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Fiction.
Literature.
Historical Fiction.
HTML:"Susan Vreeland set a high standard with Girl in Hyacinth Blue.... The Passion of Artemisia is even better.... Vreeland's unsentimental prose turns the factual Artemisia into a fictional heroine you won't soon forget." â??People /> A true-to-life novel of one of the few female post-Renaissance painters to achieve fame during her own era against great struggle. Artemisia Gentileschi led a remarkably "modern" life. Vreeland tells Artemisia's captivating story, beginning with her public humiliation in a rape trial at the age of eighteen, and continuing through her father's betrayal, her marriage of convenience, motherhood, and growing fame as an artist. Set against the glorious backdrops of Rome, Florence, Genoa, and Naples, inhabited by historical characters such as Galileo and Cosimo de' Medici II, and filled with rich details about life as a seventeenth-century painter, Vreeland creates an inspiring story about one woman's lifelong struggle to reconcile career and family, passion and geni… (more)
I love this book. I'm so glad I discovered Artemisia. I'm captivated by her art and now I understand her passion. This book was so well written and the story was compelling. I want to read more about Artemisia and get some books of her artwork. ( )
I thought this was a good biographical novel on the artist and I was particularly impressed with the author's characterization of Artemisia. But did it blow me away? Not really. Did it challenge me? Nope. Will I remember it for years to come. Don't think so. It was average, though not in a bad way. Just an average way. I'd still recommend. ( )
It was very hard to relate to the main character and her sensibilities, but the author is quite right to pen Artemisia Gentileschi in such a frustrating manner. She was a woman of her time who possessed a difficult manner. Most of the characters are difficult to understand, but I think it was the time and the patrician nature of religion. The author sees through it and allows her feminine characters to be true to themselves.
The setting was irresistible and the tale is well told. As I was reading, I looked up the paintings mentioned and looked at each through the author's/character's eyes. Very satisfying. ( )
This struck me as a very feminist novel. It was more about feminism and the relationships amongst women than it is a historical account of a female painter. ( )
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.
-W. H. Auden “Musee des Beaux Arts,” 1940
Dedication
To Kip, amore mio, for his understanding
First words
My father walked beside me to give me courage, his palm touching gently the back laces of my bodice.
Quotations
I closed my eyes and breathed slower to let the new truth settle and find a spot to live in me – how hard the world was going to make me.
“I long to know everything you’ve seen in Florence – every painting and sculpture, every church, piazza, and tower, everything in sunlight, shadow, even rain. If you could spare the time and if it would please you, put your artist’s eyes into words.”
“Where art and science touch is the realm of the imagination, the place where original ideas are born, the place where both of us are most alive.”
I could study this Sabine woman who lived nineteen centuries ago and feel empathy for her, but now her struggle did not devastate me, did not make me wince as I had the first time I’d seen her. I had walked by this sculpture a thousand times on my way to the vegetable market and I had not become rigid with anger. Those atrocities against women had not ceased to exist in the world, but life marches on. Onions and white beans must still be bought.
At home I untied the string and tipped out the earring – Graziela’s pearl drop. On a scrap of paper edged with Graziela’s leafy tendrils were the words, “Sell the pair. Buy paint.” A warm wave passed through me. I touched the earring to my lips and closed my eyes, sure that I had never understood love till now.
“I paint out of honor and pride and rapture and grief and doubt and love and yearning.” I spoke evenly, but quickly so he wouldn’t interrupt me. “I hope I may live so long as to paint out of every emotion felt by humankind.”
Had I done something similar to what Father had done, sacrificed a person for my art? … Love is so easily bruised by the necessity of making choices.
“At some times in our lives, our passion makes us perpetrators of hurt and loss. At other times we are the ones who are hurt – all in the name of art. Sometimes we get what we want. Sometimes we pay for another to get what he or she wants.” I looked at Palmira apologetically. “That’s the way the world works.”
I scraped back my chair and stood up, still waiting for her to say something. I took the letter back from her, went into the other room and poured a glass of wine, sat there alone and drank it all, quickly, three gulps. My cup of bitterness. I had a daughter with no feeling for others.
“Only painting and a daughter,” he murmured. Like him, I suddenly realized. He’d had the same two. Only I had denied him the joy of one in a way Palmira had not denied me. We looked into each other’s eyes at the same instant, both of us awash with sorrow and recognition, seeing each other face to face. I felt the cords of connection tighten. “I am my father’s daughter.” “How’s that?” “We have both chosen art over our daughters,” I said softly.
Author's notes: The Passion of Artemisia is fiction, which is to say, imagined conversations seamed together by pieces of days and nights, trivial as well as momentous actions, invented characters as well as actual people. Woolf says women’s history “has to be invented – both discovered and made up.” This is the process by which a historic figure moves from yellowed archives to academic interest and from scholarship to heroic popular legend, becoming more complex and beloved as a result. I wanted to participate in giving Artemisia her cultural moment, her own heroism. I was true to fact only so long as fact furnished believable drama, in the hope that what I produced would be concordant with the soul and passions of the real Artemisia Gentileschi, 1593 – 1653, for whom the story behind the art was always vital.
Last words
“Si, Papa.” I kissed him lightly on the forehead. “I will.”
Fiction.
Literature.
Historical Fiction.
HTML:"Susan Vreeland set a high standard with Girl in Hyacinth Blue.... The Passion of Artemisia is even better.... Vreeland's unsentimental prose turns the factual Artemisia into a fictional heroine you won't soon forget." â??People A true-to-life novel of one of the few female post-Renaissance painters to achieve fame during her own era against great struggle. Artemisia Gentileschi led a remarkably "modern" life. Vreeland tells Artemisia's captivating story, beginning with her public humiliation in a rape trial at the age of eighteen, and continuing through her father's betrayal, her marriage of convenience, motherhood, and growing fame as an artist. Set against the glorious backdrops of Rome, Florence, Genoa, and Naples, inhabited by historical characters such as Galileo and Cosimo de' Medici II, and filled with rich details about life as a seventeenth-century painter, Vreeland creates an inspiring story about one woman's lifelong struggle to reconcile career and family, passion and geni
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Book description
A historical novel based on the post-Italian Renaissance period where a woman expresses herself as an artist and painter.
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