Artemisia Gentileschi was born in Rome in 1593, the daughter of the painter Orazio Gentileschi, and became the most accomplished female artist of the seventeenth century — and arguably one of the finest painters, regardless of gender, of the Italian Baroque. She absorbed the dramatic chiaroscuro of Caravaggio through her father’s circle and developed it into a style of exceptional force and emotional directness.
Her personal history — she was raped at seventeen by the painter Agostino Tassi, and endured a humiliating public trial — has inevitably coloured interpretations of her most famous works, though her art transcends biography. Her Judith Slaying Holofernes (c. 1620), depicting the Israelite heroine sawing through the Assyrian general’s neck with grim determination, is one of the most physically intense and psychologically compelling images in all of Baroque painting. Unlike male painters’ versions, where Judith often appears dainty and reluctant, Gentileschi’s heroine is strong, focused, and fully engaged in the bloody act.
Artemisia built a successful international career, working in Florence, Rome, Venice, and Naples, and received commissions from Charles I of England. Her Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting — in which she daringly cast herself as the embodiment of art itself — is a landmark in the history of female artistic self-representation. Rediscovered by feminist art historians in the 1970s, she is now recognized as one of the major painters of her age.