A Question of Character: Artemisia Gentileschi and Virginia Ramponi Andreini

Abstract

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–c.1656) and Virginia Ramponi Andreini (c. 1583–1630/31) almost certainly met, and pictorial evidence suggests that Andreini — a commedia dell’arte actress and singer — posed for several Gentileschi paintings. The presence of Andreini within Gentileschi’s output marks an undeniable continuity between the strong female characters that populate their respective bodies of work. For both Andreini and Gentileschi, a signal place was accorded to the affective response of the betrayed woman. The ‘theatricality’ of seicento art is a trope reiterated so frequently as to be almost meaningless, yet these examples of an actual actress rendered in paint promise to illuminate the shared gestural and rhetorical ground of the two art forms. The fruits of such labour point in two directions: not only do these paintings reflect on Andreini’s theatrical practice, but Andreini’s comedic techniques provide a narrative context against which to read the drama of Gentileschi’s painted subjects, sidestepping common biographical interpretations.