In early 1613, 19-year-old Artemisia Gentileschi left Rome for Florence. Just a few weeks earlier, she had married the painter Pierantonio Stiattesi. Behind her was the trial of one of her father's colleagues, who had raped Artemisia but ultimately escaped meaningful punishment.
For Artemisia, the move offered a chance to begin again-and to build a career independent of her father.
She had been painting since childhood. Her father, Orazio Gentileschi, was a well-known Roman artist and follower of Caravaggio who trained his daughter in his own workshop. By the age of 17, Artemisia had already painted Susanna and the Elders, a large biblical scene that brought her early recognition and demonstrated that she could handle the human figure, complex composition, and dramatic narrative on the same level as male artists.
Talent alone, however, was still not enough for a woman hoping to build a professional career in the early 17th century. Artists of the period were expected to receive a full artistic education: they studied anatomy and perspective, drew from nude models, joined professional associations, and built relationships with patrons through those networks. Women had little or no access to much of this system. The few who did manage to become professional artists were often, like Artemisia, born into painters' families and trained at home. Breaking into history painting was harder still, because large-scale biblical, mythological, and historical scenes were considered the highest form of the profession.
In Florence, however, that was exactly the field Artemisia chose to pursue.
Soon after arriving, she established a studio in her father-in-law's home. At the same time, she worked on learning to read and write-during the trial in Rome she had been described as "illiterate"-and tried to enter the circles that shaped Florence's artistic life. Her acquaintances came to include painters, writers, and scholars, and she would later correspond with Galileo Galilei himself. One relationship proved particularly important: Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, the great-nephew of Michelangelo, was transforming his family home in Florence into a kind of monument to his famous ancestor and hired Artemisia as one of the artists entrusted with commemorating Michelangelo's life and talent.
Her commission was Allegory of Inclination, an image representing Michelangelo's innate artistic genius. Artemisia depicted it as a young nude woman reclining among clouds, holding a compass with a star above her head. For an artist who only a few years earlier had been able to work solely in her father's studio, the commission was invaluable: the painting was destined for the home of one of the most famous families in the history of art.
The patron appears to have considered her work exceptionally valuable. Records show that Artemisia was paid 34 florins for Allegory of Inclination, significantly more than the male artists who produced other paintings for the same room.
After that success, even more influential patrons began seeking her work. The Medici, the family that ruled Florence and Tuscany, purchased her paintings, and Grand Duke Cosimo II commissioned several pieces from her. It was also during her Florentine years that Artemisia painted one version of Judith Slaying Holofernes, which would later become one of her best-known works. According to the biblical story, Judith saves her city from an enemy army by entering the camp of the general Holofernes and killing him. Other artists had depicted the subject before Artemisia, but her version was unusually intense: Judith and her maid do not simply stand beside the victim, as they do in many other paintings, but physically restrain the struggling man together and forcefully carry the act through to the end.
Later critics often interpreted the painting through the violence Artemisia herself had endured and described it as a form of artistic revenge, although there is no evidence that she intended it that way. What did become clear, however, was that Gentileschi increasingly took on complex, multi-figure history paintings of the kind rarely entrusted to women in her era, while placing at the center of those scenes women whose stories had become legendary and who, in their own narratives, had changed the course of history.
Then, on July 19, 1616, Artemisia achieved something that firmly established her new status as a professional artist: she was admitted to Florence's Academy of the Arts of Drawing. Membership was far more than an honorary distinction. The Academy brought together leading artists and intellectuals in Florence and provided access to the professional circles and relationships on which major commissions often depended. For a woman to enter that system was exceptional-and Artemisia was only 23 years old.
