In the case of 75-year-old Camilla, however, the opposite is true. When the 26-year-old Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, people knew next to nothing about her even had the public been less respectful then, and less religious, there was never any danger the holy solemnity of the occasion would be sullied with thoughts of her earthly existence, let alone with gossip and scandal. Multiply this figure by four, and you’re only just over – by 16 years, to be exact – the age of the crown Camilla will wear at the Coronation at Westminster Abbey on 6 May (Mary of Teck, the wife of George V, bought the coronet in question at the jeweller Garrard & Co in 1911).īut time, in this case, equates to words: hundreds of thousands of them. In 2005, when Prince Charles announced his second engagement, he’d known Camilla Parker Bowles for more than 32 years, during which time she had played several different roles in his life: girlfriend, friend and adviser, mistress (she enlisted for the latter job twice). But these things are relative, of course. The fresh, engaging discourse in The Artemisia Files will help to both renew the reputation of this artist on the merit of her work and establish her rightful place in the history of art.B efore she married, the Daily Mail liked to refer to the current Princess of Wales as “Waity Katie” William’s proposal was, it was thought, rather a long time in coming. Considering the events that shaped her life and reputation-her relationship to her father and her role as the victim in a highly publicized rape case during which she was tortured into giving evidence-the authors make the case that Artemisia’s importance is due to more than her role as a poster child in the feminist attack on traditional art history here, Artemisia emerges more fully as a highly original artist whose work is greater than the sum of the events that have traditionally defined her. In The Artemisia Files, Mieke Bal and her coauthors look squarely at this early icon of feminist art history and the question of her status as an artist. Featured alongside her father, Orazio Gentileschi, in a recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Artemisia has continued to stir interest though her position in the canon remains precarious, in part because her sensationalized life history has overshadowed her art. One of the first female artists to achieve recognition in her own time, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653) became instantly popular in the 1970s when feminist art historians 'discovered' her and argued vehemently for a place for her in the canon of Italian baroque painters.

Mary d garrard