"Mary D. Garrard, author of the acclaimed Artemisia Gentileschi, furthers her study of the seventeenth-century artist in this groundbreaking investigation of two little-known paintings. Taking as case studies the Seville Mary Magdalene and the Burghley House Susanna and the Elders, paintings of circa 1621-22 attributed to Artemisia, Garrard examines the ways that identity, gender, and market pressures interact both in the artist's work and in the criticism and connoisseurship that have surrounded it.

Garrard explains differences in the artist's presentation of women in the two paintings as motivated by the same thing: Artemisia's intense ambition to excel as an artist in a culture that insisted upon sexualizing her identity. She describes the complex interaction between the artist and her audience as a reactive dynamic of creation and reception that continues into the present era."--BOOK JACKET.