Volume 36, Number 12 · July 20, 1989
Artemisia's Revenge?
By Francis Haskell
Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art
by Mary D. Garrard
Princeton University Press, 607 pp., $49.50
Pietro Testa, 1612–1650: Prints and Drawings (November–December 1988) by Elizabeth Cropper
catalog of an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with essays by Charles Dempsey, by Francesco Solinas, by Anna Nicolò, by Francesca Consagra
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 297 pp., $20.00 (paper)
Artemisia Gentileschi and Pietro Testa were very gifted artists who worked in Italy during the first half of the seventeenth century. Both suffered great misfortune: Artemisia Gentileschi was almost certainly raped (a residue of doubt remains) by a fellow painter, Agostino Tassi, who then failed to marry her, and she was in any case publicly humiliated in the subsequent trial and forced to give her evidence under torture. Pietro Testa was prone to melancholy, failed to win recognition as a painter, and committed suicide at the age of thirty-eight. Though their works were very different in every way, both of them were for a time employed by Cassiano dal Pozzo, the most cultivated art patron in Rome, and now, after some three hundred and thirty years, their destinies have come together once again—this time on the east coast of the United States: Gentileschi is the subject of an extremely long and lavishly produced monograph published by the Princeton University Press and an important exhibition of Testa's work took place at Philadelphia and Harvard, accompanied by an exemplary catalog.
Review, 4490 words
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