The Story of a Battle for Greatness.
Artemisia Gentileschi is one of the most fascinating artists in history. Apprenticed at an early age to her father, the seventeenth-century painter Orazio Gentileschi, she rapidly became more famous than he was, for her rich, dramatic canvases. But her fame was tarnished by scandal. At the age of seventeen, she was violently raped by Agostino Tassi, an artist friend whom Orazio had engaged to give his daughter lessons in perspective. On discovering Tassi's betrayal, Orazio took the case to court and there followed, in 1612, eight months of humiliation for Artemisia as the inhabitants of Rome's colourful artists' quarter came to give evidence. Their testimony - frank, partial, often cruel - in this first rape trial ever to be fully documented, made Artemisia and her father notorious.
When Alexandra Lapierre began researching Artemisia's turbulent life, she didn't expect to be drawn into a five-year-long quest that would take her to Rome, Florence, Naples, Venice and London, the city where Orazio died and Artemisia herself finished his last commission for Charles I at Greenwich. But Lapierre's determination to understand Artemisia and her complex rivalry with her father would not let her rest until she had unearthed every scrap of evidence about their lives - including the missing verdict to the trial which had lain hidden in a neglected corner of the Vatican archives. The result is a biography that reads like fiction: the extraordinary story of a seventeenth-century woman and the art world she conquered - so vivid that you can hear the din on the streets and smell the paint in the studio.
