Artemisia Gentileschi was born in Rome on 8 July 1593, the eldest child of the Tuscan painter Orazio Gentileschi. Artemisia was introduced to painting in her father's workshop, showing much more talent than her brothers, who worked alongside her. Orazio was a great encouragement to his daughter since, during the 17th century, women were considered not to have the intelligence to work.
She was raped, which strongly influenced her paintings to pour out her pain.
She  was the most important woman painter of Early Modern Europe by virtue of the excellence of her work, the originality of her treatment of traditional subjects, and the number of her paintings that have survived. She was both praised and disdained by contemporary critical opinion, recognized as having genius, yet seen as monstrous because she was a woman exercising a creative talent thought to be exclusively male. she "has suffered a scholarly neglect that is almost unthinkable for an artist of her caliber."