Artemisia

Art in America, Oct, 1998 by Mary D. Garrard

Merlet here plays into one of the most damaging of stereotypes for women. The idea that a female artist is the product of a male mentor has been an insistent theme since the Renaissance. In a letter to the former teacher of Sofonisba Anguissola, the 16th-century artist Francesco Salviati described her as "the beautiful Cremonese painter, your creation." Camille Claudel was similarly characterized as the product of Rodin; Cassatt was described as Degas's protegee, and Morisot as Manet's, even after these women had emerged as independent artistic personalities. The literature of art is replete with birth metaphors to describe the masculine parturition of artistic offspring: male artists' creative energy overflows like seminal fluid into their female students; women artists, lacking the vital essence of creativity, can only receive it passively from men. Male artists generally benefit from the linkage of sexuality and creativity. Vasari's report that Raphael died young as a result of sexual overactivity has not harmed his reputation; who even remembers it? Picasso's fabled virility only enhances his artistic identity, sustaining as it does the mythic belief that a man paints with his penis. But the stamp of sexuality is dangerous for female artists, because it tends to replace rather than enhance their creative achievement.

The "Artemisia' that Merlet's film presents is merely an echo of the cultural construction that began when Tassi called her a whore in court. Our only surviving notice of Artemisia's death is a pair of mock epitaphs that lampoon her as a cuckolding shrew. In the 18th century, she was said to be as "famous ail over Europe for her amours as for her painting."(14) The continuing preoccupation with Artemisia's sexuality, now sustained in Merlet's presentation of her as a liberated lover, has served a specific cultural function--dangerous or valuable, depending on your point of view--for if we are talking about Artemisia's sex life we are not talking about her art.

Merlet fitted her project to a time-tested formula for commercial success: sex sells, as we all know. Yet the juxtaposition of the fiction of this film with the reality of history fortuitously exposes what our culture wants to believe and what it needs to resist. We want to believe in the fantasy of woman's eternal submission to the power of love, particularly when it distracts us from the specter of a woman who was unusually free of masculine control. The Artemisia to be resisted is the artist who painted pictures that violated the social order, presenting women as powerful avengers or unwilling sexual victims. The eroticizing of Artemisia Gentileschi thus serves to contain the social threat she posed in life and art.

Merlet's Artemisia raises troubling questions about the responsibility of art to truth, for in the age of the docudrama and biopic, when many Americans gain their historical knowledge from TV, films or novels, the presentation of history in fictionalized accounts plays no small cultural role. Ultimately, this misrepresentation, this dishonoring, of Artemisia Gentileschi matters very much because she has been an important cultural role model for women, especially artists. Men have many role models, women very few. If someone discredits Michelangelo, Caravaggio and van Gogh (and I leave aside the fact that films about these artists heroize them as artists), you still have Leonardo, Rembrandt and Gauguin. And hundreds more. But there was only one Artemisia Gentileschi--no other woman artist before the 20th century has come close to being considered one of the greats. That's a status apparently worth shooting down. It's also one worth defending.