The passion of Artemisia – Susan vreeland

estselling author Susan Vreeland follows up her luminous debut novel, Girl in Hyacinth Blue, with

the remarkable fictional portrait of Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the few female post-Renaissance painters to achieve fame during her own era. After being raped by her painting teacher,

she is humiliated in papal court as a loose womar and her tes-timony is dismissed. When her father arranges i marriage of convenience, Artemisia escapes from Rome to Florence where she discovers a vibrant life in seventeenth-century Italy, is befriended by Galileo, and finds a patron in Cosimo de' Medici II. But marriage clashes with her painterly talents and growing success, and Artemisia begins a lifelong search to rec-

oncile family life, passion, and genius.