Artemisia Gentileschi

One of the first and only female artists to achieve notoriety in the 17th century, Artemisia Gentileschi was celebrated for vivid colours and forceful chiaroscuro — a technique recently taken to new heights by Caravaggio — affording her work new realms of theatre. As a woman, she also offered a unique perspective on history painting, often intentionally subverting the established male perspective to retell narratives from a female’s point of view. This gave her protagonists a power previously denied to them by other painters.

Gentileschi was born in Rome in 1593. The eldest of five children, her father, Orazio Gentileschi, was a successful Baroque painter who worked for the courts of Marie de’ Medici in Paris and Charles I in London. She studied in his studio, then apprenticed in the workshop of the landscape artist Agostino Tassi. Her first known fully autograph work, Susanna and the Elders, was completed at the age of 17. It built on her father’s sense of psychological drama, and unabashedly put the humiliation of Susanna front and centre stage.

Within months of the painting’s creation, Gentileschi was raped by Tassi. Her father took him to trial, where she was forced to give evidence whilst being tortured. Tassi was found guilty and banished from Rome, but the punishment was never enforced. For the rest of her life, Gentileschi’s trauma influenced the themes she chose to turn to: authority, violence and vengeance — each palpable in her masterpieces Judith Slaying Holofernes, Lucretia, Cleopatra and Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria.

In 1616 Gentileschi became the first woman to join Florence’s Academy of the Arts and drawing. Despite establishing herself as a successful, independent painter in the city, she was beset by debt and chased by creditors. she returned to Rome, then moved to Venice and Naples, before joining her ailing father in London in 1638, where she worked alongside him to complete the ceiling paintings for the Great Hall of the Queen’s House in Greenwich. Shortly after Orazio’s death in 1639, she returned to Naples, where she died sometime around 1654.