Woman Tuning a Lute

In the second half of the 18th century the Bolognese writer Marcello Oretti, who recorded the pictures hanging in his city's houses, saw a Crespi of a woman with a lute in the home of one Giacomo Marchesini. He noted that she was the famous singer Vittoria Tesi. If this is the picture he saw, the name cannot be right. Tesi was born in 1700, and Crespi painted this canvas around 1700 to 1705, when she was still a small child. The Marchesini family had inherited paintings from Giovanni Ricci, a Bolognese merchant who bought from Crespi, and this may well be one of them. Whoever she was, Crespi shows her absorbed in tuning the instrument, a few quiet seconds that most painters would have skipped, and he gives them a canvas one and a half metres wide. The museum bought the painting in 1969 from the collector and art historian Vitale Bloch.