by Adams, Max;
Within a month of the trial, as a function of social necessity, Artemisia was married to a minor Florentine artist, Pierantonio Stiattesi. In 1618 they had a daughter, called Prudentia after her grandmother, but the history of the marriage suggests that it was a matter of no more than mutual convenience and public show. Artemisia sustained a passionate affair with another man for several years, and husband and wife became estranged.
Her scandalous history did not prevent Artemisia from being recognised as one of Italy’s foremost painters. She was brought to Florence by a great-nephew of Michelangelo, through whom she was commissioned to paint a ceiling at the family home, Casa Buonarroti. She attracted the patronage of Cosimo II de’ Medici and was elected a member of the exclusive Accademia delle Arti del Disegno. After spells in Venice, London – with her father, who became court painter to Charles I – and Rome, she finally settled in Naples, where she was still painting in 1654.
Artemisia’s most famous works illustrate the story of Judith slaying Holofernes. In the Book of Judith, the eponymous heroine is a Jewish widow who, with her maidservant, infiltrates the camp of her people’s enemy, the Assyrian general Holofernes, and wins his affection. Coming to him asleep, lying dead drunk in his tent one night, she decapitates him with a sword and takes his head back to the Israelites as a trophy, while the Assyrian army collapses in chaos. Judith’s story was often the subject of poetic verse from the Anglo-Saxon period onwards and her assassination of Holofernes was painted many times in the Renaissance and after – perhaps the most famous incarnation being Gustav Klimt’s dazzling 1901 confection. Caravaggio’s 1598 and 1607 treatments of the scene are obvious contemporary exemplars for Artemisia, but the very personal nature of her interpretation, of about 1613,‡ is expressed in the brutal intimacy of Judith’s act, as she holds Holofernes down by his hair while drawing the bright sword blade across his throat. He, supine on his litter, stares out at the viewer almost pleading, daring us to intervene. The maidservant presses down on his chest, while his right fist pushes at her throat to fend her off. Blood runs down the perfectly white bedclothes. Chiaroscuro lighting enhances the muscular violence of the scene – both women have their sleeves rolled up; he is naked – while the extravagance of Judith’s rich blue silk dress embroidered with gold thread and the haemoglobin red of the maidservant’s gown garishly complement the blood of the victim. It is not merely wishful thinking that propels the viewer to see in Judith a likeness of the artist: not as an allegory of painting but as the personification of a violated woman. A year later, a more composed reading of the story was imagined in Judith and her Maidservant,§ in which the two women, seen in complicit profile, look stage right, Judith carrying the fatal sword with its blade upright against her own shoulder while the maidservant carries Holofernes’s head in a basket on her hip with all the sangfroid of a costermonger carrying apples to market.
In a 1620 version of the assassination,# subtle differences tell of a development in Artemisia’s theme seven years on from the immediate aftermath of the trial. First, we notice that in the new painting the artist steps back a couple of paces from the scene, offering a slightly wider view that concentrates the action against a dark background: it is more theatrical. Then, we see that the wound inflicted on Holofernes is now spurting bright jets of blood; that Judith is drawing away so as not to get spots on her – now golden-fabric – dress. One arc of blood directs the eye towards a gold and enamel bracelet that Judith wears on her left wrist; and the cameos that we can barely make out on the bracelet are seen2 as depictions of Athena and of Artemis, the virgin hunter-goddess, prototype for the Virgin Mary and namesake of the artist. It is a nice touch. A longer contemplation of the scene shows us that the maidservant’s gown is now darker and more discreet, while the blood-red of the bedclothes emphasises Holofernes’s vulnerability and the ultimate payment for his sins against the Israelites. And then, the muscularity of the first painting is enhanced by the guard of Judith’s sword, painted vertically to show the hilt as a cross, which presses into her enemy’s bicep.
If the Judith story became and remained a personal narrative for Artemisia, it is perhaps surprising that her very early treatment of Susanna and the Elders of 1610,∫ a year or so before the rape by Tassi, should substantially address the same theme. Here, a naked but chaste Susanna sits on a marble bench against a wall over which two men are gossiping lasciviously about her while she fends them off: their huddling dual form designed, perhaps, to make them look like a mountain on her back. The tightness of the depiction of the three heads makes the scene claustrophobic. It is an extraordinarily mature and accomplished, almost revolutionary conception for a young adult. Had the right poet known Artemisia at this age, he or she might have written of her, as Christine de Pizan wrote of Jeanne d’Arc, the following lines…
A girl of only sixteen years
(Does this not outdo Nature’s skill?)
Who lightly heavy weapons bears,
Of strong and hard food takes her fill,
And thus is like it. And God’s foes
Before her swiftly fleeing run,
She did this in the public eye.
There tarried not a single one.
Susanna’s story comes from the Old Testament Book of Daniel. Susanna, a respectable married woman, enjoys a private bath in her garden while two elders watch and lust after her. They follow her back into her house, where they threaten to accuse her publicly of a secret assignation unless she agrees to have sex with them. Her refusal leads to her trial on the capital charge of promiscuity. The young hero, Daniel, saves her when he exposes the men’s perjury; and they are later executed. Artemisia’s treatment of the scene, despite its physical sensuality, emphasises the complicity and moral bankruptcy of the Elders, in contrast with treatments by contemporary male artists who had begun to exploit the story’s supposed innate eroticism and resulting popularity with wealthy male patrons. She is reacting against the lasciviousness of her peers. If Judith is Artemisia slaying her enemy, Susanna expresses the young artist’s solidarity with all women against all predatory men. It has been said, echoing a description of Michelangelo, that her art is a gift to the twentieth century – since no other century would have her.3 In the second decade of a new millennium, her Susanna might be re-captioned: ‘#MeToo’.
Malice Defeated: Elizabeth Cellier
There are curious parallels between the life of Béatrice de PlanisolesΩ and that of Elizabeth Cellier (?1640–after 1688). Both were tried for their lives; both defended themselves coolly and with skill in the face of fanatical opponents. The French Cathar sympathiser, once chatelaine, of fourteenth-century Montaillou and the English Catholic midwife and pamphleteer implicated in the notorious ‘Popish Plot’ of 1678–81 both found themselves in deeply compromising company. Both spent time in prison; both survived. In Elizabeth’s case, she ensured that history knew her side of the story largely by writing it herself. Had a Protestant coup against James VII/II in 1688 not forced her into exile, she might now be remembered as the founder of a Royal College of Midwives – which, in the event, had to wait almost two hundred years for its founding charter.
Elizabeth was the graduate of an age in which women wrote and published their ideas about religion with increasing confidence, a confidence traceable to Puritans like Anne Bradstreet. Elizabeth speaks for herself: first of her childhood during the English Civil War (1642–51), her conversion to Catholicism and her loyalty to the monarchy:
…For my Education being in those times, when my own Parents and Relations, for their Constant and Faithful Affection to the King and Royal Family, were persecuted, the King himself Murthered, the Bishops and Church destroyed, the whole Loyal Party meerly for being so, opprest and ruined; and all as was pretended by the Authors of these Villanies, for their being Papists and Idolaters, the constant Character given by them to the King and his Friends to make them odious, they assuming to themselves only the Name of Protestants, making that the Glorious Title by which they
pretended Right to all things.
These sort of Proceedings, as I grew in understanding, produced in me more and more horrour of the Party that committed them, and put me on Inquiry into that Religion, to which they pretended the greatest Antipathy, wherein I thank God, I found my Innate Loyalty, not only confirm’d, but encourag’d; and let Calumny say what it will, I never heard from any Papist, as they call them, Priest nor Lay-man, but that they and I, and all true Catholicks, owe our Lives to the defence of our Lawful King, which our present Sovereign Charles the Second is, whom God long and happily preserve so.4
In the early 1670s, apparently widowed, Elizabeth married a French merchant, Pierre Cellier. She was well known among the Catholic middle classes of London, practising as a midwife and visiting the inmates of Newgate prison where, at considerable personal risk, she
…thought it my duty through all sorts of hazards to relieve the poor imprison’d Catholicks, who in great numbers were lock’d up in Gaols, starving for want of Bread…5
In 1678, rumours were rife in London that Popish plotters planned to assassinate King Charles II (reigned 1660–85) and place his Catholic brother James (reigned 1685–8) on the throne. The agent provocateur Titus Oates managed to persuade the twitchy councillors of a sensibly sceptical king that the rumours were true. He seemed to be able to provide plenty of evidence of the intended sedition but, so far as we know, nearly all of it was fabricated. Public tolerance of Catholics was replaced by intolerance; then by a feverish antipathy during which conspirators were seen and heard everywhere and foreign invasion was feared to be imminent. Elizabeth was set upon by three men and seriously injured.
A year later, during a visit to Newgate, Elizabeth began to collect evidence that Catholic prisoners were being systematically degraded, starved and tortured:
…we all heard Terrible Grones and Squeeks which came out of the Dungeon, called the Condemn’d hole. I asked Harris the Turnkey, what doleful Cry it was, he said, it was a Woman in Labour. I bid him put us into the Room to her, and we would help her, but he drove us away very rudely, both out of the Lodge, and from the Door; we went behind the Gate, and there lissened, and soon found that it was the voice of a strong man in Torture, and heard, as we thought, between his Groans, the winding up of some Engine: these Cries, stop’d the Passengers under the Gate, and we six went to the Turners Shop without the Gate, and stood there amazed with the Horror and Dread of what we heard; when one of the Officers of the Prison came out in great haste, seeming to run from the Noise,
One of us catcht hold of him, saying, Oh! What are they doing in the Prison.
Officer: I dare not tell you.
Mistris: It’s a Man upon the Rack, Ile lay my Life on’t.
Officer: It is something like it…6
During one of these visits Elizabeth met a petty rogue calling himself Willoughby who, claiming to have been falsely imprisoned, supplied her with a dossier of exactly the sort of evidence of abuse that she needed to take her case to the law courts. In return, Elizabeth paid Willoughby’s fines and he was released. At about the same time she met another inmate claiming to be in possession of evidence that the Popish Plot was a Protestant conspiracy hatched by the Earl of Shaftesbury on behalf of the king. Suspicious of his motives, she paid Willoughby to investigate the claim. By the end of the year, Willoughby had succeeded in gathering damning evidence against Oates and his confederates; or so it seemed. But the whole affair was a web of deceit. Willoughby, now calling himself Thomas Dangerfield, publicly denounced Elizabeth for a conspiracy against the Earl of Shaftesbury and the king; compromising documents were found concealed in a meal tub in her kitchen, and she was arrested on suspicion of committing high treason:
November the first, I was examin’d before His Majesty and the Lords of the Councel where… Willoughby accused me of all the Forged Stories he tells in his Lying Narrative; and I unfeignedly told the Truth, and the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth. But the Lord Chancellor told me, no body would believe a word I said, and that I would Dye. — To which I replyed, I know that my Lord, for I never saw an Immortal woman in my life: And then kneeling down, said,
Cellier: I beseech your Majesty that I may not be Tortur’d.
The King: The Law will not suffer it.
Cellier: Such things are frequently done in Newgate; and I have more reason to fear it than any other person, because of what I have done against the Keeper, and therefore I beseech your Majesty, If at any time I should say any thing contrary to what I have now said, that you will not believe me, for it will be nothing but lies forc’d from me by barbarous usage.7
Elizabeth was tried in June 1680. With the benefit of an almost forensic memory and an exceptional understanding of the law, by challenging the Crown’s case at every stage with wit and skill and by producing witnesses exposing Willoughby/Dangerfield as a perjurer and convicted felon, she defended herself successfully, was acquitted and freed. In August she published a pamphlet entitled Malice Defeated or, A brief relation of the accusation and deliverance of Elizabeth Cellier wherein her proceedings both before and during her confinement are particularly related and the Mystery of the meal-tub fully discovered: together with an abstract of her arraignment and tryal, written by her self, for the satisfaction of all lovers of undisguised truth. Elizabeth had it privately printed and sold it from her home. With its vivid use of dramatic dialogue and finely tuned ear for rhetoric, including the martyrial defiance of a prisoner of conscience, it caused a sensation:
I value not my Losses nor my Life, I’ll stay here this twenty Years, rather than Lie my self to Liberty. I am Prisoner for Truth sake, and that Cause, and the joy I have to suffer for it, makes this Dirty, Smoaky Hole to me a Pallace, adorned with all the Ornaments Imagination can think upon; and I assure you, This is the most pleasant Time of my whole Life, for I have thrown off all care of Earthly things, and have nothing to do but to serve God.8
She followed Malice Defeated with a direct satirical attack on Dangerfield, called The Matchless Picaro; but her accusations of state-sponsored torture brought her once more to trial, this time for libel. She was fined £1,000, confined to the debtors’ prison until she could pay it, and sentenced to spend three spells in the pillory, during one of which she was pelted with stones and badly hurt. Effigies of her and her infamous meal tub were paraded through the streets.
Nothing more is heard of Elizabeth Cellier until after Charles II’s death in 1685 and the accession of James VII/II, during whose short reign Catholic communities in Britain felt, once more, sufficiently self-confident to participate actively in public life, with royal patronage on their side. Elizabeth, seemingly engaged by the new queen, Mary of Modena, to attend her during pregnancy, took to print again, this time with ‘A scheme for the Foundation of a Royal hospital… and for the maintenance of a corporation of skilful Midwives…’, which she formally proposed to the king. It was a plan for the establishment of a Royal Hospital for foundlings; and since the cause of their predicament was necessarily related to high rates of perinatal maternal death, she proposed that a chartered college of midwifery be set up to teach male and female students the practical techniques that men had hitherto studied only in books and that women knew only by practice. She saw herself as its governess, under the administrative control of a ‘man mid-wife’ or director. Male students would pay higher fees than female students, who might be less able to support themselves financially.
The scheme was confronted with immediate opposition from male professionals. In response, her pamphlet ‘To Dr. —— an answer to his queries concerning the Colledg [sic] of Midwives’, was articulate, reasoned, effective and logical. Confronting the exclusive preserve of those ‘learned Gentlemen’ licensed to practise midwifery by Anglican bishops, she cites contemporary bills of mortality to show how ineffective current textbook methods were:
I hope, Doctor, these considerations will deter any of you from pretending to teach us Midwifery, especially such as confess they never deliv
ered Women in their lives, and being asked What would they do in such a Case? Reply they have not yet studied it, but will when occasion serves; This is something to the purpose, I must confess, Doctor: but I doubt it will not satisfy the Women of this Age, who are so sensible and impatient of their Pain that few will be prevailed upon to bear it in Complement to the Doctor while he fetches his Book, studies the Case, and teaches the midwife to perform her work, which he hopes may be done before he comes.9
With the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 that brought William III and Mary to the throne, Elizabeth Cellier’s hopes of founding her teaching hospital were shelved; she seems to have followed James and his queen into exile, and nothing more is heard of her. For Elizabeth, womanhood, charity, compassion and Catholicism were inseparable from each other and from her being. It was her lot to be drawn into notoriety; she both endured and exploited celebrity and had the wit and literary talent to profit from it. She may have failed in her immediate objectives; but the next generation of women writers and campaigners, for whom she prepared the ground, would enjoy the fruits of her labours.
Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal
If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?10
One of the most prominent of Elizabeth Cellier’s successors, Mary Astell (1666–1731), poses a problem for those who like their history straightforward. She is often called the first English feminist, but some of her views on women and on social hierarchy would dismay any twenty-first-century liberal; she was an unshakeably royalist Tory Anglican. For many modern readers, it is not radicalism that demands to be admired in her thinking; it is her quick, restless intellect and the unaffected modernity of her prose. She was a talented philosopher of considerable wit who wielded a very sharp pen and whose writing had a profound effect on contemporary intellectuals of both sexes. She dared to cross swords with the great liberal thinker John Locke, and sometimes beat him at his own game. In her own day she became famous, even if her personal habits, bordering on asceticism, disinclined her to what we would now call social networking. She self-identified as an anchoress, a Julian of Norwich.
