Mary Magdalene holding a Skull

This picture had no author for most of its life. It came up at a sale in Los Angeles in the middle of the 1970s, was recognised as Artemisia Gentileschi's by the art historian Burton Fredericksen in the 1980s, and was published as hers only in 1999, in Ward Bissell's catalogue of her work. It has stayed in private hands, and where it is now has not been made public.

Specialists still disagree about when she painted it, by roughly 15 years. Bissell placed it in her Florentine years, in the 1610s. The 2001 Gentileschi exhibition catalogue argued instead for about 1630 to 1632, just after she moved to Naples, on the resemblance between this head and the Virgin of her Naples Annunciation, which is dated 1630.

Single images of the Magdalene were among the most ordered subjects in 17th-century Italy. Guido Reni and his studio may have produced 15 of them, and more than 20 are given to Guercino. The composition follows one that Cigoli had painted in Rome around 1610, down to the skull at the lower right. One hand rests on her breast and the other on that skull, the two halves of the saint's story held at once.