The true story of the first female painter to break into the 17th-century Italian art world with her exotic images. Seventeen-year-old Artemisia inherits her passion for painting from her father, Orazio, a well-known painter in the Florentine tradition. Considered forbidden, a female painter has neither the right to attend classes at the Academy, nor to paint nude models. Artemisia wants to do both, and is persistent in her ambition. This anatomical quest mingles an in an impalpable way with the unleashing of her repressed sexual inhibitions.