Brilliant Businesswoman

Reducing Artemisia to her trauma is a trap worth avoiding. She was a shrewd businesswoman who ran workshops in Florence, Rome, Venice, and Naples. She negotiated her own commissions, won royal clients including Charles I of England, and cultivated powerful patrons across Italy and beyond.

She was famous in her own lifetime, then largely erased from the record after her death. For generations her paintings were misattributed to her father or to other men, and her name slipped out of the standard histories — not for lack of quality, but because a woman's authorship was easy to overlook.