Barbara Longhi

In sixteenth-century Ravenna, a city better known for its ancient mosaics than its living painters, the busiest studio belonged to Luca Longhi, a well-regarded local master. Barbara Longhi was his daughter, trained in that workshop from childhood alongside her brother Francesco, and by about 1570 she was working on his large altarpieces herself.

She made her name with small, intimate paintings of the Madonna and Child, dozens of them, meant for private prayer rather than grand churches. Giorgio Vasari, the painter whose lives of the artists was the great record of the age, mentioned her by name while she was still young and praised the grace of her drawing, an unusual notice for a woman working far from Florence or Rome.

One of her surviving works is a self-portrait in which she shows herself as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, holding the martyr's palm. Barbara lived to 86 and stayed in Ravenna her whole life. Many of the portraits she was admired for in her lifetime are now lost or hang under no name at all.