Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–c.1654), ‘Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria’, c.1615–17.

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–c.1654), Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, c.1615–17, oil on canvas, 71.4 × 69 cm, The National Gallery, London

This is not simply a saint’s likeness, but Artemisia Gentileschi’s claim to endurance. Painted in her years at Florence, the canvas merges her own image with that of Saint Catherine, the scholar-martyr who defied imperial Rome. The identification is immediate: Artemisia’s steady gaze meets ours, turning an emblem of martyrdom into a mirror of personal resolve.

The wheel at her side — broken, but still menacing — signals Catherine’s torture, yet it also becomes a symbol of the trials that surrounded a woman artist in early seventeenth-century Italy. Artemisia had already endured violence and public scandal in Rome; now she confronted the equally punishing demands of artistic survival in Florence. In choosing Catherine, she did not simply illustrate a saint’s story but aligned herself with a figure who embodied intellect, courage, and faith under pressure.

The painting bears the Caravaggesque intensity she absorbed from her father, Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639), and from Caravaggio (1571–1610) himself: sharp chiaroscuro, a solitary figure emerging from darkness, the drama concentrated in her face and gesture. Yet here the theatrical light does more than illuminate a saint — it isolates Artemisia, insisting on her presence.

Recently rediscovered and now in the National Gallery, the work endures as a rare statement of self-assertion disguised as devotion: a woman painter using sacred imagery to declare her own place in a world that resisted it.