Disobedient
Rome, 1599: six-year-old Artemisia Gentileschi is hoisted onto the shoulders of the painter Caravaggio in order to witness the public beheading of Beatrice Cenci. Cenci was executed for the murder of her father, who had persistently abused her, but whose rank had effectively made him unpunishable. Gentileschi grew to be an acclaimed artist whose reputation ultimately eclipsed that of her father Orazio. But Cenci’s fate prefigures the defining drama of Artemisia’s life: her rape in 1611 by another painter, Agostino Tassi, and the ensuing trial, in which her veracity was tested under torture that snapped her fingers whilst Tassi was unharmed. Yet Orazio, to save the family honour, had been ready to marry his daughter to her rapist (an alternative was to ‘take holy orders’ – though I think what Fremantle meant here was to take the veil).
The title of Fremantle’s magisterial novel reflects Artemisia’s resistance of an abusive marriage in which her art would be suffocated, despite the urgings of all around her (acting, they argue, for her own good). For Artemisia has no agency, being the property of her father (depicted as a jealous drunk not above passing off her work as his own) until he hands her over to a husband of his choice. As art historians have previously done, Fremantle links Artemisia’s rape to a choice of subject matter as an artist: Judith cutting off of the head of Holofernes. Blood spurts as Judith and her maid grapple with the writhing man – who has Tassi’s features. In her author’s note, Fremantle reveals that she too is a rape survivor, but it was seeing Christine Blasey Ford give evidence against Brett Kavanagh that prompted her to write a story she had hitherto shied away from. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – indeed.
