‘Non piangere.’ Don’t cry. These are the opening words of Anna Banti’s novel Artemisia. Who is talking? And when? The first-person voice – that of the author – writes ‘this August day’, omitting both the date and the year, but these are not hard to fill in: 4 August 1944. The Nazi occupation of Florence, following the collapse of the Mussolini Government, has taken its appalling, final turn. At four o’clock that morning, the Germans, who had begun evacuating the city, detonated the mines they had set along the Arno, managing to blow up all the venerable bridges except the Ponte Vecchio and to wreck many houses on or near the river, among them the house on the Borgo San Jacopo where Banti lived, under the ruins of which lay the manuscript of her new novel, nearly completed, about Artemisia Gentileschi.

‘Non piangere.’ Don’t cry. Who is talking? And where? It’s the author, still in her nightgown (as in a dream, she writes), sitting on a gravel path in the Boboli Gardens – on the promontory on the south side of the Arno – sobbing, telling herself not to cry, and finally ceasing to cry, stunned by the ever sharper realisation of what was destroyed in the havoc of a few hours before. Florence’s centro storico is still burning. There is fighting, gunfire. (It will be another seven days before the whole city is liberated by the Allies.) Refugees have clustered higher up, at the Forte di Belvedere, from which she descended a little earlier; here, she writes, there is no one nearby. Soon she will stand and look at the rubble lining the Arno. And a whole day will pass. After the ‘white troubled dawn’ in the Boboli Gardens of the first lines of the novel, it will be noon (there’s a reference to the South African soldiers who entered the city six hours earlier) and Banti will have taken refuge below in the Palatine gallery of the Palazzo Pitti, and then dusk, when she will be once more at the Forte di Belvedere (where, she says, people are risking being machine-gunned to lie out on the grass) and from that commanding view she will continue grieving for Florence and the death all around her, and for the manuscript that exists now only in her fragile memory.

‘Non piangere.’ Don’t cry. Who is talking to whom? It is the stricken author talking to herself, telling herself to be brave. But she is also addressing the heroine of her novel, ‘my companion from three centuries ago’, who had lived again on the pages in which Banti had told her story. And, as she mourns, images of Artemisia surge through Banti’s mind, first of ‘a disillusioned and despairing Artemisia’, middle-aged, in Naples, not long before her death, then of Artemisia as a child in Rome, ten years old, ‘her delicate features expressing pride and ill-treatment’. Mocking the loss of the manuscript, ‘the images continue to flow with a mechanical, ironical ease, secreted by this shattered world.’ Artemisia is lost, but Artemisia, her lamenting phantom presence, is everywhere, irrepressible. Soon – Artemisia’s distress, and Banti’s, are too keen – the anguished first-person voice of the author makes way for the voice of Artemisia, and then gives itself permission to become intermittently, then for longer stretches, the third-person voice that narrates the painter’s life.

For what the reader holds is, of course, the novel written – written again – in the following three years, and published in late 1947, when Anna Banti (the pen name of Lucia Lopresti) was 52 years old. Although she was to publish 16 works of fiction and autobiographical prose before her death at the age of 90, in 1985, this – her second novel – is the one that assures her a place in world literature.