First woman in Florence’s academy, painting biblical rage
Artemisia Gentileschi (born 1593; still active after January 1654) painted Susanna, Judith, and other biblical women with Caravaggesque force while still a teenager. She became the first woman admitted to Florence’s Accademia delle Arti del Disegno—long after a notorious Roman trial had overshadowed her craft.
Artemisia Gentileschi was born in Rome in July 1593, though one archival birth certificate gives 1590. She was the eldest child of the Pisan painter Orazio Gentileschi, whose style owed much to Caravaggio’s habit of painting real models without idealising them. After her mother died in 1605 she grew up in her father’s workshop, learning to mix colours and quickly outpacing her brothers; by 1612 Orazio was boasting that after three years of practice she had no equal. Her earliest surviving picture, Susanna and the Elders of 1610, was finished when she was about 17.
In 1611 Orazio was decorating a Roman palace vault with Agostino Tassi, who raped Artemisia in the family home the following May, helped by the negligence of the tenant meant to chaperone her. Orazio pressed charges once it was clear Tassi, already married, would not wed her. The seven-month trial treated the crime chiefly as an injury to family honour, and she was subjected to tightened finger cords to test her testimony. Tassi was convicted and sentenced to exile, a penalty never enforced, and he spent less than a year in prison.
A month after the verdict she married the Florentine painter Pierantonio Stiattesi and moved to Florence, where six years under Medici patronage made her a court painter. She learned to read and write there and became the first woman admitted to the city’s Accademia delle Arti del Disegno. In 1615 Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger commissioned her Allegory of Inclination for a ceiling honouring his great-uncle, paying her three times what the other artists received.
Between 1638 and 1642 she served Charles I in England as an expatriate painter, probably leaving as civil war broke out, and reappeared in Naples in 1649. Her Judith Slaying Holofernes hangs in the Uffizi and her 1625 Judith and Her Maidservant in Detroit. Long treated as a curiosity, she has been reassessed by modern scholars and major exhibitions, including one at the National Gallery in London.
Source: Artemisia Gentileschi
