He was an unpretentious individual, who one suspects liked working for other people, rather than managing the decoration of a whole palazzo himself. The interior decoration business demanded whole teams of people to undertake all aspects of construction and design: the painters of the scenes with figures had a relatively straightforward contribution. But Gentileschi was undoubtedly tremendously impressed by the appearance of Caravaggio’s paintings, and his encounter with him in the summer of 1600 was a watershed in his artistic career. His previous paintings had been conventional inventions that illustrated a narrative well, but without reference to the real model. In a way this never changed, because an artist who is already trained finds it difficult to change his spots, like handwriting that remains the same even after a course of calligraphy.