Book Nook: The Passion of Artemisia

If art is a reflection of life, does it only reflect the situation of the subjects or can art also reflect aspects of the artist's personality. In the case of Artemisia Gentileschi, her art has transcended time and captured the minds of her viewers because of the strength of her forms but also her stature as the first female painter accepted into the Florentine Academy of Art (a traditionally male dominated field). Susan Vreeland imagines further the cost of Artemisia's love of painting in her novel The Passion of Artemisia. This novel is a close study of personality, sacrifice, and love and blurs the line between art and realism.

The novel begins in the middle of the action when Artemisia is a young woman. Readers learn in references to the past what kind of family she has, what prospects she has, and what the political and social attitude of Rome was towards women. It isn't a pretty picture, so Artemisia decides on a marriage of convenience and embarks on a quest to find love and prove herself as a painter. However, she is constantly haunted by a specter of her past that she just can't seem to shake even though the years should have softened the fear and hatred she feels. The story follows her itinerant life from Rome to Florence to Genoa to Venice, Rome again and finally England. This is a story of lost chances and finally realizing how similar we can become to our parents.

While I enjoyed the story very much, and was ultimately moved to tears by the end of the novel, I found the writing style very choppy, especially in the beginning. Since most of the back story is told in small references, readers are left wondering what has happened to her mother, who is Agnostino, why are the sisters in the convent so important to Artemisia? You have to be able to let go and let the story lead you to the answers which can be frustrating and slow. I wish there had been more detail in the places that Artemisia visited, Vreeland is good at describing things that catch Artemisia's eyes at the moment or when they are the subject of a painting, but the places she lives in only get detail when she is first out and about in the city. It would have made the book much longer and I think that Vreeland didn't want to get bogged down with detail when the story was about a person. However, of all the people that Artemisia meets that are described in detail, Galileo, Cosimo de Medici, Cesare Gentile, etc., she and her family are the least described. Artemisia tends to not look in mirrors when she passes them so readers are only seeing the world through her eyes and not clearly being able to see themselves. But I guess that's part of the point to her story, we see the things we want in such clear focus and have trouble seeing what is right in front of us.

If you like art and painters or are particularly interested in biographies I think that these historical biographical novels are a very interesting genre to start exploring. Instead of overly detailed historic tomes good authors are able to inject emotion and humor into the stories of people who have lived in the past; connecting the modern world to important figures in history. Tracy Chevalier's The Girl with a Pearl Earring or other Susan Vreeland novels would be my suggestion to continue reading in this genre, or perhaps The Last Nude which is about the artist Tamara de Lempicka and one of her female models.

*This blog is part of a grant Medfield has been awarded through the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Library and Services Technology Act administered by the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners.