Author: Nancy M. Reale, Ph.D.
Each summer, NYU’s Liberal Studies offers a research and pedagogy symposium that brings together faculty who teach Liberal Studies courses at NYU’s sites around the world. The Florence setting for the 2018 Liberal Studies Summer Symposium and the fact that the LS faculty teaching Cultural Foundations (an interdisciplinary course sequence that introduces students to the global arts from the ancient world to the present) has recently undertaken development of an image database intended to facilitate teaching visual arts and architecture prompted me to turn to Anna Banti’s 1947 novel Artemisia as a unique and moving example of a multi-faceted, imaginative approach to thinking about visual artists and their work in relation to the spaces they inhabit—and the spaces their work continues to inhabit after their deaths.
Artemisia is a masterful novel by the Florentine art historian and novelist, Lucia Lopresti, whose nom de plume is Anna Banti and whose husband, Roberto Longhi, was an eminent Italian art historian; Banti reimagines the Roman-born Artemisia Gentileschi in a diachronic exploration of her life, her work, and its reception in relation to the cities in which she lived even as the author interrogates what Florence “meant” in the mid-twentieth century. I hoped that we might spend some time together in that city thinking about how Banti’s work offers a fascinating and useful approach to understanding both artists and cities, and, in my short PowerPoint intended for view prior to the conference, I hoped to suggest that the novel might be put in conversation with three very different literary approaches to urban landscapes in which artists move—landscapes that they shaped and by which they were shaped. The first of these is Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun’s Souvenirs 1755-1842, the second is Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World, published in 1986, and the third is Mark Obama Ndesandjo’s website on the Tang poet Li Shangyin. Vigée-Le Brun’s memoir includes her description of her peregrinations after her rapid exodus from Paris, and it is clear that, although she understood full well the gravity of the political landscape in her native country, she sought the douceur de vivre that her acquaintances in cities throughout Europe and Russia could provide. Ishiguro’s fiction, set in post-World War II Japan, traces the thoughts of Masuji Ono, a painter whose reputation has been redefined by his inevitable engagement with the politics surrounding the Japanese war effort and the disastrous end to which Japan came at the close of the war. Ndesandjo seeks to reimagine Li Shangyin’s travels in China in relation to his corpus of work, combining both with Ndesandjo’s own works, performances, and reflections about American, African, and Chinese cultures.
Banti’s novel explores in haunting fashion the layers of culture—positive and negative—that characterize any urban space, moving through time and among major European cities with both the narrative voice and the Baroque painter. The city of Florence becomes a kind of palimpsest as the life of the author intertwines with that of her character, but the real focus of the book is on the painter as she moves across Europe looking for her father, herself, and some respite from the world with which she cannot come to terms. Banti’s Artemisia is a tortured soul, searching for a paternal love that remains elusive. Banti clearly came to know Gentileschi through her painting, but also through historical records and, apparently, through an appreciation of a shared sensibility. Given Banti’s own experience of the Nazi assault on Florence, the cities to and in which Gentileschi moves are crucial to the novel—as are the intersections of these cities with Banti’s contemporary experience.
By means of my short preliminary online PowerPoint presentation and the very brief summary of my work that I could offer in Florence, I hoped to demonstrate how a number of similar works can serve “double duty” in the classroom, to be studied in their own right and for the light they can shed on artistic practices and production, on urban cultures to which they are attached, and on the rich historical dimensions of urban life that are likely often overlooked by our students. I would begin by mentioning Hiroshige’s ukiyo-e prints in 100 Famous Views of Edo, or the musical works of Handel or Haydn, or films that center on cities like The Battle of Algiers or Hiroshima Mon Amour, for instance. By placing these works in the context of imagining urban landscapes, I believe we can direct our students toward fuller ways of apprehending and appreciating the arts, the individuals who produced those arts, their cultures, and the cities in which all of those agents and elements coexisted in discrete historical moments and in which they continue to make meaning in the present.
Works Consulted
Banti, Anna. Artemisia. Trans. Shirley D’Ardia Caracciolo. Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1988.
Cesarani, Lisa. “Looking Beyond the Façade: Introducing Students to the Socio-Political Layers of Florence.” NYU Thinking Global, Teaching Local Website. https://wp.nyu.edu/ls-thinkglobalteachlocal/2018/03/22/looking-beyond-the-facade-introducing-students-to-the-socio-political-layers-of-florence/. Accessed 27 March 2018.
Hiroshige, Utagawa. 100 Famous Views of Edo (1856-9). https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/features/edo. Accessed 29 May 2018.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. An Artist of the Floating World. New York: Vintage International, 1986, 1989.
Kim David Young. The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance: Geography, Mobility, and Style. New Haven: Yale UP, 2014.
Ndesandjo, Mark Obama. A Tang Poet from Nairobi. Website. https://atangpoetfromnairobi.com. Accessed 24 March 2018.
Vigée-Le Brun, Élisabeth. Souvenirs 1755-1842. Ed. Geneviève Haroche-Bouzinac. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008.
Vigée-Lebrun, Marie Louise Elisabeth. The Memoirs of Madame Vigée-Lebrun. Trans. Lionel Strachey. Project Gutenberg, 10 April 2010. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31934/31934-h/31934-h.htm. Accessed 14 March 2018.