While now known among the great Baroque painters of the 17th century, Artemisia Gentileschi has and will continue to be, first marked by her being a woman, then an artist. It is the lack of scholarship of Artemisia’s excellence in isolation of her sex that has resulted in the feminist disposition of this essay. However, it is ultimately for an unequivocal reason. Artemisia Gentileschi remains a foremother of women artists, fiercely carving her own space, and hence the space for her influence, in the canon of art history, though not without a continuous struggle. It would seem Artemisia has been treading water since her ‘rediscovery’ by Italian art historian Roberto Longhi in 1916, with a once forgotten fragmentally documented life now tainted by the projections of feminist art historians. It is for this reason that this essay acknowledges Longhi’s wife, Anna Banti’s, 1947 neorealist novel, Artemisia for its understanding of Artemisia’s life, and will utilize its vivid imagining, paired with foundational feminist study The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, to illuminate the melancholy of the feminine artist. Further, this essay will argue the catharsis of foremothers and the abject underpin the feminist interest in Artemisia.
This essay will adopt a foundation of the prescient feminist study, The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, to consider how gender affected Artemisia’s art-making. Composed in 1979, this study focuses on the ‘gender strife’ that conditioned 19th-century women writers and established gender as a category of analysis, known as gynocriticism. What is most applicable from The Madwoman in the Attic is their explanation of male haves and female have-nots with striking metaphors to reach conclusions on the feminine artist’s melancholy. In the opening, the authors question literary paternity, stating;
In patriarchal Western culture, the text’s author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power like his penis. More, his pen’s power, like his penis’s power, is not just the ability to generate life but the power to create posterity to which he lays claim (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, 6).
This then begged the question, “With what organ can females generate texts?” Though the question may seem frivolous, the answer is complex (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, 7). The woman is not only a creation of man, from the history of mythology—generated from their brains, ribs, and ingenuity—but still under patriarchy, she will see in the mirror a male construct, “a glittering and wholly artificial child” (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, 12-17). Moreover, the all-male precursors of the arts incarnate patriarchal authority, and enclose the feminine artist in male-made strictures of her existence; extreme stereotypes that conflict with her subjectivity, autonomy, and creativity (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, 48). Gilbert and Gubar go on to argue if a woman were to attempt the pen, the “anxiety of influence” a man feels—the anxieties and inadequacies felt when confronted by the achievements of predecessors and traditions of genre—is more akin to a profound debilitating and ‘inferiorizing’ “anxiety of authorship” for women. There are no shoes to fill, she feels “she cannot create because she can never become a precursor, the act of writing will isolate or destroy her” (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, 49). Gilbert and Gubar then claim the energy and authority for creation a contemporary feminine artist may possess is only made possible by the melancholy of foremothers, the first women of artistic achievement to be recorded. This melancholy is described as “an isolation that felt like illness, alienation that felt like madness, obscurity that felt like paralysis, to overcome the anxiety of authorship because it was endemic to their cause,” a legacy must begin somewhere (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, 51). The fragments of history documenting Artemisia Gentileschi’s character and life suggest that she experienced this very melancholy.
By the account of only historical documents, the few remaining letters Artemisia wrote and the transcript of the infamous rape trial, or only a 20th-century feminist retrospective rework, emotionally knowing the artist would be impossible. As Derek Duncan writes in “Reading the Past‐Re‐Writing the Present: Anna Banti and Artemisia Gentileschi,” the failure of history to record Artemisia’s life encouraged Anna Banti to openly acknowledge the fictitious nature of Artemisia, “Artemisia's reality has no surface and as such remains immune to a realist representation” (Duncan 1991, 160). It is through the dialogue between Banti as narrator and Artemisia as both participant narrator and biographical subject that Banti can transcend the traditions of the realism novel and the biography to illuminate the process in which women must write their own history (Scarparo 2002, 365). It is only by the active presence Banti allows for Artemisia in Artemisia that a reader can empathise and emotionally know both the artist herself and her desire for her story to be told. In Artemisia, the reader does not only read about the relationships in Artemisia’s life but feels their fragility for themselves. During her teen years, she is raped by a friend and fellow painter of her father’s, Agostino Tassi. The proceeding court trial forces Artemisia to live as a recluse in her father’s house for three years, her honour violated and humiliated, she works incessantly on her painting ability (Scarparo 2002, 364). However, this is only one instance of isolation, “isolation that feels like illness,” in the artist’s life. These years of recluse close when her father marries her to Florentine artist, Pierantonio Stiattesi, and though now ‘protected,’ melancholy persists:
“How lovely it is,” she thinks, enraptured, forgetful, as she drifts off into sleep once more, “how lovely it is to belong to someone, to lose one's identity, to become different, unrecognizable. How lovely is it?” The exclamation turned into a question (Banti [1947] 2004, 73).
Then when considering the female friendships in her life, as Laura Benedetti writes in “Reconstructing Artemisia: Twentieth-Century Images of a Woman Artist,” the only women to whom Artemisa can relate are fragile, threatened by precarious health or by male violence. Not to mention Artemisia’s controversial position as a feminine artist meant little access to female or male models, a true “alienation that felt like madness.” Just as Artemisia was forced to new levels of invention on her canvas, these levels mirrored in her invention of self:
[…] no matter how much thought she gives to it, she has not managed to recognize and define herself in terms of any exemplary figure approved of by her century […] She is a woman who wants to mold her every gesture on a model of her own sex and time, a respected, noble model-but cannot find one. An image with which she could identify completely, under whose name she could fight: these are Artemisia's needs in her thirty-third year […] (Banti [1947] 2004, 99).
This is the plight of a foremother. This is Artemisia’s “anxiety of authorship” that gendered her art-making. A melancholy that permeated her marriage, her relationship with her father and daughter, and the potential of sisterhood. The search for relatability, the search to feel seen in one's desires, is native to the “anxiety of authorship” and is also a driving force for the female spectator of the abject.
To better understand the initial reception of Artemisia’s artworks and the feminist interest in her life, this essay will now consider abjection as a potential explanation. Julia Kristeva’s 1980 corpus, Powers of Horror, is the most well-known study of abjection. The abject can be understood to hover at the boundary of both subject-object and life-death. Phenomena such as excrement, vomit, blood, and the corpse, for example, are organically of-the-body but are abject because their states are indeterminate, holding an enduring power to violate our subjectively at any moment (Arya 2014, 27). To understand the subject’s visceral state of horror and disgust when expelled by the abject, Kristeva gives the example of skin-topped milk in the introduction:
The partitions between inner and outer or solid and liquid are flimsy. The threat that the milk film presents means that ‘I’ cannot expel it as it has encroached upon my being and has caused me to gag, which is a typical reflex activated by disgust. The ‘other’, that is, the milk film, cannot be objectified because it has shattered my being. In this crossing of the boundary, the stability of my self is threatened, and ‘I’ am not stable enough to expel it – it is ‘I’ who is expelled (Kristeva [1980] 2024, 4).
Further, because the abject has violated our selfhood, we cannot expel it as we would an object, instead we must lose ourselves before we can regain the boundaries of self. Though simultaneously and natural to self-preservation, we seek experiences, such as sex, that dissolve our sense of self and erode these boundaries (Arya 2014, 29). While confrontation with the abject is horror and disgust, it is also carnal fascination and catharsis. “The abject,” says Kristeva, “is edged with the sublime… The various means of purifying the abject—the various catharses—make up the history of religions, and end up with that catharsis par excellence called art” (Kristeva [1980] 2024, 17). Abject art then typically depicts the processes of expulsion (excretion, crying, ejaculation), and the undoing of the body; the fluids and substances that are secreted during these processes (viscera, blood, saliva, semen, urine, excrement, and wounds) (Arya 2014, 85).
Gentileschi’s most famous artwork, Judith Slaying Holofernes, remains the most visceral depiction of the religious scene for two reasons: the undoing of the body, specifically the undoing of Holofernes’ head from his neck, and the abject woman who painted it and thus herself into it. As Whitney Chadwick claims in Women, Art, and Society, “the naturalistic details, the choice of the moment of the decapitation, and the blood that jets from the severed arteries are present in several other 17th-century versions, including those by Caravaggio and Johann Liss.” Although the depiction of such a quantity of blood, a bodily fluid that is secreted during a process of expulsion, would be enough to justify the artwork as abject, it becomes even more so when considering its reception. For over two centuries, the painting had been neglected, “banished to dark corners and inaccessible museum stairwells,” according to Mary Garrad. Then, upon Longhi’s rediscovery in 1916, he maliciously downgraded Artemisia:
This is a terrible woman! How could a woman paint all this? We beg for mercy… What surprises is the beastly impassibility of the person who painted all this and even managed to notice that when a gush of blood is violent enough, the central spurt can be decorated with scattered drops on both sides. Unbelievable, I tell you! And please, give Signora Schiattesi—this is Artemisia's married name—enough time so that she can choose a handle for the big sword she needs! And finally, don't you find that Judith's only concern is to move away so that the blood won't stain her silky, yellow brand-new outfit? (Longhi and Gregori 2011)
As Benedetti elaborates, Artemisia never used her husband’s name to sign either her letters or paintings, here Longhi reduces Artemisia from her father’s famous name to her unknown husband’s (Benedetti 1999, 43). Further, he claims Artemisia’s mind was “by definition more masculine,” she was a “lazy and cautious” artist, and only references the trial to align himself with Tassi to allude to Artemisia’s “sexual promiscuity” (Longhi and Gregori 2011). However, this is the essential cycle of the abject, particularly the abject woman. Longhi’s expulsion of Artemisia can be compared to Mary McCarthy’s violent response to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. McCarthy writes “I would love to make her appear grotesque and ridiculous … I mean the violence of my feelings,” she wished to subject Beauvoir to “punitive satire, the satire of disgust and horror” (Chanter 2000, 141). The social rejection of a cultural artifact that abjects itself, by openly bearing abjective qualities— qualities that symbolise the fragility of identity, system, and order, in this instance, feminism— is essential because in social abjection, the body’s subjectivity becomes greater society’s, and the threat posed by the abject must be “cast-off.” To cast-off is to label a threateningly different identity, such as women, dirty and contaminated (similar to bodily fluids) to disguise greater society’s fear of their difference (Arya 2014, 7).
However social abjection underestimates the power of female voyeurism, and thus, the cycle of the abject woman, can perhaps come full circle, and be known by an audience akin to the creator. If the abject is so vexing, then why is Artemisia able to be loved by women and discussed in feminist circles at length? As previously mentioned, Kristeva acknowledges the catharsis of the abject, but the release is of oneself. In contrast, Tina Chanter proposes a confirmation of oneself:
The subject of abjection finds a certain perverse pleasure in the production of disgust. The deject, who is designated by the abject, in and through abjection, is a stray, who asks not who am I, but where am I. The deject experiences the abject as jouissance and finds himself or herself situated by abjection. He or she joys in it, finds affirmation, confirmation, finds the self alive after all. Abjection confers an identity that the deject seeks but cannot find elsewhere. In this sense, abjection, we could say, provides a proof of existence for the subject. I am abjected, therefore I exist, and I have a place in the world; I am allowed to desire (Chanter 2000, 145).
In summary, to return to the “anxiety of authorship,” the catharsis of the abject can be compared to the catharsis of a foremother. The feminine artist’s search for a female model, in Artemisia’s terms, “an image with which she could identify completely, under whose name she could fight,” is not to dutifully comply with male definitions of her femininity, but because “she must legitimise her own rebellious endeavours” (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, 50). In the abject woman and their products, the female spectator can find confirmation of not only her desire to create, destroy, or rebel but also of her own abjection. While the depiction of spraying blood from severed arteries and the undoing of Holofernes’ in Judith Slaying Holofernes can relieve a viewer of their subjectivity for a moment, it is the confirmation and catharsis awarded by an abject foremother that has driven a feminist interest in Artemisia. A “cast-off” that abjects itself, beating society to the punch, is the greatest fear of all because it holds the greatest power. The plethora of biographies and feminist readings on Artemisia are testament to this power, and prove she succeeded in not only becoming her own foremother but for a lineage of feminine artists. To answer the metaphorical question from Gilbert and Gubar, “With what organ does the female generate texts?” I believe it is not within a fleshy or membrane-bound organ, such as a man’s, but within our blood: while within us it is unbound, endless, unable to be shackled by strictures, and when it leaves the body, it demands disgust, horror or fear.
Bibliography
Arya, Rina. 2014. Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film and Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Banti, Anna. (1947) 2004. Artemisia. Lincoln: University Of Nebraska Press.
Benedetti, Laura. 1999. “Reconstructing Artemisia: Twentieth-Century Images of a Woman Artist.” Comparative Literature 51 (1): 42–61. https://doi.org/10.2307/1771455.
Chadwick, Whitney. 2012. Women, Art, and Society. 5th ed. London: Thames & Hudson.
Chanter, Tina. 2000. “Abjection and Ambiguity: Simone de Beauvoir’s Legacy.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 14 (2): 138–55. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25670324.
Duncan, Derek. 1991. “Reading the Past ‐ Re‐Writing the Present: Anna Banti and Artemisia Gentileschi.” Journal of Gender Studies 1 (2): 152–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.1991.9960487.
Garrard, Mary D. 1980. “Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting.” The Art Bulletin 62 (1): 97. https://doi.org/10.2307/3049963.
Garrard, Mary D., and Elizabeth Cropper. 1989. “Review of Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art.” Renaissance Quarterly 42 (4): 864–66. https://doi.org/10.2307/2862303.
Gilbert, Sandra M, and Susan Gubar. 1979. Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kristeva, Julia. (1980) 2024. Powers of Horror. Columbia University Press.
Kristeva, Julia, and Jody Gladding. 2012. The Severed Head: Capital Visions. New York: Columbia University Press. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Longhi, Roberto, and Mina Gregori. 2011. Gentileschi Padre E Figlia. Milano: Abscondita.
Scarparo, Susanna. 2002. “‘Artemisia’: The Invention of a ‘Real’ Woman.” Italica 79 (3): 363. https://doi.org/10.2307/3656098.
Williams, Linda. 1991. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44 (4): 2–13. https://doi.org/10.2307/1212758.
