(WARNING - CONTAINS MILD SPOILER) When the closing caption tells us that Artemisia later reconciled with her father and achieved fame and fortune, it's tempting to wonder why the film has chosen to concentrate then on this narrow early period in her life. It's a confused, apparently overly simplistic movie, the soft-core seductive pleasures of which (with more nudity by far than most recent movies) smother everything else . Her quest to be allowed to paint the male naked body, and her bull-headedness in pushing for her rights as an artist (and, by refusing to betray her older lover even when she finds out he's already married, as a woman) is undercut by the general lack of rigour and by the fact that Cervi's resemblance to Demi Moore keeps underlining the superficial self-assertion-oriented modern slant of the whole thing; it's lacking in period flavour or context. None of this is incompatible with entertainment if only because it rattles on so cheerfully, but it leaves little deeper impression (the end, when she takes the grid from his studio and for the first time we see it through her eyes, is a particularly tired rendition of the familiar theme of the woman gaining control of the image) and is not convincing or well judged.
