← After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal
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Maddie
So good, so good, so good.
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B
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Narrator
Rome 14th of May, 1612 the courtroom is stifling, thick with whispers and the rustle of onlookers leaning in. At its centre stands Artemisia Gentilesi, her gaze fixed, her breath measured. The judge's questions slice through the air. Clinical, relentless, yet she does not look away. Months of scrutiny, fear and public judgment press hard against her, but she lifts her chin and steadies her voice. The cords twisted around her fingers tighten, supposedly testing her resolve, drawing pain to the surface. Still, she refuses to waver. In this moment of brutal tension, Artemisia is not only fighting for justice, she is shaping the legacy that will blaze through her art. For centuries,
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Maddie
The revolutionary baroque painter Artemisia
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Narrator
Gentilesi's personal life was marred with trauma
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Maddie
and violence, and she channeled this suffering into explicit art. In the years following her death, attempts were made to diminish her legacy, with several of her paintings misattributed to men. Yet her voice and her artistry refused to disappear. Gentilesi's story is a testament to survival and the power of a woman whose work could not be erased despite society's best efforts. Welcome to After Dark. Foreign. Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie and you might notice that Anthony's not here now. This episode is coming to you during my maternity leave. So picture me. I'm probably covered in vomit. I'm changing some nappies. I'm probably crying at 3am while you're listening to this. Very relaxed. So do enjoy this. Anthony's having the day off. He's doing a stellar job without me, but I thought I'd give him a break. We are going to be discussing a topic and an artist I have wanted to talk about on this podcast for so long. Today we'll be exploring the extraordinary life and legacy of Artemisia Gentilesi. Born into a world that denied women artistic and bodily agency, Artemisia carved a space for herself through sheer talent and relentless determination. Her paintings, which depict complex women, let's say, resonate centuries later. From her early masterpieces to her hard won recognition, Artemisia's story is one of resilience, vision and the transformative force of art. Now, before we get into this episode, just a little warning to listeners and viewers on YouTube. We are going to be talking about a case of sexual assault. So if that's something you don't want to talk about, you don't want to hear today, go back to our back catalogue and enjoy something else. But if you're still with us, I am now going to introduce our amazing guest. It is the presenter, comedian and art historian Verity Babs and the author of the History of Art in One Sentence, which I. I am so excited to read it. It's been sat on my shelf for quite a while. I'm really excited for it. You also host an art themed comedy event called Art Laughs.
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Verity Babs
Yeah.
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Maddie
That's amazing. Tell me about that.
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Verity Babs
Oh, yeah. So, I mean, thank you for having me as well. That's quite all right. So Art Laughs. We bring comics into art spaces, museums, galleries, and we do some art fairs and basically disrupt people who want to have a nice time and ask if they want to see some improv comedy, which they mostly don't. But we do stand up nights in the National Gallery and basically it's a way hopefully to bring new audiences into art spaces and kind of encourage people that any reaction you have to art is okay. I think we think of art as like a really dour and really serious experience, but like a lot of it, very funny.
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Maddie
I tell her both to recovering art historians where we're like, we need it to be less serious, please.
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Verity Babs
Exactly like, and there's so, and there's so many sort of really brilliant stories, really uplifting stories, but also quite nice to just revel in. Quite. How nasty. Almost all of the blokes were quite fun actually.
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Maddie
Well, we're not here to talk about the nasty blokes of art history today. We're here to talk about Artemisia Gentlesi. I wanted to talk about her for so long. For people who don't know who she is, give us a little bit of an overview of her life. When's she born when and where is she in time?
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Verity Babs
So she's born in 1593 in Rome, and she is the daughter of Orazio Gentileschi. And also the different ways I will pronounce her name, and everyone's name throughout this episode is multiple, but. So she's the daughter of a really successful painter, and she's the eldest of four children, and her mother, Prudencia, dies when she's 12. So she then is sort of basically by Orazio, is kind of kept in the studio, because Rome's quite a rough place for a young girl. So she's kept in the studio and trained under her father, and she sort of becomes a surrogate mother for her younger brothers as well.
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Maddie
It's so fascinating, isn't it, that she has that kind of dual experience where, on the one hand, she becomes the eldest woman of the household and therefore has to take on the domestic responsibilities, but also that she's allowed into the studio space. And not only that, but to train as an artist, which is so rare in this moment. And, you know, this is a space in which sometimes naked men are being drawn. This is a space where it's somewhere for sort of discussion of ideas and intellect. This is not a space that women occupy ordinarily, is it? So she would have stood out right, in her father's studio. Yeah.
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Verity Babs
I mean, looking back now, there are a handful of names vaguely happening at this time of women who we now think of as, like, some of the most successful women artists of all time. But it's taken a long time for anyone to realize how good they were. That, like Gentileschi, her show. There's a show in the national gallery gallery In 2021, which was the first major show of hers in the uk, which is ever.
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Maddie
Oh, wow, I didn't know.
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Verity Babs
And it was huge, a really big deal. But now, I think with basically since the 1970s, I guess, in art history, she's really been popped back into the center of things. But up until then, it was really like she might be mentioned every now and again. But so she's really had like a.
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Maddie
And I mean, that's extraordinary in and of itself. But it seems particularly extraordinary to me when you see her paintings and you're like, how could anyone have overlooked this woman? I mean, her work is. Just get into it. But it's so full of passion and rage and beauty and power in an extraordinary way. One of the other famous painters working in this moment, of course, is Caravaggio, and she's very influenced by her Own father's work, but also by Caravaggio, isn't she? Tell me a little bit about that and how his work kind of creeps in to her early development.
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Verity Babs
Yeah. So, I mean, Caravaggio is mates with her dad, so she actually knows him
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Maddie
and artistic world in Rome.
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Verity Babs
And they're all living in the artist's quarter in Rome, so they're basically all living in Hackney Wick altogether. And so she knows Caravaggio. And there's this really grim moment in history where potentially Caravaggio and Gentileschi are, like, drawing a lot of inspiration from the same thing. So Gentileschi would only have been, like, 6 years old, like quite a young child, when basically in Rome there's a really famous public beheading of a woman called Beatrice Cenci. Not C, E, N, C, E. We'll go with that.
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Maddie
Write in and tell us who got it right.
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Verity Babs
But so there's really famous public beheading, and potentially she witnesses this. Caravaggio definitely witnesses this. And both of them supposedly draw on that experience for their own later depictions of people being beheaded.
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Maddie
Do we know why this woman's being beheaded?
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Verity Babs
So she is beheaded, basically. She has been imprisoned by her father. She is repeatedly sexually assaulted by her father, and she does him in, as she should, and she goes to court and then she's done for the murder. There's no extenuating circumstances. She's done for the murder and is publicly beheaded. And there's still, to this day, the night before her anniversary of her beheading, she's meant to pop up in Rome and carrying her severed head to sort of spook people out. Almost all of Rome basically could have seen this appalling thing, which adds into both Caravaggio and Gentileschi having this really dark and very, like, visceral approach to brutality.
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Maddie
Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting that it's this particular story and this beheading and the woman's backstory leading up to that moment that is gonna have such an effect on Artemisia herself, for reasons that are gonna become clear. Let's think a little bit. First, her ambitions as an artist, because she trains, as you say, under her father, and she's serious about this, and she is seriously talented. I mean, he speaks openly about his daughter's talent. He's very proud of her, isn't he? But what kind of obstacles would be in place for a woman wanting to professionally paint in this moment?
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Verity Babs
I mean, there are sort of the base level barriers that all women are experiencing to do anything. That there's fundamentally, like a lack of belief that women can succeed in comparison to their male counterparts. So she's coming up against that. She's coming up. I think, oddly, it ends up being a bit of an issue that she is training under her father in her father's studio, because it ends up being basically, despite the fact that Orazzio writes letters saying how talented his teenage daughter is and people must come and see this work and how she's massively accomplished at such a young age, people still think that Orazio is basically making them and sort of signing her name on them, kind of as out of charity,
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Maddie
kind of just almost like a gimmick,
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Verity Babs
maybe like as a nice daddy thing to do.
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Maddie
Yeah. Oh, so he's a bit cringe.
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Verity Babs
There's like. There's. There's an fo baby thing going on, but so she almost has to battle against the idea that maybe he's sort of doing them. But, you know, this is a problem that anyone has trying to specifically date or specifically attribute works in this era to artists. So she's got the problem of basically, people think her dad's done it. People are shocked and surprised that she's a woman and that she's so young as well. So it's like a double whammy.
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Maddie
I mean, she's painting as a teenager, isn't she?
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Verity Babs
Incredible works, completely brilliant works, when you look at them, in comparison to the work her dad does is actually like a lot softer and a lot. I think that her dad's work is quite sort of classical and like intense. But she also has this problem that all artists have in this period, which is when she kind of comes into her own as a sort of fully grown adult artist. She's working in a workshop. So by nature, other people have worked on these works. So it's then quite hard to tell that she was the one who did it.
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Maddie
Yeah. I mean, let's just explain that for people who maybe don't know about this, you know that often if you. I mean, right up until the 19th century, right. If you look at particular portrait, for example, let's take a portrait that the artist who's attributed to that work may have done the face, for example, but maybe not the clothing. Well, the background, that could have been several other hands.
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Liberty Mutual Bird Wife
Right.
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Maddie
That this is a completely different way of working to how we expect. We have the sort of the idea of, I suppose, the lone male genius working away in his studio. I'm thinking about, you know, we see this all the time on Screen things like the Vermeer film with Colin Firth, you know, where it's just one man in his studio. And maybe Vermeer did work like that, but, you know, there's a kind of lack of depiction in our popular imagination of what art working was like in this moment.
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Verity Babs
And, yes, you're going through your. Traditionally, as an artist, you go through your apprenticeships and you work in someone else's workshop. You present a masterpiece to the guild, and then the perk of that is you can then have your own workshop and get other people to do bits of the work you don't like. So lots of artists are then, like,
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Maddie
you could do that with books.
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Liberty Mutual Bird Wife
Yeah.
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Maddie
Like, could someone else do the footnotes? I mean, exactly what men did throughout the 20th century.
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Verity Babs
Right.
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Maddie
The thanks for typing idea of all those wives who did the footnotes and the research.
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Verity Babs
Often, you know, basically you earn the right to go, I'm not doing any more hands. I'm like, I'm out. I'm out of hands.
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Maddie
I mean, hands are hard. Right.
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Verity Babs
Hands are hard. You know, so she struggles with being attributed her work because of that.
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Maddie
Okay.
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Verity Babs
But then also, when she's massively successful, when she's living in Naples later on in, in her story, there are so many churches in Naples, she's really doing quite well with getting church commissions. And if you're commissioned by a church to do an altarpiece, you don't need to write your name on it. Like, it's kind of irrelevant that you did it because it's sort of holy and above you.
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Maddie
Right. So we don't know necessarily everything that she did exactly.
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Verity Babs
Or it's been really hard won to prove that it was her and how much was her. And, you know, so she's up against all these issues that actually quite a lot of Baroque and Renaissance masters are up against, plus the being a woman and being young and, you know.
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Maddie
Yeah. And having to take responsibility in that domestic space, et cetera, et cetera. She's got a lot going on. Okay. One painting from I think the age of around 17 that we do know that she painted is Susannah and the Elders. I'm going to describe this. I've seen this so many times. But I'm just going to give a brief description and then we can talk about it, because it's so. I mean, it must have been remarkable at the time and revolutionary in terms of the vibe. This is, you know, this is a biblical topic that comes up again and again. We'll talk about the story behind it. But this is A very different take to what you see in this period, particularly painted by male painters. Okay, so this is a painting of Susannah, who is in the foreground. She's sat on some kind of marble bench. She is nude, but for a little piece of cloth that is sort of wrapped around her thigh, covering her modesty. And she is recoiling in horror and anguish from the two men, the elders, who are behind her, who are chastising her, whispering about her, leering at her in this really grim way. I mean, it's sort of a depressing snapshot of the female experience across time. But this feels to me the work of a 17 year old who understands this story from a very specific point of view. Like she has lived this experience to a certain extent, hasn't she? Tell me about this painting.
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Verity Babs
Well, I mean, this is like you say, a really radical depiction of Susannah and the elders. So, story of Susannah and the Elders. Basically, Susanna, lovely young lady, and two of the elders in her community are perving on her one day and they spot each other perving, and they say, well, why don't we perv together? Why perv alone when you can perv with a friend? And they say, what we'll do is we will blackmail her for sex, otherwise we will tell the community that she has been adulterous, for which you can get the death penalty at the time. So there's like high stakes. And Susanna declines. And then they do claim that she committed adultery and there's no one else to witness against that fact. And then eventually she, you know, she pleads to God and God sends Daniel, this is in the book of Daniel in the Old Testament, to tell the truth. And so it all ends up okay,
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Maddie
thank God another man comes along to sort this out for her.
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Verity Babs
God bless Daniel. So basically this is the first depiction though of Susannah, not fundamentally kind of being coquettishly sort of into it. Lots of older depictions of this scene, which it happens time and time again. It's a real staple for art history. She's always quite like fun and flirty
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Maddie
rather than a cool, completely serene and sort of like, oh, this is just happening. But I will remain dignified. But this is. I mean, this is. She's literally holding her hands with rejection. She's pushing them away. She's the look on her face and the kind of that very actually Caravaggio esque twist of her body, like the absolute agony of what she's going through. It's so powerful. And to paint that at 17 is completely remarkable.
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Verity Babs
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
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Maddie
Let's talk a little bit about one of the major events in her life. And I'm hesitant to define her by this, but it nevertheless, it is a crucial part of her story, isn't it? And this is an assault that happens to her, that is done to her and the subsequent trial. And I mean, it's remarkable for so many reasons in terms of the publicity around it the fact that this is taken into the public sphere, the fact that accusations are made and the way that she is treated in that moment. But talk to me about the man who does this to her and how he appears in her domestic space, what happens and how this crime unfolds.
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Verity Babs
Sure. So Orazio has Artemisia in the studio and he decides that he's going to hire his friend, a man called Agostino Tassi, to give her private tutelage in painting. So Tassi is a painter. He works quite a lot with Orazio. They do papal commissions together so that they're very close and work together.
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Maddie
And presumably this is like a good opportunity for him to incorporate himself further. It's a trusted role, et cetera.
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Verity Babs
Exactly. So he brought it into the Gentileschi family home. Now, Tassi, for background, almost regardless of what happens next, is already like a total shit. He's in his 30s and he.
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Maddie
I mean, he really is, isn't he? I was reading about him in prep for this and. What an asshole.
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Verity Babs
You know, when you hear about the worst thing a historical character did and then you hear about all the rest of it was horrible.
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Maddie
Yeah. You're like, oh, okay, that wasn't a one off.
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Verity Babs
Yeah, yeah. So we overlook all the fact that he's fundamentally a really n. He is accused of having sexually assaulted his sister, sexually assaulting his wife. He brags quite a lot about. It's not quite clear how many times he was married. But he boasts about the fact that he's had one of his wives killed for being unfaithful. So generally that could be the end of his story. And he still ally, let's say, terrible vibes. And he works with Gentileschi and is giving her private tutelage. And the interesting thing about this whole case is that Gentileschi gave such detailed testimonials. So we have her work, like her exact words translated of what happened. So she says that he basically accosts her, he follows her upstairs and he pushes her into the bedroom despite her protestations, and he rapes her. And she gives the most gruesome and horrible and like, visceral details of this happening, which is remarkable at the time.
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Maddie
I mean, it's remarkable now she's 18 years old at this moment, and she
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Verity Babs
gives details about the fact that, you know, that she tried to scream, but he was covering her mouth. She says that she gripped his penis so hard she took away piece of the flesh. But he didn't. It didn't bother him at All.
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Maddie
Wow.
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Verity Babs
So there's like really like serious details in this. So, you know, it's horrific. And then Tassi offers to marry her.
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Maddie
Oh, what a gentleman.
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Verity Babs
Yeah.
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Maddie
So I'm sure she's thrilled at that offer.
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Verity Babs
But the thing is, it's like she, at that point in this society, she has lost one of the most significant things that make her sort of marriage material. Right. So she is no longer a virgin. She doesn't want her father to find out. So she agrees and she wants to keep this secret from her father. But he does find out in 1612. And then he is furious, not because his daughter has been traumatized, but because essentially his goods have been damaged. So he takes Tassi to court. It's not like, you know, Artemisia isn't taking him to court, Tassi's taking. Orazio is taking him to court.
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Maddie
And it's a sort of case of the family honor has been. Has been kind of damaged in some way. Yeah. And the goods, as you say, I mean, it's really grim. Cause you think on the one hand, you know, Orazio is kind of ahead of his time maybe in that he has this daughter that he brings into this all male space and he is willing to push her forward and to encourage her talent and to train her in this profession that is not for women in this moment. And yet this tells you the context in which they live and how they understand their roles. And. Yeah, it's sort of disappointing from a modern perspective, but it is unusual that it goes to court. Right? I mean, you know, even today, the. There are thousands of alleged sexual assaults and rape that never make it to court at all. So even in, you know, for this to happen in the 17th century really is remarkable. Tell me a little bit about the trial, because it's very public and as you say, Artemisia gives these really. Yeah. Visceral, brutal details. She's not. I mean, she might be afraid, but she's brave enough to give this level of information and to testify against her attacker, but also to stand up for herself. She's defending herself, really. She, Tassi, might officially be the one on trial, but she is not necessarily believed here, is she? So what happens in this circus?
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Verity Babs
Yeah, I mean, her reputation is completely in tatters and it remains in tatters for quite a while afterwards. But also the interesting thing about this trial, because it is, you know, the grim phrase of he said, she said, there are academics who don't really buy it, who basically believe that it was a vague setup by Gentileschi and her father, they wanted Tassi to marry her.
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Maddie
Even now, people are.
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Verity Babs
Even now. Interestingly, I've only ever heard men tell me that they doubt the sort of validity of her testimony. So we can't ever really know what happens. So the trial goes on. It's one of Rome's, still, to date, longest ever rape trials. It goes on for nearly a year. It's massively public. At one point, there's a horrible little detail where basically Tassi, who we all know is like a horrible little man, he does a little drawing in court and they still have this copy of this drawing, and it's of some kind of lute. It's something kind of musical. And over the top it says something like, you know, I am guilty for my bad situation. Which is. Which isn't interpreted as a declaration of guilt. It's interpreted as him basically saying, I, like any saintly man, feel bad that this is happening generally. So he's basically saying, I'm sorry you feel that way. So, yeah, really grim through a little sketch.
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Maddie
I mean, that couldn't get any more obnoxious.
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Verity Babs
It's very performative, very soft boy. Like, very.
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Maddie
Not good.
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Verity Babs
But, yeah. So this trial goes on, and in its 10th month, they decide that they're going to resort to torture.
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Maddie
And this isn't torture of Tassi?
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Verity Babs
No, and it's not torture of Tassi because basically Tassi is being commissioned at that time by the Pope. And in Rome, which is, you know, ruled by the Vatican, it's a really bad idea to mess with the Pope.
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Maddie
Well, lucky for him, there was no Cancel Culture at this moment, so he could carry on working at the trial. Exactly.
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Verity Babs
So they decide they're not going to torture Tassi because the way that they were going to do the torture and the torture that they did on Gentileschi instead involve wrapping ropes around their fingers and pulling very hard to sort of. It gets rid of the blood flow in your fingers. It's like, agonisingly painful.
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Maddie
Not ideal if you're an artist.
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Verity Babs
Exactly. So which is why Tassie basically could say, you know, I can't, I'm busy. And important, like when Steve Coogan got, like, a speeding ticket and he was like, I'm about to film another TV program where I have to do driving, so, sorry, I can't do it. So it's very much like that. We will be hearing from Steve Steam, but, you know. And there are worse versions of this for men. The women apparently get it a bit lighter. But there are other versions of this Torture, where there's wood attached to the rop iron, like they make it. It's horrible.
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Maddie
I'm. Presumably there's like potentially long term damage to your hands.
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Verity Babs
Yeah, big time. And she, under torture, still testifies that this is what happened to her. So Tassi is found guilty. He is found guilty and handed a sentence of five years exile, which he does not do. He does like a year or two in prison, we think. But, you know, he.
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Maddie
And that's it. I mean, it is amazing to me that he's found guilty at all. And I suppose it says something about the store that is placed by torture as a way to elicit the truth from a situation. But even then, that he is able to essentially walk free.
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Verity Babs
Yes.
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Maddie
Maybe he does a little bit of prison time. But presumably for Artemisia, her, as you say, her reputation's been ruined. What is life like for her after this? How does she recover from this moment?
- [27:14]
Verity Babs
Yeah, I mean, so for her, even though she's technically one, her reputation is completely in tatters and she basically has two options. She either marries to try to save some face, basically, and save the family's reputation. Because, you know, this is Orazio's reputation as well. It's all kind of tied up with a kind of grim patriarchal bow. So it's like they're part and parcel with each other. So to save the family's reputation, she either has to marry or basically become a nun.
- [27:41]
Maddie
Don't love those odds.
- [27:42]
Verity Babs
No, I don't love those options.
- [27:45]
Maddie
That's a terrible. Yeah, terrible TV game, isn't it? Like, welcome to Nun Swap.
- [27:53]
Verity Babs
Oh, imagine how people are like, I really should just become a nun. People who married young and they're like, I should have been a nun.
- [27:58]
Maddie
Should have been a nun.
- [28:00]
Verity Babs
In options as well. Tassi, actually, when he's found guilty, he's given options as well for what he wants to do. He's either given the option of exile or hard labor. And he takes exile, which I think says a lot about his character.
- [28:12]
Maddie
So much about him. Yeah, yeah. He's like, these hands need to remain soft for Painter.
- [28:17]
Verity Babs
So her reputation tatters. She either has to marry or join a convent. She is then set up with the brother of one of Orazzio's lawyers. Oh, okay. She meets him on the afternoon of the wedding and luckily he turns out sort of by chance to be kind of young and hot, which we love.
- [28:34]
Maddie
I love that for her, like, yes, please.
- [28:36]
Verity Babs
It could have gone really. Given that this was really. She could have had another test, really Rushed. I just need her reputation to be saved. So she marries her husband, who, who is Pier Antonio Stiatessi and he's a Florentine, and they move to Florence together. But there's a really beautiful fact about their wedding, not beautiful, but interesting fact about their wedding, that when they were married, they were married in a little tiny side chapel. Because basically all of the Gentileschi family are really worried about Tassi turning up, about someone trying to exact revenge. So they end up getting married in a tiny side bit of the chapel.
- [29:08]
Maddie
Wow. So even in this moment, the whole trial is still looming so large in her life.
- [29:12]
Verity Babs
There's a lot of like really ill feeling towards the Gentileschi family in general because of this. Tassie has like, you know, a gang, basically.
- [29:19]
Maddie
Yeah. Because they've had the audacity to call someone out for that crime that is presumably happening left, right, all the time.
- [29:24]
Verity Babs
Exactly. So they get married in this tiny side chapel and they lock all the doors, which is illegal because you have to have the doors open at a wedding so that anyone can run in, should anyone want to not hold their peace and say they're already married. Wow. So they do basically an illegal wedding. She's the only woman there. It's like a tiny little affair. And then they move to Florence together.
- [29:45]
Maddie
Wow. Okay. So she's been given, I don't wanna say a second chance because all she's done so far is just advocate for herself and live her life. But she is given this opportunity, if we want to dress it up as such, to have a life, to have some kind of opportunity and some kind of future, I suppose. How does her husband feel about her painting? Does she still continue to paint?
- [30:08]
Verity Babs
So actually it turns out not only is he young and hot, that he's actually quite. Seems quite open minded.
- [30:13]
Maddie
I mean, this guy sounds great, dreamy. The bar is literally so.
- [30:20]
Verity Babs
But he ends up being like a really good business partner for her, essentially. So she carries on painting. She has five children, so she's like heavily pregnant a lot of the time. She's still painting. She is in Florence. She basically manages to build her own network, her client book, basically. Which is massively helped by the fact that she becomes mates with the nephew of Michelangelo. So he really helps.
- [30:43]
Maddie
That always helps.
- [30:44]
Verity Babs
Yeah. If you happen to know Michelangelo, it's always massively helpful. So she. And she's building her reputation. Her husband is suitably supportive and she's painting a lot. She's building her own client book. She has five children, the first three of which pass away, which is, even for that time, terrible odds. So she's a businesswoman and an artist and a mother, but also a grieving mother. So she is.
- [31:07]
Maddie
She's been through a lot of trauma.
- [31:09]
Verity Babs
Yeah, There's a lot going on for her. Her daughter, who is the only one who survives into adulthood, also gets trained by her to be an artist, which is lovely, and is named after her.
- [31:18]
Maddie
Do we have works of hers?
- [31:19]
Verity Babs
No, we don't. We don't have any trace of work she's done, but it's believed that she was trained to be an artisan.
- [31:24]
Maddie
There's, like, a historical fiction novel, isn't there, of, like, Artemisia's daughter?
- [31:28]
Verity Babs
What happened to Prudencia? Yeah.
- [31:29]
Maddie
Oh, my God. I think she takes revenge on everyone related to Tassie.
- [31:33]
Verity Babs
Oh, so good.
- [31:34]
Maddie
Someone commissioned this. Now, please, I will write this immediately. Just thinking about her art then, that she's continuing to make. But she's been through all this trauma, but she clearly has such passion and commitment to what she does. Do we see a shift in tone in her art? I mean, it was. Was, you know, pretty outspokenly feminist already. Thinking back to Susannah and the Elders, I'm going to describe the next painting
- [31:57]
Verity Babs
that I want to talk about.
- [31:58]
Maddie
And I think this is one that people will have in their mind if they know anything about Artemis. The agenda. I think this is the one that you will have seen. This is a later painting that comes later in her life. And, I mean, where to start with this? It's really quite hard to describe. There is, at the center of the scene, a man lying on what looks like a bed. He is upside down. He is facing the viewer, and he is having his head cut off with a sword by two women who are leaning over him. One of them is holding him down. The other one is wielding this weapon. And there is blood spurting everywhere. And there's this great kind of chiaroscuro lighting, which is, again, typical of the period and very Caravaggio, actually, but it lights up. Not only the absolute panic on this man's face, the anguish of his death, but also the determination and the rage of these two women. It's pretty dark and angry and magnificent in art historical terms. Just the composition, the delicious kind of textures of all the bedding, the clothing that they're all wearing, the lighting, it's so stunning and so arresting. Is this typical? First of all, what is this painting? And is it typical of the art that we see her producing?
- [33:16]
Verity Babs
Sure. So, yeah, this is Judith slaying a holofernes and yes. So the story is that Judith, she's a widow in the city of Bethulia and Nebuchadnezzar's army takes over Bethulia. She decides in order to save her city, she will basically court Holofernes at a banquet. He gets drunk and she beheads him.
- [33:39]
Maddie
This is just a normal night out.
- [33:41]
Verity Babs
It's a big. You're gonna need a Greggs in the morning and a lie in, but you're
- [33:45]
Maddie
wake up and be like, what happened? Oh, that happened.
- [33:47]
Verity Babs
Oh, my head.
- [33:48]
Maddie
Oh, yeah. Better than his.
- [33:51]
Verity Babs
But, yeah, so it's so, you know, another story of, you know, all the way through her career. Artemisia builds her reputation on depictions of women and oftentimes wronged women, women who are misunderstood. So you get Judith and Susanna and Mary Magdalene and Cleopatra. She does a lot of these sort of women who are done wrong by.
- [34:13]
Maddie
And who are not only done wrong by, but who take matters into their own hands in some way, often to their own detriment. I think of Cleopatra and her suicide, of course, but, you know, women who often are taking revenge in some way,
- [34:25]
Verity Babs
and there's real proactivity in all of their stories. I mean, it's a problem that some academics have with the way that Gentileschi's story is told, is that we basically take everything back to this really traumatic event. So this Judith is painted in 16, 12, 13. So, you know, it's the year that the trial ends. And. And we often think of it as the art history's ultimate revenge piece. You know, that's what it's about. It's secretly about this.
- [34:53]
Maddie
It's the revenge dress of its age.
- [34:55]
Verity Babs
Very much so. And also, like Susannah is remarkably sort of fighting back in the earlier work. In this one. This is so grisly when you see even Caravaggio's beheading, which is quite gruesome. This is so full of fury because he's very much still alive. There are lots of other ones where he's kind of. He's a bit sleepy, but he's basically out. Or where he might have his eyes open, but, you know, there's not much life there.
- [35:20]
Maddie
The man in this painting is struggling for help.
- [35:22]
Verity Babs
He is fighting back. He has got his hand up, so there's still strength enough in his body to be fighting back.
- [35:28]
Maddie
He's pushing one of the women away with his hand, isn't he?
- [35:29]
Verity Babs
So it's like this is remarkably, remarkably active and remarkably grisly when you think about exactly what's happening here. So I Think that it stands out maybe because of where it comes in the timeline, in terms of this year, the revenge dress. But it is something that she's always been doing of the perspective of women. She does self portraits, which is very unusual at the time. She has this one self portrait of herself in the allegory of painting, which demonstrates sort of her belief in her position as a serious painter, as a serious artist. And yes, I think these strong women come up time and time again.
- [36:03]
Maddie
So the interest has always been there for her. But maybe it's fair to say that there's something that just tips the scales after the trial, in terms of the tone, is she's gone down a certain road. Fair play.
- [36:15]
Verity Babs
And also, we love biography, we love artist biography that, you know, I think it's human nature to try to attach events to the thing that the artist then made. And, you know, even if that's not her intention, even if she's actually trying to separate herself from it, we, you know, it's natural that our reading then is she's. She is standing in for Judith and Tassi is Holofernes.
- [36:36]
Maddie
And where do you sit on that argument? Do you think that that is a helpful way to look at this piece of work?
- [36:42]
Verity Babs
I don't know. I'm always pro artist biography feeding in. And largely that's because I don't think that it matters that much because they're dead. I actually think that history can be more useful as a tool for us to learn from and live our lives by, and art especially, to sort of inspire us. I think that we can get really bogged down in artist intention. Whereas actually, if this piece is really meaningful to someone because they now associate it with that thing happening to her, maybe that's relevant to them or they. Whatever you read into it, I think that that is more beneficial to our lives, the lives of the living, than it is necessary to sort of really respect the opinions of the long dead. But that might also be considered sacrilegious by many. So I don't really mind.
- [37:29]
Maddie
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really interesting take. And I think, you know, you can't help but stand in front of this painting and feel that visceral anger. There is no way that is not present, whether it's coming from her own autobiography or whether it's just something that she needs to put out into her work. There is that rage there. It does exist in the work. I don't think it's possible to not have that.
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Verity Babs
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
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- [39:33]
Maddie
We know that she moves to Florence when she's married. We know that she spends some time in Venice and you said earlier she spends some time in Naples as well. She also comes to London. Now, I didn't know this about her story and I was looking at the notes for this episode and I did a little squeal on the tube. I was like, what? She came to London? How did I not know this? So tell me about this. Why did she come to London when. Because she comes at a really. I'm always really interested in women artists, artists in the broadest sense here, who are sort of embroiled in moments. I think of like Mary Wollstonecraft, who gets caught up in the French Revolution and is there in that moment. And Artemisia comes to London at a particular time in history, a particular moment when things are really changing. So tell me, what's she doing there and how is her art received in England?
- [40:17]
Verity Babs
I think it's always really remarkable when, yeah, women get embroiled in massive historical happenings and you never hear about it in their work because they're just getting on with things. It's like Jane Austen never mentioning, yeah,
- [40:26]
Maddie
well, Mary Wollstonecraft had a little baby. She was like, I have stuff to do. I've been abandoned By, I think, an American. The American baby daddy. And, you know, I'm busy, I'm busy.
- [40:34]
Verity Babs
And none of this right now.
- [40:35]
Maddie
You guys can revolutionize yourselves over there. That's fine. I'm just cracking on with this. Yeah.
- [40:39]
Verity Babs
But she comes over in 1638, her father is already here and he is like a favorite of Charles I. So he. He's in London and she comes over also at this point, she is estranged from Pierre Antonio, who, despite being hot and young, I think it turns out is quite spend. Thrifty.
- [40:58]
Maddie
Oh, okay. A little bit disappointing.
- [41:00]
Verity Babs
Yeah. He's not great with money and I think that he had an affair. So, you know, things have broken down. Yeah, they're estranged. And so she comes over in 1638 and she helps Orazzio with the painting of the ceiling in the Queen's house in Greenwich, which lots of people will have seen and not realize that. But isn't it remarkable, the idea of. I always find it very difficult to. Difficult to picture historical figures being proper people who go to different places and have experiences. So the idea of Gentileschi sort of cutting about in Greenwich is.
- [41:29]
Maddie
It's so weird.
- [41:31]
Verity Babs
It's like a crossover episode where the Simpsons turn up.
- [41:33]
Maddie
I can't actually do this. Exactly. Our favourite characters are in the wrong place here and it's weird. Yeah. No, I think that that's so amazing. And to think that her and her father's hand, their art is visible in a space that is so iconic, but so deeply English in terms of, you know, how we think about it historically, how we present it, how we talk about it now. That's really remarkable. And she's here for the outbreak of the Civil War, isn't she?
- [41:57]
Verity Babs
Yeah.
- [41:58]
Maddie
Which is. I just find that absolutely fascinating. Again, that feels like a crossover episode. It's like, no, I can't. This is not computing. She does go back to Italy eventually, though, doesn't she?
- [42:06]
Verity Babs
Yeah, she goes back. She heads back to Naples and then she's moved about in Italy quite a lot for, you know, the idea that a woman from Italy in this era would go to London is boggling. The idea. Even the idea that she's gone to. She goes to lots of different cities in Italy is amazing.
- [42:22]
Maddie
She's really lived a life.
- [42:23]
Verity Babs
She's lived a real life. And she spends quite a lot of time, I think, in Italy moving about in order to avoid the plague. So she goes from Venice to Naples to kind of get away from it all. But she goes back to Naples. She spends the rest of her Life there. And she. I think this story or this part of her is like, definitely as worthy as her trauma as being something we remember her by. Is she really played the game. She, like, she really played the. The art making game. She was known for basically buying really nice clothes, like really lovely clobber on credit and sort of strolling about near the courts and writing letters to her.
- [42:58]
Maddie
Handing out her business cards.
- [43:00]
Verity Babs
Yeah. Like. And, you know, being seen to be this really elegant lady who could be in the court in the hope that then people who are in the court go, oh, we should get her in.
- [43:07]
Maddie
Yeah.
- [43:08]
Verity Babs
There's one story where she basically, her and a friend have a pretend argument about money in the. Or in a shop just as a wealthy merchant walks by and then sort of chivalrously offers her the money, she gives him a painting back. But, you know, she's hustling big time. And, you know, she's pen friends with Galileo, which again, feels like I can't. I can't get them to be in the same timeline in my head. But she's pen pals with him. She's pen pals with.
- [43:36]
Maddie
Does that correspondence survive, do you know?
- [43:37]
Verity Babs
I'm not sure whether it does, but there's a.
- [43:40]
Maddie
That would be. I mean, what were they talking about? That would be incredible to know.
- [43:42]
Verity Babs
She writes quite like, basically needy letters, being like, would you mind?
- [43:46]
Maddie
She just wants to borrow a tenner, basically.
- [43:48]
Verity Babs
She wants to borrow a tenant. Can you mention me to your friends?
- [43:52]
Maddie
Okay. That's a bit embarrassing.
- [43:53]
Verity Babs
It's like slightly embarrassing, but, like, gotta be done. You know that thing of like, oh, I don't want to put videos online. It's cringe. It's like, gotta be done. So she would be on TikTok today, big time.
- [44:01]
Maddie
She really would.
- [44:01]
Verity Babs
Yeah.
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Liberty Mutual Jingle
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- [44:02]
Verity Babs
So, yeah, so she's sending these, like, slightly needy letters to Galileo. She is aware that there are barriers in the way of her succeeding which largely revolve around her being a woman and having to make her own money now that her husband sort of is out of the picture. And she goes, do you know what? If I have to sort of lie, if I have to sort of beg.
- [44:22]
Maddie
Would we find it as embarrassing if it was a man hustling like this? I don't know. I think, you know, and that would have absolutely happened. That would have been men doing that left, right and centre. So, you know, good for her. I say she dies sometime in the 1650s. We're not really sure, are we?
- [44:35]
Verity Babs
Yeah.
- [44:35]
Maddie
I find this remarkable. Her tomb is destroyed. Am I right in saying in the 1950s, it's inside a church that is demolished. And I just think that's so interesting. We'll talk a little bit about her legacy in a second. But just thinking about, you know, that she's become this kind of pop feminist icon today, a little bit like Frida Kahlo, for example. She's sort of reproduced on tote bags and mugs and all of that. And, you know, that's a whole other kind of conversation maybe, about the use of that. But it's interesting to me that there's not really a place of pilgrimage to remember her now. There's not. Unless you go and look at her paintings, of course, or, you know, go to the Queen's house in Greenwich. Why not? But there isn't the same kind of drawing. Or I'm thinking, you know, something like Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey that kind of you can go and be with these great minds and spend time with them and sort of commune with them. We don't have that for her, so. And you mentioned previously as well, that she's kind of forgotten about until maybe the sort of 1970s and the sort of feminist rediscovery of her and reclaiming of her. What has her legacy been in? Was it literally just centuries of darkness? We forgot who she was. She no longer existed for people. And then she's rediscovered in the 20th century, like, what happened?
- [45:49]
Verity Babs
I mean, like her reputation, like when she dies. So they think that she probably died like a little bit after 1954 or in 1954, because she's still paying taxes in the early bit of that year. So they know that she's alive then, even though the year before, some people in Venice wrote an unpleasant epigraph about her in a book of epigraphs, saying that she died and basically, like, slagging her off.
- [46:09]
Maddie
Oh, wow.
- [46:10]
Verity Babs
So her reputation is already not great by the time she dies. So even though she's making this brilliant work, even though she's really. She's made it happen for her as a historic.
- [46:17]
Maddie
She is a controversial figure.
- [46:19]
Verity Babs
Yeah. And it all links back to fundamentally, the Gentileschis are trouble, basically. So she dies and then this is where sort of my art historical knowledge about what happens to her legacy in the intervening sort of hundreds of years happens. All we know is that she has this real comeback in the 20th century. And I think in the 20th century there is this genuine sense that, like, we need to find some women and big them up, basically, because there have been women, there have been loads of them. But we have the big art history books that are still wheeled out to you at university as like, this is your introduction to art history. And don't ask any questions about the fact there's no women in there, there's no people of colour in it. Like, just don't ask any questions about that. So there is this sort of. She comes back into the spotlight and a lot of that is kind of coinciding with works being re attributed to her. You know, the more popular she becomes, the more keen people are to react, reattribute things to her because there's feels like there's more of a point to it. And now she does sort of, like I was saying earlier, she now sort of represents something bigger than the art. I think that there are a lot of people who potentially would even name her among their favorite artists, but maybe they know one or two paintings, maybe they don't know any paintings, but they fundamentally sort of approve of her as a sort of figurehead of women who have made it happen, despite the shit.
- [47:41]
Maddie
She's become a sort of cultural icon.
- [47:42]
Verity Babs
Yeah, exactly.
- [47:43]
Maddie
Yeah. If there was one work of hers that you would want people to go and look at, spend some time with, either online or ideally in a gallery in front of it, which one would you recommend?
- [47:55]
Verity Babs
I mean, the two you've spoken about feel like the real highlights of her.
- [47:59]
Maddie
For me, it's gotta be Judith beheading them. Like, it's. So we've said visceral a lot on this podcast, but it is so visceral and so it's still shocking all these centuries later.
- [48:11]
Verity Babs
Later.
- [48:12]
Maddie
The violence of it and the. Yeah, the anger of it is remarkable.
- [48:15]
Verity Babs
And it's interesting to look at that piece as well, because we live in a time, thank goodness, that you see very few beheadings. Like you witness very few beheadings. But at this point it's like hard to remember that lots of people will have seen a beheading. That there is a grotesqueness to actually being able to remember that really up until very, very recently, people saw that level of growth gore quite regularly. So there's quite. It's. It kind of does, you know, it takes you aback looking at it, to then try to piece it together of like, actually this is not. It's almost shocking that it wouldn't have been that shocking.
- [48:53]
Maddie
Yes. Yeah, that's an interesting point. Verity, if people want to find your work, if they want to know more about you, where can they do that?
- [49:00]
Verity Babs
You can follow me at veritybabsart. You can buy my book please.
- [49:06]
Maddie
Available online and in store.
- [49:08]
Verity Babs
Available in all good and bad retailers.
- [49:11]
Maddie
This is the history of art in one sentence.
- [49:12]
Verity Babs
The history of art in one sentence. Thanks. It felt like a slightly My agent was like, you kind of cheated having to write a book by just doing it in sentences. So it is a slightly cheaty book, but hopefully that's kind of a an introduction to art history with some of the funny bits left in Nice. And yeah, Art Laughs the name of the comedy nights and we're regularly in the National Gallery and it'd be great to see people.
- [49:33]
Maddie
But yeah, I will be coming along. Absolutely. I really will. Thank you so much. Much. And thank you for watching along or listening at home wherever you are consuming this. If you want to hear more about any artists in the past, then let us know. You can write into us@darkstoryhit.com until next time.
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Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
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