Artemisia Gentileschi: The Court Crushed Her Painter's Fingers, and She Painted With Them for Forty Years

She was raped at seventeen by her father's friend, tortured with cords around her fingers to prove she was telling the truth, convicted the man, then crossed five cities and four decades painting women killing men.

In May 1612, in a papal courtroom in Rome, a judge ordered cords wrapped around the fingers of an eighteen-year-old painter and pulled tight. The cords were called sibille, and they were the court's instrument for testing whether a witness was lying. For a painter they were aimed at the tools of her trade. Standing across the room was the man she had accused, Agostino Tassi, a painter who had been her father's collaborator and her teacher in perspective. As the cords tightened, she was recorded as saying, "I have told the truth and I always will, because it is true and I am here to confirm it wherever necessary" (National Gallery, London).

Then she turned to Tassi, who had promised her marriage to make the assault right, and said: "This is the ring that you give me and these are your promises" (National Gallery, London).

The transcript of that seven-month trial survives, three hundred pages of it, in the Archivio di Stato in Rome. It is the reason we have Artemisia Gentileschi's voice at all.

She was born in Rome on July 8, 1593, the eldest child of the Tuscan painter Orazio Gentileschi, a Caravaggio follower who trained all his children in his workshop and found his daughter the most talented (Britannica; National Gallery, London). Her mother died when she was twelve. By 1610, at seventeen, she had signed and dated her first known work, a Susanna and the Elders now at Schloss Weißenstein in Pommersfelden, Germany, its stone step inscribed "ARTIMITIA / GENTILESCHI F / 1610" (Wikipedia)). The subject is a woman bathing in a garden, spied on by two older men who demand her body and threaten to accuse her of adultery if she refuses. Artemisia painted Susanna's distress, not the elders' anticipation. The feminist art historian Mary Garrard would write, four centuries later, that "Artemisia's Susanna presents us with an image rare in art, of a three-dimensional female character who is heroic," and that "the expressive core of Gentileschi's painting is the heroine's plight, not the villains' anticipated pleasure" (The Art Story). She painted it before the rape. The men who would judge her in 1612 had no idea what she had already understood about men like them.

The trial that made her a voice

The rape happened in May 1611, when Artemisia was seventeen. Tassi was a friend of her father's who had been brought in to teach her perspective and who had, by her account, been pursuing her for months with the help of a neighbor named Tuzia and a hanger-on named Cosimo Quorli. She testified that he locked the bedroom door, threw her down on the edge of the bed, put a hand with a handkerchief over her mouth and a knee between her thighs, and forced himself on her while she scratched his face and tore out his hair (webwinds.com, after Mary D. Garrard's translation of the trial transcript). Afterward she threw a knife at him, slightly wounding him in the chest, but could not stop him.

Then he promised to marry her, and on that thin promise she continued the relationship for months, because in Rome in 1611 the only way to convert rape into honor was to marry the man who did it. "What I was doing with him," she told the court, "I did only so that, as he had dishonored me, he would marry me" (webwinds.com, after Garrard). She did not know Tassi was already married, that his wife had vanished, presumed murdered by men he hired, or that he had served time for incest with his sister-in-law (webwinds.com). When she finally learned he had a wife, she told him to his face: "I was hoping to have you as a husband, but now I don't because I know that you have a wife" (webwinds.com, after Garrard).

Her father Orazio brought the charge to Pope Paul V in the spring of 1612, which pulled the case into canon law. He did not tell Artemisia first. He was suing, in effect, to recover a daughter's marital value. The trial ran from March to October, seven months, and it was the talk of Rome (Quartz; Law.com). Tassi's defense was a torrent of character assassination. He claimed he had never been alone with her, then that she had seduced him, then that she had slept with five other men and written them erotic letters, then that her father sold her to men for a loaf of bread, then that she had committed incest with her father. As the novelist Joy McCullough later pointed out, Artemisia could not write: at the trial she had claimed to be illiterate (Artnet).

The court ordered midwives to examine Artemisia in front of the magistrates to confirm she was no longer a virgin, because Roman law required a raped woman to prove she had been chaste in order for the rape to count as a crime (Law.com). When her word was judged insufficient, it ordered the sibille. Cords were wrapped around her fingers and tightened, with Tassi watching, while she was asked again and again whether he had raped her. "It is true, it is true," she kept answering, and the transcript records her repeating it until the notary could not keep up (webwinds.com; Artnet). She also told the court, flatly, "I have never had any sexual relations with any other person besides the said Agostino" (webwinds.com, after Garrard).

Tassi was convicted. The last pages of the transcript, with the formal sentence, are missing, but he was imprisoned for eight more months and then released, his exile from Rome never enforced (webwinds.com; National Gallery, London). A month after the verdict, to salvage what could be salvaged of her reputation, Artemisia was married off to a minor Florentine artist named Pierantonio Stiattesi, the brother of a witness who had helped her father file the complaint, and sent north to Florence (webwinds.com).

The painting as the place she controlled the story

In Florence, the same hands the court had tried to crush began to make the work that would outlast the verdict. Within a year or two of the trial she painted the first of her Judiths, the small canvas now in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, and around 1620 she painted it again, larger and more assured, for Grand Duke Cosimo II de' Medici, the version that hangs in the Uffizi (Wikipedia); Wikipedia)). The subject is the Book of Judith: a Jewish widow and her maidservant Abra behead the Assyrian general Holofernes in his tent to save a besieged city.

What Artemisia did to the scene is the thing to sit with. Caravaggio, a generation earlier, had painted the same moment with Judith standing back, faintly disgusted, the killing done at arm's length. Artemisia put the viewer on top of the bed. Two women lean their full weight on a man who is still conscious, his legs pushing against Abra's breast, his fist clawing at her chin. Judith drives the sword down with both hands, her sleeves rolled to the elbow as if she were doing a chore. Blood arcs from the neck in two spurts that, the Guardian's Jonathan Jones has argued, follow the parabolic trajectories of a body spouting under pressure, an accuracy so unnerving that scholars have wondered whether she learned it from her Florentine acquaintance Galileo, then working out the laws of falling bodies (The Guardian; Wikipedia). Judith's face has often been read as Artemisia's own, and Holofernes' as Tassi's.

For decades the critical conversation about these paintings has turned on one question: is this revenge? Mary Garrard, whose 1989 study remains the foundation of modern Artemisia scholarship, famously proposed that the Judiths function as "a cathartic expression of the artist's private, and perhaps repressed, rage," and read Judith as "a socially liberated woman who punishes masculine wrongdoing" (Wikipedia), after Garrard). The feminist art historian Griselda Pollock pushed back, arguing that the auto-biographical reading boxes Artemisia back into the very victimhood the trial imposed on her. "The painting Judith is not about revenge," Pollock wrote. "Yet it is about killing. But it is a metaphor, a representation in which the literalness of killing a man is displaced on to a mytheme wherein the action is necessary, politically justified, not personally motivated" (MDPI Arts, after Pollock). The two positions are not as far apart as they look. Both agree on what is radical in the canvas: that the women are doing the labor of the killing, that the labor is physical, and that the painter has refused to look away from the wet mechanics of it. Whether the blood is Tassi's or the Assyrian general's, the painting is a woman holding the sword.

She returned to the subject at least six times across her life (Wikipedia). She painted Susanna again, and Lucretia, and Cleopatra, and Jael, and a Mary Magdalene whose face turns away from the viewer toward something we cannot see. Whatever else they are, these are paintings of women who are not being looked at. They are acting.

The career she built without a court and without a husband

The Florence years were the making of her. In 1616 she became the first woman admitted to the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, the academy founded on Michelangelo's legacy, an admission that let her buy her own materials without a husband's permission and sign her own contracts (The Art Story; National Gallery, London). She painted for Cosimo II and his mother Christina of Lorraine, and for Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, who paid her three times the other artists on the Casa Buonarroti ceiling and gave her the Allegory of Inclination, a nude woman holding a compass, possibly her own likeness (Wikipedia). She had five children in eight years. One, a son named Cristofano, died at four and a half.

We know the texture of those years because in 2011 the scholar Francesco Solinas discovered thirty-six letters Artemisia and her husband wrote to her Florentine lover, the nobleman Francesco Maria Maringhi, between roughly 1616 and 1620, preserved in the Archivio Storico Frescobaldi in Florence (National Gallery, London; National Gallery, London). She had taught herself to read and write in Florence, having claimed illiteracy at the trial, and the letters are full of phonetic spellings and a voice nothing like the careful testimony of the courtroom. She calls Maringhi "my dearest heart" and "comfort of my life," and writes, "if hearts could be seen, we would see great things" (National Gallery, London). Five days after Cristofano died she tells Maringhi that "fortune has turned her back on me" and that God has taken her son from her, and then scolds him for sending letters too short to prove he still loves her (National Gallery, London). In another she jokes that she is "twice as large" and that between them they will have "created Ovid's Metamorphoses" (National Gallery, London). Her husband Pierantonio wrote on the backs of the love letters and tolerated the affair, because Maringhi was paying the couple's bills (Wikipedia). This is not a life that fits the word victim. As the National Gallery's curator Letizia Treves put it, the letters show "a witty, passionate woman emerges, determined to control her own destiny and gain the respect she deserves" (National Gallery, London).

By 1620 she had fled Florence, pursued by debt and the grand duke's anger over commissions she had taken advances for and not finished, and her husband disappears from the record (Wikipedia). She lived in Rome, then Venice, then settled in Naples in 1630, where she ran a workshop in which her daughter Prudenzia trained (National Gallery, London). Naples was hard. In February 1636 she wrote to the grand duke's secretary that "I no longer want to stay in Naples, both due to the riots caused by the war and also to the poor standard of living" (Apollo). She stayed anyway, because there was nowhere better. She wrote to the antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo in 1630 promising "my portrait, which you once requested," and noting, "I have painted my portrait with the utmost care" (Royal Collection Trust).

In 1638 Charles I of England, the most avid royal collector of paintings in Europe, invited her to London to join her father, who had been court painter to Queen Henrietta Maria since 1626 (National Gallery, London; Royal Collection Trust). She had refused for years; she went, in the end, because Orazio was old and dying and needed help finishing a ceiling allegory for the Queen's House at Greenwich (Apollo). There she painted the Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, La Pittura, now in the Royal Collection, in which she shows herself with dishevelled hair and a rolled sleeve, brush in one hand and palette in the other, identifying herself with the female personification of Painting itself, a conflation no male artist of the period could perform (Royal Collection Trust). Orazio died suddenly in 1639. She left England by 1642, as the civil war closed in (Wikipedia).

Back in Naples, in her last documented decade, she wrote the lines that sound most like a manifesto. In 1649, defending the price she was charging the Sicilian collector Don Antonio Ruffo for a crowded canvas, she told him that "with me Your Illustrious Lordship will not lose and you will find the spirit of Caesar in the soul of a woman," and she conceded plainly that "a woman's name raises doubts until her work is seen," assuring him her paintings "will speak for themselves." Months later she added, in a line that has become the most quoted sentence she ever wrote: "I will show Your Illustrious Lordship what a woman can do" (National Gallery, London). Her last known letter to Ruffo is dated 1650. Her last known commission is dated January 1654 (Wikipedia). The date and cause of her death are unknown; some scholars place it in the plague that devastated Naples in 1656, which killed much of a generation of Neapolitan painters. She was buried at San Giovanni Battista dei Fiorentini in Naples, and the tomb was destroyed when the church was demolished in the 1950s (Wikipedia).

After her death she was largely written out of the story until Roberto Longhi's 1916 essay and, decisively, Mary D. Garrard's 1989 study, which appended the first English translation of the trial transcript and her letters (Wikipedia; Princeton University Press). A National Gallery retrospective in 2020, the first major British exhibition of her work, walked her out of the footnote and into the main hall, and the trial that was meant to break her became, instead, the guarantor of her voice.

The court that wrapped the sibille around her fingers in 1612 was trying to decide whether a woman's word could be trusted. Four hundred years later, the only words from that courtroom anyone still reads are hers.

Read the full life: Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art, by Mary D. Garrard (Princeton University Press, 1989), the foundational scholarly biography, which includes the first English translation of the 1612 trial transcript and of her letters.