Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting

By the early 1630s Artemisia Gentileschi was one of the very few women in Europe running her own painting workshop, with patrons who would soon include the Medici, the Spanish crown, and Charles I of England. This canvas in Rome shows a painter presenting herself as Painting itself, palette and brush in hand, in the guise the writer Cesare Ripa had prescribed for the personification of the art. There is a second, more famous version of that idea, the one Artemisia made in London around 1638 that still hangs in the British Royal Collection. This Roman picture is the quieter cousin, and scholars have never fully agreed on whose hand it is. Some read it as Artemisia's own, pointing to the lace and the handling of cloth found elsewhere in her work. Others give it to the workshop of the French painter Simon Vouet, who was in Rome in those years. The surface makes the argument harder, the paint worn and the face badly rubbed despite a cleaning in the 1950s, and the picture can be traced with certainty only back to 1935, when the Barberini collection passed to the Italian state.