Life Writing for the Counter-Reformation

Abstract

On December 19, 2017 in Paris, the art world was stunned by a recordbreaking sale of a selfportrait by a seventeenthcentury woman artist — Artemesia Gentileschi’s SelfPortrait as St. Catherine — which fetched EUR 2.36 million at auction.1 This was not the first time that Gentileschi had painted herself as St. Catherine; there is a painting on the same theme with a very similar composition in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. In the portrait the figure is immediately identified as St. Catherine by the martyr’s palm and the distinctive spiked wheel; the identity of the model had long remained obscure, but is clearly established by comparison with other known selfportraits as Gentileschi herself.2 While the immediate reason for using her own image for this portrait of St. Catherine may be pragmatic — early modern social and cultural expectations precluded the use of live models by a female artist — the implications of this complex selfidentification are intriguing for thinking about various forms of life writing and selfnarratives as they emerge and develop over the course of the seventeenth century. Even if Gentileschi is her own most proximate model, the process of painting herself requires an intense level of fixation on the physical self, in this instance compounded by the necessity of using a mirror. While the mirror as an object bears tropological meaning as inappropriate selfregard and vanity for women in particular, it may also be pressed into service for purposes of selfexamination and discipline, as Tobie Matthew asserts concerning Teresa de Ávila: