Artemisia Gentileschi joins the list of great baroque masters

In the last decades, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1654) became as powerful an icon as Frida Kahlo for the history and future expectations of women. However, despite the vindication of her figure and her work erupts with the new feminist historiography of art half a century ago, there is still a lot to learn about this painter, the first to join the Florentine Academy of Drawing and whose career took place in the main cities of Italy: Rome, Florence, Venice and Naples, since 1630, from where in 1638 he traveled to London to help and finish his elderly father's work. prayer gentileschi once deceased, returning two years later to Naples, where his life will end.

Precisely, the Neapolitan stage –with the London subsection– was the best known, which gave rise to the projects of the first two exhibitions in both cities that worked in collaboration from the beginning.

After the exhibition with twenty-nine canvases by the painter was held at the National Gallery in London in 2020 – unfortunately, in the middle of a pandemic, with limited visits and which was open for only six weeks – the large exhibition of Artemisia Gentileschi in Naples.

With excellent pieces recovered and then a major advance in researchin which the contribution of the Neapolitan Historical Archive was decisive, the exhibition allows, among other things, to specify the functioning of its successful botteghawith specialized assistants for architectures (Viviano Codazzi) and landscapes (Domenico Gargiulo).

No less relevant is the contextualization of Artemisia's work with the main artists, such as station, cavallino It is palumbo with whom he collaborates, and with the stylistic trends in vogue in the city which, let us remember, was then the viceroyalty of the Spanish crown, the most populous city in Italy and the second in Europe, after Paris, with a thriving cultural life.

Artemisia Gentileschi arrives at the age of thirty-seven, preceded by fame and already as a great teacher but with the same ability to adapt to local tastes and patrons that she had practiced in other cities. In Naples, while tempers its naturalism with a certain classicismcontinues to surprise with its bold compositions, its brilliant colors, its cultured iconographic details and its tactile virtuosity in objects and fabrics.

With an elegant, theatrical and solemn museum design, the visit recalls the connection between this exhibition and that of the London National Gallery

This exhibition, therefore, far from the sinister and traumatic events of her adolescence – her rape and subsequent trial –, from which Artemisia would establish herself as one of the most independent and daring women of her time, and with almost fifty paintings, half of which are by Artemisia with notable borrowings from Europe and the United States, he focuses on studying her as one of the great masters of Baroque painting, contemporaries of our Golden Agelike Velázquez, whom he met in 1630 on the painter's trip from Rome to the Neapolitan city.

This connection with Spain is very present, since his arrival in Naples in 1630, fleeing the plague in Venice at the invitation of the new viceroy. Fernando Afán Enríquez de Ribera, III Duke of Alcalá, whom he met in Rome and who had already acquired three of his works in 1925-26. In addition to his successor, Manuel de Acevedo and ZúñigaCount of Monterrey, former ambassador to Rome – who had commissioned Hercules and Omphale for Philip IV in 1628 – in Naples would include Artemisia in the works for the life cycle of Saint John the Baptist to the Bom Retiro Palace in Madrid.

[Artemisia Gentileschi, the spirit of Caesar in the soul of a woman]

Also due to his influence, he would work on the renovated Pozzuoli cathedral alongside the city's most prominent artists. A patronage that will not prevent the painter from continuing with commissions for the elite of Italian and European collectors, while at the same time attracting the best local patrons.

With an elegant, theatrical and solemn museum designthe tour begins by recalling the connection between this exhibition and the exhibition at the National Gallery in London, with the Self-portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandriaacquired by the British gallery in 2018 and belonging to the Florentine period, from which other self-portraits by the painter will be echoed in the exhibition.

Next, comparing the Christ blessing the children by the painter's hand together with other canvases caracciolo, Guido Reni It is baglione belonging to the Apostolate of the III Duke of Alcalá, donated to the Charterhouse of Seville in 1929, together with another scene of Christ created by his father, Orazio Gentileschi.

A comparison of religious themes with finaglio, Giovanni Rica, guarino and Ribera who continues with a fantastic Notice done shortly after arriving in Naples for the infanta Maria Anne of Habsburg.

Furthermore, an excellent period copy of the Birth of Saint John the Baptist, belonging to the Prado Museum, where Artemísia displays her skills of good manners, dressing the women like Neapolitans; and the monumental canvases of Saint Geronimo It is holy proculuspatron saint of the city with his mother Nicaea, to the cathedral.

In the field of private devotion, two other versions of Santa Catalina de Alejandría stand out, and the small oil on copper, the virgin of the rosarybelonging to our national heritage.

Of course, also in Naples there continues to be representation of Biblical and mythological stories starring heroines and strong womensuch as Judith and her servant Adra –here, in two versions, the masterpiece of the Museo di Capodimonte and another recently acquired by the National Museum of Oslo–, Delilah, Susanna, Bathsheba, Cleopatra, Corisca and Galatea.

Iconographies with which he would already be known in Rome and Florence, but which in this Neapolitan period are far from the traumatic pathos of their beginnings to affirm the courage of these female figureswho reject and reprimand their attackers, as occurs in both versions of Susana and the old womanor mock directly, as in Corisca and the satyrexpressing their moral superiority.

And they often appear acting with other women, like Dalila, here alongside an excellent version of the Neapolitan painter diana di rose (1602-1643), which also adds a hijacking of europe, among the twenty recognized works of his authorship. It is to be hoped that further investigations will advance the relations between these two painters with such close interests.

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