A painting from the artist Artemisia Gentileschi, with light on the figures in the foreground and an inky black background.
Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting ‘Judith Slaying Holofernes’ may also slay some of the artist’s demons.
It’s an image remarkable both for its ferocity and exquisite execution. The painting, dated 1620, demonstrates the artist’s technical brilliance while depicting an execution described in the Bible.
In her 1620 painting, “Judith Slaying Holofernes,” Artemisia Gentileschi captures the Old Testament tale in which Judith saves her village from marauding Syrian forces by decapitating General Holofernes in his tent with the help of her maid, Abra. The style highlights the painting’s subjects against dark surroundings. It’s one of the artist’s most famous works, and may also have served as a personal catharsis.
Although the artist was well known in her day, she and other women artists from Italy’s Baroque period later fell into obscurity. But now, Artemisia (often referred to by her first name so as not to be confused with Orazio Gentileschi, her father and fellow painter) is experiencing a renaissance of sorts.
This month Forward Theater will premiere Artemisia, a new play the company commissioned from noted playwright Lauren Gunderson. The production, which runs April 13-30, is Forward’s entry into World Premiere Wisconsin, the statewide new play festival that director Jen Uphoff Gray helped create with theater companies from around the state.
But it’s not the only work celebrating the artist and her influence that has a Madison connection.
In 2017, Laura Schwendinger, professor of composition at UW’s Mead Witter School of Music, debuted her opera, also called Artemisia, in New York City. This year, Schwendinger and Ginger Strand, her librettist, won the prestigious Charles Ives Opera Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the opera. Schwendinger would love to see a Madison production.
“The story of Artemisia hit me when I was an artist-in-residence in Rome in 2009,” says Schwendinger, who also paints. “I visited a lot of galleries and was struck by her works like “Judith Slaying Holofernes.” What drew me to her is the mindblowing power she has in her paintings. It puts women into a different category than their male contemporaries.”
Artemisia was the first female member of Florence’s prestigious Accademia di Arte del Disegno. However, historical accounts remembered her for centuries as a teenage victim of rape by another artist, Agostino Tassi. A friend of Artemisia’s father, Tassi found the 17-year-old at home one day and assaulted her.
Following the rape, Tassi promised to marry Artemisia. But when Tassi reneged on his promise, Artemisia’s father pressed charges against Tassi, not for violating his daughter, but for shaming his family. The lawsuit, highly unusual for the time, resulted in protracted proceedings. Tassi eventually was sentenced to one year in prison and banished from Rome, but the sentence was never carried out.
Artemisia would go on to have a successful career, rare for a female painter in her time. At age 27, she painted “Judith Slaying Holofernes,” in which her facial likeness appears on the figure of Judith taking a broadsword to Holofernes’s neck. Some art historians speculate that Holofernes’ face bears the likeness of Tassi.
Schwendinger’s opera includes both the rape and Artemisia’s life as a painter.
Forward’s Gray and playwright Gunderson both discovered the artist from a 2020 piece by Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker. “A Fuller Picture of Artemisia Gentileschi” sparked an immediate conversation between them.
“Artemisia’s trauma is not the most important thing we should take away from this story,” Gray says. “What I find compelling is that it introduces us to a talented and powerful woman who endured trauma but went on to have an incredible and empowered career.”
Gunderson calls her play “a story about a father and daughter, and not an easy one at that. It explores those prickly, hard relationships that bring out the best and worst in us and can often surprise us in moments of crisis.”
Gunderson, whose plays often center on feminist themes, says that imagining the story for the stage let her write about “resilience, ambition, ardor, desperation and bravado.” She calls Artemisia “a radically visionary artist who kept reinventing how stories were told on canvas. That’s what Forward and I are doing with the play as well, and incorporating her paintings as well as her life felt like we were telling the story together.”
The playwright hopes audiences will sense “the power of a woman fighting for — to quote Gentileschi herself — control of her being.”
In March, Gunderson spent a week in Madison working with the cast and crew, tweaking language, sculpting scenes, and refining the production’s purpose. It was a rare opportunity for both the playwright and actors, Gray says, and a perfect way to understand and embrace the play’s main character.
“If there’s a moral to this story, it’s the idea of resilience and not letting one circumstance define your life,” Gray adds. “I want the theater audiences to feel joy and pleasure that they just got to spend 90 minutes in the company of this incredible woman.”
