Sant’Apollonia

Saint Apollonia was an elderly deaconess in Alexandria who, during an anti-Christian riot in the year 249, had her teeth beaten and pulled out before she died. That is why she is shown here holding a pair of pincers gripping a single tooth, the sign by which everyone knew her, and why she became the saint people prayed to against toothache. Artemisia Gentileschi painted this in Naples in the early 1640s, where she had settled as one of the very few women running a busy painting workshop. She had learned the strong shadow and raking light of Caravaggio's followers, and she uses them here to pull the saint's upturned face and pearl-trimmed sleeves out of a nearly black ground.