(b Rome, 8 July 1593; d Naples, after Jan. 1654). Daughter of Orazio Gentileschi. She was among the first Italian female painters whose artistic achievements were praised by her contemporaries. She worked for several European rulers and ran an impressive workshop during her more than 20 years in Naples. She worked in Rome, Florence, Venice and Naples, and spent a brief period in London in the late 1630s. From the beginning she refused to limit herself to portraits, still-lifes and small devotional pictures, the staples of most women artists in the 16th and 17th centuries, but established herself immediately as an ambitious history painter and was also highly sought after as a painter of the female nude.
Ann Sutherland Harris and Judith W. Mann