Artemisia glows, spotlit and close in the obliterating darkness. She looks straight back at us, head turning to meet us on arrival, direct speech from the silence of art. Her hands speak, too: one resting on a wheel pierced with horrific iron spikes (attribute of the saint whose role she is playing), the other holding an upright palm frond, long and slender as the brush with which she is painting this picture.
For although Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria memorialises the 4th-century saint condemned to death on a wheel studded with spikes, it is no stretch to imagine (even to see) the artist hard at work between the mirror and the easel. The swither is spectacular, between the ardent saint and the passionate painter, sleeve falling away to reveal her powerful forearm – a feat of both painting and empathy.
