The Female Painter Who Defied Powerful Men And Was Forgotten For 300 Years

Born in 1593 in Rome to the painter Orazio Gentileschi, who moved among the radical painters of the Baroque era, including Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi did not have access to the classes at the Roman art academies. Nor was she allowed to draw from the live model. Instead, she studied within her father’s home studio, preparing paints and studying chiaroscuro, the stark play of light and shadow.

When Artemisia’s mother, Prudentia Montone, died in December 1605, 12-year-old Artemisia was left as the only daughter, since she also had three younger brothers. She took on much of the responsibility for running the household while continuing to train as a painter. She did hear stories about how her embroidery on a skirt left behind by her mother was commended by visiting artists, and she had a reputation as an aspiring painter. 17th-century writer Cristofano Bronzini recorded the embroidery anecdote as something Artemisia herself had passed down as a family story. Artistically, though, Artemisia didn’t have an official outlet.

At 17, Artemisia painted Susanna and the Elders, finished in 1610. The painting depicts a scene from the Bible where Susanna finds herself trapped and menaced by two lecherous elders posing as judges. Where most painters of her time would turn Susanna into an object of sexual desire, often making her nude, Artemisia painted her fear, her terror, and her sense of helplessness.

Early in 1611, Orazio Gentileschi hired a painter called Agostino Tassi, a specialist in quadratura, or the painting of illusionistic architecture, to teach his 17-year-old daughter Artemisia perspective. Orazio brought Tassi into their own home and gave him regular access, and the tutor was trusted there. It would not last.

In May 1611, Agostino Tassi assaulted Artemisia in the Gentileschi household while her father was not present. In the subsequent trial, records suggest Artemisia resisted Tassi’s assault, scratching his face and grabbing a knife against him. A year later, that resistance became key evidence when Orazio brought the criminal case that would put her endurance and her testimony on public record.

Under a custom of the time known as reparative marriage, a man could redeem a victim’s public honor and his own reputation by taking her as his wife. After the rape, Agostino Tassi made repeated promises to Artemisia that he would take this step. For nine months or so, she corresponded secretly with him and waited for the fulfillment of her expectations under both the law and social custom. Still, it did not occur.

Women could not bring criminal charges against men in Rome, which was directly ruled by the Catholic Church. So in March 1612, Artemisia’s father petitioned Pope Paul V to press criminal charges against Agostino Tassi. Orazio had discovered that Tassi was married, and therefore could not keep his promise to marry his victim, and that Tassi had also stolen a Judith painting from his workshop. The case moved forward under Orazio’s name.

The trial of Agostino Tassi lasted from March to November of 1612 in a Roman court named Tor di Nona. Artemisia was examined by two court-appointed midwives on oath to verify that she had been raped. Public testimony and cross-examination with her father, Tassi, and others took place over these eight months.

On May 14, 1612, Artemisia was subjected to the usual device employed in the examination of the accused and their witnesses. Her fingers were tied with strings which were passed through wooden pegs. It was a common practice, but for a working painter the risk to her hands was real. According to the records of the trial, Artemisia did not alter her tale. Instead, she seemed to have cried out, “It is true, it is true, it is true… This is the ring that you give me, and these are your promises.”

The trial reached its conclusion on November 27, 1612, when Agostino Tassi was found guilty. The following day, he was given a choice between five years of hard labor in the papal galleys or banishment from Rome. Tassi chose the latter, but thanks to the influence of his friends, including the pope’s nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, he was never actually banished.

The next day, November 29, 1612, after Agostino Tassi’s sentencing, Artemisia wed a relatively obscure Florentine painter named Pierantonio Stiattesi. Her father had the match made so that she could recover her good name. Tradition dictated that, following a public scandal, a woman needed a husband. In early 1613, the pair left for Florence, then under the rule of the Medici, who loved art. Here Artemisia would find not only a new city but also a new clientele, at a distance from the gossip of Rome.

Judith Slaying Holofernes depicts the Old Testament heroine Judith, assisted by her maid, Abra, beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes. Artemisia created two versions of this painting between approximately 1612 and 1620. The first is held in Naples, while the second, larger painting is housed in Florence. The work is frequently interpreted as a personal response to her trial, though there is no question that she had also achieved great technical skill with dramatic, Caravaggesque lighting and composition, both of which brought her commissions.

Artemisia became the first woman admitted to the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, the city’s official academy for painters and sculptors, on July 19, 1616. It allowed her to enter into contracts, purchase art materials, and control her finances independently of her husband. She also learned to read and write as an adult around this time.

Artemisia was paid 34 florins by Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, grand-nephew of the Renaissance sculptor, to paint an allegory for the Buonarroti family house. Between 1618 and 1620, she had an extramarital affair with Francesco Maria Maringhi, a nobleman. This relationship is described in letters to Maringhi that were only discovered in 2011. Artemisia’s husband, Pierantonio, was aware of the affair and knew that Maringhi provided financial support, which Pierantonio then used to offset some of his own debts.

When Artemisia’s husband’s debts became unmanageable in 1621, she separated from Pierantonio Stiattesi and went back to Rome with their daughter, Prudentia, the only one of the couple’s five children to survive past childhood, as a single mother. In the 1620s, Artemisia ran her own workshop there, painting pieces such as Lucretia and the painting Jael and Sisera, in which women resist or overpower men. She was making a career.

In 1630, Artemisia relocated to Naples, an important art market ruled by the Spanish. She established a busy commercial workshop employing several paid assistants, including her daughter Prudentia. She received significant public commissions such as large altarpieces for Pozzuoli Cathedral. This wasn’t just a woman painting by herself in a studio. It was a working business.

King Charles I of England asked Artemisia to visit his court in London in 1638, where she was able to see her father, Orazio, who had moved there years earlier to work for the English court, again. They worked together painting ceiling panels for the Queen’s House in Greenwich. Orazio died in London in 1639, and Artemisia completed the royal commission on her own, then left for Naples around 1640 as civil war approached in England.

Artemisia later painted a self-portrait in the late 1630s called Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, where she holds a brush and palette as the personification of art itself. She used a popular emblem book by Cesare Ripa as a reference for the pose of this figure. She no longer only painted women from the Bible or ancient legends. She claimed the role of Art for herself.

“With me Your Illustrious Lordship will not lose and you will find the spirit of Caesar in the soul of a woman,” Artemisia wrote while negotiating for payment from a collector in Sicily named Don Antonio Ruffo in November 1649. Tax records show that she was still alive and active in Naples as late as August 1654. While there’s no surviving death certificate, most historians agree that she likely succumbed to the Naples plague of 1656, which took some 150,000 lives.

For nearly 300 years after Artemisia’s death, her works were attributed to Caravaggio, her father Orazio, or various other anonymous masters. Correcting this took a long time. In the 1970s, feminist art historians Linda Nochlin and Mary Garrard researched the original records of her 1612 trial and rightly reattributed various paintings to Artemisia, restoring her name, literally her signature, to various masterpieces. Thanks to decades of painstaking scholarship, major museums, including London’s National Gallery and Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, have begun to recognize her as one of the leading painters of the Baroque era.

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