David and Bathsheba

We continue our month with Advancing Women Artist Foundation—for the next three Sundays we will be presenting pieces restored by the foundation. By giving a voice to historic women artists, AWA rescues and reclaims the hidden half of Florence’s art. You can find more about their cause here.

Artemisia’s David and Bathsheba became part of the Grand Ducal Collection and documents show that it decorated the Grand Duke of Tuscany’s apartment in 1662. After restoration by Advancing Women Artists, David and Bathsheba was unveiled on November 27, 2008, in collaboration with Palazzo Pitti’s Palatina Gallery. During a six-week exhibition, titled A Christmas Gift to the City of Florence, the painting was shown alongside its tapestry reproduction by Pietro Févère (1594–1669), the Medici’s chief weaver. In 2009, the painting was loaned to Pisa’s Palazzo Blu for an exhibition on Galileo and his contemporaries. It is now in storage at the Pitti Palazzo—not for long, we hope!

Artemisia painted scenes from the David and Bathsheba story in at least six versions. It depicts the biblical story of David seeing the wife of Uriah from the loggia of his palace. This short description by Todd Gould for the screenplay of Invisible Women: Forgotten Artists of Florence provides a worthy overview of Artemisia's successful Florentine period: "In the early 1600s, Artemisia Gentileschi received some of the highest-paid commissions ever bestowed on a female artist of the period. Her reputation for grand-scale narrative works earned her not only significant sums of money, but also friendships with noted scientific and political leaders of the era, including Galileo and the Grand Duke Cosimo II, a descendent of the great Medici dynasty, celebrated patrons of the arts."