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To survive the accumulation of debts from her husband, Artemisia will be forced to accept numerous orders and will have to adapt her style to the tastes of the time bringing her dark lights closer to the Caravaggio style.
Artemisia is renowned in her time for being a woman with extraordinary charm and, if this has earned her much torment, it has opened doors for her as well. Often in her paintings her busty and energetic heroines have her own features at the express request of her sponsors. This fascination that she exerts and her success fed many jokes on her private life throughout her career.Precocious artist, tenacious, free and daring woman, she apprehends her relationship to painting as a physical and liberating act. This gaze of female youth in the face of male old age obsessed her work. She painted her first canvas «Suzanne et les Vieillards» at the age of 17 and will revisit this subject all her life, making a last canvas 42 years later.The exhibition takes place chronologically in several rooms, starting from her apprenticeship in Rome in her father Orazio’s workshop, to follow the Italian cities where she stayed. Her early Roman works embodied female figures inspi- red by the Bible or Antiquity, «Cleopatra» (1611), «Danae» (1612) and «Judith beheading Holoferne» in two different Florentine versions. These mythological works bear witness with force and power to her desire for revenge in the face of the violence suffered.
The last two Neapolitan rooms retrace the last twenty-five years of her life. Her magnificent self-portrait in allegory of painting shows her appeasement, she has finally found her place and her tranquility.
Artemisia, a singular and gifted artist, court painter under the patronage of the Medici, was one of the only women to paint biblical and mythological heroines with brutal realism and yet total femininity in an atmosphere heavy with stuff and chiaroscuro.
Artemisia, like the goddess whose name she inherited, her life was made of freedom, beauty and fury in a hunt worthy of Olympus.
Judith and her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes(about 1623-5) © The Detroit Institute of Arts