ABOUT
THE BOOK

This is a fictional portrait of Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the few female post-Renaissance painters to achieve fame during her own era. After being raped by her painting teacher, she is humiliated in papal court as a loose woman and her testimony is dismissed. When her father arranges a marriage of convenience, Artemisia escapes from Rome to Florence where she discovers a vibrant life in seventeenth-century Italy, is befriended by Galileo, and finds a patron in Cosimo de’Medici II. But marriage clashes with her painterly talents and growing success, and Artemisia begins a lifelong search to reconcile family life, passion and genius.