María Magdalena

By 1630 Artemisia Gentileschi had moved to Naples, then the largest city in Europe after Paris and packed with painters competing for church and court work. She set up a busy workshop there and stayed, on and off, for the rest of her life. The Magdalene was a subject she returned to again and again, the wealthy woman of the Gospels who turns from luxury to penitence, and it let her paint rich fabric and a real, weighty female body at once. She had learned that drama of deep shadow and raking light from the followers of Caravaggio, whose paintings she had known since her girlhood in Rome. In Naples she ran her own studio and signed her own contracts, a rare footing for a woman in the trade.