Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi

New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2001. Hardbound. VG/VG. Maroon cloth with gold lettering; maroon, color-illustrated dj with cream lettering; 496 pp. with 249 illustrations, including 121 color plates. "This beauttifully produced volume brings together for the first time works by two remarkable painters of seventeenth-century Italy who happen also to have been father and daughter: Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi. Famous in their own day, these two artists have enjoyed renewed fame in the twentieth century: Orazio as one of the first and certainly the most individual of Caravaggio's followers; Artemisia as the outstanding female painter prior to the twentieth century. The tumultuous lives of these two artists moved along parallel trajectories and take the reader from the popular quarters of papal Rome and te rough-and-tumble world of Naples to the courts of the grand duke of Tuscany, Marie de' Medici in Paris, and Charles I in London. These changing circumstances nourished two different aesthetic visions, both of which were deeply rooted in the Caravaggesque practice of painting directly from the posed model. While Orazio's art became ever more refined and elegant, Artemisia espoused a rhetorical form of dramatic presentation that is the basis of Baroque painting." (dj) With essays and dozens of examples of the artists' work in the annotated and illustrated catalog. Nice!