Hands across three centuries

Artemisia Gentileschi (b. 1593) is a feminist icon of such power that she has penetrated even to these islands, for instance in a book by our own feminist icon, Germaine Greer. Not only was Artemisia almost the only woman artist of her age, but while still in her teens she was raped by a fellow-artist, and again did what no woman had done before, standing up in court and testifying against her attacker. Her most famous painting, ‘Judith and Holofernes’, was a sweet revenge: it shows the biblical heroine hacking off the head of the invader as he sleeps, with streams of blood flowing towards our feet.

This is not the only historical reality Artemisia draws on. Anna Banti (b. 1895, real name Lucia Lopresti) first finished the novel in the spring of 1944, at the height of the battle for Italy. That summer her house, like many others in Florence, was bombed by the Germans, and the manuscript buried in the ruins.