Artemisia Gentileschi

During the last four decades the painter Artemisia Gentileschi (b. Rome 1593—d. Naples 1654?) has become an increasingly popular subject for both scholars and the general public. Against considerable odds, she was trained by her painter father, Orazio Gentileschi, and demonstrated a precocious talent from an early age. Her first known signed and dated painting is a Susanna and the Elders of 1610 (Schönborn Collection, Pommersfelden); she returned to this subject many times during her career, including her last known signed and dated painting of 1652 (Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna). In the intervening years she devised innovative compositions for both traditional and not-so-traditional iconographies, with a focus on heroic women from sacred and secular sources—in addition to Susannas, she painted Judiths, Mary Magdalenes, and Lucretias, among others—as well as multiple self-portraits, indicating demand for her abilities and interpretation as well as her image. Her rape by the painter Agostino Tassi in 1611, and the trial that followed in 1612, has been seen by many as a pivotal moment in Artemisia’s life, which it certainly was. But her artistic accomplishments must be understood in the much wider contexts of nascent feminist ideologies and painting in Baroque Europe. During her long career, spent in Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples, and London, Artemisia acquired numerous patrons and correspondents. These included Grand Duke Cosimo II of Florence and his wife, Christina of Lorraine; Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger; Galileo Galilei; the Duke of Alcalá Fernando Enríquez d’Afán de Ribera y Enríquez; Philip IV and his sister Infanta María of Spain; Cassiano dal Pozzo; and Charles I of England. She was named the first female member of Florence’s Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in 1616, and she deftly managed her own thriving business and extensive studio, largely on her own. The last known documented reference is a Neapolitan tax document of 1654; she may have died during the plague outbreak in the city that year. Her burial site, allegedly in the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, has not been identified, but a later text states that it was marked with a now lost stone simply inscribed “HEIC ARTEMISIA,” or “Here Lies Artemisia.” The lack of more detailed information provides an indication of the fame she had achieved during her life. The literature on Artemisia Gentileschi has expanded significantly in recent years, as has her body of work, but not without considerable scholarly disagreement.

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 1-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridget Cherry

A revised and abridged record of the Annual Lecture of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, given at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, on 12 November 2012Two exceptional events in London in 2012, the queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics, provoked questions about the origins and legacy of major public events of the past. This article explores the impact on the fabric of London since the eighteenth century of occasional planned spectacles through discussion of two main types of event, namely the procession along a predetermined route and occasions requiring a large organized space.George, Elector of Hanover, succeeded to the throne as George I on 1 August 1714. The proclamation of a new monarch took place at a series of traditional sites. The Heralds started at the king’s residence, St James’s Palace, and proceeded to Charing Cross, where the statue of Charles I had replaced the medieval Eleanor cross destroyed in the Civil War. The third site, Temple Bar, marked the boundary of the City Liberties. Within the City the proclamation was repeated at St Mary le Bow and at the Royal Exchange — recent post-Fire buildings, but iconic sites — marking the significance of the Church and the power centre of the City merchants.


2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 405-424
Author(s):  
Alina Nowicka -Jeżowa

Summary The article tries to outline the position of Piotr Skarga in the Jesuit debates about the legacy of humanist Renaissance. The author argues that Skarga was fully committed to the adaptation of humanist and even medieval ideas into the revitalized post-Tridentine Catholicism. Skarga’s aim was to reformulate the humanist worldview, its idea of man, system of values and political views so that they would fit the doctrine of the Roman Catholic church. In effect, though, it meant supplanting the pluralist and open humanist culture by a construct as solidly Catholic as possible. He sifted through, verified, and re-interpreted the humanist material: as a result the humanist myth of the City of the Sun was eclipsed by reminders of the transience of all earthly goods and pursuits; elements of the Greek and Roman tradition were reconnected with the authoritative Biblical account of world history; and man was reinscribed into the theocentric perspective. Skarga brought back the dogmas of the original sin and sanctifying grace, reiterated the importance of asceticism and self-discipline, redefined the ideas of human dignity and freedom, and, in consequence, came up with a clear-cut, integrist view of the meaning and goal of the good life as well as the proper mission of the citizen and the nation. The polemical edge of Piotr Skarga’s cultural project was aimed both at Protestantism and the Erasmian tendency within the Catholic church. While strongly coloured by the Ignatian spirituality with its insistence on rigorous discipline, a sense of responsibility for the lives of other people and the culture of the community, and a commitment to the heroic ideal of a miles Christi, taking headon the challenges of the flesh, the world, Satan, and the enemies of the patria and the Church, it also went a long way to adapt the Jesuit model to Poland’s socio-cultural conditions and the mentality of its inhabitants.


Author(s):  
Rosamund Oates

Tobie Matthew (c.1544–1628) lived through the most turbulent times of the English Church. Born during the reign of Henry VIII, he saw Edward VI introduce Protestantism, and then watched as Mary I violently reversed her brother’s changes. When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, Matthew rejected his family’s Catholicism to join the fledgling Protestant regime. Over the next sixty years, he helped build a Protestant Church in England under Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I. Rising through the ranks of the Church, he was Archbishop of York in the charged decades leading up to the British Civil Wars. Here was a man who played a pivotal role in the religious politics of Tudor and Stuart England, and nurtured a powerful strain of Puritanism at the heart of the established Church....


Author(s):  
James B. Bell

In step with the gradually unfolding imperial policies of the successive governments of King Charles I and later monarchs, the Church of England was extended to the northern part of the Western hemisphere between 1662 and 1829. Under the supervision of the Board of Trade and Plantations until 1701, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts from that year, decade after decade an increasing number of men of differing origins and places of collegiate education in Britain came to serve missions of the Church in early America. The ranks included natives of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and the American colonies, who were supported by the SPG or the legislatures of the provinces in which the Church was established. Development was shaped by imperial policies and administration over 160 years amid rising populations, changing political situations, and the consequences of war and diplomacy.


Urban History ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Asif Siddiqi

Abstract This article recovers the early history of the Soviet ‘closed city’, towns that during the Cold War were absent from maps and unknown to the general public due to their involvement in weapons research. I argue that the closed cities echoed and appropriated features of the Stalinist Gulag camp system, principally their adoption of physical isolation and the language of obfuscation. In doing so, I highlight a process called ‘atomized urbanism’ that embodies the tension between the obdurate reality of the city and the goal of the state to obliterate that reality through secrecy. In spatial terms, ‘atomized’ also describes the urban geography of these cities which lacked any kind of organic suburban expansion.


2017 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-111
Author(s):  
Florian Mazel

Dominique Iogna-Prat’s latest book, Cité de Dieu, cité des hommes. L’Église et l’architecture de la société, 1200–1500, follows on both intellectually and chronologically from La Maison Dieu. Une histoire monumentale de l’Église au Moyen Âge (v. 800–v. 1200). It presents an essay on the emergence of the town as a symbolic and political figure of society (the “city of man”) between 1200 and 1700, and on the effects of this development on the Church, which had held this function before 1200. This feeds into an ambitious reflection on the origins of modernity, seeking to move beyond the impasse of political philosophy—too quick to ignore the medieval centuries and the Scholastic moment—and to relativize the effacement of the institutional Church from the Renaissance on. In so doing, it rejects the binary opposition between the Church and the state, proposes a new periodization of the “transition to modernity,” and underlines the importance of spatial issues (mainly in terms of representation). This last element inscribes the book in the current of French historiography that for more than a decade has sought to reintroduce the question of space at the heart of social and political history. Iogna-Prat’s stimulating demonstration nevertheless raises some questions, notably relating to the effects of the Protestant Reformation, the increasing power of states, and the process of “secularization.” Above all, it raises the issue of how a logic of the polarization of space was articulated with one of territorialization in the practices of government and the structuring of society—two logics that were promoted by the ecclesial institution even before states themselves.


1838 ◽  
Vol 5 (9) ◽  
pp. 1-60

Henry Thomas Colebrooke, the subject of this memoir, was born in London, on the 15th. June, 1765, and was the youngest of seven children. His father, Sir George Colebrooke, Baronet, was for many years chairman of the East India Company.As a boy, he was of a quiet retired disposition, seldom mixing in any of the usual amusements of childhood, and was distinguished at an early age among his brothers and sisters for his extreme fondness for reading. In allusion to this, he used to say to them, that by his habits and tastes he was best fitted for the profession of a clergyman, and expressed a strong desire to his father that he might be placed in the church.


2007 ◽  
Vol 1047 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleni Pavlidou ◽  
N. Civici ◽  
E. Caushi ◽  
L. Anastasiou ◽  
T. Zorba ◽  
...  

AbstractIn this paper are presented the studies of the paint materials and the technique used in 18th century wall paintings, originated from the orthodox church of St Athanasius, in the city of Maschopolis, a flourishing economical and cultural center, in Albania. The church was painted in 1745 by Konstantinos and Athanasios Zografi, and during the last years, restoration activities are being performed at the church. Samples that included plasters and pigments of different colors were collected from important points of the wall paintings. Additionally, as some parts of the wall-paintings were over-painted, the analysis was extended to the compositional characterization of these areas. The identification of the used materials was done by using complementary analytical methods such as Optical Microscopy, Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM-EDS) and X-ray fluorescence (TXRF).The presence of calcite in almost all the pigments is indicative for the use of the fresco technique at the studied areas, while the detection of gypsum and calcium oxalate, indicates an environmental degradation along with a biodegradation. Common pigments used in this area at 15-16th centuries, such as cinnabar, green earth, manganese oxide, carbon black and calcite were identified.


2011 ◽  
Vol 122 (6) ◽  
pp. 297-298
Author(s):  
Christopher Cocksworth
Keyword(s):  
The City ◽  

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