The first member of the artistic Gentileschi family that I became aware of was the Italian Baroque artist, Orazio Gentileschi, whose Rest on the Flight to Egypt I came across a few years back in Vienna’s magnificent Kunsthistorisches Museum. However, as acclaimed as Orazio was, it is his daughter, Artemisia, whose name has come down to us today bearing the most critical acclaim, and not just because she is championed as a woman who thrived in a man’s world, but also because she was literally a brilliant and accomplished world-class artist.

Artemisia flourished in the first half of the 17th century, working in her father’s workshop in Rome but also later working in Florence, Venice, Naples and even in London where both she and her father had a spell working as court painters for Charles I not long before the outbreak of the English Civil War. She specialized in painting naturalistic pictures of strong and suffering women from myth, allegory, and the Bible – Susanna and the Elders, Judith Slaying Holofernes, Delilah, Salome, Bathsheba, Lucretia, Cleopatra, Jael, Mary Magdalene…

Her works are convincing depictions of the female figure, anywhere between nude and fully clothed, and she clearly had a wonderful talent for handling colour and building depth. Her Judith Slaying Holofernes, painted between 1614 and 1620, is a dramatic piece of art theatre. It depicts the scene of Judith beheading Holofernes, an episode taken from the apocryphal Book of Judith in the Old Testament, in which the Assyrian general Holofernes is assassinated by the Israelite heroine Judith. The painting shows the moment when Judith, helped by her maidservant, beheads the general after he has fallen asleep drunk. Artemisia was just seventeen when she painted this, so precocious was her talent.

That she was a woman painting in the seventeenth century is worthy of note, of course (how much more art would exist today had talented female artists, the ones that were less connected or gutsy than Artemisia, been allowed to express themselves?). But purely on her work alone she was one of the most progressive and expressive painters of her generation, and that was a generation that was already rich in artists inspired and flourishing in the footsteps of Caravaggio. As it happens, she is due to be commemorated this spring in a retrospective exhibition at London’s National Gallery. I’ll be there, hopefully!