In Florence Gentileschi’s husband, Stiattesi, apparently lived large and racked up debts well beyond the young couple’s means. After another daughter was born (she did not survive), and Gentileschi painted her second Judith Slaying Holofernes, they were forced to flee their creditors. They separated, never, it seems, to meet again. With her daughter Prudentia, Gentileschi returned to Rome.
The remainder of Gentileschi’s life was spent in a perpetual quest for lucrative patronage for her painting. She probably traveled to Genoa, and certainly to Venice. In Rome she gave birth to another daughter in 1627, but nothing is known of the circumstances. Her most sustained residence was in Naples, then the largest city of southern Europe and part of the Habsburg empire of Spain. She lived there for about a decade before traveling to London in 1638 to paint for King Charles I, the son of King James and Queen Anne. With her father she painted ceilings for the Queen’s House in Greenwich, which had been designed by Inigo Jones; the canvases were later moved to Marlborough House in Westminster. But when civil war broke out in England in 1641 she returned to Naples, where she remained until her death, around 1656. Her later works are graceful but less forceful and original than the paintings of her youth.
Allegory of Inclination, 1615–1616, by Artemisia Gentileschi. Oil on canvas, 61 × 152 cm. Casa Buonarroti, Florence.
The Right Hand of Artemisia Gentileschi Holding a Brush, 1625, by Pierre Dumonstier le Neveu. Black and red chalk, with charcoal. British Museum, AN92210.
Gentileschi’s painting is thought to be a self-portrait. The figure as painted by her was nude, and the drapery was added later.
The French artist Pierre Dumonstier le Neveu said that the hand holding a paintbrush in his chalk and charcoal drawing was that of “the excellent and wise noble woman of Rome, Artemisia.”
The well-known phenomenon whereby hostages feel sympathy with their captors is called the Stockholm syndrome, after a 1973 bank robbery in Sweden. FBI data suggests that such sympathy is felt by more than a quarter of hostages. It is most common where the aggressor holds power over a victim who feels grateful for the occasional small kindness. Something similar must have affected some of the women who, to restore their honor, became the wives of men who had raped them. It may also have affected the Powhatan maiden Matoaka, who was kidnapped and subsequently married to John Rolfe, a member of the colony that abducted her. Consistent with Stockholm syndrome behavior, she complained that her father Powhatan would not exchange her for weapons (he did pay part of the ransom the colonists requested but felt he could not in good conscience give up the weapons and tools requested of him), and she was reported to have been reluctant to leave England and return to Virginia after her visit. In the broadest sense, a large percentage of the female population of the early modern period, essentially held subject by their brothers, fathers, and sons, may have experienced aspects of something like the Stockholm syndrome. Some women exhibited the feelings of shame, self-blame, subjugation, paradoxical gratitude, and resignation that have been identified as symptoms of a victimization syndrome that may be thought of as a subset of posttraumatic stress disorder. (Reading the above, my daughter Ellen suggests it could be argued that “attitudes that seem to be gratitude and indebtedness were carefully crafted written and public expressions in line with social mores of the time, rather than innermost feelings.” She says I should grant women more “subtle autonomy” than the passage might imply.)
More is known about John Rolfe than about his wives, as is typical of the time. Matoaka is, to a degree, an exception, but even in her case we have only a few remarks in her own voice, whereas we have extended texts from her husband. Her brief moment of celebrity in London was in a sense artificially generated as an aspect of the public relations efforts of the Virginia Company, whose directors wanted to show a reformed heathen as an example of their work. Apart from that moment, she does not often appear in contemporaneous writings related to the Virginia Colony, and does not become a prominent part of its history until John Smith’s romanticized story about her became popular in later centuries.
Illustration for The Tempest from Rowe’s Shakespeare, 1709.
John Rolfe and his first wife were among the passengers on the Sea Venture, a merchant ship bound for Virginia. Caught in a hurricane, the ship was wrecked off the coast of Bermuda. Rolfe survived and continued to Bermuda, but his wife and a daughter born on the island died. Survivors’ descriptions of the storm that wrecked the ship probably inspired Shakespeare’s play The Tempest.
Matoaka was the second of John Rolfe’s three wives. The first was a woman known to history only as “Mistress Rolfe.” In 1609 Rolfe, then in his mid-twenties, decided to take passage to Virginia on a newly built 300-ton armed merchant ship called the Sea Venture. One hundred forty men were aboard, along with ten women, among them Mistress Rolfe, who was with child. The expedition, funded by the Virginia Society, was intended to bring resources of people and supplies to the new, struggling Jamestown colony. In July the vessel was hit by a hurricane. The ship took water and everyone aboard patched cracks with anything they could find, cast off possessions and cargo, and bailed furiously for thirty-six hours. Just as the travelers had reached the end of their strength and were preparing for death, the ship crashed on a reef off the coast of Bermuda. Everyone aboard was able to reach the island in the ship’s boats; there the castaways happily discovered a population of hogs left by early explorers.
Among the travelers was William Strachey, who left an account of the voyage. “The storm in a restless tumult had blown so exceedingly as we could not apprehend in our imaginations any possibility of greater violence; yet did we still find it not only more terrible but more constant, fury added to fury…. Winds and seas were as mad as fury and rage could make them,” Strachey wrote. “The sea swelled above the clouds and gave battle unto Heaven…. I had been in some storms before…. Yet all that I had ever suffered gathered together might not hold comparison with this: there was not a moment in which the sudden splitting or instant oversetting of the ship was not expected.” Although the Virginia Society tried to suppress his account as bad press, it probably inspired Shakespeare’s Tempest, which was first performed in 1611.
The Rolfes’ daughter, christened Bermuda, was born on the island but died shortly after. Over the following months the enterprising colonists constructed two pinnaces, which they called the Deliverance and the Patience. The Rolfes took ship for Virginia on one of these vessels, but Mistress Rolfe died on the way, or soon after arriving. Women’s lives were short, so marriages seldom lasted more than a couple of decades.
In Virginia Rolfe now found himself without a family, and Matoaka caught his eye. When she was captured, she was a married woman. What became of her husband, a man named Kocoum, is unknown. Among the Powhatans separation could dissolve marriage bonds, but it is curious that little was made of her first marriage by the English. Possibly they considered it nonbinding because of its non-Christian nature, or maybe they just chose to ignore it because it did not suit the message of native conversion that they were trying to convey back to England in order to garner additional support for the colony.
Matoaka was kept captive for more than a year. She was placed in the care of the women of the colony, who dressed her in the English fashion and instructed her in appropriate female behavior. A clergyman named Alexander Whitaker was charged with making her literate and teaching her the Christian religion. She learned the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Catechism. Whitaker baptized her with the name Rebecca. Around this time she attracted the attention of Rolfe, who was beginning to make tobacco farming in Virginia a viable business (his breakthrough had come when he imported Nicotiana tabacum seeds from Trinidad to replace the harsher native strain; how he obtained the seeds is not known). Rolfe wrote a long, anguished letter to the governor of the colony in which he struggled with his apparent guilt at feeling lust for a heathen but concluded that his religious duty justified marryin
g the captive woman. “What should I doe?” he wrote. “Shall I be of so untoward a disposition, as to refuse to leade the blind into the right way? Shall I be so unnaturall, as not to give bread to the hungrie? or uncharitable, as not to cover the naked? Shall I despise to actuate these pious dueties of a Christian? Shall the base feare of displeasing the world, overpower and with holde mee from revealing unto man these spirituall workes of the Lord, which in my meditations and praiers, I have daily made knowne unto him? God forbid.”
God forbid indeed. There is no record of Matoaka’s feelings for Rolfe, but he need not have been so troubled. The marriage fit perfectly with the Virginia Company’s public relations plans, and was approved. The couple were married in April 1614 (the discovery of the remains of the wooden church where they were wed was called one of the top archaeological discoveries of 2010), and Matoaka gave birth to a son, Thomas, nine months later. In London in 1616 Matoaka was exhibited as a princess and made the rounds as American royalty. Her portrait was done by a young Dutchman, Simon Van de Passe. Latin and English inscriptions on the engraving he produced identify her as the “Matoaks als Rebecka,” princess, daughter of Powhatani, emperor of Virginia, “converted and baptized in the Christian faith, and wife to the worthy Mr. Joh Rolff.” Not everyone, however, bought the Virginia Company’s line. One Londoner sent a copy of the engraving to a friend with the bitter comment, “Here is a fine picture of no fayre Lady and yet with her tricking up and high stile and titles you might thincke her and her worshipfull husband to be sombody, yf you do not know that the poore companie of Virginia out of theyre povertie are faine to allow her fowre pound a weeke for her maintenance.”
Pocahontas, 1616, by Simon Van de Passe. Copper engraving.
The inscription under this portrait made from life reads Ætatis suæ 21 A. 1616, Latin for “at the age of 21 in the year 1616.” In fact Matoaka, better known as Pocahontas, was only nineteen at the time. The Virginia Company exaggerated her age because they wanted to show off a convert to Christianity beyond what was considered the age of consent.
As a visiting princess Matoaka attended the royal Twelfth Night masque in the Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace in January 1617. An observer reported that “The Virginian woman Poca-huntas, with her father counsaillor hath been with the King and graciously used, and both she and her assistant well placed at the maske.” Although the English regarded Uttamatomakkinas Matoaka’s assistant, from the Powhatan point of view it was he who should have been regarded as the visiting dignitary.
The masque, by Jonson and Jones, was called The Vision of Delight. Like all royal masques it exalted the king. The Vision celebrated the advent of spring in his kingdom, with dancers representing Delight, Harmony, Grace, Love, Laughter, Revel, Sport, and Wonder. The antimasque figures were comical pantaloons and phantasms, drawn from the Italian commedia dell’arte, who represented vices of gluttony and lechery. To begin the concluding dance, courtiers descended from a Bower of Spring; the featured dancer was George Villiers, the king’s new favorite (he of the famously shapely legs), who had recently been named Earl of Buckingham.
What might Matoaka have thought of this spectacle? Again, she leaves no record of her feelings. But shortly after the performance the Rolfes prepared to return to Virginia — “sore against her will,” according to an observer. She did not get far. Many of the visitors from Virginia had most likely been infected with a form of dysentery known as the “bloody flux” (some sources say their affliction was a lung disease, pneumonia or tuberculosis). The ship had to stop before it had exited the Thames. Matoaka was taken ashore. There she died within hours and was buried in an unmarked grave in a churchyard in the town of Gravesend.
Having lost his second wife Rolfe prepared to continue to Virginia with their son. But Thomas too was ill. Rolfe left the boy on shore to be retrieved by a relative and went on alone. He would never see his son again, but Thomas survived. After his father’s death he would return as an adult for the first time to his birthplace, where he would fight against his mother’s people and become a person of influence.
After his return to Virginia John Rolfe married for a third time, to a daughter of original Virginia colonists. His tobacco enterprise prospered, and he became a large landowner. In his lifetime he was highly regarded, while Matoaka, like most women of her age, had been thought of little consequence — except as a pawn, first in the interplay between the colonists and the Powhatans and then as a public relations symbol for the Virginia Company in London. But by 1995, when Disney Studios made an animated film of her story (presenting her, one critic said, as a “buckskin Barbie”), the situation had become reversed. The film company wrote Rolfe entirely out of the story.
Piled Snow on Cold Cliffs, 1616, by Zhao Zuo. Hanging scroll, ink and colors on paper. 76 × 211 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei.
Zhao Zuo renders the isolation of a forested mountain landscape blanketed by snow. Like many Western painters of the period, he plays with contrasts of light and dark, rendering snow through areas untouched by ink.
Zhao was a friend of the art theorist Dong Qichang, and like Dong he sought precedents in past traditions of Chinese painting, often alluding to such masters such as the late Yuan painter Ni Zan. But this painting, with its volumetric molding of forms (see p. 141 for a reproduction of the entire painting) appears to show the influence of Western artistic styles.
Although Dong Qichang did not himself paint snow scenes, many other Chinese artists of his time did. The winter of the year this picture was painted, 1616, was, according to a Chinese art collector’s diary, the harshest in years. Timothy Brook has suggested that the increase in winter scenes may respond to the Little Ice Age, which by one reckoning lasted from about 1550 to about 1700.
Not only in China but throughout the early modern world, artists were rethinking their connections to ancient traditions, experimenting with fresh directions suggested by exposure to new styles, and documenting the changing world in which they lived.
3Creative Imitation
In 1939 the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges published a story called “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” What if a twentieth-century author were to write a book exactly the same as the one written by Cervantes, Borges wondered — not a copy, but an original (though identical) work. What new meanings would such a book acquire? In the opinion of Borges’s narrator, Menard’s Quixote surpassed Cervantes’s.
Borges’s story addresses a paradox of imitation and originality. Around the turn of the seventeenth century a group of Chinese writers known as the Seven Late Masters were grappling with similar issues. They observed that to imitate the ancients would be to adopt their form but depart from their spirit, because the ancients had not been mere imitators of others. And yet, to go off in entirely new directions would be to fail to respect the achievements of the ancestors. The leader of the group, a man named Wang Shijen, argued for a middle way. With reference to the ancients, he said, “If one’s own method corresponds to theirs, one must attempt to express oneself; if one’s method departs, one must attempt to return. When there is departure in correspondence and correspondence in departure, there shall be awakening.”
As Chinese visual artists were exposed to new influences from Western art they struggled with the relationship between current artistic practice and the examples of ancient masters. The leading painter and art theorist of the late Ming, Dong Qichang, proposed that artists could resolve this problem through a principle that he called fang, or “creative imitation,” by which entirely new works were to be built from structural elements borrowed from the past. The artist would pay homage to past masters by studying their techniques and constructing works from them that would be fresh and new, and would manifest a comparable spirit.
But in 1616 the angry mob that gathered at Dong’s estate in Huating (now a part of Shanghai) cared little for the theoretical issues preoccupying the scholar. Already enraged, they had been rallied by a series of handbills and public denunciat
ions of him. Shouting and carrying torches, their number swollen to at least ten thousand people (some say as many as a million), they stormed Dong’s home, smashing his collection of antiquities. They did not care about his paintings, widely acclaimed by the educated elite as the best of the age, or those of the ancients that he had collected. They rushed into his home and looted it, not only destroying his paintings but burning the house to the ground for good measure. They also destroyed a retreat Dong owned outside of town, the homes of two of his sons, and the home of his principal servant; they beat the servant’s wife and flung her into the roaring flames of the burning house. Dong, however, managed to slip away with a few paintings, which he later had to sell off for funds.
There are various explanations for the mob’s anger, but common to them all is a picture of Dong as an arrogant man and an oppressive landlord. Dong, then sixty years old, had taken a fancy to a beautiful young maidservant who had been adopted by the family of one of his servants. Her own parents were still alive, however, and when she learned that her mother was seriously ill she went to visit her. One of Dong Qichang’s sons became suspicious that she was evading his father’s attentions. Taking with him more than two hundred of the family’s slaves, he went to retrieve her. The men broke into the house and trashed it, and carried her off by force.
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