Artemisia - Alexandra Lapierre

Alexandra Lapierre had been haunted by the rich, iconoclastic paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi ever since she first saw them. Little did she know, when she started researching Artemisia's turbulent life, that she would be drawn into a fascinating, five-year-long quest which would take her to Rome, Florence, Naples, Venice and London and to neglected corners of the Vatican archives where she would finally unearth the verdict to one of the most notorious rape trials in history. In the early 1600s, Rome was a magnificent building site. Artists flocked there to furnish the new palaces and churches with paintings and the crowded artists' quarter became a place of fierce rivalries and passions. In order to bring to life this frenzied and fascinating milieu, Lapierre has written a biography that reads like a novel. She recreates the public and domestic lives of the seventeenth century artist so vividly that you can hear the din on the streets and smell the paint in the studio - and in one studio in particular where Orazio Gentileschi and his daughter Artemisia battle with each other to become the greatest painters of their time.