Every artist paints himself.’ This well-known Renaissance motto somewhat rings true. During the fifteenth century, when individual creativity was valued highly, and mirrors first became widely available, artists often began to take themselves as their own muses. As well as hiding their self-portraits within paintings, they opened the doors of their studios to represent themselves, positioned before an easel, at work. As if caught in the act of art-making, the likes of Diego Velázquez and Rembrandt affirmed themselves as talented artistic geniuses.
But this is an obviously problematic saying of its time, too. Divisively constructing the idea that artists must be men, it ignores women entirely or, at best, relegates them to the prevailing notion of the passive female muse. Women have, therefore, just as zealously, if not more so, taken to self-portraiture to assert their identity as artists. Sofonisba Anguissola and Catharina van Hemessen are among those who have consciously portrayed themselves, paintbrush in hand, on the same terms as their male counterparts. However, none have advocated their creative status quite as defiantly as the celebrated Italian baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi. She too depicted herself as a painter at work, but more than that, she cunningly turned the tools of male artists against them.
In Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1638–39) Gentileschi, as the title indicates, uses allegory as her weapon of choice. An assured dark-haired woman, wearing a shimmering green dress and a brown apron, stands before a large bare canvas. With a palette in one hand and a paintbrush in the other, she leans in, ready to make the very first mark; in doing so, a gold chain falls away from her neck, its skull-like pendant suspended in mid-air. The pale-skinned brunette woman is without doubt an image of Gentileschi, who painted numerous self-portraits. But this figure, alive with symbolism, is also a personification of ‘Painting’.
Gentileschi’s representation of ‘Painting’ comes straight from the pages of Iconologia, a popular handbook of symbols written by the sixteenth-century iconographer Cesare Ripa. Arranged in alphabetical order, the arts and sciences, virtues and vices are personified in imaginative descriptions. ‘Painting’ is characterised by Ripa as ‘a beautiful woman, with full black hair, dishevelled, and twisted in various ways, with arched eyebrows that show imaginative thought, the mouth covered with a cloth tied behind her ears, with a chain of gold at her throat from which hangs a mask, and has written in front “imitation”’.
Gentileschi was by no means the only artist to have visualised Ripa’s personification of ‘Painting’, although her image stands in stark contrast to portrayals by her male counterparts. In François Boucher’s Allegory of Painting (1765) a young woman, reclining on a bed of clouds and surrounded by cherubs, reaches out to paint on a round canvas. In doing so, her pretty pastel-coloured dress falls away to reveal the soft bare skin of her shoulder. Not even looking at her painting – she turns her head sideways so that viewers can see her angelic face – it’s obvious that this woman is only posing for the sake of the picture. Following Ripa’s example, Boucher’s painting emphasises the idea that art, just like an attractive woman, should be observed as an object of beauty.
Gentileschi’s figure, on the other hand, is fully involved in the strenuous act of painting. She turns her body at an awkward angle, causing strands of dark hair to come loose, and there is even a glimmer of sweat on her forehead as she focuses her eyes intently on the canvas ahead. Gentileschi is quite clearly contesting the equation of art with the concept of a sensual young woman who exists purely to be looked upon. Instead, she claims agency for the female personification who, rendered in realistic terms, demands respect as an artist hard at work.
By pulling ‘Painting’ down from an idealistic pedestal, Gentileschi proves that art is both an intellectual and physical endeavour, and one in which she, a woman, is completely absorbed. The artwork’s serious atmosphere reflects the fact that Gentileschi would have encountered far more obstacles than her male contemporaries while pursuing a successful career of her own. In seventeenth-century Europe, female artists were deprived of formal education, denied access to art academies and even their movement was restricted. Gentileschi fought against such adversity, learning to read and write in her twenties, before becoming the first woman to be granted membership of the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence in 1616.
Nevertheless, Gentileschi recognised that she would always be at a disadvantage, as expressed perfectly in a letter to one of her patrons: ‘A woman’s name raises doubts until her work is seen.’ Experiencing such entrenched inequality in the patriarchal art world, Gentileschi refused to simply emulate the straightforward self-portraits of her male counterparts at work inside their studios. Instead, she needed an approach entirely of her own, with which she could define herself in distinct terms.
At this time, as renowned art historian Mary Garrard has pointed out, ‘the art of painting was symbolised by an allegorical female figure, and thus only a woman could identify herself with the personification’. Gentileschi has, therefore, manipulated the device of personification to subvert stereotypes from within: in Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting she has both identified as an assiduous painter while also elevating herself beyond the status of her fellow artists to the prestigious rank of ‘Painting’. ‘If you can’t join them, beat them’ is the distinct message of this work, in which Gentileschi exists on a higher plane.
Similarly, Gentileschi embodies another traditional allegorical image in her earlier portrait Clio, the Muse of History (1632). A statuesque young woman with brown hair, in the likeness of Gentileschi, wears a green velvet gown with rust-coloured sleeves. Standing within a shadowy space, she places one hand on her hip, while using the other to rest a trumpet on an open book. Gazing into the distance, her head, which she holds up high, has been illuminated by golden light, which catches a crown of laurel leaves and a luminous pearl earring dangling from one ear.
Once again, Gentileschi was referencing Ripa’s Iconologia, in which he stated that the Muse of History should be illustrated with a crown of laurels, a trumpet and an open book. In both paintings and sculptures from this period, Clio appears frequently in this majestic image. In Johannes Vermeer’s The Art of Painting (1666–68) a painter, most likely depicting the artist himself, is seated before an easel, paintbrush in hand. Posing for a portrait is a young woman who stands to the left of him, in the light of a window. Wearing a blue dress and a laurel wreath, holding a trumpet and carrying a book, she perfectly matches Ripa’s description of Clio.
There is of course, though, an obvious difference between Vermeer and Gentileschi’s treatment of the muse. While Vermeer has separated himself, the artist, from the muse who is inspiring him, Gentileschi has assumed the identity of Clio. There is a teasing manner to the way in which Gentileschi appropriates allegory; it’s as if she is telling an art-world in-joke to undermine the gendered mythology of artistic achievement as inherently male. While her male contemporaries portrayed themselves in self-portraits as distinct from the feminine allegories of ‘Painting’ or the muses who provided inspiration, Gentileschi could be both artist and muse.
Gentileschi is also challenging another idea perpetuated by male artists – that the muse is passive. In contrast to Vermeer’s model, Gentileschi sets the record straight, instead portraying Clio as an active heroine. Deriving from the Ancient Greek kleô, Clio’s name means ‘to proclaim’ or ‘to make famous’, and she was invoked by those who wished to retell factual accounts. Here she has written on a page of the book ‘Artemisia’ and the date of the artwork’s creation to bestow recognition in turn upon the painter. By associating herself with Clio, the Muse of History, Gentileschi proclaims herself an artist, and one who is rewriting, or rather repainting, history.
Gentileschi employed this manner of self-representation not only to make a bold statement on her identity as a professional female painter, but also as a means of attracting clients. As art historian and curator Letizia Treves has remarked, such paintings should be read as ‘a conscious act of self-promotion’. Gentileschi would have understood the appeal of her beauty to collectors and used her image – of an attractive female artist inspired by herself – to gain the attention of collectors, institutions and paying patrons who made her career viable.
A similar visual strategy has been employed by numerous other female artists, including early twentieth century Hungarian–Indian painter, Amrita Sher-Gil. In her Self-Portrait at Easel (c.1930), Sher-Gil makes it clear that she is aware of her beauty: with her dark hair and eyes, full lips and arched eyebrows, the artist stands at an easel, wrapped in a red cloak, staring outwards at both the viewer and a mirror, from which she can paint her striking reflection. Sher-Gil had painted this work during a five-year stay in Paris, where she moved to study at the renowned École Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Aware that she was regarded as an erotic and exotic ‘other’, she revelled in this status, wearing both Western clothing and sarees, and began to experiment with representations of the non-Western body in paintings, including herself.
Both Gentileschi and Sher-Gil are among those women artists, disadvantaged because of their sex, who at the same time used their femininity to their advantage. Rather than denying it, they played on stereotypical notions of the muse as a beautiful woman to be looked at. In canvases such as Self-Portrait as Tahitian (1934) Sher-Gil even portrayed herself as the topless muse of Gauguin, whose richly-coloured paintings of Tahitian girls and women she had recently seen. But whilst the male artist exploited his subjects – both in his art and sexually in real life – Sher-Gil has reclaimed herself; here she stands nude, imagined through her own lens, with her hair tied back in an unadorned manner and staring resolutely into the distance. Both Sher-Gil and Gentileschi could cleverly critique the commodification of femininity from within, and particularly in images of themselves as an artist, these two women demonstrated that they too were involved in the act of looking and making artworks, pointing to themselves as both object and subject.
As Gentileschi once wrote to a patron, ‘I will show Your Illustrious Lordship what a woman can do,’ and her own paintings were the best billboard for this. But there is, of course, far more at play in Gentileschi’s portraits than an advert for her professional talent; she was also drawing upon and expressing personal pain through paint. In 1611, at the age of seventeen, she was raped by the painter Agostino Tassi, who was a friend of her father, artist Orazio Gentileschi and had been entrusted to teach her in private. In the legal trial that followed, Gentileschi was tortured with ties around her fingers to determine if she was telling the truth. ‘It is true. It is true. It is true. It is true,’ she exclaimed and was eventually believed, winning the case.
In court it emerged that Tassi had previously engaged in an adulterous relationship with his sister-in-law, intended to murder his wife and was planning to steal some of Orazio’s paintings. Although he had now been convicted by the court and banished from Rome, the decision was subsequently overturned on the Pope’s instructions. Gentileschi, on the other hand, would face lifelong consequences. In much of Europe at this time, rape was considered a source of shame to the family of the victim – in essence, a crime against another man, the owner of the woman, rather than the woman herself. Moreover, if Gentileschi had not been a virgin at the time, under Roman law Tassi’s assault would not have been classified as rape. She was therefore quickly married off – to another painter, Pietro Stiattesi – and the couple moved to Florence.
But despite her new start, the impact of such sexual violence, as well as this notion that she was a ‘damaged object’, had a lasting impact upon Gentileschi, and is manifest in her work. In the year after her rape, she painted Judith Slaying Holofernes (c.1612–13) in a bold reimagining of the biblical Book of Judith, in which the Jewish heroine seduces the Assyrian general, Holofernes. However, having entered his tent, she has only one intention: to decapitate him before he carries out the destruction of her city, Bethulia.
Judith was a popular subject for Renaissance and baroque artists, who focused on her beauty; in many versions she appears topless or entirely naked, having already carried out the attack. In her characterisation by many male painters, Judith’s action loses some of its power – even this bloody attack becomes just a tableau, an after-the-act inspiration to be painted, often reduced to sexual imagery. However, in Gentileschi’s psychologically charged version, Judith fully clothed, in a blue dress and with her sleeves very much rolled up, is directly engaged in the bloody act of the beheading.
It’s clear from this canvas that Gentileschi was a follower of Caravaggio: her depiction echoes his 1598 version, in which intense chiaroscuro is used to dramatise the scene in heroic terms. In Caravaggio’s canvas, commissioned for a man, the heroine stands back, holding the sword in a gentle manner, apparently distancing herself from the act, with an almost sorrowful expression on her face. In contrast, Gentileschi’s Judith leans right in. Just like the figure of ‘Painting’, she is fully involved in the physical act, this time of killing a man, so much so that she needs the help of a maid to suppress Holofernes.
Around ten years later, Gentileschi painted this poignant scene again, including even more purposeful and powerful iconography. In Judith and Holofernes (1620–21), which belongs to the Uffizi gallery, the heroine now wears a spectacular golden yellow dress and a deeply symbolic bracelet – which features depictions of Artemis. In Greek mythology, she was the goddess of wild animals, the hunt and fertility; she was also granted eternal virginity, and gave grave punishment to men who attempted to dishonour her in any form. Through this emblem of ferocious femininity, Gentileschi clearly seems to be identifying with the Holofernes-slaying Judith.
The two versions of Judith Slaying Holofernes belong to a large group of paintings by Gentileschi which centre strong, self-motivated heroines from the Bible, history and mythology. Salome serves up the head of St John the Baptist, Jael is about to drive a tent peg through the head of a sleeping Sisera, and Lucretia, having been raped by Sextus Tarquinius, decides to commit suicide to protect her honour. Gentileschi used herself as the model for all these paintings, a fact she made no effort to disguise because she has dressed her cast in clothing of her own time. Given her personal experience of sexual violence, these artworks – in which women fight back and overcome men – can surely be read as a form of cathartic revenge portraiture.
By taking violent and decisive action on the canvas, Gentileschi gives the sense that she is reclaiming ownership of her own body, particularly following her rape. As she once exclaimed, ‘As long as I live, I will have control over my being.’ Many survivors of sexual assault feel that they have lost ownership of their bodies – as the main character in Louise O’Neill’s 2015 novel Asking for It concedes, ‘My body is not my own anymore.’ By depicting herself as these heroines, Gentileschi affirms her own strength as a survivor; acting as an emboldened agent in each self-representation, she is engaged in empowering acts of painting and writing to killing, all of which involve her body.
Gentileschi is one of the first artists who, having suffered sexual abuse, have turned to art to tell their story and recover their identity. During the 1970s and 1980s, numerous feminist artists began to address violence against women’s bodies, including their own. Nan Goldin photographed herself, bruised and battered, to share the damaging effects of her destructive relationship with a man. More recently, in 2014 Emma Sulkowicz, a student at Columbia University, carried a twin mattress around campus for nine months to protest and make visible the rape she had suffered by a fellow student. Titled Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) this piece of performance art made visible the serious but underdiscussed issue of rape culture in universities. Carrying the heavy mattress also symbolised Sulkowicz’s strength as a survivor – just as Gentileschi appears in her compelling artworks.
Becoming her own muse was an ultimate act of control for Gentileschi. By twisting the tools of tradition to identify with Clio, ‘Painting’, biblical protagonists and mythological heroines, she presented herself as both artist and subject, solidifying her concept of self and triumphantly affirming her identity to others. Through such self-possession, she wasn’t just asserting ownership of her own body, but speaking out against the male ownership of all female bodies too. Today, through her self-portraits, Gentileschi continues to exist on a higher and untouchable plane of existence, elevated to such status through her own resolve and hard work. As she once wrote, ‘The works shall speak for themselves’ – which they most certainly do, proclaiming her a survivor and an avenging, pioneering painter.