It is just after 10 a.m. at London’s National Gallery on March 10, 1914.

A woman in a pinstriped suit, a long skirt and double-breasted jacket, enters Room 17 carrying a meat cleaver.

She approaches one of the museum’s most important paintings, The Rokeby Venus by Spanish painter Diego Velázquez, an oil painting created between 1647 and 1651. It depicts the Goddess of Beauty naked and reclining, her body seen from behind as she gazes into a mirror held by her son Cupid, which reflects her face.

The woman’s name is Mary Richardson. Born in Belleville, Canada, on the eastern shore of Lake Ontario, she studied music and art history. She uses the knife to slash the protective glass over the painting, striking the Venus eight times.

The episode became famous because it was part of the campaign by the Women’s Social and Political Union for women’s suffrage, led by the celebrated suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst.

The attack was a response to the violence suffered by suffragettes in general and Pankhurst in particular. Richardson was sentenced to six months in prison for vandalism.

Velázquez’s painting is the artist’s only surviving nude, and it had long been censored by the Spanish Inquisition precisely because it depicted a naked woman, even though she is shown from behind. The Venus’s bare backside appears natural and softly proportioned in its whiteness; her face is blurred in the mirror, a mirror in which she cannot actually see herself but instead appears to look directly at the viewer. The graceful curve of her hips is perfect, with neither excess flesh nor muscle, conforming to the standards of abstract beauty, yesterday and today.

Richardson made two statements about the attack. In the first, she said she wanted to avenge Pankhurst and the punishments she had endured, describing her leader as a symbol comparable to the Venus.

“Justice is an element of beauty just as much as color and the contours of a canvas,” she said after her arrest.

The second statement came years later, in her autobiography, when she acknowledged that the Venus had been painted solely for the pleasure of men looking at her.

The episode captures the meaning of the word “rebellion” particularly well: a deliberate, considered action that turns a political principle into an explosive and deeply consequential moment.

As Richardson slashed the canvas with her knife, she was also drawing a comparison between the body of a living woman — Pankhurst, tormented by political repression, along with all the other women fighting for the right to vote — and the imagined, idealized artistic bodies of women represented through the “male gaze.”

In Scrivere femminista (Writing Feminist, NOT, 2025), feminist thinker Azélie Fayolle draws a distinction between the female gaze, women’s view of the world, and the feminist gaze, women’s political view of the world. The latter does not merely change the perspective; it fills it with a clear political meaning — that of women who, over the centuries, have demanded to be recognized as legal subjects with rights.

Is a life worth more than a painting? Is a civil cause worth more than a work of art? Is an imaginary, stereotyped body worth more than a flesh-and-blood existence, with all its flaws and peculiarities?

When asked to account for her actions, Richardson said it had not been a simple or easy gesture. Having studied art history and being an educated woman, she saw it not simply as an act of anger and protest, but also as a sacrifice.

Her action was condemned from many quarters, including by women in the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, which took a more conservative line. The National Gallery was closed for several weeks, while newspaper accounts attacking Richardson used language closer to murder than vandalism. In the years that followed, the suffragist activist was imprisoned and subjected to one of the most brutal practices of the period: force-feeding, imposed on women like her who went on hunger strike.

The hunger strikers were seated in chairs with their heads tilted backward and forcibly fed through a tube and funnel. The torturous procedures left many of them close to choking on their own vomit and caused permanent damage to their throats and esophagi.

Meanwhile, a response to the rebellion was delivered: Velázquez’s Venus was restored and returned to the National Gallery, while Richardson was remembered as “that woman” whose rebellion had offended art, decency and morality.

But what kind of “rebellion” has meaning if not one that is indecent, determined and dramatic, one that goes beyond merely rolling up one’s cuffs or slipping down a side street?

The subject will be explored at the Inquiete Festival in Rome, which runs through Sept. 27. This year marks the 10th anniversary of an event that brings together women writers from around the world.

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