Christopher R. Marshall - MAP FORUM

MAP FORUM - 29 October 2024
“The rest is easy”: Problems of Attribution and Workshop Organisation in the Later Neapolitan Paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi.
The recent influx of new attributions to Artemisia Gentileschi has stimulated an ongoing critical revision of her oeuvre, particularly in relation to the many new attributions datable to her later Neapolitan career. This lecture proposes to address the problems and questions raised by these new attributions by firstly underscoring the importance of Gentileschi’s apprenticeship under her father, Orazio. When setting up her own workshop in Naples, Artemisia was required to adapt workshop practice somewhat since she was not able to gradually train teenaged male apprentices while they resided in her home and learned to paint in her style - a professional handicap that derived both from her gender as well as from her previously itinerant lifestyle. The innovative model of workshop organisation that this strategy engendered might have solved the issue of Gentileschi’s Neapolitan productivity, yet it created the concomitant problem, in turn, of a high degree of workshop variance between different levels of studio production.
Christopher R. Marshall is Associate Professor in Art History and Curatorship at The University of Melbourne. His publications on Baroque art and the art market include Artemisia Gentileschi and the Business of Art (Princeton UP, 2024); Baroque Naples and the Industry of Painting (Yale UP, 2016); and chapter contributions to The Economic Lives of Seventeenth Century Italian Painters (Yale UP, 2010) and Mapping Markets in Europe and the New World (Brepols, 2006). His publications on museums and curatorship include Sculpture and the Museum (Routledge, 2011) and contributions to Museum Making; Making Art History and Reshaping Museum Space (Routledge, 2005, 2007, 2012).