Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi

This beautifully produced volume brings together for the first time works by two remarkable painters of seventeenth-century Italy who happen also to have been father and daughter: Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi. Famous in their own day, these two artists have enjoyed renewed fame in the twentieth century: Orazio as one of the first and certainly the most individual of Caravaggios followers Artemisia as the outstanding female painter prior to the twentieth century. The tumultuous lives of these two artists moved along parallel trajectories and take the reader from the popular quarters of papal Rome and the rough-and-tumble world of Naples to the courts of the grand duke of Tuscany, Marie de Medici in Paris, and Charles I in London. These changing circumstances nourished two different aesthetic visions, both of which were deeply rooted in the Caravaggesque practice of painting directly from the posed model. While Orazios art became every more refined and elegant, Artemisia espoused a rhetorical form of dramatic presentation that is the basis of Baroque painting.