Hello! And welcome
to the Artemisia Gentileschi Exhibition
at the National Gallery.
Artemisia was one of the greatest
of all Baroque artists.
But she was also a woman.
And that of course made her special
in interesting ways.
I mean, she wasn't the first woman artist
in Western Art.
But she was the first who imbued
all her work with a sense of her femininity.
It makes her work powerful.
It makes it pioneering.
And it certainly makes it exciting.
As you come through the door,
the first picture you see,
kind of slaps you around the face really,
is this.
And it shows this famous biblical story
of Susanna and the Elders.
Susanna was a Hebrew wife
who was lusted over
by a couple of old men in the village.
And they watched her while she was bathing.
And tried to force her to have sex with them.
When she refused them, they took her to court.
They lost the case. She won the case.
So it's a kind of feminist story, if you like.
But Artemisia has made something
so creepy out of it.
Lots of Baroque artists painted Susanna
and the Elders.
But never with this intimate sense
of the blokes crushing into her space.
Leaning right over into her confidence zone.
But the really extraordinary thing here
is that when she painted this
she was probably 16.
At most 17.
Now, this show ahead of us
tells us an awful lot of things about
Artemisia Gentileschi.
But one of the first things it says
is that she was a prodigy.
She could paint better earlier
than just about anybody else
in Western Art.
When Artemisia was 17,
she was raped by a friend of her father's.
Another painter called Agostino Tassi.
And this rape was to have a powerful impact
on her life of course.
And there was a very infamous court case
that resulted from it.
And one of the things they've got here
is an actual transcript
of the court proceedings.
And what's wonderful about it
is that you could hear Artemisia's voice.
The things she said.
The way she spoke.
Sometimes they tortured her
to make sure she was telling the truth.
But she always came back
with these snappy reposts.
These witty answers.
And she emerges in this show
as someone who wasn't just a tragic victim
but was a really rounded and interesting figure.
This is probably Artemisia's most famous image.
So famous she did it twice.
And fortunately, the National Gallery
has managed to get both versions
up at once.
It's Judith beheading Holofernes.
Judith was a Jewish heroine
who fought back against Holofernes
and beheaded him.
So a very feminine subject.
And a subject which
because of Artemisia's rape
felt particularly personal.
But what I like is
the way the two pictures are
subtly different.
I mean, they're both gory.
Because one of the great lessons of Caravaggio
was that violence is something that
makes people look at art.
It's a bit like Sam Peckinpah movies
in the 80s and 90s.
You know, violence is just something
that shakes you out of your everyday rhythm.
And makes you notice things.
What's wonderful is the actual detail here.
Look at this gigantic sword that she's weilding
as she cuts off the poor guy's head.
And here, there's just a little bit
of blood pouring out of him.
It's savage. But it's not quite
a gore fest.
By the time she does this,
the second version,
wow, look at the blood there.
It's pouring out like water
from a Baroque fountain.
What a piece of drama that is!
Now, the National Gallery didn't own any
Artemisia Gentileschis until
a couple of years ago
when very fortunately they managed
to buy this masterpiece by her.
And this St. Catherine,
who was tortured with a horrible
wooden wheel with spikes in it
that was turned over her.
But also it's a self-portrait of Artemisia.
So it's Artemisia as St. Catherine.
Identifying fiercely with her.
And this is Artemisia's St. Cecelia.
It was another early Christian martyr
who was tortured for her beliefs.
And who became the patron saint of music.
That's why she's strumming away there.
Look at that look on her face.
It's very accusatory, isn't it?
It sort of picks you out.
It seems somehow to make you feel
a bit guilty.
It's self-portraiture
but self-portraiture with these
bigger ambitions.
I think to somehow reach across the ages
and identify with these sad, martyred figures
of young women from the early Christian days.
Now, this room here shows
the work that she started to paint
when she moved back to Rome in the 1620s.
And it's particularly clear here
that everywhere she went,
every time she moved on,
her art changed a bit.
I mean, this too
is Susanna and the Elders.
So it's that first subject in the show.
The creepy guys staring at the naked woman.
But here it feels less antagonistic.
It's calmed down.
It seems to be more about the beauty
of the flesh.
And even the blokes don't look
quite as horrible as they do
in that wonderful picture that she painted
when she was 16.
So there's an attempt here, I think, to become
a slightly more respectable Artemisia.
So it's important to remember
that she wasn't this feminist heroine
beheading men all the way through her career.
She had these phases.
And the show judges beautifully, I think,
the development from one phase to another.
Although the show's basically chronological,
and takes us through all the main periods
of Artemisia's career,
it loses that chronology at the end.
And with a bit of sneaky exhibition-making,
it fast-forwards through the Neapolitan years
and brings us straight to the time
that Artemisia spent in England.
Because, yes, she came to England.
In 1638, just before the Civil War,
she arrived here and worked on various
decorative schemes with her father, Horatio.
And what I really like here
is that this famous painting
was also painted in England.
And it's one of her most famous images.
Artemisia Gentileschi embodying art.
Art itself. Symbolically.
A lot of people have always said
it's a self-portrait.
Indeed, it's called a Self-Portrait.
But we've seen the other self-portraits
in the show.
And it's clear that isn't her.
Now, this isn't a literal self-portrait.
It's a symbolic self-portrait of her,
her presence,
of what art can be in the world.
And because she's working with one figure,
it's got that intensity about it again.
So it's a fantastic ending
to a fantastic show.