Italy Impressions #7 The Barberini
Notes on Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes, and the ever popular rape of the Sabine (and other) Women.
We ate tramezzini and supermarket pasta for lunch, squatting on the steps leading to more steps leading to the garden behind the Barberini Palace, which houses Italy’s Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica. I’d hoped we could at least picnic in the gardens behind it before spending the afternoon inside, but when I staggered up the long and beautiful stairs to the garden, I found no benches, and little shade, either, if you didn’t count the bush that a cat was under hiding from the blazing sun. The only other creature in the large expanse was a young man sprawled beneath a pencil-thin tree stuffing potato chips into the hole above his beard which collected whatever greasy crumbs fell from his mouth.
Which is why, after a sweaty, exhausting morning, we found ourselves huddled in the few inches of shade on the Barberini’s back steps trying not to get kicked in the head by the occasional tourist climbing them en route to the garden, the military men taking a shortcut up to a club behind it, the museum employees who carefully looked away as if we weren’t there. I was grateful to them for that. Grateful for the surprisingly good sandwich filled with chopped artichoke and mozzarella after the bizarre mozzarella and tomato sandwich the day before which was so bad I almost puked, but ate it anyway, the tomato fizzing strangely on the tongue.
Forget about that, though, this sandwich cancelled out the other. And as I chewed I thought about the Roman artist Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 – 1656), whose paintings like Susanna and the (extremely creepy) Elders, or Judith Slaying Holofernes (who absolutely deserved it) made her a leading Baroque painter.
When I’d first programmed the Barberini, it was because I’d seen that a Judith Killing Holofernes was there, and didn’t notice it was the one by Caravaggio until I was looking at the guidebook again. It said, too, that the museum also had the famous 1506 painting The Rape of the Sabine Women by Giovanni Antonio Bazzi aka Sodom, which portrayed a foundational moment in the history of Rome in which, not long after killing his brother Remus during a disagreement over just which hill they should build their new city on, Romulus and his crew of criminals, exiles, refugees invited the neighboring Sabines to a festival and used the opportunity to abduct young Sabine women so they could use them as breeders.
I call up that painting with the languid bare-breasted women and hate it with all my heart. One woman has an arm artistically raised to her forehead in a sign of tepid despair. You can almost hear her saying, “Oh, woe is me,” before swooning to the ground. I remember seeing a slide of it, or a similar one, during an art history course, or maybe in a book, and not computing that word “rape”. It must surely mean something else in this context because rape was something serious and that was anything but. At least for the women who probably didn’t swoon, who probably didn’t just shrug and submit.
Though maybe for the men it wasn’t serious at all. They were as nonchalant as cattle rustlers. Agostino Tassi, for instance, an artist in the workshop of the Tuscan painter Orazio Gentileschi, thought nothing of raping his boss’s daughter Artemisia. When she painted Judith Slaying Holofernes she knew enough about suffering to at least put a grimace on the man’s face, and squirt plenty of blood around.
While the faces of Judith and her maid are largely impassive, concentrating on the task at hand, their emotion, the rage of every victim outwitting her aggressor is embodied in the twisting angled lines, the vibrant color. When it was clear Tassi wouldn’t marry Artemisia, and restore her honor, her father pressed charges against Tassi (she herself didn’t have the right) and there was a seven month-long rape trial in which Tassi was eventually found guilty and briefly imprisoned. There’s a transcript of the trial at the Archivio di Stato in Rome (and described in this biography by UK’s National Gallery) in which Artemisia repeatedly asserts that she is telling the truth.
To test the veracity of her statement she was tortured using the 'sibille' (cords wrapped around the fingers and pulled tight). As the cords tighten, she was recorded as saying:
"I have told the truth and I always will, because it is true and I am here to confirm it wherever necessary."
Then, turning to Tassi, who had falsely promised her marriage, Artemisia quips:
“This is the ring that you give me and these are your promises”.
I can’t look at that painting without thinking of her rape. Although Holofernes wasn’t a rapist (at least not a famous one), he was a general in the Assyrian army besieging the Jewish city of Bethulia which did not want to be besieged. So he deserved what he got when Judith approached him in her sexy clothes, seduced him and killed him with his own sword.
Regularly turning up in #metoo memes, Artemisia’s Judith Slaying Holofernes is displayed at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Such strange things hang on the walls of museums, are glorified in monuments. Elsewhere in Florence, at the Loggia dei Lanzi, just outside of the Palazzo Vecchio, there’s a sculpture by Giambologna that, like Sodom treats The Abduction of a Sabine Woman (1581-83). Probably Gentileschi saw it after her marriage to Florentine artist Pierantonio Stiattesi, and was living in the city. I wonder what she thought. Maybe nothing. She just gritted her teeth, built a career. Won laurels. Made money. Sold herself to clients, assuring one collector that:
with me Your Illustrious Lordship will not lose and you will find the spirit of Caesar in the soul of a woman.
What a positively Roman thing to say.
Hats off to you, Artemisia. If only you were in Rome.
By the time we finished our lunch, we were stiff and dull. Even in the shade it was 103 degrees, 39.4 C. I briefly wondered why the new generation of art censors in the U.S. pulled down the statues of slaveholders but let the rapists stand— the proud founders of the Roman empire. Like Poussin’s Abduction of the Sabine Women at the Met in New York? Then I thought about the marvels and atrocities just a few steps away,
Sweat dripped from my face. I imagined putting on a mask, going inside, struggling to breathe.
“What if we just went back to the hotel and air conditioning and Netflix? Would you mind? I bet we can find something to stream.”
That’s it for this time.
Ciao,
xoxo Kelly