Artemisia Gentileschi: Violence, Gender, and Making a Name in Baroque Italy (lecture)

Date: Sunday, August 19, 4:00 p.m.
Location: Getty Center, Harold M. Williams Auditorium
Admission: Free; reservations required. Call (310) 440-7300 or use the "Make Reservation" button below.



Join art historian Jon Seydl for a fresh look at Artemisia Gentileschi, a complex, ambitious, and powerfully independent artist who brought the perspective of a female artist to the male-dominated art world of Baroque Italy. Learn about Gentileschi's remarkable evolution from wunderkind to leading painter and explore the great range of her work, from scenes of harrowing conflict to private devotional portraits such as The Penitent Magdalene, currently on loan to the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center.

Seydl investigates Gentileschi's innovative style, which is characterized by psychological complexity, unexpected compositions, and empathetic depictions of real women, and considers her paintings alongside those of her father, Orazio Gentileschi, and her male contemporaries. He retraces Gentileschi's dramatic life, including her motherless childhood, her complicated personal and professional relationship with her father, and her rape by a fellow artist and the extraordinary legal proceedings that followed. He questions whether Gentileschi's biography can shed light on her tense, even violent style, and whether gender influenced the way she painted.

About Jon Seydl
Jon Seydl is the Paul J. and Edith Ingalls Vignos, Jr., curator of European Painting and Sculpture, 1500–1800, at the Cleveland Museum of Art. He was formerly associate curator of paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum. An expert in European art of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, he curated the exhibitions From Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter: German Paintings from Dresden and For Your Approval: Oil Sketches by Tiepolo, among others. He is co-editor of the new book Antiquity Recovered: The Legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which traces how perceptions of the past have changed over the course of three centuries of excavations in the Vesuvian cities.

How to Get Here
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