Artemisia Gentileschi probably painted more female nudes than any other woman artist of the period. She painted a languid, laid-back Sleeping Venus (now in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts) when she was in Rome in the late 1620s.42 Like her Susanna, discussed at the beginning of the chapter, her Venus (see plate section, image no. 23) reflects the fashionable body type of the day – pale body, plump thighs, rounded stomach, pert breasts – and, like nudes by her male contemporaries, fetishises the female body as an object for erotic contemplation.
