Born in Rome as the daughter of the painter Orazio Gentileschi, who also became her major teacher, she was a teenage prodigy who had completed several paintings of her own at the age of 17. 

One of this early works is Susannah and the Elders (1610) which dates not long after that Agostino Tasso, a colleague of her father, had raped her. Gentileschi's painting differs significantly from the traditional artistic treatment of this often-depicted story, emphasizing Susannah's distress at being spied upon, rather than the voyeur's delight in peeking. 

The rape was followed by a vicious trial, where Artemisia was questioned and later tortured to make sure she was telling the truth. But in the end Tassi was imprisoned and Artemisia’s reputation restored. 

Shortly after the trial, Gentileschi married, moved to Florence, and had a son. She introduced the Caravaggesque style of painting to the Florentines and, during this period, created one of her most dramatic baroque compositions, Judith Decapitating Holofernes. This gruesomely realistic work shows Judith and her maidservant in the act of slicing off the head of Holofernes. It is one of at least seven paintings by Gentileschi depicting this biblical story in which Judith seduces and murders the marauder Holofernes with his own sword. 

Artemisia lived an unusually autonomous life for a women of her time. She set up her own atelier and learned to read. In later years she apparently lived as a single mother, travelled all over Italy and was court painter to the king of England. 

In her day Gentileschi was known mainly as a portraitist, but her reputation now rests on her impressive full-scale religious paintings, marked by her sophisticated understanding of anatomy and perspective, and her higly personal flair for the dramatic.