The Kimbell Artwork Museum in Fort Price, Texas, has acquired an Artemisia Gentileschi portray that has been owned by personal collectors for practically 400 years. When the work goes on view at this time, will probably be the primary time the portray has been exhibited publicly because the Seventeenth century.
The portray, titled Penitent Mary Magdalene (1625–26), facilities a feminine determine from the Bible, making it one of many many by Gentileschi to take action. Gentileschi’s work has been prized by artwork historians for the best way it supplied her feminine topics a type of interiority that was not at all times current in work by her contemporaries.
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Although lesser-known for years than the male painters of Seventeenth-century Italy, Gentileschi is at this time thought-about one of many foremost artists of the Baroque period, largely because of scholarship of feminists like Linda Nochlin and Mary Garrard. A current Gentileschi retrospective at London’s Nationwide Gallery was extensively praised by critics.
Taking cues from artists like Caravaggio, Gentileschi painted dramatically composed works reminiscent of this one, through which a hunched-over Mary Magdalene experiences a second of introspection. The portray was purchased by Fernando Enríquez Afán de Ribera, the third Duke of Alcalá and Viceroy of Naples, and was displayed in his Seville residence, the place it gained fame, in response to the Kimbell Artwork Museum.
After the Duke of Alcalá died in 1637, the portray was handed all the way down to his heirs. Then, per the museum, it appeared to fade from view, with little documentation of its whereabouts till 2001, the yr that the portray appeared at public sale at Tajan. The museum mentioned an unnamed collector purchased the work, then consigned it to Adam Williams Effective Artwork, Ltd., a New York gallery that offered the portray to the museum this yr.
There are numerous copies of this work, and when it was offered in 2001 at Tajan, the attribution was listed because the “atelier of Artemisia Gentileschi.” However in 2021, artwork historian Jesse Locker printed analysis in Apollo that appeared to substantiate that the portray was, certainly, by her. He identified that there are copies of Penitent Mary Magdalene, however this portray comprises a tasseled curtain that’s not rendered the identical method in different works. That very same drape seems in different works confirmed to be by Gentileschi.
The Kimbell Artwork Museum didn’t announce the financial worth of Penitent Mary Magdalene. Gentileschi’s public sale report, set in 2019, stands at $5.3 million.
Eric Lee, director of the museum, mentioned in a press release, “The Kimbell has lengthy wished to accumulate a piece by Artemisia Gentileschi however till now by no means discovered the precise portray for its assortment by this main determine of Italian Baroque artwork. We’re thrilled to current Artemisia Gentileschi’s dazzling Penitent Mary Magdalene to the general public for the primary time because it was painted within the seventeenth century.”