La notte tu mi fai impazzire

Agostino Tassi, a painter, in 1611 began with his established friend Orazio Gentileschi to decorate the Casino delle Muse in Rome. At the end of February 1612 Orazio brought him to trial for abusing his daughter Artemisia, also a talented painter. This trial turned into one of the most sensational events of the time, sparking countless rumors that slandered Artemisia, Agostino, and Orazio himself from time to time. “There is only one night in the Western imagination. And it is the night of Agostino Tassi, known as the Smargiasso. It is the night of paintings, of frescoes in loggias and halls of the ill-famed place par excellence, the seventeenth century. … At the end of a painful and humiliating trial before the Inquisition, the bigamist Tassi gets rid of Artemisia with a yawn…”: 60 years after Anna Banti’s famous Artemisia and its feminist reading, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, with his sharp and provocative style, offers us an unprecedented interpretation “on Agostino’s side.”