Susanna and the Elders

The date on this canvas is 1610, which makes it the earliest signed work we have from Artemisia Gentileschi, painted when she was about 17 in her father's Roman workshop. Susanna is a story from scripture, a woman bathing who is cornered by two older men threatening to accuse her of adultery unless she yields. Painters usually made it an excuse for a pretty nude. Here the two men lean in over the stone parapet and Susanna twists her whole body away, hands raised, her face closer to real distress than to seduction. That date itself was doubted for a long time, some reading the last digit as a 6 or a 9, until an x-ray in 1970 settled it at 1610. She would paint the subject again more than once across her life.