Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–c. 1656) was among the first women painters to gain international fame in a world dominated by men. She trained in her painter father's workshop, inherited Caravaggio's revolution of sharp light and shadow (tenebrism) directly, and turned it into her own powerful language. She was the first woman admitted to an academy in Florence and supplied works to the courts of Europe.

Her best-known work is "Judith Slaying Holofernes," treating a scene from the Bible. Judith is the Hebrew heroine who, to save her people, kills the enemy commander Holofernes in his tent. The subject had been painted by many before; but Artemisia's version is startlingly different. Her Judith is neither shy nor disgusted; sleeves rolled up, putting her whole weight into it, she wields the sword like someone coolly finishing a task. Her maidservant does not flee the scene either but helps to pin the victim down. The light, as in Caravaggio, draws from the darkness only what is needed — the straining arms, the spurting blood, the resolute faces.

The power of this painting comes, besides its technical mastery, from the authority it carries: the female figures here are not the object of a man's fantasy but the agents of the action. Artemisia's own life casts its shadow too; the rape she suffered in her youth and the humiliating trial she then endured are documented. Modern commentators see in these works the expression of an anger and an agency — but the painting has an artistic power that cannot be reduced to biography.

Long left in the shadow of her father or other men, Artemisia was reassessed in the late twentieth century as one of the most important Baroque masters in the history of art; she stands too at the centre of debates about the place of women's experience and agency in art.