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But if the idea of a feminine sensibility—fluffy, vaporous, pink-and-white—retreats before most of the work in this show, the sense of female experience does not. That theme is announced almost at once, in the work of Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652), the daughter of a well-known Tuscan painter, who became, as Nochlin puts it, "the first woman in the history of Western art to make a significant and undeniably important contribution to the art of her time." Gentileschi's Susanna and the Elders (1610) is a work of staggering precocity, painted when she was 17. Beauty spied on and plotted against by randy, intrusive old men—this biblical incident was a hot and obvious favorite with late-Renaissance patrons, but Gentileschi turned it into an image of sexual fear in a way that, one suspects, no man could readily have imagined. The stocky, naked Susanna writhes as if in pain from the oppressive, whispering conclave above her; the picture is about impending rape, a common subject, but unique in being perceived from the woman's eyeline. Heavily influenced by Caravaggio, Gentileschi's paintings were determinedly "unfeminine," full of darkness, gore and gesticulation: witness the candlelit hand and shadowed face of Judith, like a waning moon, in Judith and Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (circa 1625). A few other late-Renaissance women, like Sofonisba Anguissola, got more commissions than the forthright Artemisia; they moved with more ease at court and could play society better. But there is good reason to regard Artemisia Gentileschi as the most distinguished woman painter to have worked between the 16th century and the end of the 19th, when Sonia Delaunay and Georgia O'Keeffe were born.