Artemisia Gentileschi Essay

Out of all the women artist of seventeenth-century Italy, Artemisia Gentileschi was one of the most influential and admired. She is the first woman in history of Western art whose historical significance is unquestionable (Chadwisck 100). Artemisia was born in Rome but was active in Florence, Naples, and London. Her father was the famous painter Orazio Gentileschi, and he was one of the most important of Caravaggio’s followers. Because her father’s artist style was inspired by Caravaggio during the time when Artemisia was learning how to draw and paint, she style was just as heavily influenced by Caravaggio as well. The monumental composition, naturalistic rendering and strong contrasts of light and shadow, and use of contemporary models, are all indicators
Another source of Artemisia’s representation may be a lost work by Rubens, which sheds light on the painting’s iconography as well as its gruesome nature (Chadwick 112). Rubens work also provides a possible source for the powerful female figure… but also is significantly different from the rendering in its attention to the graceful and revealing swirl of drapery around the female body (Chadwick 112). Even with her list of impressive influences, nothing can prepare the viewer for Artemisia’s expression of female physical power, captured in the composition in which the interlocking, thrusting arms meet Holofernes’s head. This, in combination with the women’s gazes, is what makes this painting unusual. The coy and averted gazes on Western female figures is missing, and in their place is a direct confrontation which disrupts the conventional relationship between an “active” mal spectator and a passive female recipient (Chadwick