Being a woman and a painter in a historical biopic: the case of Artemisia Gentileschi
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24310/Eviternare.vi11.14110Keywords:
Baroque, Cinema, Feminism, Gaze, RapeAbstract
The celebrity status of the Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (Rome, 1593-Naples, 1653) has reached a height that surpasses, if not eclipses, the critical fortune she achieved during her lifetime. Metamorphosed into a caravaggesque and a feminist heroine since the 1970s, she has been the subject of a proliferation of analyses and studies on her life and work carried out from different perspectives and supports. The rape perpetrated by her master Agostino Tassi is defined as a causal event in her life and work and concentrates a large part of the spotlight that blinds the ultimate gaze on the artist beyond the myth. While none of the "fictions of Artemisia" completely dispenses with factual material from the painter's life, they all place greater value on the construction of a dramatic subject whose life is structured as a narrative. Against the backdrop of the Italian Baroque, Artemisia (Agnès Merlet, France/Italy, 1997) combines the narrative conventions of the Künstlerroman or artist's novel, the monograph and the fictional autobiography to offer a particular, and at the very least controversial, example of the biopic genre. The synopsis of Artemisia revolves around the protagonist's struggle to achieve success as a painter despite the blatant inequalities she suffers by virtue of her sex, while at the same time experiencing her sexual awakening.
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