Justice embracing Peace

Psalm 85 has a line that painters liked because it can be staged literally. Mercy and truth are met together, it runs, and justice and peace have kissed each other. This small round panel, about 25 centimetres across, does that and nothing else. Two heads fill the circle, leaves at one edge, the glint of a blade at the other, and the kiss is the entire subject. The picture belongs to a private owner. Almost everything known about it comes from two winters of exhibition, at the Palazzo Reale in Milan from September 2011 and then at the Musee Maillol in Paris the following spring, where the curators Roberto Contini and Francesco Solinas listed it plainly as Artemisia Gentileschi, oil on wood, about 1635. She was working in Naples in those years. Where the panel was before 2011, and where it is now, has not been published.