a tutor, showed a talent for writing and
reading in Latin. Formal education was re-
served for boys, however, and her parents
intended for her to enter a convent. As her
fame spread beyond her home town, and
all the way to the royal court of Spain,
Queen Isabella summoned her for Latin
lessons and to tutor Princess Juana. Histo-
rians believe Galindo may have served the
queen as an adviser. She founded a hospi-
tal for the poor in the capital of Madrid,
whose leaders commemorated her by nam-
ing a district of the city La Latina. Her ap-
pointment as tutor to the queen led to an-
other as a professor at Salamanca, where
for many years she suffered the jibes and
condescension of scholars and fellow lec-
turers at the all-male institution. She au-
thored volumes of Latin poetry and also
wrote commentaries on the works of Aris-
totle; at the university she lectured in
rhetoric, philosophy, and medicine, while
advocating equal educational opportunity
for girls and women.
Gentileschi, Artemisia ......................
(1593–1652)
Painter of the Italian Baroque period
whose masterful religious works reflected
a turbulent life. Born in Rome as the
daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, a leading
artist of Rome, she may have collaborated
with her father on his works from a young
age. Her first picture to be signed isSus-
anna and the Elders, which she completed
in 1610. About the time she was working
on this painting, at age seventeen, she was
raped by Agostino Tassi, a landscape
painter and colleague of her father, who
had hired Tassi to tutor her. When Tassi
refused to marry her despite his promises,
Orazio Gentileschi brought him to court.
During the trial, in which Tassi was found
guilty and sentenced to a year in prison,
Artemisia was forced to recount her as-
sault while under torture.
In 1612 Gentileschi moved to Florence,
where she became the first woman ac-
cepted into the prestigious Florentine
Academy of Design. She had married the
Florentine artist Antonio di Vicenzo Stiat-
tesi in 1612 but separated from her hus-
band after a short time and lived the rest
of her life as an independent woman and
painter. In Florence she enjoyed the pa-
tronage of Duke Cosimo II and gained a
reputation as a woman artist unafraid of
rendering powerful and violent scenes
from biblical and classical traditions, sub-
jects that many believed were beyond the
abilities of a female artist. Michelangelo
Buonarroti, the nephew of the Renaissance
artist, commissioned her to paint the ceil-
ing of a picture gallery in the Casa Buonar-
roti, his uncle’s home.
Despite her growing fame in Florence,
well-paying commissions were given to
other artists, and with poverty threatening
Gentileschi settled again in Rome in 1620.
She received few commissions for major
works, but found herself in greater de-
mand as a portraitist, a genre thought
more suitable for a woman. In about 1627
she moved to Venice, where she absorbed
the Venetian painters’ taste for subtle ef-
fects of light, shown in her paintingsThe
Sleeping VenusandEsther and Ahasuerus.
In about 1630 she moved to Naples, where
she spent the rest of her life. In the late
1630s she also spent time in England,
where she worked as a painter at the court
of King Charles I and helped her father
create ceiling paintings for the queen’s
royal palace in Greenwich.
Gentileschi’s pictures express her fasci-
nation with the theme of women strug-
gling and eventually triumphing over ad-
versity. An early work,Judith and HerGentileschi, Artemisia