Simone Martini Painting the Portrait of Laura for Petrarch

Everything known about the scene in this painting comes from two sonnets.

In 1336 the Sienese painter Simone Martini arrived in Avignon, where the popes were then living, and met Petrarch. The poet asked him for a portrait of Laura, the woman his poems are addressed to, and sonnets 77 and 78 of the Canzoniere thank him for it: the painter, Petrarch writes, must have seen her in paradise to have caught the face, and then he complains that the image will not answer him. The portrait is lost, and was probably a small drawing rather than a panel. No description of it survives.

So Saltini, painting it in 1863, had to invent the studio, the pose and Laura herself. He called his painter Simon Memmi, the name Vasari had mistakenly given Simone Martini and the name every 19th-century Italian knew him by, and the museum's title still carries it.