Maidservant with the Head of Holfernes,
also shows the influence of Michelangelo
da Caravaggio, who brought a stark real-
ism and drama to religious paintings with
his use of chiaroscuro, or contrasting light
and shadow. Gentileschi transferred this
sense of drama and her keen perception of
human emotion to her other major works:
Judith Slaying Holofernes, The Penitent
Magdalen, andLucretia. After moving to
Naples, Gentileschi completed several late
masterpieces, including Bathsheba, The
Discovery of Moses, andThe Annunciation.
She had a strong influence on painters of
Naples in the Baroque period, while in
later centuries her life inspired plays, nov-
els, and several historical works that
painted her as one of the original feminist
artists.
SEEALSO: Caravaggio, Michelangelo da;
Naples
Gesualdo, Carlo ...............................
(ca. 1560–1613)
A musician and composer, Gesualdo was
born into a noble, wealthy family and in
1584 inherited the title of Prince of Venosa,
a small domain in southern Italy. He stud-
ied composition from an early age and de-
voted himself to music for the rest of his
life. His work and life were strongly af-
fected by a sensational crime he commit-
ted on October 16, 1590, when on discov-
ering his wife Donna Maria d’Avalos with
her lover, the Duke of Andria, Gesualdo
brutally stabbed the pair in the Palazzo
San Severo in Naples and dragged the bod-
ies into the street for public viewing. As a
nobleman, he was safe from prosecution;
he also managed to escape informal justice
from the family of his wife and her lover.
In 1594 Gesualdo moved to Ferrara, a cul-
tural capital of Italy under the rule and
patronage of the d’Este family. The six
books of madrigals Gesualdo began com-
posing in Ferrara are his most famous
works, in which he experimented with new
techniques of composition that are star-
tling precursors of the impressionistic mu-
sic of the early twentieth century. He
moved back to his family estate in 1595
and assembled a company of musicians
and performers, but his solitary nature
prevented him from developing a musical
school of his own. Gesualdo suffered from
depression and remorse over the murders
he committed in Naples; his troubled na-
ture is expressed in the strange and jarring
dissonances, chromatic melodies, and sur-
prising chord combinations of his madri-
gals and other vocal works.ghetto ..............................................
Originally a district in Venice reserved for
Jewish inhabitants of the city, and a name
applied to any neighborhood that, either
by law or custom, holds a majority of any
single national, ethnic, or religious group.
There were Jewish inhabitants of Venice
early in its history, with most earning their
livings from certain trades permitted to
them: moneylending, tailoring, and medi-
cine. After Jews were expelled from Spain
in 1492, however, the arrival of several
thousand foreign Jews prompted the Vene-
tian Republic to take action restricting
their movements in the city. One law al-
lowed them to live in the city for no more
than fifteen days every year. In 1516 Ven-
ice designated the ghetto as the restricted
area where Jews could live. The city also
had designated areas of residence for other
groups, including German merchants, who
were limited to a single building known as
the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, and the Turks,
in the Fondaco dei Turchi.
The Venetian ghetto was linked to the
rest of the city by two small bridges thatGesualdo, Carlo