Throughout our wonderful seminar we have explored so many influential artists from all different centuries. From Rembrandt to Matisse, Richard Serra to de Kooning, we have certainly broadened our artistic horizons and tweaked our sensitivities to becoming “art snobs.” But a question has always lingered in the back of my head. As we viewed art from a myriad of generations, it is apparent that female artists are a relatively new phenomenon. So why have there been no great women artists in Frans Hals’ century or Vermeer’s lifetime? And then I found the art of Artemisia Gentileschi.
Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting
Born on July 8, 1593 to the Tuscan painter Orazio Gentileschi, Artemisia Gentileschi entered into one of the most enthralling periods of Western art. As a female Italian Early Baroque painter, her recognition as a talented artist in a historically male oriented art world is an indisputable attestation to her remarkable expertise.
Influenced by Italian artist Caravaggio, Artemisia painted brilliant works with bold brushstrokes and unique subjects. In her painting Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1630), Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro is evident. Artemisia’s face is strikingly illuminated against the subdued background and shadows of her body. The shift from light to dark is not gradual; Artemisia appears in a dramatic spotlight. Combined with the rich texture of her clothing, her rustling hair, and her working arm stretched across the canvas in an asymmetrical diagonal, Artemisia appears alive and almost tangible in Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting.
The title of this painting is comprehensible upon further research. Italian aesthetician Cesare Ripa compiled his emblem book Iconologia in 1593, which identified central qualities of various concepts in art, science, vices, and virtues. Ripa attached an allegorical description to each figure. Artemisia follows all but one of Ripa’s allegorical references of painting. Ripa’s personification of painting is a beautiful woman with unruly curls, a vibrant dress of shifting colors, a gold pendant hanging from her neck, and a piece of cloth binding her mouth. The bound mouth is symbolic of the artist’s reliance on non-verbal means of expression. In Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, Artemisia encompasses all of these traits, but her mouth remains unconstrained.
Women during Artemisia’s time were expected to be submissive and dependent on men. They were forced to accept domestic roles and were not considered proper sources of creativity. Artemisia’s unbound mouth represents her refusal to “keep quite” in the male dominated world as she asserts her independence as an astounding female artist.
Not only were women artists shamefully underrepresented in Frans Hal’s day, they continue to be a minority in the contemporary art world. One of the few that comes to mind would be Ursula von Rydingsvard.
For me, Ursula is a particularly memorable figure. Her medium, larger than life sculpture created with huge textured wooden blocks, seems to contrast with her femininity. The sawdust in her workshop, and the snow-lined creek behind her upstate home are some of my youngest and fondest childhood memories. When I look at her wooden work, I see the warmth of her house, and the plastic castings remind me of the icy NY outdoors.
http://www.ursulavonrydingsvard.net/site/selected_sculpture/
Wow. You’d think more people would know about Artemisia. She was quite the maverick. I think her images would be great for some feminist groups to utilize in their campaigns and movements. She has the potential to become the new Rosie the Riveter.
I’ve thought about the question you raised in your post’s title a lot, actually. There are certainly many great modern female artists I can think of (Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine are two examples), but haven’t we any female artists who we can mention in the same breath as Da Vinci? You wrote that a lot of that has to do with the fact that until fairly recently, women were just not expected to assume roles of creativity outside the domestic realm. It’s a rather unfortunate chapter in the human story. Who knows how much talent we have lost out on because of gender stratification in the artistic world?
Admittedly, there were a few females who rebelled against the roles society placed them in to become artists (the impressionists Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt come to mind), but while these women were critically acclaimed in their times, not many people have heard of them today. It’s pretty strange because one would think that the one place women would be free from the usual restrictions that were placed on them would be in the artistic world, which is largely unbounded and unrestricted. I guess that fact they were not just speaks to society’s evolving attitude towards women, which has made great progress but still has some way to go.