Madonna and Child

By 1609 Caravaggio himself was gone from Rome. He had killed a man in a brawl three years before and fled the city, but the way he painted, ordinary bodies caught in raking light, had stayed behind and changed everyone. Orazio Gentileschi was one of the painters closest to that new manner, and you can feel it here in the plain weight of the Virgin's arms and the real, sleepy heft of the child on her lap. There is nothing courtly about them. She could be any young mother in Rome shifting a heavy boy who has just dropped off. In these same years Orazio was teaching his teenage daughter Artemisia in the family workshop, and she would soon outgrow him. This picture later entered the royal collection in Bucharest, where it hangs among the Italian paintings gathered by Romania's kings.