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Garrard1982.pdf
FEMINISM
AND ART HISTORY Questioning the Litany
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Edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard
ICON EDITIONS
tfj 1817
HARPER & ROW. PUBLISHERS, New York Cambridge, Philadelphia, San Francisco
London, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Sydney
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FEMINISM AND ART HISTORY. Copyright © 1982 by Norma Braude and Mary D. Garrard. All rights re- served. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission ex- cept in the case of brief quotations embodied in criti- cal articles and reviews. For information address Har- per & Row, Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto.
FIRST EDITION
Book designed by C. Linda Dingler
Page layout by Abigail Sturges
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title: Feminism and art history.
(Icon editions) Includes index.
I. Feminism and art-Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Feminism in art-Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Broude, Norma. II. Garrard, Mary D. N72.F45F44 1982 701'.03 81-48062
AACR2 ISBN 0-06-430525-2
83 84 85 86 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 Z ISBN 0-06-430117-6 (pbk.)
84 85 86 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
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Contents ----====~>~4·c==== __ __
Preface and Acknowledgments vn
Introduction: Feminism and Art History 1 NORMA BROUDE AND MARY D. GARRARD
1. Matrilineal Reinterpretation of Some Egyptian Sacred Cows 19 NANCY LUOMALA
2. The Great Goddess and the Palace Architecture of Crete 33 VINCENT SCULLY
3. Mourners on Greek Vases: Remarks on the Social History 45 of Women
CHRISTINE MITCHELL HAVELOCK
4. Social Status and Gender in Roman Art: The Case of the 63 Saleswoman
NATALIE BOYMEL KAMPEN
5. Eve and Mary: Conflicting Images of Medieval Woman 79 HENRY KRAUS
6. Taking a Second Look: Observations on the Iconography !OI of a French Queen, Jeanne de Bourbon (1338-1378)
CLAIRE RICHTER SHERMAN
7. Delilah 119 MADLYN MILLNER KAHR
~ "" I I VI CONTENTS
8. Artemisia and Susanna 147 MARY D. GARRARD
9. Judith Leyster's Proposition-Between Virtue and Vice 173 FRIMA Fox HOFRICHTER
10. Art History and Its Exclusions: The Example of Dutch Art 183 SVETLANA ALPERS
II. Happy Mothers and Other New Ideas in Eighteenth- 201 Century French Art
CAROL DUNCAN
12. Lost and Found: Once More the Fallen Woman 221 LINDA NOCHLIN
13. Degas's "Misogyny" 247 NORMA BROUDE
14. Gender or Genius? The Women Artists of German 271 Expressionism
ALESSANDRA COMINI
15. Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century 293 Vanguard Painting
I CAROL DUNCAN
16. Miriam Schapiro and "Femmage": Reflections on the 315 Conflict Between Decoration and Abstraction in Twentieth-Century Art
NORMA BROUDE
17. Quilts: The Great American Art 331 PATRICIA MAINARDI
Notes on Contributors 347 Index 351
1. Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, 1610. Pommersfelden, Schloss Weissenstein, Collection Dr. Karl Graf von Schon born (Brooklyn Museum).
8 Artemisia and Susanna
MARY D. GARRARD
When the large exhibition Women Artists, 1550-1950 was seen in several American cities in 1977/ American viewers were treat~ ed to the spectacle of six paintings by Arte- misia Centileschi, more than are normally found in any single city in the world. The rar- est sight among these for Centileschi scholars was the painting of Susanna and the Elders [I], a work long hidden from the public eye in a private collection in Pommersfelden, Cer- many, and a problematic picture in the Cen- tileschi oeuvre.' In response to the stimulus of the exhibition, I have attempted here to resolve the attribution and dating problems connected with this painting, offering new evidence in support of Artemisia's author- ship. I shall demonstrate as well that part of that evidence, namely, the painting's unor- thodox interpretation of the biblical theme of Susanna and the Elders, is of wider signifi- cance, for both Artemisia's art and her life.
Although the painting bears the prominent inscription "ARTEMITIA/GENTILESCHI F.j1610" on the step at the lower left [2], scholars have been divided in their attribution of the work between Artemisia and her father Orazio
Centileschi. Orazio was proposed as the art- ist, first by LOl1ghi, then by others," on the grounds that 1610 was impossibly early for the daughter, who was presumed to have been only thirteen years old in that year. In 1968, Ward Bissell established Artemisia's correct birthdate as 1593 rather than 1597, and sustained the attribution of the Susanna to her on stylistic grounds.' He suggested, however, following an idea earlier advanced by Voss,' that the date on the canvas should be read as 1619, when Artemisia's artistic ma- turity would have more nearly matched the technical sophistication of the painting. In her catalogue entry of the Los Angeles exhi- bition, Ann Sutherland Harris supported the attribution to Artemisia and reaffirmed the probable date as 161O, following a reading of the inscription offered by the curator of the collection.' When the painting arrived in Los Angeles in January 1977, and was available in the original for the first time to Artemisia scholars, close inspection confirmed that the date indeed reads 161O.
Still, the possibility remained that the sig- nature and/or date had been altered or added
148
2. Centileschi, Susanna and the Elders, detail. Pommersfelden, Schloss Weissenstein, Collection Dr. Karl Graf von Schonborn (Brooklyn Museum).
later. When the exhibition moved to the Brooklyn Museum in October 1977, I took the opportunity to consult the museum's chief conservator, Susanne P. Sack, who, with the generous cooperation of the owner, Dr. Karl G. SchOnborn, subjected to laboratory analysis the inscribed portion of the painting [2J. Ultraviolet photography revealed no over- painting of a previous date or signature, and in Mrs. Sack's opinion, the character of the pigment, the structure of the lettering and its conformity with the internal lighting of the painting, and the craquelure of the surface all strongly indicate that the signature and date formed an original part of the picture.' All technical evidence points, therefore, to the authenticity of the signature and date, and consequently, to the authenticity of the Su- sanna and the Elders as the earliest preserved painting of Artemisia Gentileschi.
Even with the advancing of Artemisia's age from thirteen to seventeen, however, the pic- ture still confronts us with an unusually ac- complished technical performance by a young artist who in 1610 had, by her father's ac- count, only been painting about a year.' A logical explanation, one advanced by Moir,' is that Orazio helped his daughter-pupil exten-
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MARY D. GARRARD
sively in the planning and execution of the work. This view differs only in degree from Longhi's opinion that Orazio essentially painted the picture and put Artemisia's name on it.lO From an exclusively stylistic point of view, this is an irrefutable argument, since the early works of Artemisia are very similar to those of Orazio in formal conception and color harmony. On the other hand, if we take into account the expressive character of the painting, we can distinguish between the two artists even at this early point in Artemisia's career. Surprisingly, no scholarly attention has yet been devoted to the single most ex- ceptional aspect of this painting, which is its treatment of the theme.
Like most versions of the Susanna theme, the SchOnborn painting presents the central confrontation between the principal charac- ters, the moment when the two Elders return to joachim's garden to seduce Joachim's wife Susanna. As Ann Sutherland Harris has noted, the Gentileschi Susanna belongs in the general context of a group of Susanna paint- ings and prints from the Carracci circle, a group that includes Annibale's print of ca. 1590 [3J, and a painting by Annibale of around 1601-02, now lost but known in a copy or variant by another artist, who was probably Oomenichino [4J." Yet granting a family resemblance among these works, a di- rect comparison of them with the SchOn born picture serves principally to establish its es- sential difference from the others. While Su- sanna's legs correspond generally in pose with those in Annibale's print, the position of the arms has been decisively changed, and her image accordingly revised, from that of a sexually available and responsive female to an emotionally distressed young women, whose vulnerability is emphasized in the awkward twisting of her body. The artist has also eliminated the sexually allusive garden set- ting, replacing the lush foliage, spurting foun- tain and sculptured satyr heads that appear in the Carracci circle works with an austere rec-
ARTEMISIA AND SUSANNA
tilinear stone balustrade that subtly reinforces our sense of Susanna's discomfort. The ex- pressive core of this picture is the heroine's plight, not the villains' anticipated pleasure. And while one might well expect this to be the case, since Susanna's chastity and moral rectitude were, after all, the point of the Apocryphal story, it is in fact the Carracci circle pictures, and not Artemisia's work, that represent the more usual treatment of the Su- sanna theme in Western art.
Few artistic themes have offered so satisfy- ing an opportunity for legitimized voyeurism as Susanna and the Elders. The subject was taken up with relish by artists from the six- teenth through eighteenth centuries!2 as an opportunity to display the female nude, in much the same spirit that such themes as Danae or Lucretia were approached, but with the added advantage that the nude's erotic
149
3. Annibale Carracci, Susanna and the Elders, etching, ca. 1590. Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund (National GaJJery).
4, Domenichino (?), Susanna and the Elders. Rome, Palazzo Doria"Pamphilj (Gabinetto Fotografico Nazjonale).
I
150 MARY D. CARRARD
5. Tintoretto, Susanna and the Elders, 1555-56. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum (Kllnsthistorisches Museum).
appeal could be heightened by the presence of two lecherous old men, whose inclusion was both iconographically justified and por- nographically effective. It is a remarkable tes- tament to the indomitable male ego that a biblical theme holding forth an exemplum of female chastity should have become in paint- ing a celebration of sexual opportunity, or, as Max Rooses enthusiastically described Ru- bens's version, a "gallant enterprise mounted by two bold adventurers."" Tintoretto, whose adventurers stage their advance in a manner more sneaky than bold [5J, nonethe- less offers a representative depiction of the theme in his emphasis upon Susanna's volup- tuous body and upon the Elders' ingenuity in getting a closer look at it. Even when a paint- er attempted to convey some rhetorical dis-
tress on Susanna's part, as did the eighteenth- century Dutch painter Adriaan van der Berg [6J, he was apt to offset it with a graceful pose whose chief effect was the display of a beauti- ful nude. Because the Susanna theme was particularly prevalent in Venice, two Vene- tian examples, one an anonymous painting of the early sixteenth century [7J, and the other of the eighteenth century, by Sebastiana Ricci [8J, may suffice to demonstrate that the prevailing pictorial treatment of the theme typically included an erotically suggestive garden setting and a partly nude Susanna, whose body is prominent and alluring, and whose expressive range runs from protest of a largely rhetorical nature to the hint of out- right acquiescence.
In the sense that the imagined consequence
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ARTEMISIA AND SUSANNA 151
7. Anonymous artist, Susanna and the Elders, early 16th century. The Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement, Devonshire Collection (CourtauJd Institute).
8. Sebastiano Ricci, Susanna and the Elders. The Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement, Devonshire Collection (Courtauld Institute).
If' .. ' .. ~
152
of the action is possession of a woman who has firmly said "No," the covert subject of the Susanna theme in Western art is not se- duction but rape, imagined by artists-and presumably also by their patrons and custom- ers-as a daring and noble adventure. That rape should have been glorified in art is not surprising, considering the heroic position it has occupied in mythic tradition, serving as the pivotal event in such epics of coloniza- tion as the rape of Helen by Paris or the rape of the Sabines, not to mention the inventive- ly diverse forms of sexual conquest performed by Zeus and Apollo, all inevitably sanitized in description as "abductions."" And yet "ab- duction," a word defined as the taking away of women, "with or without their consent," is precisely accurate. Language has convenient- ly not distinguished between willing and un- willing women, since it is not at all clear what were the attitudes of Europa, 10, Helen, or the Daughters of Leucippus toward their ab- ductors. Those artists who have glamorized the act of rape, deemphasizing or leaving un- developed the reaction of the victim, have at least acted in consonance with the masculine bias of the creators of the Greek myths." Su- sanna, however, as a potential rape victim who emphatically halted the proceedings, is a rare heroine in biblical mythology-her ex- tremism in defense of virtue is topped only by that of Lucretia-and Susanna's unusually well-defined resistance throws into bold relief the extent to which she has been distorted into a half-willing participant in post-Renais- sance art.
The biblical Susanna was distorted in a dif- ferent direction in the patristic literature of the Early Christian Church. A recent writer, Mark Leach, has described the exegetical comparisons between the temptation of Su- sanna and the temptation of Eve that were drawn by Hippolytus, the third-century bish- op and martyr; St. John Chrysostom; and the fourth-century bishop St. Asterius of Ama- sus.!' Hippolytus explains: "For as of old the
MARY D. GARRARD
Devil was concealed in the serpent in the gar- den, so now too, the Devil, concealed in the Elders, fired them with his own lust that he might a second time corrupt Eve."!7 Rubens alludes to this tradition in his Munich Susan- na [9], as Leach has shown, by including an apple tree in the garden instead of the oak or mastic called for in the story. Susanna, who is also associated for Hippolytus with the Church, successfully resists this "supreme temptation involving the essence of. human volition" (Leach's phrase), and thus prefi- gures the Church's redemption of original sin. But the extraordinary underlying assump- tion on the part of both Hippolytus and Leach is that Susanna-Eve should have found the pair of old lechers as tempting as they found her! Indeed, the Apocryphal account of Susanna and the Elders effectively eliminates the potentially distracting issue of mutual temptation by casting the male assailants as Elders, thus rendering their lust reprehensi- ble and Susanna's voluntary acquiescence un- thinkable, in order to concentrate dramatic attention upon the story's climax and denoue- ment, in which Daniel successfully differenti- ates between her true account and their false ones. IS
As an Old Testament parable, the Susanna story represents a contest between good and evil, or virtue and vice, mediated by wise judgment. Susanna herself is a personification of the good Israelite wife, whose sexuality was her husband's exclusive property/' and Susanna's total fidelity to Joachim is demon- strated in her willingness to accept death rather than dishonor him by yielding to the Elders. Her resistance is heroic because she faces danger; it is not complicated by any conflict of feeling toward her oppressors, and she is crucial to the story, flat character that she is, in the absoluteness of her resolve, her virtue and her honesty. Renaissance and Ba- roque artists, however, like the early church fathers, ignored the fundamental moral point concerning the discovery of truth and the ex-
ARTEMISIA AND SUSANNA 153
9. Peter Paul Rubens, Susanna and the Elders, 1636-40. Munich, Alte Pinakothek (Baycrischen StaatsgemiildesammJungen ).
ecution of justice, to focus instead upon the secondary plot devices of temptation, seduc- tion, and the erotic escapades of the Elders. (Tellingly, many more depictions of Susanna and the Elders exist than of either the Judg- ment of Daniel or the Stoning of the El- ders.)'" Both the patristic and the artistic con- ceptions of Susanna, whether as an Eve triumphant over her own impulses or as a va· luptuous sex object who may not bother to resist, are linked by the same erroneous as· sumption: that Susanna's dilemma was whether or not to give in to her sexual in- stincts. In art, a sexually exploitative and morally meaningless interpretation of the theme has prevailed, most simply, because most artists and patrons have been men,
drawn by instinct to identify more with the villains than with the heroine.
There have appeared occasionally versions of the Susanna theme that place some empha- sis upon her character and her personal an- guish. In Rembrandt's Susanna of 1647 in Berlin [10], one of the most sympathetic treat- ments of the biblical heroine, we find a can· cern with her youth, innocence, and vulner- ability that is thoroughly characteristic of the artist. Yet even Rembrandt implants in the pose of Susanna, whose arms reach to cover her breasts and genitals, the memory of the Medici Venus, a classical model that was vir- tually synonymous with female sexuality." In the Carracci, Domenichino and Rubens Su- sannas, the classical model is the crouching
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154 MARY D. GARRARD
10. Rembrandt, Susanna and the Elders, 1647. Berlin (West), Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz (jtirg P. Anders).
Venus Anadyomene, a type known in numer- ous variants, whose association with the bath connects her with Susanna on a luxurious and erotic level." The frequent echo of these an- tique prototypes in paintings of the Susanna theme underlines their use as a device to evoke erotic recollections, in the classic for- mulation of having it both ways: adhering su- perficially to the requirement that Susanna be chaste, while appealing subliminally to the memory of the Venus archetype, whose ges- tures of modesty call attention to what she conceals.
In the Centileschi Susanna, the Venus model has been conspicuously avoided. In- stead, the artist, evidently as aware as the Carracci circle artists of the possibili ties of double entendre through classical allusion, re- places the crouching Venus with an unmis- takable reference to a different antique proto- type. The dramatic defensive gesture of Susanna's upper body is taken from a figure on a Roman Orestes sarcophagus, the figure of Orestes' nurse [llJ, who memorably con- veys the anguished response of Orestes to the advent of the Furies. This sarcophagus was
ARTEMISIA AND SUSANNA
11. Roman sarcophagus, Orestes Slaying Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, detail. Rome, Museo Profano Later3nense (Alinan').
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12. Michelangelo, Expulsion of Adam and Eve, 1508-11. Rome, Vatican Palace, Sistine Chapel ceiling (Alinari).
known in Rome in at least three variant ver- sions, in the Lateran, the Vatican and the Giustiniani Palace, and was the source of nu- merous borrowings by artists in the Renais- sance.'" One of the most prominent quota- tions of the nurse's pose is found on the Sistine Ceiling, where it is used in reverse by Michelangelo for the figure of Adam in the Expulsion [12].24 The artist of the Schenborn painting, by incorporating a gesture that car- ried associations with antique and Renais- sance works of epic proportions and tragic overtones, restored to the Susanna theme the
12
tone of high seriousness that it surely de- serves.25
The Schenborn Susanna carries over from its antique prototype the suggestion that a sympathetic character is being hounded on a psychological level, and the painting differs in this respect from the Expulsion of Adam and Eve, where the relationship between the punished Adam and the moral authority, Ga- briel, is direct and physical. At the same time, and unlike Michelangelo's straightfor- ward narrative, the painter of the Susanna sustains a certain ambiguity about guilt and
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punishment, right and wrong, that is present in the relief as well. Orestes' action was not a clear-cut instance either of just vengeance or of unjustified murder, and the figure of the nllrse effectively sets the expressive tone in the relief; through her gesture of pushing away a thing she cannot face, she establishes a psychological dimension that indirectl y re- calls the complexity of Orestes' feelings about the deed." Similarly, if we read the Centileschi picture naively, the figure of Su- sanna appears, in her position and gestural re- sponse, to react to some judgment from the two men who loom high over her. Such ambi- guity is brilliantly suited to the Susanna theme, reminding the viewer simultaneously of the Elders' false accusation of the woman and their threat to expose and punish her,
13. Orazio Gentileschi, David and Goliath, ca. 1605-10. Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland (National Gallery of Ireland).
MARY D. GARRARD
and-a subtler echo-of the just punishment that came to the Elders when their own genuine guilt was exposed by Daniel.
The painter of Susanna and the Elders, then, rejected traditional allusions to Venus and drew an alternative expressive vocabu- lary from the Orestes sarcophagus to suggest both the anguish of the heroine and the puni- tive consequences of the event. Certainly by now, the reader will have anticipated the con- clusion that it must have been the female Ar- temisia Centileschi, rather than the male Orazio, who made such an artistic decision. While I believe that the evidence of the sar- cophagus quotation does support that conclu- sion, the problem is complicated by the fact that Orazio Centileschi also borrowed from the Orestes sarcophagus a pose for the figure of David in his Dublin David and Goliath [I3J, a picture that is close in date to the Su- sanna." Does this mean that Orazio, who un- questionably painted the David, must also have painted the Susanna? Or that he brought the sarcophagus to the attention of his daughter who, in incorporating a pose from it in her Susanna, was reflecting her fa- ther's interests rather than her own? Neither, I think, if we examine closely the nature of the borrowing in each case. Evidently, the swashbuckling pose of the male hero, Ores- tes, and his interaction with fallen bodies, were the elements that interested Orazio and shaped his conception of this active version of the David theme, a version that is sharply contrasted with the contemplative Davids (Spada, Berlin-Dahlem) of the same period, which were built upon different classical pro- totypes." In the Dublin David, Orazio incor- porated part of the nurse's gesture in the hero's left hand, in order to develop a more energetic and gracefully balanced figure than the Orestes of the sarcophagus. This trans- planted gesture differs markedly from its counterpart in the Susanna, where it is what we might call functional rather than decora- tive, serving by its pivotal placement to inter-
ARTEMISIA AND SUSANNA
!Upt the compositional flow and to convey in- tense inner feeling.
It is very unlikely that Orazio would make of a single antique prototype two such entire- ly different expressive uses as are made of the nurse in the Susanna and the Dublin David, and particularly not during a single brief peri- od of his career. Orazio's use of the Orestes sarcophagus may have directed Artemisia's attention to it, but the difference between the pictorial derivations establishes beyond doubt that it is Artemisia's creative imagina- tion we see at work in the Susanna. Looking at the sarcophagus with different eyes, female eyes, she saw the gesture of the nurse as of central, not peripheral, importance, and chose it to form the expressive core of the Susanna.
The conception of the figure of Susanna in- volves, of course, more than a fortuitous clas- sical quotation, since the rudimentary gesture has been developed into a fully realized fe-
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14. Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, detail. Pommersfelden, Schloss Weissenstein, Collection Dr. Karl Graf von Schon born- Wiesentheid (Brooklyn Museum).
male nude, and set in a new pictorial context. As an almost totally nude figure, Susanna would not be a complete anomaly in either artist's work, but another point in favor of Artemisia's authorship is the figure's uncom- promising naturalism, since as a woman she had access only to female nude models, while male artists in general during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries usually worked from male models, improvising their transfor- mation into women where required.29 Susan- na's body is persuasively composed of flesh; it is articulated by specific touches of realism that are unflattering by conventional stan- dards of beauty, such as the groin wrinkle, the crow's foot wrinkles at the top of her right arm, and the lines in her neck [14]. The naturalistically pendant breast, the recogniz- ably feminine abdomen, and the awkwardly proportioned legs further attest that this fig- ure was closely studied from life. By contrast, Orazio Gentileschi's relatively rare nude and
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partly nude females, for example, his Danae [15] in Cleveland of 1621-22, and his Vienna Magdalene of the late 1620s, are more ideal- ized, with inorganic, molded breasts and little anatomical articulation.
The difference between Artemisia's and Orazio's treatment of female figures is more fundamental, however, than their approaches to anatomical drawing. While women figure prominently in Orazio's paintings, in such themes as judith and Holofernes, Lot and His Daughters, the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, or St. Cecilia (perhaps significantly, no Susan- nas are known), their range of expression is basically passive. Orazio, whose general pref- erence was for quiet and meditative themes, portrayed even his most active female charac- ters, judith and her maidservant [16], in a mo- ment of watching and waiting, suggesting through the women's anxious glances in two directions the existence of a pervasive outside force more powerful than the heroines. By contrast, Artemisia's Detroit and Pitti Judiths [17] react to a specific danger from a single
MARY D. GARRARD
15
direction, indicating that the threat is both life-sized and local.'"
The SchOn born Susanna behaves more like Artemisia's judiths than Orazio's, in her physically active resistance of her oppressors and in her expressive intensity. She conveys through her awkward pose and her nudity the full range of feelings of anxiety, fear and shame felt by a victimized woman faced with a choice between rape and slanderous public denouncement. As a pictorial conception, Su- sanna presents an image rare in art, of a three-dimensional female character who is heroic in the classical sense. For in her strug- gle against forces ultimately beyond her con- trol, she exhibits a spectrum of human emo- tions that move us, as with Oedipus or Achilles, both to pity and to awe.
The uniqueness of Artemisia's interpreta- tion is further confirmed by the existence of two examples of the Susanna theme that are based in part upon her version. The first [18] is a painting by Simone Cantarini in the Pinacoteca, Bologna, dating from 1640-42."'
ARTEMISIA AND SUSANNA
16
17
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15. Orazio Gentileschi, Danae, 1621-22. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Purchase, Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Bequest (photo: Cleveland Museum of Art).
16. Orazio Gentileschi, Judith and Her Maidservant, ca. 1610-12. Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum (Wadsworth Atheneum).
17. Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith and Her Maidservant, ca. 1625. The Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit Institute).
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Susanna in this picture repeats Artemisia's pose histrionically and without inner rnotiva- tion, while the relocation of the Elders makes Susanna's gesture pointless. The picture is a classic instance of an artist borrowing a pose without understanding its expressive func- tion. The second picture, in the Palazzo Cor- sini, Rome [19], by an anonymous Bolognese artist of the. seventeenth century, presents a Susanna whose gesture is more faithful in spirit both to Artemisia and the Orestes sar- cophagus, with a more dignified sense of measure and of physical bulk than is seen in Cantarini's flyaway figure. Yet here too the sympathetic treatment of the Elders and the subliminal sexual message suggested through the spotlighted earring betray an essentially masculine conception of the theme. Through their own internal inconsistencies, these paintings reveal their derivative nature, and they demonstrate as well that a portrayal of Susanna from the heroine's viewpoint was a rare achievement indeed in Renaissance and
MARY D. GARRARD
18
Baroque art, unattainable even by imitators of such a model.
One must acknowledge that in differentiat- ing between Orazio and Artemisia Gentiles- chi, and then between Artemisia and her male imitators, on the grounds of their re- spective treatments of a female character, one runs the risk of oversimplification. Yet it is rare that we know anything so categoric about two artists' psyches as we do about Ar- temisia and her father, distinguished as they are by sex, and consequently by attitude and experience. Particularly in view of what we today would call the feminist cast of much of Artemisia's subsequent work,a2 it is reason- able to propose in this instance that the con- sideration of temperamental probability may be as valid as connoisseurship of style in solv- ing the attribution problem.
And the Susanna problem is not an isolated one. Women artists in history are now being rediscovered in increasing numbers, and be- cause their artistic identities have so often
ARTEMISIA AND SUSANNA
been subsumed under the names of their fa- thers and husbands, it is important to have reliable bases for distinguishing the women's work. Stylistic considerations are often of limited value since, as we have seen with Ar- temisia and Orazio, the pupil was usually an eager disciple in the master's style. Yet if Morelli's hypothesis may be applied here, the artist functioning on an unconscious level be- trays personal traits-traits in this case hap- pily more interesting than Morellian earlobes and fingernails-that offer rich evidence for discovering his or her identity. This is not to insist that all art by women bears some inevi- table stamp of femininity; women have been as talented as men in learning the common denominators of style and expression in spe- cific cultures. It is, however, to suggest that the definitive assignment of sex roles in histo- ry has created fundamental differences be- tween the sexes in their perception, experi- ence and expectations of the world, differences that cannot help but have been
19
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18. Simone Cantarini, Susanna and the Elders, 1640-42. Bologna, Pioacoteca (Frick Art Reference Libr~ry).
19. Anonymous artist, Susanna and the Elders, 17th century. Rome, Palazzo Corsini (Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale).
carried over into the creative process, where they have sometimes left their tracks. We need not decide whether sex-role differenti- ation has been a good thing, or whether art has been the richer or poorer for it, to ob- serve that the sow's ear of sexism has given us at least one silk purse: an art historical tool for distinguishing between male and female artistic identities.
These considerations apply in the case of another Susanna and the Elders that has been connected with the Gentileschi. A picture in the collection of the Marquess of Exeter, at Burghley House [20], was formerly exhibited as a work of Orazio and is presently ascribed to Artemisia.'" No scholar has vigorously de- fended the Artemisia attribution; Bissell and Harris both merely consider it "possible," with Harris suggesting a date in the 1620s."' If Artemisia were the artist, the concreteness of detail, the firmness of contour and the large scale of figures in relation to format would indeed mandate a dating in the 1620s or early
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20. Anonymous artist, Susanna and the Elders, 17th century. Burghley House, Collection of the Marquess of Exeter (Courtauld Institute).
1630s, since Artemisia's later paintings of the l640s differ appreciably in style from the Burghley House picture, offering smaller, more fluidly painted, and less solid figures. Yet this English Susanna is totally inconsis- tent with Artemisia's treatment of female characters in the earlier period. The work shows no interpretative continuity with the Schilnborn picture, but reverts instead to the Carracci and Domenichino prototypes, rein- troducing a seductive, Venus pudica pose and upturned eyes, and an environment swelling with Cupids and spurting fountains. It is in- conceivable that the Burghley House Susan- na, as an Artemisia Gentileschi, could be con- temporary with the heroic and anti-romantic Judith and Holofernes in Detroit. Other typo- logical differences, such as the broad noses of the three characters in this picture that con- trast markedly with Artemisia's preferred narrow, pointed nose type, merely serve to confirm one's instinctive reaction to reject
MARY D. GARRARD
this attribution because its expressive charac- ter would have been alien to the young Arte- misia. But while we should also reject Orazio as the artist on similar formal grounds-the faces and the female anatomy, in particular, do not correspond to his usual types-it would be difficult to assert with the same confidence as with Artemisia that the nature of expression is sharply out of character for the artist.
The simple fact that Artemisia Gentileschi was female is sufficient to explain her unique- ly sympathetic treatment of the Susanna theme. Yet one important event in Artemis- ia's personal history provides a parallel be- tween art and life that is too extraordinary to be passed over. In the spring of 1611 Arte- misia was allegedly raped by Agostino Tassi, Orazio's colleague whom Orazio had hired to teach Artemisia perspective. Orazio brought suit, and after a trial that lasted five months, Tassi, who had earlier been convicted of ar-
to ARTEMISIA AND SUSANNA
ranging his wife's murder, was sentenced to eight months in prison. He was subsequently acquitted, while Artemisia, whose testimony was put to the test of torture by thumbscrew, acquired a reputation as a licentious woman that has persisted to this day. Not only does the Susanna theme correspond to the real in- cident in its components of sexual assault, public trial, conflicting testimony and punish- ment, but this particular picture corresponds as well in its emphasis upon the girl's person- al anguish, and in certain telling details.
In no other version of the subject known to me are the Elders shown whispering to one another. The motif heightens the conspirato- rial character of their act, and suggests allu- sively the whispering campaign that was the Elders' specific threat, to ruin Susanna's repu- tation through slander. Artemisia's reputation figured prominently in her rape experience, a fact attested by Orazio's speedy arrangement of her marriage to a Florentine shortly after the trial to spare her the glare of publicity in Rome,35 Artemisia, moreover, like Susanna, had two assailants. Orazio mentioned in the proceedings of the trial that Tassi had an ac- complice, a certain Cosimo Quorli, who joined him in the rape; Orazio's statement was corroborated by Tutia, Artemisia's guardian, who independently implicated Quorli in the aflair." With exact biographic correspondences such as these, one is tempt- ed to interpret as an echo of personal experi- ence the peculiarly concrete Elder on the left [14}, whose depiction as a thick-haired young- er man is, as far as I can determine, complete- ly unique in Susanna pictures.
The most logical explanation for the un- usual iconographic character of the Schon- born Susanna is that it reflects the real situa- tion in which the young Artemisia found herself. Yet the date, now authenticated, clearly reads 1610, while the rape occurred a few days after Easter, 1611."' But can the manifest connections between the painting and Artemisia's experience really be coinci-
163
dental? In order to understand what hap- pened, we must look more closely at the cir- cumstances surrounding the rape, an event which has remained controversial despite the fact that Tassi was convicted of the crime.
The truth of Orazio's testimony at the trial has consistently been doubted by the schol- ars, predominantly male, who have touched on the subject of Artemisia's rape. For them, her innocence is compromised by the fact that while Orazio claimed at the trial that she was a minor when the rape occurred, she was actually seventeen at the time; and they also see as contradietory and incriminating his claim that she had been raped "many, many times."38 A fuller consideration of rape re- minds us, however, that sexual coercion can take a range of forms. Artemisia was very clear in her own trial testimony about her ex- perience and her subsequent expectations. She alleged that Tassi had planned to seduce her, but instead took an opportunity when she was painting alone to assault her sexually, an assault she resisted vigorously, to the point of wounding him."" After the rape, Tassi promised to marry her to quiet her. For that reason, she said, she considered herself subse- quently to be his wife, but when he didn't keep his word, she revealed the incident to her father, who then filed charges against Tassi. That marriage was the expected out- come is further illustrated in Artemisia's gal- lows-humor outburst at Tassi when she was tortured with thumbscrews: "This is the ring you give me, and these the promisesJ"40
Implicit in Artemisia's admission that she thought of herself as Tassi's wife following the rape is the probability that she continued to have sexual relations with him, but the re- ality of this experience must be understood in the context of law and custom. In seven- teenth-century Italy, as in biblical times, and in Sicily even today, a raped woman was con- sidered damaged property, spoiled for mar- riage to anyone other than her violator.'! Hence there was strong social pressure for
164
the rapist to marry her. After being raped, Artemisia's best chance for salvaging her honor would have been to go along with the sexual demands of the rapist, since that would have been her only leverage for get- ting him to marry her. Orazio's accusation, that Tassi raped her many times, was perhaps not far off the mark.
Tassi's gambit for escaping his obligation was to cloud the issue of who had deflowered Artemisia. His erstwhile friend G. B. Stiattesi testified on March 24 that while Tassi loved Artemisia, he could not marry her because Cosima Quorli had already taken advantage of her." Five days after that, Tassi accused Stiattesi of having raped her himself, then added two days later that a Modenese painter Gironimo had raped her, and that he (Tassi) had helped to beat him up.'" All of this "evi- dence" is too patently self-serving to the cause of the accused Tassi to be taken seri- ously, yet it exposes the underlying issue in the trial, which was to determine whether or not Tassi was personally guilty of having damaged the legal property of Orazio Gen- tileschi. Orazio himself made this explicit in his initial appeal, describing the rape as an ugly act which brought grave and enormous damage to-none other than himself, the Hpovero oratore."44
Artemisia's personal sexual feelings were no more relevant to these strictly legal pro- ceedings than were Susanna's toward the El- ders, yet historians have dealt with Artemisia in the same way that Susanna was treated by artists and theologians: she has been the butt of one long historical dirty joke. R. Ward Bis- sell and Richard Spear, scholars who have written perceptively and objectively about Artemisia's life, nevertheless have each in- serted a note of irrelevant skepticism by put- ting the word "rape" in quotation marks!' In his popularized Lives of the Painters, John Canaday speaks of the "unsavory-or savory, as you wish-lawsuit," and, hinting broadly that Artemisia's experience with Tassi may
MARY D. GARRARD
not have been "introductory," offers the gra- tuitous information that "she demonstrated until her death ... an enduring enthusiasm for the art of love that paralleled her very great talent as a painter."" Although Arte- misia's reputation as a sexual libertine flour- ished in the eighteenth century, when she was described by an English commentator as "famous all over Europe for her amours as for her painting,"" this legend appears to have been based upon little other than Tassi's self- protective charge of her promiscuity and the scandal of the trial.'" Wittkower caught the bitter irony of the fact that Tassi, whose "es- capades" included "rape, incest, sodomy, le- chery, and possibly homicide," was remem- bered by biographers as a competent painter liked for his good humor and wit, who even- tuall y even made up with his old friend Ora- zio Gentileschi.49 Yet Wittkower parallels this observation with the extraordinary de- scription of Artemisia as Ha lascivious and precocious girl," levying once again upon Ar- temisia the undeserved defamation of charac- ter that Tassi undeservingly escaped. If twen- tieth-century scholars can unthinkingly perpetuate such chauvinist attitudes, one can only imagine what Artemisia's male contem- poraries had to say. Orazio may have re- deemed her honor through the arranged mar- riage, but he could not protect her ultimate reputation from the undying masculine as- sumption that, if a woman is raped, she must have asked for it.
Looked at from this perspective, the paint- ing of Susanna and the Elders may literally document Artemisia's innocence and honest testimony in the trial. Susanna, like Arte- misia, endured sexual persecution at the hands of two men for the sake of preserving her respectability. As it turned out, Artemis- ia's protestation of innocence, like Susanna's, was not accepted at face value, and it took a trial to establish that she had indeed been as- saulted. And while each woman was eventu- ally vindicated, both were permanently stig-
i
~ /"f'
. . >1 " ~~
ARTEMISIA AND SUSANNA
matized as primarily sexual creatures as a result of sexual acts imposed upon them by others. Artemisia's choice of the Susanna theme and her unorthodox treatment of it formed a perfect vehicle for the expression of the sexual victim's point of view, even though she may well have carried out such a personal statement on a deeply unconscious level.
But how are we to account for the discre- pancy between the date on the painting, 1610, and the date of the rape, 1611? One possible explanation is that the picture was painted shortly after the rape, but falsely inscribed with the date 1610, a decision that would undoubted- ly have been that of Orazio, for the dual pur- pose of establishing his daughter's early compe- tence as a painter-which he is known to have wanted to do '"-and of concealing the direct and potentially embarrassing relation between the picture's content and the artist's personal trauma. Such a purpose would have been served by the conspicuous addition of the earli- er date beneath Artemisia's name. Moreover, if Orazio were willing to falsify her age at the trial, one presumes he would not have hesitated to falsify a date on a painting.
A more likely solution, however, is one that does not call for the hypothesis of a de- ception. Artemisia may well have experi- enced sexual harassment for some time be- fore the rape actually occurred. She suggests as much in her trial testimony, in which she describes the eflorts of Tassi to seduce her." Tassi, who had come to Rome in 1610, and whose friendship with Orazio must have de- veloped in that year," was a frequent visitor to the Gentileschi household. According to Artemisia's testimony, Tassi and his friend Cosima Quorli pressured her for sexual fa- vors with the taunt that she had already given them to a household servant. Although Artemisia fixed the period of Tassi's atten- lions to her as shortly before the rape itself- that is, in the spring of 1611-it is by no means certain from the trial evidence exactly
165
when Tassi's acquaintance with Artemisia began. Moreover, the innuendoes about her promiscuity made by Tassi and Quor Ii, and her defensive responses to them, suggest that the question of her sexual availability had been of interest to several men in her imme- diate environment, perhaps for a long while.
What the painting gives us then is a reflec- tion, not of the rape itself, but rather of how the young woman artist felt about her own sexual vulnerability in the year 1610. It is sig- nificant that the Susanna does not express the violence of rape, but the intimidating pres- sure of the threat of rape. Artemisia's re- sponse to the rape itself is expressed in the dark and bloody Judith Decapitating Holo- femes in the Uflizi [21] painted shortly after her marriage and move to Florence, in which-as even the most conservative writers have realized-Judith's decapitation of Halo- femes appears to provide a pictorial equiv- alent for the punishment of Agostino Tassi. Once we acknowledge, as we must, that Arte- misia Gentileschi's early pictures are vehicles of personal expression to an extraordinary de- gree, we can trace the progress of her experi- ence, first as the victim of sexual intimida- tion, and then of rape-two phases of a continuous sequence that find their pictorial counterparts in the Susanna and the Uflizi Ju- dith respectively.
Artemisia's continuing personal interest in the Susanna theme is measured by the fact that, the Burghley House picture aside, there are four other recorded paintings of Susanna and the Elders by her.'" One of these, painted the year before the artist died, is likely to have been her last picture," and thus the sub- ject effectively brackets her entire career. The late dates of these paintings suggest that none is likely to have equaled the Schon born picture in originality and in the intensity of personal expression. Rather, Artemisia's in~ cipient social challenge represented in her earliest known picture was developed in the sequence of Judiths of the late teens and
166
21. Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Decapitating Holofernes, ca. 1614-20. Florence, Uffizi (Alinari).
twenties. Ironically, Artemisia's judiths are routinely characterized as "castrating" and "violent," while the early Susanna has, we may assume from critical silence, been re- garded as expressively benign. Writers and lecturers who respond with acute sensitivity to a scene in which violence is done to men, have passed over a picture that gives full ex- pression to an equivalent female fear, the menace of rape, an event that is no less men- acing because the act is not shown." Seen metaphorically, Artemisia's Susanna and the
MARY D. GARRARD
Elders differs significantly from her judiths, however, in offering not one woman's fantasy revenge, but a sober expression of the broader situation which gives rise to that ex- treme solution: the reality of women's con- fined and vulnerable position in a society whose rules are made by men.
Manifestly, a seventeen-year-old girl brought up in an unquestioned patriarchal world could not have consciously intended all this. But as all great artists are those who can convert unconscious emotions into palpable
ARTEMISIA AND SUSANNA
form without intervention of the socialized brain-and we accept this in a Michelangelo, a Rembrandt or a Goya as the explanation for their articulation of more deeply human val- ues than ,those espoused by the cultures in which they funCtioned-it is more than possi- ble that the young Artemisia Gentileschi, the
167
victim of a traumatic sexual experience and the later-to-be defiant advocate of female ca- pability, should have drawn subconsciously from the wellspring of her female identity and experience to humanize the treatment of a biblical theme that men had distorted al- most beyond recognition.
NOTES
Author's note: I am grateful to the American Asso- ciation of University Women Educational Founda- tion for a fellowship awarded me in 1978-79, which made it possible for me to write this essay during that academic year. Special thanks are also due to Norma Braude, whose incisive suggestions helped to strengthen this study in many ways.
1. See Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Noch- lin, Women Artists: 15)0-1950, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York, 1976. The ex- hibition opened in Los Angeles, December 1976, and traveled to Austin, Texas; Pittsburgh; and Brooklyn.
2. The painting has been in the family collec- tion of Dr. Karl Craf von Schon born, Pommersfel- den, Schloss Weissenstein, at least since the early eighteenth century. A reference of 1715 in the family archive mentions the painting of Susanna as a work of Orazio Centileschi. I am grateful to Dr. Schonborn for generously supplying information on the picture. The Susanna and the Elders mea- sures 67 by 47% inches and is painted in oil on canvas.
3. R. Longhi, "Ultimi studi sui Caravaggio e la sua cerchia," Proporzioni, I (1943), p. 47, n. 38. See also A. Emiliani, "Orazio Centileschi: nuove pro- paste per il viaggio marchigiano," Paragone, 9, no. 102 (1958), p. 42.
4. R. Ward Bissell, "Artemisia Centileschi-A New Documented Chronology," The Art Bulletin, 50, June 1968, pp. I 53fl., especially p. 157.
5. H. Voss, Die Malerei des Barock in Rom, Berlin, 1925, p. 463.
6. Harris and Nochlin, p. 120. 7. The conservator pointed out that the white
highlights visible on the left portion of the signa-
ture fade as the inscription passes into the shadow cast by Susanna's right leg, a carefully thought-out detail that appears to have been part of the origi- nal conception. Some damages in this passage have been repaired by restorers, but these are easily dis- tinguished from the original pigment. Mrs. Sack confirmed that surface cracks run thraugh the let- tering, and this can be seen indistinctly in Figure 2. In her opinion, the picture is in unusually good condition, with much of the freshness of the origi- nal color still preserved.
8. In a deposition of 1612, Orazio declared that Artemisia had been painting for three years. See Bissell, p. 154. By this, Orazio probably meant (as Norma Broud~ suggested to me) that she had been painting independently for three years, since her apprenticeship would undoubtedly have begun be- fore the age of sixteen.
9. A. MOlr, The Italian Followers of Caravaggio, Cambridge, Mass., 1967, Vol. I, p. 100.
10. Longhi, p. 47, no. 38. Bissell, in his doctoral dissertation (The Baroque Painter Orazio Gen- tileschi: His Career in Italy, University of Michi- gan, 1966, Vol. II, p. 262), aptly questions why Orazio would have wanted the name of his young daughter on one of his own paintings.
II. The Susanna in the Doria-Pamphilj Callery is thought to be by Domenichino by Richard Spear (Caravagglo and His Followers, Cleveland, 1967, p. 54) and by Ann Harris (Harris and Noch- lin, p. 120). D. Posner, Annibale Carracci: A Study in the Reform of italian Painting Around 1590, London, 1971, Vol. II, nos. 57 and iliA, has pub- lished the painting as possibly by Lanfranco, after Annibale's lost original. For literature on Anni- bale's print of ca. 1590, see D. Bohlin, Prints and Related Drawings by the Carracci Family, Nation-
168
al Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1979, p. 444. 12. Most versions of the Susanna theme date
from this period, with only occasional examples from before the sixteenth century and after the eighteenth. See L. Reau, L'iconographie de l'art chietien, Paris, 1957, Vol. II, pp. 393f1., and A. Pigler, Bamckthemen, Budapest, 1956, Vol. I, pp. 218fl.
13, Speaking of Rubens's several depictions of the Susanna theme, Rooses remarks: "11 est permis de croife que, pour lui, Ie charme du sujet n'etait pas taot la chastete de l'hero'ine biblique que l'oc- casion de montrer une belle femme nue, deux au- dacieux qui ten tent une enterprise galante et les emotions fort diverses qui en resultent pour cha- cun des personnages"-M. Rooses, L 'Oeuvre de P. P. Rubens, Antwerp, 1886, Vol. I, p. 171.
14. In her recent study of rape, Susan Brown- miller offers a graphic parallel from military histo~ ry. Examining rape as an acceptable corollary of wartime conquest, she observes that in a situation in which killing is viewed as "heroic behavior sanctioned by one's government or cause," other forms of violence acquire part of that heroic lus- ter-S. Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, New York, 1975, pp. 31f!.
15. S. B. Pomeroy, in Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity, New York, 1975, p. 12, comments upon the "pas- sivity of the woman [who] never enticed or se- duced the god but was instead the victim of his spontaneous lust," in the "endless catalogue of rape in Greek myth."
16. M. C. Leach, "Rubens' Susanna and the El- ders in Munich and Some Early Copies," Print Re- view, 5 (1976), pp. 120-27, especially p. 125. Use- ful further bibliography on the Susanna theme is given by Leach, p. 121, n. 8. Despite its theologi- cal popUlarity, the Susanna theme was only rarely treated in medieval art; see K. Ktinstle, Ikonogra- phie der Christlichen Kunst, Freiburg-im-Breis- gau, 1928, Vol. I, pp. 302-03, and Reau, L'icono- graph ie, Vol. II, p. 395, for a few examples.
17. Leach, p. 125. 18. The story of Susanna and the Elders is be-
lieved by some scholars to have been based upon a legend that symbolized a struggle between the Pharisees and Saducees over laws concerning false accusation and false testimony, the Pharisees hav~ ing instituted as reforms over laxer Saducee prac-
MARY D. GARRARD
tices the thorough examination of witnesses and the severe punishment of false witnesses. See W. O. E. Oesterley, The Books of the Apocrypha, London, 1915, pp. 391f!. An alternative view is represented by scholars who argued that the Su- sanna story derives from a combination of folklore and myth. See P. F. Casey, The Susanna Theme in German Literature, Bonn, 1976, pp. 2lfl. Schol- ars generally agree that the story was written in Hebrew during the reign of Alexander Jannaells (102-75 B.C.). The story was appended to the Book of Daniel, although the two Daniels are historical- ly unrelated, and acquired its present position as chapter 13 in that book in 1547, as decreed by the Council of Trent.
19. See Phyllis Bird, "Images of Women in the Old Testament," in Religion and Sexism, ed. by Rosemary R. Ruether, New York, 1974, pp. 48ff., especially p. 51.
20. Reau, L'iconographie, vol. II, pp. 396-98, lists as many Susannas at the Bath as he does Ston- ings or Judgments combined; Pigler, Barockthe- men, pp. 218ft, gives nearly eight times as many Susannas at the Bath as Judgments, and lists no Stonings.
21. A study in the Louvre connects Rem- brandt's Be,lin Susanna with a painting of 1614 by Pieter Lastman that is also in the Dahlem Muse- um (see H. Gerson, Rembrandt Paintings, Amster- dam, 1968, iIIus. p. 94 and fig. a, p. 327), but Rem- brandt deviates from Lastman in repeating the Medici Venus pose for Susanna that he used in his 1637 Susanna in The Hague.
22_ The connection between Rubens's Susanna figure and the famous antique model has been ob- served by a number of writers; see Leach, p. 123, n. 14. Leach himself attempts to distinguish the expressive character of Rubens's Susanna in the Munich painting from that seen in several copies of the picture by other artists, suggesting that the copyists mistakenly converted a "carefully selected gesture of modesty" into a "coy and inviting ges~ ture." In my view, Leach attaches too much im- portance to an inconspicuous detail added by the copyists, Susanna's grasping of a lock of her hair (surely an Aphrodite Anadyomene reference with its bath-sea-fertility associations, and not a Vani- tas, as Leach suggests), and too little importance to the overtly seductive facial expression in Rubens's original Susanna-an expression that surpasses the
ARTEMISIA AND SUSANNA
copies in coyness (not fear), and countermands whatever modesty the "closed-composition" pose may convey.
23. See C. Robert, Die Antike Sarcophagreliefs im auitrage, des kaiserlich deutschen archaeologis- chen Instiluts, Berlin, 1890-1919, Vol. II, pp. 155, 157, and 171. Raphael drew a number of the fig- ures seen in the Loggia frescoes from this sar- cophagus, as Robert notes. Titian also used poses taken from the Orestes sarcophagus, e.g., the fig- ure of Bacchus in the London Bacchus and Ariadne, which is based upon Orestes, and the fig- ure of Goliath in the S. M. della Salute David and Goliath, which is based upon the fallen Aegisthus. See O. Brendel, "Borrowings from Ancient Art in Titian," The Art Bulletin, 37 (1955), p. 118 and n. 19, and p. 121. The defensive gesture of the nurse also appears in Sebastiana del Piornbo's Raising of Lazarus (National Gallery, London), in the Giulio/ Raphael Repulse of Attila in the Vatican Sala di Costantino, and in the eighteenth century in Fuse- Ii's Oedipus Curses his Son Polynices (Paul Mellon Collection).
24. See C. de Tolnay, Michelangelo, Princeton, N.j., 1945, Vol. II, p. 134, and fig. 304, which illus- trates the Orestes sarcophagus in reverse. Tolnay credits Walther Horn for first observing the con- nection between Adam's gesture and the Orestes sarcophagus.
25. It is unlikely that the specific subject of the Orestes sarcophagus was known in either Miche- langelo's or Artemisia's time, inasmuch as two learned early writers betrayed their own ignorance of the theme in their descriptions of the sarco- phagi. In his Naples diary, Cassiano dal Pozzo identified a sarcophagus in the house of the Duke of Bracciano as having the same theme as the Vatican and Ciustiniani sarcophagi with the note that a certain painter, Micheli, who worked for the duke had some information about what its subject might be (T. Schreiber, ed., Unedirte romische Fundberichte aus italienischen Archiven und Bib- liotheken, Leipzig, 1885, Vol. Ill, p. 37, no. 54). And when the Ciustiniani sarcophagus was pub- lished in P. S. Bartoli's Adrrp'randa Romanorum antiquitatum of 1693, Bellori, who wrote the notes that accompanied the engravings, resorted to a lit- eral description of the action without identifying the characters, although nearly every other monu- ment in the album is named by subject. Montfau-
169
con, in the eighteenth century, supposed that the relief commemorated one of the grandest deeds of antiquity, but admitted he did not know which one. It was apparently Winckelmann who first identified the subject of these celebrated sarco- phagi as the story of Orestes avenging his father's death by slaying his mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus (J, J. Winckelmann, Monuments in edits de I'antiquite, Paris, 1809, Vol. III, pp. 2611.; see also Robert, Vol. II, p. 130).
But if the early writers could not pinpoint the relief's theme, some at least understood the action generally to involve punishment. This is made ex- plicit in a description of the Giustiniani sarcopha- gus written in 1550 by Fabricius, who names it as "this image in which some figures are pun- ished .. ,." ("servilium suppliciorum (simulachra) in qui bus alii capite plectuntur, aliis brachium saxo impositum alio saxo frangitur ... ," G. Fabri- cius, Roma, 1550, p. 177, in j. Lipsius, Roma illus- trata sive Antiquitatum romanarum breviarium, Amsterdam, 1689).
26. It may suffice to recall the intricate interplay of moral forces in Aeschylus' Oresteia through one critic's observation that while Orestes in the Od- yssey kills his father's assassins "without a qualm of conscience" and is "completely successful and completely in the- right," Aeschylus' Orestes is "right and wrong, his father's avenger and a guilty matricide and more, the vortex where the Furies and the gods converge with fresh intensity and ef- fect"-W. B. Stanford, intra., Aeschylus: The Oresteia, trans. by R. Fagles, London, 1976, p. 42.
27. Bissell, Orazio Gentileschi, Vol. II, pp. 77ff., dates this David in the period between 1605-10. Moir, p. 70, places the picture in the second dec- ade.
28. The pose assumed by Orazio's contempla- tive Davids is a familiar one in antique art, seen in depictions of the contest between Poseidon and Athena (e.g" the cameo in Naples upon which one of the fifteenth-century relief tondos in the Medici Palace cortile is based; see Il tesoro di Lorenzo 11 Magnifico, eds. N. Dacos, A. Giuliano, and U. Pannuti, Florence, 1973, Vol I, pI. ix, fig. 81, and cat. 6), and seen also in the Odysseus Before Te- lemachus in the Villa Albani; see Winckelmann, Monuments inedits de l'antiquite, Paris, 1809, Vol. 1Il, no. 157.
29, In a paper delivered in a recent symposium,
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The Carracci and Italian Art around 1600, Nation- al Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., April 7, 1979, Carl Goldstein observed that the use of a female studio model was rare before the nine- teenth century, as a result of the prevalent attitude that women had uglier bodies than men. Occasion- al specific mention of female models in contempo- rary descriptions of seventeenth-century Roman art academies indicates that these were unusual practices; see N. Pevsner, Academies of Art, Past and Present, Cambridge, Engl., 1940, pp. 73 and 77.
30. The Det,oit Judith dates from the mid· 1620s. See Bissell, Orazio Centileschl; Vol. II, pp. 95ff. and 102ff., for a clarifying discussion of the several versions of the Judith theme by Orazio and Artemisia. See also Bissell's recent monograph, Orazio Gentileschi and the Poetic Tradition in Caravaggesque Fainting, University Park, Pa., 1981, pp. 153-56.
31. See the exhibition catalogue compiled by C. Gnudi, Nuove Acquisizioni per i Musei della Stato, 1966-71, Palazzo dell'Archiginnasio, Bolo- gna, Sept. 28-0ct. 24, 1971, pp. 62-63. In his cata· logue entry, Andrea Emiliani suggests these dates for the painting, connecting it with Cantarini's Roman journey. Emiliani considers Cantarini's Su- sanna to 'be a development of an idea first stated by the artist in a drawing of Ariadne (Brera, inv. 509). While I have not seen this drawing, Emi- liani's statement that it shows the influence of An- nibale Carracci's print of 1592 suggests that Ariadne's pose may not be especially similar to that of Cantarini's Susanna.
32. Although a thorough iconographic study of Artemisia's heroic female characters remains to be made, Ann Sutherland Harris has briefly discussed the artist's proto-feminist statements and has em- phasized her preference for subjects with heroines; see Harris and Nochlin, pp. ]]811. See also M. D. Carrard, "Artemisia Gentileschi's Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting," The Art Bulletin, 62, March 1980, pp. 97-112.
33. See Bissell, p. 167. 34. Harris and Nochlin, p. 121, n. 18; Harris sees
the influence of Guercino in the background and the color scheme.
35. See Bissell, p. 154, for a fuller account of Artemisia's marriage to Pietro Antonio di Vin- cenzo Stiattesi, who may, as Moir suggests (p. 99,
MARY D. GARRARD
n. 101), have been related to the G. B. Stiattesi who testified on Tassi's behalf at the trial.
36. A. Bertolotti, "Agostino Tasso; suoi scolari e compagni pittori in Roma," Giarnale di Erudi- zione Artistica, V. fasc. VII and VIII, July-August 1876, p. 200. Bertolotti's article contains a reduced transcription of the trial proceedings that are pre- served in the Archivio di Stato, Rome. See Bissell, p. 153, no. 2, and p. 155.
37. Bissell, p. 154. In 1611, Easter fell on April 3.
38. See, for example, Bissell, p. 153, and also T. Pugliatti, Agostino Tassi ira canformismo e li- berta, Rome, 1977, pp. 24 and 167.
39. Bertolotti, p. 201. 40. Bertolotti, p. 195, quoting from Passeri's bi-
ography of Tassi. 41. I am grateful to Malcolm Campbell for call-
ing to my attention the modern vestiges of older practices concerning rape. On the traditions under which rape was seen as an offense against proper- ty, see in particular P. Bird, "Images of Women in the Old Testament," in Religion and Sexism, R. R. Reuther, ed., New York, 1974, pp. 51-52; and L. M. C. Clark and D. J. Lewis, Rape: the Price of Coercive Sexuality, Toronto, 1977, pp. 11511.
42. Bertolotti, p. 202. See also Moir, p. 99, n. 101.
43. Bertolotti, p. 203. See also R. Wittkower, Born Under Saturn, New York, 1963, p. 163.
44. Bertolotti, p. 20 I. 45. Bissell, p. 153; Spear, p. 96. 46. J. Canaday, The Lives of the Painters, Lon-
don, 1969, Vol. II, pp. 364 and 366. 47. From an anonymous note on Artemisia add-
ed to the English edition of Roger de Piles's The Art of Painting, London, 1754, p. 376.
48. Moir, Vol. I, p. 100, observes that these were the chief factors that conditioned reports of her replltation, mentioning in addition two scarce- ly damning bits of information: one, that she may have had some relationship with one of her room- ers, and, two, that she had a reputation for writing good love letters. That Artemisia was defined in sexual terms even when not specifically accused of promiscuity is also shown in Baldinucci's anecdote concerning the portrait painted of her by C. F. Romanelli and the subsequent jealousy of his wife (F. Baldinucci, Delle Notizie de' Professon' del Disegno, Florence, 1772, Vol. XII, pp. 9-13). Em-
1 I
ARTEMISIA AND SUSANNA
phasis upon the artist's love life was sustained in a fictional romance about her, Artemisia, by Lucia Longhi Lopresti (pseud. Anna Banti), Florence, 1947.
49. Wittk9wer, p. 164. 50. Evidence that Orazio was anxious to publi-
cize his daughter's precociousness is given by Bis- sell, p. 154. In any event, the picture would not have been painted later than 1614, since by then Artemisia was settled in Florence and consistently signed pictures with her Tuscan family name, Lomi. Also, the light and color arrangement of the Susanna, with its somewhat Venetian combination of blue, violet, red and olive green, is close to Ora- zio's color of the first decade, and differs markedly from the more intense chiaroscuro in the paintings
the early twenties. 51. Bertolotti, p. 201. The full text of the trial,
which has just been published, carne into my hands too late for me to be able to include sections of it here. See Artemisia GentiieschljAgostino Tassi: Attf di un processo per stupm, E. Menzio, ed., Milan, 1981.
52. T. Pugliatti, Agostino Tassi ira coniormismo e libertii, Rome, 1977, p. 19.
53. These include (I) a painting in England in collection of Charles I, mentioned in Van der
'''·hom'', inventory as being in Henrietta Maria's '.chanlber at Whitehall (Walpole Society, 37 [1960],
177); (2) a Susanna of the 1640s in the house of
171
Dott. Luigi Romeo, Baron of S. Luigi, Naples, said to have been a pendant to the Bathsheba in Co- lumbus, Ohio (see Bissell, p. 163, n. 82); (3) a signed Susanna in BrUnn, Czechoslovakia, a heav- ily damaged and overpainted work, whose design, however, is said to resemble that of the Schonborn Susanna (see Bissell, p. 164); and (4) a Susanna signed and dated 1652, known only from the cita- tions of Da Morrona and Lanzi that it was in the collection of Averardo de' Medici (see Bissell, p. 164). In addition to these, Longhi, L'Afte, 19 (1916), p. 299, attributed to Artemisia a Susanna in the Pinacoteca, Naples, that was previously as- cribed to Stanzioni, and more recently, to F. Guar- ino.
54. See note 53 above, item (4), and Bissell, p. 164.
55. Cf. Germaine Greer: "The fear of sexual as- sault is a special fear: its intensity in women can best be likened to the male fear of castration"-G. Greer, "Seduction Is a Four Letter Word," in L. C. Schultz, ed., Rape Vjctjmoiogy, Springfield, Ill., 1975, p. 376. See also Creer's sound treatment of Artemisia Gentileschi in general and her discus- sion of the Susanna in particular in The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Ther, Work, New York, 1979, especially pp. 191- 93. Greer's conclusions, published after this essay was written, accord with my own in several points.
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