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After Juliette Binoche studied art by candlelight in The English Patient, but before Scarlett Johannssen and Colin Firth got steamy over the canvasses in The Girl with the Pearl Earring, there was Agnes Merlet's Artemisia, the story of Artemisia Gentileschi, now widely regarded as the most talented and successful woman artist of the Renaissance period. We follow Artemisia from her early days studying painting under her father through to her becoming a student of another painter – a rival of her father's – Agostini Tassi. Before you can say 'chiaroscuro', the two of them are lovers; but Vatican spies are whispering about illicit liaisons in her father's ear and it isn't long before the proverbial pigment hits the canvas.
Historical inaccuracies aside (critics dispute the supposed sexualisation of Artemisia and her apparent fondness for sketching male genitalia, among other things), Artemisia's erotic innocence makes for captivating viewing, although the movie is perhaps best viewed as an adolescent rites de passage, in the same vein as, say, Jean-Claude Lauzon's Léolo.

 

Peter Wild on 21st May 2007
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