Elisabetta Sirani

This newly discovered Allegory of Charity is a late work of Elisabetta Sirani, and datable to just before her early death at the age of twenty-seven in 1665. Massimo Pulini has confirmed the attribution to Sirani, and noted that she treated the subject a few times at the very end of her career.¹ In May 1664, an entry in her diary notes that she was working on the Allegory of Charity, Justice, and Prudence for Leopoldo de’ Medici (now Collezioni Comunali, Vignola).² And, in 1665, she painted the striking Portrait of Anna Maria Ranuzzi Marsigli as Charity, the prime version of which is in the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio, Bologna. Pulini relates two drawings by Sirani to the present composition: a pen and brown ink and wash Study for an Allegory of Charity (Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, inv. no. 953), an upright composition which varies somewhat from this canvas, but depicts the woman in a similar attitude, as well as a head study in red chalk that is quite close to this woman (Windsor, Royal Collections Trust).   

¹ Unpublished document dated 26 December 2025.

² M. Pulini, Il Diario di Elisabetta Sirani, Rimini 2025, p. 264, reproduced fig. 149.