The Passion of Artemisia
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The 17th century painter who inspired a story of artistic passion
The author of Girl in Hyacinth Blue explores the incandescent talents of a woman artist bound by Baroque sensibilities BY SUSAN VREELAND What would it have taken, centuries ago, for a woman to be a famous artist or writer? Talent. Passion. An understanding family. A receptive, or at least tolerant, community. And, according to Virginia Woolf, £500 a year and a room of her own.
But what if there had been a father-painter who had offered? One who saw great talent in his daughter and undertook to teach her how to paint? Two years ago, the art history teacher of the high school where I taught English literature and ceramics said to me mysteriously, having just read Girl, "I know who your next novel will be about." I stopped breathing a moment. How did she know when I didn't? Though a life-long lover of art, I was not an art historian myself. So when she told me that a well-known Italian Baroque painter, Orazio Gentileschi, did teach his daughter, Artemisia, I was fascinated. That Artemisia produced works of startling invention, expressing a feminist sensibility in paintings of strong heroines caught in dramatic moments, thinking and acting against the grain, that she was the first woman to be admitted into the Accademia dell' Arte in Florence, the first woman to make her living solely by her brush -- all this was more than I'd hoped for. And when I read that she had been raped at 17 by her father's friend and collaborator, whom he had hired to teach her perspective, I knew there was a story here. But I wanted it to be a story narrowly focused on specific themes, one penetrating an artist's mind and revealing a single, developing soul, not a sweeping narrated biography with dozens of characters. Inquiring into the state of mind most propitious for creative work, Virginia Woolf asserts that "the mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent, like Shakespeare's mind." She says of him, "All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or grievance was fired out of him and consumed. Therefore his poetry flows from him free and unimpeded." But what of a woman who had plenty of reasons for grievance -- rape; public scorn; torture by a papal court intending to cripple her talented fingers; betrayal by a father who saw her as a novelty through which he could make money; jealousy; and the indifference of a philandering husband? How was she to set it all aside so as to give birth, whole and unstained, to the work gestating in her? Could those passions be used, or must they be repressed in order to achieve a fragile satisfaction in her work? In post-Renaissance Italy, what would be required of a woman to keep that mind incandescent? Those were the questions that fascinated me. I had to write the novel to find the answers. Such a focused work of fiction about a 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 some 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 had to wrench myself free of biography to imagine the personalities and interactions of Artemisia, her father and her husband, and to devise dramatic moments that would propel a plot. I came to see that my task was not far different from her own in devising her versions of dramatic moments in women's lives true to the Baroque sensibility. Like a painter who clothes figures from centuries past in the garb of his or her own time, so have I sought to render Artemisia in a way meaningful to us three and a half centuries later, yet concordant with the soul and passions of the real Artemisia Gentileschi,1593-1653, for whom the story behind the art was always vital.
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In Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Magdalena, my fictional daughter of Johannes Vermeer, longed to paint. With the eye of a painter she imagined a composition of the moment of her father's death. "She yearned to [paint] it, but the task was too fearsome. She lacked the skill, and the one to teach her had never offered."