A Double Destiny

Susan Sontag

‘Non piangere.’ Don’t cry. These are the opening words of Anna Banti’s novel Artemisia. Who is talking? And when? The first-person voice – that of the author – writes ‘this August day’, omitting both the date and the year, but these are not hard to fill in: 4 August 1944. The Nazi occupation of Florence, following the collapse of the Mussolini Government, has taken its appalling, final turn. At four o’clock that morning, the Germans, who had begun evacuating the city, detonated the mines they had set along the Arno, managing to blow up all the venerable bridges except the Ponte Vecchio and to wreck many houses on or near the river, among them the house on the Borgo San Jacopo where Banti lived, under the ruins of which lay the manuscript of her new novel, nearly completed, about Artemisia Gentileschi.

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[*] Trained as an art historian, Banti was as respectful of the available sources as she could be, and the novel conveys a brilliantly researched sense of the period. The changes she made in the character or life were in the name of her uniquely possessive relation to Artemisia (child, beloved, sorrow-sister, familiar), and are avowed; they are part of the emotional play of the novel. But the writer’s deliberate choice to alter known facts in a novel based on a real historical personage must be distinguished from imperfect knowledge. Thus, 1598, the year Banti gives in the prefatory Note to the Reader for Artemisia’s birth, was the date accepted then. Only some twenty years after the publication of Banti’s novel was a birth certificate discovered which establishes that Artemisia Gentileschi was born in 1593. With Banti’s date the Artemisia who was raped was 13. And she would have been 12 when she executed her first major painting, Susanna and the Elders, signed and dated 1610. The rape, and Artemisia’s willingness to press charges against her rapist and undergo torture at the trial to ‘prove’ her veracity – not to mention the ability to produce such a mature, brilliant painting – make for a rather different, though no less astonishing, story now that we know she was in her late teens.