ipl-logo

Artemisia Gentileschi Essay

1502 Words7 Pages

Artemisia Gentileschi has remained one of the most famous women artists in modern history that is not famous for solely her skill. Though talented, scholars have instead chose to highlight the sexual assault and personal struggles Gentileschi went through as a means to deeper understand and criticise her masterful art. Although she painted few altarpieces and no frescoes, her talent was still comparable to some of the great male masters of her time, with her rendition of the story of Judith and Holofernes frequently being compared to the great Caravaggio’s. Despite her success as an artist, many historians have instead focused on her role as a woman. Undoubtedly, Artemisia experienced many things that other men, and male artists, would not …show more content…

She has been studied in regards to her gender, her life experiences and her art, most often a combination of the three. Many of the discourse on Artemisia and how her biography affected her work is also centered around two of her most famous images: Judith and Holofernes and Susanna and the Elders. Despite this, it is useful to mention that in a catalogue of her work in Florence, 15 of her paintings imagined women as subjected to male control or male lust otherwise owe their fates to men and where more than half of her subjects (excluding portraits) carry implications of sexuality (573). She has been heralded as a painter of strong women, and many feminist art historians have taken this as a sign that Gentileschi was a feminist. Others, like Ward Bissell, have debated that she would not be considered a feminist, even by 17th century standards, and that her success was merely a result of her response to the market conditions of the time. In regards to her gender and how that affected her success, Bissell hypothesizes that “as far as the male viewer was concerned it was the painter, not the painting, that made the work titillating” (573). This analysis continues the conversation that while she was an artist, above all, Artemisia was a woman, and thus an object for men to

Show More
Related
505 Words | 3 Pages

One of his most famous engravings, St. Jerome in His Study, is also rich in symbolism. Both the Arnolfini Wedding and St. Jerome in His Study are true masterpieces. In these two artworks we see that the painters were

Read More
1513 Words | 7 Pages

While men have always featured prominently throughout history, women tend to be more of an afterthought, and especially in fiction, women tend to fall into strict archetypes that allow very little deviation. This holds true in Apuleius’ novel The Golden Ass, but many of the female characters also exhibit great agency and power that women in other Roman stories tended not to have. There is a wide range of female archetypes in this book but they are also deep and complex characters that should not be pigeon-holed into one category. One of the first complex female characters that Lucius, the main character, meets in The Golden Ass is the servant girl Photis. While Lucius is staying with his friend Milo, Lucius’ aunt Byrrhena warns him of Milo’s wife, Pamphile, who practices witchcraft, she tells him instead to turn his attention to Photis, saying on page 22, “So even though it has its hazards, Photis must be your target (Apuleius).”

Read More
1231 Words | 5 Pages

Outside of the cities and in impoverished, rural areas women supported their families by assisting in agricultural and manual labor tasks. In domestic affairs women served as midwives, maids, cooks, laundresses and servants (Mc Graw). Those with bolder pursuits to utilize their talents, were met by women such as Isabella Andreini an actress and artists Sofonisba Anguissola and Artemisia Gentileschi, (Mc Graw) the latter who became the 1st female to be inducted into the prestigious Florence Academy of Design (Passion of Artemisia). Likewise by the late 16th century around 25 women had already

Read More
326 Words | 2 Pages

Pardon & punished are reoccurring themes within Romeo and Juliet. It is also an obvious recurring theme within Shakespeare’s work. At the end of the play the prince says “Pardon means to be forgiven for an act or mistake that you have done or the act of forgiving someone for something they have done. Punished is when you inflict a penalty or sanction against someone who has wronged. The idea of “punishment & Pardoning” are relevant to the play because they represent the good and bad within the play.

Read More
181 Words | 1 Pages

In Gender and Immortality: Heroines in Ancient Greek Myth and Cult, Deborah Lyons discusses the significance of the heroine in ancient Greek religion and society. She brings up the reality that because of ancient Greek sexism, very little attention has been given to women hero figures. Lyons believes the heroine is involved in the relations between male and female and mortal and immortal. Throughout the text, she attempts to portray the importance of the heroine in ancient Greek society. One such example she provides in the form of Attic-vase painting.

Read More
519 Words | 3 Pages

She was actually the first woman to become a full member of the Accademia di Arte Del Disegno in Florence. She later died in 1656. A common theme in which Artemisia Gentileschi's paintings are mostly women in a struggle; often strong women, suffering women. Why?

Read More
985 Words | 4 Pages

The two pieces of art I will discuss is Edouard Manet’s ‘Olympia’ and Mary Cassatt 's ‘Woman in Black at the Opera’. Manet’s Olympia was not critically accepted, the reaction to his painting was negative, only four critics out of sixty were favorably disposed to Olympia. Olympia was a derivative of Titian 's Venus. In 1863 the critics and the viewers didn’t know how to take Olympia, “they were unable to cope with so many novel factors and so they were unable to categorize the picture and so were unable to analyze it or understand it in any context” (Laurence, 2012). Nowadays we are more open minded and are able to see the painting in a different light.

Read More
1345 Words | 6 Pages

In a time where social strictures denied most women a future in the field of visual arts, Harriet Hosmer defied all social convention with her large scale success in neoclassical sculpting. At a young age, Hosmer had already developed a striking reputation, one that qualified her to study abroad in Rome under the tutelage of renowned sculptor John Gibson. As if this opportunity wasn’t rare enough for women artists in her day, Hosmer’s outstanding potential earned her the luxury of studying from live models.6 The respect she gained from taking this unconventional route to her success is one that entirely transformed society’s perception of women. Not only did her unique story serve as a catalyst in the progression of gender equality, but she also hid symbolic messages within each of her sculptures to find a way to penetrate her beliefs of equality through to any soul.3 As the National Museum of Women in the Arts perfectly captures, “[s]he preferred Neoclassical idealism to more naturalistic trends and rendered mythological and historical figures, such as Oenone, Beatrice Cenci, and Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, with nobility and grandeur.

Read More
2740 Words | 11 Pages

In this essay, I’m going to discuss the gender roles in the paintings of Dalí, in the film “Un Chien Andalou” by Buñuel and the poems of Federico García Lorca. Gender roles play a huge part within these works. All three of these artists had the ability to showcase something beautiful or majestic through disturbing and off putting imagery. This is what made their work so distinctive compared to many other artists during the surrealist period. The main things all of these artists have in common are their feelings and expressions of gender roles.

Read More
965 Words | 4 Pages

Portraits drawn by Raphael are a vital source for the analysis of his artistic motives. “Lady of the Unicorn” (fig. 3), one of Raphael’s earliest Florentine portraits, owes much to Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” in its design. However, the clarity of light which infuses even the shadows with colour not only recalls Raphael’s early exposure to the paintings of Piero della Francesca, but also in itself a statement he wanted to make through his art. Raphael’s obsessive experiments with clarity of features cannot be construed as a mere influence of his teachers or contemporaries. Somewhere deep down, deliberation to do away with the mysterious haziness associable with divine or religious mystification must have inspired the Italian great to incorporate

Read More
1324 Words | 6 Pages

Manet’s Olympia defied traditional art conventions in depicting the female body. The salon displayed traditional nudes for the pleasure of the, primarily male, viewer. Under the male gaze, the woman’s bare body became an erotic object—an object from which he may craft an erotic fantasy, characterized by male domination.

Read More
769 Words | 4 Pages

Art Analysis Essay In the work Lucrezia Romana by Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli, otherwise known as Giampietrino, there stands a contorted woman with a dagger nearly piercing her own flesh as she waits to take her own life. The figure, Lucretia, is a character from the ancient Roman period who was said to have been raped by the son of the tyrannical ruler of Rome. The oil painting on wood was completed in 1540 in the city of Milan, in the midst of the High Renaissance period. While Giampietrino’s painting stands as a remarkable piece of artwork, it must be noted that a lot of the stylistic qualities he implements into the work are extremely similar to that of Leonardo Da Vinci’s.

Read More
1271 Words | 6 Pages

Artwork is a form of self-expression from an artist based on life experience, or on something that the artist feels strongly about (Berenson, 87). The product of art can help others with similar experiences but not able to express the same feeling themselves. From the product of art, people can start drawing excitement, purpose as well as encouragement about the real thing being expressed. Through a piece of art, the artist can communicate a purpose, an emotion or an idea in their work. In this research paper, I compare two pieces of artwork; Madonna and child with the saints by Giovanni Bellini and Madonna and child with the two angels done by Fra Filippo Lippi.

Read More
1050 Words | 5 Pages

Thousands of paintings and sculptures were made in these periods of time. In this essay, I will imagine myself being a curator of an art gallery that has a Greek room, a Roman room, an Early Christian room, a Gothic room, a Renaissance room, and a Baroque room. I will select two pieces for each room and discuss why I would put those paintings and sculptures in each room at the gallery. I will explain two pieces that I would place in the Greek room at the gallery. The first piece is a painting called "Amphora".

Read More
1330 Words | 6 Pages

There has been a persistence of classical myths into the art and thought of Renaissance. This paper aims to discuss the relationship of the artistic and mythical representation of the story of Diana and Actaeon. The setting is a grotto in a dense forest, which was leafy and dark. Situated at the grotto is a pool and fountain. The goddess of hunt, Diana, together with her nymphs, flaunts themselves at the pool, naked.

Read More

More about Artemisia Gentileschi Essay

Related Topics

Open Document