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Belen Vidal, Tina Olsen Lent, and Mary Garrard apply a feminist art historical approach to their discussions of the ways in which the fictionalized depiction of the artist Artemisia Gentileschi in Agnes Merlet’s film Artemisia (1997) is problematic. Though Vidal offers no definitive thesis, her essay looks at the ways in which female artist biopics, such as Artemisia, manipulate the biographies of a famous woman artist of the past to serve contemporary cultural gender ideologies. She applies an overwhelmingly large scope of feminist concepts ranging from subject/object, gaze/glance, nature/culture, and Artemisia’s “looked-at-ness “ to her analysis of the film’s central themes of gazing, posing and framing in attempts to show how the film incorporates the “formative narratives of second wave feminism” and “filter[s] them” (77) through the conventional romance narrative involving Tassi and Artemisia. According to Vidal, Merlet produces a film that reflects on gender and creativity in a truly post-feminist manner. Vidal argues that Artemisia is problematic in its blurring of boundaries between romance narrative and history, and in its overall confusing combination of “previous feminist traditions—especially the narratives of second-wave feminism—and contemporary postfeminism revisions” (Vidal 70).
Lent’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” uses the term “Artemisia fictions,” to address the recent treatments in film and literature of Artemisia Gentileschi, and their conflation of the story of artist and her art, in comparison with the scholarly treatments of her life in the 1970s. Lent gives an in-depth overview of novelistic, story-telling forms—kunstlerromane (coming of age story of the artist, which, in regard to the female, focuses on a growing down), and monograph (non-fictional artist biography which forges the male artist as the genius and hero)—arriving at the conclusion that the Artemisia fictions combine “the narrative conventions of the fictional Kunstlerroman, the fictionalized autobiography, and the non-fictional artist monograph” (Lent 214). By the Artemisia fictions’ narratives formed around the tragic events of her rape and trial, events of heightened emotion, they “reinforce familiar ties between creativity and passion, reiterate women’s creativity as exceptional and the result of male influence.” As the title of the essay suggests, Lent remarks one of the dominant themes of these highly emotional narratives—Artemisia’s sexual relationship with Tassi, and her true love story with her father, Orazio. Lent describes Artemisia’s relationship with these two men, one sexual, and one true love, in relation to the cultural construction depicting male as the creator who forms the female. In the case of Tassi is seen as the male artist who awakens Artemisia, the female, to creative inspiration through his sexuality. The teacher/student relationship featured in Artemisia, is a classic example of the feminist notion of the “feminization of the canvas.” Though Lent uses the analogy of male artists’ “artistic creativity flowing like seminal fluid into their female students,” Artemisia’s relationship with Tassi as featured in the film can also be related to the analogy of the brush of the male artist with a phallus, attacking and crafting the blank female canvas, Artemisia and cultivating her, the formless female. Artemisia’s relationship with Orazio in the film’s narrative highlights another form of the cultural constructed notion of male as the creator, as Orazio is shown to be “the author of [Artemisia’s] life script” (Lent 216). As Lent writes, “he made her a painter, then, through the rape trial, he destroyed her love, introduced her to suffering, and blocked her path toward respectability.” In the Artemisia fictions’ manipulation of the artist’s biography to feature the two central men in Artemisia’s life in the role of the creator, the male genius, and Artemisia in the role of the passive female being formed, they ultimately perpetuating women artist stereotypes.
Mary Gerrard also speaks of the harmful effects Merlet’s fictionalized version of Artemisia’s biography has on feminist progress. Gerrard deems the movie as a problem piece in its straying from the historical reality and its heavy sexualizing of Artemisia’s biography, a decision which instead of creating a work highlighting women’s freedom of choice (which is arguably Merlet’s intention), Merlet’s actually plays into many damaging stereotypes. Gerrard points out that the film neglects to give the viewer any conception of why Artemisia’s works are important and instead it highlights a recurring theme of “inappropriate sexualizing of what are really [Artemisia’s] artistic interests” (i.e. her interest in drawing her boyfriend in nude is misinterpreted as a sexual invitation as a opposed her genuine interest in human anatomy) (Gerrard 67). Gerrard also touches upon the film’s damaging depiction of female artistic inspiration as the creation of male sexuality, of Tassi’s sexuality ultimately being responsible for unlocking Artemisia, as discussed by Lent. Gerrard comes to a similar conclusion as Lent in her deeming that Artemisia’s sexuality overrides her acknowledgement as an artist.
I tend to agree with Vidal, Lent, and Gerrard that fictionalizing history in a biopic is overall damaging. In the case of a woman artist, it is a step backwards in the progress towards the woman artist being acknowledged as the subject, as opposed to always being associated with the object being looked at, analyzed. The distortions of the historical record about Artemisia’s relationship with Tassi and her father are for this same reason not justifiable. If the common cultural perception of women as the ones being given form (literally and figuratively) by the male, is ever to be changed, forms of media which are consumed by the media, such as films, must refrain from showing woman’s artist as being shape and direction by the male artistic genius.