Attributed to Giovanni Battista Paggi

Psyche holds a lamp over her sleeping lover, and a drop of hot oil is about to wake Cupid and send him away. When this canvas first appears in a Borghese inventory, in 1790, it is listed as Bernardo Strozzi, the Genoese Capuchin painter. Later writers called it 18th-century, then Ligurian, then Luca Cambiaso's, and even a copy after Padovanino, before the scholar Ettore Giovanati argued that it belongs fully to the manner of Giovanni Battista Paggi. The museum accepts him with attributed to, which means the case rests on style.

Paggi came from a well-to-do Genoese family and took up painting as a gentleman. Around 1579, in a dispute said to have been over payment, he mortally wounded a patron and fled to Tuscany, where he worked, largely in Florence, until he returned home in 1599. While still in exile he won a lawsuit against the Genoese painters' guild in 1590, the city's government ruling that a man of noble birth might practise the art. The canvas is dated to the first decade of the 17th century and was restored in 1951.