This book offers what one would expect of a catalogue produced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the exhibition Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi: Father and Daughter Painters in Baroque Italy—a thorough study of the subject at hand, essays written by well-seasoned scholars, a complete bibliography, and good-quality color reproductions. As an added bonus, an appendix with pertinent documentation and a chronological chart for Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi are also included.

The material is logically divided into two sections, the first on Orazio and the second on his daughter. Subsections within each deal with issues such as historiography, patronage, creative milieu, and technique, in a chronological arrangement. After an introduction by Keith Christiansen, the section on Orazio continues with essays on his activities in Rome (by Alessandro Zuccari), the Marches (by Livia Carloni), Genoa (by Mary Newcome), France (by Jean-Pierre Cuzin), and finally England (by Gabriele Finaldi and Jeremy Wood). The section on Artemisia is introduced by Judith Mann and continues with essays by Elizabeth Cropper, Patrizia Cavazzini, Roberto Contini, Richard Spear, and Riccardo Lattuada. These situate Artemisia, first in Rome at her father’s house, then Florence, back in Rome, and finally in Naples.

The book illustrates how problematic the scholarship on these two important painters continues to be. Witness, for example, the Cleopatra in the Morandotti Collection in Milan, which appears twice in the catalogue, first as a work by Orazio (cat. no. 17) and later as a work by Artemisia (cat. no. 53). The reason for this is that Christiansen and Mann, in charge of the catalogue entries on father and daughter respectively, disagree on the painting’s attribution. Christiansen reminds us that Orazio is known to have created several Cleopatra paintings, such as the one listed in Carlo Giuseppe Ratti’s guidebook of 1780 as part of the collection of Pietro Maria III Gentile of Genoa. Also, Nicolò Tassi, Orazio’s friend and neighbor, wrote to Galileo describing in verse a painting by Orazio of the same subject that had recently been sent to Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici in Florence. Hence, the subject was not alien to Orazio. For Christiansen, the treatment of the white linens and red drapery in the painting are consistent with the artist’s style, and the model is the same Orazio used for the woman with a fan in the Casino delle Muse (Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi, Rome), often identified as a portrait of Artemisia.

According to the testimony of one of the witnesses in Artemisia’s rape trial, she sometimes posed nude for her father, and Christiansen believes this to have been one of those occasions. However, the testimony may have been nothing more than yet another ploy by Agostino Tassi and his witnesses to discredit Artemisia’s reputation in order to attain an acquittal.

Also, if we compare the Cleopatra to Orazio’s Danae, for example, stylistic differences in the rendering of the nude are clear. Danae is a thin, elegant figure with porcelain-like skin, soft facial features and hair, and very small and rather unrealistic breasts, characteristics also found in his Mary Magdalen (cat. no. 35). The Cleopatra, on the other hand, is a buxom figure with large, naturalistic breasts, a rather crude face, and an awkward pose. The crudeness, size, and more naturalistic, less sensuous anatomical details are elements often found in Artemisia’s nudes, never in Orazio’s. Mann, in arguing for attribution to Artemisia, points out that Orazio usually followed established modes of representation, while his daughter invented “new interpretive moments” (304). Here, there is a pause, that moment between life and death, similar to that seen in Artemisia’s Lucretia (cat. no. 67). There is also attention to narrative details, like the parting of the curtains in the background and the snake forcefully grabbed by the figure and coiling around her wrist. Orazio, as Mann points out, did not focus as intently on the “logical denouement of his narratives” (296) and often omitted essential details.

Neither Christiansen nor Mann embrace Mary Garrard’s apotheotic reading of the Cleopatra (in Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989], 244–77). Christiansen instead believes that the work simply follows a long tradition of mythological and historical female nudes. Mann states in her entry on the second Cleopatra (Rome, private collection) by Artemisia (cat. no. 76) that there is no concrete evidence to suggest that the artist would have been acquainted with the complex metaphoric allusions Garrard reads into the painting. Many of Garrard’s interpretations are in fact rejected in the catalogue. Garrard has asserted (in part 2 of Artemisia Gentileschi around 1622: The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic Identity [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001]) that the Burghley Susanna (cat. no. 65) was altered by a second hand either as a collaboration or after it left Artemisia’s studio, but Mann sees the alterations as nothing more than pentimenti—adjustments made by Artemisia who was having trouble with the composition.

In dealing with Artemisia’s Penitent Magdalen (cat. no. 68), Mann again disagrees with Garrard, who believes that here the artist fused the masculine, melancholic seer with the contemplative female to create a feminine representation of artistic inspiration. Instead, for Mann, Mary Magdalen’s tears and gesture of twirling her hair refer to her washing and drying of Christ’s feet. The exaggerated tilt of her head, instead of relating to Melancholia, as Garrard sees it, refers to the traditional pose of lamentation in scenes of the Crucifixion and Entombment.

Another example of the problematic nature of Gentileschi scholarship is the Judith and her Maidservant in the Nasjonalgalleriet in Oslo, included among the works by Orazio but rejected, as Christiansen notes in his catalogue entry (cat. no. 13), by John Spike, Benedict Nicolson, and Rodney Palmer, who credit it to Artemisia, an attribution Garrard finds unacceptable. Spike has also given to Artemisia the Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata (cat. no. 3, private collection), yet the work is normally assigned to Orazio. Artemisia’s Pommersfelden Susanna and the Elders (cat. no. 51) has been viewed by some as a collaboration between father and daughter in spite of Artemisia’s signature. Since she was only seventeen when the work was painted, they believe that she could not have possibly created a work of such quality on her own. But Mann and Garrard both reject Orazio’s intervention.

Add to this problems of chronology (of the sixty-some-odd paintings by Orazio included in the catalogue, only one is firmly dated through documentation), and what emerges, at least in the case of Orazio, is an uneven artist who indiscriminately moved back and forth from Caravaggism to a more classicizing mode of painting, explained in the book as Orazio’s ability to adapt to the tastes and demands of his patrons. However, it is hard to fathom how an artist who could paint as exquisite a work as the Annunciation for Carlo Emanuele I, duke of Savoy (cat. no. 43), could also paint the Mocking of Christ in the Mathiesen Gallery (cat. no. 49) only a few years later. While the Annunciation boasts elegant figures and resplendent colors, the Mocking of Christ shows crude, homely individuals with awkwardly foreshortened heads and overextensions of the neck and torso. In fact, because of these clumsy elements, R. Ward Bissell, in my view correctly, classifies the work as perhaps having been executed by a Northern master, based on a lost original by Orazio.

Then there is the Saint Christopher (cat. no. 27) at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, which was attributed in the first decades of the twentieth century to Adam Elsheimer, until Roberto Longhi suggested that the work was perhaps by Orazio. But the painting is so strikingly different from any others by his hand that it is hard to accept as his. Again, Bissell has rejected the attribution to Orazio, suggesting instead that it may be the work of a landscapist, possibly German, from the circle of Elsheimer and Carlo Saraceni.

In the case of Artemisia, the heated debate over whether her early paintings are autobiographical, which has been such a major focus of scholarship on the painter, is addressed in the catalogue. Christiansen writes that, in regard to the recent feminist view that Artemisia’s early Biblical paintings are “a self-projecting voice of protest…we might question the distinctly late-twentieth-century accent of the voice these writers profess to hear” (5). He warns scholars who attempt to read artists’ biographies into their art to consider the fact that Orazio had a coarse temperament yet was capable of creating some of the most refined masterpieces of the period.

Mann complains that a new stereotype of Artemisia has emerged from feminist scholarship by Garrard and others. Before these studies, Artemisia was labeled a “floozy,” due mainly to Rudolf and Margot Wittkower’s characterization in their classic text Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists, A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution ([New York and London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1963], 164). The new scholarship on Artemisia paints a different picture of her, which is no less damaging—Garrard proposes that she depicted only assertive females and that she insisted on including her own personal interpretations of the subjects, even if not necessarily conforming to her (male) patrons’ preferences. In Mann’s view, this has caused scholars to reject from Artemisia’s oeuvre paintings that do not fit into this paradigm, and/or to attach lesser value to them. For Mann, the international touring exhibition and the accompanying catalogue allow for a more balanced presentation of Artemisia’s body of work, though this was a difficult task since the lost paintings by the artist, if we follow Bissell’s list in his catalogue raisonné outnumber the extant work by two to one, with the 1640s being the most problematic period in her career. In her contribution to the catalogue, Cropper similarly complains that, because Artemisia has been turned into an historical model of feminist scholarship, her work has been upstaged by her biography.

Two voices are missing from this catalogue, those of Bissell and Garrard, the foremost authorities on Artemisia, with Bissell also the chief authority on Orazio. We are told, however, in the foreword that they both acted as consultants to the exhibition. Bissell and Garrard have disagreed on many points on Artemisia scholarship, and in some instances these disagreements have taken on a rather bitter tone. One has but to read Garrard’s complaints in the preface and introduction to Artemisia Gentileschi around 1622 to appreciate the depth of this problem. In keeping these two scholars on the sidelines, the organizers of the exhibition and catalogue have benefited from their expertise while, at the same time, producing a refreshing study of Artemisia, one that is unencumbered by the antagonistic tone scholarship on her has recently acquired.