Ideas - This Italian painter was a feminist before the word existed

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

*Please note that this episode features descriptions of a sexual assault that some listeners may find disturbing.* Seventeen century artist Artemisia Gentileschi upended traditional depictions of women in her paintings by creating gutsy, strong female figures. With her paintbrush as in her life, she fought gender inequality and helped to reimagine womanhood and what it could mean to be a female artist. *This episode originally aired on May 24, 2022.Fill out our listener survey here. We appreciate your input! 

This program is brought to you in part by Spex Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at specksavers.cavers.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. Artemisia Gentileski is one of the strongest female spirits that has ever walked the planet. She was quite simply the most celebrated female painter of the 17th century. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Isid. Susanna and the elders. It shows the young Susanna, who's been bathing in her garden. That was Artemisia's first known painting.

She's naked, she's bathing. The young woman is being leered at by two men, both much older and fully clothed. And what Artemisia's choosing is the moment in which the men emerge and accost Susanna, in all her vulnerability. Artemisia Gentileski was just 17 years. years old when she painted Susanna and the Elders. Susanna and the elders from the Book of Daniel, chapter 13. Susanna, a very beautiful woman and one who feared the Lord.

Every day, two elders used to see her and began to lust for her. History paintings had until then been the domain of men, but Artemisia's powerful biblical heroines. Susanna, Judith, Esther, offered a new vision of womanhood. Artemisia made it possible for women in the future to imagine that it might be possible to remake the world as it needed to be for them to succeed. She was fighting for all the things that we're fighting for today, and she was a feminist in the truest sense of the word before the term feminism had even been invented. Artemisia Gentilesky is now often known by her first name, Artemisia, just like superstar male artists, Michelangelo, Picasso, Baskia.

But the drama of her biography, she was raped and had to endure a humiliating trial, has often eclipsed her sensational and subversive paintings. Artemisia is painting through the lived experience of a female body. She wants us to feel how it moves, how it suffers, how it's strong, how it can feel fertile, how it can feel lusty, how it can be a source of joy, and how it can be a source of strength. This documentary by Elisa Siegel is called What a Woman Can Do and delves into three Artemisia paintings, Judith Beheading Polofernes,

self-portrait as the allegory of painting and Susanna and the Elders. You can see all of them on our website, cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. We begin this exploration of womanhood then and now with Susanna and the Elders. Together, the elders arranged for a time when they could find Susanna alone.

Artemis's first known work is of Susanna and the Elders and it's a picture that's signed and dated 1610 so she must have been about 17 when she painted this picture One day, while they were waiting for the right moment she entered the garden as usual only wanting to bathe for the weather was warm It's astonishing for its maturity both in its storytelling but also just in the sheer skill in the way it's painted.

It shows the young Susanna. She's sitting on a stone step and her foot is trailing in the water. And she's almost entirely naked. And behind a stone wall, there are two men huddled very closely together. When her maids had gone out, the two elders ran to her. They said, look, the garden doors are shut. and no one can see us. We are burning with desire for you.

So lie with us. If you refuse, we will testify against you that a young man was with you. We see how terrible these two men are and how they conspire together. Their faces are almost touching. And one of them has their finger drawn up to his mouth in a kind of conspiratorial gesture.

And these two men have been spying on Susanna whilst she was bathing. And they come out and they try to seduce her. And she refuses their sexual advances. And as a result, they threatened to accuse her of adultery, which was something that was punishable by death. Susanna, according to the biblical story, cries out, I am completely trapped. For if I do this, it will mean death for me.

If I do not, I cannot escape your hands. I choose not to do it. I will fall into your hands rather than sin in the sight of the Lord. For me, the greatest strength of this painting lies in the contrast between her beautiful, smooth, shining, clean flesh. It's tender, it's plump, it's feminine. It's round. It looks motherly. It looks warm. It looks inviting. And the harshness of that stone wall behind her and the red cloth, red, blood red, danger red, of one of the elders who is leaning over it. My name is Sheila Barker. I'm director of the Jane Fortune Research Program on women artists. at the Medici Archive Project. It's so primordial this contrast between something that is

vulnerable and soft and supposedly weak and something that cannot be changed or moved. The stone wall that maybe represents the traditions and the laws and the way things are. and it's supposed to protect her, and yet we have this figure dressed in a scary, alerting, red cloak, leaning over, falling into her space. My name is Letitia Trevis, and I'm the Sassoon curator of the later Italian paintings at the National Gallery in London. What Artemisia focuses on is that very strong, I would say violent, physical, rejection of the elders. And Susanna's body is twisted in a very awkward pose and she's brought her arms up to sort of protect her. And she's trying to push the men away and her head is turned in the opposite direction. And you can see her furrowed brow, the sort of anguish she's

feeling. And for me, it's the sort of psychological drama as well as the kind of technical ability which is astonishing in this picture. The subject had been painted many times before. Many of the pictures by her male contemporaries, you know, they saw this as an excuse to really paint quite an erotic subject, a half-naked woman, a sort of titillating subject. And she never seems entirely convinced that she's saying no to the elders. But I would say this is the first picture in my mind where Susanne is very clearly saying no. She is rejecting the elders. There's absolutely no question. Oh, eternal God, you know that these men.

have given false evidence against me. And now I am to die, though I have done none of the wicked things that they have charged against me. Just a few months after this picture was painted in May 1611, Artemisia herself is the victim of unwanted sexual advances, and she is raped by the painter Agostino Thasi

in her father's house, in her father's studio. that in the month leading up to that point, she was being harassed by Tassi. And so you can't help us sort of see that there must be some connection with what's being painted here, or at least that she's sort of sympathetic to what Susanna's feeling. Artemisia made the choice when depicting this image to include something similar to her own features.

This was never called a self-portrait, but it represents a woman who is about Artemisia's age when it's made. Artemisia would have been turning 17 in the year 1610, and viewers of this image would have, without a doubt, made a connection between Artemisia's body, not just her person, but her very body, her nude body. She knew that viewers would make a connection between that naked woman and herself. Male artists rarely had opportunities to study from female nude models.

So Artemisia is both connecting herself with the image of a vulnerable woman who is being threatened by men and clearly at a disadvantage. And she's making that simultaneously an allusion to the fact that she has an advantage over her male peers, the artist who couldn't afford to hire female models or who couldn't get a female model to strip in front of them because of issues of modesty. But she also is making the most of her womanhood and the fact that she had the ability to work with other women and to convince them to take off their clothes and sit before her for hours without the fear that harm would be done to them. They were safe with Artemisia.

Artemisia was their stone wall. Artemisia was the wall that gave them protection to be nude in front of her as an artist. And so at this painting, we can see it both as a biblical story that is told with great invention, but we can also see it as a rare and exciting opportunity to see a woman artist tackling the female nude. In this painting, the men are very close and very intimate with each other. Their bodies are almost united. They act as a huge. unified force to inflict their purient, lusty desires upon an innocent woman. And yet they are the

ones, these men, they are the ones who appear to us in this image to be trapped. They are part of the wall. And it is Susanna who moves, who twist, and who will get away. Artemisia wants us to remember that Susanna, the weak one, ultimately is the victor. She is ultimately found to be the one who told the truth. And so I think that if we just look at the bodies alone, we can understand already here that, that Susanna's and Artemisia's own quest for liberty and own quest for a kind of righteous vindication is present in the female body. The thing that is supposed to be the weakness turns out to be the source of strength. What really grabs me in Artemisia's work is

the strength of the awareness of her talent and her mission that she conveys through her paintings. Her voice is really clear. My name is Alessandra Masu. I am the co-founder of the Association Cultural Artemisia Gentilesky, which is based in Rome, Italy. And I am the director of the Artemisia Museum, the first virtual museum of women in the arts. With her work and with her voice, Artemisia, she was really doing a social revolution. What's revolutionary about this work is that it celebrates the female, victim without sexualizing her. She is attractive and beautiful, but there's too much fear and

discomfort and awkwardness and surprise and horror. And so even though she has an incredibly beautiful and attractive body, we cannot help but sympathize with the victim and feel her struggle and feel her suffering and the suffering of women. And we are led to see the wickedness of the men and the virtue of the woman and to love that virtue, not to love the flesh, but to love the virtue. And I don't think that a male artist before or after Artemisia ever quite managed to get that aspect right. If we look at it really as an act of painting, we see Artemisia resisting what men have been telling women they can and cannot do. They've been telling women that they cannot paint.

They cannot act in an intellectual capacity at the same way men do, just as these two men lean over a wall to tell Susanna that she cannot get out of this situation with. her honor intact. Artemisia ignores that. She ignores what the men are saying to her and she paints fearlessly. Again, for a woman her age to associate herself, her features with a nude body that would have been displayed on the wall of another person's house and then resold and resold and resold, always with her name prominently displayed on it, was an act of incredible courage and self-confidence and a gauntlet thrown down to the world. The assembly cried out with a loud voice, and they arose against the two elders, for Daniel had convicted them a false witness by their own mouth.

They did to them as they maliciously intended to do to their neighbor. They put them to death. Thus, innocent blood was saved. Her most famous painting, her, the most iconic, is that of Judith beheading Holofernes, of which there are two very closely related. The pictures painted shortly after Artemis's rape and the trial that saw her rapist accused of deflowering her,

that is taking away her virginity. and her statement is very moving, and she also agrees to undergo torture to prove that she's telling the truth. And I think Artemisia's words that are recorded in this trial, and the documents still exist today in the Archivio di Stato in Rome, what comes across is Artemis' extraordinary self-composure. She's only 18, you know, and she's facing her rapist, and the torture she agrees to is the Sibile, which was a system of ropes tied around the fingers. and then tightened. And the tighter you pull,

the more likely you are to break the person's fingers. And, you know, she's a painter. The judge ordered that the prison guard put on this thumb screw. He adjusted the cords between each finger, each in the presence of the witness, Agostino Tassi. As it's happening, She says, I have told the truth and I always will because it is true.

I have told the truth and I always will because it is true and I'm here to confirm it when it's necessary. And they're tightening as the guard tightens the cords around her fingers. She says, It is true, it is true, it is true. It is true, it is true. It is true, it is true. She repeats these words over and over again.

It's vero, is vero, is vero. And then she looks at Tassi, who is in the room in front of her, and she says, This is the annello that you gave me, and these are your promises. And she's referring to the fact that he always promised to marry her. She's saying, instead of a wedding band, this is the ring that you've given, you know, ropes tied around my fingers. asked whether what she had testified in her examination and had just now confirmed in his presence

was and is true she answered it is true it is true it is true everything that I said Augustino Tassi he was condemned but his punishment was exile for five years

years, but ultimately he only spent a short time in exile and came right back to Rome and resumed business as usual. At precisely what should have been the lowest moment in Artemisia's life, she showed an incredible capacity for resurrection from the ashes of this slanderous rape trial in which everyone that her father knew had come out and spoken either for or against Artemisia. She gathered the strength to marry a man that her father had introduced her to. He was the brother of the notary that was advising Oratio Gentilesky throughout the trial. So Artemisia may have never met her husband before the wedding day, who came into Rome for the church wedding, scooped her up and took her back to Florence in the winter when traveling is very difficult. The roads are muddy. The days are short and dark. And of course, they don't have a lot of money to spend on fancy carriages. So they might have been traveling by.

horseback. And yet this is where she is spiritually reborn. She arrives in Florence and almost immediately she is painting. She showed no hesitation at all. She fell into this new life with complete energy and dedication, embracing Florentine life. They're using her dowry to set up her studio and within a few months she falls pregnant. And in fact, she has five children in five years. So for much of those years in Florence where, you know, her career is really taking off, she is pregnant. And, you know, she's a true working mother.

And painting is a very physical work. And to think that she was heavily pregnant for much of it is extraordinary. I see now that fortune has, without a doubt, turned her back on me. That effectively me privates of everything that can give me pleasure or be useful to me. And to speak the whole truth, consider that God has taken my son from me. I nearly died of grief.

He has already been dead five days. That I've had to mourn with dolor, it's just five years that he's morto. Only two of her children actually survive. One of those two actually dies when he's just four and a half. And the other, a daughter, is the only one. that actually survives to adulthood. So she suffered extreme sort of pain and grief and loss in those years as well.

But she is the breadwinner, and I felt that was quite an important element of understanding her. What followed in Florence were a few years of artistic independence, personal freedom, because as a married woman, you're able to move around in different circles. You can move around unaccompanied. She set up her in studio, and she learns to read and write. she becomes the first woman to join the Artists' Academy in Florence in 1616. An academy was a really important step for an artist

because it's also where you met other artists and other poets and other intellectuals where you met prospective patrons. And one of the critical friendships that she makes in Florence is Michelangelo Buonarotti, who is the great-nephew of the great Michelangelo, the Renaissance artist. and she also knows Galileo Galilei, the astronomer,

but it's Bonarotti who gives her an important commission and probably through him, she has given access to the Medici and to the Grand Duke. And she paints the Judith Beheading Hall of Farnies to Daniel Fizi in Florence. This painting occupies a very special place in Artemisia's career. it is a fulcrum point. It was commissioned by the Grand Dukes

and was hung in the Pitti Palace. So it was seen by heads of state. It was seen by every diplomat that came to court to see either the Grand Duke or the Grand Duchess. For me, it's a sort of showstopper. I think she's showing what she can do in this painting. And she signs it very emphatically. I did this. And it's a statement, you know, I, Artemisia, I a woman, did this.

I mean, it's a really shocking picture. No one had seen anything like it before. And if you wanted to bring attention to yourself, this is it. This is the picture to do it with. It catapulted her into international stardom. You're listening to Ideas. on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. This program is brought to you in part by Spec Savers.

Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cavers.cai.a. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists.

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Learn more at eggfarmers.ca.com slash supply management. Brought to you by Egg Farmers of Canada. Artemisia Gentileski painted Judith beheading Holofernes in the year 1619. The blood-curdling masterpiece, which can be seen on our website, presents a brand-new, if-shocking, Judith, courageous, clever, and strong. prosper what my hands are now to do for the greater glory of Jerusalem. For now is a time to recover your heritage and to further my plans to crush the enemies arrayed against us. The story of Judith beheading Holofernes was widely known, but it was often shown as a slightly different point in the story. It's taken from the apocrypha, Old Testament apocrypha,

and it tells a story of Judith, who is a Jewish widow, who wants to save her city of Bethulia from the Assyrians. And to do so, she decides to enter the enemy camp at night and to kill their general Holofernes. And she enters the camp dressed in all her finery with her maid-servant. She dines with Holofernes in his tent. And just as he falls asleep, she clutches his sword and comes. cuts his head off.

And then with her maid servant, she has to bundle his bloody head into a bag as she returns victorious with her sort of booty to Bethulia and is the great hero of her city. And Artemisa chooses to show the moment of the beheading itself. And it's really gruesome. I mean, she spares us none of the horror

and the violence. We see her at the moment when she plunges that sword into his neck with the strength of a lioness. It's built around these three protagonists. Holofernes is stretched out on the bed. His head is right in the foreground

at sort of R.I. level and his head is upside down and he's looking out at us as he's riving on this bed trying desperately to break free. his massive right hand is sort of pushing upwards against the maid servant who's trying to pin him down so that Judith can get a proper grip and then Judith is on the right of the painting

in these beautiful gold and silk gowns and in all her finery and in her right hand she's firmly clutching this huge oversized sword that she's trying to drive through the neck of Holofernes and in her left hand she's pushing down on his face and his beard and his hair. And you can see the tufts of hair peeking through her fingers. She's got strong arms.

The general, this large man with his head very close to us, is flailing about. He's come to his senses. We see his large fist in the air impotent because his blood is going everywhere. The blood is streaming down the bedsheets and it's also spurting in arcs, splattering on her body,

on her chest. Judith's sword penetrates his neck almost in an exact vertical alignment, and it's perpendicular with the picture plane, so it looks like a cross. Judith has her knee on the bed of Holofernes, and she's leaning into her sword so that she can commit this act of great bravery. the maid servant behind her is helping to hold down the body of this humongous man. In the story, the maid servant is actually at the door of the tent. She's keeping watch.

But what Artemisia does is she brings the servant inside the tent. She's helping. She's an accomplice in this horrible deed. But there's a feeling of sisterhood with these two women who are in it together. and there's something very empowering about it even though obviously what you're looking at is utterly horrific. It's a really violent picture

built along these very strong diagonals set at night so you have this very dramatic lighting. And of course you think of Caravaggio because Caravaggio painted this exact moment of the beheading of Holofernes a few years before. But I think the difference between Caravaggio and Artemis' representations is that while Caravaggio's Judith is a statuesque and heroic,

Artemis is really struggling, physically struggling. There's a realism here. She imagines how hard it would be for a woman to actually cut off the head of a man as strong as Holofernes. and the hilt of the sword is actually pressing on Holofernes's arm and you can see how it pushes his flesh and you can sense the sheer strength, the brute force needed to carry out this really gory task. Destiny is changing. Suddenly with this one act, as that blood falls to the floor, the Israelites will survive, they will be victorious.

And this huge change in history is taking place. Only Artemisia, I think, succeeded in painting Judith as a figure worthy of having changed the course of history with a single stroke of a sword like this. No other artist makes Judith so strong, so imperturbable, and so determined, and so perfect and agent of divine will. With all her might, she struck his neck twice and cut off his head. Soon afterward, she came out and handed over the head of Holofernes to her maid, who put it in her food bag. Then the two went out together for prayer as they were accustomed to.

They've often been described as Artemis's revenge in paint against her rapist. And for me, that's rather diminutive. I think there's a danger there to sort of diminish the achievements. and the extraordinary originality of these pictures by just reading them in that vein. For me, this picture is all about taking your life into your own hands, doing what you have to do to save your people if you're Judith, to save yourself, your reputation if you're Susanna.

I think for me that's really what Artemisia's pictures say. This painting shows us the courage of women, the fearlessness of women, And that includes the ability to do violence. It's a necessary act, this horrible murder, but it requires courage that comes through faith. And that is the source of this woman's determination. And it's the source of Artemisia's as well. It was important to the Medici dynasty because the Grand Duke was on his deathbed,

and it was time for Maria Madelena von Habsburg, his wife, to step into the role of being a leader for the Tuscan people. So both for Artemisia and for her patrons, this courageous woman was an emblem, all of, modern life, not just an ancient biblical story, but modern life. What Artemisia brings is this very particular truthfulness to the subject and introduce a sort of psychological depth to these heroines, to their strength, to their vulnerability, to their predicament, and I think that's what really sets her apart. I see this as a feminist painting in every aspect. aspect. It's feminist from the point of view of its creator, Artemisia, who is painting

history paintings. That in and of itself is a feminist act. The subject matter shows a woman undertaking an incredibly dangerous task in order to be a hero of her people. And then in terms of its force on viewers of later eras, it has always surprised people that it was painted by a woman. The idea that a woman could conceive of such potentially frightening ideas really changed people's conception of what women's imaginations were like. Of course, they can see from her painterly skill that she has intellect. They can see from her ability to tell the story that she has intellect. But to see that she is able to think through a violent, combative scene, to understand how to wield a sword, to represent the blood spurting out of veins as the heart beats in its sporadic pumping,

These are ideas that really surprised a lot of people of Artemisia's time and later eras, including women, including powerful women, who just were shaken by the notion that this came from a woman's hand and a woman's mind and a woman's imagination. I will therefore I will therefore say to your mostriestrish, that in the quadri that me propone that can't assassare of the price,

that I've said something, but they're not even of 400 ducats I will therefore say to your most illustrious lordship that in regard to the paintings for which you seek a bit of a discount on the price that I've given, they cannot be had for less than 400

ducats, and I'm to be given a deposit for them. Artemisa was incredibly ambitious. She absolutely wanted to be considered on a par with her male contemporaries. She writes to one patron, I will show your illustrious lordship what a woman can do. She's fully aware of the difficulties she's facing being a woman painter, but she in a way embraces those and sort of challenges people with them, and I think it's that sort of empowerment of it, of the situation that is so astonishing.

But I must clarify that the higher the price, the harder I will endeavor to make a painting that is to the liking of your lordship and comfortable to my taste and yours. Regarding the painting for your most illustrious lordship, which is already finished, I cannot give it to you for less than what I am. she writes in another letter to the same patron with me your lordship will not lose and you will find the spirit of caesar you will discover the spirit of caesar in the soul of a woman and retrovera an animo of a woman and retrovera anima of a woman You get a sense of her ambition, her determination.

She fiercely defends the prices that she's charging for her pictures. Very clearly, she's saying, no, I can't sell this painting for less than 400 Dukati because it costs me money because it's particularly beautiful because it meets the standards that you are expecting from me and I am sure that I'm delivering with this piece. We're talking today about gender pay gaps. I mean, she clearly felt that even then in the 17th century.

And I do think that she's an incredible role model for us today. You know, she was fighting for all the things that we're fighting for today. I strongly believe that we can appreciate Artemisia's artwork best when we remember that she was a woman artist. She did not want us to forget that she was a woman artist. Not all women artists want to be thought of as women artists, but Artemisia did. She signed her paintings on the front precisely because she wanted us to remember her own female nature. And that gave her several advantages.

And I think that they are things that come through her art more strongly than in the art of any other painter of her time. Time after time in our time, in our time, Artemisia's paintings, the women are actively changing their destinies with their bodies and their minds. It's a lot harder for an artist to paint what the mind is doing. So Artemisia uses the active body as a stand-in for the active mind. She gives her figures, she treats them with a sense of intimacy. She brings the figures close to the picture plane. and allows us to see aspects of the female body that we don't normally see.

Now, Susanna, because of the story of her bathing, is almost always shown nude to some degree. But Artemisia and other paintings will show a dress slipping off a shoulder or will show us a woman nursing, her infant. She brings us into women's lives, allows us to see their body, under all different kinds of life conditions, and she does it in a way that is knowing and understanding that could only have been gained by spending time with female bodies in the studio. So there is that kind of knowledge that comes through observation, and then there's the kind of knowledge that comes from living in a female body, and Artemisia is painting through

the lived experience of a female body. She wants us to feel how it moves, how it suffers, how it's strong, how it can feel fertile, how it can feel lusty, how it can be a source of joy and how it can be a source of strength. For serve your signoria, I've used every diligence in far to make my retratto, in order to serve your lordship, I've used all possible diligence in making my portrait. And if all this does not satisfy you, you can, at your convenience of the author.

You can, at your convenience, lash the image of the author. She wants to belong to a pantheon of the author. great. She knew that she wanted to be a great artist, but she also knew that she had to prove it more than her male peers. So this is the urgency. She could never let her guard down. She had to represent herself, her art, her honor as a woman and as a member of her family. And in a way, she had to reverse the prejudices of her time, not with words, but with pictures. The self-portrait is the allegory of painting in the Royal Collection

is considered by many to be sort of the pinnacle of Artemisia's career or her achievements. There's no question that Artemisia wants us to associate this woman at her easel with her. and the painting is relatively small. It's a woman shown in half-length with dark sort of unruly hair. She's turned side on and standing in front of what looks like a blank canvas on an easel.

And in one hand she's holding her painter's palette with all the paint blobs laid neatly out in a row. And in the other, she has a raised arm holding this very fine paintbrush, which looks like it's poised and she looks ready to begin her painting. Artemisia's self-portrait is the allegory of painting is one of the few works we know that she executed during her time in England. In the late 1630s, traveling to England would have been an extraordinary journey at that time for anyone, male or female.

And she had gone there at the request of the King and Queen of England, King Charles I, and Queen. Henrietta Maria. The king was at the time very interested in the painting of Italians. And he had already brought Oratio Gentileski to his court as a court painter. And Artemisia is naturally going to be inclined to meet up with her father there. She may have been looking for royal patronage, which is going to be the highest paying patronage available. So Artemisia was doubly motivated to go to England, not only because of her father's presence there, she probably hadn't seen him for at least 12 years, but also because of the opportunity to earn a lot of money with this important patron. This particular image that remains in the

Royal Collection to this day is a testimony to her patron's interest in having a record of Artemisia. What she does in this picture is she conflates two different traditions, that of self-portraiture and that of allegory, allegory being a sort of abstract idea, being given a human form, because it's debatable to what degree the woman in this painting is actually a self-portrait, a literal self-portrait. It may not be her striking mirror image, of course at the time Artemisia in 1639 would have been 46 years old and we're looking at probably a 23, 25 year old woman here. But it represents Artemisia in spirit. It represents an ideal self in the form of a woman artist at her height of beauty, physical beauty, but also

engaged in an intellectual activity. She's wearing this beautiful green silk gown and she's rolled up her sleeves. And to me, this picture just exudes energy. It's sort of for me what perhaps Artemisia thinks painting is. It's a physical act. It's a very purposeful act. This woman knows what she's doing. And her sort of unkempt hair and the light hits her forehead, you know, as if she's sort of inspired. The loose hair on this woman who's carrying out her painting indicates the fury of her genius, the work of her mind. And Artemisia was very concerned about promoting herself as an intellect, as a thinker. So we are able to see this woman painter as she leans towards us in a way, but she's not looking at us.

She's looking out to the side of the canvas because she's trying to get around the edge of her, own canvas and see beyond it. She is painting the world around her. And that is Artemisia's statement about the kind of painting she does. She combines intellectual activity with careful observation of the world around her. And it wasn't really proper for women to explore the world on their own and go around looking at things. They were supposed to be very modest with their eyesight and with their gaze and especially with their movements outside of the house. So this is a woman doing something quite bold. And so we see this woman looking out beyond her canvas at the world and she's going to create a picture. But we don't see anything on that canvas yet. This is a blank canvas. It's

been prepared with an umber colored ground and she's about to begin laying out a line with her paintbrush. In other words, she is improvising in oil on her canvas. She is representing this allegory of painting in general as being a figure who works with the fire of inspiration underneath her. Once again, this is a picture no male artist could paint with the same sort of undercurrents. She emphatically puts her initials on the painter's palette

right in the foreground. AGF, Artemisia Gentilesky faced it. Artemisia Gentilesky did this. Assiguro, Vossor, Your Honor, Illustrissima, I assure your illustrious lordship that these are paintings which include female nude figures,

which are very expensive. In my estimation, no other woman of Artemisia's time managed to step out of the very prescribed narrow traditional roles for women as boldly as she did, and at the same time, to do that with such success, monetary success and celebration and adoration from men and women. She was one of the best paid artists of her times, and enjoyed an incredible degree of success at the same time she was flouting society.

I believe that all women artists, particularly in the 17th century, are Artemisia in the sense that they share with Artemisia the talent and the courage and the awareness of the necessity of fighting hard to have their talent recognize and their voices heard. Today I discovered that having made a sketch of the souls of purgatory for the bishop of Santa Agatha and to save money they're going to have this altarpiece carried out by another painter a painter who reaps the profits of my labor If I had been a man I do not doubt this would ever have happened. Artemis's death may have been the result directly or indirectly of a plague that struck Naples in 1656 and 1657.

were chaotic times and during plagues victims were buried in mass graves to prevent the possibility of contamination from the cadavers. That's one hypothesis, but it also might have been the case that she died of natural circumstances during the plague and just the chaos of the times might have made it impossible for a funeral to be held or for a a proper record or notice to have been made of her death. I think this feminist interest in her work, which has sort of increased enormously since the 70s, and I'd say over the last sort of 50 years,

I mean, it has led to Artemisia become a sort of feminist icon. And I feel that Artemisia now, quite rightly, is considered one of the greatest artists of the Baroque, independently of what happened to her as a young woman. It's not because of what happened to her. that she's known. This art that she was making, this art was her battle. This was her battlefield,

and the victory she won with this art was a victory that all women have benefited from. she was extremely outspoken and very determined to live life according to the way she wanted to live she was radically overthrowing all the limitations despite all of the risk and dangers involved in being that kind of a woman this made it possible for women in the future to imagine that might be possible to remake the world as it needed to be for them to succeed. And without her, I think that we simply wouldn't have had so many great artists in successive centuries and so much interest in the collecting of women artists. She made womanhood and women's lives interesting.

she was able to make the image of women on her canvas a source of fascination. And I think men and women took greater interest in what it was like to be a woman and what women's worlds were like thanks to her. You were listening to What a Woman Can Do, a documentary produced by Alisa Siegel. Special thanks to Brian Foss, Mary Gerard, and Judy Mann. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval. The senior producer is Nicola Luxchich.

The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.C.com slash podcasts.