From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
This book is a study of the financial and entrepreneurial strategies of a baroque painter. It is also a quest to understand the appeal that Artemisia Gentileschi’s paintings held for her contemporaries as well as their significance for audiences today. Throughout the first 12 chapters, Marshall highlights the sale prices, subjects and sizes of Artemisia’s paintings. In doing so, he lays out the artist’s evolving strategy for running her business profitably, which is presented as the prime motivation behind disparate aspects of Artemisia’s career: an early focus on the female nude, the many presumed self-portraits, a stylistic malleability tending towards an eclectic form of classicism, frequent collaborations with other painters in Naples and her feminist declarations when corresponding with later patrons. Of particular note is Marshall’s portrayal of Artemisia as a resolute materialist, which cuts against recent studies focusing on her quest for excellence, her determination to penetrate the homosocial world of artists, her concern for the dignity of women and for her own reputation, and the intensity of her creative intellect. It is thus curious that Marshall consistently presents her as a struggling artist in financial jeopardy, failing in the very arena supposed to be her main preoccupation.
Although the book aims to engage casual readers (for whom it defines the term ‘catalogue raisonné’), it frequently tackles the sort of esoteric problems of attribution that mainly interest experts. More consequential than any single issue of authorship, though, is the author’s overarching contention that Artemisia received insufficient artistic training compared to her male peers and that, throughout her career, she disguised this handicap by seeking out better trained male artists to collaborate with her and make up for her failings. Marshall argues that this practice began with the 1610 version of Susanna and the Elders to which, despite her prominent signature, he suggests her father, Orazio, contributed.
Susanna and the Elders (1610), Artemisia Gentileschi. Schloss Weissenstein, Germany. Photo: GL Archive/Alamy Stock Photo
This alleged technical inferiority is Marshall’s justification for assigning many of the male figures in her paintings to male artists. Time and again, Marshall implies that Artemisia relied upon her father, her assistants and her collaborators to help her carry out projects that outstripped her skills. Artemisia’s wry response to such scepticism bears repeating: ‘a woman’s work raises doubts until her work is seen.
Marshall’s view that Artemisia’s training was inadequate requires further examination. Many baroque artists, including Caravaggio and Ribera, neither studied in an academy nor pursued formal training in techniques of perspective, whereas Artemisia may have studied perspective under Agostino Tassi. Moreover, the record of Artemisia’s rape trial offers several indications of her highly advanced skills even while she was still an apprentice to her father, including her activity as a drawing instructor and her sharing of her father’s male models. For the art historian Gianni Papi, Artemisia’s juvenile works show better command of anatomy and space than Orazio, who told Christine de Lorraine, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, that his daughter was the equal of any master.
As for enlisting collaborators to mask supposed shortcomings, wouldn’t this charge also apply to male artists such as Rubens who worked with specialists to create complex images that surpassed the abilities of any one single painter? The art historian Riccardo Lattuada has suggested that artistic partnerships appealed to sophisticated patrons who enjoyed the game of distinguishing different hands. I would add that it would have been entirely within the spirit of baroque gender play for Artemisia to surprise her viewers by painting the male figures while assigning a male artist to paint the female ones. Moreover, Marshall overlooks the possibility that these collaborations were a concession to the local artists of Naples, given the notorious ferocity of the city’s native painters towards outsiders.
Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura) (c. 1638–39), Artemisia Gentileschi. Royal Collection Trust. © His Majesty King Charles III 2024
A few corrections about Artemisia’s finances and commissions are in order. Marshall speculates that her dowry included property, but the contract specifies a dowry paid entirely in cash. Her delayed payment of debts in Florence, as I have argued elsewhere, was not the result of destitution but rather a negotiating strategy commonly used in the Italian marketplace. It is also worth noting that Artemisia waited four years before selling her remaining property in Florence, a clear sign that she was not in dire financial straits. To wit, she had enough money on hand to decorate her next home in Rome lavishly, describing it as ‘fit for gentlemen’.
It also seems misleading to refer, as Marshall does, to Artemisia as a ‘chronic defaulter’ to the Medici and the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno. With regard to the Medici, she was penalised in a single instance for having left Florence without taking leave and before finishing a painting for the grand duke in which she had employed the court’s ultramarine blue; the painting was eventually received at court to their satisfaction. As for the Accademia, Giorgio Vasari Jr. seems to have omitted charging her any penalty at all and the Accademia’s accounting books show that she was never in arrears to that institution. Finally, Marshall refers to a commission from Margherita, Artemisia’s servant and the widow of Bartolomeo Benvenuti, when in fact that commission was given by the silk merchant Simone Carducci.
The book’s final chapters describe the revival of Artemisia’s reputation by feminist art historians and her popularity in both contemporary culture and the art market. While Marshall’s reservations regarding Artemisia’s painterly skill and business acumen might not find tremendous favour in those realms, they will certainly provide rich material for debate.
From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.