Artemisia

Rome 1610. Leave the convent, become a painter, depict human beings in their could a young 17-year-old woman in the baroque period foster any wilder dreams? Daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, a disciple of Caravaggio, Atemisia is determined to succeed in her ambitions. Access to the Academy or the use of male models remains desperately off-limits to her. She will paint clandestinely, studying anatomy while at the same time discovering the world of the senses and the pleasures of the flesh. hen she encounters Agostino Tassi, the mysterious libertine artist from Florence and colleague of Orazio. Infatuated, Artemisia obtains permission to learn perspective from Agostino. But what the worldly and lustful master will teach his young student, filled with volcanic yet innocent desires, is the supreme embrace of two bodies that are no loner objects to be represented on canvas, but the living seat of pleasure and pain. Crushed by the scandal, drunk with fatherly rage, Orazio offers his daughter as a sacrifice to the court and institutes proceedings against Agostino for rape. Sickened and deeply wounded by her father’s ruthlessness, at once the victim and the accused, finds her strength in art, immortalizing her passion and her tragic story in the most famous of her paintings, Judith Decapitating Holofernes. The extraordinary odyssey of one of the most celebrated woman artists in history, Artemisia is a mesmerizing historical panorama and a liberal interpretation of the Golden Globe-nominated film by Agnès Merlet.