''Artemisia'' is a 1997 French-German-Italian

biographical film A biographical film or biopic () is a film that dramatizes the life of a non-fictional or historically-based person or people. Such films show the life of a historical person and the central character's real name is used. They differ from docudra ...

about

Artemisia Gentileschi Artemisia Lomi or Artemisia Gentileschi (, ; 8 July 1593) was an Italian Baroque painter. Gentileschi is considered among the most accomplished seventeenth-century artists, initially working in the style of Caravaggio. She was producing profess ...

, the female Italian

Baroque The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including ...

painter. The film was directed by

Agnès Merlet Agnès Merlet (born 4 January 1959) is a French film director A film director controls a film's artistic and dramatic aspects and visualizes the screenplay (or script) while guiding the film crew and actors in the fulfilment of that vi ...

, and stars

Valentina Cervi Valentina Cervi (born 13 April 1976) is an Italian film and television actress. Cervi was born in Rome, Italy. She is the daughter of director Tonino Cervi and granddaughter of actor Gino Cervi. Her mother is the Italian producer of Austri ...

and Michel Serrault.

Plot

Seventeen-year-old Artemisia Gentileschi (Valentina Cervi), the daughter of

Orazio Gentileschi Orazio Lomi Gentileschi (1563–1639) was an Italian painter. Born in Tuscany, he began his career in Rome, painting in a Mannerist style, much of his work consisting of painting the figures within the decorative schemes of other artists. After ...

, a renowned Italian painter, exhibits artistic talent, and is encouraged by her father, who has no sons and wishes his art to survive after him. However, in the chauvinistic world of early 17th century Italy, women are forbidden to paint human nudes or enter the

Academy of Arts An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary or tertiary higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membership). The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, f ...

. Orazio allows his daughter to study in his studio, although he draws the line at letting her view nude males. She is direct and determined, and bribes the fisherman Fulvio with a kiss to let her observe his body and draw him. Artemisia seeks the tutelage of

Agostino Tassi Agostino Tassi (born Agostino Buonamici; 1578 – 1644) was an Italian landscape and seascape painter, who was convicted of raping Artemisia Gentileschi in 1612. Because he aspired to nobility he modified the details of his early life. Though h ...

(Mike Manojlovic), who is painting frescoes in the same building as her father, to learn from him the art of perspective. Tassi is a man notorious for his night-time debauchery. The two hone their skills as artists, but they also fall in love, and begin having sexual relations. Artemisia's father discovers the couple together and files a lawsuit against Tassi for rape. During the subsequent trial, Artemisia's physical state is investigated by two nuns, and then she is

torture Torture is the deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering on a person for reasons such as punishment, extracting a confession, interrogation for information, or intimidating third parties. Some definitions are restricted to acts ...

d by cords wound round her fingers. Nevertheless, Artemisia denies being raped, and proclaims their mutual love. Tassi himself, devastated by her plight, admits to raping her in order to stop her ordeal. Merlet said of her film, "I didn't want to show her as a victim but like a more modern woman who took her life into her own hands."

Cast

* Michel Serrault -

Miki Manojlović Predrag "Miki" Manojlović ( sr-cyr, Предраг "Мики" Манојловић; born 5 April 1950) is a Serbian actor, famous for his starring roles in some of the most important films of former Yugoslav cinema. Since the early 1990s, he su ...

* Luca Zingaretti - Cosimo Quorli * Emmanuelle Devos - Costanza *

Frédéric Pierrot Frédéric Pierrot (born 17 September 1960) is a French actor. He has appeared in more than 120 films and television shows since 1986. He starred in the film '' Tell Me I'm Dreaming'', which was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the ...

- Roberto * Brigitte Catillon - Tuzia * Yann Trégouët - Fulvio *

Maurice Garrel Maurice Garrel (24 February 1923 – 4 June 2011) was a French film actor. Garrel was born in Saint-Servais, Isère. He appeared in over a hundred films and was nominated twice for a César Award for best supporting actor: in 1991 for ''La ...

- The Judge * Liliane Rovère - The Rich Merchant's Wife *

Jacques Nolot Jacques Nolot (; born 31 August 1943) is a French actor, screenwriter and film director. Life and career Jacques Nolot was born on 31 August 1943, Marciac, Gers, a small village in Southwest France. A fragile child, Nolot was doted upon by his m ...

- The Lawyer

Controversy

The film focuses on the incident of Artemisia's rape and its immediate aftermath, and was initially advertised as "a true story" by Miramax Zoe, its American distributor. However,

In the transcript (of Gentileschi's testimony at the trial, based on records preserved in an archive in Rome), Gentileschi describes the rape in graphic detail and states that Tassi continued to have sex with her... with the understanding that he would protect her honor by eventually wedding her ... In the movie, by contrast, she's a willing partner in lust. During the trial, she says only that "I love him"; "he loves me"; "he gives me pleasure." In the movie, Gentileschi refuses to testify that she was raped, even under torture, a sacrifice that prompts a devastated Tassi to make a sham confession ... Just as problematic....is the way the movie ascribes Gentileschi's creative maturation to the influence of, of all people, the man whom history records as her assailant ... At the same time, many inconvenient details – most glaringly, Tassi's relentless campaign during the trial to smear Gentileschi as a slut – didn't make it into the movie ...

Art historian Mary Garrard and feminist

Gloria Steinem Gloria Marie Steinem (; born March 25, 1934) is an American journalist and social-political activist who emerged as a nationally recognized leader of second-wave feminism in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Steinem was a c ...

, incensed by the misinformation in the film, organized a campaign to inform audiences for "Artemisia" that what they were seeing was not, as was promised in early advertisements, "The Untold True Story of an Extraordinary Woman.". They put up a website attacking the film as untruthful in presenting what they say was Artemisia's rape by her teacher, Agostino Tassi. At the New York premiere screening of the film on April 28, Gloria Steinem and other women in the audience circulated a fact sheet prepared by Steinem and Garrard. This intervention led Miramax to retract its claim that that film presents a "true" story. Steinem and Garrard's stated intention was not to interfere with the filmmaker's creative freedom, nor with Miramax's distribution of the film, but rather to counter its historical distortions with concrete factual information about the subject.

The other side

Feminist

Germaine Greer Germaine Greer (; born 29 January 1939) is an Australian writer and public intellectual, regarded as one of the major voices of the radical feminist movement in the latter half of the 20th century. Specializing in English and women's literat ...

points out in her chapter on Artemisia in her book on women painters, ''The Obstacle Race'', that the rape trial transcripts are not transparent, and that there is evidence that supports Merlet's construction. The rape trial records may be found in an appendix to Garrard's book. Garrard interprets them one way (Artemisia was raped, didn't love Tassi); Greer interprets them differently (Artemisia was raped, but came to love her rapist); Merlet offers a third interpretation (Artemisia loved her rapist from the start). Garrard's account was savaged by a number of feminist reviewers, and most recently challenged by

Griselda Pollock Griselda Frances Sinclair Pollock''The International Who's Who of Women''; 3rd ed.; ed. Elizabeth Sleeman, Europa Publications, 2002, p. 453 (born 11 March 1949) is an art historian and cultural analyst of international, postcolonial feminist stud ...

in ''Differencing the Canon'':

Merlet's film is, I would argue, not really a biography, for there is no analysis of the impact of the early death of the artist's mother and her bereavement, no exploration of how she made a massively successful career in Italy and beyond after the horrors of the trial and her torture, how she married and mothered several daughters who also became artists, how she negotiated with some of the major patrons of her time for the commissions on which she lived and through which she, not their father, accumulated dowries for her daughter. No one wants to tell that story.

(Artemisia had only one daughter who survived to adulthood, Prudentia, but as she was known by another name, Palmira, some scholars have erroneously concluded they were two different women.)

Critical receptions

''New York Times'' film critic

Stephen Holden Stephen Holden (born July 18, 1941) is an American writer, poet, and music and film critic. Biography Holden earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Yale University in 1963. He worked as a photo editor, staff writer, and eventually be ...

was very favourable towards the film:

This handsomely photographed film, whose indoor scenes recreate the heavy
chiaroscuro Chiaroscuro ( , ; ), in art, is the use of strong contrasts between light and dark, usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition. It is also a technical term used by artists and art historians for the use of contrasts of light to achi ...
of
Caravaggio Michelangelo Merisi (Michele Angelo Merigi or Amerighi) da Caravaggio, known as simply Caravaggio (, , ; 29 September 1571 – 18 July 1610), was an Italian painter active in Rome for most of his artistic life. During the final four years of h ...
paintings, takes a decidedly 90s view of a woman whom feminist art historians rescued from obscurity in the 1970s. If the central character emerges as a feminist heroine for flouting patriarchical taboos, she also happens to be a tantalizing sex kitten whose artistic curiosity smacks of voyeurism. As portrayed by Valentina Cervi, Artemisia is two distinctly different entities. One is a gorgeous early-17th-century sex kitten. The other is a fearlessly ambitious teen-age prodigy who is so sure of her talent that she breaks the rules of female decorum and dares go where no ''nice'' woman of her time and station has gone before. These two Artemisias don't really fit together, but they make for a ripely sensuous portrait of the artist as a saucy but virtuous siren.

Roger Ebert Roger Joseph Ebert (; June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013) was an American film critic, film historian, journalist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, Ebert beca ...

also liked the film:

''Artemisia'' is as much about art as about sex, and it contains a lot of information about techniques, including the revolutionary idea of moving the easel outside and painting from nature. It lacks, however, detailed scenes showing drawings in the act of being created (for that you need ''
La Belle Noiseuse ''La Belle Noiseuse'' (, ) is a 1991 drama film directed by Jacques Rivette and starring Michel Piccoli, Jane Birkin and Emmanuelle Béart. Loosely adapted from the 1831 short story '' Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu'' (''The Unknown Masterpiece'') by H ...
'',
Jacques Rivette Jacques Rivette (; 1 March 1928 – 29 January 2016) was a French film director and film critic most commonly associated with the French New Wave and the film magazine '' Cahiers du Cinéma''. He made twenty-nine films, including '' L'amour f ...
's 1991 movie that peers intimately over the shoulder of an artist in love). And it doesn't show a lot of Artemisia's work. What it does show is the gift of Valentina Cervi, who is another of those modern European actresses, like
Juliette Binoche Juliette Binoche (; born 9 March 1964) is a French actress and dancer. She has appeared in more than sixty feature films and has been the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, a Silver Bear, ...
, Irene Jacob,
Emmanuelle Beart Emmanuelle is the lead character in a series of French erotic films based on the main character in the novel ''Emmanuelle'' (1959), created by Emmanuelle Arsan. Character history Emmanuelle appeared as the pen name of Marayat Rollet-Andr ...
and
Julie Delpy Julie Delpy (; born 21 December 1969) is a French-American actress, film director, screenwriter, and singer-songwriter. She studied filmmaking at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and has directed, written, and acted in more than 30 films, includ ...
, whose intelligence, despite everything else, is the most attractive thing about her.

Daphne Merkin Daphne Miriam Merkin (born in New York City) is an American literary critic, essayist and novelist. Merkin is a graduate of Barnard College and also attended Columbia University's graduate program in English literature. She began her career as ...

wrote in the ''New Yorker'':

This controversial and confused new film, written and directed by Agnès Merlet, is ostensibly about the seventeenth-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi, but it is really the silliest form of late-twentieth-century iconography. The movie, which stars the fetching Valentina Cervi, makes a sexy love story out of Artemisia's relationship with her teacher, Agostino Tassi (played by Miki Manojlovic): it's art lessons as foreplay. "Let yourself go," Tassi tells his young pupil, as though he is quoting from Masters and Johnson, and Artemisia not only expertly guides him in bed but insists that he gave her pleasure when he raped her. Although the real Artemisia did flout the conventions of her time by insisting on painting from live models, it's hard to believe that she proceeded with the air of defiant entitlement she's given here. Once you accept the film on its own fraudulent terms, however, it's quite engaging-not least because of the erotic subtext.

References

Other works inspired by the artist's life

* Alexandra Lapierr
''Artemisia: A Novel''
* Sally Clark

a play by the Canadian playwright * Cathy Capla
''Lapis Blue Blood Red''
a play which opened off-Broadway in 2002 * Susan Vreelan
''The Passion of Artemisia: A Novel''
* Rauda Jamis
''Artemisia ou La Renommée'' 1990
(in French, not translated in English yet) * Anna Bant
''Artemisia''

External links

* *

article by Mary O'Neill in the ''Smithsonian'' magazine, May 2002 * {{DEFAULTSORT:Artemisia Artemisia Gentileschi 1997 films 1990s biographical drama films Biographical films about artists Biographical films about painters Cultural depictions of 17th-century painters Cultural depictions of Italian women Films directed by Agnès Merlet Films set in the 1610s Films set in Italy French biographical drama films French courtroom films German biographical drama films Italian biographical drama films 1990s French-language films Films about rape Torture in films 1997 drama films 1990s French films 1990s German films French-language German films French-language Italian films