David and Bathsheba

Artemisia Gentileschi painted this in Naples in the 1640s and sent it north to Grand Duke Ferdinando II in Florence, who liked it enough to have the composition copied in wool by Pietro Fevere, the Flemish weaver who ran the Medici looms. After that the canvas went into the stores at Pitti and stayed there for the best part of three centuries, rolled up crosswise, which cracked and lifted the paint in long bands. It was restored in 2008 in the Palatine Gallery's own laboratory by three women, who consolidated what had survived instead of repainting the gaps. At the end of the work one of them, Nicola Ann Mac Gregor, uncovered the figure the title depends on. David is there after all, tiny, watching from a distance at the edge of a canvas nearly three metres high that is otherwise given over to Bathsheba and the women attending her.