A painting by Artemisia Gentileschi is coming to auction at the Dorotheum in Vienna on 28 April, with an estimate of $120,000 to $ 170,000. Sounds like a bargain? Unfortunately, its face has been cut out. Not damaged, not abraded, not lost to the usual processes of time and neglect. Cut out. At some point, probably amid the chaos of postwar Berlin, someone took a knife to the canvas and removed the head of Saint Mary Magdalen from a work that Artemisia painted between 1615 and 1618. The painting then spent decades rolled up in a cellar in Germany. There is no known evidence of why this picture was vandalised or of the whereabouts of the key part of the artwork, the missing visage.
The work is an autograph second copy of the Mary Magdalen held in the Palatine Gallery at Palazzo Pitti in Florence, almost identical in size; the two canvases are close enough in dimension that they were clearly produced using cartoons, the technique Artemisia inherited from her father, Orazio Gentileschi. Cartoons allowed the transfer of a composition from one canvas to another while enabling variations in execution, detail and quality depending on the terms of the commission. This wasn’t copying in the pejorative sense. It was a standard working practice of the period, and the differences between the Pitti version and the fragment now heading to auction are specific enough to confirm that Artemisia was actively rethinking the composition as she worked rather than mechanically reproducing it.
The differences are worth dwelling on. The drapery in the fragment is more dynamic, painted with looser, more vigorous brushwork. The position of the left hand has been changed; in this version, Mary pushes away the mirror rather than contemplating it, a gesture that shifts the symbolic emphasis toward active rejection of vanity rather than passive reflection. The ointment jar with which Mary anointed Christ’s body has been moved from the foreground to the background, making the elaborate fringe of the green cloth covering the table visible. A gold chain lying on the table has been added. The trim along the bottom edge of the dress, reduced to a sketch in the Pitti version, is here an intricate, stylised representation of acanthus tendrils.
These are not the adjustments of an assistant working from instructions. They are the decisions of an artist reconsidering her own composition, and they make the fragment a document of Artemisia’s working method as much as a finished work in its own right.
The attribution was first established by Roberto Contini, who brought the painting to light in 2011 after it had surfaced in a private German collection. He included it in the exhibition Artemisia Gentileschi: Storia di una Passione at the Palazzo Reale in Milan that year, and the catalogue entry established the scholarly groundwork. Riccardo Lattuada has now fully endorsed Contini’s attribution and dating, confirming the work as produced during Artemisia’s Florentine period, when she was in her early twenties and rebuilding her life after the trauma of the rape trial in Rome.
Gianluca Poldi’s technical study is direct. The attribution is not hanging on instinct or wishful thinking but on hard evidence. Infrared reflectography shows the artist thinking on the surface, nudging the figure’s outline, reworking the foot, shifting the wrist. Those small corrections feel entirely in keeping with Artemisia’s hand, not a copyist but a painter working it out as it evolves.
The materials are also consistent. Lead white is applied densely to the shirt. The mantle carries that slightly earthy mix of lead, tin, yellow, and ochre. Flesh is worked from vermilion, handled with confidence. And there it is, ultramarine made from lapis, turning up in the chair back and along the edge of the cloak. It all belongs to the seventeenth century.
The missing head is, of course, the thing. Dorotheum’s Old Master specialist, Marc MacDowell, has described the alteration as lending the work harrowing power, rendering it almost contemporary.
These are not idle comparisons. The painting, in its damaged state, does something the intact version at the Pitti cannot quite do. The missing face creates a void at the centre of the composition that the eye is drawn to repeatedly and cannot resolve. Mary Magdalen, as a subject, is already charged with themes of grief, transformation, and witness. A painting of her from which the witnessing face has been violently removed adds another register entirely. The loss, whatever its circumstances, has become part of the work.
The provenance runs from Dr Alfred Berliner, a Berlin collector who died in 1943, through his wife, Clara Berliner, who died in 1945, to their heirs, and then into a series of private Berlin collections from the 1960s onward. The gap in the record coincides precisely with the period when the head would most likely have been removed. What happened to this canvas in those years in Berlin, and who decided to take a knife to it, remains completely unknown.
The work was carefully restored after its recovery and has been in a private Berlin collection since 1989. It will be sold at Dorotheum’s live Old Master sale in Vienna on 28 April, housed in a seventeenth-century Florentine carved, gilded, and painted frame with acanthus-leaf and scroll motifs.
An Artemisia Gentileschi without its face. Estimate $120,000 to $170,000. Dorotheum Vienna