Gabriel Krauze

THE WOMAN WEARS A BLUE DRESS. She holds the naked man down on the bed: his knees are drawn up, his head is braced upward, he looks toward us, inverted. Another woman, by her left side, takes the man’s hair in her left hand. With her right arm she wields a short sword, tip pointed downward. She draws the blade toward her. It cuts through the man’s neck. Blood runs down through his beard and onto the bed sheets. The light bathes the scene in a sepulchral glow. The executioners’ faces are vengeful and calm.

“Artemisia Gentileschi was raped as a young girl,” says novelist Gabriel Krauze, handing me the phone to show me the image. “You can see the pain and the suffering and the rage in this work.” Gabriel looks at my face as I stare at the screen. Caravaggio painted the same biblical scene 100 years earlier, but the maestro’s version does not have the same feeling. “Look at the viciousness here, look at the sense of revenge infused in this version – you’ve never heard of Gentileschi, because she is a woman,” he says, taking the phone back and sitting down on the sofa. “You’ve heard of Caravaggio. You’ve heard of Leonardo. But so many stories are never going to be told. So many experiences are never going to be shared.”

Gabriel Krauze writes seldom-told stories in a language