Agostino Tassi

This painting is one of many versions of the biblical story of Judith beheading Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi, a well-known female painter of the Baroque period. Although she gained acclaim as a painter, few women of her time had the opportunity to become an artist, a privilege afforded to her in part because her father owned a studio and painted, as well. In the Bible, Holofernes, an Assyrian bully and enemy to Israel, slaughtered his way into the city of Bethulia, a town at the entrance…

Renowned for her brutal renderings of Biblical scenes with female protagonists, Artemisia Gentileschi was one of the most prominent artists of the Baroque movement, backed by the patronages of the House of Medici and Charles I of England in a time especially hostile toward woman artists. Yet, despite her death in the seventeenth century, misogyny persists even in contemporary scholarship of Gentileschi. In both of their articles, Whitney Chadwick and Mary D. Garrard deliberate how gender and…