Artemisia Gentileschi

By 1610, at seventeen, Artemisia Gentileschi had already painted Susanna and the Elders, a large biblical scene signed with her own name, trained since childhood in her father Orazio's workshop in Rome. Two years later she spent seven months testifying in a rape trial. The accused was Agostino Tassi, a painter her father had hired to tutor her. Because the court did not trust a woman's word alone, she was made to give her testimony with cords tightened around her fingers, a routine method meant to test whether pain would make her change her story. It did not. Tassi was convicted, though the sentence against him was quietly never enforced.

Around that same period she painted her own version of Judith Beheading Holofernes, the Old Testament widow who saves her city by killing an invading general in his tent. Earlier painters of the scene, including her father's friend Caravaggio, had kept Judith at a careful distance from the violence. Gentileschi's Judith and her maid lean their full weight into the act, blood arcing across the sheets, and art historians have long pointed out the resemblance between the dying general's face and Tassi's.

She went on to build a career few women of her era could match, painting for the Medici court in Florence, then in Rome, Venice, Naples and briefly for Charles I in London, and in 1616 became the first woman admitted to Florence's Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, the city's painters' academy.