Hands across three centuries

Artemisia Gentileschi (b. 1593) is a feminist icon of such power that she has penetrated even to these islands, for instance in a book by our own feminist icon, Germaine Greer. Not only was Artemisia almost the only woman artist of her age, but while still in her teens she was raped by a fellow-artist, and again did what no woman had done before, standing up in court and testifying against her attacker. Her most famous painting, ‘Judith and Holofernes’, was a sweet revenge: it shows the biblical heroine hacking off the head of the invader as he sleeps, with streams of blood flowing towards our feet.

This is not the only historical reality Artemisia draws on. Anna Banti (b. 1895, real name Lucia Lopresti) first finished the novel in the spring of 1944, at the height of the battle for Italy. That summer her house, like many others in Florence, was bombed by the Germans, and the manuscript buried in the ruins. The Artemisia we have now was rewritten over the next three years, and transformed by that necessity for rebirth, so like Artemisia’s own. Banti could not separate her grief from her subject’s, and did not try; instead she wove her own devastation and reclamation into Artemisia’s, and reconstructed the novel as a conversation with her subject.

So Artemisia has not just one heart-stopping tale to tell but two; and the fact that they are both true adds to their power. On the other hand, could any novel live up to the facts and to this ambitious double idea? Does this one?

At first I feared not. Anna Banti was an art historian and a classic Italian writer, and the result is a style not immediately friendly to the English reader.