So, the apprentices charged, she was asking for it when one of them, Agostino Tassi, raped her in her bedroom. Artemisia, who was 18, hardly saw it that way, and her father had Tassi prosecuted in a Roman court. While proving her case, she had to endure judicial torture (literally, she was subjected to the thumbscrew) - and a public gynecological examination. Tassi was finally convicted, and Artemisia moved to Florence, where she began exorcising her personal demons with artistic fury. She still painted nudes and sacred subjects, but her scenes of women taking violent retribution against men, like “Jael and Sisara,” were the real eye-openers. Her “Judith Decapitating Holofernes” is so realistic it might have made even Caravaggio squirm. Her heroines often looked like her, and the calm self-assurance with which they took revenge was worthy of Thelma and Louise.
Acclaimed throughout Europe, Artemisia was believed to have been courted by Galileo. Yet a current show of 27 of her paintings at Florence’s Casa Buonarroti is the first exhibition ever devoted to her works. Her accomplishments came in an age when acknowledged women masters were even rarer than they are in this century. Many critics now think her a better artist than her father. So why is he remembered, and she has had to be rediscovered? No doubt Artemisia would have had an answer as sharp as Judith’s terrible sword.
