Sotheby's will offer a rediscovered Artemisia Gentileschi painting, *David with the Head of Goliath* (1620s-30s), at its Old Master evening auction on 2 July, with an estimate of £1m to £2m. The work had been misattributed for decades—first to Giovanni Francesco Guerrieri in 1975, then as 'School of Caravaggio' in 2018—before definitive attribution to Artemisia was confirmed in 2020 when Simon Gillespie Studio discovered her signature running down the sword blade. The painting has been on the market only twice before, most recently selling for €104,000 in 2018.
The sale matters because it represents one of the most significant Old Master discoveries in the past decade, adding a major work to the small known corpus of Artemisia Gentileschi, a Baroque artist whose reputation has surged in recent years. The painting's dramatic signature—placed on the weapon of the biblical hero—exemplifies Artemisia's bold self-fashioning and her famous declaration, 'I will show you what a woman can do.' If it sells within estimate, it would set a record for the artist at auction and further cement her status as a canonical figure in art history.