Diana the Huntress

Diana the Huntress — the virgin goddess of the hunt, here in her active, athletic identity rather than the contemplative bathing scene of Actaeon paintings — gave Orazio Gentileschi scope for depicting a powerful female figure in energetic movement. Now at the Nantes Museum of Arts, the year given (1700) appears anomalous for Gentileschi, who died in 1639, suggesting either a copyist attribution or a metadata error; the canvas is most plausibly a work of his mature period. The Nantes Museum assembled Italian Baroque works through French royal and later revolutionary appropriations, and this canvas likely reflects the taste for mythological subjects with strong female protagonists that characterized sophisticated French collecting. Gentileschi's daughter Artemisia — herself a celebrated painter — also depicted Diana, and the two treatments invite comparison in terms of the fathers and daughter's different approaches to powerful female subjects.

Canvas with the challenge of depicting a figure in active motion: Diana in the act of hunting, drawing a bow or moving through landscape. Gentileschi's refinement of the Caravaggesque technique here meets the demands of dynamic figure painting. Quiver and bow are rendered with material attention; moonlight as Diana's attribute may modify the usual quality of illumination.