The painting I’ve come to see is upside down, above my head. Standing at the window of Casa Buonarroti looking up at a ceiling inset with paintings, I spy the one I’ve come for. It’s a woman, wrapped in billowing blue-green cloth, seated on a cloud. As I turn in a circle beneath her, the familiar face of artist Artemisia Gentileschi comes into focus. Despite scholarly debate, it seems to be another self-portrait, this time in the guise of the Allegory of Inclination, the representation of an innate creativity. She holds a brass mariner’s compass in her hands and a white star shines over her head as she gazes into the distance, lost in thought.
Today, I’m following in the footsteps of two artists. One is the 17th-century painter who was commissioned to make the allegory as a tribute to the qualities of Michelangelo Buonarroti. The other is the 20th-century writer Anna Banti, whose genre-defying novel Artemisia put both artist and author in dialogue.
Anna Banti was born in Florence in 1895 as Lucia Lopresti. Educated as an art historian and married to the famous art critic Roberto Longhi (whose 1916 essay on Artemisia and her father helped revive interest in the artist), she wrote many stories and novels, usually about historical women. Her most famous work, published in 1947, remains Artemisia. It’s a novel that’s hard to categorize. A pioneering work of historical fiction and biography, it also presents the author’s own first person reflections on memory and the creative process.
Artemisia Gentileschi was one of the most successful painters of her time and a rare example of a 17th-century woman who excelled in a male-dominated field. For a long time, the story of Artemisia was overshadowed by the rape trial she endured as a young woman in which she had to prove, under torture, that her art instructor had raped her. Her accomplishments far surpass this trauma. She was the first woman accepted into the Academy of Art and Design in Florence in 1616 and went on to train other artists, including her own daughters. Her clients included the Medici duke Cosimo II, King Charles I of England and the Spanish viceroy of Naples, among many others. Artemisia’s work redefined the portrayal of women, showing them not as passive objects, but as defiant and heroic.
My pilgrimage continues on the other side of town, the wistful face of Artemisia as allegory swirling in my mind. Now I’m on the trail of Banti and the first pages of her novel that open in August of 1944. I pass through the grand courtyard of Palazzo Pitti, through a dark curving tunnel and out into the light of the Boboli Gardens. Pristine shrubbery, tourists taking selfies, ancient Roman statuary and the grand sweep of a Roman-style theater greet me. In the distance lies the familiar and shining Florentine skyline. It’s hard to imagine the vision in front of Banti and her fellow Florentines as she described it at the beginning of Artemisia.
The novel starts with the words “Don’t cry,” as Banti surveys a Florence in ruins after the Nazi army blew up the bridges over the Arno. Among the rubble was Banti’s home on borgo San Jacopo, which contained the first version of her manuscript on Artemisia. “Don’t cry,” a voice repeats, as she weeps for Florence and the manuscript, writing, “under the rubble of my house I have lost Artemisia, my companion from three centuries ago who lay breathing gently on the hundred pages I had written.”
And yet, Artemisia was not lost. The voice in her ear, the ghost at her side and a compass pointing to the North Star to guide her, Artemisia stayed with Anna Banti as she rewrote the novel. In the first pages, Banti writes, “I begin to talk to [Artemisia], without crying, beneath the ashes of the explosions.” The novel becomes a meditation on the creative life itself, a conversation between two women, divided by time, but centered around their shared creative struggle. Anna, Artemisia and Florence itself were all reborn from the ashes.
