LE DISOBBEDIENTI

What links Artemisia Gentileschi, raped to eighteen years old from a friend of her father's and later a leading figure in seventeenth-century painting, to an icon of beauty and twentieth-century glamour like Frida Kahlo? What is the connection between Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, forced into exile by the French Revolution, and Charlotte Salomon, persecuted by the Nazis? Is there something that links the elegant Berthe Morisot, to whom Édouard Manet devotes passionate portraits, to the transgressive Suzanne Valadon, the mistress of Toulouse-Lautrec and so many others in Belle Époque Paris? Despite the diversity of historical period, environment and character, one essential trait unites these six female painters: talent first and foremost, but also the strength of desire and the courage to rebel against the rules of the game imposed by society. Each of them, in fact, has been able to arm herself with a special quality of the soul to counter their own fragility and the aggressions of life: ancient feminine resources, such as courage, tenacity, resistance, or vices transformed into virtues, such as restlessness, rebellion and passion. Elisabetta Rasy recounts, with tireless attention to the details of intimacy that draw a destiny, the lives of the six female painters in their irreducible singularity. All of them, in the self-portraits that open the intense pages of the writer, look into the eyes of the reader and invite to discover the audacity with which they fought and won the hard battle to assert themselves - beyond prohibitions, obligations, misunderstandings and prejudices -, changing forever, with their own opera, the image and place of women in the art world.