In Baroque paintings, women’s hands are often depicted as pale, delicate and limp – in other words, stereotypically feminine. This is not so in Artemisia Gentileschi’s work. In all of her paintings, women do anything that was believed to be beyond their capabilities: wield swords, resist attackers, even grip instruments with reasonable force. Gentileschi was not the first, but she was certainly at the forefront of a long history of women fighting for recognition of their intrinsic strength.
Today, we are lucky to live in a world where our hands are not under quite so much scrutiny. We have more freedom than we’ve ever had before, and we owe it to the countless women before our time who blazed the trail. Our fate rests in our own hands now. For an audio recording visit: https://soundcloud.com/christina-jane-george/hands-for-flute-and-piano
