Artemisia Gentileschi, born in Rome in 1593, was a Baroque painter and the first woman admitted to the art academy of Florence. The most surprising fact about her comes from a courtroom record: in 1612, she held to her accusation of rape while cords were tightened around her fingers.
She went on to work in Rome, Florence, Naples and London, and both the record of her trial and many of her own letters survive.
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The court wanted proof, and the proof it chose was pain. Artemisia was seventeen when the attack happened, in May 1611, and the case reached a judge only after a year of useless waiting, when her father Orazio filed a complaint. To test her word, the court had cords bound around her fingers and pulled tight while she spoke. They were called sibille. The hands in them belonged to a painter.
She did not change a word. The man she accused was Agostino Tassi, a painter who worked with her father, and he was in the room. At the end of the trial he was condemned to exile from Rome, a sentence he never served.
What came after is stranger than the trial. A woman treated as a suspect in her own case went on to paint for the Medici, to enter the academy of Florence in 1616, and, four centuries later, to have a self-portrait of hers bought by the National Gallery in London for £3.6 million.
What was the ring Artemisia spoke of in court?
A marriage promise that was never kept…
What You'll Discover
What she owed in Florence.
Who helped her collect a fee.
What was painted over her nude.
What she promised a patron in 1649.
What it cost to buy her back.