By Elena Bonacini
TW: Rape, sexual assault, violence.
Susanna’s trial by the Elders, a biblical story that appears in the Latin Vulgate as an appendix to the Book of Daniel but not in the original Hebrew or Aramaic text, became one of the most popular subjects to be illustrated by seventeenth-century artists. The story concerns a case of attempted rape that took place in ancient Babylon. Susanna, a faithful wife renowned for her beauty and virtue, catches the attention of two lecherous elders. These elders become consumed with lust for her and threaten to accuse her of adultery if she does not submit to their advances. Susanna, steadfast in her faith in God and in her devotion to her husband, refuses their immoral demands. At Susanna’s trial, the two elders testify against her, but a young prophet named Daniel, gifted with divine wisdom, proves that they conspired against Susanna. Artists from Tintoretto to Reubens seized upon this material as an opportunity to paint the beautiful naked female body, but another celebrated early modern artist approached the subject with her own unique perspective. This artist was Artemisia Gentileschi, the first woman painter to be widely recognised in Italian Baroque art.
Artemisia’s reputation rose in her lifetime but fell after her death. Many of her most accomplished paintings were initially attributed to her father, Orazio Gentileschi, and she was only mentioned as a footnote to his career. Orazio never sent Artemisia to school, but he allowed her to train in his studio with her brothers. Unlike her brothers, however, she could not visit many of the churches and institutions that exhibited the most critically acclaimed art in Rome at the time. Nevertheless, she would have had the chance to pore over two of Caravaggio’s most notable works found in her local church, Santa Maria del Popolo, and attempted to reproduce her own features to improve her drawing skills. Evidence suggests that Orazio acknowledged that Artemisia had more talent than her brothers. As he proudly put it in a letter to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany: ‘she has in three years become so skilled that I can venture to say that today she has no peer’. Artemisia herself was unafraid to assert her worth as an artist. ‘With me Your Lordship will not lose’, she once wrote to a patron, ‘and you will find the spirit of Caesar in the soul of a woman’. Artemisia’s intrepid spirit helped her find the resilience to endure a harrowing experience of sexual assault and its aftermath.
When Artemisia was seventeen, Orazio engaged a friend and fellow painter, Agostino Tassi, to teach her perspective, but Tassi took advantage of the situation and raped her. Tassi’s harassment and rape of Artemisia are recorded in a cache of documents detailing the infamous rape trial rediscovered in 1876 in the Vatican library. Artemisia recalled that Tassi locked her inside her bedroom and forced himself on her. ‘He then threw me onto the edge of the bed, pushing me with a hand on my breast’, she told the court, ‘and he put a knee between my thighs to prevent me from closing them’. Tassi clasped his hand around her throat and she tried to defend herself fiercely against his attack. ‘I scratched his face’, she added, ‘I grasped his penis so tight that I even removed a piece of flesh’. Artemisia was put through a painful, intimate examination, Tassi was merely questioned—and eventually set free. Artemisia’s sensationalised life story often overshadowed her achievements as an artist, but technically accomplished works such as Susanna and the Elders and Judith Slaying Holofernes demonstrate that she became an original artist whose legacy is much more complex than reductive narratives about her assault might suggest.
Artemisia’s paintings are unsettling reminders that male violence against women remains an everyday occurrence now as it was when she originally painted them in seventeenth-century Italy. Judith Slaying Holofernes gained worldwide popularity in October 2018, when Christine Blasey Ford stood up to testify that US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her. Art historians like Letizia Treves have noted that it has become something of a commonplace to read this gruesome scene and Susanna and the Elders as an expression of Artemisia’s rage over Tassi’s assault. But the most remarkable features of these paintings are perhaps her mastery of the technique of chiaroscuro and her innovative approach to composition. Artemisia’s decision to paint her version of the Susanna story vertically rather than horizontally makes her painting of this biblical tale the first depiction of sexual harassment from the perspective of the victim. ‘The way Artemisia paints it’, Treves commented about Susanna and the Elders, is ‘really the first time a woman is shown forcefully saying no to these men’. Treves’s 2020 Artemisia retrospective at the National Gallery helped reinstate her in her rightful place in art history, but there is still much work to be done to raise her status to the level of the masters of Italian Baroque art.
Refrences:
Elizabeth S. Cohen, ‘The Trials of Artemisia Gentileschi: A Rape as History’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 31, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 47–75
Judith W. Mann, ‘Artemisia and Orazio Gentileschi’, in Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, ed. Keith Christiansen and Judith W. Mann (New York and New Haven: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2001)
Rebecca Mead, ‘A Fuller Picture of Artemisia Gentileschi’, The New Yorker (October 2020)
Bluestocking Oxford 