Santa Catarina de Alexandria

Artemisia Gentileschi painted this in Florence, in her twenties, not long after leaving Rome, where a public trial had followed her rape by the painter Agostino Tassi, and where she herself had been tortured with cords to test whether her testimony held. Here she gives us Saint Catherine, the scholar-martyr sentenced to die on a spiked wheel, who leans against its broken frame with a palm of martyrdom in her hand. The face is very likely Artemisia's own. She reused the same drawing for another near-identical version now in London, altering the pose as she went. In Florence she found what Rome had denied her, becoming the first woman admitted to the city's academy of art.