Violence: Peripheral idiosyncrasy or the axis of interpretation

It is no secret that artists find inspiration in the trials and tribulations of their lives, and while this is true throughout history, contemporary artists, for better or worse, undertake the tiresome task of explaining their work themselves whereas such a task must be done for historical artists by intellectuals who combine chronological research with their analysis of artworks in an effort to provide a complete exegesis. It is not uncommon to see similar experiences surrounding the lives of multiple artists from the same, and even different, periods of history, although, in many cases, the extent to which an individual artist’s traits or social circumstances are said to be reflected in their work can largely be determined by one thing – their gender.

Narratives of the lives of Baroque painters Caravaggio (1571-1610) and Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653), for example, are permeated with violence and written by historians whose interpretations of history and analysis of artworks are constantly contradicting.

Figure 1: Caravaggio, Self-Portrait as Bacchus (c.1595)

Figure 2: Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (c.1615-17)

Caravaggio’s dramatic paintings often depict biblical scenes, especially moments of violence, which made his work controversial but hugely popular during his lifetime. While these paintings are celebrated for their intensity that his masterful use of chiaroscuro develops, and while historians and biographers of the artist will often make mention of his work mirroring the violence of his life, these are usually minimised to characterisations of him being “arrogant, rebellious”, or that he “sometimes found himself in trouble because of his extravagance”.1 In reality, however, he was known to be incredibly violent, often fighting and dueling over trivial matters, for which he escaped punishment with the help of his wealthy and influential patrons. It is believed, although unproven, that he had killed a man while living in Milan in the last years of the sixteenth century which forced him to flee to Rome where he was eventually sentenced to death after he murdered Ranuccio Tomassoni, the son of a wealthy Spanish family, in one such violent outburst in 1606.2

Despite extensive documentation of his violence, Caravaggio’s legacy remains protected by the Western canon wherein he is cemented, which has resulted in a multitude of biographies which, writers Felix Witting and M.L. Patrizy declare, “all focused on the violent and extravagant personality of the painter” rather than his artistic oeuvre.3 Although, with a quick read of these biographies or what the canon teaches, it becomes clear that the amount of attention given to his immorality is reminiscent of the average three-year-old’s interest in their new favourite toy – fleeting and tossed aside when it no longer meets their needs.

Figure 3: Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1601-02)

Such disregard of Caravaggio’s brutality is especially seen in his biography, Lives of Caravaggio, which Witting and Patrizy site as being the most important and famous of his plethora of biographies, wherein the author, Mancini, dismisses all negative traits as being “the reflection of a brisk and passionate mind and of a strong personality”, and that violent incidents, including murder, “may have tarnished his glory and reputation”.4 In this and so many of his biographies, Caravaggio’s violence was simply part of his “personality” that would occasionally “erupt into his art” and the two have remained relatively separate with historians managing to maintain a certain level of objectivity when studying Caravaggio’s work and his immoral life being added in as a footnote or briefly mentioned in a single sentence.5

The same cannot, however, be said for fellow Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, who, throughout her life, saw significant artistic success, but her accomplishments were largely ignored after her death in 1653 and it wasn’t until the rise of Feminist art history in the 1970s that her impact on her contemporaries was highlighted, did she become ever so slightly canonised.

Gentileschi, too, saw significant violence in her life, although unlike Caravaggio, such violence was a singular event that she did not instigate which has now become the axis upon which many historians interpret her art in collaboration with canonical devaluations of women artists.6 Rotating around this axis, Gentileschi’s work is viewed as an expression of her rage and a form of self-portrait, mirroring the violence done to her (not by her), regardless of the subjects they depict. This outlook is true for the paintings she created after her assault in May 1611 and subsequent trial in March the following year, as well as those she painted beforehand, which ostensibly foreshadow her future, violated self. Only able to view her entire body of work in relation to her attack, Artemisia, the multifaceted person, and Gentileschi, whose work is deeply complex and socially revealing, is reduced to one day in May 1611, and the seven-months between March and October 1612.

Figure 4: Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as a Lute Player (c.1615-18)

As Feminist art historian Griselda Pollock notes, Gentileschi’s twenty-first century fame is inextricably linked to her attack and fascination with her work is “more a matter of notoriety and sensationalism than of any real interest in or comprehension of ‘Gentileschi’ as a set of artistically created meanings”7, which is the result of the habitual use of women’s biographies to portray her as both interesting, by reducing her work to a visual record of her psyche, and an exception, as only exceptional women were free from the weaknesses of the female sex. Contrarily, the biographies of male artists are a mythifying device whereby its details are conveyed as applicable to all men, but intensified in the mind of an artistic genius.8 Whereas the biographies and histories of the surrounding society is used to analyse and give meaning to the work of male artists, the opposite is true for women – their art is used to analyse and give meaning to the parts of their biography that are most interesting and exciting to our patriarchal canon of art history, reflecting the sexual double standards that buttress patriarchal cultures and control female sexuality. For Artemisia Gentileschi, this means that she is only seen as “savage” and “the woman who took revenge in oil”.9

“A drama documentary about the artist would be bound to focus on the extraordinary trial that followed the rape to which she was subjected by her ‘teacher’, Agostino Tassi” Pollock surmises. “The paintings they would focus on would be those whose apparent subject was sexual violence and violation, such as Susanna and the Elders, and that could be read as ‘expressing’ a women’s vengeful feelings towards men as a result of traumatising sexual assault, such as Judith Slaying Holofernes. Life would be mirrored in art and art would confirm the biographical subject – a woman wronged. Gentileschi’s art would speak only of that event – indexing directly to experience and offering no problems for interpretation”.10

Figure 5: Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders (1610)

Despite being completed a year before Tassi assaulted her, Gentileschi’s portrayal of Susanna and the Elders (1610), the first painting she ever signed and dated, is still often read in relation to the attack and some writers even suggest that it was painted in the 10 months between the attack and the trial beginning, and that Artemisia or her father, Orazio, then changed the date in an effort to separate the painting from the stigma created by the trial.11 While there is no evidence to confirm this theory, it is argued that the similarities between the lives of Susanna and Artemisia are too great to be coincidence, as is that of several compositional elements. In her biography of Gentileschi, historian Mary D. Garrard notes that, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the story of Susanna and the elders had “become a voyeuristic opportunity for male art patrons and viewers”, but the young artist brought depth to the character and a feminine lens to the theme by casting one of the men as younger than the other, appearing to be around the same age as her Susanna, which “brings us closer to the world of flesh-and-blood women who might need to say no, yet are not immune to sexual attraction”. In making this compositional change, Gentileschi’s Susanna is now “resisting his demand, she is not simply defending her honour as a flat moral absolute, she is also resisting potential sexual temptation. Her rejection is a test of her willpower”.12 Moreover, taking artistic agency allowed Gentileschi to refocus the biblical narrative away from the men’s pleasure and to the woman’s distress, subtly articulating the struggle of sexually vulnerable women knowing that, no matter how subversively women behaved, men will only praise their beauty.

Refusal to allow Gentileschi to be anything other than a victim, and the constant need for her work to be brought back to the actions of men, is never more so clear than in the incongruous interpretation and analysis of Caravaggio and Gentileschi’s renditions of the biblical stories of Judith, who cuts off the head of the Assyrian general Holofernes in order to free her people from his tyranny. In their respective paintings of Judith beheading Holofernes, Caravaggio is simply retelling a biblical story and his work is hailed and analysed for his genius application of thick impasto and Chiaroscuro that emphasises the extreme violence of the subject depicted, whereas Gentileschi’s painting of the same scene is “reduced to therapeutic expressions of her repressed fear, anger or desire for revenge”.13 Readings of their respective compositional choices also indicates how they wished for their works to be interpreted. Caravaggio typifies the Baroque propensity for obedience to the written words of biblical narratives; his youthful Judith holds Holofernes’s head and her sword at arms-length, one hand is almost entirely obscured by his hair, the sword pommel hidden by her hand in the shadow of his face as if to hide the fact that this is her doing. She has a look of nervous uncertainty, almost repulsed by her task and the watery blood falling from his severed neck in neat ribbons. His depiction of Judith’s maidservant, Abra, is also in line with its religious context and telling the viewer that it is she, the old crone, who is calling the shots, wrinkles outline her elderly face, full of contempt and determination, she waits patiently at Judith’s shoulder. His Holofernes is shocked by the attack, on hand raising himself off the bed, the other gripping the bedsheets, suggesting that the beheading went quickly, without the opportunity to defend himself.

Figure 6: Caravaggio, Judith Slaying Holofernes (c.1598-99)

Gentileschi, however, depicts Judith as a heroic defender whose sexuality is not juxtaposed with the masculine violence of her act, as is seen in Caravaggio’s and, indeed, most other contemporary depictions of the subject. Unperturbed by the viscous blood spurting in all directions, she is focused, determined. Holofernes fights against her but she leans in, elbows locked, her strong grip on his head pressing him down into the mattress, with head, hands and pommel meeting in the centre of the composition. In this version of the narrative, Abra is not an old crone as she is usually depicted, but as youthful and strong as Judith. Her youth and active participation is equally as transgressive as Judith’s stolidity with this being one of the few images of the beheading to be performed by two women. Garrard argues that this choice imbues Gentileschi’s painting with political meaning as, while a lone assassin is merely an individual with a private grievance or mission, “two assassins can represent a community”. There is no debate as to whether Judith’s execution of Holofernes is a political act she makes on behalf of her people, the Israelites, but, in Gentileschi’s version, “the community is cast as the female sex. And because the agents are physically strong women who overpower a man, the image rises to a metaphoric level to symbolize female defiance of male power”.14

Figure 7: Gentileschi, Judith Beheading Holofernes (c.1612-13)

Parallels are frequently drawn between Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes and her assault with most analyses being limited to suggestions that she was relieving the stress of the ongoing trial through her 1612-13 painting and later embodying the attacker to take a form of pictorial revenge in her 1618-20 recreation. While there may be some validity to the effect her rape had on her art, critics of such psychological interpretations often meet the opposite problems associated with minimalising it. As has been stated, dilemma of the relationship between the violent image and the artists’ experience with violence is not seen in analyses of Caravaggio’s Judith Slaying Holofernes but, interestingly, no parallel has been drawn between Judith’s use of a sword to murder her foe and Caravaggio’s own use of a sword in his numerous fights and duels, nor is it suggested that his remorseful Judith foreshadows his guilt of murdering Tomassoni. Inevitably, one is left to wonder why.

1. Arrogant…: “Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio”, The National Gallery, 2016, https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/michelangelo-merisi-da-caravaggio

Sometimes found himself…: Félix Witting and M.L. Patrizi, Caravaggio (New York: Parkstone International, 2007).

2. Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993).

3. Witting and Patrizi, Caravaggio.

4. Ibid, 6.

5. Hibbard, Caravaggio.

6. Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London: Routledge, 1999).

7. Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London: Routledge, 1999), 97.

8. Nanette Salomon, The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission, (1991), quoted in Pollock, Differencing the Canon.

9. Jonathan Jones, “More savage than Caravaggio: the woman who took revenge in oil”, The Guardian, October 5, 2016 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/oct/05/artemisia-gentileshi-painter-beyond-caravaggio

10. Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 97.

11. Mary D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe (London: Reaktion Books, 2021).

12. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe.

13. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2003), 25-107.

14. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe.

Image credits

Figure 1: Caravaggio, Self-Portrait as Bacchus (c.1595). Oil on canvas, 67 x 53 cm. Galleria Borghese, Italy.

Figure 2: Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (c.1615-17). Oil on canvas, 78 x 61.5 cm. Uffizi, Italy.

Figure 3: Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1601-02). Oil on canvas, 116 x 156.5 cm. Private collection.

Figure 4: Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as a Lute Player (c.1615-18). Oil on canvas, 77.5 x 71.8 cm. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, U.S.A.

Figure 5: Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders (1610). Oil on canvas, 170 x 119 cm. Schönborn Collection, Germany.

Figure 6: Caravaggio, Judith Slaying Holofernes (c.1598-99). Oil on canvas, 145 x 195 cm. Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica at Palazzo Barberini, Italy.

Figure 7: Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Beheading Holofernes (c.1612-13). Oil on canvas, 158.8 x 125.5 cm. Museo Capodimonte, Naples, Italy.