Portrait of Elena Mastiani Brunacci

The date on this canvas, 1809, was the year Tuscany stopped pretending. Napoleon had absorbed it into France and handed it to his sister Elisa Baciocchi, who took the title of Grand Duchess and ran Florence as an imperial province. Having your portrait painted here that year placed you inside the new order, and the room around Elena Mastiani Brunacci is furnished in the severe style the empire had made fashionable.

Benvenuti signed it along the edge of the lower shelf of the little table beside her, the same table a pug has climbed onto. It is a wide picture rather than a tall one, which gives the room more space than it gives the sitter.

The painting then stayed where it began. It hung with her descendants for more than 120 years, and the Italian state bought it from Count Leandro Mastiani Brunacci on the 10th of December 1935.