Caravaggio’s amazing depiction of this is floating among the tumblrs and I just had to post this one, “Judith Slaying Holofernes” by Artemisia Gentileschi, which I’m always blown away by. Artemisia had a really intense story too — at age 14, she was raped by a painter who worked under her father (also an artist in the Caravaggio school), Agostino Tassi. Tassi was supposed to be her teacher, but was a notorious bad-guy. The way women were treated back then, well, let’s just say that young Artemisia was branded a slut and in a court case defending Tassi, Artemisia was put in thumb screws (OUCH) to coax the “truth” out of her — because of course they believed a 14-year-old had seduced Tassi.
There’s much more to her story that should very much be read, but I think the interesting part (all learned in art history class) is how she depicted the subjects of her paintings — the women are powerful (check out Judith’s determination to saw off Holoferne’s head!) and the men are given a different treatment than they are as subjects in works by the male artists of her generation.
Oh, and the art class I learned about Gentileschi in? It was ”women in the history of art.” Yeah, they skipped her entirely in my two-semester survey of the “masters.”
