She was the forgotten genius of the art world – then I rediscovered her

To bring to light an unknown masterpiece sounds like the plot of a novel. But the total rediscovery of an artist who had slipped entirely from history’s grasp — the remarkable Michaelina Wautier — is more like a fully fledged miracle. “I still ask myself: if I hadn’t walked past the picture, hadn’t looked in the right direction, would I ever have come across her? Maybe not,” says Katlijne Van der Stighelen, the Belgian art historian whose shrewd eye alighted on Wautier’s circa 1655 oil painting The Triumph of Bacchus in a storeroom at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna three…