Self-Portrait as a Female Martyr

Around 1615 Artemisia Gentileschi was starting over in Florence. She had left Rome after a public trial in which her father's colleague was accused of raping her, an ordeal that included her being tortured to test her testimony. In Florence she rebuilt everything, won commissions from the Medici, and became the first woman admitted to the city's drawing academy. She even signed her work Artemisia Lomi, borrowing an uncle's surname that carried weight there. In this small panel she painted her own face and set a palm frond in her hand, the sign of a Christian martyr, without naming which saint she is meant to be. The picture has stayed in private hands, and an old inscription on the back records, in Italian, that it came from Artemisia's own hand.