Marco Benefial

For years some of the best paintings in Roman churches went out under the wrong name. From the 1720s until 1741 Marco Benefial worked in a mezzeria, a half-share partnership, with Filippo Evangelisti, a far weaker painter. The fees were split down the middle, and many pictures Benefial painted entirely on his own were delivered as Evangelisti's. Two scenes from the life of Saint Margaret of Cortona, painted between 1726 and 1732 for a chapel in Santa Maria in Aracoeli, the church on the Capitoline Hill, were long believed to be his partner's. They are now counted among Benefial's finest work.

Born in Rome in 1684, he spent much of his life quarrelling with the city's art establishment. In 1720 he protested publicly against a decree issued under Pope Clement XI that only members of the Accademia di San Luca, the academy of Rome's painters, might teach drawing, and the decree was revoked. He joined the academy in 1741, and in 1755 he attacked his colleagues' ignorance so fiercely that they expelled him. From about 1750 a protector, Count Nicola Soderini, allowed him to work in peace. He died in Rome in April 1764, and 20 years later a memorial to him was set up in the Pantheon.