Where to See Artemisia Gentileschi Around the World

Born on the 8 July 1593, Artemisia Gentileschi lived in an era where few women studied or worked in the arts. Despite this, she became an accomplished artist with international clients, and the first female member of the Florentine Accademia di Arte del Disegno.

She specialised in painting female characters of allegory, myth, and history. Her work took her from Rome to the Italian city states of Florence, Venice, Naples, and later to England. So, perhaps it's no surprise that her work has entered collections across the world…

Down the road, the National Gallery holds this image of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, a martyr of the early Christian church and a popular saint in art. She holds a broken spiked wheel, which was used to execute her after she rebuked the Roman emperor Maxentius.

This work, which may also be a self portrait, was painted around 1615, when Gentileschi was newly arrived in Rome and looking to promote herself. As Saint Catherine was one of the most holy women in Christianity, this image would have been very popular.

Some of the best known works by Gentileschi are the numerous violent murders and revenge killings that she seems to have depicted with glee, such as this image of Jael and Sisera at the Museum of Fine Art Budapest.

The Israelite Jael killed the Canaanite Sisera by first seducing him, exhausting him by having sex, and then driving a tent peg into his skull while he slept.

Some have connected this story and the gory subject to Gentileschi's own experience of rape at the hands of the artist Agostino Tassi, and her desire for revenge. Historians can't be certain, but it appears she did specialise in artworks that inverted male hierarchy.

At the Detroit Institute of Arts is this dramatic work, Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes. The stark lighting and exaggerated poses of the characters suggest that this is supposed to be a contemporary stage play, rather than a real scene from history.

This painting also offers another explanation for Gentileschi's bloody subjects; that she was responding to the kinds of stories told on stage in theatres of the era. This theory seeks to expand Gentileschi from a one dimensional victim into a woman of the world.

Certainly, many of her works involved references to dramatic productions. This painting of Esther before Ahasuerus recounts the story of the Jewish heroine Esther, who appeared before King Ahasuerus to plead for her people, breaking with court etiquette and risking death.

Yet their highly fashionable contemporary clothing, neo-classical architecture, and the red velvet canopy shows that this scene isn't taking place in the ancient past, but in 1600s Baroque Europe. It could quite easily be a play being acted out in King Charles I court.