Deborah Anderson Silvers Time Now Come Thesis

Deborah Anderson Silvers is a graduate of the University of South Florida. She completed her Master’s thesis on a series of paintings by Gentileschi. Anderson Silvers begins her thesis by providing an extensive detailing of Gentileschi’s life at home, as well as providing insight into the social customs of 17th century Roman society. Like Garrard Silvers supports her arguments with Biblical text; however, unlike Garrard, she draws parallels between the character of Susanna and Artemisia herself, rather than between the story and the painting. She makes a direct correlation between the slanderous campaign undertaken by Agostino Tassi, the man who raped Gentileschi, and Gentileschi’s real-life response to these accusations, as mirroring the virtue exhibited by the biblical Susanna. Anderson …show more content…
The primary sources that Anderson Silvers uses are the aforementioned paintings by Gentileschi, the “Theodotian version of the Septuagint,” and the transcripts from the 1612 rape trial. The secondary sources she uses include many feminist art historians, namely Mieke Bal’s The Artemisia Files in which Nanette Salomon and Griselda Pollock are included. Silvers also employs Anita Silvers’ Has Hero(ine)’s Time Now Come? which argues against reading Gentileschi’s choice of a female protagonist as akin to her identifying with her. Due to the nature of the paper, Anderson Silvers is effective in her use of secondary sources. She directly roots her arguments in the arguments of the authors she cites, and as evidenced by her comparison of Nanette Salomon and Anita Silvers’ respective claims: places them in dialogue with one another. Her contribution to our understanding of Susanna is most evident in Anderson Silvers’ visual analysis which puts forwards new ways of interpreting the various Susanna paintings individually, and as an interactive