Artemisia Gentileschi

(Born July 8th 1593, Died 1653) Artemisia Gentileschi was the most important woman painter of Early Modern Europe by virtue of the excellence of her work, the originality of her treatment of traditional subjects, and the number of her paintings that have survived (though only thirty-four of a much larger corpus remain, many of them only recently attributed to her rather than to her male contemporaries). She was both praised and disdained by contemporary critical opinion, recognized as having genius, yet seen as monstrous because she was a woman exercising a creative talent thought to be exclusively male. Since then, in the words of Mary D. Garrard, she "has suffered a scholarly neglect that is almost unthinkable for an artist of her caliber." 
The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi For Feminists and Other Thinking People 
Gentileschi, Artemisia, Bal, M. The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and Other Thinking People (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005).