Artemisia Gentileschi, female artist

Artemisia was the daughter of painter Orazio Gentileschi, and was able to study with her father while she was still a child. She worked in his studio as an apprentice at about age 7. This was a great privilege. Later she studied with Guido Reni.

When Artemisia was a teenager, her father hired Agostino Tassi, a landscape and seascape painter, to teach her perspective. Tassi was known as an expert in perspective at the time. During one of the lessons, Tassi forced himself on Aremisia. Artemisia resisted and cut him with a knife. Tassi offered to marry her, but he did not follow up on this. Unfortunately, as a non-virgin, the mores of the time caused her to look upon the possibility of marriage to her rapist as the only hope for maintaining a respectable reputation.

Tassi never followed through on the marriage offer to Artemisia, so her father Orazio Gentileschi filed a lawsuit against Tassi when he found out.

The trial included physical torture of Artemisia to be certain that she was telling the truth. Tassi said that the sex was consensual. Tassi charged that Artemisia had been with many men before him, so Artemisia also had to endure a humiliating vaginal examination to establish her virginity was intact prior to the rape.

"It soon came to light that he had been sued for rape before, had impregnated his wife's sister, had arranged to have his wife murdered, and had obtained this same wife in the first place by raping her and then proposing marriage, as he had with Artemisia. The trial official cleared up any questions regarding Artemisia's virtue prior to the rape, but nonetheless left her marked for life in a number of ways."

-Virgil Elliott, The Portrait Signature, Journal of the American Society of Portrait Artists, Volume 4; 2000

Artemisia Gentileschi married Pietro Antonio di Vincenzo Stiattesi. Pietro had testified for Artemisia at her trial. Agostino Tassi had claimed she was promiscuous, but Pietro contradicted this assertion. Pietro Antonio di Vincenzo Stiattesi was and artist from Florence, and that is where the couple settled.

Artemisia Gentileschi received several well paying portrait commissions and became a member of Academie del Disegno in 1616.

Several versions of the Biblical Judith Slaying Holofernes were painted. My historians believe that the fact that she painted heroic and violent scenes more than once shows her mental state from the rape and subsequent trial.