I just got an e-mail from Karen Q. telling me about a wonderful exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. Living in the "other" Washington, I was only vaguely aware of this museum which just celebrated its 20th birthday. One of the current exhibits is Italian Women Artists from the Renaissance to the Baroque (click on the link to find more about the exhibit and then click on "view the interactive" to see a fascinating slide show with music). It looks like an excellent exhibition and I hope any of you who live in D.C., or will be visiting between now and mid-July, will stop in and see it.
One of the featured artists in this show, Artemisia Gentileschi (in Italian "schi" is always pronounced "ski"), is a favorite of mine.That's her self portrait on the left. I was lucky enough to see an exhibit of nearly all her works in St. Louis a few years ago, right after I finished reading about her life in the extremely well-researched, barely fictionalized, historical novel Artemesia: A Novel
To place her in historical context, she was born about thirty years after the death of Michelangelo and during her youth Caravaggio was considered the greatest living painter. You can imagine how difficult it must have been, and how great an artist she was, to have achieved fame and fortune--one of her patrons was the Medici Grand Duke Cosimo II-- as a female artist at that time of giants.
We'll see a some of her best paintings in October on An Artful Tour of Florence and Venice when we visit the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace galleries. You can also see her works and read more about this wonderful painter at The Life and Art of Artemisia Gentileschi, a comprehensive website with a fine "tour" of her many paintings.
