Artemisia Gentileschi around 1622: The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic Identity

by Mary D. Garrard

Overview

Mary D. Garrard, author of the acclaimed Artemisia Gentileschi, furthers her study of the seventeenth-century artist in this groundbreaking investigation of two little-known paintings. Taking as case studies the Seville Mary Magdalene and the Burghley House Susanna and the Elders, paintings of circa 1621-22 attributed to Artemisia, Garrard examines the ways that identity, gender, and market pressures interact both in the artist's work and in the criticism and connoisseurship that have surrounded it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520228412
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	02/21/2001
Series:	The Discovery Series , #11
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	204
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Mary D. Garrard is Professor of Art at American University. She is the author of Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art and coeditor, with Norma Broude, of Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany; The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History; and The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Connoisseurship in a New Key
Gender and the Social Construction of Artistic Identity
Gender and the Personal Formation of Artistic Identity

PART ONE: A New Magdalen
A Tale of Two Pictures
Artemisia and Mary Magdalene
The Example of Caravaggio
The Example of Michelangelo
Artemisia as the Allegory of Painting
The Magdalen as Melancholy
The Reappropriation of Gendered Melancholy

PART TWO: The Burghley House Susanna
A Problem Picture
Susanna in the Garden of Love
Susanna as Social Scapegoat
The Picture: Technical Analysis and Documentation
Collaboration or Unauthorized Alteration?
Artemisia and Susanna, Public and Audience

Conclusion: The Shaping of a Complex Identity
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

"[Gerrard] has augmented our understanding of Artemisia's aesthetic tendencies and revealed the complexity of thought beneath them. She has also demonstrated with great clarity that the paintings themselves are richly suggestive of the methods that she combines. She should be applauded for using each in an evenhanded fashion that does not displace the object for the sake of a dogmatic methodological correctness/"

Sixteenth Century Journal

"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." 

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