The National Gallery must have been biting its collective nails waiting for the truck that delivered these paintings as it wended its way across Europe, picking up masterpieces for the gallery’s first solo exhibition for a historical female artist.
And what paintings they are. As with one of her stylistic antecedents, Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi was forgotten about for an awfully long time, and though there’s a tiresomely obvious reason for that, looking at these you can’t help but think the establishment must have been blind as well as bigoted.
Anyone who has heard of her knows this about Artemisia: she was raped, she was tortured in court to prove her truthfulness, she won the case. This show reveals her more fully — as a great painter, a skilful operator, a savvy (if not financially) businesswoman and a passionate lover. A few recently discovered letters to her fancy man Francesco Maria Maringhi are on display, and quite spicy they are too.
It starts with Artemisia’s first, stunning version of Susannah And The Elders, painted aged 17 in her artist father Orazio’s style — but even here, her female bodies, with their warm, softly creasing skin, are the more convincing, possibly because she had one. This is also probably why she so often appears in her own paintings — as a gypsy lutenist (sexy) or St Catherine of Alexandria (chaste, in almost exactly the same pose). Kept at home by her father until her marriage, she had no access to publicly displayed classical artworks, and couldn’t afford models.
It’s tempting to see her choice of subjects — often heroic women — or their depictions through the lens of the sexual violence she experienced. But although no doubt her startlingly visceral depictions of Judith and her maidservant beheading Holofernes were informed by her painful awareness that it would take two women to hold one big man down, her subjects were popular ones, often painted by other artists. Hers are simply more emotionally acute.
Her style, too, changed in response to new markets as she moved around Italy and, briefly, to London. Unpretentious but ambitious, she painted to sell. And she was in demand, making monumental public works, portraits and more intimate canvases for illustrious clients. Because she was, simply, a fantastic painter. At last we can see it too.
October 3 to January 24, 2021
