Artemisia Gentileschi (above is a self portrait with lute) was described as ‘peerless’ in her craft even at the age of 18 after she had only had three years of practice in painting. The work below, ‘Susanna and her Elders’, was painted in 1610 when she was just 17. It depicts the Biblical story of Susanna and her Elders.

The story in the Bible tells how two elders spied on a young girl bathing, then tried to force her to have sex with them. When she refused, they accused her of immorality with another man, and she was sentenced to death. Susanna was rescued, but this scene of her with the elders was very frequently depicted by renaissance artists.

It was around the time of this painting that Artemisia was raped by another artist, Agostino Tassi. During the process around the trial, Artemisia was tortured with thumbscrews to ‘verify’ her testimony. Tassi was found guilty but remained unpunished. Many of Artemiia’s paintings depict strong women revenging themselves or showing courage in the face of men. Notice that in each of the three paintings below, the defeated men have what some described as a striking resemblance to Tassi.

The painting below, Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1638-39) was bought by Charles I of England. Making herself the very personification of art, shows great confidence in her position. She followed exactly the precept of Ripa, who said "Painting" should be shown as “a beautiful woman, with full black hair, disheveled, and twisted in various ways, with arched eyebrows that show imaginative thought, the mouth covered with a cloth tied behind her ears, with a chain of gold at her throat from which hangs a mask, and has written in front ‘imitation’.

She holds in her hand a brush, and in the other the palette, with clothes of evanescently covered drapery.” Artemisia makes one change to that formula, she declines to have a cloth over her mouth.