Concept & Music by Mary Finsterer

~ The Heart of a Woman, the Soul of an Artist ~

ARTEMESIA is inspired by the work of Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, who specialised in painting pictures of strong and suffering women from myths and biblical stories. The structural premise of the opera will refer to her Susanna and the Elder’s trilogy consisting of her 1610, 1622 and 1649 paintings.  These works are a self-referential series based on the artist’s own feelings of betrayal by the men in her life. They comprise 'her first canvas showing youthful fear, and a very importantly timed work in mid-career symbolizing commercial success. In these, she relates the Apocryphal tale of Susanna and the Elders to events that are happening to Gentileschi at each stage of her life and career, aging the figures of Susanna and the Elders along with the appropriate time in her own life. In the final canvas of the trilogy, Gentileschi brings the work to full circle, using the story to make peace with her past by visualizing a reconciliation with her father Orazio, from whom she had been estranged for most of her career, both as parent and as artistic mentor.

About Artemisia Gentileschi

Artemisia was the daughter of the painter Orazio Gentileschi, and it was in his studio where she learned to paint. As a young woman, Artemisia was raped by Agostino Tassi, another painter, while working to decorate a palace in Rome. Following the crime, she and her father participated in the prosecution of Tassi, who was apparently sentenced to a year of prison but never served the time. Although it is significant that Artemisia was able to participate in the prosecution of her rapist, the process of the trial was most likely a negative and damaging experience, as her testimony involved a gynaecological examination and torture with medieval thumbscrews. These brutal details of Artemisia’s life mustn’t necessarily be a part of our viewing experience of her works, but they are a reminder of the reality of 17th century life and the importance of human dignity.

The Opera

As a backdrop to critical biographical events that structure the work, ARTEMISIA draws from the 17th century as a well-spring of creativity in the various forms of the baroque, as a time of religious and intellectual turmoil, as the beginnings of western individualism.

The work will be formally structured, both musically and dramaturgically, as linear and mathematical, as a schematic diagram of Celia Grilla Borromeo, as ritualistically progressive as a Palestrina Mass, as carefully composed as a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi.

Ideally the work will be a gradual developing and unfolding of themes: the discovery of fact, the glimpse of eternity, the revelation of beauty, a coming to maturity, a Mundus Novus. This would be in counterpoint (dramatically speaking) with the struggles and triumphs of a famous woman or women of the era, much as Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris constructs a portrait of an age and a way of thinking through a sequence of structured portraits.

Visually, we imagine the work as ornate, bejewelled, lush, in contrast to a coldness or forensic light of modernity, a world of myth, of candlelight, of rite and stone. But inside this aesthetic, a mind or minds which open hitherto unseen doors, ushering in a mysterious and strange new universe.