La Mort de Cléopâtre

Cleopatra lies stretched out in the last moments before the asp's bite, her body painted with a bluntness that has become the heart of an argument. The picture comes without question from the Gentileschi workshop in Rome, but which Gentileschi is contested. Some scholars give it to the father, Orazio. Others to his daughter Artemisia, still young, reading her own hard experience into the queen's exposed flesh. The dating slides with the attribution, landing somewhere in the 1610s if it is early Artemisia. It passed through Genoese families for generations before surfacing in a private collection in Milan, where it remains.