A Polite Parisian Exhibition Sanitizes Artemesia Gentileschi’s Proto-Feminist Rage
Artemisia Gentileschi: Jael and Sisera, 1620. Photo Museum Of Fine Arts Budapest.
Artemisia Gentileschi’s empathic and heroic portrayals of women have made her a protofeminist icon. Her works—most famously Judith Slaying Holofernes(c. 1612)—do more than transform her passive objects into active subjects; they endow them with the power to enact righteous, even vengeful violence.
Such scenes are inseparable from Artemisia’s own biography, according to Patrizia Cavazzini, co-curator of “Artemisia, Heroine of Art,” a major retrospective currently on view at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris. Yes, Gentileschi asserted autonomy, both in her technical mastery and in her strategic self-portraiture. But above all, she rejected the confining ideal of the “virtuous woman artist” that dominated 17th-century Italian debates over the role of women in art and society.
Born in Rome in 1593, Artemisia was the eldest of four children and the only daughter in a household headed by the painter Orazio Gentileschi. A central thread in the exhibition is the evolving relationship between Artemisia and her father. In an era when most women were denied access to artistic training, Artemisia not only received instruction and studio privileges from Orazio but was actively encouraged to paint. Her early masterpiece, Susanna and the Elders (1610), painted when she was just 17, bears only her signature—despite evidence of her father’s involvement—underscoring Orazio’s commitment to promoting her career.
Artemisia’s feminist attitudes of assertion and defiance come through in Susanna and the Elders. Drawn from the biblical story where two old men blackmail Suzanna to sleep with them, Artemisia and Orazio’s version of this oft-depicted scene groups the three figures into a tight frame. This framing effectively conveys the uncomfortable claustrophobia of sexual harassment while keeping with Caravaggesque conventions—naturalistic renderings of live models, neutral backgrounds, and stark chiaroscuro.
Two men leer at her over a stone railing; meanwhile, the painting’s nude heroine shies away, her hands raised in a gesture of protective revulsion. Scholars have argued that the scene captures something of Artemisia’s feminine perspective, pointing to Susanna’s expressive gestures and posture as convincingly portraying the discomfort of sexual aggression—as if Artemesia were painting from experience rather than imagination.
The exhibition juxtaposes Orazio’s (ca. 1612) and Artemisia’s (ca. 1615) Judith and Her Maidservant paintings. Both works capture a tense moment following Judith’s decapitation of Holofernes, but Artemisia’s version offers a more forceful heroine, richer textiles, and a gesture of solidarity between Judith and her servant that her father’s painting lacks. It marks the emergence of Artemisia’s own sensibility, one more intimate, more psychologically charged, and often more brutal than her father’s.
