The Witch and the Painter: A Parallel Re-reading of Leonardo Sciascia’s La strega e il capitano and Anna Banti’s Artemisia

Abstract

This thesis seeks to explore the rewriting of two historical female figures from the early 17th century, the ‘professed witch’ Caterina Medici da Broni and Artemisia Gentileschi, a Baroque painter, offered in La strega e il capitano (1986) and Artemisia (1947) by authors Leonardo Sciascia and Anna Banti respectively. In the context of the recovery of microhistories, I specifically investigate how these literary representations of the two historical female figures articulate their multifaceted subversion of cultural and societal normative models, and the role the latter had played in their erasure from a dominant History. I conduct my analysis through two parallel case studies. These engage both with the two authors’ stance in relation to the validity of historical legacies and with the notion of female subversion and consequent marginality. The comparative perspective proposes a parallel reading of the two texts through an object-led, separate yet interlinked analysis. It will show how Banti and Sciascia position themselves vis-à-vis hegemonic History, and how their analogous choice of historical figures constitutes an expression of female subversion, buried in and by the archive, that culminates in two very distinct narrative responses. Ultimately, the two literary pathways delineate unique answers. On the one hand, the male-authored account acts as a dispenser of justice; on the other, the female-authored account articulates a journey of self-discovery that places agency at the forefront.