Loth et ses filles

Gentileschi painted this around 1622 in Genoa, one of three canvases the local nobleman Giovanni Antonio Sauli had commissioned from him the year before for his palace there. Orazio had learned a great deal from Caravaggio's stark naturalism back in Rome, though he kept a cooler, more refined finish of his own, and you see it in the heavy shine of the satin. The story is a hard one from Genesis. Having fled the destruction of Sodom, Lot's two daughters, believing the world had ended and their family line was finished, get their father drunk in a cave. Gentileschi paints the quiet before that, the sleeping father, the wine, the daughters conferring. He returned to the composition more than once, and X-rays have shown this Getty canvas to be his first, original version.