Recently discovered and restored Artemisia Gentileschi painting will go on view at the Getty in Los Angeles

Artemisia Gentileschi scholars and fans alike have reason to celebrate. After an extensive conservation by the Getty in Los Angeles, a major painting now attributed to the proto-feminist Baroque artist, which depicts a playful battle-of-the-sexes scene, is going on view at the museum (10 June-14 September). Experts say it has not been exhibited in public for at least a century—and possibly two or three.

“To the best of my knowledge, it has never been shown publicly,” says the Getty’s senior curator of paintings Davide Gasparotto, who is investigating the work’s provenance.

“To my eye it is one of her great masterpieces,” says the art historian Sheila Barker, of the Medici Archive Project, who first saw it in the Getty’s conservation studio a year ago. “It’s an absolute enchantment—powerful, fascinating, fun.” She says she has “no doubts” about the Gentileschi attribution and “didn’t see any evidence of a workshop hand”.

The painting previously hung unidentified in Sursock Palace in Beirut, home to the Sursock family. But after the port explosion in the city in 2020 damaged the home and its holdings, the painting drew serious attention from scholars such as Barker, who even before seeing it in person attributed it to Gentileschi.

Roderick Sursock has since located an undated receipt, which appears to be around 100 years old, documenting its acquisition by his grandfather from a dealer in Naples. The receipt identifies the family of the Marquis de Spinelli as the seller, and Gasparotto suspects it was originally commissioned by a different branch of this family, meaning the painting has remained in private hands throughout its life.

The subject is classic Gentileschi, famous for portraying donne forti or “strong women” from the Bible and Greco-Roman mythology. It captures a moment from the myth of Hercules and Omphale after the Delphic oracle has sentenced the powerful hero to become a slave to Omphale, the queen of Lydia, for committing murder. Gentileschi has chosen to portray Hercules, despite his brawn, as vulnerable both physically—sitting half-naked with Omphale towering over him—and emotionally, with Cupid beaming at his side. The gendered role reversals continue with Omphale wearing Hercules’s lion skin and holding his club, while Hercules grips a spindle, associated with the more “feminine” craft of weaving.

Barker believes the life-size painting dates to the mid 1630s or later, given its style and multi-figure composition. “This is not something that a young struggling artist could afford to undertake without a major commission,” she says. “I would say based on the complexity this is from the period of her greatest fame and market appeal, when she’s getting commissions from Philip IV, the King of Spain.”

When it arrived at the Getty, the painting was in rough shape. It had many holes from the Beirut explosion, which shattered windows in the palace and sent glass shards, like shrapnel, into the canvas. There were significant areas of paint loss, including a patch of Hercules’s nose. A large tear ripped through his right knee.

Aided by Gentileschi’s pentimenti

The Getty conservator Ulrich Birkmaier spent more than two years working on the canvas, with structural help early on from the Italian conservator Matteo Rossi Doria. Birkmaier got lucky with Hercules’s nose. His inpainting of this passage was aided, he says, by Gentileschi herself in a way. As revealed by the Getty’s X-ray, she had originally painted another version of Hercules’s face first in three-quarter profile before turning his head slightly so his eyes meet Omphale’s. Birkmaier was able to use information gleaned from the pentimenti to complete the shape of the nose.

The conservator was also able to take Gentileschi’s lead when it came to the awkwardly painted foot of the tambourine-playing female figure at bottom left, which turned out to be overpainting. When he removed some water-soluble colours, he found more original paint fragments by Gentileschi than he expected.

To do that inpainting, he consulted Federico Castelluccio, a realist painter and Old Masters collector (who in his double life as an actor appeared on the hit HBO series The Sopranos). After receiving a photograph of the foot, Castelluccio painted his own version of it to show Birkmaier. At press time, they were discussing one of the last remaining paint jobs: how to complete the big toe, which was barely legible.

As for Hercules’s torn knee, Birkmaier says you can still see “a little bit of disruption”, but that is inevitable, maybe even desirable, he suggests. “It is a tightrope walk. We don’t want to go so far with the conservation as to create something new. This painting has gone through an ageing process for hundreds of years. Some scars and little losses don’t distract from the overall experience of being able to see the painting again very, very close to how Artemisia intended for us to see it when it left her studio.”

The Getty will display the painting as part of a focused exhibition, Artemisia’s Strong Women: Rescuing a Masterpiece, along with four other canvases by the artist: Lucretia (around 1627) from the Getty, Bathsheba (around 1636-37) from the Columbus Museum of Art, a version of Susanna and the Elders (around 1635) from the collection of the television producer Dick Wolf and a self-portrait from an unidentified private collection. Hercules and Omphale will travel to Columbus for viewing this autumn, before returning to Beirut once reconstruction of the Sursock Palace is complete.

• Artemisia’s Strong Women: Rescuing a Masterpiece, Getty Center, Los Angeles, 10 June-14 September