There has been such a super abundance of artists and genius from Italy, 
that many talents have been "assigned" to relative obscurity, except for a 
few brief moments of "illumination" such as this.

The father and daughter relationship, the similarities and differences in 
their paintings, their personal lives [only briefly touched on here], imbues 
the art with fascinating dimensions!   
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ARTISTIC KIN, SO DIFFERENT, YET SO ALIKE.

Nerw York Times
By Michael Kimmelman
February 22, 2002

I hope the Metropolitan Museum's exhibition of Orazio and Artemisia 
Gentileschi, father and daughter, besides getting the predictable crowds 
attracted by her fame, also causes visitors to look patiently at his work. 
Orazio's paintings will come as a revelation to many people, I suspect. In 
the curious way that fashionable scholarship and mass culture sometimes 
combine, he has been vastly eclipsed by his daughter in terms of name 
recognition.

But if not an especially endearing topic for biographers (a dead white male 
who wrote obscene verse and befriended the scum of Roman society), Orazio was 
at his best a great artist, nearly as great as they got in the century of 
Caravaggio, Van Dyck, Rubens and Rembrandt, which is to say sublime. He is 
one of those curious cases of a coarse man capable of making the sweetest 
art, as if a hard outer shell were protection for a soft heart.

Along the lines of other memorable shows of neglected Italian eccentrics and 
minor geniuses like the 16th-century painters Dosso Dossi and Lorenzo Lotto, 
this exhibition therefore serves the invaluable function of bringing Orazio 
to the attention of a modern art public that sometimes has its priorities 
backward.

Artemisia, the celebrity, was a great artist, too, when she was good, and I 
don't mean that as an afterthought. Paintings like her "Judith Slaying 
Holofernes" have a visceral charge that is unlike what Orazio did and is 
unforgettable. People who haven't had a chance to see more than a few 
pictures by her have that chance now. When you see many of her works 
together, she turns out to be a more complicated painter than her biographers 
indicate, her art refusing, like all art, to conform to the clichés and 
predisposed interpretations of ideologues.

The show, put together by Keith Christiansen of the Met and Judith Mann of 
the St. Louis Art Museum, presents much of the best of what both father and 
daughter did, along with more than a few pictures that are not so terrific. 
It poses the relevant questions: What did Orazio teach his daughter? What did 
Artemisia do apart from him? Who painted what in several disputed cases? Who 
painted how? Who painted well, the quality of their biographies aside?

The exhibition is basically a connoisseur's exercise, treating both him and 
her respectfully as artists who would have wanted to be remembered for what 
they painted, not as symbols or victims or fodder for modern novelists, 
cultural theorists and pop psychologists. Notwithstanding its modish angle 
thanks to Artemisia's popularity, the show would be a pity to miss for the 
sheer satisfaction of looking long and hard at what's in it.

Orazio, first. He was born in 1563 in Pisa, the son of a Florentine 
goldsmith. We learn of him in Rome as a teenager. The key event took place 
there: already 37, he saw the work of Caravaggio.

How interesting that a middle- aged man with a respectable career threw over 
what he had been doing, which was marketable if nondescript late Mannerism, 
to suddenly remake himself in the style of a younger painter.

We can't discount the commercial pressure of artistic competition in Rome, as 
in New York today, which Orazio may have felt the need to keep up with. He 
began to paint from live models, as opposed to drawing on his imagination or 
antique art, emulating Caravaggio's naturalism.

The switch wasn't easy. Several of the early paintings in the show reveal the 
miscalculations of someone not yet accustomed to doing things differently. 
You can see the models uncomfortably holding their poses while Orazio 
shuffles them around, a stage director moving his actors inexpertly.

Then gradually, over the course of a decade, he evolves a style that takes 
off from Caravaggio but becomes his own. Caravaggio's art entailed stark 
settings and gloomy lighting. Orazio's involved a new, soft luminosity.

The early 20th-century Italian critic Roberto Longhi, who became fascinated 
by Caravaggio after having seen the work of Courbet at the Venice Biennale 
(this is how the peculiar minds of critics work sometimes), then discovered 
Orazio through Caravaggio. He described Orazio's achievement as a combination 
of Caravaggio's naturalism with the calm, filtered light and color skills of 
a Vermeer.

Mr. Christiansen put it to me this way: Orazio took Caravaggio's art out of 
the cellar and brought it into the sun. He filled his own paintings with a 
serenity and luster that makes subtle poetry of works like "The Lute Player," 
"Danaë" (the one in Richard Feigen's collection especially), "David 
Contemplating the Head of Goliath" and "The Rest on the Flight Into Egypt" 
(both in different versions), and the "Annunciation" from Turin.

Some of these, like the "Annunciation," are so tenderly painted they can make 
you weep, and they convey a peculiarly old-fashioned quality that harks back 
to Raphael. Orazio slipped through a crack in time, as Rilke once said about 
the modern artist Balthus. His ambiguous position between generations (the 
follower of a younger painter, not yet a Baroque artist, like his daughter) 
seems to have given him the liberty to pick and choose from past and present 
art.

That is the impression the work leaves, anyway. Mr. Christiansen describes 
this in the catalog as "an indelible impression, as though we had encountered 
something both strange and familiar, at once remotely abstract in its formal 
language and hauntingly human in its quality of personal revelation."

Then Orazio declines. His later art, when he was painting for kings, set the 
tone for 17th-century French artists like Simon Vouet and Laurent de La Hyre, 
but the quality slackens. His last paintings, done in England, are an 
acquired taste. He died there in 1639.

Over the years Orazio recycled many images. The show includes paintings with 
figures in them traced from other paintings. They are a window onto the 
practice of an ambitious, perhaps overcommitted 17th- century artist (and an 
example for today's artists who trace photographs and other images). 
Presumably, part of Artemisia's training with her father included copying and 
tracing his work.

He avidly promoted her career. Early in the exhibition one room puts 
paintings by each of them side by side for comparison's sake, and also 
includes disputed attributions, beginning with "Susanna and the Elders," a 
picture of psychological nuance and compositional sophistication, which has 
Artemisia's signature and the date 1610. She was 17 in 1610.

That was a year before her rape by Agostino Tassi, Orazio's sometime 
collaborator, two years before Tassi's trial and her face-saving marriage to 
an obscure minor artist from Florence. A vast and ardent literature has 
accumulated arguing for and against Artemisia's having painted all or part of 
"Susanna." There are arguments over whether the work illustrates a "female" 
point of view; about its relationship to her feminist image as a champion of 
strong women; and about the work's relationship to her later art, with which, 
on the face of it, it has minimal connection.

I leave it to the experts to thrash out these issues. Someone judging simply 
by looking at the pictures might conclude that "Susanna" bears more 
resemblance to Orazio's art in 1610 than to Artemisia's early work — unlike, 
say, "Cleopatra," another debated attribution and a bold image, fraught for 
scholars because it is a picture seeming to celebrate sexual availability 
painted at just around the time Artemisia was raped.

But reading biography into art is always tricky. The historian Elizabeth 
Cohen has done invaluable research into how differently rape was regarded 
then and how differently it might have been regarded by Artemisia from the 
way it is today. Artemisia certainly did not style herself as a victim in her 
career. Elizabeth Cropper, another historian, writes in the catalog: "Whether 
or not women were taken seriously as artists in the 17th century, Artemisia 
clearly was, and her very exceptionality was a sustaining principle in her 
career. None of this in any way resembles modern feminist critiques."

"She was," Ms. Cropper adds, "a very famous painter during her own lifetime, 
not just infamous now."

I am particularly struck by the eloquence and force of Artemisia's 
"Conversion of the Magdalene"; "Judith and Her Maidservant," the version 
belonging to the Detroit Institute of Arts; and an earlier "Judith and Her 
Maidservant" from Florence. They are paintings fully independent of Orazio 
and distinctly by her.

Was she particularly attracted to subjects of strong women? As a deeply 
unsophisticated test, I briefly wandered back into Orazio's galleries and 
counted almost as many similar types of women in his pictures, but they are 
never quite as assertive. Artemisia once wrote to a patron about herself: 
"You will find the spirit of Caesar in this soul of a woman." Keenly aware of 
being a woman in a man's world, she seems to have been determined above all 
not to be perceived as a female artist, of which there were many others in 
her day.

But like her father and successful male artists, she was also responding to 
the market's demands. That is what she was doing not just by exploiting 
certain subjects but also by shifting styles from Florentine to Roman to 
Neopolitan, keeping up with the tastes of the places she worked.

The show's last galleries betray her increasingly eclectic and pedestrian 
output. Some of these late pictures are nondescript, a few are just awful.

That said, the exhibition leaves you aware of an exceptional career. Neither 
Artemisia nor Orazio deserves to be measured against the skill or 
biographical value of the other, any more than they should be measured 
against Caravaggio and Van Dyck. He was his own man. She was her own woman.

That's the show's most clever accomplishment, ultimately: to bring together 
two related artists to prove how distinct each one is.