The Sleeping Christ Child

Artemisia Gentileschi moved to Naples in 1630, and soon afterwards she painted this on a sheet of copper a little larger than a postcard. She signed it on the painted wall behind the child, in an abbreviation that names the city along with herself. Arte. GentilescA, fecit Napo. Made in Naples.

For most of the time since, the composition was known only from prints. Pieter de Jode II engraved it in Paris in the early 1630s, adding a skull beside the sleeping baby that the painting itself does not have. The painting surfaced at an estate sale in Le Mans in 2015 and reached Boston in 2022.

There is one detail the museum is careful about. Collection inventories going back to 1698 record a small copper by Gentileschi showing a sleeping child with his head on a red cushion. The cushion here is green.