Artemisia Gentileschi
The powerful storyteller of the Baroque.
Artemisia Gentileschi was the first woman in the Florentine academy of art. Her pictures of strong women such as Judith are dramatic and charged.
Artemisia Gentileschi was born in Rome in 1593. Her father, Orazio Gentileschi, was a successful painter strongly influenced by Caravaggio. Her mother died when Artemisia was twelve. She received no formal education but learned to paint in her father's workshop and was highly skilled from an early age. She painted her first signed work, Susanna and the Elders of 1610, at the age of seventeen.
In 1611 she was raped by the painter Agostino Tassi, who worked with her father. Orazio took the matter to court, and the trial records from 1612 survive. During the trial Artemisia was tortured with thumbscrews to test her credibility. Tassi was convicted, but the sentence was never carried out. Shortly after the trial she married a Florentine painter and moved to Florence.
In Florence she was supported by Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici, and she corresponded with Galileo Galilei. In 1616 she became the first woman admitted as a member of the city's academy of art. There she painted Judith Slaying Holofernes, now in the Uffizi. Judith and her maidservant hold the general down with powerful arms while the blood spurts. The subject was common, but few had painted it with such physical force. The picture has often been interpreted in the light of her own experience, but scholars warn against reading all her art as autobiography.
She later worked in Rome, Venice and, from 1630, Naples, where she ran her own workshop. Around 1638 she travelled to London to work with her father at the court of Charles I. Her Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, in which she depicts herself at work, is there. She had several children, but only one daughter survived to adulthood. She died in Naples, probably around 1654–56.
After her death she was largely forgotten. She was rediscovered in the early 20th century, and since the 1970s she has become a central figure in feminist art history. Today she is regarded as one of the most important Caravaggisti of the Baroque.