Ló e suas filhas

Artemisia Gentileschi painted this in Naples in the later 1630s, by then running her own busy workshop, one of the very few women in Europe to lead one. The subject is the grim biblical night after the fall of Sodom, when Lot's daughters, believing the world had ended, get their father drunk to bear his children. Many painters used the story as an excuse for a nude. Artemisia keeps it sober, dressing the figures fully and letting the wine and Lot's bare foot carry the sense of a man losing himself. For a long time the museum in Toledo owned it as the work of a Neapolitan man, Bernardo Cavallino. Only later study returned it to Artemisia, whose name it now carries.