Focus on this artwork and explain the Historical context.
Gentileschi was born in Rome in 1593, just at the start of Baroque painting.  Gentileschi's father, Orazio, was a well-known artist, and Artemisia trained in his workshop for a number of years before creating works herself. In the 1610s, Artemisia was raped by an older member of the workshop, Agostino Tassi, an event which coloured the rest of her life and is reflected in her art, which often shows subjects with a "Power of Women" themes such as  Judith Slaying Holofernes and Salome with the Head of St. John the Baptist. The artist's focus on her work, away from the viewer, highlights the drama of the Baroque period, and the changing role of the artist from craftsperson to singular innovator.Abstract concepts like "Painting" were traditionally represented by female allegorical figures, and therefore the painting was not one that any male painter could present in the same way, as both self-portrait and allegory.  The Self-Portrait was also influenced by the works of Cesare Ripa, most notably his Iconologia, in which he suggests how virtues and abstract concepts should be depicted, with human qualities and appearances.  Ripa said "Painting" should be shown as: “A beautiful woman, with full black hair, disheveled, and twisted in various ways, with arched eyebrows that show imaginative thought, the mouth covered with a cloth tied behind her ears, with a chain of gold at her throat from which hangs a mask, and has written in front "imitation." She holds in her hand a brush, and in the other the palette, with clothes of evanescently covered drapery.” Other than the cloth tied around the mouth, Gentileschi follows this prescription quite accurately.
Cesare Ripa Orazio Judith Slaying Holofernes Baroque painting self-portrait allegory Power of Women