As Sheila Barker points out in the introduction to this collection of essays, there has been no shortage of scholarship concerning Artemisia Gentileschi in recent years. And much of it has teetered between examining the artist from a feminist viewpoint or not, creating rifts in attribution and interpretation that seem impossible to bridge. There is a certain irony in this, because it was the publication of Mary D. Garrard's groundbreaking, staunchly (and, to this reviewer's mind, rightly) feminist monograph, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (1989), that propelled this growth in scholarship. Earlier studies, primarily by Roberto Longhi (1916) and R. Ward Bissell (1968), as well as Anna Banti's fictionalized biography (1947), brought some attention to Gentileschi, but this was often in relation to Caravaggio or her then better-known painter father, Orazio. Following Garrard's monograph—and her Artemisia Gentileschi around 1622 (2001)—the literature grew exponentially. This has been punctuated by the at-times-contradictory views in Bissell's Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art (1999) and the exhibition on father and daughter curated by Keith Christiansen and Judith W. Mann (2001), as well as archival evidence like Francesco Solinas's critical edition of Gentileschi's letters (2011) and the necessary corrective to part of his interpretation by Elizabeth Cohen (2015), in addition to many more exhibitions, books, and articles, too numerous to list.

Among the most important of these recent publications is Barker's volume, the proceedings of the Medici Archive Project's Third Annual Jane Fortune Conference, “Artemisia Gentileschi: Interpreting New Evidence, Assessing New Attributions,” held at the Palazzo Pitti and the British Institute in Florence in 2015. Ten of the fourteen talks, by an international team of scholars, have been expanded and published here, together with one additional essay. Barker's introduction, “What is True about Artemisia?,” outlines the inherent challenges for Gentileschi scholarship, and insists on the need for methodologically diverse examinations that foreground knowledge of both the artist and her oeuvre. This is followed by Garrard's keynote lecture, “Identifying Artemisia: The Archive and the Eye,” a brilliantly argued study that should become essential reading in the field. In this, Garrard dissects recent attributions, and criticism, to counter the belittling of female ingenuity and skill through her careful examination of both paintings and documents, arriving at what she describes as “the intrinsic Artemisia” (13), a highly skilled and inventive artist who had enormous ambitions for herself and her art.

The remaining ten essays cover topics ranging from individual paintings and subjects and their roles in Gentileschi's career, as well as in Italian art overall (Allegory of Inclination, Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, Medea, Achlles in the Palace of Lycomedes, Madonna of the Svezzamento, Susanna and the Elders), to Gentileschi's finances; her knowledge of literature, music, and theater; her life and work in Naples; her connections to women artists associated with the Barberini family; and her gendered reputation. These topics, however, are fluid, and the essays offer a comprehensive treatment of many of the paintings, with the newly rediscovered Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy being a particularly vivid example, referenced in multiple essays and examined by a team of conservators, who provide valuable insights into Gentileschi's working methods. The essays cover every period of Gentileschi's career—from her youth in Rome to her maturity in Florence, Rome, Venice, Naples, and London—as well as her connections to both male and female artists, before and during her lifetime. An overarching theme—indeed, a continuation of the conference premise—is the need to look critically at both the paintings long assigned to Gentileschi and newer attributions to establish and understand her chronology, and to reveal the astonishingly creative ways in which she conceived her subjects.

The volume is beautifully designed, with extensive reproductions of both Gentileschi's paintings and a wide range of comparanda, though the omission of a complete bibliography, in favor of a list of “works cited” at the end of each essay, is unfortunate. But this is a small criticism; Barker's volume will be vital for Gentileschi scholars—and scholars of the Italian Baroque and early modern women in general—for many years to come.