 Hello and welcome to Hist Fest 2021. My name's Rebecca Adil and I'm the director of Hist Fest and I'm so very excited to share this weekend's events with you. We have a fantastic assortment of talks and discussions coming up so please do check out everything else that's going on via the website www.histfest.org Before we get started, on behalf of Hist Fest and the British Library I'd like to acknowledge the passing of His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh and pay tribute to his long public service. Now, before we get on with the first event there are just a couple of points of housekeeping to note. Using the menu above you can provide feedback on the event and also, if you wish, donate to the British Library. The Library is a charity and your support really does help to open up a world of knowledge and inspiration to everyone. Your feedback is also incredibly important in helping the Library plan future cultural events. There you will also find a tab with a link to the bookshop where you can browse a range of titles by the festival's many speakers. At the end of the discussion there'll be a short audience Q&A. Please do submit your questions using the box below the video. Also below the video are social media links should you wish to continue the conversation on different platforms afterwards. Without further ado, I'm going to hand you over to today's sponsors to introduce you to the panellists for Artemisia Mistress of Blood. Hello, I'm Alexandra Whitaker, the PR manager at Fellowes Auctioneers. Fellowes is one of the UK's most established auction houses with a focus on luxury watches, designer brands and unique pieces of jewelry. We're delighted to support Artemisia Mistress of Blood featuring art historian and presenter of the BBC's Britain's Lost Masterpieces, Dr. Benda Gravener, historian and author of The Beauty and the Terror, Dr. Catherine Fletcher and art historian and host of the Art Matters podcast, Farron Gibson. Enjoy. Thanks for joining us for our discussion of Artemisia Dzyntylewski's life and amazing work. She was a formidable artist at a time when it was not easy for women to train as an artist, let alone reach her level of incredible success. I do want to note that as we go into Dzyntylewski's story, we'll be discussing an instance of rape. So I'd like to flag that as sensitive material right now. My name is Farron Gibson. I'm an art historian and your inquisitive hostess for this event. I'm joined by Catherine Fletcher, professor of history at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is an author of several fascinating books, including her most recent book, The Beauty and the Terror, an alternative history to the Italian Renaissance. We're also joined by Binder Grobner, an art historian, broadcaster, and a downright detective when it comes to uncovering lost masterpieces. He also curated the Bright Souls exhibition in 2019, which was the first UK exhibition on Britain's 17th century women artists. This evening, we're going to look at a few of Dzyntylewski's works and see what they can reveal about her life and painting style and life in Italy at that time. Please be sure to send through any questions you have as we discuss, and we'll have a look at some of those towards the end. So let's begin with our first image. It is her allegory of painting, which is believed to be a self-portrait. Catherine, maybe you could set the scene for us a bit by telling us about Dzyntylewski's early life. Yeah, well, this painting is actually from quite late in her career when she was at the English court in the 1630s, but we have to go back really four decades to her birth in 1593 in Rome into a family already very much involved in the Baroque art scene. Her father, Orazio Dzyntylewski, was actually a court painter in England at the time of that particular work that we've just seen. So Artemisia was born into a family of artists, which of course is one of the classic ways that the women artists of this period get their training. It's actually very relatively uncommon for women to go out of the household to train as an artist as men would do. So Artemisia comes in with some advantages and already in her teens, she is creating extraordinary work. Let me just tell you a little bit about one of her first paintings. It's a Susanna and the Elders. Susanna and the Elders is a really popular subject for biblical paintings at this time. It shows the virtuous young Susanna in her bath being spied on by two lecherous old men, the Elders. And most versions of Susanna and the Elders show Susanna either completely oblivious to what these old guys are doing or even perhaps slightly enjoying it. Artemisia completely changes that and she paints Susanna who is traumatised and horrified at these old men and she's only 17. So it's an extraordinary start to the career of this teenage artist. But it very, very quickly, her life takes quite an unpleasant turn. First of all, there is some very nasty rumour and gossip about the fact that perhaps she had been modelling nude in front of an audience prompted by her father. She of course says that that is not true. It's a moralist rumour and it's very important for women in this period to maintain the reputation of being chased. And then things get even worse when in 1611 she is assaulted by one of her tutors, Agostino Tassi, a man who has been brought into the household to teach her the complex process of trompe-loy painting, the kind of painting that you do on ceilings to give a three-dimensional effect. Instead of taking his job seriously, what he does is he takes advantage of his position and he rapes the young Artemisia and then tells her that he's going to marry her and goes on to sexually exploit her over an extended period. There's some fairly horrific testimony which I'm not necessarily going to go into in detail at this point. But eventually, after some months, Artemisia's father reports him and the rapist is put on trial. And in this period, this is a trial basically of between these two men, between the father whose property his daughter has been devalued because she's no longer a virgin and the rapist. And it almost becomes a trial of Artemisia herself because she is questioned under torture about what had happened. They use thumb screws as a method of torture. It's fairly horrific. She gives her testimony, she insists that she was forced into it, that she actually tried to defend herself with a knife, that she wanted to kill him. And in the end, after some further testimony from a witness about the very, very dubious past of Tassie who had previously tried to have his wife murdered, Tassie is found guilty. It's a horrific and traumatic trial. And one that has often been seen as very key to understanding Artemisia's life and certain of her works which we will come on to as we will see. She paints some very, very powerful women. And we see even in those very early instances that she is absolutely sure about defending herself and defending her reputation when she is effectively put on trial by the legal system. Yeah. Well, I'm wondering now, I was thinking we should talk about allegory of painting first, just because it's possibly a self-paint, a self-cultured. But now I'm wondering if what you've just explained would be a good way of going into Judith and Hall of Furnace in terms of how critics and historians have often connected the events of her life to some of the imagery that she did in the time that she lived in Florence just after the trial. So do you guys think it might be good to go into Judith and Hall of Furnace perhaps right now and we can come back to the other? Well, sorry. I think while we've got the allegory of painting up, can I just say something about it? Because I think it's, although Catherine rightly said, it's not an early work from the beginning of her life that we're talking about now, it does encapsulate a very distinctive approach to painting. So we don't know exactly the circumstances in which this self-portrait came to be. Or indeed, even when it was painted, it's worth pointing out at this early stage in the discussion, there's so much about Artemisia Gentileschi's life that we don't unfortunately know. And I'm not saying that as a sort of get out of jail free car for when I get things wrong in this discussion. But unfortunately, for reasons we'll go into, there's so much we don't know about her life. But this painting, this wonderful self-portrait, this wonderful allegory of painting, is recorded in the collection of King Charles I in the 1630s when she comes to London briefly. It seems not to be recorded as a self-portrait. And it's interesting how, although it almost certainly is her in a sense, or certainly her features a model on her in the painting, it's interesting how it wasn't regarded as a conventional self-portrait. And it just tells us so much about how differently she approached topics like this throughout her career and that's what makes her such an exciting artist. She's, as you can see, she's sort of rather acrobatically approaching the canvas with a brush in her hand. She's sort of really ready to do battle with the canvas in front of her and a palette in the other hand. And that's so different from conventional male artists self-portraits at the period. In fact, very often in male self-portraits you don't even see the artist with a paint brush in their hand or a palette. They're so often trying to present themselves as not artists, but sort of members of the gentry or even courtiers or noblemen. We might, for example, think in this country quite a well-known self-portrait from about the same time is Sir Anthony Van Dyke's self-portrait, which is a national portrait gallery. And there again, he's dressed in his finery. There's no hint of a brush. Rubens is the same with his gold chain on that's also in the Royal Collection. So Artemisia, she's demonstrating that she does things differently. And it's possible that this portrait was sort of sent ahead of her as a calling card, if you like, sort of element of marketing to the king. And that helped establish some patronage for her when she got here. Well, it's interesting to the name of it as allegory of painting because there are so many paintings at this time that are allegory for this and that spring or abstract ideas like design and drawing and things. So for her to potentially, if this is in fact a self-portrait, show herself as the allegory for painting. That's really interesting and quite bold actually. I think it's a particularly gendered thing because the allegory of painting is female. I mean, the artistic muses are always female, but a lot of the time they're being painted as these idealized women by male artists. And so to have a woman painting a female allegory of painting is in itself a kind of interesting play on some of the gender politics at the time. And something only a woman could do in that, as you said, often allegory version of women. So she's uniquely able to do that, which is quite fun actually. So this was done, she had, well, maybe we should come back to that in terms of the chronology, because she spends a little bit of time in England, I think a bit later. So after the trial, she does get married and she moved to Florence and has a kind of Florentine phase, if you will. So can we maybe look at the second image or have that queued up as we talk about her time in Florence and Judith and Holofernes. So Catherine, maybe you can kick off with that, which was like at that time. Yeah, I mean, she gets married off after the trial to somebody who is probably a relative, has the same surname as one of the key witnesses, and he's a citizen of Florence. So Italy at this point is not all one country, it's divided into different states. And the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, which has Florence as its capital, is a very nice place to be indeed if you're an artist, because the Grand Duke, Cosmo II, who is the second is keen to commission paintings. So that's good. It's also got a great intellectual scene. So Michelangelo's nephew is there putting together a house to commemorate his famous uncle. So Artemisia gets a commission to paint another allegory, Allegory of Inclination for the Casablanca Roti. And she also gets to know people like Galileo, who is also at the court at this time, who has just published his treatise, The Starry Messenger. She becomes a member of the Florentine Academy, the Academy of Art and Design. And that's quite extraordinary for a woman in Florence in that period. She's the first woman to join the Florentine Academy. So again, it's a real kind of breakthrough move for women artists in that particular part of Italy. And she's also having children. I mean, this is a working mother. She has at least four, probably five children during these years in Florence, and is combining that with this huge amount of output with, you know, trying to cultivate patrons as well, because you need to convince these very well-off people that they want to commission you. You need to dress up nicely and go and play the game at court. And there's one instance where she turns up and she plays the lute at a fancy dress party. And there are actually a number of lute plays again, so I think at least one of those is speculated to be a self-portrait. I mean, lots of people like to say that all the Artemisia works are self-portraits one way or the other. And I think there's perhaps a little too much of that going on sometimes. But it's a fascinating world. She and it's one in which she paints this very, very dramatic Judith and Helophonies that we've just seen. So this is a biblical story, like Susanna and the Elders. But it's an incredible take on that particular story. So there are a number of treatments of this work going right back to, well, I mean, Donatello. I think this is Judith by Donatello. There's, in Florence, there's quite a tradition of it. And here, though, we have a painting that really shows the kind of the power and the struggle of these women to subdue this man and cut his head off. It's the earlier version by Caravaggio in which there's a kind of rather sort of polite use of a sword to neatly slice the chap's head off. There's not all of that going on here. She's really got this sense of the muscle that's needed to cut a guy's head off. And often, artists show maybe before or after the events have happened, don't they? So she's really showing us the gore of what's going on here. Maybe, Bender, you can talk a bit about what's happening in the scene and maybe a bit about the story as well, just in case people watching don't know about the story. So, sure, Judith and Holofernes is an Old Testament tale. And Judith was an Israelite heroine because Holofernes is the general of the advancing, invading a Syrian army at one point. And she decides that she's going to save the day by... Judith is actually a widow. So she decides to put on her very best clothes and take out some treats to go and basically... the word in the Bible is delight. Now, lots of people have thought that means sort of seduced, but it probably just means tempt with all sorts of lovely treats and, most importantly, lots of wine, too. So Holofernes becomes drunk and lies down on his bed as we see here to go to sleep. And that is when Holofernes pounces and chops his head off and takes the head back to the Israelite camp, sticks it on the barricades, and the Assyrian army see this the next morning and they flee in terror, and Judith saves the day. So what's... it's very interesting that Catherine mentioned the Caravaggio's painting of this, which is about 1600. So we're talking about 15 years earlier. And that painting is in Rome. Artemisia may have seen it, but we can't be absolutely sure. But the treatment of the light here, and we may discuss that later on, is very Caravagesque. But in Caravaggio's painting, the slicing of the head is not particularly convincing. It seems Caravaggio was sort of more interested in portraying Judith as this sort of lovely model who's rather delicately sort of wafting a sword over the neck and unconvincingly blood gushes out. But what I think is so exciting about Artemisia's representation here is that she's really thought about what it would be like, the sort of pose and form you'd have to get into to slice a fellow's head off. And in the Bible, we know that it took two goes with the sword to hack it off. So there were quite brutal blows. And what I think we see here with Judith, she's grabbing the head very convincingly in one hand and the sword is coming out. And she's sort of, you can see all the effort in her arms and her shoulders. And quite interesting too is that you can see she's almost recoiling from the blood. She's got her very finest clothes on. And she may be concerned about the blood going on her dress. And this picture, the one we've got on the screen at the moment, she painted this scene as with a number of her compositions. She repeated them. She seems to have been quite the businesswoman. If she had a hit, she did it again. The painting we've got on the screen is actually the second version. The first one she painted shortly after the trial and the rape. And in this one we see here, it's bigger. This one is in Florence in the Uffizi. It was painted for the Medici's. And there is extra gore. That's the really interesting thing. There's much more blood in this one. Otherwise, the composition is pretty identical. And it appears that the blood is spurting towards Judith in quite a precise manner. And it's been pointed out that this matches her friend Galileo's theory of the parabolic projection of liquids like this. So that may be a nod to her friendship with Galileo. And my last point about how I think Artemisia sort of reinvents this pose and gives it a particularly distinctive female approach is that is the presence of the maid. So in the Bible, the maid does not take part in the killing. She's given a name subsequently in the literature. She's called Abra. And generally, artists portray her either sort of off-camera, ready to take the head away, or she's sort of carrying in the corner, not quite sure what to do. But here, Artemisia absolutely makes her party to the killing. She's holding Holofernes down. So they're both at it. And Catherine's quite right to say that sometimes it's a little bit too tempting to see Artemisia's own physiognomy in these various figures. But I don't know. It's probable that we see her here. And it may even be, because the two figures look quite alike, it may even be that we sort of see the same person twice. Well, I wonder, and we're going to come back to discussing models and how difficult it was to have models for a woman artist at that time. So I wonder if that's a factor. But I think what's interesting is that Judith looks quite heroic in my point of view in this painting. And I think that with a lot of baroque art at this time, the idea is that the church is trying to get artists to create this very dramatic, edifying art of biblical themes, classical themes as a sort of instructive moral tool for morality. And so oftentimes I feel like male artists might show Judith or Delilah and Samson as a sort of warning about what women can do to you if you give in to their, you know, give into the buyer and all of these things. And she's showing this from a totally different perspective of the woman as a hero and taking charge, which I think is quite interesting. Yeah, definitely. And as Catherine did mention, this topic was quite favored by the Medici. It's sort of symbolized the smaller force overcoming the bigger one. And of course, as Catherine said, Italy at the time was a series of small states and the Medici's often managed to punch above their weight. And it is perhaps worth, I mean, a lot of people emphasize Artemisia's input into this painting was a kind of reaction to the rape by Agostino Tassi. But it is also worth, I think sometimes that overshadows our understanding of how she worked, but it is also worth mentioning that the paradoxical role of position of women in society at this time, there were so many things they couldn't do. But occasionally, because of the sort of, you know, the aristocratic structure of societies, occasionally women did have absolute power and could be very strong women. So there was a sort of celebration of strong women like this and the Old Testament gave you many examples with which to draw on. The Medici, of course, had their own examples in the family. Marie de Medici is at this time, for much of this period, she's effectively ruling France herself. And so they tap into that. And it's worth mentioning also that Judith was a very common name. So I think Shakespeare calls his two daughters, Susanna and Judith. And we've mentioned both stories already. So that's part of the sort of paradoxical position of women in society at the time. You were supposed to be a strong woman, but in so many ways you couldn't be. Because in Florence itself, you also have the Duchesses and the daughters of the grand Duke and Duchess of Florence. So you have a whole court society in which women are able to play particular roles. In a way, you don't quite have the same thing in Rome because at the papal court it's men and it is often sometimes men and their mistresses. And there's the Roman nobility, but they're not quite on an even level with the pope and the cardinals. So the dynamics of Florence at this point as a city for intellectual women are probably relatively more welcoming. For all that in Rome, I mean, yeah, Urban Year Eighth does allow women to join the Roman Academy. Perhaps it's not quite the same social dynamics as at a court where you have a grand Duchess and where you have, you know, Medici women marrying across European royalty, making all those connections across the continent. Nor is it the same. We'll see a little bit later. She goes to Naples. And again, in Naples, you've got a viceroy. You have the Spanish nobility. You have Spanish noble women there, very present, very much in a court society where women, yeah, they have to place particular roles, but they're able to operate. Of course, one of the ways that Artemisia operates in Florence in this court society is that she has an affair with a nobleman called a Moringi with the knowledge of her husband. And he is quite a significant patron for them. And for a while it seems to go quite well, but it eventually becomes a source of scandal. So again, these sort of the kind of sexual games that are played around court society are a little bit too edged in some ways. On the one hand, they might bring a female artist's patronage. On the other hand, if it just gets all a little bit too much, it might be easier to get out of town. And in fact, that is what Artemisia ends up doing. She ends up with a legal separation from her husband and starts to do her own thing. So, yeah, very, very different circumstances. Before we leave Florence in our story, I guess, and move on to a next painting and kind of babe in her life, I did just want to clarify one thing, and I hope everyone is sending through questions as and when you have them who's watching. We keep saying, oh, it's like Caravaggio, it's Caravagesque. And I thought it might be good to clarify what are some of the visual elements we're talking about, maybe in terms of tinnoprism or that drama. And the Judith and Holofernes is a really good example of that, I think. So, Fender, maybe you can point out some of those, that classic baroque drama and what makes it like a Caravaggio. Yes, very good point, Fern. Thank you. So, Caravaggio, he's one of the great geniuses of Italian painting, and he essentially has one great idea, and it really is a great one, and that is to light his pictures a little bit like a sort of dramatic stage set. And he does this by introducing a single light source. One of the most famous examples is a chapel in Rome, and I should remember the name of it because I was making a film there before the pandemic started, but it's just temporarily left my brain. It's the story of St. Matthew, and he lights the paintings as if they were lit only from the single window in the chapel. And when you do that in a painting, it instantly creates much more drama amongst the characters because you get this great interplay of light and dark, and as you mentioned, it's called tinnoprism. Italian for that contrast, tinnoprosso, so we call it tinnoprism. And that idea was an instant hit in Italian art, and Artemisia's dad through whom she studied so much at the beginning of her career, he was a great friend of Caravaggio and saw lots of his work. So Artemisia adapts this idea, and I think you could position Artemisia. I mean, for example, in the picture we've had on the screen, there is the single light source coming from the top left-hand side and it casts a dramatic light over the whole thing, and it allows you to play as an artist with so many lovely details, particularly the shadow of the blood and the way that the light catches the falls of the various bits of drapery. I think you can make a convincing case, actually, that Artemisia, despite the fact that she was forgotten for so much of art history, actually, she's the sort of the true heir, the best heir of Caravaggio, that next generation after Caravaggio dies, because not only can she do that fantastic light source trick and make all her paintings so dramatic, but in bringing so much more convincing human presence and emotion to so many of these subjects, like Judith and Holofernes, that female view, she actually enhances the drama in a way that Caravaggio couldn't do. We mentioned Caravaggio's own rendering of Judith and Holofernes. As Catherine said, Judith looks like a model that's slightly uncomfortably brought in and never wielded a sword in her life, and that often holds back Caravaggio's pictures, but it doesn't with Artemisia. No, I think that's absolutely right, and I think that for quite a long time, right since the end of the 19th century when she started to be rediscovered, Artemisia was treated as a little bit of a novelty. She was, oh gosh, a woman who can paint, how amazing. And so much of the early rediscovery of her was around the fact that, oh gosh, she's a woman. Oh gosh, she had this terribly exciting, if traumatic life story. And it was very, very focused on a biography, and the painting, the actual quality of the painting got slightly dropped out of the story. And I think it's only very, very recently that people have started saying, look, yes, some of that, what she adds to those sort of genre paintings, the paintings of the biblical subjects, the well-known subjects comes out of the fact that she's a woman and has had particular experiences, but it's not all about her sex. It's also about the fact that she was moving the whole art world forward with that work. And that is something that I think is just about emphasized now, but really even going back 20 or 30 years, it was still very much about the biography. Yeah. So I want to, because we've got another 10 minutes before we go to questions, because time really does fly. So I wanted to talk about another painting, if we can. So I'm quickly changing stories here. And I want to look at our third painting, which is Venus and Cupid. It's quite different from what we were just talking about and an opportunity for us to go into a few other challenges that she experienced, perhaps, as a woman artist and with something as simple as, where do you find models when you're doing a painting of a nude woman or a nude man? I don't know if she did nude men actually, but where do you find these models? So she left Lawrence, as you said, and she went to Rome and then Venice in that next decade and if we could pull up Venus and Cupid. I'd love to talk a bit about what's happening in this scene. And yeah, some of those challenges I just mentioned. One thing I love about this painting, as we'll see shortly is that it, to me, it has like a kind of secret landscape painting in the background. She shows the windows to the back and you can see the greenery to the back. And I think it's just a cheeky little landscape that she inserts in there. It's quite fun. I think one of the extraordinary things about her, just while we're waiting for the image, is the fact that she learns all this classical literature. She is really able to pick up on the references and she has gone from somebody who, when in her teens, at the point of the trial, was describing herself as barely literate. She could just about read a letter. And suddenly, by less than a decade later, she has got the knowledge, got the expertise, got the literacy to participate in the very, very intellectual circles of the Florentine Academy. And that's quite an extraordinary learning curve. And so she starts painting these classical subjects, which alongside the religious subjects are the kind of, those two are the bread and butter of Baroque art, really. And she not only does the Venus and Cupid, she also does Chariska and the Satire, which ties into some work by women writers of the period. We've got the image now, that's lovely. But you can see again, this is a very, very wonderful treatment. Perhaps I'll let Bender say a little bit about the composition and so forth. There's a terrible word in art history, which is called scopophilia. And it's used to describe the male gaze, the aestheticizing of the male gaze over the naked female form. And when I have to embark on this, it always makes me terribly uncomfortable, but... Sorry. Thank you for teaming me up. There's no denying, actually, that this is a really beautiful depiction of a naked Venus. And I came across, actually, I was reading in the Grove Dictionary of Art, which is kind of the mainstay, one of the foundational texts for art history students. And in the entry for Artemisia, it does mention, it says, rather pejoratively says, the heavy build of her figures and the occasional compositional awkwardness display her lack of conventional training. Now, I think what's so interesting about Artemisia's nudes like this is that they are so different. The two pictures we've discussed before, they're so different in their approach. We may be able to imagine in our minds that one of the, for example, the famous Titian Venus of Urbino, when there's a sort of Jim Thin Venus lying naked there, looking slightly unconvincing. And these are works by artists who have been allowed into the academies, who've studied drawing from life, often from classical statues. So very idealized bodies, not necessarily very convincing or realistic. And here, I think, what's so interesting about Artemisia, as with a number of her nudes that Catherine mentioned, she becomes quite famous for them, quite in demand for subjects like Danii and Bathsheba. This one is very obviously a real woman. And I think it's no less powerful for that. But because art history has for so long been the domain of men, you can see how somebody who's used to a sort of Raphaelesque classical beauty when they see a naked Venus might look at Artemisia's Venus here and say, oh, rather large hips, not quite right, a terrible lack of formal training. And it is true that Artemisia was not able to do that formal training. But in fact, I think that makes her pictures all the more convincing and successful because she had to just learn from herself and maybe her female friends. Or she wasn't sort of shoehorned into that slightly artificial style. And that's what I think we see so successfully here. Later, when it was more common to learn through the academies, rather than as an apprentice, women artists weren't allowed to sit in on the new drawing classes and things. And there's writing about how they felt that they suffered for that, that they weren't getting the practice that they needed. And I know, Catherine, you've spoken before about how challenging it was for her to find models. Can you talk a bit about that? You were talking about being chased early. That's not allowed. Well, it's funny because this work is really in demand from her patrons. Particularly once she's established in Naples after about 1630. She has her own workshop. More people want these than she can supply. And she's very, very shrewd businesswoman. Marketing her work, sending work out. And she complains that finding models is very expensive. And I don't know whether that's because the models are overcharging her or what. It's a big headache. When I find good ones, they fleece me. And at other times, one must suffer their pettiness with the patience of Job. So she's really saying, God, models such a nightmare. Can you imagine it? I love that letter because it really brings to life those sort of little tensions in the workplace and everybody's not really getting on with each other. And somebody wants to pay rise and you're the boss and you're trying to manage money. You're trying to manage your demanding client who wants a discount, which you suspect is, you know, because you're a woman and you're thinking at a cheaper price. And she's fighting off all these people and negotiating very, very hard on one hand to not be ripped off by the models who are cheating her or on the other hand not be ripped off by the clients who think that they can, in one case, she has a client who gets her drawings on spec, has a look and then hires a man to paint them more cheaply, which she's extremely offended by and quite rightly so. But this is the living reality of trying to make a career out of being a professional painter. It isn't always easy. So I think because we're coming into the last few minutes here before when we've got some good questions lined up, it might be good. We didn't get to go through the whole list of things that we said we might cover, but that's fine. What do you think her legacy has been? Certainly in the decades immediately after she died and then up to the present day how that might be changing. Anyone happy just free to go first on that? Catherine, maybe you could start. Well, I mean, I think she is somebody who, I suppose, stands in quite a long tradition of women in the visual arts. And we've started to put some of these women back into art history over the past few decades. So going back into the 16th century to women like Sophie Nisba and Gwisola to Lavinia Fontana, both of whom made very significant careers as portraitists. Platinine Nellie, whose Last Supper has quite recently been uncovered in Florence and is now on display. But I think what she does is that she sort of takes being a woman artist onto a sort of a whole different level. And she says it is possible to sort of be the boss of your own workshop and work on equal terms with men and run a business and actually be really in that top tier. And I think for quite a long time once, when we skip on and get to the point of professional art history getting going in the late 19th century, when the canon is established, she's really sort of fairly minor in it except as a novelty. And gradually she has been put back to what I think is her rightful place in that top tier. But it's taken a very, very long time, a great amount of determined effort on the part of multiple scholars to dig out all the documents, work through all the details, try to piece together which works are hers, finding the documents and so forth. And yeah, so I think the legacy immediately, in the 17th century, is that a woman can do this. And in the longer term, I think it's about trying to recover her place in terms of her significance in the art world. And Bender, you mentioned her kind of maybe picking up the baton from Caravaggio already. What's your kind of feeling about how things have evolved, her legacy? Well, I brought actually two visual aids for this. So the first I have is, this is E.H. Gombrich's story of art and any art history students among them will know about this. And as it says on the front here in the sticker, five million copies sold. And I bought this probably about 20 years ago. So maybe six million now. And this is supposed to be the survey book of art in the world. And there's only one woman mentioned in this, one woman that's extraordinary. And yet my second visual aid. And it's not Artemisia. No, it's not Artemisia. I think my second visual aid is this. This is Petty's dictionary of women artists. Now, there are 21,000 women in here who were working as artists. Now, and so that just gives you an idea of how absurd it is that someone like Caravaggio, sorry, that someone like Artemisia Gentileschi got left out of the earth because she was so good perfecting so many different styles as well. And the names that, sorry, the names of other female artists, because Artemisia wasn't the first. But the names that Catherine also mentioned like Sofany's Bang with Solar, they tended to focus on the genres of art that it was more accepted for them to do. So portraiture still lie, for example. Where Artemisia is so interesting and innovative is that she takes on those big history subjects, the big biblical subjects and no one had ever done that before. And we've gone from the period of Artemisia being entirely forgotten in our history. We are going through, I think we've been through the moment where we see her life story mentioned sort of almost entirely through the story of her rape and subsequent reaction to that. And I think we're now moving through to, I think, the more the best analysis of her legacy, which is that she's the first woman in art history to give us a female take on the major pictorial subjects of her day. And that is something that we should cherish and celebrate. And the most exciting thing, I think, is that because she was forgotten for so long, there is so much more to find out about her. We're finding new works all the time and new letters. And it's just going to get more and more exciting. So, in answering that question, you both have already touched on a couple of the questions I'm seeing coming through, which is asking, who else? Who else? What other women were around at this time? So, we've mentioned a couple. I don't know if you wanted to touch on any others or if I should perhaps move on to a different sort of question in terms of Denzeloski's contemporaries, who was around? Well, yeah, I mean, there are a number of creative women around in Rome at the time, including an architect, Platilla Bricci. There are women working across the visual arts. So, for example, and the arts more generally. So, one of the prominent women who's a contemporary of Artemisius in Venice is a woman called Archangelo Tarabotti, who is very, very famous for writing a virulent attack on the enclosure of unwilling women in convents. This is very common in Venice in this period that women whose families could not afford a dowry for them to marry get pushed into living in convents. Tarabotti hated this, and she wrote a very, very lively treatise on just how dreadful this was. And she's kind of a famous one, but there's a whole literary culture of women writing at this time. Some of Artemisius' history paintings actually draw on theatrical works by women. So, there are actresses like Isabella Andreini. There are women in the opera. You start to get the first women on stage in Venice in the early 17th century singing in Monteverdi's operas, for example. So, this is a very, very lovely time for women across the visual arts, across literature, in music. So, yeah, she's out there, but she's certainly not on her own. She's one of a whole group of people. And, sorry, I had a question queued up. Oh, someone managed to see the National Gallery's Artemisia exhibition, which, good on you, and such a shame that, you know, it's not as many people will have seen it, then it could have been in other circumstances. But they said that they noticed that there are quite a few maids in her paintings. They wondered if we had any thoughts about that in terms of her trying to surface women who are often overlooked in society at that time, or if there might be some kind of feminist angle as to why she does that. And you've already mentioned a bit about how this maid is getting out of the killing actions in the Hallifurness painting. So, what are our thoughts there? Well, very sadly, I didn't get to go around the stage, and I've been so looking forward to it, and this cursive pandemic got in the way. And I'm afraid to say that I wouldn't have been able to go around, I wouldn't have been able to make that conclusion. I don't have anything further to add about the maids other than what we already mentioned in the enhanced role of Abra in the duties in the Hallifurness pictures, which of course is a subject that Artemisia paints, I think, six or seven times. And the maid is always there playing a central role. I think this perhaps goes back to, you know, being a woman in a period, part of your job is running the household. That is the traditional woman's role. And if you are running the household, you will know, particularly in this period before labour-saving devices, how important it is to have competent women around you in that kind of middle-class household, to do some of the cooking, to do the laundry, to look after your multiple children while you were trying to do your art. So I suspect that just by virtue of her gender, Artemisia is perhaps that little bit more aware of how necessary it is to have other women around you sharing that labour than, you know, a male artist of the period who was relying on his wife to, you know, take care of things might not have thought about it just quite so much as the woman who knows that this is meant to be her job. We mentioned, gosh, it's Elizabeth Serrani. We didn't mention her, but she was painting around the same time. And she's an interesting story in terms of someone who was a breadwinner. She was an artist and a breadwinner and her husband took that role of kind of looking after maybe more of the domestic side of things, which is really interesting. It just came to mind as you mentioned that in terms of flipping traditional roles, if you want to call it that, someone has asked, have things really changed for female artists? I think I'm thinking of the work of the Gorilla Girls and their comments on the art scene today. So art seems actually that much better. You probably need to ask some women artists, but I mean, I guess, certainly in theory, the possibility, you know, there's a sort of equal access to art school and so forth, but you know, I think there is, yeah, I mean, right up and down, if you look at the kind of the work of the kind of avant-garde feminist artists in the 1970s, they're still very much kind of challenging that notion of what a woman's proper role is. Even today, if you look at, I mean, I've personally done the numbers of how many of the works of art is someone like the National Gallery by men and how many by women, but certainly it's not very even proportions. It's not very even proportions in the I think it might be something. No, I was going to say a number, but I don't want to be wrong. I think we're, yeah, we're decidedly under 50, very much so under 50, but I don't know if it's like close to 10 or if it's closer to 50, but yeah, proportionately not as many women. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing that strikes me from the life story actually that is that comes across as sadly very, very similar is the questions that are asked about the rape, which is you used to sleep around, didn't you? And all and that kind of allegation is still very, very commonly made in decisions to prosecute or not prosecute today. And I mean, that's like astonishing to be that 400 years on we haven't made, you know, progress on those questions in how, you know, courts make their decisions. That's the modern, the sad modern parallel that strikes me. So, we've got literally a minute left on our time. I wanted to just throw to you guys to see if there's anything that you, you're like, ah, we didn't get to cover it. And you were dying to say regarding Gentileschi. Just, I just, I always teach people to keep their eyes peeled because her of known and accepted works at the moment, I think is not much more than 60. And if you consider that she was a professional artist for more or less the age of 17 until we don't know quite when she died, but you know, many decades of professional artistry. That seems an almost absurdly low number of works, given how successful we know she was and how celebrated we know she was in her lifetime. So keep your eyes particular for her portraits. We have one or two examples of her commission portraits. We know she did them. There's one lovely one of a lady with a fan and it's quite unlike any portrait of a lady paint that a male artist would have painted for the period. She looks like she's swanning into the canvas with some real disco fever beats. Accompanying is so full of attitude is fantastic. And we know that when she was in London briefly, she also painted portraits of English people here. So everybody must get out there and keep looking. We'll find more stuff. When I next get back to No, because I was when I next get back to Italy, I shall start going through those antique shops. Diving through looking for that's a whole Britain's lost masterpieces series for you there looking for the hidden gentiles use across the nation. Well, thank you both so much for your time today and for this great discussion and so much more that can can be gone into. So I hope that curious minds out there will do some digging around and learning more about themselves and thanks to the British Library as well and his best.