Artemisia: A Novel. - Review - book review

Art in America, Jan, 2001 by Mary D. Garrard

Artemisia: A Novel, by Alexandra Lapierre, trans. by Liz Heron, New York, Grove Press, 2000; 443 pages, $27.

Let's face it: the life of Artemisia Gentileschi will continue to be fictionalized until the last syllable of recorded time. There now exist at least a dozen literary and dramatic re-creations of Artemisia's life; cumulatively, they outweigh the historical record itself. Among the most prominent are Anna Banti's Italian novel of 1953 (English translation, 1988), Agnes Merlet's film of 1998 and now Alexandra Lapierre's biographical novel, published in French in 1998, which has just appeared in English translation.[1] Each of these works is entitled, simply, Artemisia--that single name inscribed on her now lost tombstone, which has come to signify the famous female painter, infamous rape victim and (for some biographers) passionate lover of men in seicento Italy.

It is pointless to ask that accounts of Artemisia's story adhere strictly to what is actually known. Much of what has been written about her is necessarily invented because, beyond the transcripts of the rape trial and a small collection of letters and documents, there is precious little to go on. The blank pages of Artemisia's life have been filled by writers seeking a truth beyond the facts. Novelists and art historians have thus shared in the invention of Artemisia, a serious project--if understood in the Italian meaning of inventare, to discover or find out--for each seeks some essential truth about this elusive subject.

Alexandra Lapierre, award-winning French novelist and biographer,[2] has produced a book that combines biography, fiction and scholarship. The British edition was published as a narrative biography; the American edition is called a historical novel. It's not clear which category of book Lapierre set out to write--and there are occasional tensions of genre here--but she was evidently intent on discovering some fundamental facts. She equipped herself for this five-year project by learning Latin and Italian in order to search the Roman archives, by reading Ariosto and Tasso to better understand Galileo (a minor character in this story) and by steeping herself in 17th-century Italian and English culture through a voracious devouring of historical sources. Her thorough archival research yielded a number of important documents that significantly increase our small store of knowledge of Artemisia's life.

Lapierre discovered that Artemisia was named for her godmother, Roman noblewoman Artemisia Capizucchi, displacing the legendary Hellenistic queen Artemisia, but opening a new avenue for the investigation of Gentileschi family connections. Digging deeper in the Roman archive that contains the 1612 rape trial testimony, Lapierre found critical documents that had escaped other scholars (myself included): the verdict and the sentence. We now know that Agostino Tassi was convicted of rape, and sentenced to choose between five years on the galleys or banishment from Rome. (The next day, the sentence was softened to five years' exile.)

Lapierre firms up details about Artemisia's married years in Florence following the rape trial and about her return to Rome in around 1620. Contrary to our previous belief that she left her husband, Pierantonio Stiattesi, behind in Florence, husband and wife are now documented in Rome in March 1621, living in Via del Corso with their daughter Palmira (or Prudentia, as she is called in some records). Lapierre was the first to publish this document, and she helped to fix Stiattesi's departure from the household at 1622-23. By far the most important of Lapierre's discoveries is that Artemisia lived in Venice between 1627 and 1629. A Venetian visit around 1621 had been conjectured, but Lapierre found evidence, in the letters of Antonio Colluraffi, published in 1627, of Artemisia's connection with several members of a literary and artistic group headed by Colluraffi. Her position in Venetian intellectual circles now becomes a new topic for investigation.

To create the historical stage set for her story, Lapierre read extensively on city planning, architecture and gardens, festivals and theatrical performances, and the history of costume. She read up on academies of art and on the legal rights and duties of 17th-century married women, and consulted new studies on rape. She explains the Roman prison system (only the accused were imprisoned; the convicted went straight to galleys) and trial procedure (the judge couldn't give a verdict until the accused confessed). And she makes imaginative use of unusual sources, such as priests' collections of communion cards, a practice that permits historians to track down parishioners by name.

On this foundation, Lapierre constructs a highly readable story that accurately reflects some important events and concerns of artists and courtiers in seicento Italy and England. She has a novelist's eye for evocative details, and an admirable ability to construct a scene out of scattered facts and bring it vividly to life. The book opens, for example, with the public execution of Beatrice Cenci in Rome, for patricide, on Sept. 11, 1599. Witnesses include the six-year-old Artemisia and her father--a justifiable invention, since the historical event occurred within walking distance of their home. This minor bit of artistic license makes for good theater, and permits the author to hint that the cruel decapitation of an 18-year-old girl for killing the father who had beaten, raped and imprisoned her would have some bearing on Artemisia's art. One benefit of Lapierre's extensive reading of the literature of the period is that she writes convincing dialogue. The characters speak credible thoughts for their time and place, in language that might have been used. The painter Cristofano Allori, for instance, asked by the Florentine Grand Duke to compare the talents of Artemisia with those of her father, replies that Artemisia is better at conveying the human passions, while in Orazio's work "the visible world becomes poetry."