Saint Cecilia

In 1599, during work on the church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, the saint's tomb was opened and her body was reported to be intact. The sculptor Stefano Maderno carved her lying as she had been found, and for the next generation Cecilia was one of the saints Rome loved most.

Pietro da Cortona painted her early in the 1620s, when he was in his twenties and still making his name in the city. She sits at a table with a sheet of music, the palm of her martyrdom beside her, a small portable organ on the left and an angel leaning on a harp on the right. A third figure looks out of the shadow behind a curtain, and in the upper corner stands a classical temple, the kind of antique detail he was studying in those years.

For a long time the picture went under other names. When the Scottish collector Sir Robert Udny owned it, around 1790, it passed as a Domenichino, and later it was put down to an unknown Roman painter. Just in front of her halo she wears a small crown of red and white roses.