Parergon

Reviews 111 there is the promise of greater things to come. W h e n it is complete, it will be possible (for subscribers to both databases) to search this and the Patrologia Latina at the same time. That will offer an unparalleled opportunity to study the resources ofboth in a way that scholars of other generations could scarcely have dreamed of. In The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis described 'medieval man' as 'an organiser, a codifier, a builder of systems' who 'would most have admired the card index' among m o d e m inventions. H e continues by noting 'the tranquil, indefatigable, exultant energy ofpassionately systematic minds bringing huge masses of heterogeneous material into unity'. Whether Lewis isrightor not does not matter here, but I suspect those same 'passionately systematic minds' would have been mightily impressed by the opportunity to bring huge masses of material, if not into unity, at least into view. Peter Whiteford Victoria University of Wellington Bissell, R. Ward, Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art: Critical Rea and Catalogue Raisonne, University Park, PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999; cloth and paper; pp. xxiv, 446; 257 b/w illustrations, 27 colour plates; R R P US$39.95; ISBN 0271017872 (cloth), 0271021209 (paper). The Artemisia phenomenon is one of the more remarkable and significant developments in recent 'Old Master' art history. Artemisia Gentileschi (1593c .1653) once seemed just one of the Caravaggisti labouring in the vineyard of European Baroque art, unusual only for her gender, still rare among artists of the era. But today she is a superstar, referred to by herfirstname, like Piero, Leonardo, Madonna, etc. Many scholars of the period now see her as a genuine rival for her contemporaries, even including Caravaggio himself: witness for example the comparison between his slightly insipid Judith and Holofernes (c.1599) and her much more dramatic versions of the same subject (c.1611-12 and c.1620). In these and many other depictions of powerful w o m e n from history, Artemisia spoke with a distinctly female voice, in an age when images ofmale aggression, by male artists, for male patrons, were clearly the norm. A crucial aspect of Artemisia's m o d e m fortuna is that she is seen as standing for the whole category of early m o d e m female artists and their struggle for recognition and equality (thus already by Germaine Greer in The Obstacle Race, 1979). This view was reinforced by Mary Garrard's scholarly but equally 172 Reviews committed 1989 monograph, describing both Artemisia's life and imagery under the heading"the image of the female hero'. Artemisia has also joined Caravaggio and Vermeer as seventeenth-century artists of interest to a wider (non-specialist) audience, evidenced by a recent crop ofplays and historical novels, and a feature film, a rather saccharine account by French director Agnes Merlet (1998). A considerable part of her appeal (as with Caravaggio) is that her life was as dramatic as her art. At the age of 18, she was raped by another painter, and subsequently subjected by her outraged artist-father Orazio to a humiliating trial whose record survives. The fact that she overcame these obstacles, and the misogynist climate of her day, makes her long and successful career (in Rome, Florence, Naples, and London) all the more extraordinary. R. Ward Bissell was in the vanguard of Gentileschi studies back in 1968, when he published a ground-breaking scholarly article on her work. Bissell has since written a monograph on Orazio Gentileschi (Penn State, 1981), and has continued to study Artemisia. So he is well placed to write this new book, whose core is a lengthy catalogue raisonne, that key element of the traditional arthistorical repertoire. Here, it is of particular importance in securing for Artemisia a solid corpus of paintings (several of them formerly doubted or seen as Orazio's work). Through close argument and analysis, for example, Bissell confirms the authenticity and precocious date ofArtemisia'sfirstmajor work, a Susanna and the Elders (1610) which radically re-envisaged a theme typically used by male artists and patrons of the era as a thinly-veiled pretext for a perve (as...