Artemisia Gentileschi

This month’s essay is about Artemisia Gentileschi, who was one of the few successful women painters of the Baroque period. She was the most important woman painter of Early Modern Europe by virtue of the excellence of her work, the originality of her treatment of traditional subjects, and the number of her paintings that have survived (though only 34 of a much larger corpus remain, many of them only recently attributed to her rather than to her male contemporaries). Contemporary critics both praised and disdained her work; she was recognized as having genius, yet she was also seen as monstrous because she was a woman exercising a creative talent thought to be exclusively male. Because of this misogynistic prejudice, as art historian Mary D. Garrard has stated, Artemisia “has suffered a scholarly neglect that is almost unthinkable for an artist of her caliber.”