Rediscover Artemisia with retrospective in Paris

Paris. Painter in a violent and chaotic era, the Italian Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-Hacia 1656) was a mastery of the chiaroscuro who won the appreciation of the European Courts, a woman beaten by the tragedy and now the protagonist of her first retrospective in Paris.

The Jacquemart-André Museum hosts about 40 paintings and drawings over eight thematic rooms.

Gentileschi’s life is full of chiaroscuros, as his painting influenced by Master Caravaggio, whom he probably met in his hometown, Naples, at that time under Spanish dominance.

Mother’s orphan when she was a girl, her father, the painter Orazio Lomi Gentileschi, educated her with an iron hand in her workshop, which barely let her out in her youth.

Almost illiterate, he learned to paint practically imitating his father, without attending the academies or centers to which male apprentices were entitled at the time.

At 17 he signed his first painting, Susana and the old (1610). A few months later, his mentor, the painter and friend of his father Agostino Tassi raped her in the workshop.

Artemisia’s father denounced him. The trial, whose records remain for history, was a new and terrible humiliation for the artist.

Artemisia Gentileschi was tortured to check if he told the truth. His fingers were crushed. Tassi was finally convicted, but the protection of Pope Innocent X managed to only be sentenced to exile.

The Gentileschi legend had just begun: he married, moved to Florence, moved away from his father and began a new life.

Artemisia, art heroineopen until August 3, seeks to resituate his place in the history of European painting and also with respect to his father, who for too long made his firstborn shadow.

She is a woman of great character, with an extremely strong personality; Painter in an extremely masculine mediumdeclares Pierre Curie, conservative of the museum and one of the commissioners of the exhibition, together with Patrizia Cavazzini and Maria Cristina Terzaghi.

Artemisia quickly began working for the powerful Medici family in Florence.

He painted mythological and religious portraits and scenes, often women starred in their fabrics.

Thus, your most famous picture, Judith deciding by Holofernespainted at the time of his complaint for violation (1612), contains a scene of great violence that according to some experts surpasses the equivalent work of Master Caravaggio.

At present there are just over a hundred Gentileschi paintings identified, but With the investigations that have been done in recent years, others do not cease to appearexplains Curie.

It is not at all a minor artist, he was well known In his time, he explains.

He worked for the Emperor of Germany, the Spanish king Felipe IV and at the end of his life he met his father for a few years, in London, in the royal court.

He had five children, of whom only one girl survived.

Dressed as a man

But Paris’s exhibition does not simply want to emulate the fascination that Gentileschi has caused during generations between art scholars and feminist.

The complexity of its tour is demonstrated with a series of drawings made by friends painters in Rome.

One of them, Leonaert Bramer, the portrait dressed as a man, with hat and mustache, an obvious allusion to the statute outside any rule of the young womanwho poses smiling.

Artemisia also portrays herself, with a lute in her hand (1614). He learned music, even composed poems.

It is also portrayed like a beautiful Allegory of inclination (Around 1615-1616), recently discovered, in which it appears almost naked.

Until the end of his life (he probably died around 1656 in Naples, because of the plague), Artemisia Gentileschi will not stop alternating between those sweet and the most gloomy moments, such as the shocking Yael and Sísara (1620), where the heroin of the biblical book of the judges is preparing to nail a metal stake in the temple to General Canaano while he sleeps.