Isn’t She Good—For a Woman?

At its worst, well-meaning feminist rehabilitation can create a new prison to replace the old one. The quest to reverse our condescension toward muses, the novelist Zadie Smith has argued, resulted in off-putting biographies that were often “unhinged in tone, by turns furious, defensive, melancholy, and tragic.” These underdog narratives “kept the muse in her place, orbiting the great man.”

The court records in the National Gallery’s exhibition also keep Gentileschi orbiting her rapist. “In my view, and the view of most people who are writing about Artemisia today, we want to throw up our hands and say: Enough already about the rape trial; let’s talk about her as an artist,” Mary Garrard, an art historian and the author of Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe, told me. “It’s not the fact that she was raped; it’s what she made of the experience.”

What she made of it was art. Gentileschi is a psychological painter. Her 1610 portrait of Susanna is a study in power. The composition shows her vulnerability—two clothed men looming over a naked woman—and her face shows fear. Susanna knows that if she is attacked, her word is worthless. “For the first time in the history of art, it was sexual harassment from a woman’s point of view,” Garrard said. “It was earth-shattering in its significance.”

Like many trailblazing women, however, Gentileschi played the system in ways that later generations might find uncomfortable. The exhibition includes mythological rapes (Danaë, Lucretia), biblical voyeurism (Susanna, Bathsheba), and incest (Lot and his daughters). “They were put next to pictures of Venus, intermingled in collections,” Treves said. “There was definitely an additional appeal for a collector to have a woman paint these pictures.” Choosing biblical subjects allowed Gentileschi to repel charges of smut. Nonetheless, her Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy looks more like an encounter with a Rampant Rabbit than a profound religious experience. Gentileschi’s notoriety as a “fallen woman” might have given the pictures an added piquancy for collectors.

Historical rediscovery is one of the feminist movement’s great successes. From the 1970s onward, books such as Sheila Rowbotham’s Hidden From History, Dale Spender’s Women of Ideas (And What Men Have Done to Them), and Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing argued that the traditional canon—literary, artistic, scientific—is skewed by sexism. Many brilliant women were underappreciated in their lifetime; others were discarded by posterity. The Brontës wrote under men’s names. Marie Curie was named on the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903 only after her husband, Pierre, also her co-researcher, intervened. Orchestras refused to play the work of female composers. Over the past 50 years, there has been a concerted effort to counterbalance this tendency.

Gentileschi is an obvious beneficiary. She was popular enough to earn a good living from painting, yet she somehow faded from view after her death in the 1650s. Dozens of her paintings are lost, or are languishing in private homes or galleries, unloved and unattributed; her self-portrait as Saint Catherine only came to light in 2017. She was “essentially a rediscovery by a group of feminist art historians in the 1970s,” Treves told me. A small exhibition in Florence followed in 1981, then a joint 2003 exhibition with Gentileschi’s father, Orazio, in Rome, New York, and St. Louis. Garrard’s diligent historical work also raised her profile. When Garrard began writing, in the 1980s, the study of women artists was “a subversive underground subject,” she told me. “It was not exactly mainstream.”