Which Baroque woman painter's Judith Slaying Holofernes stunned Florence?

Artemisia Gentileschi painted the subject at least twice, and the Uffizi version of about 1620 is the one people mean. Everyone painted Judith. What almost nobody else painted was the physical work of it: two women bracing against the bed, the maidservant pinning Holofernes down with her whole weight rather than standing by with a bag, and Judith leaning back out of the way of the arterial spray with her sleeves pushed up. It is a picture about leverage.

Her life is unusually documented because of a court case. In 1611, aged seventeen, she was raped by the painter Agostino Tassi, a colleague of her father's. The seven-month trial transcript survives. During it she was tortured with cords tightened around her fingers - a routine test of whether a witness was lying - and went on repeating that what she had said was true. Tassi was convicted and the sentence was never enforced.

The career deserves the attention the biography usually takes. She was the first woman admitted to Florence’s Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, ran a busy workshop in Naples, negotiated her own commissions in letters that survive and are extremely sharp about money, and worked for a time at the English court. She was painting professionally for some forty years.