Artemisia Gentileschi is by far the most famous woman artist of the pre-modern era. Her art addresses issues that resonate today, such as sexual violence and women’s problematic access to political power. Her forceful paintings with their vigorous female protagonists have excited modern audiences, especially feminists. This book breaks new ground by placing the artist in the context of women’s political history, and the feminist protest that was bubbling in early modern Europe. Mary D. Garrard discusses recently discovered paintings, offers fresh perspectives on known works and examines the artist anew in the context of early modern feminism. This beautifully illustrated book, now in paperback, gives a full portrait of a strong woman and a great artist who fought back through her art.

"In this admirable work, at once passionately argued and lucidly written, Professor Garrard effectively considers the social, psychological, and formal complexity of the shaping and reshaping not only of the artist's feminine and feminist identity in the misogynistic society of the seventeenth century, but also of that identity in the discipline of art history today."--Steven Z. Levine, author of "Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection

"Mary Garrard's detailed investigation into attribution problems in two Artemisia Gentileschi paintings brilliantly interweaves connoisseurship, constructions of gender and artistic identity, and historical analysis. The result is a richer and more nuanced vision of the best-known female artist in western history before the modern era, and an important contribution to feminist studies." --Whitney Chadwick, author of "Women, Art, and Society

"In her new book, Garrard has taken two bold steps that challenge much received opinion in the 'discipline' of art history. Analyzing two of Gentileschi's least violent but most moving images, Garrard argues that the painter's personality is discernible no less in the subjects and their interpretation than in the 'style' of the works; consideration of both aspects is essential to understanding the meaning of these extraordinary pictures and her authorship. Perhaps even more important, Garrard makes crystal clear that Artemisia Gentileschi, far from a 'good woman painter, ' was one of the major visual thinkers of her time."--Irving Lavin, co-author with Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, of "La Liturgia d'Amore: Immagini dal Canto dei Cantici nell'arte di Cimabue, Michelangelo, e Rembrandt (Modena, 2000)

"Developing herearlier methodologies and revising some conclusions, Garrard clarifies her distinct theoretical approach and voice among feminist critiques of art history. In this text, which reads in part like a forensic mystery, Garrard builds not only an argument for attributions of particular works, but a new understanding of Gentileschi herself at a particular moment in history."--Hilary Robinson, editor of "Visibly Female: Feminism and Art Today

"One of our most distinguished feminist art historians brings contemporary gender studies to bear on traditional paintings connoisseurship to show how attributions to female artists have often been governed by tacit cultural assumptions about the limitations of women. Her case makes compelling reading for anyone interested in early modern society, culture, women and art in Italy, and in the problematics of feminism and art history."--Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, author of "Leonardo e la Scultura

"By revealing a great woman painter's ways of expressing uniqueness while negotiating expectations, Mary Garrard helps each of us with the subtleties of remaining authentic while living in the world. Artemisia Gentileschi around 1622 is art history to live by."--Gloria Steinem

Artemisia Gentileschi, widely regarded as the most important woman artist before the modern period, was a major Italian Baroque painter of the seventeenth century and the only female follower of Caravaggio. This first full-length study of her life and work shows that her powerfully original treatments of mythic-heroic female subjects depart radically from traditional interpretations of the same themes.

This volume is the third in an influential series of anthologies by editors Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard that challenge art history from a feminist perspective. Following their "Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany" (1982) and "The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History" (1992), this new volume identifies female agency as a central theme of recent feminist scholarship. Framed by a lucid and stimulating critical introduction, twenty-three essays on artists and issues from the Renaissance to the present, written in the 1990s and after, offer a nuanced critique of the poststructuralist premises of 1980s feminist art history.The contributors include: Allison Arieff, Janis Bergman-Carton, Babette Bohn, Norma Broude, Anna C. Chave, Julie Cole, Bridget Elliott, Mary D. Garrard, Sheila ffolliott, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Ruth E. Iskin, Geraldline A. Johnson, Amelia Jones, Maud Lavin, Julie Nicoletta, Carol Ockman, Erica Rand, John B. Ravenal, Lisa Saltzman, and Mary D. Sheriff.

Feminist historians of science and philosophy have shown that during the Italian Renaissance, the profound shift in the concept of nature - from an organic worldview to the scientific - was assisted by the gender metaphor that defined nature as female. In this provocative and groundbreaking book, Mary D. Garrard extends this analysis to the history of art and proposes that the larger shift was both anticipated and mediated by the visual arts. In case studies of such major figures as Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Giorgione, and Titian, Garrard examines the changing relationship of art and nature in the Renaissance, and shows how they were cast by artists and theorists as gendered competitors in a steadily escalating rhetoric.

The Old and New Testaments are full of compelling female characters: good wives and bad, courageous heroines, and deceptive - sometimes deadly - femmes fatales. Dangerous Women presents works from the rich holdings of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art that explore different artists' responses to the women of the Bible. Paintings by Pietro da Cortona, Francesco Cairo, and Fede Galizia and others stand as a reminder of how dangerous biblical women have continued to loom large in the modern imagination. These stories in this volume show how narratives of power are constructed, interpreted, and continue to evolve over the course of time. While some women saved their people, were paragons of virtue, or repented, others were purveyors of sin, harlots, and seductresses. Even if it was through their misbehaviour, all of these women - from Mary Magdalene, to Judith and Esther, to Salome and Potiphar's Wife - shaped biblical history.