Autoritratto come suonatrice di liuto

Artemisia Gentileschi painted herself as a lute player around 1616, when she was in her early twenties and living in Florence. Those Florence years were a turning point. She had come from Rome after a public rape trial against her teacher, and in Florence she rebuilt her life as an independent artist, ran a workshop, won Medici patrons, and in 1616 became the first woman admitted to the city's official drawing academy. This picture is bound up with that world. A 1638 Medici inventory lists a portrait of Gentileschi playing a lute, by her own hand, which is very likely this canvas. She shows herself as the performer rather than the sitter, turned in a plumed costume with her fingers on the strings, mouth slightly open as if mid-song. It stayed largely unknown until a Connecticut museum bought it in 2014, one of only a handful of her self-portraits to survive.