Guest Lecture: Artemisia Gentileschi and the Ghost of Michelangelo
One of the most esteemed artists of the seventeenth century, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1654?) began forging her reputation as the era’s premier painter of heroic yet life-like female nudes at the precocious age of seventeen. In doing so, she was consciously following in the steps of one of the greatest artists of the previous century: Michelangelo Buonarroti. Michelangelo’s nephew, known as Michelangelo Buonarroti Jr., recognized this spiritual connection when he met Artemisia in Florence. He reserved a special affection for her, even serving as godfather to her child. Drawn from the archives of the Buonarroti and the Medici court, this talk will explore the surprising parallels between these two irascible, brilliant, and independently minded artists, tracing a trail from Rome to Malta, to Florence, and finally to Indianapolis.
Sheila Barker, an art historian, took her BA at Amherst and completed an MA and a PhD at Columbia University. She is the founding director of the Jane Fortune Research Program on Women Artists at the Medici Archive Project, the world’s first archival research program dedicated to women artists. That program has now been rebranded as the Center for Women in Renaissance Archives, with the mission of harnessing technology to expand access to archival information about women of the past. In 2021, she curated an exhibition at Palazzo Pitti on the 17th-century woman artist Giovanna Garzoni. In addition to numerous articles and her three edited volumes (Artemisia Gentileschi in a Changing Light, Women Artists in Early Modern Italy, and Artiste nel chiostro), she also authored the leading biography on Artemisia Gentileschi, published by Getty Publications, and reviewed in the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal.
