I Know What I Am by Gina Siciliano

I know I've said this before, but a book can be impressive and magisterial and a wonderful achievement, but still be a chore to read. (Some people might say those things are always correlated; I wouldn't go that far.) Today's book is a case in point.

Scholarly books have extensive footnotes and lists of references; they show clearly the author's reasoning and defend how the author arrived at specific, potentially controversial, points. They are often dense: they have a lot of detail to cover, and only a limited number of pages. Art books show great works of art and architecture with similar apparatus, giving context variously historical, site-specific, personal, and cultural.

I Know What I Am: The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi is something like 75% of the way to being a scholarly monograph on the 17th century painter of the title in comics form, which is hugely impressive but still makes I Know What I Am a bit of a slog to work through.

Gina Siciliano letters most of it in an all-capitals format, which is a bit tiring, particularly since she has massive captions in nearly every panel. It's all entirely reasonable: she has a huge cast with complicated connections to each other and is covering nearly sixty years of one of the most tumultuous times and places in history on one hand, and specifically uses sentence case to show where she's directly quoting from source documents [1], which is a great use of the comics form in service of clear scholarship.

But it does leave her with over two hundred pages of comics -- oversized pages, occasionally falling into something like a 9-panel grid, but often breaking out of that -- filled with long explanatory captions in all capitals, and another fifty-plus pages of two-column text backmatter to accommodate the copious notes and a long list of referenced works. So this is a dense book -- even if the reader just reads through the comics (and I'm enough of a purist that I followed along with the notes as I went), it's a long, slow read.

Siciliano works in what looks almost like pencil, light and expressive with lots of shading and crosshatching. Her faces are excellent, and I never had trouble distinguishing between characters. (Remembering who they all were and why they were important...maybe, but that's on me.) She draws a lot of major architecture in her backgrounds, and talks about getting it just right in her notes -- I didn't find this really obvious in the work, though, since the people and their concerns are always central in her layouts.

I'm not an art history scholar, so I'm not qualified to comment on the liberties Siciliano may or may not have taken here with the life of Artemisia Gentileschi, the most famous and successful female painter before modern times. (Some would argue for Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun, whose work I know a bit more and like a lot.) It was a tumultuous life, even more so than her male contemporaries, which is saying a lot. For example: Caravaggio was a pimp, they all lived through the Black Death, and several served in various wars of the era. Artemisia's just being a woman meant she had Ginger Rogers Syndrome in everything she touched: just having the career and life she had was only just barely this side of impossible to begin with.

 I Know What I Am is an inherently feminist book; I'd like to think any telling of Arteminia's life would have to be. One of the central events of her life was a trial of her rapist Agestino Tassi, and Siciliano does not shirk from describing just how biased and horrible the justice system was in that time and place. (For just one thing, rape was not illegal. Deflowering a virgin could be, if the culprit didn't marry her afterward and/or didn't have other extenuating circumstances.) This is the kind of book that will make any reader with the slightest bit of compassion a bit more feminist than he went into it.

So I was deeply impressed with I Know What I Am, and I'm glad I read it, but it's not a happy book -- biographies often aren't, since their subjects always die at the end anyway -- and it's harder work than most of us expect from comics. It is worth it, though: it shows a world and a life that most of us will know very little about.

[1] Well, translations of source documents -- Siciliano is American and is working in English; Gentileschi and the people around her were mostly Italian and spoke Italian most of the time.