Bathsheba

By about 1640 Artemisia Gentileschi was living in Naples, then the largest city in the Spanish empire after Madrid, and running one of its busiest painting workshops. The story here comes from the Hebrew scriptures: King David, walking on his palace roof, sees a married woman named Bathsheba bathing below, and sends for her. Artemisia stages the moment before any of that, with Bathsheba attended by her maidservants, the light held on her skin and on the heavy folds of cloth around her. It was a subject she returned to more than once, because Naples had a strong market for large canvases of biblical women, and she had built her reputation on exactly these heroines. This version is a big painting, close to three metres tall. It stayed out of public view for a long time and surfaced at auction in Italy in 2011.