Ginevra Cantofoli

The best-known painting attached to Ginevra Cantofoli's name spent centuries under someone else's. A young woman in a white turban, turning to look back over her shoulder, hung in Rome as a Guido Reni and was shown to visitors as Beatrice Cenci, the noblewoman beheaded there in 1599 for her part in her father's murder. The dates do not allow it. Cantofoli was born in Bologna in 1618, or by some accounts a decade earlier, and the picture is generally placed near 1650. Palazzo Barberini, which owns it, now lists Cantofoli with a question mark, and specialists are still arguing.

Her training is argued over as well. Bolognese writers of the period, Carlo Cesare Malvasia among them, called her a pupil of Elisabetta Sirani, the celebrated young painter who ran an academy for women in the city, although Sirani was 20 years her junior. She more probably learned in the workshop of Sirani's father, Giovanni Andrea. A body of some 30 pictures was assembled under Cantofoli's name in recent decades, and part of it has since been claimed for the Flemish painter Luigi Gentile.

What is documented is a working career in Bologna, from small pastel portraits up to altarpieces for churches including San Procolo and San Giacomo Maggiore, most of them now lost. The self-portrait of about 1660 in Milan shows her in the guise of the allegory of Painting.