Artemisia Gentileschi’s Danaë: Female Pain as Male Pleasure
Content warning: Explicit discussion of r*pe and sexual assault
Innumerable artists throughout history, and particularly the Renaissance and Baroque — Correggio, Titian, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, to name a few — have adopted Danaë as a subject for their paintings. Even in more modern art movements, the likes of Klimt and Singier have also boarded the Danaë bandwagon by responding to the myth. However, the content, that is, the truth of the original myth, is a stark contrast to the ‘beauty’ of these pieces; how can an image of a woman being raped possibly be beautiful?
According to the myth, Danaë is locked up in a tower by her father Acrisius, who fears a prophecy that her son will kill him, but she is nonetheless raped by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold.[1] While the myth’s sources detail Danaë’s beauty, none of them sexualise the moment of her rape in the same way as it appears time and time again in western art history. Danaë (along with Leda, and countless other mythological women) therefore is just one of a number of equally galling examples where the trauma and violence experienced by a woman being raped is suddenly transformed into a pinnacle of artistic and ideological aesthetics within western art. The history of the way in which women’s bodies have been displayed in museums is comparable to pornography; exposure to the content leads to immunity, so consumers seek increasingly extreme — and unrealistic and unhealthy — forms of the medium. In other words, rape as an artistic subject has been normalised to the level of ‘normal’ nudes. In short, these women in particular are not propped up as conventional artistic nudes; they are being raped and postured as beautiful in the process of it.
Given all this, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 — c. 1656) breaks the mould. Gentileschi was an Italian Baroque painter, and despite the lack of opportunities for female artists, her father Orazio Gentileschi realised her talent and encouraged her training. She worked hard for fame and recognition within her lifetime and is now better known for her depictions of strong female characters within Greco-Roman and biblical stories/myth.
However, before we look at how Artemisia responds to and paints her ‘Danaë’, I’d first like to focus on her father Orazio’s take on the same subject as an example of the Baroque artistic standard.
Orazio Gentileschi presents a Danaë drenched in gold, from the sheets, bedframe and curtain trim to the stream of coins which she reaches out to receive with her hand and upturned face. Despite the apparent harmony of these elements, her posture is unnatural, reclined in a faux-modest manner and pointed directly at the viewer to take in, while her partially-covered body suggests the ‘Venus Pudica’ pose, where statues of Venus shyly but purposefully fails to cover her naked body, pretending to not want to be seen. Indeed, her body recalls that of Galatea (the statue/girl in the Pygmalion myth), being so purposely propped up and posed for the viewer’s benefit.
The presence of Cupid drawing the curtain suggests a miraculous event in the erotic sphere; this is a momentous occasion, a blessing for a mortal. So, like the majority of his forefathers, contemporaries and many more descendants, Orazio Gentileschi presents Danaë as an object for sight. John Berger writes of this, “In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man. Everything is addressed to him. Everything must appear to be the result of his being there. It is for him that the figures have assumed their nudity.”
Now compare Orazio’s ‘Danaë’ to Artemisia’s. Here, the colours contrast in clashing reds and blues, while the gold shower’s landing zone appears to be on the verge of overwhelming Danae’s whole body. Her posture is also unnatural, but contorted inwards, rather than out to the viewer, as if in discomfort or unwillingness; likewise, her crossed legs and tightly clenched fist introduce a sense of tension and even resistance/non-consent. The absence of Cupid, and presence of a female attendant or slave, signals this as the mortal realm; Zeus’ appearance is not a divine epiphany of love/sexual desire, but an unwelcome interruption into normality. Compare this also to Artemisia’s painting ‘Judith Slaying Holofernes’, in which the servant is directly involved with and complicit in the murder, despite the biblical source stating that the servant merely kept a watch.[2] Thus, Artemisia arguably introduces a sense of collective female defiance against the event, and indeed she later painted ‘Judith and her Maidservant’ which perhaps confirms her conception of the beheading of Holofernes being an act of solidarity between women.
Artemisia’s ‘Danaë’ was completed after she was raped by her art tutor and father’s friend, Agostino Tassi. The female tenant in the house ignored her cries for help and Tassi was only taken to court because Artemisia had been a virgin and he had reneged on his promise to marry her (this was in order to preserve her honour and was a common practice). Artemisia also volunteered to be tortured so that she would have a better chance of convicting Tassi, as evidence given under duress was more likely to be accepted especially by a non-citizen (i.e.: a woman).[3] Although it would be erroneous to interpret all of her work as being influenced by a traumatic backstory, it is at least worth considering her simultaneous prominence and struggle as an artist, being a woman in a heavily male-dominated discipline. It’s also interesting to note that her painting ‘Cleopatra’ features an almost identical image, despite the fact that Cleopatra appears to be on the verge of/in the throes of death, with the infamous asp in her hand; for Artemisia, it seems there was overlap between the figure of a woman being raped, and a woman dying.[4] Suffering unites both images.
However, Artemisia was ultimately still an artist for a living and had bills to pay; her work could only be so provocative. Though she was still known for her depictions of strong and defiant women, the art market was not only awash with male artists, but male buyers and patrons — and what man would buy a painting of a woman taking the moral high ground against creepy men, or a patriotic woman beheading a man, or, for that matter, a mortal woman resisting being sexual assaulted? Interestingly, Mary Garrard and a number of other scholars argue that Artemisia in fact took advantage of the fame of her rape trial in order to cater to the male sexual fantasy of female domination, especially in her later work; in this light even the seemingly defiant elements are designed to please the male gaze. Inevitably, as Garrard points out, Artemisia was “both ahead of her time and of her time.”[5] These reasons are therefore why Artemisia’s portrayal of Danaë, while differing from the norm, still has many of the conventional attributes of a man’s perspective of her, such as the performative nudity and typical Baroque female beauty standards (e.g.: the pallor and voluptuousness of the body). As a woman, she, as Berger puts it, “sees and is seen”, and so she responds, performs and parrots the male gaze in her work so as to sell it to the man with the money.[6]
Rape myths of ancient Greece and Rome often formed the beginning of a hero’s birth and subsequent storyline (though of course, these myths still originated from patriarchal societies, and indeed problematically pose woman’s pain as being a dispensable means to the worthy end of creating a hero). These later artists’ responses to the myth, then, hold a magnifying glass over the moment of rape seemingly for no other purpose than to gratuitously show rape. This act of conquering a female body renders this moment of extreme violation and trauma as something beautiful. Indeed, to build further on Berger’s gaze theory, we as the audience assume a bystander’s position, we have power by visually transfixing Danaë in the moment she is being assaulted, but at the same time we are powerless by watching; we are complicit with the act of rape and are reduced to watching it voyeuristically in such a way that it becomes pleasurable. This pleasure arises out of a paradoxical twofold lens; the rape is enjoyable for the viewer as it is being presented, on a basic level, as an aesthetically pleasing piece of art to be appreciated, and so any pain displayed is diminished. At the same time, the rape is also enjoyable for the (more so male) viewer as it is being presented as an enforcement of male power over women, where the pain displayed is transformed into a symbol of submission.[7] (Again, Berger writes, “men of state, of business, discussed under paintings like this (i.e.: of nude women displayed for male pleasure). When one of them felt he had been outwitted, he looked up for consolation. What he saw reminded him that he was a man.”)[8] Even more extremely, Carlin Barton likens the power of sight as almost equivalent to “a form of violence — vivisection, as penetrating, as mutilating, as any that one human being could inflict upon one another”.[9] In this light, both artist and viewer almost become rapists by virtue of looking at Danaë (and indeed identifying with almighty Zeus himself) — and this is a privilege as we get to look at a beautiful woman (thing) and exert our power over her while we’re at it. Therefore, the nature of this relationship between art and viewer the normalises participation of both, and so further crystallises the idea of rape/sexual assault as artistic pleasures and ideals. Ultimately, these artistic choices fall into a historical narrative of simultaneously fetishizing and normalising women’s pain.
Numerous feminist scholars have written on the prevalence of rape in art and classical texts, and Danae falls in this intersection. But moving forward in terms of the modern day, perhaps it is time to re-evaluate the status of the Western artistic ‘canon’ in order to re-balance our conception of artistic ideals and the place that rape and sexual assault occupies in this. In a related modern-day analogy, Caroline Criado Perez, on the subject of Edexcel’s choice to not include a single female composer amongst sixty three pieces of music set for A Level Music, writes that “canon formation is passed off as the objective trickle-down of the musical marketplace, but in truth it is as subjective as any other value judgement made in an unequal society.”[10] The same goes for the artistic canon; even when a woman is let into the canon, as we have seen with Artemisia, she still must play to the male gallery to keep its attention. The reception of the Danaë myth in art, therefore, has been fraught with difficulty.
However, on a more positive note, reception responds to reception.[11] Therefore, we may now respond to both the myth and its receptions critically and with awareness. As recently as the 1970s Artemisia’s work was ‘re-discovered’ after her painting style quickly fell out of fashion towards the end of her lifetime, and this re-vitalised an interest in scholarship around her work. Only this year (2020) has Artemisia’s work been displayed for the first time at the National Gallery. Thus, widening the canon to include figures such as Artemisia, and indeed opening up opportunities and education now to increase awareness of both institutional sexism and the reactions to it have functioned in the past, and how we can respond to these responses. In the case of Artemisia’s ‘Danaë’ in particular, it is important to contextualise this amongst the legacy of raped women in western art, and from there rebuild our preconceptions of visual beauty and pleasure.
Bibliography
Apollodorus, The Library. Frazer, J. G., Apollodorus, The Library. Volume 1: Books 1–3.9. Loeb Classical Library 121 (Cambridge MA, 1921)
Barton, C. “Being in the Eyes: Shame and Sight in Ancient Rome” in: D. Fredrick (ed.) The Roman Gaze (Baltimore MA, 2002), 216–235.
Berger, J. Ways of Seeing (London, 1972)
The New American Bible Revised Edition (Oxford, 2011)
Criado Perez, C. Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Built for Men (London, 2019)
Garrard, M. “Early Modern Feminism and the Dangerous Artemisia Gentileschi”, ‘Artemisia’ Exhibition Online Events (The National Gallery, 12th Nov. 2020a). Lecture.
Garrard, M. Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe — Renaissance Lives (London, 2020b)
Mulvey, L. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in: Screen, vol. 16 (1973), 6–18.
Richlin, A. “Reading Ovid’s Rapes” in: A. Richlin (ed.) Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome (Oxford, 1992)
Sharrock, A. “Looking at Looking: Can You Resist a Reading?” in: D. Fredrick (ed.) The Roman Gaze (Baltimore MA, 2002), 265–295.
Wark, K. Host. “Great Women of the Classics”, Start the Week, (BBC, 2nd Nov. 2020). https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000p1t4
[1] Apollodorus, The Library, 2.4.1ff.
[2] New American Bible Revised Edition, Judith 8.4ff
[3] Treves, L. in Wark (2020)
[4] I am aware that there is debate over whether Orazio or Artemisia painted ‘Cleopatra’. Either way, Artemisia’s ‘Danaë’ is still a direct response to it.
[5] Garrard (2020a)
[6] Berger (1972), 47ff.
[7] It may well be overly simplistic to divide gazes between a gender binary of men/women, and this is indeed a common criticism of Laura Mulvey’s gaze theory (1973), in which she coins the idea of the ‘male gaze’. However, this binary works well in this instance to explain the inherent violence of patriarchal society and its strict gender roles, especially around this period in Europe.
[8] Berger (1972), 57.
[9] Barton (2002), 224.
[10] Criado Perez (2019), 18.
[11] James (2002), passim
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