Porträt eines Ritters des Ordens vom heiligen Stephan

By the time she painted this, around 1619, Artemisia Gentileschi was working in Florence, where she had become the first woman admitted to the city's academy of drawing and had taken on Medici patrons. The sitter is a knight of the Order of Saint Stephen, a Tuscan military order run by the ruling Medici family. Her skill shows in the soft fur trimming his robe and the crisp white ruff at his throat. For a long time the portrait was given to a man, the Medici court painter Justus Sustermans, and her hand in it was forgotten. Then, under the dirt of centuries, restorers uncovered her own signature, faded but still there, and the picture came back to her name.