Agostino Tassi

Agostino Tassi was a landscape and quadratura painter of real facility whose name survives almost entirely because he raped Artemisia Gentileschi and was tried for it. He was born Agostino Buonamici in Rome, worked in Livorno - where he may have served a period as a galley slave, the sources are unclear - and became sought after for illusionistic architectural frescoes, the painted colonnades and false ceilings that Roman palaces wanted. Claude Lorrain worked in his studio. In 1611 Orazio Gentileschi engaged him to teach his daughter perspective. He raped her, and afterwards promised marriage, which was the ordinary way such a thing was settled and was the basis on which the relationship continued for months. Orazio prosecuted in 1612. The trial ran seven months; Artemisia gave evidence under sibille, thumbscrews applied to test whether she was lying, and the record shows Tassi's witnesses discredited, his previous conviction for arranging his wife's murder raised, and his claim of Artemisia's promiscuity unsupported. He was convicted and sentenced to exile from Rome. The sentence was never enforced; he was back at work within a year and continued receiving commissions for three decades. He died in Rome in 1644. His frescoes survive at the Palazzo Lancellotti and the Quirinal in Rome and are technically accomplished; the seascapes and harbour views influenced Claude Lorrain directly. The trial record was rediscovered in the nineteenth century and published in 1876, and it is the reason Artemisia s biography can be written from documents rather than legend. Modern readings differ over how much of the transcript reflects her words and how much the notary s, but not over the verdict or the failure to enforce it. He remains in the corpus as the other party to a case the collection documents.

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