Artemisia Gentileschi's Self Portrait As La Pittura

Artemisia Gentileschi’s (1593-1653) Self Portrait as La Pittura (c. 1630)[Fig. 1] does something that no other painting before that point had been able to do: combine the artist with the allegorical figure of painting, La Pittura, as outlined in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia. Because she was a woman, Gentileschi was able to create an image of herself that also simultaneously represented the allegorical figure of painting, legitimizing her identity as an artist in a way unavailable to men. Self Portrait as La Pittura was painted c. 1630 in oil on canvas, measuring 38.5 x 29.5 inches, and is currently located at Hampton Court in London, England. In Self Portrait as La Pittura, Gentileschi depicts the figure in the act of painting, with one hand holding

Her hair is unruly, and her expression focuses on the blank surface before her. She wears a greenish-purple dress and a mask pendant, and the colors of her clothing and the background mirror those on the artist’s palette. Several of Gentileschi’s attributes in Self Portrait as La Pittura are direct reflections of La Pittura’s attributes as outlined in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, first published in 1593. For instance, her unruly hair represents the artist’s creative passion. The mask pendant that Gentileschi wears around her neck is also representative of the allegorical figure of painting, the mask symbolizing imitation, and the chain itself illustrating what R. Ward Bissell calls “the interdependence of all aspects of the noble profession.” Gentileschi’s colorful gown is the drappo cangiante, a color-changing garment that indicates the artist’s skill with color. Gentileschi, however, deviates from Ripa’s La Pittura in a few aspects of her painting; the tabula rasa in the painting, for instance, was “. . . added by Artemisia to Ripa’s instructions in order to ‘stress the primacy of the artistic idea, as superior to the particular depicted image on the canvas that follows in its