Portrait of Beatrice Cenci

For centuries visitors to Rome were told a stirring story about this picture. The girl in the turban was said to be Beatrice Cenci, a young noblewoman beheaded in 1599 for plotting the death of her abusive father, and the painter was said to be Guido Reni, who supposedly caught her likeness in prison on the eve of her execution. It made her the tender face of a Roman tragedy. The trouble is the dates. The painting is now given to Ginevra Cantofoli and placed around 1650, some 50 years after Beatrice went to the scaffold, so no one working on it could have seen her. Reni does not quite leave the story. Cantofoli learned to paint in Bologna, in the workshop of Giovanni Andrea Sirani, one of Reni's closest collaborators, who kept the studio going after the master died in 1642. Sirani's daughter Elisabetta, 20 years younger than Cantofoli, later took her into the painting school she ran for women, and the Bolognese writers of the day tidied that into an apprenticeship with the younger woman as the teacher.