Artemisia

Starring: Valentina Cervi, Michel Serrault

Release: 1997

Artemisia (1997) follows the early career of Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, often credited as the first genuinely successful Western female painter. At a time when women were reliant on their male relatives for everything, Gentileschi supported herself, her husband, and their children with her often large original oil paintings. The film ends before any of this occurred, when Gentileschi was a teenager under the tutelage of her father Orazio and the painter Agostino Tassi. In particular, the film focuses on her physical relationship with Tassi, a relationship that would lead to jail time for him.

The film represents their relationship as passionate and intellectual. Their physical and artistic relationships are intertwined – they are shown lying in bed together animatedly debating sketches for her oil painted pictures. When Orazio discovers the affair, the film says, he put Tassi on trial for rape, despite Artemisia’s protestations. In reality, while the facts surrounding the relationship and trial are controversial, this doesn’t seem to have been a grand sweeping love affair.