Disobedient

by Elizabeth Fremantle

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Rome, 1611. Artemisia Gentileschi has grown up in the workshop of her father Orazio, learning to paint in a profession controlled by men and denied the formal training available to male artists. Her ability is unmistakable, but her ambitions remain subject to her father’s decisions. When the painter Agostino Tassi enters the household as a tutor, admiration and dependence give way to sexual violence and betrayal.

Artemisia’s refusal to remain silent leads to a public trial in which her conduct is examined more harshly than that of the man she accuses. She must endure family pressure, hostile legal procedures and the threat that scandal will end her career. The novel uses her struggle for justice and artistic independence to trace how the experiences later associated with her powerful biblical heroines were formed in the studios and courts of early seventeenth-century Rome.