When a deadly explosion rocked the port of Beirut in August 2020, antiques were reduced to rubble and paintings torn to shreds. But in one Lebanese mansion an anonymous painting — pierced by shards of glass from a blown-out window and impaled by wood from the window frame — gained something extraordinary.
It is now recognized by experts as a long-lost painting of Hercules and Omphale by Artemisia Gentileschi, the great 17th-century Italian painter known for portraying strong women from biblical and mythological scenes.
“This painting is definitely by Artemisia,” said Davide Gasparotto, the Getty Museum’s senior curator of paintings, who has brought it to the Getty for restoration and exhibition under a long-term loan agreement. “It’s a very powerful, convincing painting — one of her most ambitious in terms of size and the complexity of the figures.”
Sheila Barker, a leading Gentileschi scholar who has yet to see the painting in person, says consensus for the attribution, proposed by the Lebanese artist and art historian Gregory Buchakjian, is already strong: “I don’t know of anyone who has a dissenting opinion.”
