Isn’t She Good—For a Woman?

Artemisia Gentileschi is a painter who makes you feel like a mind reader. Even by the high standards of 17th-century Europe, her work is impressively sensuous, dynamic, and psychologically acute. This winter, she became the first woman in the 197-year history of Britain’s National Gallery to receive a solo exhibition. The reviews have been adulatory.

The paintings on show include a significant proportion of wronged or vengeful women. There are depictions of the biblical character Susanna, caught bathing by two men, and Gentileschi’s self-portrait as Saint Catherine, posing with the wheel on which the martyr’s body was broken. In the second room hang her masterpieces: two huge canvases of Judith, another biblical heroine, sawing off the head of Holofernes, having been sent to seduce and kill him. These have echoes of Caravaggio, but an aggression that is all their own.

The exhibition also contains an object that makes its curator, Letizia Treves, uneasy: a heavy book, its tissue-thin pages open to a record of a court case. A teenage girl was raped by her father’s apprentice, and when her attacker would not marry her—the expected redress at the time for taking her virginity.”. Unbroken, she then looked at her rapist and, referring to the loops of string, said: “This is the ring that you give me, and these are your promises.”