Artemisia Gentileschi: An Eye for Drama

Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders (1610–11). Courtesy of the Schloss Weißenstein collection, Pommersfelden, Germany

‘I will show Your Illustrious Lordship what a woman can do.’
Artemisia Gentileschi in a letter to Don Antonio Ruffo

I recently visited a splendid exhibition dedicated to the Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (The National Gallery, London, until 24 January 2021).

Artemisia was born in Rome in 1593, the eldest child of the artist Orazio Gentileschi. Having lost her mother when she was 12, she studied painting in her father's workshop and developed a style influenced by Caravaggio, the master of light.

‘Susannnah and the Elders,’ Artemisia’s first recorded work, was painted when she was just 17. While Susannah is bathing in the garden, she is surprised by two elders. The lecherous men, intent on seduction, threaten to accuse her of adultery if she refuses them. Susannah resists. 

In Artemisia’s painting the elders lean in from above, leering, menacing. In hushed voices they conspire against the naked Susannah. She turns away in disgust, recoiling from their foul breath. It is an extraordinarily vivid scene.

A year after she painted ‘Susannnah and the Elders,’ Artemisia was raped by Agostino Tassi, an artist who had been working with her father. To clear her name she had to endure a public trial and judicial torture. As the brutal rope instrument tightened around her fingers, she stood by her testimony:

‘It is true, it is true, it is true.’

The court found in Artemisia’s favour and, a month after the trial, Orazio married her off to another artist. The couple settled in Florence. 

Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1620

It is easy to see Artemisia channelling her anger into her most famous work, ‘Judith Beheading Holofernes.’ The city of Bethulia is under siege by an Assyrian army. Judith has put on a fine dress, entered the enemy camp and dined with the general Holofernes in his tent. He has fallen asleep drunk.

In the darkness Judith and her maidservant Abra set about their grisly business with grim determination. Abra pins Holofernes to the bed. Judith rolls up the sleeves of her gold brocade gown to reveal strong forearms suited to the task. With one hand she grasps Holofernes’ hair and holds his head steady. In her other hand she clutches the sword with which she slices through the general’s neck. The suddenly awoken Holofernes reaches up in terror. Blood spatters over the bed sheets below and onto the arms of the two women. It is like a scene from a horror movie.

Artemisia returns to the theme of Judith and Holofernes a number of times. In other works she paints Judith and Abra immediately after the execution. Abra crouches over Holofernes’ head, bundling it into a sack. Judith stands at the entrance to the tent, illuminated by a solitary candle. Staring out into the black night, she plots their escape. She grips her sword tightly, blood still dripping from its blade. She may have to use it again.

Artemisia clearly has an eye for drama. She carefully chooses ‘the decisive moment’ in a story, presents the characters in compelling relation to one another, considers every nuance of their emotions and lights the scene to accentuate the tension. It is as if time stands still. 

Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith and Maidservant with Head of Holofernes c. 1623–1625

Artemisia does this repeatedly, often celebrating the fortitude of female characters in history and myth. Nymph Corisca escapes the embrace of a lustful Satyr. Persian Queen Esther, pleading for the fate of the Jews, faints into the arms of her two ladies-in-waiting. Jael kneels over Canaanite general Sisera while he is sleeping, and serenely drives a tent peg through his head.

There is a lesson for us all here. If we want to create drama, we should select a precise point in time; stage it; frame it; light it so as to heighten the tension. Set nerves jangling, pulses racing. Make viewers feel the urgency of the occasion.

After the travails of her youth, Artemisia became a successful court painter in Florence, enjoying the patronage of the Medici, and she was the first woman accepted into the artists’ academy. She learned to read and write, socialised with the great and the good, including the polymath Galileo, and embarked on an intense relationship with a local nobleman. She had five children, four of whom died, leaving her to raise her surviving daughter as an artist. In all she had a 40-year career, working in Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples and London. She died around 1654 in her early 60s. She had lived a full life.

'As long as I live I will have control over my being.'

From the court papers of Artemisia’s trial and a bundle of her letters found in 2011, we gain a sense of a strong, defiant, proud and passionate woman. Her vitality and lust for life also leap out from her paintings, not least because in many of them she uses herself as a model.

In ‘Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting’ Artemisia depicts herself as the embodiment of the painterly art. She wears a green silk gown and a gold pendant hangs from her neck. Her hair is organised neatly in a bun, a few strands falling over her cheeks and forehead. In her left hand she grasps the palette, and with the brush in her right hand she reaches for the canvas in front of her. Ignoring us, the viewers, she is a picture of quiet confidence and intense concentration.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, 1638–39, Royal Collection

 'Oh, I am a lonely painter.
I live in a box of paints.
I'm frightened by the devil,
And I'm drawn to those ones that ain't afraid.
I remember that time you told me, you said,
"Love is touching souls."
Surely you touched mine, 'cause
Part of you pours out of me,
In these lines from time to time.’

Joni Mitchell, ‘A Case of You'

No. 304

Lunch at the Spaghetti House, Holborn: Making Friends with Failure

New York Resturant - Edward Hopper, 1922

'If you want to win at life every time, do not step in the ring.’
Anthony Joshua, on regaining the World Heavyweight Boxing Title

One day in the Autumn of 1991 I took my mother to the British Museum. We wandered around the galleries reflecting on Samurai armour and the Sutton Hoo helmet; pausing in front of Ramesses, reliquaries and the Rosetta Stone. Devout and Irish, she was particularly interested in the Celtic crosses and medieval church statues. I was drawn to anything Classical, and the bearded Assyrian man-beasts. I bought her a few postcards from the shop for the collection she kept in scrapbooks back at Heath Park Road.

Afterwards we adjourned to the Spaghetti House in Holborn. I ordered spaghetti bolognaise and told Mum that it wasn’t as good as the one she made at home – with Heinz tomato soup and mince from the local butchers. We chatted affectionately about Dad, her school and my siblings.

I had decided that this was the beginning of a new chapter in our relationship. I would no longer be the sullen, introverted, taciturn youth. I would be solicitous, attentive, considerate. I would take Mum out to lunch, ask her how she felt. I would be an adult.

The day went very well and, as we parted, I told Mum that next time we could visit the National Gallery together. She was surprised and amused. In her own quiet way.

A few months later she was dead.

I had made a mistake. I had left my initiative too late. I would forever be in her debt, unable to pay back all the love and affection of my childhood. And grief and guilt would cast their long shadows.

According to a recent survey of 2,000 people in the UK (Mortar/ KP), we spend 110 hours a year regretting what might have been - the equivalent of 500 waking days over a lifetime. Eight in ten people believe their lives would be better if they had taken more risks. 57% wish they had taken another job. 23% pine for past loves. 

We all walk hand-in-hand with failure and loss, with regret and remorse. And with every passing year our errors add up and accrue. They become life-companions, ghosts that are ready at any moment to tap us on the shoulder and darken the mood.

'Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.'
Salvador Dali

I was nonetheless heartened to read about another recent study, this time from the journal, Nature Communications (November 2019). Scientists at Brown University, the University of Arizona, UCLA and Princeton conducted a series of machine-learning experiments in which they taught computers simple tasks. 

The computers learned fastest when the difficulty of the problem they were addressing was such that they responded with 85% accuracy. The scientists concluded that we learn best when we are challenged to grasp something just beyond our existing knowledge. When a task is too simple, we don't learn anything new; when a task is too difficult, we fail entirely or just give up.

So learning is optimized when we fail 15% of the time. 

This has a ring of truth about it. In the creative arts practitioners have long been familiar with the concept of learning through misstep and misadventure. Failure illuminates the terrain, suggests new opportunities, and points us on the right path. It confirms that we are pioneering something new. It strengthens our resolve.

'An artist's failures are as valuable as his successes: by misjudging one thing he conforms something else, even if at the time he does not know what that something else is.'
Bridget Riley

'I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.'
Sylvia Plath

Similarly in the world of commerce, entrepreneurs and titans of industry have often celebrated the proving ground of trial and error. 

'I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.’
Thomas Edison

'The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.'
Henry Ford

Indeed the more ambitious a business is to pioneer new categories and sectors, the more it must be prepared to countenance defeat and disappointment. Alphabet’s innovation lab, X, seeks 'radical solutions to huge problems using breakthrough technology.’ X doesn’t just acknowledge the risk of failure; it exalts it:

'If you’re not failing constantly and even foolishly, you’re not pushing hard enough.'

The truth is that failure and how we deal with it define our character. We all look over our shoulders and see a landscape of rash decisions, missed opportunities and wasted time. But, for better or worse, this is our homeland, our mother country. It makes us who we are. 

'Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.'
Truman Capote

I have resolved to be more forgiving of myself and others; to be more comfortable with my past errors of judgement. I plan to make friends with failure. 

So from now on I’m aiming to be wrong 15% of the time. That still gives me a lot to work on. I think Mum would have understood. She’d have been surprised and amused. In her own quiet way.

 'I can't eat, I can't sleep anymore.
Waiting for love to walk through the door.
I wish I didn't miss you anymore.’
Angie Stone, ‘Wish I Didn’t Miss You’ (A Martin / G Mcfadden / J Whitehead / L Huff / I Matias)

No. 276

NOTES FROM THE HINTERLAND 1

Damola suggested that I could supplement the blog with a regular newsletter.

I thought I might make some broad observations about business prompted by plays, films, art, articles and so forth.

So here are this week’s notes from the hinterland…

If We Rid Ourselves of Our Demons, We’ll Lose Our Angels Too

In a recent Desert Island Discs, Stephen Fry quoted Tennessee Williams: ‘If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels too.’

Creative businesses are often confronted with behaviour that is unreliable and unruly, eccentric and erratic. If we expect unconventional answers, we should not be surprised when they come from unconventional sources. Creative talent rarely arrives with a diploma for good behaviour.

And yet creative businesses also have staff that need protecting and values that need sustaining. So where should we draw the line?

Fair Play?

I saw the new Marber play, The Red Lion, at the National Theatre. It’s a compelling piece about life in lower league football. It boasts rich language, good observations on masculinity and some very funny moments.

In the programme notes the former England cricket captain Mike Brearley considers the ‘gang culture’ and ‘mutual humiliation’ at the heart of modern sport.

‘A young middle order batsman who murmured sycophantically to [the bowler} Fred Trueman on his way back to the Pavilion, ‘That was a fine delivery, Fred’ – received the reply ‘Aye, and it were wasted on thee.’

There is a fine line between such more or less legitimate discomfiting gestures and messages on the one hand, and behaviour that goes beyond the spirit of the game on the other…

Sport could not have arisen without individual competitiveness, ambition and Oedipal striving. But nor could it have arisen without love, cooperation and respect.’ 

As ever, sport poses questions that are just as relevant to business and life. What is the appropriate level of competitiveness and rivalry in the era of partnership and collaboration?

The Same But Different

I watched a very funny screwball comedy from 1937. In The Awful Truth Irene Dunne and Cary Grant spar with each other over their divorce.

Lucy: ‘Things are just the same as they always were, only you’re the same as you were too, so I guess things will never be the same again.’

Jerry: ‘You’re wrong about things being different because they’re not the same. Things are different except in a different way. You’re still the same, only I’ve been a fool and I’m not now. So long as I’m different, don’t you think that…well maybe things could be the same again…only a little different, huh?’

It struck me that this is an age-old yearning that applies as much to business as to love. We want to embrace change, but somehow to acknowledge timeless truths. The same but different…

Multi-tasking v Mono-tasking

The Beckett radio play All That Fall was recently performed at the Barbican for an audience sitting in deckchairs. Though it sounds suspiciously like physical theatre, I have to say it was an excellent experience. In the play Mr Rooney demands:

‘Once and for all, do not ask me to speak and move at the same time. I shall not say this in this life again.’

I’m with Mr Rooney. I have always been more a mono-tasker than a multi-tasker. I was encouraged by recent research that suggests the productivity associated with multi-tasking is a myth. Some have suggested it should be called ‘multi-switching’ rather than multi-tasking.

A Lawyer in Heaven

A Man Reading (Saint Ivo?)
about 1450, Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden

At a visit to the National Gallery yesterday I noticed this excellent painting of Saint Ivo by the Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden. Ivo is celebrated as 'the patron saint of lawyers and an advocate of the poor'…

No. 38

Pretentious? Nous?

Philosophy, Salvator Rosa

When I went to school there were the Sports Guys and the Music Guys.

The Sports Guys liked doing circuit training, spraying Ralgex and making noises with their studs in the shower. The Music Guys wore heavy tweed overcoats, pored over the NME crossword and argued about the relative merits of Joy Division and Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King. I liked both categories, but fundamentally I guess I was a Music Guy.

I went to college equipped with Country Born hair gel, ‘fu shoes and Radio London mix tapes. I covered my walls with album covers from Wah, Defunkt and Echo and the Bunnymen. I danced all night to James Brown and Washington Go Go. (Mine was an awkward, heavy-shoe shuffle that alienated girls more than it attracted them.)

I confess I became somewhat pretentious. But I imagine it was an innocent sort of pretentiousness. A love of words and ideas and debate. Of music, books and film.

Obviously pretentiousness is somewhat silly and self-important, but that’s part of its charm. Look at Salvator Rosa in the self portrait above from the National Gallery. He’s painted himself as a sensitive, brooding philosopher , braving a dark, stormy world. He’s carrying a Latin inscription (natch) that reads ‘Keep silent unless you have something more important to say than silence’. How absurd, how pretentious, how cool…

Self Portrait in a Turban, Duncan Grant 1961 Estate of Duncan Grant courtesy Henrietta Garnett

Last summer I visited Charleston, the Sussex country home and social hub of the Bloomsbury art set between the wars. They painted the walls and furniture, they painted each other, they discussed pacifism, ballet and the global financial crisis. They made a show of drinking coffee rather than tea. To be honest I didn’t love all the decorative artwork and I wasn’t too sure about their sleeping arrangements. But I had to admire the fact that they had a view about the world, a design for living.

When I left college I fell into advertising as I thought it was one of the few professions where we Music Guys were welcome. Advertising is an art not a science, it’s creative persuasion, lateral thought. Advertising folk cultivated curious facial hair, absurd spectacles and MA1 Flight Jackets. I felt at home.

In the ’90s our Agency produced the Levi’s campaign and I recall it referencing Ansel Adams, Hunter S Thompson, Rodchenko, Bill Brandt, Burt Lancaster and more besides. Pretentious perhaps, but also bracing stuff.

Now let’s be clear. I’m certainly not a subscriber to the view that advertising is art. At its best it’s creativity applied to a commercial end. But I do believe that creativity needs to be inspired, catalysed and nourished by a broader set of cultural references and ideas.

Of late I’ve begun to  wonder whether we Music Guys have lost our way and our voice a little. I’m concerned that there may not be enough people discussing arthouse movies, German dance troupes, experimental theatre. Shouldn’t the Agency be abuzz with fevered debate about Hockney and Hirst? Shouldn’t creative reviews be inspired by more  than YouTube? I worry in fact that we have become less pretentious.

Perhaps people work so hard nowadays that they don’t have time to develop what Denis Healey called a ‘hinterland’. Maybe it’s straitened times. We want to be seen as sensible, rational, commercial. Maybe it’s Anglo Saxon reserve. We apply a blanket pejorative to anything slightly outside the norms of conversation and thought. Perhaps it’s British anti-intellectualism. Our TV is dominated by unreality shows, costume anti-dramas, middle brow mundanity (what Simon Schama recently labelled ‘cultural necrophilia’). Our Queen prefers Lambourn to Glyndebourne. Our Prime Minister prefers tennis to Tennyson. And his favourite read is a cook book. Maybe we’re just too busy jogging.

Whatever the source of the problem, l’ve come to rue this loss of pretentiousness. I wish people more often cited the marginal and the maddening, the absurd and the abstruse from the world of art, academia and literature. Not just because it’s interesting, challenging, funny. But because today’s obscure eccentric is tomorrow’s bright young thing. Because creativity’s favourite bedfellows are difference and diversity.

So I’ve determined that I’m going to be pretentious in 2012. And I’ll encourage everyone else to do the same.

Honi soit qui mal y pense…

First published: BBH Labs  10/02/2012

No. 11

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