Art was a battlefield for Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi, a feminist before the word was invented.
The 17th-century artist painted a new vision of womanhood and fought for the very things women fight for today.
Alisa Siegel · Posted: May 25, 2022
17-century artist Artemisia Gentileschi upended traditional depictions of women in her paintings by creating gutsy, strong female figures.
With her paintbrush as in her life, she fought gender inequality and helped to reimagine womanhood and what it could mean to be a female artist.
*Please note that this episode features descriptions of a sexual assault that some listeners may find disturbing.*
Guests in this episode:
Sheila Barker is an art historian and director of the Jane Fortune Research Program on Women Artists at the Medici Archive Project. She is the author most recently of Artemisia Gentileschi (Lund Humphries and Getty Publications, 2022).
Alessandra Masu is co-founder of the Associazione culturale Artemisia Gentileschi in Rome and director of The Artemisie Museum, the first virtual museum and database dedicated to women in the arts.
Letizia Treves is the Sassoon curator of Later Italian Paintings at the National Gallery in London, England. In 2020-2021, she curated the retrospective, Artemisia, at The National Gallery, London — the first exhibition dedicated to the painter ever to be held in Britain.