Baroque Age
Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1656)
Italian Baroque painter.
Artemisia Gentileschi was the most accomplished female painter of the seventeenth century and the first woman admitted to Florence's Accademia delle Arti del Disegno. She trained in Rome in the workshop of her father, the Caravaggist painter Orazio Gentileschi, absorbing tenebrism and the naturalism of the model at first hand. In 1611, aged seventeen, she was raped by the painter Agostino Tassi; the ensuing trial, in which she was tortured to test her testimony, is documented in the surviving court records and shadowed — though it does not exhaust — the reading of her work.
She built an independent international career rare for any painter and unprecedented for a woman: Florence under Medici patronage, then Rome, Venice, Naples, and a period in London working alongside her father at the Stuart court. Her subjects are dominated by strong biblical and mythological women — Judith, Susanna, Cleopatra, Bathsheba, Esther — rendered with muscular physical conviction and psychological force. Her Judith paintings are among the most powerful treatments of the theme in European art.
Her letters to the Sicilian collector Don Antonio Ruffo, written late in her life around 1649, survive and show a shrewd, self-assured professional negotiating prices and defending her worth. She spent her final years in Naples, where she died about 1656.
The words the record keeps using: forceful, unflinching, muscular, dramatic, defiant, assured, visceral, commanding.
At a glance
- Lived 1593–1656
- Origin Italian (Roman)
- Worked in Florence, Rome, Naples
- Era Baroque Age
- Movements Baroque
- Mediums Oil on canvas
- Techniques Chiaroscuro, Tenebrism
Works in the archive
- Judith Slaying Holofernes, 1620 (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence)
The Uffizi version of Artemisia's signature subject shows Judith and her maidservant together pinning and beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes with concerted, physical effort. Unlike earlier treatments, both women… - Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes, 1623 (Detroit Institute of Arts)
The aftermath rather than the act: Judith and her maidservant pause, alert, in the moment just after the beheading, the general's head half-wrapped in a basket as they listen for danger. A single candle is the only… - Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura), 1638 (Royal Collection, United Kingdom)
Painted probably during her stay in London, this is Artemisia's most ingenious self-portrait: she depicts herself as 'La Pittura', the female personification of Painting described in Ripa's iconography — with the gold…
What was said
Writing to her patron Don Antonio Ruffo, Artemisia insisted he would find the spirit of Caesar in the soul of a woman, and declared she would show his Lordship what a woman is capable of doing.
In the same correspondence she defended her prices and her invention, warning Ruffo not to expect works cheaply and asserting that the name she had made guaranteed the quality of what she delivered.
The surviving records of the 1612 Roman trial of Agostino Tassi document that Artemisia was subjected to torture with the sibille (cords tightened on the fingers) to test the truth of her testimony against him.
Lineage
Learned from Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
What would Artemisia make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Artemisia Gentileschi", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Artemisia · Keep a life moment the way Artemisia would · Pictures made after Artemisia