Berenice

The scissors have done most of the work in deciding who this young woman is. She wears a blue turban and holds shears in one hand and a cut lock in the other. The Borghese inventory of 1833 called her a portrait by the painter Giovanni Francesco Romanelli. In 1893 the critic Adolfo Venturi saw the shears and took her for a seamstress. In 1955 the art historian Paola della Pergola made her Atropos, the Fate who cuts the thread of life. In 2004 Massimo Pulini gave the canvas to Ginevra Cantofoli, painting in Bologna in the 1660s, and named the sitter as Berenice, a queen of Egypt in the third century BC. She vowed her long hair to Aphrodite if her husband came home safe from war, and the offering was said to have been set among the stars. The constellation is still called Berenice's Hair.