Disobedient: The gripping feminist retelling of a seventeenth century heroine forging her own destiny

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I do enjoy a story that dusts off an important female figure from history to shine the light in our contemporary world. Disobedient by Elizabeth Fremantle is a fictional novel based on the life of baroque female painter Artemisia Gentileschi, set in Rome in the early 17th Century. Disobedient is not easy to read because of what Artemisia Gentileschi, a genius Italian painter has to deal with as a female in late 16th and early 17th century Rome.

Orazio is a talented artist, heavily influenced by the more famous Caravaggio, but it quickly becomes obvious even to him that his daughter’s work is better than his own. This is a historical novel about the teenage years of Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653) during which time she was raped and was forced to endure truth testing by torture in the subsequent rape trial. Elizabeth Fremantle homes in on the infamous rape case that tarnished Artemisia’s adolescence even as it ultimately freed her to become one of the most accomplished artists of her era. This book will stay with me for a long time, to remember Artemisia's courage in the face of her horrible trials and her triumphs.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. It brought the world that this artist struggled in to full life and showed how she continued to rise to make a name for herself eventually.

Perfecting her craft takes time, and one day a mysterious and handsome painting tutor decides to help her hone her skills. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The book makes Gentileschi's father, Orazio, into a bumbling idiot with no talent, even though several years after the events of this book take place, he becomes a noted patron of Queen Henrietta Maria, the woman after whom Maryland was named. Erotic elements of paintings like Caravaggio’s “Judith Beheading Holofernes” are frequently situated side-by-side with the double standards of strict piety and virtue pounded into the very women who are sheltered from looking upon such paintings or hearing the Biblical story they're based on. Elizabeth Fremantle is the acclaimed author of Sisters of Treason, Queen's Gambit, Watch the Lady, and The Poison Bed (also available from Pegasus Books) and she has contributed to Vogue, the Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and the Sunday Times (London).Artemisia wants to become an artist but she lives in a mans world,which includes her father following rules,. All that wonderful characterisation aside, this novel is fast paced, exciting, horrifying, gruesome, infuriating and while I cannot admit to ever having a keen interest in the history of art, you guessed it I’m off down a carmine red rabbit hole. What we do know is that she was tortured during the trial , a painful torture involving breaking the fingers of the person and that this could have affected her talent. The feminist element is strong and forceful in this book, downtrodden yet defiant Artemisia Gentileschi’s life and Fremantle’s interpretation of this feels congruent, heart clenching, and gut wrenching.