If Caravaggio had been raped what would he have painted?

"He locked the room and then threw me on the bed, immobilizing me with one hand on my chest and putting one knee between my thighs so that I could not close them and lifted my clothes, something that cost him a lot of work. He put a hand on me. with a handkerchief in his throat and in his mouth so that he would not scream (…). I scratched his face and pulled his hair ".

It is the story of a rape. Of a sexual assault that took place more than four centuries ago, specifically in the year 1611.

The woman who suffered it was called Artemisia Gentileschi and she was an artist of exceptional talent, as evidenced by the fact that she was the first woman to get into the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, the same institution that Michelangelo passed through. .

But Artemisia was not only raped, she not only had to endure seeing how her aggressor did not serve a single day in jail and her testimony about her aggression was openly questioned. She also suffered the indifference and rejection of the artistic world of her time for the fact of being a woman, she went through the humiliation that many of her paintings were attributed to her father or other male artists and for centuries she endured being considered a mere curiosity. , like a rarity.

In life she painted non-stop and came to enjoy a certain fame.

But after her death in Naples around 1654, Artemisia Gentileschi fell into a long and deep oblivion that has lasted for centuries.

It was only in the second half of the 20th century that her art began to be appreciated by some critics again and her name unearthed.

But, above all, it was as a result of the feminist movement turning this artist into a symbol of the gender struggle in the 70s that Artemisia finally resurrected.