Artemisia Gentileschi was an Italian Baroque painter, born in Rome on July 8, 1593, and last recorded alive in Naples in 1654. Trained by her father Orazio, she became the first woman to join the academy of artists in Florence, and she worked for collectors and courts from Venice to London.
She is best known for Judith Slaying Holofernes, in which two women kill a general in his bed. Many people see in it the rape she suffered as a young woman, and the trial that followed in 1612.
The painting hangs in the Uffizi in Florence. Blood arcs across the bed sheet and onto Judith's sleeves and dress while her maid, Abra, pins the man down. That trial did not end her career, though. For decades afterward, rulers and collectors went on buying her pictures.
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Artemisia grew up in Rome, the only daughter of the painter Orazio Gentileschi. Her father was a friend and follower of Caravaggio, whose violent contrasts of light and dark had made him famous in the city. She trained in her father's workshop from about 1608 or 1609.
By 1610 she had signed and dated a painting of her own. Two years later she was standing in a Roman court, giving evidence. Her words from that court survive in the transcript, and years afterward she put more of herself on paper, in letters to a lover and to a patron.
What You'll Discover
Whose hand painted her first picture.
What she said while the cords tightened.
What Judith's maid is really doing.
Who she called her dearest heart.
What she painted, then covered over.
What she promised her Sicilian patron.