FAMILY VALUES
ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI, LOT AND HIS DAUGHTERS, ca.1636-8
(Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio)
As an atheist who considers religion an overwhelmingly negative force in human history, I consult the Bible almost as rarely as I reach for the Koran, but an encounter with Artemisia Gentileschi’s Lot and His Daughters forces me to take my King James Version down from the shelf it shares with Nietzsche and Rushdie, blow the dust off the top (cough) and read of the destruction of the ‘cities of the plain.’ It’s a wonderful little tale, an exemplary parable of Biblical ‘family values’.
Lot, as the pious among us will recall, was a man of Sodom and apparently the only non-sodomite among Sodomites. Yahweh was already determined to destroy the city for its vaguely described offenses when two angels appeared to Lot and, good Sodomite that he was, he insisted that they all go back to his place and stay the night. But the other citizens of Sodom, their horniness out of control, gathered at Lot’s door and called upon him to bring the angels "out unto us, that we may know them." In the King’s English, of course, ‘know’ means ‘fuck,’ and literary critic Harold Bloom’s comment on this passage is priceless: "A populace perpetually on fire to bugger every passing stranger is indeed already on fire, and so the angels only confirm a prevailing condition."1 Lot’s response to his fellow citizens is curious, to say the least:
And [Lot] said, I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly.
Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you,
bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes; only unto these men do
nothing...2
Outrageously, Lot is perfectly willing to sacrifice his daughters to avoid offending Yahweh. (He’s like a Borscht Belt comic: "Take my daughters–please!") This stellar display of family values saves the Lot family from the flames. But it does not, unfortunately, save his wife from being transformed to a pillar of salt for the ridiculously minor offense of turning back to glance at the burning city. The three surviving Lots take shelter in a cave, where the daughters hatch a plot to continue the family line:
And the firstborn said unto the younger, Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth:
Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.
And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose...3
The next night the younger sister did the same, and thus, the chronicle tells us, "were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father."
Since the story of Lot is inserted into the Abraham narrative shortly before the sacrifice of Isaac, it can be interpreted as a dramatization of the concept of the relative strength of taboos. No taboo is stronger than that against disobeying or disrespecting Yahweh. It even trumps the taboo against prostituting one’s own daughters or killing one’s own son (as Isaac learns when Papa Abraham ties him up and raises a knife). The Lot family incest story is a minor-key variation on this main theme: the taboo against exogamy (marriage outside one’s clan, village, town) is more powerful than the incest taboo.
When Artemisia Gentileschi painted the subject in the 1630's at the height of the Baroque era, she chose to portray the scene of wining and dining prior to the first seduction. Lot sits between his two daughters at the entrance to the cave, their three figures arranged in a shallow frieze-like composition. Far behind them the city burns, and in the middle distance Lot’s wife is frozen into a Baroque statue, her arms outstretched in terror–a touch of Dali amidst the Caravaggesque realism. The three main figures are intricately interlocked by a system of rhyming arms and legs that recalls Mannerist compositions of a century earlier (e.g., Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid). Three prominent arms take us across the painting from left to right in a slowly falling rhythm: the daughter’s arm on the wine jug rhymes strongly with Lot’s lower arm which in turn intersects with a third arm that curves gently down to the tabletop. This strong compositional connection, with its concomitant association of wine jug, wine glass and bread, tends to implicate all three Lots in the incest to come. There are no passive victims in Gentileschi’s trio; everyone takes an active role. In addition to this play of arms, the legs of Lot and the daughter on the right strongly rhyme, and the daughter’s legs are also slightly higher than Lot’s, creating an upward movement that converges with the downward fall of arms. This careful (one might almost say ‘mathematical’) composition would lead our eye inevitably to the right-hand daughter, even if she were not also the focus of Lot’s gaze and the recipient of a harsh Baroque spotlight.
Since this daughter on the right (presumably the firstborn and first to seduce) is so clearly the overdetermined focus of the painting, let us consider her. Both daughters are united by the colors of their drapery: a rich blue traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary, a white signifying virginal innocence and a gold that evokes associations of purity and preciousness, as in the gold grounds of medieval paintings and mosaics. The firstborn daughter sits in a powerfully twisted pose that must have been quite difficult for Gentileschi’s model to hold. (Try it.) Her blue drapery passes snake-like between her thighs and emerges lower to rhyme with the angle of Lot’s leg, all of which suggests the sexual act in which the drunken father will assume the drapery’s position between his daughter’s legs. The fact that this is a Virginal blue cloth also casts an ironic shadow over the daughter’s signature colors: they are virgins, but if all goes according to their plans, that situation will soon be remedied. And what of the objects the firstborn daughter holds, the bread and knife to which the play of arms and hands insistently leads us? Well. Sometimes a virgin bun cleaved by a phallic knife may only be a virgin bun cleaved by a phallic knife–but not in this painting. This is clearly a symbol of virginity lost: the bread’s outer skin has been violently broken and its fresh, inviting interior exposed to the light.
The firstborn turns her head sharply toward Lot. His ruddy complexion and earth-toned clothes set him off from his brighter daughters, but there’s also something else about him that captures our attention, something very odd. Look at his gesture and separate it, for a minute, from the context of the narrative. One hand is on his daughter’s shoulder and his other arm rises toward her with a glass of wine in his hand. He is offering her a drink. And his facial expression seems to be encouraging or imploring her, as if he’s saying, "Come on. Take a sip. Take more than a sip. Get yourself good and plastered, so I can fuck you." Gentileschi’s Lot is a lecherous old coot who wants to intoxicate his daughter and then rape her. Even the curious detail of Lot’s exposed knee suggests this motivation; it both hints at the naked, animal desire beneath the superficial clothing of humanity and reminds us of Titian’s late Tarquin and Lucretia, in which the knife-wielding rapist places his knee between his victim’s thighs.
Given this revelation of her father as not merely a willing accomplice but an active instigator of incest, the elder daughter’s psychology now appears as complex and conflicted as her tortuously twisted pose. Having already decided to seduce her father, she now finds herself in the position of letting him believe he is seducing her. But now that she recognizes the extent of the old man’s debauchery, she might no longer wish to "preserve" his "seed." Her facial expression is also more complex than it may initially appear. She seems to wear a standard, well-lighted mask of Baroque martyrdom, but closer observation reveals an interesting ambiguity: we cannot be certain of the object of her gaze. Is she looking conspiratorially at her sister, as the Toledo Museum curators suggest? Is she gazing directly at her incestuous father? Or is she looking past him at distant Sodom and a vision of punishment for tabooed sexuality (and thus disobeying the angelic injunction against looking back)? Her gaze is as ambiguous as the meaning of her sister’s hand on Lot’s shoulder: does this gesture encourage the father or express concern? Is the left-hand sister egging Lot on, or is she trying to stop what is already too obviously going to happen?
One sees the mind of a female artist at work in this painting. I’m not speaking of any essentially ‘feminine’ qualities, but simply the artist’s recognition of the psychological complexity of two characters to whom the patriarchal text doesn’t even give names of their own. In this painting, Lot’s daughters are individual, mysterious, fully-human characters. They are more acting than acted upon. One hopes, therefore, that the attribution to Artemisia is correct (for many years the painting was attributed to the little-known Neapolitan painter Bernardo Cavallino). Because this is one of the very rare cases in which the fact that a work was painted by a woman–specifically, this woman–does indeed make it more interesting. The painting can be seen as Gentileschi’s powerful jab at the patriarchal society that actively blocked the progress of women in the arts and at one point even forced her to undergo torture as part of a rape trial. Interestingly, this view of Gentileschi’s painting may accord with her Biblical source. If Harold Bloom’s provocative theory is correct and the so-called J text (which includes the Lot narrative), the oldest of the several texts that make up the book of Genesis, was written by a woman with an ironic attitude toward Yahweh and the patriarchs, then Gentileschi’s portrait of Lot as an incestuous letch may be a more accurate reflection of the text than any orthodox conception of the scene. By going inward and painting from personal experience, Gentileschi may have set herself in harmony with the far-off author of the Book of J.
That said, take another look at the painting. In great art, there’s always something else going on. Now one might notice the artificiality of it all. The work is composed like a theatrical scene acted out in dramatic lighting before a painted backdrop. The bread, the knife, the glass, the wine jug–these are so many stage props. And these people? Are they Lot and his daughters? Of course not. They are three models carefully draped and posed in Gentileschi’s studio and probably illuminated with an overhead lamp. With just a little effort, a little imagination, we can see through the illusion. (I love this paradox: it takes imagination to see reality.) The veil is so thin, the artificiality so prominent, that we are led to conclude that the artist wants us to break through. She dares us to think about lust and desire, about incest and rape. In this painting that concerns itself in so many ways with the violation of taboos, Gentileschi encourages us to lift the veil of Biblical narrative and explore the deeper, darker, unspoken reality that lies underneath.
NOTES
1. Bloom and Rosenberg, Book of J, 204.
2. Genesis, 19:7-8.
3. Ibid., 19:31-33.