Attributed to Artemisia Gentileschi
Papal States · Caravaggisti
The story
Attributed to Artemisia Gentileschi is the label for a painting a museum thinks is hers but cannot be sure of. For her the doubt has a long history. After her death her name faded, and her pictures were catalogued for generations under her father Orazio, among the followers of Caravaggio, or under Neapolitan painters. In 1916 the Italian art historian Roberto Longhi published an essay on father and daughter, one of the first studies to treat her as a painter in her own right.
Her working life makes the sorting harder. In Naples, where she settled in the 1630s and spent most of her later years, she ran a workshop and sometimes shared canvases with specialists working in the city, such as Viviano Codazzi, who painted architectural settings around her figures. Her letters from 1649 to 1651 to a Sicilian collector, Don Antonio Ruffo, survive and show her negotiating prices and sizes for the pictures she was painting for him.
