Alegoria da Inclinação

Around 1615, Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger was decorating a gallery in his Florence house to honour his famous great-uncle, and he hired the young Artemisia Gentileschi for one of the ceiling panels. She painted Inclination as a nude woman floating in the sky, holding a mariner's compass and following a star, the natural pull of talent toward its calling. She was in her early twenties and newly arrived in the city. Then the story turns. Some 65 years later, a descendant of the family decided the bare figure was indecent for the household, and had another painter, Volterrano, add blue drapery and veils across her body. Those coverings are now roughly 350 years old themselves and cannot be removed without destroying what lies beneath, so restorers have reconstructed Gentileschi's original nude only digitally, through X-rays and imaging.