The Passion of Artemisia

Like her bestselling debut, Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Susan Vreeland's second novel, The Passion of Artemisia, traces a particular painting through time: in this case, the post-Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi's violent masterpiece, "Judith." Although the novel purports to cover the life of the painter, the painting serves as a touchstone, foreshadowing Artemisia's rape by Agostino Tassi, an assistant in her father's painting studio in Rome; the well-documented (and humiliating) trial that followed; the early days of her hastily arranged marriage; and her eventual triumph as the first woman elected to the Accademia dell' Arte in Florence. Although Vreeland makes a bit free with her characters (which she admits in her introduction), attributing some decidedly modern attitudes to people who would not have thought that way at the time, her book is beautifully researched and rich with casual detail of clothing, interiors, and street life. She deftly works history and politics into the background of her canvas, keeping her focus on Artemisia and her family. Beyond the paintings Artemisia left behind, Vreeland's vision may be as close as we can come to understanding the anger and ambition that kept this talented woman at the doors of the Accademia, demanding entrance, in a time when respectable women rarely left their homes. --Regina Marler

Artemisia Gentileschi burst upon the post-Renaissance art scene with all the drama of an Italian opera. When I learned that she was the first woman to be admitted to the Accademia dell' Arte in Florence, producing paintings of startling invention which expressed a feminist sensibility, and the first woman to make her living solely by her brush, and furthermore, that she was raped at seventeen by her father's friend, her teacher, I knew I'd found material for a novel.

Rather than focusing on the rape or using a broad brush to paint a sweeping biography, I chose to explore the inner Artemisia, her developing state of mind, her transcendence over misfortune and resentment, the possibilities of forgiveness and love in a ruptured life, and the connecting tissue of beauty, art, spirituality, and wholeness.

Such a focused work of fiction about an historical person must be a work of the imagination, true to the time and character always, but true to facts only so long as fact furnishes believable drama. To suit my purposes, I combined actual people into composite characters, eliminated others, and invented still others. Though I used the trial record, her paintings, and her associations with Galileo, Cosimo de' Medici II, and Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger as recorded in art histories, I imagined the personalities and interactions of Artemisia, her father and her husband, and devised dramatic moments that would propel a plot. This is the process by which an historic figure moves from yellowed archives to scholarship, and from academic interest to heroic popular legend, becoming more complex and beloved as a result. With The Passion of Artemisia, I wanted to participate in giving Artemisia her cultural moment.