Published in 1947, Artemisia is the most famous and most admired book by the Italian novelist, short story writer, and art and literary critic, Anna Banti. Today the only member of the great succession of European Old Masters who was a woman, Artemisia Gentileschi was not an admired, canonical painter when Banti decided to make her the principal character in a novel which cannot be subsumed under the conventional categories of historical novel or fictional biography. Comparable in its intensity with such one-of-a-kind masterpieces as Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Marguerite Yourcenar's The Memoirs of Hadrian, Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower, and Leonid Tsypkin's Summer in Baden-Baden, Artemisia is a masterly, provocative account of creativity and the condition of being a woman.