The diagnostic campaign reveals the secrets of this exceptional painting, and of its valorous author.
The super gallery Robilant+Voena in New York presented until 10 February 2024, entitled “Ahead of Her Time: Pioneering Women from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century.” The gallery offered a fantastic selection of works executed by over 20 women artists from the 16th to the 20th century, coming from Italy, England, France, and the United States. Most of the works had never been exhibited to the public for entire generations, as they belonged to private collections. Among works by Orsola Maddalena Caccia, Rosalba Carriera, Giulia Crespi, Lavinia Fontana, Fede Galizia, Angelica Kauffmann, and many others, a new masterpiece by Artemisia Gentileschi emerged, a Penitent Magdalene proposed by the New York Gallery for a hefty 7 million dollars!
Just for reference, during the European Art Fair (Tefaf) in Maastricht this March 2024, where the Penitent Magdalene was offered for sale, a rare early painting by Vincent van Gogh, “Head of a Peasant Woman with a White Cap,” was priced at 4.9 million dollars.
We are thus facing a new Artemisia-mania, but also a phenomenon of great reassessment of works by female painters who are experiencing a real boom on the market, a success that could also be seen as compensation, linked to the sense of guilt that society, and the field of artistic studies in particular, feels towards these artists, often deliberately excluded from the history of art because they were considered somewhat second-rate.
The fame of Artemisia in particular, as for all Caravaggesque painters, is really recent, and dates back to the mythical exhibition organized by Roberto Longhi in 1951 at Palazzo Reale in Milan entitled “Exhibition of Caravaggio and the Caravaggesques.”
Artemisia Gentileschi, however, had a story all her own, almost a fiction, not only for the well-known details of her life but also because it was a novel that brought her back to the attention of the general public. Anna Banti, pseudonym of Lucia LoPresti, the wife of Roberto Longhi, published a novel in 1947 dedicated to the intense and unfortunate life of the painter, and since then her fame has not declined.
Regarding Banti’s novel, there is another small “romantic” detail worth remembering. The writer and art critic had practically completed her biographical tale in the spring of 1944, but in August of the same year the manuscript was destroyed in the German bombings on Florence. With “heartfelt stubbornness,” the writer then returned to her character, “a very talented painter” but above all “one of the first women who supported with words and works the right to congenial work and equality of spirit between the sexes.” The result was indeed Artemisia: a book of strong emotions, chiaroscuro, and hidden identities, just like Artemisia’s Caravaggesque painting.
The masterpiece rediscovered and proposed by the Robilant+Voen Gallery is one of Artemisia’s favorite subjects, a Penitent Magdalene, an oil on canvas measuring 81×68.5 cm. It comes from a private collection in Florida and has not been seen in public for many decades.
Depicted in three-quarters, the beautiful Magdalene meditates with melancholy on her past. With her right hand, she caresses a skull that almost seems golden, an ocher color that softens the macabre force of the object, blending with the painting’s setting to make the skull almost a decorative object. Magdalene, wearing rich garments, sensually uncovers her generous décolleté to the point of showing a particularly sensual detail, and wears precious jewels, visible reminders of her past as a courtesan.
In this composition, attributable to the years 1625-30, it emerges how the painter, after a phase more closely inspired by Caravaggesque painting, then recovers what has been defined as the characteristic costumism of Florentine painting of these years, that is, the great attention given by Tuscan painters and Florentines in particular to the details of fabrics, and jewelry decorations. It should not be forgotten that Artemisia, although born in Rome, came from a Tuscan family, originally from Florence and then Pisa.
Moreover, in this work, references to painters like Simon Vouet and Nicolas Régnier can be recognized, present in this circle of years in Rome and an important source of inspiration for Gentileschi’s painting. Among other things, at Palazzo Blu in Pisa, there is a portrait of Artemisia Gentileschi painted by Simon Vouet, a tangible testimony of their relationship. A curiosity: Simon Vouet’s wife was named Virginia Vezzi and she too was a respected painter!
Not to mention the Venetian references recognizable after her frequentation of the lagoon city precisely in these years of the ’20s of the ‘600.
Another element that emerges from the work is the iconographic overlap between Magdalene and the Allegory of Melancholy. From Dürer onwards, and especially in famous examples like Michelangelo’s Medici Tombs, the woman with her head supported by an arm denoted a melancholic meditation on her own existence.
In good condition, the canvas underwent a diagnostic campaign in February 2023, which, as always, proved to be extremely important. In fact, the X-ray images highlighted that initially the female figure had been conceived as a Cleopatra. Indeed, although in the same position, the right hand was holding an asp, and the skull and the ointment jar were later added. Other analyses, such as stratigraphic analysis together with pigment analysis, however, demonstrated that the iconographic change is absolutely contemporary with the painting and above all attributable to the same hand of the artist. This change in the subject of the painting through small additions of objects or details is found several times both in Orazio and in Artemisia, often linked to the will of the patron, and therefore it is an additional element towards the autography of the painter.
This beautiful and melancholic Magdalene shows Artemisia’s constant openness to the different artistic environments in which she found herself working. Her extraordinary ability to understand and enhance the different characteristics of the artists she encountered in the various phases of her eventful life speaks volumes about her exceptional painting skills.
