LONDON’s blockbuster art exhibitions, on show for a limited time period, tend to be overwhelming but not just for the quality of their programmes. They can attract huge audiences and with crowds of spectators, jamming up a room, all wanting to view a small number of paintings, the experience can be less than ideal. Not so with the Titian and Artemisia exhibitions at the National Gallery.
The Titian exhibition occupies one room of the gallery and consists of seven paintings, completed over ten years and based around Ovid’s retelling of certain Greek myths in his Metamorphoses. Women with none too many clothes on are featured in all the paintings: ample, naked flesh applied with lashings of heavy brush strokes. This inevitably provokes questions about the male gaze but the exhibition’s title – Love, Desire, Death – indicates there is more than one layer of meaning to be contemplated.
In conversation with Vasari after visiting Titian in his studio, Michelangelo dissed the painter for poor drawing skills. Michelangelo, “the divine draughtsman” for Vasari, may have found the anatomical precision and musculature of Titian wanting but surely he admired the use of colour, light and composition to depict states of mind through bodily behaviour. The seven paintings work together to create a dialogue with the viewer about human behaviour in extreme situations.
Events that include the plight of a rape victim (Diana and Callisto), begging a loved one to stay knowing they will die if they leave (Venus and Adonis) and a fatal transgression (Diana and Actaeon) are modulated through the lens of Greek mythology but Titian renders their plight in ways that invite viewers to make their own sense of emotionally charged situations.
National Gallery Titian and Artemisia exhibition
National Gallery Titian and Artemisia exhibition
National Gallery Titian and Artemisia exhibition
National Gallery Titian and Artemisia exhibition
National Gallery Titian and Artemisia exhibition
Artemisia Gentileschi, born in Rome some 20 years after Titian’s death, also drew on myth, classical and biblical, for her paintings but invests them with a sensibility that has seen her hailed as a feminist. Susannah and the Elders, completed when she was only 17, dramatically focus on a woman’s vulnerability to sexual blackmail in a patriarchy. Bathing in a fountain, two lecherous predators demand her compliance or they will accuse her of adultery and she will be punished with her life.
While still a teenager, Artemisia herself would be raped by another artist and, although her father had him successfully prosecuted it was only after judicial torture with thumbscrews that her evidence was accepted. The rapist never served his sentence and with this in mind the term revenge art has been applied to her two paintings entitled Judith Beheading Holofernes. Both canvases, without sparing horrific details, show Judith dispatching her enemy with the efficiency of a farmer killing a hen.
A visit to the National Gallery would be worthwhile just to see the paintings of Susannah and Judith but many other works by Artemisia have been brought together, making this easily London’s most exciting and extraordinary exhibition. Whether a visit is possible or not, the published catalogue is a compulsive purchase for its wealth of illustration, information and interpretation.
The entries for the two Judith works, for example, reproduce each painting (close-ups of section appear elsewhere in the book) as well as Caravvagio’s earlier depiction of the scene, drawing out similarities and significant differences.
In addition to the commentaries on each of the paintings in the exhibition, the catalogue has a series of six insightful essays. One of them examines how Artemisia’s work has been associated with portraits of herself, not just as self-portraits – a term not in use at the time – but also as representations of a selfhood arising from identifying with the subject matter of her canvases. Others look at her love letters (only discovered in 2011), her family and the influence of her father, and the history of an artist who for centuries had a marginal presence in art history.
The exhibition and the book are celebratory testimony to the fact that Artemisia Gentileschi has finally assumed her rightful place in the pantheon of great painters.
by Sean Sheehan
At the National Gallery, London, Love, Desire, Death is on from 3 December to 17 January 2021and Artemisia from December 3 to January 24, 2021. The book Artemisia is published by the National Gallery, London.