The coming to age of adolescent girls portrayed by the two painters highlight the different erotic potentials at the threshold of womanhood.  What emerges from the drawings are the strength and dignity of a process that does not require the sacrifice of the Erotic potential.  In Tanning this is signified by the doors that open in front of them - the possible choices they can make for themselves. In Gentileschi it is signified by the lingering between the high spirituality of Saint Catherine and the self portrait as an adolescent who had already known abuse.  The reflection will be around the prejudices that are projected on the erotic potential of adolescent girls.

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The image is of Dorothea Tanning on her birthday in 1942.

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Caterina Vezzoli is a psychologist, a Jungian Training Analyst with the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich and the Centro Italiano Psicologia in Italy, and President of the Philemon Foundation. With an active interest in the flowering of medieval women’s mysticism during the first millennium, neuroscience, the psychoid unconscious, and synchronicity, she is one of the editors of Jung Today, 2009; and has published widely, including in Europe Many Souls, 2016; Time and the Psyche, 2017, Manuale di Psichiatria e Psicologia Clinica,2017; ARAS Connections: Image and Archetype, 2019. During 2021 two ofher articles on the Covid-19 pandemic have appeared: ‘Art in support of Life. Caravaggio and the Plague’, in the Journal of Analytical Psychology; and Encounters in the silent land of Covid-19 quarantine: Art and Literature’, in Jung Journal San Francisco.

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Tanning D., An American Artist and Surrealist Painter, February 24, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1SZ-99Qx1M

Locker J. M., Artemisia Gentileschi the Language of painting. Yale University Press (2021)

Scappini A., Il paesaggio Totemico tra reale e immaginario. Mimesis (2017)

Tanning D., Between lives: an Artist and her World, W.W. Norton & Company (2001)

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