A new play restages the trials of Artemisia Gentileschi

By J.W.S.W.

IT IS a heady, turbulent time to be an artist. In one of the world’s urban centres, celebrity painters rub shoulders with politicians and plutocrats. A monied, international elite of collectors drives up the prices of works by a set of revered masters. Beneath the sheen of wealth and power, scandal rumbles. Rumours of sexual impropriety never quite seem to stick to the alleged perpetrators, powerful men who are shielded by their status. This isn’t 21st-century London or New York, but 17th-century Rome: the setting for “It’s True, It’s True, It’s True”, a raw and timely new play showing at the Edinburgh Fringe festival.

The affinities between the two worlds, separated by centuries, are at the play’s heart. Most of the script is lifted from surviving transcripts of the trial in 1612 of Agostino Tassi, an artist who was accused of raping his student, Artemisia Gentileschi, when she was 15 years old. But in a modern English translation, the startlingly candid 400-year-old testimonies sound like a front-page report of a courtroom drama. Kathryn Bond, Sophie Steer and Ellice Stevens ably alternate the roles of Tassi, Gentileschi and a miscellaneous cast of legal officials and witnesses called during the course of the lengthy trial.

Tassi’s first line of defence is to smear Artemisia’s sexual morals; perversely, the trial hinges on whether or not she was a virgin at the time of the assault. He slings lurid accusations of affairs, cartoonishly illustrated on stage in farcical scenes of pornographic sex. When this fails to convince, he loses his temper in vicious outbursts, only to obsequiously appeal to the judges with faux decorum. Ms Steer is utterly convincing as the spiky, petulant Tassi, arrogantly navigating a court which puts Artemisia on trial as much as him. It is she who must undergo intrusive gynaecological examinations, she who must verify her testimony under torture with thumbscrews (Tassi’s hands, of course, must be spared—she might be a painter, but he is painter to the Pope).

Interweaved with the verbatim transcripts are potted art histories of Gentileschi’s works; the cast acts out the biblical scenes she painted. In a staging of Gentileschi’s representation of Susanna being spied on while bathing, the episode is not titillating, but tiresomely seedy; as in the painting, Susanna is matter-of-factly naked, rather than suggestively nude. Gentileschi’s portrayal of Judith beheading Holofernes, often interpreted as her artistic revenge on Tassi, is enacted in a climactic, bloody revenge scene, with Judith reincarnated on stage as an impassioned feminist foremother.

Courtrooms are now mercifully free of thumbscrews, but the psychological manipulation, the victim-blaming and the untouchable sway of powerful men will all be recognisable. Even as she is dragged through physical and mental torture, Gentileschi maintains her dignity and composure in the fight to be believed. Her control only slips at the play’s forceful climax, when the transcript records Gentileschi’s obsessive repetition of the play’s title: “It is true, it is true, it is true”. At once, the words are a mantra to cope with the agony of torture, a desperate assertion of agency, and a haunting reminder that the play’s events really happened—and continue to happen.

In the end, although he was found guilty, Tassi served four days of his sentence of exile before the Pope pulled the requisite strings for him to return to work in Rome (his art, celebrated at the time, is now forgotten). Gentileschi moved to Florence where, despite everything, she enjoyed considerable success, becoming the first woman to be admitted to the Accademia di Arte del Disegno, and gaining an international clientele that included the Medicis and Charles I. Her prestige continues today: last month, the National Gallery in London acquired for £3.6m ($4.59m) a Gentileschi self-portrait in the guise of St Catherine (a self-portrait as Mary Magdalene is pictured above).

In it, Gentileschi looks out at the viewer, her eyes slightly flared. One hand rests on the wheel that tortured the saint, the other holds a palm frond that looks similar to a paintbrush. The portrait, and its price tag, are defiant expressions of survival.