The Passion of Artemisia - Hardcover

Vreeland, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786238569 ISBN 13: 9780786238569

Publisher: Thorndike Pr, 2002

Synopsis

What do Italian Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi and 20th century novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch have in common? In addition to the obvious--that they're both women--their life stories have eclipsed their art; sadly, because their work is of real significance and interest. Gentileschi has been the subject of an earlier novel by Anna Banti and a 1998 film. In actuality, she was raped at 19 by one of her father's fellow painters, Agostino Tassi, and the documentation of the seven-month trial has survived, to be given very different interpretations in all these accounts. Susan Vreeland's Artemisia is a feisty feminist, brimful with brio and passionate about her painting, who offers her narrative in the intimacy of the first person. After Tassi's trial, Artemisia's father arranges her marriage to Pietro Stiattesi, a Florentine painter--and dedicated philanderer. Artemisia, so she hopes, is to begin life anew in Florence. Indeed, she gives birth to a beloved daughter, Palmira, and distinguished painting commissions come to her. She is accepted as the first woman into the Academy of Art and Design, is envied for of Cosimo de' Medici's patronage, befriends Galileo, and soon outstrips her husband's reputation. Her marriage asunder, she begins her peripatetic travels to Genoa, Venice, Florence and eventually to London, always in search of work, and always fleeing the taint of her rape. Vreeland paints her character and the different worlds she inhabits with loving and compelling detail--the sights and sounds of Florence, the snooty male hegemony of the Academy, the Medici feuds and intrigues. But the writing, particularly in Artemisia's own reflections and dialogue, is often jarringly "I really was living the life of an artist in the greatest art city in the world"; "I wanted to hug them all"--and this does detract from the novel's tone and persuasivenss. The book's cover is a a portrait of St Cecilia--the model is thought to be Artemisia and the painting is by her father. But why not one of Artemisia's own extraordinary indeed, her absorbed, intense self-portrait speaks volumes? What a sad irony that its very boldness has been sacrificed to the more saccharine beauty of her father's work. -- Ruth Petrie

About this title

Review

Like her bestselling debut, Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Susan Vreeland's second novel, The Passion of Artemisia, traces a particular painting through time: in this case, the post-Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi's violent masterpiece, "Judith." Although the novel purports to cover the life of the painter, the painting serves as a touchstone, foreshadowing Artemisia's rape by Agostino Tassi, an assistant in her father's painting studio in Rome; the well-documented (and humiliating) trial that followed; the early days of her hastily arranged marriage; and her eventual triumph as the first woman elected to the Accademia dell' Arte in Florence. Although Vreeland makes a bit free with her characters (which she admits in her introduction), attributing some decidedly modern attitudes to people who would not have thought that way at the time, her book is beautifully researched and rich with casual detail of clothing, interiors, and street life. She deftly works history and politics into the background of her canvas, keeping her focus on Artemisia and her family. Beyond the paintings Artemisia left behind, Vreeland's vision may be as close as we can come to understanding the anger and ambition that kept this talented woman at the doors of the Accademia, demanding entrance, in a time when respectable women rarely left their homes. --Regina Marler

From the Author

Artemisia Gentileschi burst upon the post-Renaissance art scene with all the drama of an Italian opera. When I learned that she was the first woman to be admitted to the Accademia dell' Arte in Florence, producing paintings of startling invention which expressed a feminist sensibility, and the first woman to make her living solely by her brush, and furthermore, that she was raped at seventeen by her father's friend, her teacher, I knew I'd found material for a novel.

Rather than focusing on the rape or using a broad brush to paint a sweeping biography, I chose to explore the inner Artemisia, her developing state of mind, her transcendence over misfortune and resentment, the possibilities of forgiveness and love in a ruptured life, and the connecting tissue of beauty, art, spirituality, and wholeness.

Such a focused work of fiction about an historical person must be a work of the imagination, true to the time and character always, but true to facts only so long as fact furnishes believable drama. To suit my purposes, I combined actual people into composite characters, eliminated others, and invented still others. Though I used the trial record, her paintings, and her associations with Galileo, Cosimo de' Medici II, and Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger as recorded in art histories, I imagined the personalities and interactions of Artemisia, her father and her husband, and devised dramatic moments that would propel a plot. This is the process by which an historic figure moves from yellowed archives to scholarship, and from academic interest to heroic popular legend, becoming more complex and beloved as a result. With The Passion of Artemisia, I wanted to participate in giving Artemisia her cultural moment.

Edition details

• Publisher: Thorndike Pr
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0786238569
• ISBN 13: 9780786238569
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 464