A Tocadora de Alaúde

Early 17th-century Rome was mad for music. New forms were being invented, the first operas were only a few years old, and the city's painters kept turning out pictures of players and singers. Gentileschi's woman sits turned away from us, absorbed in tuning her lute, sheet music and a cornetto and a violin laid out on the table beside her. The daylight falls clean across her back and the folds of her golden dress. People have wanted her to be someone in particular, Saint Cecilia the patron of music, or even the painter's daughter Artemisia, but scholars have set those ideas aside. She is more likely just Music itself, or simply a player caught mid-task. What Gentileschi took from Caravaggio, that hard clear light on ordinary things, other painters would in turn take from this very canvas.