In her preface, Mary Garrard declares that she wants her book to serve as an exemplary methodological model. She seeks to provide a new mode of connoisseurship, one that includes not only a thorough analysis of the formal elements within a given work of art, but also a detailed discussion of the social, psychological, gender-specific, and iconographic elements particular to the artist studied. In this volume, her latest contribution to Artemisia Gentileschi scholarship, Garrard has accomplished just that. The methodological mélange she employs results in a work that both engages the reader from beginning to end and thoroughly delivers what it promises. The book consists of an introduction, two analytical chapters, and a conclusion. Although having only two chapters may seem odd, here it is completely justified, since the book deals in an in-depth manner with only two paintings that have presented problems of attribution, Mary Magdalen (Spain, Cathedral of Seville, Sala del Tesoro) and Susanna and the Elders (Stamford, Burghley House Collection), both dated by Garrard to ca. 1622.

The first chapter, on the Seville Mary Magdalen, concentrates primarily on iconography—based on gender, social, and psychological considerations—which ultimately reveals unequivocally Artemisia’s authorship and perhaps also her self-perception as an anomaly in a male-dominated field of painting. Garrard reads the Mary Magdalen as having an autobiographical dimension, as Artemisia’s alter ego—not surprising since many of Artemisia’s paintings have been read along these lines, not only by Garrard herself, but also by scholars like Griselda Pollock, Marcia Pointon, and others. Garrard recognizes sixteenth-century precedents for the Magdalen’s pose (seated with head tilted to the right, resting on her bent wrist, and left arm between her legs), including Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving of Saint Helen (early sixteenth century), Michelangelo’s marble figure Night (Florence, New Sacristy, San Lorenzo), and Fabrizio Boschi’s Allegory of Painting Awakened by Cosimo II de’ Medici (Florence, Appellate Court), a fresco dating to the early seventeenth century. The choice of precedents reveals an iconographic conflation in Artemisia’s Mary Magdalen—that of the figure as Melancholia, a signifier of artistic genius, and of a visionary, like Saint Helen, who dreamt of the True Cross. As such, according to Garrard, the painting divulges Artemisia’s appropriation of the saint’s image as her own to speak of herself as the divinely inspired female artist who awakens, like Boschi’s Pittura, to fulfill her calling. These iconographic elements, then, establish Mary Magdalen as the precedent for Artemisia’s Self-Portrait as Allegory of Painting (London, Kensington Palace, 1630), where the artist grapples with similar issues. (On this painting, see Garrard’s “Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as Allegory of Painting,” The Art Bulletin 62, 1980: 97–112).

In dealing with the Burghley House Susanna and the Elders in chapter 2, Garrard relies more heavily on formal analysis than iconography, aided here by conservation technology—that is, infrared reflectography and radiography. Tests conducted and the cleaning of the work in 1995 revealed that most of the left side and other smaller passages were repainted. Garrard’s thorough sleuthing uncovered the hand of two artists, which led her to two possible conclusions: 1) that Artemisia painted the original composition, which is more akin to her earlier Susanna and the Elders (Pommersfelden, Schloss Wissenstein, 1610) (in which the female is harassed by the elders and clearly disturbed by it), and later hired a collaborator to add the landscape and other details to make the work more saleable (more erotic and hence appealing to a male collector); or 2) that the changes to the painting were made entirely after the work left Artemisia’s workshop.

Artemisia scholarship of the past decade or so has provoked fierce (and in some cases rather unfortunate) debate between the exponents of feminism and those who reject it. Garrard has endured a barrage of criticism resulting from her determination to examine Artemisia’s career using gender as a principal consideration. In their exhibition catalogue on the artist (Artemisia [Rome: Leonardo De Luca Editori, 1991], 110), for example, Gianni Papi and Roberto Contini accused Garrard of using an “angolazione filofemminista.” Similarly, Richard Spear in The Divine Guido: Religion, Sex, Money and Art in the World of Guido Reni ([New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997], 345 n. 53) impeached Garrard for pressing a feminist agenda onto images that do not support her interpretations, and R. Ward Bissell concurred in his Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art: Critical Reading and Catalogue Raisonné ([University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999], passim). (For the state of research on Artemisia, see Richard Spear, “Artemisia Gentileschi: Ten Years of Fact and Fiction,” The Art Bulletin 82, 2000: 568–79. Elizabeth S. Cohen’s “The Trials of Artemisia Gentileschi: A Rape as History,” Sixteenth Century Journal 31, 2000: 47–75 also deserves mention).

Steven F. Ostrow, in reviewing Bissell’s book in CAA.Reviews, spoke of Garrard’s monograph Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) as the (bad) antithesis to Bissell’s (good) text. He hailed Bissell’s book as “exemplifying traditional art history at its best,” implying his rejection of the feminist approach. In my view, this attitude is just as problematic as the supposed rigid perspective used by Garrard that he, Bissell, and others reproach. A more grounded approach is offered in Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2001), the catalogue for a touring exhibition.

In response, Garrard feels compelled in her preface, introduction, and various footnotes throughout the text to justify her earlier interpretations of Artemisia’s works. She complains of scholars distorting her methodological aims, seeing her reading of Artemisia’s art as simply autobiographical, and perceiving Artemisia the woman as a timeless figure whose art “represents a monolithic and historically unchanging woman’s perspective” (xix). In the introduction, Garrard explains how gender has affected connoisseurship. The long-held notion that female artists painted only feminized images has led some to perceive the artist’s most original early works as either having been executed by her father, Orazio Gentileschi, or as a collaboration between the two—such as the Pommersfelden Susanna.

To illuminate Artemesia’s early career, Garrard uses the examples of the copper Madonna and Child (Madrid, Escorial) and the Madonna and Child in the Spada Collection, Rome. The first features a small, delicate, smiling Madonna incongruent with the usual buxom females Artemisia portrayed, yet Bissell believes this work to be by the artist’s hand. The second, a monumental Madonna with the usual Artemisian vocabulary—dimpled knuckles, wisps of hair caressing her cheeks, a palette of earthy and golden hues—has been rejected because the figure does not befit the myth that females paint feminized images. The Virgin here is just too crude and homely. Yet Papi, in a review of Bissell (Burlington Magazine 142, 2000: 450–53), discovered an inventory dated 1637 of paintings owned by Alessandro di Biffi (which later entered the Spada collection), where a Madonna and Child by Artemisia of similar dimensions and composition is listed. The previous attitudes toward Artemisia’s youthful body of work, Garrard contends, have painted a picture, so to speak, that is chaotic because they leave gaps that impede the perception of a gradual, logical, linear evolution.

Garrard also complains of being accused of overheroicizing and overcelebrating Artemisia and, although for the most part I admire her scholarship, I do believe that at times she tends to place the artist on a higher pedestal than she deserves. Although I cannot deny that Artemisia was an original painter who offered clever, new perspectives to old themes, I do not believe that she was as influential as Garrard purports. According to the author, Artemisia’s Seville Mary Magdalen was Guercino’s prototype for his Night in the Casino Ludovisi, Rome (1621). For Garrard, Guercino’s lost Jael and Sisera (ca. 1619–20) depends on Artemisia’s of the same subject (Budapest, Szépmüvészeti Museum, 1620). Artemisia, in Garrard’s view, was the originator of the image “because of her carefully detailed figures, seemingly directly studied” (64 and 143 n. 91). Guercino’s “awkwardly naturalistic Venuses,” as she calls them, were inspired by Artemisia’s nudes, such as Cleopatra and Lucretia. But no evidence exists to support such allegations. Even less believable is her contention that Diego Velázquez, who met Artemisia in Naples, may have taken her Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting as “a point of departure for amplifying in Las Meninas the theme of painting as an inherently noble act” (60), when Las Meninas is by far a superior painting in invention, composition, and meaning than Artemisia’s self-portrait.

In the conclusion, aside from reiterating the main points of the book, Garrard severely chastises the French filmmaker Agnès Merlet for the depiction in her film Artemisia of the artist’s relationship with Agostino Tassi as a love story, and her sexual initiation by him as the current that unleashed her creativity. Merlet has already been crucified by critics for perpetuating gender stereotypes, and I certainly do not wish to defend her film in any way, even if she is entitled to freedom of creativity (as repugnant as her work may be). Yet although the Artemisia/Tassi relationship was one of sexual abuse, and Merlet’s distortions are certainly distasteful, in a way Tassi did provoke Artemisia’s creativity. If we accept that Artemisia’s Judith paintings speak of the artist’s subconscious desire to punish her assailant, as so many have written, and that the Pommersfelden Susanna speaks of the sexual harassment she endured from Tassi and other men in her father’s workshop prior to her rape, then we must also accept that if it were not for the rape these works would not have taken their present form. (See Cohen’s article, cited above, for the legal aspects of the rape trial). Anguish can be one of the greatest fuels of creativity, and Artemisia’s works testify to this.

In all, Garrard’s book is insightful and provocative. It resolves mysteries relating to two problematic paintings by studying them through myriad perspectives, while raising issues of scholarship that will no doubt spur renewed debate among the exponents of various methodologies. A definite “must-read” for scholars of Italian Baroque painting, although others will benefit from what the book has to offer in terms of connoisseurship.