Gentileschi, Artemisia

(born July 8, 1593, Rome, Papal States—died 1652/53, Naples, Kingdom of Naples) Italian painter. The daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, she studied with him and with landscape painter Agostino Tassi. Her earliest known work is Susanna and the Elders (1610), formerly attributed to Orazio. She was raped by Tassi, and, when he did not fulfill his promise to marry her, Orazio Gentileschi brought him to trial in 1612. During that event she herself was forced to give evidence under torture. In 1616 she joined the Academy of Design in Florence and began to develop a powerful style of her own. She was one of the greatest of Caravaggio's followers in the Baroque style. Although her compositions were graceful, her subject matter was often violent; she illustrated such subjects as the story from the Apocrypha of the Jewish heroine Judith beheading Holofernes, an invading general. She worked in Rome and Naples and spent three years with her father in London (1638–41). The first woman artist to attain an international reputation, she is admired today as the earliest to show a feminist consciousness in her work.

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