Jaël et Sisera

Gentileschi signed this one where you cannot miss it, carving her name and the date 1620 into the base of the pillar. The story is from the Book of Judges. Sisera, an enemy general, has fled a lost battle and taken shelter in the tent of a woman named Jael, who gives him milk and lets him sleep, then drives a tent peg through his skull. Gentileschi catches the instant just before the blow, Jael steadying the peg, the mallet raised, Sisera slack in sleep across her lap. She was in her late twenties, building a career as one of the very few women running her own workshop in Baroque Italy, and she often chose subjects of women meeting violence with nerve. The signature uses the Latin faciebat, was making it, the same modest form Michelangelo had once carved on his Pietà.