Portrait of Carolina Zucchi (The Sick Woman)

In Milan in the 1820s, the house of an accountant named Zucchi was a place where painters met musicians, and it was there that Hayez came to know the opera composers Donizetti and Bellini. Carolina, the daughter of the house, became his pupil, his model and, for some years, his lover. Here she lies back against the pillows in a white nightgown, which is how the picture came to be called The Sick Woman. Her own memoirs give a better caption. Everyone thought I was ill, she wrote, but my illness was love.

Hayez painted this panel around 1825, in the words of the man who later bought it, for his own study, and he was reluctant to let it go. That collector, Pietro Baldassarre Ferrero, acquired it in Milan in 1833 and, in 1845, published a careful description of it in the Messaggiere Torinese, a Turin newspaper. The museum singles out the many shades of white in the nightgown and the bed linen.