Sleeping Cupid

Artemisia Gentileschi is remembered for large, fierce canvases, women like Judith with a sword in hand. This is the opposite kind of object. It is small, painted in oil on a sheet of copper barely the width of a hand, the kind of precious cabinet picture that aristocrats kept close and passed among themselves. Cupid has fallen asleep, his bow and arrows laid aside, love off duty for a while. She made it in the 1620s, when she was running her own workshop and taking private commissions across Italy, and pictures this small on copper were luxury goods, valued for the smooth, enamel-like surface the metal gave. For a long time it stayed in private hands, out of public view. It returned to the wall in 2025, in a Gentileschi retrospective in Paris.