Minerva

Artemisia Gentileschi signed this where you can find it, on the shield at the goddess's feet, her name lettered across the face of Medusa. The figure is Minerva, goddess of wisdom and of war, a fitting subject for the most celebrated woman painter of 17th-century Italy, the first to be admitted to Florence's academy of drawing. By the time she painted this, around 1635, Artemisia was running her own workshop and taking commissions from courts across Europe under her own name, rare for any painter then and almost unheard of for a woman. She gives Minerva a plain, strong presence rather than beauty, seated and looking off to one side, a staff in her hand and the Medusa shield resting beside her.