Danae

Artemisia Gentileschi was still in her late teens when she painted this Danaë in Rome around 1612, the princess of Greek myth reclining as Zeus reaches her as a shower of gold, her maid gathering the falling coins in her apron. For a long time the picture was not even hers on paper. When it surfaced at auction in 1986 it was sold under the name of her father Orazio, the painter who trained her, and only in 1993, after the Saint Louis Art Museum had bought it, was it given back to Artemisia. This was the same period when she was building the career that made her one of the very few women admitted to a painters' academy in 17th-century Italy.