Artemisia

Artemisia

While most artists work with naked models, some use themselves instead. In the clandestine beginning scenes of “Artemisia,” a girl does this, too. She is Artemisia Gentileschi, and she wants to be a painter at a time when women cannot have that profession. So she draws anyway. And when the nuns find her nude sketches and show them to her father, he tells her with pride: “You are the child of a painter.”

He is Orazio (Michel Serrault), a competent professional artist whose craft is a little bit behind what’s coming out of Florence right now. It is 1670, baroque times, and so he lets his beloved daughter study in his studio though he draws the line at letting her look at naked men. She is direct and determined, this kid; she gives the fisherman Fulvio a kiss for letting her draw him.

Artemisia is played by Valentina Cervi, who looked so dark-haired and bright-eyed when she was John Malkovich’s love child in “Portrait of a Lady.” She looks older here but still like an adolescent colt on tiptoe; she strides eagerly into rooms and quakes with sudden courage. You like her immediately because you sense there’s no deceit in her; like all true artists confronted with human flesh, she sees not the dirty parts but only the technical challenge.

A famous artist named Tassi (Miki Manojlovic), Agostino more advanced than Orazio in his knowledge of light and shadow comes down from Rome to help her father on a papal commission. The first thing Artemisia says when she meets him is that she wants to study under him. He doesn’t want anything to do with her until he sees how well she works; then he accepts her.

“Someday you’ll take lessons from me,” she tells him. It is predestined that they will fall in love and rather touching, since he is a citizen of the world whom she has spied on through a brothel window. He’s not just interested in her sexually; it’s also because he has literally never met anyone like her before: a woman who thinks for herself, is as talented and ambitious as any man, and says what she believes.

The movie then follows through on the inevitable consequences of their romance. There’s an ecclesiastical trial in which the cardinal in charge, bored with all the conflicting testimony, simply has Artemisia’s fingers wound tight with a leather thong until either they are cut off or somebody tells the truth.

In this sense she shares some kind of destiny with her sister to the north in “Dangerous Beauty,” another 1998 movie set about 100 years earlier, about a Venetian woman who can be independent only by becoming a courtesan. You can’t be a modern woman without your world getting medieval on you.

The difference between Artemisia and other women, is that she sells her work not herself; so far as we know, she was the first woman in Western history to have a profession as an artist. She was commissioned, accepted into the Florence Academy of Fine Arts and sent to England on business.

Today her paintings are in European museums, among them Judith Beheading Holofemis” which hangs in a gallery here. (You don’t have to look closely at it,” said my colleague Harvey Karten, “to know it’s by a woman. Two women stand over the bearded general one holding him down on a bed while another holds a sword at his throat.” Not your favorite 17th century male fantasy.)

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