An Allegory of Inclination: Conclusion

[DISCLAIMER: Violence, artistic nudity, child death.]

A candlelit hallway. Enter Artemesia and Tuzia.

ARTEMESIA: Tuzia, do you know the story of Judith, from the Good Book? I want to tell you how important this story is as a theme for the art of Italy.

TUZIA: Is this another one of your hard narrative lessons, Madama Lomi or should I say Stiattesi? Where is that husband of yours these days?

ARTEMESIA: Be silent, you treacherous bitch, puttana infida! it is no lesson. No lesson could teach you. This is only one of my artistic obsessions. Donatello in Florence was the first artist that I know of to tell this story, in his bronze sculpture:

Yet it was Caravaggio much more recently that painted one of the most beautiful canvasses I have ever seen, and hope to rival. My father said it "symbolizes the unity of the Italian commune against Tyranny."

It tells the same story as Donatello, a simple one, do you know it? it's from the Old Testament. Holofernes was an Assyrian general set out to destroy the city of Bethulia in Judea. This was the home of a widow named Judith, a fearsome woman in her faith and devotion. When she heard of the oncoming armies and their doughty captain, she put on her finery and went to his tent outside the city, to offer her body to the conqueror as a whore. She poured him cup upon cup of wine, teasing him slowly with details of her nakedness, until he was so weakened and near losing consciousness, that Judith was able to overcome and behead the fearsome captain of hosts, while her servant assisted. Tell me, would you do that for me, Tuzia?

TUZIA: (clearing her throat) Sure, sounds like fun. I do have to say you certainly have a knack for painting blood soaking into textiles. Did you get any on your dress? Such pretty colors, Madama!

ARTEMESIA: Once the deed was done, they dropped his hairy bearded head almost as ugly as Goliath's in a basket; or in some versions it's set on a silver platter. Thus the conquering pair marched in a jolly and confident mood back to Bethulia with their trophy. End of Story.

PART III: THE FUTURE

Everywhere and Nowhere.

With such a reputation, and such a shocking palette, the renown of Artemesia Lomi Gentileschi will only grow from here. Her savagely beautiful works will be forgotten and rediscovered cyclically, but that will be beyond her reckoning.

The hardest loss she will face is that of her children. Giovanni Battista, Agnola, and Lisabella will none of them reach their first year. Cristofano will die at the age of five. Each one will represent an irreparable rift within and without that no fame can repair.

Her resolution will be forever and sealed, never to paint a Madonna and Child.

Prudenzia, known as Palmira Gentileschi will survive, and is going to embark on her own career as a painter, instructed by her peerless mother. Unfortunately, none of her works will remain to be known to the future.

Artemesia will work in Venice, enriching her colors; she will work in Naples, enriching her line. She will reunite with her father in London at the court of king Charles the First, painting side by side with Rubens and Van Dyck, always thirsty for fresh influences in her craft. She will influence all the art to come, but will not be rediscovered as a serious artist until the twentieth century. She will die an old lady in Naples after many a sweet evening, sipping wine on her balustraded veranda and looking across the Bay at Mount Vesuvius.

FINAL CRITICS: Biblical Heroines in 17th Century Dresses Try to Make Sense of it All

JUDITH: Gendered readings have created far too narrow a field in which to view the innovations that both she and her father have made towards the development of Baroque Art.

SUSANNA: If it's not Baroque, don't fix it. What I actually see here latent in her art is a Political Struggle, a rebellion against the brainwashing of a patriarchal norm that says only men can be violent; it was this supposedly man's world of bloodshed that she embraced in her aesthetic and became more fascinated with than Quentin Tarantino. Were such candid sheets the place for so brutal a massacre? Yes indeed they were. And, this was a woman's Hand? of course it was; there was nothing sadistic here, it was all done impassibly by a true killer at heart.

ESTHER: You're projecting. To be perfectly honest, I don't see what all the fuss is when it comes to Artemesia Gentileschi; while I admit that she is a competent executrix of Baroque tropes, the art that she embodies is a world of imitation invented entirely by men. She did nothing groundbreaking, and her character is also questionable. This Judith is [merely] one of those rehash scenes that her father had already painted and established as valid in that brainwashed and pre-constructed mind of hers he was using as his palette all along. See!

ELIZABETH: So you reject the repressed vengeance theory. Interesting. Still, look down there at the blood, spurting with such feverish intensity, adorning with two spoutlets the central fountain? do you think that just anyone can do that? Her father's work is of course beautiful and heroic, but it is not the same. His inclination is fixed, but on a different star.

So maybe you think she only turns away to avoid the gush of blood which would stain her dress? Impassibility, really? she is impassioned. She was shrewdly exploiting the rape scandal surrounding her person to cater to a male audience drooling for sexually charged female-dominated pictures. Still, she vanquished rather brutally (for herself at least) the prejudice against women in art.

JUDITH: Again, gendered readings have created too narrow a field in which to view the general synthesis of artistic trends anthologized in her work, and to a lesser extent in the work of her father, uniting the pictorial language of the peninsula of Italy into a cohesive whole. But that's enough, ladies.

Exeunt.

ARTEMESIA EPILOGUING AT THE EASEL: (in semi-obscurity, illuminated by a bold shaft of light, working.)

If you asked me why all this violence,

Why all this baring of flesh;

If you asked me why this obsession with blood where

[some demons need to be exorcised]

what can I say? this obsession is aesthetic/

Cathartic//: AN AXIS OF KNOWLEDGE;

Like the Way of All Flesh that they covered with draperies,

Veiling the Nudity of my Inclination.

For, there is a beauty in Blood that eviscerates emotion.

Most primal of colors, it ruddies living flesh,

Fresh when it's reddest of all--

Hematite, or iron-oxide

Like the shimmer of silks, that I paint. In pain

There is a beauty to Blue,

Lengths of cut-out contemplation framed

In the temple of the sky;

There is also splendor to Yellow,

Blasted in deafening solar saturation

Like sunflowers and lemon, an acidic stare. Yet it is

Only the secrets of the shadows that

Shade the growing season

Of your merry floral roundels, and

A truly luscious garden

Must have its butterflies,

AND its weevils.

If you ask me why all this trauma and drama,

Well, I did not decide upon that

With this Hand. It was thrust upon me, so

If you ask me why these obsessions, I fear

All that my ghost can tell you is that

It was my Inclination.

See Part I: