Elisabetta Sirani

When Elisabetta Sirani died in Bologna in 1665 she was 27 years old and had already produced more than 200 paintings, and the city was so shocked that it suspected murder. A maid was tried for poisoning her and acquitted, and later opinion settled on illness, probably bleeding ulcers, but the grief was real enough that Bologna gave her an enormous public funeral.

She had trained under her own father, a painter and former assistant to the great Guido Reni, and by her late teens she was running the family workshop as its main earner, turning out altarpieces and mythological scenes at remarkable speed. She kept a notebook listing her works so clients could not claim her father had done them.

She also opened a painting school for young women, training a generation who had few other ways in. Her tomb was placed beside Reni's in a Bologna church, the master and the prodigy who had died less than half his age laid in the same ground.