Essay on Banti's Artemisia

In Banti's Artemisia, the dynamic interplay of images and words, the visual and the verbal, lends itself to a writer telling the story of herself depicting in words the life of a painter. Banti visualizes Artemisia, interacts with Artemisia, invents Artemisia, becomes Artemisia in order to tell Artemisia's story and her own in a compound autobiography.

Banti constructs her own autobiography within an autobiography with what she refers to as "disrespectful digressions" (51). Artemisia constructs hers from 'the memory of a sort of textbook, an illustrated manual" (26) in Banti's mind. When Banti disingenuously writes that Artemisia "was lying in a sort of good faith, lending to her memory the image of a sheet of white paper covered in attractive handwriting" (36, my emphasis), Banti may also have been "lying in good faith" herself, writing biographical fiction, "lending to her [own] memory [not only] the image of white paper covered in attractive handwriting", that of a her lost manuscript, but images from Artemesia's life that in Banti's head have become her own: "the color of her hair changes", Banti confesses, "becomes almost black, and her complexion olive, such as I imagined her when I first read the accounts of her trial on the mold-spotted documents." (17, my emphasis). "Having her follow me so closely" she writes a few pages later, "means that she distorts the images and memories I have of her" (20) and "the days change but not the things and events around me. Nor does this obstinate labor change, a labor not of the memory, but of the images that from the memory draw an imperceptible sustenance." (26, my emphasis).

On page 40, Banti writes: "I carry Artemisia around with me in fragments" (40), an obvious reference to fragments as products of an explotion. Banti is putting these fragments, the pieces of Artemisia's life, together much as she is picking up the pieces of her own life, and the pieces of the lost manuscript in her mind, as they lie scattered all around her by the devastation of war. "...the spirit is with the dead now," she writes, "and it loathes nothing more than having to provide life, provide for life. As a message for the future, it has no respect for a testament, and the testament that Artemisia dictates to me is null." (51) Some of it may be dictation, some of it may be sheer imagination: "[Artemisia] wants to prove to me that she believes everything that I invented" (17, my emphasis). At one point Banti tells Artemisia, " 'It's not important, Artemisia, it's not important that you remember what the judge thought of women; even if I wrote it, it wasn't true.' " (17, my emphasis). Then she says, "I decide that I will not let Artemisia speak again, nor will I speak for her again" (22). Later, however, Banti puts words in Artemisia's mouth: "I feel that I have reached the truth, an inexpressible truth, as I form these words on Artemisia's lips. She must have uttered them at least once, with that Spanish haughtiness she acquired in her thirties in Naples..." (42, my emphasis).

The intensity of Banti's identification with Artemisia is genuine even when reflecting the historical record:

I discover that one moonlit evening in Naples, overlooking the sea, Artemisia said, 'I too have kept a written record of my first journey.' She was speaking to Tommaso Guaragna whom she had known for only six hours. She was thirty-six years old, and she was lying. She was lying in a sort of good faith, lending to her memory the image of a sheet of white paper covered in attractive handwriting; and it was the least she could do, so strongly did she taste the flavor of the eels in Bologna and feel the hardness of the bed in San Quirico and hear the voice of the postilion saying 'From here to Radicofani it's downhill all the way.' (36, my emphasis).

This could be Banti saying that she herself could taste the eels, she could feel the hardness, she could hear the voice, that she is re-experiencing, re-living, re-inventing Artemesia's life: a true fiction of another's self. Banti even keeps Artemisia company (40). Artemisia talks to her and Banti talks back to Artemisia: "I close my eyes and for the first time use 'tu' to her" (17). Twenty or so pages pages later, we read a stunning shift in narrative:

...Orazio sat in silence, his thoughts far away. And back into Artemissia's mind came the ungainly, makeshift husband she had married.
I was on my own (this commemoration often slips from the third person), I was on my own in Florence for most of the day... (38, my emphasis).

Here Banti shifts for the first time Artemisia's narrative from third to first person and speaks as if she were Artemissia herself without any other explanation but that disingenuous parenthesis: the biographer and biographee become one and the same, and biography turns into autobiography within autobiography. Banti's own story becomes intertwined with Artemisia's, the shelling that destroyed the house containing the first manuscript takes backstage to Artemisia's unfolding life story.

Language in all of its richness is a powerful tool to bring a story to life. Banti-Artemisia strive for verbal authenticity in their account by highlighting details of language. The first evidence of this feature comes with Banti's description of Artemisia's speech as a young girl: "When she talks of her father, of his painting, of his successes, with a mixture of innocent invention and plain truth, Artemisia in her haste swallows both the sounds and the meaning of words" (p. 8). Banti points out one more such detail as evidence of her belief in Artemisia's story: "To have remembered that at the age of ten Artemisia used to say, 'Now he's paintin' for the monks,' truncating the flow of her inherited Tuscan speech with a harsh borrowed accent, seems to me a measure of success, evidence of my belief in her story." (9, my emphasis). When Artemisia goes to Florence with her father, she notices his change in accent: "The landlady brought me my meals in the room. Father came back at night: I would hear him laughing as he took leave of his friends. he had begun to talk in the Tuscan dialect again. 'You've plenty of time,' he said 'to see the city'." (38, my emphais). When she returns to Rome to move in with Antonio and the Stiattesis in Ripagrande, Artemisia wants to ask Giambattista a question, and "She took pleasure in speaking the Florentine accent she never normally used, to ask, 'And who are these two?'" (58, my emphasis). By contrast her new found family members speak with accents associated with those on the lower social scale: "...'Are you deaf?' [Mariuccia] roared, flying into a rage, fully revealing Tuzia's peasant accent, with the heavy, guttural, raucous tones of her derisive question. At that, Artemisia looked away and, sitting down on a bench, enquired about her husband." (59, my emphasis).

This attention to language, to the verbal and all its implications, mirrors the book's other featured language: the visual. Banti writes that the young Artemisia has learned to speak this language well: "...there is [...] room for the satisfaction of the artist who has overcome all the problems of her art and speaks the language of her father, of the pure, of the chosen [...] Only with herself on the canvas, is she able to speak it, and she receives a response not only from the artist but also from the young Artemisia desperate to be justified, to be avenged, to be in command." (p.46) Artemisia's story is told in this visual language of painting, and the words of this language for the Rome-Florence section of the book are images of violence, images of blood. When telling Cecilia about the San Sebastian that her father is painting, Artemisia says, "'Now he's doing a Saint Sebastian, completely naked, with the arrows and the wounds and the blood running down. Yes, real blood,'

she specifies shamelessly, spurred on by the amazement in the blue eyes, 'whoever's modeling for Saint Sebastian has to put up with being hurt'." (7-8, my emphasis). Later when she paints her Halofernes, blood stands out as its main feature, its main allure: "...the women [...] remembering the artist and her painting, crowding around to note its progress, to admire it in their own way: 'The sheet looks like silk: was Halofernes a prince?' 'Blood from the throat is darker than that.' 'Is that how you hold a dagger?' 'I wouldn't be able to stick it in.' 'I would.' 'I'd love to try.' 'All that blood...' They always came back to the blood that Artemesia was painting, a carnage woven, drop

by drop, like embroidery on the white linen." (45, my emphasis). A little later the image still persists. "The white linen on which she had done the painting evoked the idea of laundry hanging out and the blood was now like cheerful, purple ribbons [...]" (p.47). The most powerful image of these is that of Artemisia herself embodied as Judith in her painting to achieve catharsis, to avenge vicariously the wrong that had been done to her:

Caravaggio's oloferne

"...The foolish women did not realize whose was the truculent expression which Judith, on the canvas, had begun to reveal: earlier, while she was alone, Artemisia had looked in the mirror for the features of her heroine and she had been rewarded by a sneer, the motives for which now belonged to the remote past [...] Agostino, the dagger, the pitiful scene in the fourposter bed had all found a means of expression, not with words or silent self-pity, but by a route that the mind ought to have defended and maintained inviolate." (p.45-46, my emphasis)

That "means of expression" beyond words, whether verbal, visual or musical, is the true language of art. Those who speak it well can transcend cultures and boundaries: it is universal. It is a language well spoken in Banti's Artemisia, Artemisia's Banti.