Artemisia Gentileschi’s signature and partially legible date on the blade of David’s sword were discovered on this impressive picture during recent conservation treatment that removed dirt, old varnish and overpaint to reveal in the words of Keith Christiansen: ‘a very fine work by Artemisia; one of the strongest to come on the market’ (fig. 1).¹ It depicts the Old Testament episode of the Israelite shepherd David, who triumphed over the Philistine Goliath by firing a single, well-aimed stone from his sling (1 Samuel 17: 41–51). Artemisia is thought to have painted this treatment of the subject in London at the end of the 1630s. After cleaning, the painting’s high quality and original colour scheme also became apparent, particularly evident in the artist’s distinctive use of ochre yellow and the nuanced depiction of David’s white linen sleeves, whose handling is characteristic of her work. The tenebrous modelling of the heads, as well as the attention paid to the intricacy of details such as the sword, combined with the power of the overall conception and large-scale design, make this one of Artemisia’s most imposing paintings.

Larger than life, the young hero David has slain his enemy Goliath, whose severed head—jaw slack, mouth gaping wide—lies on a rocky ledge at his feet. His attitude conveys a mixture of pride and confidence in his own skill, tinged with an air of nonchalance. His expression has been aptly described by Judith W. Mann as capturing the hubris of youth.² He sits with one leg resting on his left knee, his right arm propped across the elaborate hilt of Goliath’s huge sword, which he has just used to decapitate him. The bloodied head is positioned beneath his outstretched knee like a boulder on the ground. Beside it is David’s sling. Cast shadows and reflected light are used to masterful effect to heighten the drama of this encounter with the conquering hero. As light falls through the structure of the figure, his pose creates a complex interplay of shadows between his body, foreshortened limbs, the giant head below and the spaces in between. This is seen to best effect in the complex landscape of David’s lap and the billowing sleeves of his shirt and now blue jerkin (originally purple). Mary Garrard has commented on the nuances of green and gold in David’s clothing, while others, including Sheila Barker, have noted the handling of the folds in the white fabric and the complex intricacy of the sword design.³

David and Goliath first came to light when it was offered for sale at Sotheby’s in London in 1975, with an attribution to Giovanni Francesco Guerrieri (1589–1655). The first scholar to recognise the picture as the work of Artemisia Gentileschi was Gianni Papi, who published it as such from an old black and white photograph in 1996, when the painting’s whereabouts were not known. Not long after, in 1999, also from a photograph, Roger Ward Bissell refuted the attribution, ascribing the painting to an anonymous master in the Roman circle of Vouet, circa 1620.⁴ This view, given nearly two decades before the painting resurfaced at auction in Germany in 2018 and its subsequent cleaning, seems not to have garnered much scholarly attention. Initially presented in the Munich sale as the work of a 17^th-century painter of the school of Caravaggio, the painting was given a revised attribution to Gentileschi in the online auction catalogue when the omission of Papi’s article of 1996 was rectified a few days before the sale.

Since then, the attribution has been strongly endorsed by several scholars, including Mary Garrard, Keith Christiansen, Judith W. Mann, Sheila Barker, Jesse Locker, Nicola Spinosa and Riccardo Lattuada. Mary Garrard praised the subtlety of the colour relationships and lighting and suggested the work might date from the mid-1630s. Keith Christiansen regards it as one of the more important works to emerge by Artemisia. He dates it to her Roman period—following her return from Florence, as it seems to him to connect strongly with Vouet, especially in the play of light and shadow in the head. Sheila Barker considers it fully autograph, describing it as a spectacular work.⁵ In 2020 Papi published a detailed article in The Burlington Magazine, in which he identified the painting as one of three recorded versions of the subject by Artemisia, dating it to the late 1630s, when the artist was in London.

The subject of David and Goliath is one that Artemisia revisited throughout her career and for which there are precedents also in the work of her father Orazio, notably in paintings now at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin and the Galleria Spada, Rome. Three documented references to pictures of this subject have been discussed in connection with Artemisia’s work: firstly the painting listed in the inventory drawn up in Rome in 1638 on the death of the marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani (1564–1637) on canvas ‘with the full-length figure of David holding the head of the Giant Goliath […] by the hand of Artemisia Gentileschi, in frame’;⁶ secondly a ‘most beautiful depiction of David, at life-size, holding in his hands the enormous and horrifying head of Goliath’, seen by Joachim von Sandrart (1606–1688) when he visited the artist’s studio in Naples in 1631 and described by him some forty years later;⁷ and thirdly, a painting described by the Reverend Matthew Pilkington (1701–1774) in his biographical sketch of Gentileschi published in 1798, and probably identical with the picture recorded by Horace Walpole (1717–1797) as having belonged to King Charles I. Although Papi does not exclude the possibility that these references may relate to the same work because of the lapses in time between them, nevertheless he thinks it much more likely that they refer to three separate pictures painted at three different periods in her career: one in Rome for Giustiniani, probably done when back in Rome in the third decade; another in Naples, painted either in the 1630s before she went to England, or when she settled back there in 1640; and a third treatment of David with the head of Goliath painted for the King of England, which he identifies as the present work.

Sheila Barker and Judith W. Mann are in broad agreement with the arguments advanced by Papi that this David with the head of Goliath was painted during Artemisia’s period in England. Papi proposes that it was painted for King Charles I during the course of her stay in Britain from 1638 until the early months of 1640 and later described by Pilkington: ‘the most celebrated picture of her hand, is the Victory of David over Goliath’;⁸ and by Horace Walpole, also writing about it towards the end of the eighteenth century: ‘King Charles had several of her works. Her best was David with the head of Goliath’.⁹ Although the painting is not mentioned in the inventories of Charles’ collection, or in the records of the sales of the collection after his death, comparison with the Allegory of Painting, also from Gentileschi’s London period, substantiates such a dating. Moreover, a treatment of the same subject by the Roman-born painter Domenico Fetti (c. 1588–1623) has been cited as a source of inspiration and since an example had entered the English Royal Collection prior to Artemisia’s stay in London, she likely had first-hand knowledge of his design (fig. 2).¹⁰ While Artemisia’s David adopts a similar arrangement for the figures, it differs in its psychological insight and style. Certainly, David’s brooding manner is her own invention, so too his rather androgynous figure. In Papi’s words, the protagonist’s expression ‘projects the distinctive proud and cool virility we find in so many of Gentileschi’s heroines’.¹¹

The long-limbed figure recalls Artemisia’s renditions of Bathsheba.¹² Jesse Locker has compared the landscape with that in Artemisia’s Christ and the Samaritan Woman at the Well, 1637, at Palazzo Francavilla, Palermo, noting parallels that suggest a continuity and consistency with her other works from the mid- to late 1630s.¹³ Stylistic analogies have also been drawn between the handling of David’s white sleeves and the chemise worn by the serving woman in the foreground of the Birth of Saint John the Baptist, c. 1635, in the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid;¹⁴ and by the nymph in a signed work of about 1635–37, titled Corisca and the Satyr, in an Italian private collection, Artemisia’s only surviving painting of a contemporary literary subject (fig. 3).¹⁵ In the latter, the combination of colours—notably the yellow ochre and whites—as well as the treatment of landscape and sky, are highly comparable. Even more pertinent to the proposed dating to Artemisia’s production in England is Barker’s discussion of her contribution to the Allegory of Peace and the Arts.¹⁶ This was a commission initiated by her father Orazio for Queen Henrietta, in which Artemisia’s figure of Strength is depicted in an olive-coloured skirt and armour that recall David’s dress.

For David with the head of Goliath Artemisia used a dark brown canvas preparation and made incisions into the ground layer while still wet, working out the composition and changing the lines of the design. This is evident to the naked eye, for example, in the heel resting on the ground, the right knee, neck and fingertips of the right hand. Artemisia changed the direction of the folds in David’s white sleeve, which were initially incised to point down in the other direction from the way they were painted. The existence of a variant of the present work, of similar size and composition, in a private collection in Naples, first published in 2013 and then offered at auction in Vienna in 2019, has prompted discussion about the relationship between the two.¹⁷ The principal difference in the variant’s design is that the head of Goliath instead of being at David’s feet is held by him and supported on a balustrade, while the hilt of the sword rests on the ground.¹⁸ As this accords with the description of the picture in the Giustiniani collection—David holding Goliath’s head—it has been proposed as the work listed in that inventory and as the one described by Sandrart.¹⁹ Lattuada has drawn attention to two further inventory references to pictures of David by Artemisia: one on the market in Naples in 1663, measuring 8 by 6 palmi; and another of the same size listed in the collection of Ferdinando d’Aflitto, Prince of Scanno, on 29 April 1700, ‘6 larghi et 8 lunghi’ (6 by 8 Neapolitan palmi), corresponding roughly to 156 cm. wide by 208 cm. high, which may be the same painting.²⁰ Albeit these documentary references cannot be connected to specific paintings with absolute certainty, nevertheless they demonstrate incontrovertibly the success Artemisia enjoyed with her depictions of the David and Goliath story. Indeed, the inspired design of the present painting succeeds admirably in conveying with dramatic effect the triumph of faith and determination over brute strength: the biblical hero David as a counterpart to Judith.

We are grateful to all those consulted for their opinions.

¹ Email communication, 13 May 2025.

² Getty Center, Los Angeles, Artemisia Gentileschi: New Perspectives, panel discussion, 13 November 2021 (34: 39).

³ Email communication with the owner, 23 June 2019 and 29 March 2019 respectively.

⁴ R. Ward Bissell 1999, pp. 313–14, no. X-8.

⁵ Email communication with respectively Simon Gillespie, 23 June 2019; and the owner, 11 May 2019 and 29 March 2019.

⁶ S. Danesi Squarzina, La collezione Giustiniani. Inventari I, Turin 2003, p. 289: ‘alta palmi 9 lar. 6 e – in circa’ (approx. 200 by 140 cm.).

⁷ J. von Sandrart, Teutsche Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste, Nuremberg 1675–80, A.R. Peltzer (ed.), Munich 1925, p. 290. Lattuada and others consider the painting seen by Sandrart in Naples to be the one that came to light in a Neapolitan private collection, later offered at auction in Vienna in 2019, see below and n. 17.

⁸ M. Pilkington, The Gentleman’s and Connoisseur’s Dictionary of Painters…, London 1798, p. 256.

⁹ H. Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England with Some Account of the Principal Artists…, London 1826–28, vol. II, 1826, p. 269.

¹⁰ On Fetti’s original composition datable to c. 1614–15 now at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, and autograph variants and copies, see E.A. Safarik, Fetti, Milan 1990, pp. 44–47, no. 7.

¹¹ Papi 2020, p. 190.

¹² Papi 2020, p. 190.

¹³ Oil on canvas, 267.5 x 206 cm.; L. Arcangeli in Artemisia Gentileschi, The Story of a Passion, R. Contini and F. Solinas (eds), exh. cat., Milan 2011, pp. 210–13, no. 34, reproduced in colour. Email communication with Jesse Locker, 26 May 2025.

¹⁴ R. Ward Bissell 1999, pp. 249–56, no. 32, reproduced fig. 139.

¹⁵ London 2020, pp. 210–11, no. 31, reproduced in colour.

¹⁶ Barker 2022, p. 101.

¹⁷ Oil on canvas, 203.5 x 152 cm. Dorotheum, 22 October 2019, lot 56; Artemisia: la musa Clio e gli anni napoletani, R. Contini and F. Solinas (eds), exh. cat., Palazzo Blu, Pisa 2013, pp. 46–49, no. 4, reproduced in colour p. 47; see also N. Spinosa, Grazia e tenerezza ‘in posa’. Bernardo Cavallino e il suo tempo 1616–1656, Rome 2013, reproduced in colour p. 62, fig. 47.

¹⁸ A tracing made of the figure in the present work was overlaid on the painting before its sale in Vienna and was shown to correspond closely except in the height of the head. There is little evidence of any incisions; virtually no alterations were detected; and the application of paint is more precise, with almost no overlapping of colours; see also Gillespie’s assessment, 14 November 2019, in Papi 2020, p. 194.

¹⁹ R. Lattuada, in Barker 2017, p. 193, reproduced pp. 194–95, figs 14 and 15.

²⁰ R. Lattuada and E. Nappi, ‘New Documents and Some Remarks on Artemisia’s Production in Naples and Elsewhere’, in Artemisia Gentileschi: Taking Stock, J.W. Mann (ed.), Turnhout 2005, pp. 79–96 and p. 98, document 8.