Artemisia gentileschi biography

Two exclusive extracts from Sheila Barker’s new book for Lund Humphries’ Illuminating Women Artists series

To explain how Artemisia got her start as an artist, it is not enough to say that her father was a painter.

Artemisia gentileschi biography

Her father was a male painter, and in seventeenth-century Italy, this was quite different from being a female painter. Given the times, Artemisia could never comport herself in society as a male painter did, no matter how sublime her canvases.

Moreover, to suggest that her father’s example sufficed to introduce her to the profession overlooks the degree to which emulation in early modern Italy was a gendered and inveterately homosocial phenomenon, meaning that young women hesitated to pursue art seriously unless they knew of other women who had won admiration for their achievements in this realm. 

As a motherless teenager awakening to the conditions of womanhood and to the challenges these conditions presente