Gender and art

PARIS.- Today at Sotheby’s Paris, the extremely rare and powerful work, by the important Italian 17th century Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi, achieved €865.500 ($1.179.832) against a pre-sale estimate of €200.000-300.000 – World Auction Record for the Artist. This masterpiece was rediscovered by Sotheby’s Paris Old Master Department in an old collection in the South of France, after being hidden from view for 80 years. 

One of the most famous and skilled painters of the Baroque era, Artemisia Gentileschi was centuries ahead of her time. Among the first women artists to achieve success in the 17th century, she brought to her work an electric sense of narrative drama and a unique perspective that both celebrated and humanized strong women characters. Rediscovered by feminist art historians in the past few decades, Gentileschi has inspired a spate of books, both scholarly and popular, and a number of films. But it is the sensational painting Judith Slaying Holofernes (c. 1620) that epitomizes her career. The Art Institute of Chicago, in collaboration with the Foundation for Italian Art and Culture (FIAC), is thrilled to present this stunning work, an exceptional loan from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, for its first display in Chicago.

Violence and Virtue and its accompanying catalogue explore Gentileschi’s painting in the context of her remarkable career and the complex responses of Renaissance and Baroque artists to the story of Judith. The exhibition draws on the rich holdings of the Art Institute as well as a private collection in Chicago, putting Artemisia Gentileschi’s extraordinary work together with paintings and works on paper by such artists as Lucas Cranach, Jan Sanders van Hemessen, Jacopo de’ Barbari, and Felice Ficherelli, thereby enhancing a rare presentation of this truly pioneering and compelling artist.

Violence and Virtue: Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Judith Slaying Holofernes”

Art Institute of Chicago

October 17, 2013–January 9, 2014