C14| Saturday/Sunday, August 17 - 18, 2019 ** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.**
ICONS
When a
Woman
Wields the
Weapon
point in “The Heidi Chronicles”
(1988). The contrarian Camille
Paglia said condescendingly that
she “was simply a polished,
competent painter in a Baroque
style created by men.”
Gentileschi was raped in 1611
by Agostino Tassi, an associate
of her father with whom she
was working in Rome. There
was a trial, and Tassi was sen-
tenced to exile, but the sentence
was not carried out. She then
married the Florentine painter
Pierantonio Stiattesi. She bore
him a daughter around 1618, and
later had an affair with a Flo-
rentine nobleman, which her
husband tolerated. It all sounds
like a chapter out of “The Real
Housewives of Renaissance It-
aly.”
Even if we accept the theory
that the 1612-13 “Judith” is Gen-
tileschi’s literal and figurative
self-portrait, neither biographi-
cal facts nor armchair psycholo-
gizing will explain the effect of
her picture. What matters is the
art. Female strength as a re-
sponse to male violence was al-
ways on Artemisia’s mind, even
as her work matured and some-
what softened. Gentileschi returned to the sub-
ject c. 1620 for a second version of the same
scene, in a picture now at the Uffizi in Florence.
The story, illustrated by countless Renais-
sance painters and sculptors, comes from the
Book of Judith. The Jewish heroine enters the
tent of the Assyrian general Holofernes, who is
besotted with her and who is also about to de-
stroy her hometown. Sometimes depicted alone,
sometimes with a handmaiden, Judith slays her
enemy, having first, in some versions, plied him
with drink, and carries away his head in a bas-
ket.
In this painting—influenced heavily by Cara-
vaggio’s use of chiaroscuro—we see the three
figures from below, light coming in from theleft. Judith’s knife plunges straight into Holofer-
nes’s throat. His head has not yet been sepa-
rated from his body. Decapitation will come
later. Gentileschi emphasizes her characters’
arms. Judith’s left hand steadies her enemy’s
head, while her right hand firmly grasps her
murder weapon. Both arms are dramatically
vectored to her right. The maidservant’s arms
push straight down, while Holofernes’s right
arm juts up involuntarily against the servant’s
chin, his outsize hand symbolizing resistance
and fear.
Other geometric forms draw us in. The three
faces make for a strong triangle. Judith looks
down, but aslant, as her angled body tilts left;
she leans away in order to give her slicing armgreater leverage and control. The
servant, eyes shaded, also looks
down. Holofernes, having passed
out, now lies with eyes open, his
left arm bent across his chest but
not fully visible to us. And Gentile-
schi’s colors dazzle: red and blue
for the women’s gowns, white for
the sheets, accented by dripping
streams and drizzling drops of
blood.
This trio of faces and bodies en-
acts a powerful drama of surprise
and submission, violence and re-
sistance. In her second rendering
of the scene (in Florence), Gentile-
schi gives us more of Holofernes’s
body, but the earlier picture, with
its tight, claustrophobic view of
the action, is the more horrifying.
At the Capodimonte, this pic-
ture hangs between two other,
much later Gentileschi works. On
the left is “Judith and Her Maid-
servant” (1645-50) and on the
right a 1630 “Annunciation.” Both
of these are more fully Baroque. They prove
that Gentileschi had learned to paint full fig-
ures, in billowing garments, and with flowery
details, and that she had mastered larger spatial
arrangements. In the “Annunciation,” Gabriel,
kneeling and holding a lily, looks positively fem-
inine, while the Virgin stands and bows gra-
ciously to him. In the late “Judith,” the female
hero stands surveying the scene, while her ser-
vant wraps up her enemy’s head on the floor.
Neither is as powerful as the tense, compact
painting made by a woman wise beyond her
years.Mr. Spiegelman writes about the arts and books
for the Journal.It can be read as a literal and
figurative self-portrait related to
a traumatic event in the young
artist’s life, but its stunning
power extends beyond her story.W
illiam Blake (1757-1827) was born into the age of En-
lightenment, but scientific reason and logic had no
place in his work. In the books of poetry and prose
that he both wrote and illustrated, Blake elaborated
a complex mythology about a world full of angels and
demons who battled for control of the human soul.
The villains in Blake’s morality were religious dogmatism, cold ratio-
nality and the industrial revolution, whose “dark Satanic mills” he imag-
ined in his poem “Jerusalem.” To counter them, he preached a message
of liberation, radical innocence and joy. The extreme originality of
Blake’s work made his contemporaries think of him as an eccentric, if
not a madman, and he spent most of his life working in obscurity in Lon-
don. Not until after his death did he start to be seen as one of Britain’s
greatest artists and poets.
But Blake had hoped for a much grander role as a public artist, in the
tradition of the Renaissance masters whose flowing lines and muscular-
ity inspired his own style. “Blake described himself as somebody who
was going to be a rival to Michelangelo and Raphael in producing gigan-
tic pictorial schemes,” said Martin Myrone, the lead curator of “William
Blake,” a new show opening next month at London’s Tate Britain. “His
failure to become that kind of public artist is part of his tragedy.”
The exhibition, which runs from Sept. 11 to Feb. 2, 2020, will belatedly
fulfill Blake’s dream of having his work appreciated by the masses. It fea-
tures 350 artworks from public and private collections, including paint-
ings, watercolors, drawings and prints, as well as illuminated books cre-
ated by the artist with the help of his wife Catherine.
Among the highlights of the show are two paintings, “The Spiritual
Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan” (c. 1805-09) and “The Spiritual Form
of Pitt Guiding Behemoth” (c. 1805), that are less than three feet high.
In the former, the British naval hero Admiral Nelson is directing a huge
biblical sea monster that Blake used to symbolize war; in the latter, the
subject is British Prime Minister William Pitt, who was described by
Blake as “directing the storms of war” against France
after the Revolution of 1789.
Both works were made with glue-based tempera
paints that have a rugged surface evocative of wall-
painting, and Mr. Myrone said that Blake talked
about them as “sketches” for much larger frescoes
that he was planning. At Tate Britain, Blake’s dream
will finally come true, in a way: The paintings will be
digitally enlarged and projected onto a gallery wall.
The exhibition opens with Blake’s watercolor “Al-
bion Rose” (ca. 1793), which depicts a young man
with his arms outstretched in a gesture of liberation.
In Blake’s personal mythology, the figure of Albion
was an idealized Britain, here shown casting off the
shackles of industrialization and slave labor. “It’s an
iconic image which contains ideas of youthful rebel-
lion, creative freedom and personal liberty,” Mr. My-
rone said. “In this show, we want to celebrate the
idea of Blake as a source of inspiration across the
generations.”
“William Blake” sets out to do this by debunking
the idea of Blake as an artist defined by poverty, iso-
lation and mental instability. In fact, he earned his
living as a sought-after commercial engraver, and the
exhibition showcases work that he produced for a
number of supportive patrons.
Among them are eight watercolors illustrating
Robert Blair’s poem “The Grave,” which were lost for
165 years until they turned up at a second-hand
bookstore in Glasgow in 2001. One of these works,“Death of the Strong Wicked Man” (1813), demon-
strates all of Blake’s intricate draftsmanship and flair
for visual narrative in its depiction of a death-bed
scene.
Another rarity is a portrait miniature of Blake,
which Mr. Myrone believes is probably by Blake him-
self, and which has only been exhibited once before.
“It’s certainly a very revealing image of Blake as an
autonomous creative being,” he said. “That frontal
gaze is something that appears in artists’ self-por-
traits from around 1800, including J.M.W. Turner’s fa-
mous self-portrait.” It will be shown alongside a pen-
cil portrait the artist made of his beloved Catherine.
“William Blake” strives to respect the original
form of Blake’s work as much as possible by show-
casing copies of his books that were bound in his life-
time, rather than just individual plates. The books of
poetry and images, which were all relief-etched by
Blake himself using a process that he invented, are
each unique in their printing and coloring. Their
muscle-bound, mutable heroes, such as Urizen and
Orc, are shown undergoing mythological adventures
of intricate complexity, which baffled readers at the
end of the 18th century.
But they seem fit to be rediscovered now. “You
think of how Blake’s imagery and universe anticipates
graphic novels and superhero comics perhaps more
directly than fine art practice,” Mr. Myrone said.
“That, you might say, is one of the places where
Blake’s legacy has ended up.”MASTERPIECE| ‘JUDITH SLAYING HOLOFERNES’ (1612-13), BY ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI
FROM LEFT: YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART; THE HUNTINGTON ART COLLECTIONSSCALA/MINISTERO PER I BENI E LE ATTIVITÀ CULTURALI / ART RESOURCE, NYAbove left,
an etching
from William
Blake’s
‘Jerusalem’
(1820).
Above right,
Blake’s
watercolor
‘Albion Rose’
(1793).REVIEW
LET’S CALL THE PICTURE a 17th-century artic-
ulation of the #MeToo movement. Its maker
was a very young woman. It’s Artemisia Gen-
tileschi’s arresting painting “Judith Slaying Ho-
lofernes” (1612-13) in the Museo di Capodi-
monte in Naples: biblical in subject, violent and
vengeful in energy, Baroque in style. It repre-
sents the lessons its precocious creator had ab-
sorbed from her teacher-father, Orazio, and
from her near contemporary Caravaggio, who
had done his own version of the same subject
some years earlier. Most of all, it reflects her
own experience and genius. Like Picasso, she
was a master right from the start.
Gentileschi was born in Rome in 1593, to a
Tuscan painter and his wife. She died c. 1656 in
Naples, perhaps during a plague that swept
through the city. Her career took her through-
out Italy, to the court of Charles I in London,
and then back to Naples. She was the first
woman admitted to the Accademia delle Arti
del Disegno in Florence. She earned commis-
sions.
From her own day until ours, she has never
gone unrecognized. In 1916, the Italian scholar
Roberto Longhi cited her as the only woman of
her day who understood painting’s fundamen-
tals; he also praised the excellence of her fe-
male figures. George Eliot used part of her
story in “Romola,” her 1863 historical novel.
Judy Chicago gave her a place at the table in
the now iconic 1979 “The Dinner Party,” and
Wendy Wasserstein featured her as a reference
BYWILLARDSPIEGELMAN
BYTOBIASGREY
A new exhibition at London’s Tate Britain offers William Blake
the mass audience he never enjoyed in his lifetime.
Mythic Images
On a Grand Scale