Gentileschi, Artemisia (är'tāmē`zhə jān'tēlĕs`kē), c.1597–c.1652, Tuscan painter, daughter and pupil of Orazio Gentileschi Gentileschi, Orazio (ōrä`tsēō jān'tēlĕs`kē), c.1562–c.1639, Tuscan painter, b. Pisa.
..... Click the link for more information. , b. Rome. She studied under Agostino Tassi, her father's collaborator, who was convicted of raping the teen-age Artemisia in 1612. Over the years, she has been portrayed as a strumpet, a feminist victim or heroine, and an independent woman of her era and her life has been fictionalized in several novels and plays. In purely artistic terms, she achieved renown for her spirited execution and admirable use of chiaroscuro in the style of Caravaggio Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da (mēkālän`jālō mārē`zē dä käräväd`jō)
..... Click the link for more information. , and during her life she achieved both success and fame. In 1616 she became the first woman admitted to the Academy of Design in Florence. About 1638 she visited England, where she was in great demand as a portraitist. Among her works are Judith and Holofernes (Uffizi); Mary Magdalen (Pitti Gall., Florence); Christ among the Doctors (N.Y. Historical Society); and a self-portrait (Hampton Court, England).

Gentileschi, Artemisia

(born 1593, Rome, Papal States—died 1652/53, Naples, Kingdom of Naples) Italian painter. The daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, she studied with him and with the landscape painter Agostino Tassi. Her earliest known work is Susanna and the Elders (1610), formerly attributed to Orazio. She was raped by Tassi, and, when he did not fulfill his promise to marry her, Orazio Gentileschi brought him to trial in 1612. During that event she herself was forced to give evidence under torture. In 1616 she joined the Academy of Design in Florence and began to develop a powerful style of her own. She was one of the greatest of Caravaggio's followers in the Baroque style. Although her compositions were graceful, her subject matter was often violent; she illustrated such subjects as the story from the Apocrypha of Judith, the Jewish heroine, beheading Holofernes, an invading general. She worked in Rome and Naples and spent three years with her father in London (1638–41). The first woman artist to attain an international reputation, she is admired today as the earliest to show a feminist consciousness in her work.