So we've just heard about some of the
amazing loans that are going to be coming to our 'Artemisia' exhibition here
at the National Gallery which opens on 4th of April so Letizia Treves, the
curator of the exhibition, is here to tell us a little bit more about some of
the works that are going to be in the show. So first of all: tell us why is this
show so amazing Letizia? - So the idea of the exhibition actually came about on the back of our acquiring the 'Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of
Alexandria' in 2018 so we've had about 16 months to put the show together but
there's never been an exhibition on Artemisia in the UK, which is surprising.
She even came here in the late 1630s and joined her father in London at the
court of Charles I but there have been a number of exhibitions around the
world on Artemisia but this is the very first time that we're gathering
some of her most famous works and also some newly discovered works, like our own
picture here, at the National Gallery. - So who exactly was Artemisia Gentileschi? - She was the most famous female painter of the 17th century, of the baroque. Her
father was a painter as well so she grew up in Rome, he trained her and then
she went on to have an independent career in Florence and went to Naples as
well and lived there for almost 25 years of her life. Her life spanned about, I
mean, she had a sort of 45 year career and, you know, worked in a number of
Italian cities. - So I think one of the key loans of the show is probably one of her
earliest paintings that she actually completed when she was a teenager which
is pretty amazing. - That's right. So the show will open with her first known signed and dated work which is a painting of 'Susanna and the Elders' and
it's dated 1610, so she's just 17 years old and she paints it and it is
absolutely astonishing. It's such a kind of mature painting both technically
but also from a kind of narrative interpretation point of view. It's a very
sensitive portrayal and I think you already see what a great storyteller she
is. I mean it's such a sophisticated picture that many believe it's actually
by her father even though the picture is signed and dated because at this time,
she is painting in her father's studio. So she's trained alongside her three
brothers but we know from a letter of 1612, just two years after this picture
was painted, that her father Orazio writes to someone in
Florence saying "My daughter's a fantastic painter. She's been painting
independently for three years and she has no equal" and you know, this picture's
really testament to that. I think what she brings to these subjects, and
we'll talk about it more in a moment, is she brings a very kind of individual and
very particular feminine, if you like, sensibility to these subjects because
she's not the only one painting 'Susanna and the Elders', a very popular Old
Testament subject, but she really puts herself in the shoes of her protagonist
so she imagines what it's like for Susannah to be leered on by these
elders while she's bathing in her garden and you can see by the twist of her body
in just how sort of traumatized she is and she really feels a kind of
physical threat and I think she really sort of gets under her skin you know, she
really gets under the skin of her protagonist. That's what makes her such a
powerful story teller. - So this is one of the earliest paintings that we're going to have in the exhibition and I think one of the particular highlights
is going to be the two versions of 'Judith and Holofernes' which was possibly
inspired, as some people might have suggested, by something very traumatic that
happened in her life? - That's right. So when Artemisia was in her father's house she's raped in 1611 by Agostino Tassi who's an artist who's collaborating with
her father at that time on a large sort of fresco decoration and he comes into
Orazio's house, where Artemisia lives and works, and rapes her there and this
is all recorded because all the documents relating to the trial that
follows still exist so it is really extraordinary that we have these
documents that describe not just what happened but also in Artemisia's own
words because you have the testimony of those at the trial including Artemisia
and Tassi. So, her 'Susanna and the Elders' is dated from 1610 before this event
takes place but you could imagine that this young girl has already experienced
some sort of harassment and she's already in quite a vulnerable position:
there are lots of people coming and going in Orazio's house, she's not
allowed out but there are plenty of people coming in and out so a lot has
been read into these leering old men in relation to the imminent assault that
she experiences. And the 'Judith beheading Holofernes' that exists in sort of two
variants, they're not exactly the same: one is in Naples and that one's slightly
earlier and that's thought to date from the very end of her time in in Rome and
just before she moves to Florence and then the one in the Uffizi, probably
from shortly after that, is almost certainly painted as sort of a showpiece to gain
patronage in Florence but it is so brutal. I mean, it is absolutely
astonishing that someone in paint can portray this horrible moment of a woman
beheading Holofernes. Now it's been shown plenty of times before and
Caravaggio of course paints it in a very violent way but his 'Judith' is totally
impassive. She's this very grand sort of heroine but Artemisia really portrays
the kind of nitty-gritty of this really grisly task and that's what I
find so fascinating about her: she really imagines what it's like for a woman to
have to overpower this huge bulk of a man, this general, and so she gets her
maidservant to help her. So the maidservant in the story, in the
Apocrypha, is standing outside keeping watch but in Artemisia's painting, she's
basically straddling Holofernes, pinning him down and Judith is really sort of
hacking his head off and there's arcs of blood spurting. I mean it's a
really unique...it's a really tough picture to look at but I find it so
interesting because it really embodies, I think, what Artemisia brings to
painting: this very different sort of sensibility to her stories. - So, after the trial she's married. She moves to Florence and it's really there she
starts to use her own image, almost, to promote herself. - That's right. I mean, I
think there's a certain sense of kind of practical issues so it's much
easier to just look at herself in a mirror and use her own face than it is to hire
models which was costly, it was expensive; there's a letter later in her life where
she complains about how expensive it is to hire good models, so she uses herself.
She was also famed for her beauty and so this is one of those pictures where
Artemisia assumes a sort of role or assumes a guise rather like in the
'Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria'. So here
it's a very literal self-portrait. We know there are portraits of Artemisia so
we really know what she looked like and this is very, very faithful to those so
she probably copied her own face from a mirror but then she's shown here playing
the lute. Now we don't know if she played the lute. She was certainly musical but
there is this very intriguing reference to a 'Señor Artemisia'
in 1615 taking part in a performance at the Medici Court where she was
apparently dressed as a gypsy and singing and dancing and I
think it's extremely plausible that this is a sort of reference to that, possibly
painted for the Medici because the picture is described in the 17th century
Medici inventory and so it's play-acting but it might also recall a
real-life event and here she is dressed in the sort of amazing costume with a
sash tied round her waist with this wonderful sort of cloth wound around her
head and she's actually got this beautiful little gold hoop earring
so it definitely looks like Artemisia but it's her also taking on a role but I think there's also a sense of almost self-promotion so a way
of marketing yourself and your paintings by using your own image and she sort of
play-acts and there's a lot of play acting in these self-portraits where she
assumes the guise of Saint Catherine or a lute player in the picture from Hartford,
which we're borrowing which is very closely related to our picture, and I
think this is in part, as i say, to kind of promote her own image rather like
Rembrandt does as well in the Netherlands. It's a very conscious act of
promoting herself. - And I think one of the really exciting things for me about the exhibition is we're not just going to get to see her paintings, we're going to get to
learn about Artemisia the woman through her own words. - That's right. I was very
keen...I mean obviously Artemisia is such a famous figure in art and some people may
know her work, some people may know her life story but not necessarily be that
familiar with her work and she has become a sort of feminist icon but I
was very keen to get under the kind of human side and
really have a kind of 'Artemisia more fully in the round' in this
exhibition and she is a very kind of empowering figure. She's
incredibly resilient, tenacious. I mean you hear it from her letters...In 2011
this extraordinary group of letters were found. They're very intimate letters
written by Artemisia to her lover Francesco Maria Maringhi who was a wealthy
administrator she met in Florence and of course these letters were never
really meant to be read by anyone except him but what they reveal is this very
sort of human side of Artemisia, a very vulnerable side at times and, I
think, for people to see her handwriting and to see her names written so legibly,
you know, it gives me goose bumps It makes her feel very, very
real. She's not just this sort of iconic figure. She was a real woman of flesh and
blood who felt...I mean one of the letters we're borrowing...she writes just after her
four-year-old son dies and it's scrawled, you can see her emotional
turmoil in the way it's very messily written and you know she talks about
just being kind of ripped apart by grief at the death of her son and you know
this sort of human element and this human side of Artemisia...also the
kind of jealousy towards her distant lover because she's, by this point, in
Rome and her lover is still in Florence, I think will really bring Artemisia to life for people. - And she spent 25 years of her life in Naples running her own workshop. What was so special about that city and what did that offer to her in her career? - So, after reaching new heights of fame in Rome
in the 1620s she moves briefly to Venice but then effectively settles in Naples
in 1630 and she stays there until the end of her life but she doesn't like it. I
mean within five or six years she's writing, complaining about the cost of living and violence. She was very keen to leave Naples and she's sending pictures all
over Europe to try and gain employment elsewhere but she does end up staying
there a very long time except for this brief trip to London but what Naples
gave her was a whole series of opportunities she hadn't had before then.
Firstly she paints on a very different scale: she's suddenly painting much larger
pictures and I think that's going to be very obvious in the exhibition just the
sheer scale of the pictures, the monumental canvases. Her very first
altarpiece is from 1630. It's a painting she paints as soon as she's arrived in
Naples and you have to remember, until that point, and she's already in her
thirties by this point, she's not painted anything that's on public display
anywhere in Florence or Rome so this is the first time she's painting with that
in mind. She's also working alongside other artists so she was very much
welcomed into the artistic community in Naples which was not an easy thing. Other artists like Guido Reni had been driven out of Naples, had been
effectively bullied out of Naples but she's clearly welcomed there and she
becomes part of the kind of artistic scene. So in some paintings she
contributes one or two canvases to a sort of cycle of paintings. In other cases like in this painting of Bathsheba...so this picture
shows David and Bathsheba. David's actually tiny: he's this very tiny figure
here alone on the balcony in the palace behind. So rather like Susanna, Bathsheba
is shown bathing and David spies her from afar and ends up seducing her and
she bears him a son and here this picture is by Artemisia but also in
collaboration with two other artists: with Viviano Codazzi for the
architecture and beyond and with Micco Spadaro probably for the landscape
and this is something that was entirely usual. The artist would collaborate with
other artists, everyone had their own sort of specialisms and so you might
work with an architectural painter and a landscape painter and it
shows just also how integrated Artemisia was in Naples and worked with other
artists on single commissions like this and I love this wonderful detail of the
of the basin here in the foreground. Your eye is really drawn to that and of
course Bathsheba like Susanna and these subjects
were often paired in 17th century collections. They were sort of really
seen as kind of erotic subjects or they could be painted in an erotic way
because they showed semi-naked women bathing but here Artemisia paints Bathsheba in a much more sensitive way. You can see, actually, her
nudity is concealed so you can see the white drape covers
her and her arms are actually concealing her breasts so we're not actually shown any
nudity at all and the focus is really on this very elegant interaction between
Bathsheba and her maidservants so again she brings a sort of different
sensibility to this subject. -The white...your eye is really drawn to the center of the painting isn't it? - Like Susanna. I mean I think you have the sort of
glowing naked figure, who's really the kind of center of the story, at the very
center of the picture so you're immediately drawn to...you end up
sort of admiring her rather like David admiring her on the palace balcony
beyond - So it's quite apt that one of the most exciting rooms in the exhibition is going to be called 'The Female Hero' because that's basically
what Artemisia pretty much was. - That's right and I think you know a lot
of pictures of female protagonists are associated with Artemisia
because that's what her reputation has been built on in the modern day but I
think also, in her own time, she was known for these pictures of biblical heroines:
Susanna, Judith, Cleopatra, Lucretia, these female heroes that she turns back to these subjects throughout her career
sort of turning afresh to these stories every time and reinterpreting
them and I felt it was very important to sort of dedicate a room to that and why?
What made her so different from contemporaries? Why would I, as a patron, go to Artemisia rather than to one of her male peers? I think the point is that
the patrons would determine what subject they wanted so they would say "I want a
painting this big of Judith and Holofernes" but it was up to Artemisia
really to have some sort of artistic license and how she would portray that
and I think male patrons knew, predominantly male patrons knew, they
would get something different from Artemisia and they knew that
there was certainly an additional appeal of having a picture of a female by a
woman. I think there was definitely this sort of USP that she had
and she was perfectly well aware of it. - And of course she came here to London as well. - She did. So she comes to London in the late 1630s. We don't actually know
exactly when she arrives or when she leaves but she probably comes in the
course of 1638. Her father is in London at that point. He's been in London since
1626 as court painter to Charles I and I was very keen in the
exhibition to sort of have a room really reuniting father and daughter because
the exhibition begins with Artemisia in her father's workshop and sort of seeing,
in a way, how far she'd come...And so they're reunited in London and one of
the big projects she's thought to have had a hand in is the ceiling which was
originally in the Queen's House at Greenwich which Orazio painted for
Queen Henrietta Maria and it's now a Marlborough House in St. James's and it
was moved there in the 18th century and it's thought that she may have had a
hand in that. I mean the degree of her participation is much debated but we
know she painted pictures here. She even sent a picture before arriving because
one of her pictures is being framed in London well before she actually arrives. But of course the most famous picture from her London period is the
'Self Portrait as Allegory of Painting' and this is a picture...it's really the
only firmly identifiable picture that Artemisia painted in London and it is
the 'Self Portrait as Allegory of Painting' and there's been a lot of
discussion about whether this is a very literal self-portrait. You have to
remember Artemisia was in her 40s when she paints this and you know I think this
woman looks a bit younger than that and also the physical impossibility of being
able to paint yourself in this angle, you know, you would need a very
complex system of mirrors, so I think it's a more sort of figurative self-portrait.
I think it's a real embodiment, if you like, of painting and of what Artemisia
believes painting should be and that is not a contemplative act,
a very physical act, a very purposeful act and I think you know showing painting as
a woman, personified as a woman here at an easel, holding her painter's
palette with her brush poised, she's about to embark on her painting,
you can see the canvases completely clear in front of her...so for me this captures
everything and it calls to mind some of these great phrases she
puts in some of her letters towards the end of her life to her famous patron, the
Sicilian nobleman Antonio Ruffo. She famously writes "I have the
spirit of Caesar in the soul of a woman" It gives you the sense of real
grit, a kind of very tenacious figure and also she famously said "Let me show
you what a woman can do" and that always comes to mind when I look at this
picture because I think it really does embody everything Artemisia thought
about painting - So why should people come?
I mean it sounds absolutely amazing... Why should people book and come to see this exhibition? - Well I think there's the fact
that we've never had a chance to showcase Artemisia in this country and
I think it's about time to do it and also with having acquired our own
painting we were the right place to do it. It has been a real challenge getting the loans. She's hugely sought after
and there have been a lot of other exhibitions in recent years and I think
it would be a real challenge for people to do it again, for another sort of
generation. So I really think it is an opportunity to see some of these really
famous pictures alongside also some less well-known
pictures, the more recently discovered pictures, so you know...I hope also
bringing through the human element of the letters people get a more
profound and more rounded understanding out of Artemisia whether you come to
it to just look at the paintings or because you're fascinated by Artemisia
as a figure, I think there's sort of something for everyone! - Sounds absolutely
brilliant. We can't wait to see the exhibition and tickets are on sale now
at the National Gallery website. you
