The Martyrdom of Saint Cecilia

This altarpiece was painted for a church in Rome that stood inside the Pantheon, Santa Maria della Rotonda, and it never hung there. Riminaldi was not paid, so he kept the canvas, and when he left Rome for Pisa in 1627 the picture went with him. He died three years later and his heirs put it in the Pisan church of Santa Caterina, where Grand Prince Ferdinando de' Medici, the heir to Tuscany and a serious buyer of pictures, acquired it in 1693. To make it fit the frame waiting for it at Palazzo Pitti, the canvas was widened on three of its four sides. The executioner has hold of Cecilia's hair to bare her neck for the sword. Her violin and her sheet music lie on the ground beside her.