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Dec 23 - Jan 6, 2001 |
The Gentileschi family of soulful painters
Orazio's elegance is coupled with the romanticism of daughter Artemisia in Rome's Palazzo Venezia
Originally Published: 2001-12-02
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Orazio's Magdalen petitioner
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After Caravaggio, Rome rediscovers the Gentileschi. Father Orazio and daughter Artemisia will undeservedly be confined for centuries to the boundless sea of imitators of Caravaggio. In actuality, they were the authors of some indisputable masterpieces that will be on display for the first time in one place, Palazzo Venezia, until next January 20.
Presented to the press in the presence of Under-secretary of state for Cultural Heritage Vittorio Sgarbi, this exhibition is the fruit of a collaboration with New York's Metropolitan Museum and Saint Louis' Art Museum, and its curators are Keith Christiansen, Judith Mann (the real power behind the show, due to her passion for Artemisia), and Rossella Vodret.
The exhibition, displaying some 50 works with great simplicity and rigour, has an international dimension, just like the art of Orazio and Artemisia who worked in the service of Europe's courts, where they were considered among the major representatives of Italian 17th century painting.
The exhibition, according to Rossella Vodret, is a milestone event, which will cause great steps forward to be taken in art history studies, because it brings together the masterpieces of the two Gentileschi, taken from all the different phases of their long career as cosmopolitan artists. Vodret also added that this exhibition maintains a very high scientific level, at long last dispensing with Orazio's confinement "in the boundless marsh of the followers of Caravaggio." According to Vittorio Sgarbi, who collects paintings by Artemisia, she was probably a greater painter than Caravaggio himself.
The under-secretary lent one of his paintings by Artemisia to the exhibition, a sensual Cleopatra; but the curators largely ignored this "juvenile masterpiece," much to Mr. Sgarbi's great disappointment. In the painting, the body of her father Orazio emerges powerfully from a red cloth in a very Caravaggio-like composition.
Artemisia's fame, whom Sgarbi called "a star in art history," will probably attract a large public to the exhibition, due to the dramatic events in her life (she was raped at 18 years of age by a minor painter, Agostino Tassi, although, as Sgarbi explained, the two of them entertained a month-long affair, (but he broke his promise to marry her) and to the eroticism in her art.
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