The Martyrs Cecilia, Valerian and Tiburtius

On 22 October 1599, a dig beneath the high altar of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, in Rome, opened three sarcophagi. Inside, the accounts of the day said, lay Cecilia and the two men standing beside her here, her husband Valerian and his brother Tiburtius. The cardinal who had ordered that dig, Paolo Sfondrato, made the find famous across a city preparing for the Jubilee of 1600.

Gentileschi painted this some seven years later, for the high altar of the Augustinian church of Santa Cecilia in Como. He shows the moment before any of it, an angel coming down with a wreath for the couple's wedding and a palm for the deaths ahead. Cecilia is the patron saint of music, and the signature sits on the base of the organ.

Sfondrato came to see it. A note left by a Como man, Francesco Magnocavallo, places the cardinal in that church in November 1607, with the picture newly in position.