The nineteenth-century writer Anna Brownwell Jameson, after reflecting upon Artemisia’s Judith and Holofernes (Uffizi), described Artemisia as a painter of “atrocious fidelity,” who could depict blood and gore dispassionately day in and day out (174). Later, Roberto Longhi wondered in print about the same picture: “how could a woman paint all this?” (174). The painter who relishes the depiction of arcing spurts of blood from a decapitation is the Artemisia typically celebrated in modern art history textbooks. As Jesse M. Locker argues in the sixth chapter, a long-standing critical tradition concerning Artemisia’s work, one emerging from Baldinucci’s biography, presented her as just such a painter of marvelous depictions of horror, though later writers such as Jameson expressed more awe than delight at her powers to disgust.

Although this familiar representation of Artemisia as a painter of graphic violence lends itself to the aesthetic preferences of our own day, it is not the only critical tradition in which her work needs to be examined. Rather, the investigation of her early literary reception and intellectual, social, and cultural contexts undertaken in this book brings to life an artist who hobnobbed with the noble ladies in the Spanish court of the Neapolitan viceroy (examined in chapter 1). Artemisia moved in elevated literary and social spheres, forming close contacts with members of little-known academies in Venice (particularly the Accademia degli Incogniti) and Naples, considered in chapters 2, 3, and 4. Poets and writers celebrated the force of her paintings (especially her skills as a colorist) and her beauty. Her wit and accomplishments in the sister arts of music and perhaps theater are also tantalizingly considered here, particularly in chapter 5, which examines her Self-Portrait as a Lute Player (Wadsworth Atheneum) and her Self-Portrait (Galleria Nazionale, Palazzo Barberini). A fascinating investigation of her critical reception in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries follows in chapter 6, and the book concludes with a brief postscript.

Locker’s approach makes plain that to embark on a study of Artemisia’s artistic and intellectual contexts, on her reception and critical fortune, is a task for one who is nearly as intrepid as the painter herself was. To study Artemisia is to enter a realm of considerable debate, particularly concerning the fraught question of the artist’s protofeminist stance, which Locker addresses in the context of her ties to the Incogniti, an institution that took up the question of the nature and virtue of women and supported the feminist writer Arcangela Tarabotti, among others. In spite of formidable hurdles — inconsistencies in the critical tradition or the loss of paintings celebrated by seventeenth-century poets as by Artemisia — Locker is not deterred from a study of Artemisia’s literary culture, understood here both in relation to her critical reception and to her engagement with contemporary literary debates and ideas. He deals deftly with the potential methodological objection — her self-confessed illiteracy in her testimony of the rape trial — by demonstrating that she, like notable male contemporaries (including the fabulously successful Cavaliere d’Arpino), acquired literacy later in life. Limited literacy, Locker asserts, presented no barrier to the acquisition of literary knowledge within the largely oral culture of the seventeenth century.

Considering that recent studies of Artemisia have centered upon the still very large questions of chronology and attribution, as, for instance, concerning the authorship of Susanna and the Elders of ca. 1636–38 (unknown location), alternately attributed to Artemisia or Bernardo Cavallino, this ambitious book opens up new territory in Artemisia studies. Much here is unanticipated and provocative. Readers may be surprised by Locker’s comparison of Artemisia’s Self-Portrait as a Lute Player to contemporary Caravaggesque paintings of gypsy fortune-tellers rather than to Orazio’s famous Lute Player (National Gallery, Washington, DC) or Caravaggio’s, as might be expected; or the interpretation of Artemisia’s Esther Before Ahasuerus (Metropolitan Museum of Art) as a picture gently poking fun at men by representing a seemingly spineless king dressed in outdated and overly ornamented costume. Locker’s book provides precious insight into Artemisia’s ties to seventeenth-century academic culture, into the breadth of literary admiration for her work, and into her intellectual and artistic milieu.