The seven-month trial that followed was gruesome. To verify the truth of her rape account, Artemisia was subjected to torture in the form of the sibille, a kind of thumb-screw where chords are fastened to rings around the fingers of one hand and then tightened to excruciating degrees. It was the seventeenth-century version of a lie detector test, the legal gold standard for truthfulness of its time. In agreeing to the sibille, Artemisia not only accepted terrible pain but also risked damage to her hand, an unthinkable fate for an artist. But to be believed, she had to endure it.
