Elders', a very popular Old Testament subject, but she really puts
herself in the shoes of her protagonist so she imagines what it's like for
Susannah to be leered on by these elders while she's bathing in her garden
and you can see by the twist of her body in just how sort of traumatized she is
and she really feels a kind of physical threat and I think she really
sort of gets under her skin you know, she really gets under the skin of her
protagonist. That's what makes her such a powerful story teller.
- So this is one of the earliest paintings that we're going to have in the exhibition and I
think one of the particular highlights is going to be the two versions of
'Judith and Holofernes' which was possibly inspired, as some people might have suggested,
by something very traumatic that happened in her life?
- That's right. So when Artemisia was in her father's house she's raped in 1611 by Agostino Tassi
who's an artist who's collaborating with her father at that time on a large sort
of fresco decoration and he comes into Orazio's house, where Artemisia lives
and works, and rapes her there and this is all recorded because all the
documents relating to the trial that follows still exist so it is really
extraordinary that we have these documents that describe not just what
happened but also in Artemisia's own words because you have the testimony of
those at the trial including Artemisia and Tassi. So, her 'Susanna and the Elders'
is dated from 1610 before this event takes place but you could imagine that
this young girl has already experienced some sort of harassment and she's
already in quite a vulnerable position: there are lots of people coming and
going in Orazio's house, she's not allowed out but there are plenty of
people coming in and out so a lot has been read into these leering old men in
relation to the imminent assault that she experiences. And the 'Judith beheading
Holofernes' that exists in sort of two variants, they're not exactly the same:
one is in Naples and that one's slightly earlier and that's thought to date from
the very end of her time in in Rome and just before she moves to Florence and
then the one in the Uffizi, probably from shortly after that, is almost certainly
painted as sort of a showpiece to gain patronage in Florence but it is so
brutal. I mean, it is absolutely astonishing that someone in paint can
portray this horrible moment of a woman beheading Holofernes. Now it's been
shown plenty of times before and Caravaggio of course paints it in a very
violent way but his 'Judith' is totally impassive. She's this very grand sort of
heroine but Artemisia really portrays the kind of nitty-gritty of this really
grisly task and that's what I find so fascinating about her: she really
imagines what it's like for a woman to have to overpower this huge bulk of a
man, this general, and so she gets her maidservant to help her. So the
maidservant in the story, in the Apocrypha, is standing outside keeping watch
but in Artemisia's painting, she's basically straddling Holofernes, pinning
him down and Judith is really sort of hacking his head off and there's arcs of
blood spurting. I mean it's a really unique...it's a really tough
picture to look at but I find it so interesting because it really embodies,
I think, what Artemisia brings to painting: this very different sort of
sensibility to her stories.
- So, after the trial she's married. She moves to Florence
and it's really there she starts to use her own image, almost, to
promote herself.
- That's right. I mean, I think there's a certain sense of
kind of practical issues so it's much easier to just look at herself in a mirror
and use her own face than it is to hire models which was costly, it was expensive;
there's a letter later in her life where she complains about how expensive it is
to hire good models, so she uses herself. She was also famed for her beauty and so
this is one of those pictures where Artemisia assumes a sort of role or
assumes a guise rather like in the 'Self Portrait
as Saint Catherine of Alexandria'. So here it's a very literal self-portrait. We
know there are portraits of Artemisia so we really know what she looked like and
this is very, very faithful to those so she probably copied her own face from a
mirror but then she's shown here playing the lute. Now we don't know if she played
the lute. She was certainly musical but there is this very intriguing
reference to a 'Señor Artemisia' in 1615 taking part in a performance at
the Medici Court where she was apparently dressed as a gypsy and
singing and dancing and I think it's extremely plausible that this is a
sort of reference to that, possibly painted for the Medici because the
picture is described in the 17th century Medici inventory and so it's
play-acting but it might also recall a real-life event and here she is dressed
in the sort of amazing costume with a sash tied round her waist with this
wonderful sort of cloth wound around her head and she's actually got this
beautiful little gold hoop earring so it definitely looks like Artemisia
but it's her also taking on a role but I think there's also a sense of
almost self-promotion so a way of marketing yourself and your paintings
by using your own image and she sort of play-acts and there's a lot of play
acting in these self-portraits where she assumes the guise of Saint Catherine or a
lute player in the picture from Hartford, which we're borrowing which is very
closely related to our picture, and I think this is in part, as i say, to kind
of promote her own image rather like Rembrandt does as well in the
Netherlands. It's a very conscious act of promoting herself.
- And I think one of the really exciting things for me
about the exhibition is we're not just going to get
to see her paintings, we're going to get to learn about Artemisia the woman
through her own words.
- That's right. I was very keen...I mean obviously Artemisia is such a
famous figure in art and some people may know her work, some people may know her
life story but not necessarily be that familiar with her work and she has
become a sort of feminist icon but I was very keen to get under the
kind of human side and really have a kind of 'Artemisia
more fully in the round' in this exhibition and she is a very kind of
empowering figure. She's incredibly resilient, tenacious. I mean
you hear it from her letters...In 2011 this extraordinary group of letters were
found. They're very intimate letters written by Artemisia to her lover
Francesco Maria Maringhi who was a wealthy administrator she met in Florence and of
course these letters were never really meant to be read by anyone except
him but what they reveal is this very sort of human side of Artemisia,
a very vulnerable side at times and, I think, for people to see her handwriting
and to see her names written so legibly, you know, it gives me goose bumps
It makes her feel very, very real. She's not just this sort of iconic
figure. She was a real woman of flesh and blood who felt...I mean one of the letters
we're borrowing...she writes just after her four-year-old son dies and it's scrawled,
you can see her emotional turmoil in the way it's very messily
written and you know she talks about just being kind of ripped apart by grief
at the death of her son and you know this sort of human element and this
human side of Artemisia...also the kind of jealousy towards her distant
lover because she's, by this point, in Rome and her lover is still in Florence,
I think will really bring Artemisia to life for people.
- And she spent 25 years of her life in Naples running her own workshop.
What was so special about that city and what did that offer to her in her career?
- So, after reaching new heights of fame in Rome in the 1620s she moves briefly to Venice
but then effectively settles in Naples in 1630 and she stays there until the end
of her life but she doesn't like it. I mean within five or six years she's
writing, complaining about the cost of living
and violence. She was very keen to leave
Naples and she's sending pictures all over Europe to try and gain employment
elsewhere but she does end up staying there a very long time except for this
brief trip to London but what Naples gave her was a whole series of
opportunities she hadn't had before then. Firstly she paints on a very different
scale: she's suddenly painting much larger pictures and I think that's going to be
very obvious in the exhibition just the sheer scale of the pictures, the
monumental canvases. Her very first altarpiece is from 1630. It's a painting
she paints as soon as she's arrived in Naples and you have to remember, until
that point, and she's already in her thirties by this point, she's not painted
anything that's on public display anywhere in Florence or Rome so this is
the first time she's painting with that in mind. She's also working alongside
other artists so she was very much welcomed into the artistic community in
Naples which was not an easy thing. Other artists like Guido Reni
had been driven out of Naples, had been effectively bullied out of Naples but
she's clearly welcomed there and she becomes part of the kind of artistic
scene. So in some paintings she contributes one or two canvases to a
sort of cycle of paintings. In other cases like in this
painting of Bathsheba...so this picture shows David and Bathsheba. David's
actually tiny: he's this very tiny figure here alone on the balcony in the palace
behind. So rather like Susanna, Bathsheba is shown bathing and David spies her
from afar and ends up seducing her and she bears him a son and here this
picture is by Artemisia but also in collaboration with two other artists:
with Viviano Codazzi for the architecture and beyond and with
Micco Spadaro probably for the landscape and this is something that was entirely
usual. The artist would collaborate with other artists, everyone had their own
sort of specialisms and so you might work with an architectural
painter and a landscape painter and it shows just also how integrated Artemisia
was in Naples and worked with other artists on single commissions like this
and I love this wonderful detail of the of the basin here in the foreground. Your
eye is really drawn to that and of course
Bathsheba like Susanna and these subjects were often paired in 17th century
collections. They were sort of really seen as kind of erotic subjects or they
could be painted in an erotic way because they showed semi-naked women
bathing but here Artemisia paints Bathsheba in a much more
sensitive way. You can see, actually, her nudity is concealed
so you can see the white drape covers her and her arms are actually concealing her
breasts so we're not actually shown any nudity at all and the focus is really on
this very elegant interaction between Bathsheba and her maidservants so again
she brings a sort of different sensibility to this subject.
-The white...your eye is really drawn to the center of the painting isn't it?
- Like Susanna. I mean I think you have the sort of glowing naked figure, who's really the
kind of center of the story, at the very center of the picture so you're
immediately drawn to...you end up sort of admiring her rather like David
admiring her on the palace balcony beyond
- So it's quite apt that one of the most exciting rooms
in the exhibition is going to be called
'The Female Hero' because that's basically what Artemisia pretty much was.
- That's right and I think you know a lot of pictures of female protagonists are
associated with Artemisia because that's what her reputation has
been built on in the modern day but I think also, in her own time, she was known
for these pictures of biblical heroines: Susanna, Judith, Cleopatra,
Lucretia, these female heroes that she turns back
to these subjects throughout her career sort of turning afresh to these stories
every time and reinterpreting them and I felt it was very important to
sort of dedicate a room to that and why? What made her so different from
contemporaries? Why would I, as a patron, go to Artemisia rather than to one of her
male peers? I think the point is that the patrons would determine what subject
they wanted so they would say "I want a painting this big of Judith and
Holofernes" but it was up to Artemisia really to have some sort of artistic
license and how she would portray that and I think male patrons knew,
predominantly male patrons knew, they would get something different from
Artemisia and they knew that there was certainly an additional appeal
of having a picture of a female by a woman. I think there was
definitely this sort of USP that she had and she was perfectly well aware of it.
- And of course she came here to London as well.
- She did. So she comes to London in
the late 1630s. We don't actually know exactly when she arrives or when she
leaves but she probably comes in the course of 1638. Her father is in London
at that point. He's been in London since 1626 as court painter to Charles I
and I was very keen in the exhibition to sort of have a room really
reuniting father and daughter because the exhibition begins with Artemisia in
her father's workshop and sort of seeing, in a way, how far she'd come...And so
they're reunited in London and one of the big projects she's thought to have
had a hand in is the ceiling which was originally in the Queen's House at
Greenwich which Orazio painted for Queen Henrietta Maria and it's now a
Marlborough House in St. James's and it was moved there in the 18th century and
it's thought that she may have had a hand in that. I mean the degree of her
participation is much debated but we know she painted pictures here. She even
sent a picture before arriving because one of her pictures is being framed in
London well before she actually arrives. But of course the most famous picture
from her London period is the 'Self Portrait as Allegory of Painting'
and this is a picture...it's really the only firmly identifiable picture that
Artemisia painted in London and it is the 'Self Portrait as Allegory of Painting'
and there's been a lot of discussion about whether this is a very
literal self-portrait. You have to remember Artemisia was in her 40s when she
paints this and you know I think this woman looks a bit younger than that and
also the physical impossibility of being able to paint yourself in this angle, you
know, you would need a very complex system of mirrors, so I think it's
a more sort of figurative self-portrait. I think it's a real embodiment, if you
like, of painting and of what Artemisia believes painting should be and that is
not a contemplative act, a very physical act, a very purposeful act
and I think you know showing painting as a woman, personified as a woman here at
an easel, holding her painter's palette with her brush poised, she's
about to embark on her painting, you can see the canvases completely clear
in front of her...so for me this captures everything and it calls to mind
some of these great phrases she puts in some of her letters towards the
end of her life to her famous patron, the Sicilian nobleman Antonio Ruffo.
She famously writes "I have the spirit of Caesar in the soul of a woman"
It gives you the sense of real grit, a kind of very tenacious figure and
also she famously said "Let me show you what a woman can do" and that always
comes to mind when I look at this picture because I think it really does
embody everything Artemisia thought about painting
- So why should people come? I mean it sounds absolutely amazing...
Why should people book and come to see this exhibition?
- Well I think there's the fact that we've never had a chance to
showcase Artemisia in this country and I think it's about time to do it and
also with having acquired our own painting we were the right place to do
it. It has been a real challenge getting the loans.
She's hugely sought after and there have been a lot of other
exhibitions in recent years and I think it would be a real challenge for people
to do it again, for another sort of generation. So I really think it is an
opportunity to see some of these really famous pictures
alongside also some less well-known pictures, the more recently discovered
pictures, so you know...I hope also bringing through the human element of
the letters people get a more profound and more rounded understanding
out of Artemisia whether you come to it to just look at the paintings or
because you're fascinated by Artemisia as a figure, I think there's sort of
something for everyone!
- Sounds absolutely brilliant. We can't wait to see the
exhibition and tickets are on sale now at the National Gallery website.
you