Artists

I have a lot of feelings about Renaissance and Baroque art (and the little sliver of Mannerism in the middle) However, one of the strongest of these feelings is about Artemisia Gentileschi and her version of the biblical story of Judith beheading Holofernes.

The story goes like this (but I’ve never actually read the story I’ve only been told it in the traditional bardic fashion, and this is the version I’ve always been told): The Assyrian army is preparing to take over a town but they’ve stopped for the night, camping just outside the town and resting up for the battle planned for the following day. The townsfolk are nervous and preparing for the worst, and Judith and her lady-in-waiting concoct a plan.

A plan to masquerade as hookers in order to get into the general’s tent and kill him. They dressed up in sexy outfits, walked into the army camp, eyelashes fluttering and hips swinging just so, and soon, the general let them into his tent.

This general, Holofernes (you can see where this is going), gets absolutely wasted, and as he is on the verge of passing out, Judith grabs his sword and beheads him while her lady-in-waiting holds him in place.

Evidently, the screams from the tent probably sounded like the right kind of screams, because Judith and her lady-in-waiting were able to leave the camp with his severed head by smiling coyly at the guards on duty.

The following morning, when the army was ready to attack, the soldiers found the headless body of their general in his tent and, when they approached the villagers, found his head in Judith’s hands. Needless to say, the army accepted defeat and left, demonstrating that there are more tools in a person’s arsenal than traditional weaponry.

Great story. Inspirational as hell. Right?

Caravaggio would disagree. He painted the climactic scene of the beheading, but not the way most people would picture it these days. He showed Holofernes as asleep, Judith as a young maid holding the sword with a sour expression on her face, and her lady-in-waiting as an old crone directing Judith on what to do. It is decidedly not the powerful scene I would have pictured when hearing the story, but it was probably the scene Renaissance and Baroque people pictured.

*Judith Beheading Holofernes*, 1598-1599. Caravaggio. Oil on canvas. [Public domain] Wikimedia

Except.

Except Artemisia painted the same scene. Holofernes is awake and screaming in agony, Judith has one hand holding his hair and the other holding the handle of the sword she’s using to cut off his head, and her lady-in-waiting is on top of Holofernes, trying to hold him down so Judith can do her thing.

*Judith Beheading Holofernes*, 1614-1620. Artemisia Gentileschi. Oil on canvas. [Public domain] Wikimedia

Objectively, it’s a much more dynamic scene! If we look at just the figures, we have three characters: Judith, her lady-in-waiting, and Holofernes. In Caravaggio’s, Judith is young, practically a teenager, and wears an expression of disgust and confusion. She holds the sword at an arm’s length, which even an untrained eye would feel is going to make it hard to cut off someone’s head. In Artemisia’s, she’s older, using both her hands, elbows bent, holding Holofernes’ head in place as she viscerally carves with the sword.

Judith’s lady-in-waiting has arguably the most stark differences. In Caravaggio’s, she’s an old crone, barely in frame on the far right side of the scene. She is not involved in the act and is instead directing Judith’s actions. In Artemisias’s, she’s young, strong, and straddling Holofernes, holding him down and in place so Judith can more easily behead him. She plays an active role in the scene.

Even Holofernes is portrayed differently. In Caravaggio’s, Holofernes is almost unconscious, implying that Judith beheading him was more of a crime of opportunity than a premeditated and planned action. It cheapens the act and makes it feel like it was easier than the story leads us to believe. Conversely, Artemisia makes sure Holofernes is awake and still kicking when Judith beheads him. This allows her to involve both Judith AND her lady-in-waiting, and creates a fundamentally more dynamic scene.

Both paintings demonstrate similar painting techniques such as tenebrism, so the main distinctions come down to how the figures in the paintings interact with the story depicted. And Artemisia simply painted a better depiction of the story.

Pretty harsh stance to take, right?

But my reaction upon seeing his art for the first time was exactly that. I was looking at his 1961 painting School of Athens, confused as to how he could be considered a pivotal artist of the post modern age. The scribbles and what looked like colored pencil or crayon pissed me off so much, and it took me a while to pinpoint exactly why I felt so mad.

When my art history professor asked me why I thought it was a terrible work of art, my response was, “It looks like a child drew it.” A fair assessment, and I stand by it to this day, but my professor had a rebuttal.

“Child-like drawings have merit. Drawing like a child is a style many artists adopt, especially modern and post modern artists who lean heavily into the avant-garde.”

This was a moot point to me. I did not care that it was a style. I insisted that there is a difference between “drawing like a child” and “drawing poorly” but I was convinced that Cy Twombly was just a terrible artist. I felt that giving him the justification of “drawing in the style of a child” was disingenuous to his character and giving him a free pass to make terrible art.

My professor decided to let it lie, and not try to convince me that Cy Twombly had some deep meaning I just wasn’t seeing, and I appreciate that. I had taken many classes from this professor and they had learned long ago that I am not easily convinced. However, they also knew that I would likely go research the artist or the work of art on my own, if only to come to class one day and say, “And another thing—!”

When a friend of mine asked me why I thought Cy Twombly was a terrible artist, I had better words. She gave me a look of distraught confusion, Twombly being one of her favorite artists. I calmly explained myself:

“His drawings are rudimentary at best and lazy at worst. He draws and paints and makes are like a child except he doesn’t have the excuse children do. He’s old enough and familiar enough with art that he knows what is possible in art and he chooses to make drivel. He had access to the whole of human art and experience and he made scribbles. Cy Twombly’s art is an affront to artists and art historians as a whole and all but spits in the face of the progress humanity has made up to this point in time. He takes the whole idea of dadaism and the avant-garde and goes the pompous philoso-bro route saying, “Oh, look at me, I’m making nonsensical marks on a piece of canvas that mean nothing, but I’m going to pretend they mean something profound just to make people feel like idiots.”

My friend, saint that she is, smirked and gave a few tsk tsk tsk’s before opening her laptop and typing something into google. “What you’re focusing on,” she began, “is how Twombly fits into the time period, and how the time period fits into the whole of art history.” She turned her laptop around to show me the screen.

“You need to forget all of human achievement and focus about what’s on the canvas.”

I have never appreciated advice more than I appreciate that last sentence. The work she showed me was Cold Stream, made in 1966. A dark grey background with row after row of light squiggles.

“What does that look like to you?” Her voice dripping with amusement.

“It looks like…a kid’s notebook when they’re bored in class,” I replied.

“Yes,” she said, getting excited. “If you were going to make art and you wanted to make something people could relate to without having to understand the kinds of paint you used or the techniques you used or the life you had led up until you painted the painting…you would make art of your school days, wouldn’t you? You would take the mundane scribbles and squiggles of being bored in class and make them with nice quality paint on nice quality canvas, and you would want to hang it in a nice museum. Purely so that, as viewers wander through the gallery, flexing their brains to understand the works of try-hards like Pollock and Duchamp, a person can come across your work and be reminded of those little breaks from learning they would take in class. The little things they did so their brains didn’t explode from all the learning. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

And I did. Cy Twombly tapped into that raw, emotional understanding of the world that children have, and put it into his art. His Cold Stream was a perfect example of how art doesn’t have to mean something deep and profound, and yet my friend and I were able to give Cold Stream a meaning that was deep and profound.

I had never been so glad to have been wrong. I went back and looked at School of Athens (1961) and saw it in a different light. Instead of haphazard scribbles and messy colors, I now saw a sketched outline of a building and splashes of color to symbolize figures. I saw a relaxed approach to perspective as well as an emotional attempt to capture the feeling of the original renaissance painting, rather than directly copying it. I understood how Cy Twombly was not a modern artist, nor a post-modern artist, nor an avant-garde artist. He was an abstract expressionist, and a damn good one at that.

I went back to my professor and said, “Hey, so, I learned some things, opened my third eye and all that jazz, and I have come to the conclusion that Cy Twombly isn’t all that bad and that you were right.”

So, Cy Twombly wasn’t a terrible artist. He wasn’t even a bad artist. I was just not as well-versed in expressionism as I should have been, and my friend—a person with a passion for Twombly’s art and a patience to rival oil painters—gave me a better explanation than I could have hoped for.

Cy Twombly was about as un-terrible as you could get. I would now even argue he was one of the best artists of the 20th century.

(One of the Many Reasons) Why Artemisia Gentileschi is Better Than Caravaggio

Cy Twombly Is A Terrible Artist