The organization of a large-scale exhibition featuring the works of father and daughter artists Orazio and Artemesia Gentileschi provided a welcome opportunity for the reconsideration of these two Baroque painters, particularly in reference to the familial and artistic ties which link their works. However, neither the exhibition, which this reviewer saw in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (other venues were the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Museo del Palazzo di Venezia in Rome), nor the accompanying catalogue focus on the connections between Gentileschi father and daughter to the exclusion of an examination of the particulars of each artist’s oeuvre and, in some cases, a reevaluation of key works by each artist. The result is a well-balanced and fascinating look at the styles, circumstances, and critical fortunes of each of these important painters.

The exhibition, organized by Keith Christiansen of the Metropolitan Museum, Judith Mann of the Saint Louis Art Museum, and Rossella Vodret of the Soprintendenza in Rome, is organized in three parts, with an examination first of the works of Orazio, then a consideration of Orazio and Artemisia together, and ending with a section devoted to the later work of Artemisia. The catalogue, edited by Christiansen and Mann, follows a similar pattern, though with only one essay, that by Mann, which focuses specifically on Orazio and Artemisia together. Taken together, the catalogue essays accomplish two main ends – first, to provide a critical and contemporary reevaluation of the work of Orazio Gentileschi, who, as is noted in the foreword, has been largely eclipsed in recent years by the increasing attention paid to his daughter, Artemisia; second, to attempt to approach Artemisia’s work through a critical lens indebted to, but not dependent on, the feminist scholarship which has tended to emphasize Artemisia’s infamous rape and to read her paintings through that life event.

In his opening essay, Christiansen provides an overview of the life and work of Orazio Gentileschi, with a particular consideration of Orazio’s response to the style of Caravaggio and with an intriguing analysis of his working practice, especially the way in which replication of compositions played a key role in Orazio’s artistic production. In their essays, Livia Carloni, Mary Newcome, Jean-Pierre Cuzin, Gabriele Fandi and Jeremy Wood discuss Orazio’s changing style as he moved throughout Italy and Europe, painting in areas as diverse as Rome and the Marches, Genoa, France, and England. Issues of patronage are carefully examined, as are Orazio’s responses to regional styles and courtly tastes. When the essayists observations are linked to the beautifully reproduced, and chronologically and geographically arranged, images of Orazio’s works, the reader is left with a refined appreciation for Orazio’s emergence as an artist and for the development of his mature style.

Those essayists writing on Artemisia Gentileschi faced, in some ways, a more challenging task, because of the formidable body of recent scholarship on the artist, including Mary Garrard’s 1989 groundbreaking feminist analysis of the artist and R. Ward Bissell’s 1999 catalogue raisonné. It is clear that the authors of the present catalogue are interested in moving the discussion of the artist beyond a conflation of life and art and to refute what Mann describes as a “by-product of the feminist focus on Artemisia Gentileschi…that, were she not female, she would not warrant the kind of scholarly and popular attention that she has received over the last thirty years.” In her essay, Mann looks extensively at the problems of attribution for those paintings which scholars have had difficulty in assigning definitively either to Artemisia or to Orazio, among them the Danaë from the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Cleopatra from the Morandotti collection in Milan, paintings which were shown together for the first time in this exhibition.
Elizabeth Cropper’s wide-ranging essay argues for an evaluation of Artemisia’s life and work that pays increased attention to the years after the rape trial and which examines Artemisia’s unusual status not only as a woman artist, but also as a famous and generally successful woman artist. Patricia Cavazzini returns us to the early years of Artemisia’s career with her analysis of the domestic environment of the Gentileschi household and the role such an environment would have played in shaping the young woman artist. Following the format employed in the Orazio section of the catalogue, the final three essays, by Roberto Contini, Richard Spear, and Riccardo Lattuada, explore the relationship of place to Artemisia’s work, investigating her years in Florence following the rape trial, her return to Rome, and her lengthy stays in Naples. As with her father, Orazio, Artemisia’s movement around Italy, and her sojourn to London, can be analyzed in terms of patronage issues and demand, or lack thereof, for her particular style and preferred subject matter, the strong, female heroine.

In both exhibition and catalogue, Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, provides a timely and significant consideration of the work and lives of these two important artists. Undoubtedly, the work done here will also provide the genesis for future scholarship on both father and daughter which will serve to increase still further our understanding of the Gentileschi and their artistic and social milieu.