Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy

By the early 1620s Artemisia Gentileschi was one of the very few women in Europe running her own painting workshop, taking commissions in Rome from cardinals and princes under her own name. Here she gives us Mary Magdalene alone, head thrown back, eyes closed, lost in religious rapture, a saint painted with startling physical directness rather than pious calm. Then the picture vanished. For centuries it hung unrecognised in a family's house in the south of France, its author forgotten, until a scholar spotted an old photograph of it in a Sienese archive in 2011 and traced the original. In 2026 the National Gallery of Art in Washington acquired it, the first painting by Artemisia to enter that collection.