Artemisia's Uffizi Judith Has Been Little Admired

Powerful though it is, Artemisia's Uffizi Judith has been little admired and much criticized.

It was hidden away in the eighteenth century because the Grand Duchess Maria Luisa de' Medici could not stand to see such a horror; in the nineteenth century the writer Anna Jameson described it as "a dreadful picture."

Today, the painting hangs in an inaccessible stairwell of the museum, not on public display. Why should Artemisia's picture have been considered excessively violent when Caravaggio's equally violent art was often snapped up by collectors and praised by critics?

The answer is clear enough: her Judith offends because it presents a socially unacceptable violence, the murder of a man by women who carry out the action so purposefully they may seem as much vindictive as heroic.

This chilling image of female retribution has, in fact, been interpreted by some writers as Artemisia's imagined revenge against the man who raped her several years earlier.

In 1612, Orazio Gentileschl brought suit against his friend, the artist Agostino Tassi for the rape of his daughter, initiating a now-famous trial that lasted seven months.

The extensive trial testimony has been preserved, material that makes quite clear that Artemisia endured sexual harassment and intimidation from Tassi and other men as well.

Artemisia's experience was not unusual, for rape and violence against women were as commonplace in seventeenth century Italy as they still are, unfortunately, today.

What is unusual is that she was able to use that experience as emotional raw material for the creation of radically subversive images of the biblical character (she painted at least four versions of the Judith theme) whose story gives full vent to the principle of violent punishment for a violent act.

Artemisia's Judith paintings are powerful images, resisted by many who find the occasional violence perpetrated by women more shocking than the ubiquitous violence practiced by men.

(A modern equivalent both in its plot and the critical response it provoked is the 1991 film Thelma and Louise.)

Yet we need not advocate murder as an appropriate punishment for rape to recognize the psychic catharsis provided by Artemisia, for herself and for all women who live in male-dominant cultures, in her images of strong, self motivated women who -unusually in art- take physical action upon men rather than being acted upon by them.

Artemisia Gentileschi
The Penitent Magdalen
1617-20
oil on canvas
Palazzo Pitti, Florence